Natalie Brunell Makes the Perfect Case for Bitcoin in 9 Minutes

0:00for the average person, like if you're working, your issue is probably not what currency am I gonna use to buy my coffee. It's probably, why can't I save? Why am I making just barely enough to get by? That's your problem. So like, I think store of value is really, really critical. The inflationary aspect of our money that destroys purchasing power, that being removed. That is so, so, so important. And I think is one of the most important use cases of Bitcoin as a savings technology. The biggest problem, especially for the average person, is inflation. Because the wealthy and those well connected, they've actually tremendously benefited from inflation. They own assets, those assets have gone up in value and they're probably sitting pretty, maybe looking at Bitcoin saying, I don't need this. But for the average person, the majority of people and the working class, they've been shot out of that ownership and that equity. And Bitcoin allows them to have it every time they create new money, which is debt. It's all IOUs. It dilutes the purchasing power of your money and you had no say in it.

1:01It's not fair. It creates an inherently unfair system that leads to a tremendous amount of wealth concentration. And there is a solution. If you just listen to what the CPI is, the inflation rate that they report, it doesn't tell the whole story and people know it doesn't, right? I mean, we hear it's around 2% and that's the target. They're targeting a dilution rate for you of losing 2% which compounds over time. But the reality is it is much higher than that. I didn't realize how ignorant I was about the financial system. What money actually was, how it was issued, how the issuance impacted our wealth concentration and the purchasing power of the money. The central bank literally changes the balance at the biggest banks by the press of a button and just creates more money supply. And that money starts to flow and it doesn't flow to your paycheck, the impacts of the cancel on effect. When money is printed, it does tend to pull at the top because the closest to the money printer are the institutions, it flows into assets first.

2:01That's why today, of course it feels out of reach for someone to buy their first home and these stock valuations have ballooned even though the real economy is in some serious trouble and we have all these layoffs and people feeling like their paycheck to paycheck and struggling, the assets is where all the money went and the average person doesn't own them, which is one of the messages of my book in order to keep up and in order to get ahead, you have to own assets and I argue why Bitcoin is the best asset. People are really frustrated about that right now, price of things at the grocery store, healthcare, insurance premiums, all these things, they're going up at a rate far higher than someone's paycheck. Our government is just running on a credit card that it never actually has to pay back. It just rolls it on another credit card and on another credit card. And that's all being placed as a burden on future generations. Again, thank goodness that we have Bitcoin because you get to opt out. I think we have to show people that they have to care about it. We understand that inflation is the problem.

3:01Bitcoin is the solution. It's just really about showing a spotlight to other people to say, hey, isn't this common sense to you? If technology is supposed to make our lives more efficient and better and drive prices down, why the heck is the price of everything going up? Once you are empowered with the knowledge that your dollars are just constantly losing value because of the supply going up and the dilution that's happening, you can empower yourself with the ability to do something about it. One of the biggest arguments from the Fiat world is you need inflation or things will collapse. You need inflation in a credit-based system. If everything is built on debt and everything is expanding through these IOUs in order to produce less and less real growth, yes. It's very, very scary to not have inflation because things will start to collapse. And the dollars that you have to pay back in the future are worth more than in the present, which is very scary for people taking on debt. That's the system we live in, right? So deflation is scary. A debt-based system does require inflation.

4:02That's why people are so scared of deflation because in an inflationary credit-based system, deflation creates this toxic cocktail, if you will, as Jeff Booth puts it, and the whole thing collapses on itself. But in an equity-based system, that is where you can really have for the first time free market capitalism. We've never even experienced it. We've never lived in a free market. We don't know what capitalism really is. Everybody, especially young people, they demonize capitalism. And I did two at one point. When I graduated from college into the great financial crisis recession, I was like, capitalism is terrible. I mean, and crazy for me, right? Because my parents' flood communism, and here I am, and I'm like, tax the rich. But I didn't understand. That wasn't capitalism. That was essentially socialism for the rich people. Capitalism means the consequences of risk are born by those who take it. And we have not really had that. The whole system needs to be reordered. And we can only do that by rebuilding the foundation, and the foundation is like, how we interact

5:04with each other financially. It's the money. The money is what's broken. The money is what needs to be fixed. The capital itself is what needs to be something that's immune to inflation that no one can control so that it creates a new set of incentives. And those incentives are aligned with what actually provides value and let the market set the price. We shouldn't have Jerome Powell this week deciding what the interest rate is. It should be the market deciding what should be the price of money and what am I willing to lend it at. But in the Bitcoin system, that is the deflationary system. If you start to price things in Bitcoin, the price of homes are coming down. They're becoming more affordable. The price of cars and healthcare and all the things you actually want to buy are becoming more affordable. It is the glimpse into the deflationary world that people are so scared of and yet it creates all of this abundance because as Jeff beautifully puts it, abundance and money means scarcity everywhere else. Scarcity and money creates abundance everywhere else.

6:04Inflation, it's the greatest lie we've ever been told. You don't need inflation. That's one thing that I've learned through Bitcoin and I would happily argue anyone about this. We actually don't need it. It means that you inherently believe that we need theft in order for society to function and that's absolutely not true. So long as the money is divisible and it can move rapidly across the world, which Bitcoin can, any number is enough as long as you can divide it among billions of people which you can with Bitcoin. Gold was a very powerful form of hard money and at all these wonderful properties that I explained in the book, but it had as you scaled it in growing economies into the globe, it had a defect which is that you cannot settle it very quickly. So you kind of have to abstract it in paper over it, which is what led to Fiat. And at first it was okay because it was tethered to gold. It had a backing and then they loosened the backing and then they loosened it some more until they let go of it entirely in 1971. Why was I not taught the importance of 1971 in school?

7:07Like the Bitcoiners taught me that my education didn't but that was a huge important moment. We detached ourselves from something with a low inflation rate, something tethered to reality. And we just started printing these promises. So how can we be surprised that now other countries are looking at us and going, well why would we continue to trust them? They keep inflating, they can hit the magic money printer, we can't print dollars, why would we continue to have dollars sitting in our reserves that that government can print at the press of a button and we have to work for it. No way Jose, right? Like we're gonna add gold to our reserves, we're gonna maybe diversify into other currencies. Eventually they'll be buying Bitcoin but like it's such a natural outcome of the system that we created as of 1971. So thank goodness we have Bitcoin because it solves for the issues, the like Achilles heel of gold. The journey you go on Bitcoin is truly an incredible one. It's truly life changing. It makes you think about every aspect of your life. Differently it makes you think about your time differently.

8:09It makes you think about society's greatest problems, the affordability crisis, why the cost of living is exceeding people's incomes, how we've gotten so divided in this country, why the quality of things are deteriorating while prices are going up. Like you start to really understand how the world works when you learn about Bitcoin. Let's say people have acquired assets. For most people that's probably their house and all of their net worth is sort of attached to the house but home values have become completely detached from their utility. They've been inflated because of all the money printing. You don't really come to appreciate how distorted everything has become. Like prices don't really mean anything anymore. What they actually signal is just your loss of purchasing power. And if you look, I find it fascinating to look at all those charts whether it's a big Mac or a movie ticket or an average house and just seeing how it skyrocketed over the years. The whole thing, it's when you study Bitcoin, you're like, oh my gosh, this has impacted every aspect of our lives.

9:09And here we are, we're like pointing the finger at each other. It's like, oh, it's politics, it's us versus them. It's left versus blue. Let's elect someone else to fix it. No, you can't fix it that way. You've got to address the core problem, which is the financial system. And we thankfully have this parallel alternative system. We can opt into peacefully, which is Bitcoin, which is immune to the thing that truly destroys our purchasing power and that's inflation. So for me, the first and most important fix that I think Bitcoin solves and the most important thing that everyone needs is the ability to save. Save. Save. Save. Save. Save. Save. Save. Save. Save.