Khalil Rountree's Bitcoin Awakening

I went to the Bitcoin Conference in Miami this year and just got to see and hear some really, really cool things and the people who are pioneering this and really believing in Bitcoin specifically, not just the whole world of cryptocurrency but Bitcoin itself. I haven't been excited about something like this in a really long time and I'm not a finance guy. Really? I grew up knowing about financial systems and networks and stock markets or anything and now I'm finally at a point where I'm starting to be able to see a future for myself and also a way to ... People like me don't really have generational wealth. I don't see how I can really create that through fighting alone. So lately I've just been trying to understand more of the advancement of technology and where we're headed. For instance, when I was a kid in the 1990s and early 2000s when the internet came versus now, in that jump in my lifetime, it's night and day difference. I'm living in the sci-fi compared to what was in the 90s. Now just listening to people, really smart people, even like Yoon Mi Park who you had here and hearing her and how she spoke about how Bitcoin is actually helping save some children from ... So in North Korea, this is what she said, in North Korea when women are taken as sex slaves and shipped over to Northern China where these guys are buying them because China has this one child rule in certain areas. So if the sex slave has a child, then that child is half North Korean and half Chinese and the Chinese won't accept them and they can't go back to North Korea because the women kind of like escaped. So because of that, there's actually what she said are pretty much millions of stateless children who can't get birth certificates, who can't get schooling, who can't get anything, and they are either sent to prison camps as children or killed because what are they going to do with them? China doesn't accept them and they can't go back to North Korea, so what happens? So there's underground church groups that are actually taking these kids in and because they can't use Chinese money and because it's happening in China, because they can't use Chinese money, the only currency that they can use right now is Bitcoin. And so people are able to fund them too so that they can at least school these kids and feed them and things like that. So from a currency and money standpoint, there's a small fraction of where I'm like, okay, I see how this works. But then trying to uncover and dive more into the whole system of how this can be implemented into just like daily society, I'm seeing more and more possibility and it's making me more and more secure on, hey man, I can actually finally have something that I own that's mine. Like whatever I earn is going to be mine and you can't touch it. No one can touch it. And there's a guy, Adam Curry, who's like- It's a good buddy of mine. Yeah. You know, like Podcast Index, now they've created this thing where if you want to have your own platform and not worry about being taken down or censored or whatever, and you can also get paid in satoshis, which are fractions of a Bitcoin, from the supporters. So you can stream your stats. You don't have to buy Bitcoin. You can create a platform where, hey, I'm speaking. If I wanted to start one and I'm like, you know what? I don't have the money to actually buy Bitcoin, but I do have a lot of stuff that I want to talk about. Subscribe to my podcast and then my fans and my followers are streaming to me satoshis just like they would on Instagram, like likes. You get what I'm saying? So likes and replays and all that stuff is also a currency that people don't really look at it that way. But like a lot of these companies that want to do business with me, it's like, oh, how many followers do you have? What's your Twitter engagement? What's your Instagram engagement? Oh, this video only got 70,000 plays. That's a form of currency because that's like looked at as my value or my worth on whether or not you're going to work with me or not. Well, that's why shadow banning is so sneaky. Yeah, man. Shadow banning is so insidious because you're limiting a person's ability to grow. Exactly. And they do that all the time with people. I think of Bitcoin the same way I think about the early internet. I think they didn't see it coming and now it's a viable form of currency. You can actually buy things with it. And I think the government is freaking out. I think what they're going to try to do is they tried to do some shit with the internet during the Obama administration where they were going to try to censor the internet. And it fell apart because people were furious in the uproar and they thought the political repercussions of it were not worth it. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze, so they backed off of it. But I feel that there's going to come a time where some government, whether it's the United States or another government might try it first, they're going to try to implement ... I know they already do it in China, but they're going to try to implement a digital currency, a centralized digital currency that they can control. What's scary about that is they could say, Khalil, we've looked at your behavior online and you have some marks against you and so you're not going to be able to buy this. Or you can only buy staples. You can buy food and shelter, but we're not going to allow you to travel. Because that could be a real thing where they could literally limit what you spend your money on. 1,000%.