Will Bitcoin Become the Currency of the World? | CoinDesk Interview

i think nfts are going to be a framework that we trade in collecting utility in access in for the rest of our collective lives you've got your perspective i just want to be happy don't you our first guest is a media maestro serial entrepreneur and prominent internet personality he co-founded restaurant reservation app resi which i use from time to time and was an early angel investor tech firms like facebook twitter and venmo joining us now is gary vaynerchuk chair of vaynerx and the ceo of vader media welcome gary welcome to the show thanks for having me how are you guys all right great to have

you great all right so you know we just had people on last week we have midikovan the buyer of his 70 million dollar nft later on the show are we in an nft bubble what do you what are your thoughts on that people said we he thought he we were do you agree i do i think that we are in a very similar place to where we were in internet stocks in 2000 i think when you have these massive transformation technology shifts there's a moment where everybody gets excited about it and you know for me the internet was happening in 95 6 7 but you started to really see the stock market embrace with those ipos in 98. 99 and then obviously in april uh march april 2000 you had the collapsing of it at the time of the stocks at the time a lot of people talked about the internet being a fad and that never being meaningful for businesses blah blah what happened in reality was the internet was this game-changing revolution of technology but a lot of the early projects were just overpriced on the excitement i think we're absolutely in the replication of this i think nfts are going to be a framework that we trade in collecting utility in access in for the rest of our collective lives but i think some of the projects that you're seeing right now on the individual pieces um are going to burst

so you have a long experience in in marketing and are obviously quite skilled at that until recently bitcoin was widely considered to have a marketing problem like people just didn't get it like people the mainstream now that's changed a little bit just because of the price but if you were if you had to give kind of like the elevator pitch for bitcoin like the quick marketing sound bite what would you say like how would you sell bitcoin to the masses um you know to me you know if i was selling bitcoin i would speak about history you know why did gold do xyz why did fiat happen like what is the human psychology to acceptance i would speak about things that could happen like what if amazon accepts it what if xyz country invests aggressively at it so i think there's a lot of logical steps to continue the uh affirmation and confirmation of the currency and i think history has proven that and i would use history and examples of one domino effect that could change the outcome for the people that are cynical about it so just to follow up on that how would

you market nfts you know if at nfts like right now there's all these people being like why is someone spending 70 million on a jpeg like if you just had to quickly explain to somebody what the value is of an nft what would you say i usually go down the route of do you know somebody who's bought a fortnight skin for a hundred bucks comma do you think a blue check on instagram is worth something comma i educate them for a minute on the metadata on the nfts and speak about access membership clubs vip treatments one-on-one dinners and talk about all the charity events and things that are sold when people get access to things that they can't get access to so getting back to the topic you know

keeping on this whole idea of the nft bubble etc um nonetheless uh nfts how would you translate that into the real world you know you've been in the business of selling physical goods so how would you translate the nft from intellectual property into the physical world how will that come about i think people really under underestimating and undereducated on the smart contracts and the reality is you could sell the digital asset then deliver the individual the physical good but then in the smart contract let me give an example if i decide i have a book coming out in november but then i'm a free agent and i was going to sign another book deal now i'm debating should i just nft my book after that print 200 000 copies make an nft replication of the cover make 190 000 uh that look exactly like the cover and if you buy it for 20 bucks the nft i send you the book it's literally and you have now this little digital asset that you might be able to trade on to make some of your dollars back or what have you but then there's ten thousand covers left nine thousand of those can be silver covers and they may be a hundred dollars but what that does in the smart contract is it allows you to be part of my book club and once a month once a week whenever i decide in the smart contract i will go with that small group and do q a and learnings that leaves a hundred gold books that might be things like one-on-one dinners or a live conference and maybe one platinum book that is somebody that gets to spend a month with me the access underneath the smart contract i think is going to end up being the aha for a lot of people as they become more educated that it's not just a jpeg not to mention people care about the ownership of provenance and as that becomes social currency and the way we live it's no different than in 1999 when i told my friends that everybody would online date and they lasted me out of the room they were unable to see the chess moves to how society would evolve i believe in 15 years people are going to look at people's public wallets to see what they have bought to become a conversation piece or a social currency layer the way that logos are the way that followers on social media your wikipedia or google search results are that's funny you say that because i'm about to do that right now with you gary you tweeted in 2013 that you just bought using bitcoin google smart pants and had it delivered by a drone in 21 minutes first of all must be a very expensive pair of pants in today's dollar terms and seconds you know what was your experience with paying something with bitcoin should it be used as a currency what are your thoughts on that should be i apologize my experience was in 2013 good

yeah should be should bitcoin be used as a currency it is it's not even a should this is not about predictions people accept bitcoin all the time it's already happened the question becomes what happens next i think this you know bitcoin is so much further along than the majority of things that have come before it as an accepted currency to me i don't get to say nor do most humans get to say what should or shouldn't be accepted if enough people believe in it then it becomes you know i always remind people somebody used to live in the world before gold meant anything you know we didn't have great documentation but gold was a created ecosystem should gold be expected what should be the currency of the world is my question to you whatever

enough of the people in the world accept right humans create their ecosystems i don't think this is a game of should how has it always happened people used to trade berries for sheeps furs for people uh people used to trade high-end wine for workers to build things i mean i laugh at people's naivete to think what is going on today or what we grew up with is the end-all be-all uh that that's just laughable the human race will continue to evolve and if anything i think it makes more sense that things that are digital become the currency as we go that route as a race do you see bitcoin becoming the currency of the world that everyone will start using and

you know i like to answer things that i understand and you can see the conviction i come in on the other questions i really don't know you know for me the reason i've gone harder into nft than let's say currencies is because i just enjoy it more you know i wasn't the kind of person that really traded equities my whole life i haven't spent the meaningful hours that i think other people have around really being able to answer that question what i can tell you is people are naive and if they don't understand that a shocking number of people have accepted this i think there's a lot of conversation of what happens to the dollar when it goes off of the gold standards in the 70s i think there's a lot going on with our society and our relationships with governments and i think the ingredients are in place for bitcoin and you know you've got to understand if bitcoin hits and becomes a currency of society well that leads to a lot of other currencies and variables like nfts to also follow suit and it creates a real digital finance economy so for a long time people have been

getting really frustrated with our current social media platforms in particular facebook right in terms of you know keeping our data selling our data you know individuals having limited control um over these sort of centralized platforms and but we still haven't really seen anything truly disrupt the current model the sort of facebook twitter model um i guess my question is how do you see the future of social media and do you think blockchain technology will play a part of it do you see a decentralized social media uh coming in the future i do see a decentralized social media i do think on the flip side that our great disgust with facebook inc is more of a mainstream media headline than reality i haven't seen this grand exodus from instagram because they sell our data you know i when you talk to normal people it's like talking about defy or bitcoin or nfts most people speak about it from a headline standpoint but can't actually articulate what they're so upset about when they quote unquote sell our data it's not like people are surveillancing our life they're creating a scenario where we are getting more relevant advertising in our feeds based on our clicks and our actions this great propaganda that these machines are manipulating us is laughable you can absolutely delete the app so you know there are two separate things i think the reason you haven't seen anything too crazy is real life humans are not so up in arms for seeing root beer ads in their feed because they like root beer comma i do think a decentralized central network is inevitable because decentralization is here right like the technology is here and every aspect of our society will play on top of it so uh along those lines do you have an

expectation for instance for where the price of bitcoin will be in a couple of years from now uh based on just the overall change in the economy and how people view uh networks and how they trade currency etc i you know what's funny my friend i don't tend to predict i'm very good at seeing something and then tasting it using it and having observations here's what i will say i will say that there i don't believe there's a really middle ground for bitcoin i think it's so far advanced that unless you have government involvement i think it will continue to go up and then if you do have massive government regulations if russia america europe decides to say you are if you are a citizen of our state our sovereign nation you are not allowed to hold this i think you've got a whole nother bag of issues and a whole who knows what comes out of that but i don't think there's this middle ground for a very long time i think you got another decade max of potential middle ground and then it's going to space or you're going to have real interesting unrest between citizens and sovereign nations thanks all right thank you so much gary for joining us this morning and sharing your thoughts always a pleasure thanks for having me team bye-bye youtube watcher what's up it's garyvee first of all thank you so much i hope you're doing super well during these times i also want to ask you please subscribe because my commitment and exploration of youtube is about to explode stories polls more content more engagement more surprise and delight this is the time to subscribe i hope you consider it and i hope i see you soon