저자: PeterThiel · 외국인
요약 보기
결론: 비트코인은 금(저회전·고가치 저장수단) 대체재로서 아직 저평가되어 있으며, 장기적으로 주식시장 대비 큰 상승 여지가 있다는 주장. [화폐 이론] 화폐는 회전율(속도)과 가치저장 기능의 역관계로 설명된다. 페이팔 초기 모델은 폐쇄형 저장 모델이었고 이후 고속 회전 구조로 전환됐다. 금·비트코인은 저회전·고가치, 비자(Visa)·이더리움은 고회전 결제 시스템에 해당한다고 봤다. [비트코인 vs 이더리움 밸류에이션] 현재 비트코인 시총 약 8300억 달러, 이더리움 약 3860억 달러. 이더리움은 비자 시총 수준으로 공정가치에 가깝다고 평가하며, 가스비 하락 등 마찰 제거가 전제라고 봤다. 반면 금 시장 규모(약 12조 달러)와 비교하면 비트코인은 크게 저평가되어 있다고 주장. [금·주식 대비 비율] 1970년대 말 금과 주식 시총 비율은 약 1:1이었으나 현재는 전체 상장주식 약 115조 달러 대비 금 약 12조 달러로 약 10:1. 인플레이션·고세율 환경에서는 주식도 자본이득세 실효세율이 높아 나쁜 투자가 될 수 있다고 봤다. [비트코인 목표 관련] 2022년 4월 기준 약 4만 3천 달러에서 10배 상승 시 금 대체 시나리오, 주식 대비 100:1 비율 시 상승 여지를 언급했다. 구체적 단기 목표가·기간은 명시하지 않았다. [리스크·조건] 비트코인이 향후 주식과 함께 움직이는 고베타 자산으로 작동한다고 인정했다. 1970년대형 고인플레·고규제 환경이 도래하면 상승 근거가 강화되고, 연준 등 중앙은행이 인플레이션 경고를 무시하고 있다고 비판했다. [기타 발언] 시장 저항 세력(ESG, 기관투자자 등)을 비판하며 비트코인 운동을 정치적 혁명으로 규정했다. 출연자 전망은 장기 낙관.
다듬은 글
There's so much I was wrong about in 1999, but I thought I'd reflect on some of the things I was thinking at the time, give some perspective on what it means for for the world today of 2022. You know, when I was running PayPal, when I was getting it started, the standard way I'd start an investor pitch would I'd hold up several hundred dollar bills.
It would always get people's attention. It's kind of hypnotic, you know, even though, you know, it's really weird. What is What is this? I mean, it's it's probably not very good as toilet paper. It's not good as wallpaper. It's um it's sort of this crappy fiat money. It's a very mysterious thing, what is money?
Is it a network effect? You know, um you know, would the gentleman in the front row like to have the money? Does somebody come up and get it? But uh I don't know how to throw it out at people. I thought I thought you guys were supposed to be Bitcoin maximalists, you know? And so uh And so this is like it's it's it's like kind of crazy that this stuff still works, you know?
Um but you know, when we and and when we were starting PayPal, we knew nothing about money, about banking, about payments, about any of this stuff. It was sort of uh all thought of from first principles. We probably got a lot very wrong. I'll I'll mention the two slides uh that describe what we thought we were doing.
This is the PayPal February 1999 seed round pitch. We were going to replace uh we said the US Treasury. We actually meant the the central bank. We didn't know the difference between the two. Um but it was going to be sort of a closed loop system, a new form of money, new network effect, um electronic 21st century version um of uh of money.
By uh 2002, at the time of the IPO, the PayPal business model looked like a funnel, where the money went in and out fast. And I just want um and you know, this was it was just it was a payment system. And I want to just start with those two pictures, a closed network versus a funnel, are are two very different pictures.
You know, in some ways this was a more practical business. It was a but it was a decline. It was much less ambitious. Money goes in and out super fast. And I think one of the ways to think about um all of these different things, this is not a perspective I had at the time, but if you think about these different forms that money can take, you can have forms of money that are high velocity, where it moves super fast, but then you don't actually need that much um in in the form that it has.
It's just like maybe an accounting device or something like that. And if you have forms of money that are intrinsically low velocity, then um the quantity you need is is much much greater. And it's this inverse relationship that got goes across many different forms of money. And so the the PayPal 1999 was a closed loop, where you'd have you'd have this enormous uh store of value that gets built up.
The PayPal 2002 was sort of a high velocity loop. You know, and this is of course also analogous to something like gold bullion is store of value, low velocity money. It moves once, you know, every few decades in a central bank vault. Visa, super high velocity, moves trillions of dollars a year, but Visa itself doesn't need to have very much money on on its own.
And I think one of the reasons people always get uh these two different modalities confused, they're like radically different kinds of products. Is that when we think of money, we are still always just thinking of the hundred dollar bill that I presented you at the beginning. And physical cash is it's it's sort of the one very weird form of money that's actually sort of intermediate velocity and intermediate value.
It's not really great at either. You know, you can um you can store money in a piggy bank, physical cash. You can You store it in a mattress. That's That's getting pretty weird. You can maybe use it to buy, you know, pay for a restaurant, a club, you know, a maybe a used car. Probably gets hard to use physical cash to buy for a house.
So it's sort of both It's not that great at either payments or store of value, but it's in between. And because we always think of uh physical cash when we think of money, we tend to think store of value and uh and sort of high velocity things are the same, even though in practice most things are at these two opposite ends of ends of the spectrum.
And then, you know, I I want to uh I want to obviously suggest that, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum are at these two extreme opposite ends of the spectrum. Bitcoin, store of value, gold replacement. Ethereum, if it works, is going to be sort of the super high velocity, fast fast moving thing. And um and the thing that's sort of I would say fundamentally honest about Bitcoin is that we are just at this one, you know, sort of low velocity, high value end of the spectrum.
And then if you look at something like Ethereum, you are um um you you you you will you will say that it's high velocity. It's going to be sort of a frictionless payment system, but then it's also going to uh have it incredible amounts of intrinsic value. And there's probably something about all those things that doesn't quite add up.
Um you know, so if we if this is by the way, this is a I I I took I took this slide from uh from Vitalik from Vitalik himself. So uh so uh this is uh um And there's sort of a question, how do we compare and contrast them? And um and so if we if we look at the current market caps, 830 billion versus 386 billion of Ethereum.
But if we if we map Bitcoin onto gold and Ethereum onto Visa, um well, Ethereum's worth roughly as much as Visa. So it's fairly valued. You know, if if you have a seamless, frictionless payment system, you know, it's worth 400 billion dollars. As it works, the gas fees have to go down. It has to become completely frictionless to work.
Um and then whereas gold is um is 12 trillion. And if if Bitcoin is going to replace gold, the question is really, why is it so undervalued? What is it going to take for it to go up uh the 10x? I'm going to close up on that close on that a little bit later. Uh yeah, so there there's sort of all these um all these different ways Bitcoin is going to has every potential to replace gold.
Question is uh why it has why it has not done so yet. Um now I think there's if we take one step further back, we can even ask a question, why is you know, why is gold worth 12 trillion dollars? How much How much should all the gold in the world be worth? And um and if we look at say the 1970s, um gold did remarkably well.
Um and you know, stocks were were kind of a crappy investment. And um and it's sort of very different from today. So if you look at all the gold in the world today versus all the publicly traded equities in the world today, it's about 12 trillion of gold, 115 trillion of equities, roughly a 10 to 1 ratio.
If you look at sort of the peak of of the of the of the bull market in the late '70s, early '80s, where gold peaked at about $850 an ounce in nominal dollars. At the time, all the gold in the world was worth about 2 and 1/2 trillion. All the publicly traded equities were worth 2 and 1/2 trillion. And the ratio was actually 1 to 1.
And so one of the questions you have to ask is uh yeah, why why is the ratio um 10 to 1? Why can't it be 1 to 1? Maybe it should be 100 to 1. It can be all over the map. What What defines these kinds of ratios? And I would say the I would say sort of one one simple version is um is that uh in the 1970s, you know, cash was trash, bonds were trash, but equities were pretty bad investments as well, because in an inflationary world, um in a high regulation, high inflation, high tax world, um the effective capital gains tax rate goes well north of 100% because you don't set the basis uh on on equities.
You don't adjust it to inflation. And so uh equities become an extraordinarily bad investment. In the world of the 2010s, you know, gold did pretty well, Bitcoin did extremely well, but the real competitor uh for, you know, Bitcoin is not Ethereum. That's a payment system. It's not you know, it's not even gold.
It's It's something like the S&P 500. It's the stock market as a whole. And this is the way you know, this is the way Bitcoin trades every day, you know, if the stocks go up, Bitcoin goes up. Now it's it's it's like a highly levered Nasdaq stock on a day-to-day basis. And and that is sort of in a sense the real competitor.
And the question is um whether we're headed towards a kind of 1970s style world, where it's higher inflation, more regulation, um and um and even being, you you don't want to be in a stock or bond, but even being sorry, you don't want to be in cash or bond, but even being in a stock, you're effectively um in something that's like a government linked entity.
Companies, woke companies, are sort of quasi controlled by the government in a way that Bitcoin never will be. And in that sort of a world, um I I would submit that perhaps the way we should think of the Bitcoin to equity ratio, you know, the the benchmark for Bitcoin is not gold, but equities. And the question is, why can't there be parity between Bitcoin and equities?
Why Why shouldn't we be talking about something more like a hundred to one? Which of course won't be won't be as good as it sounds, because the fiat money will be worth a lot less and it'll be taxed pretty heavily and and whatnot. But I think but I'm I'm still hopeful that if Bitcoin goes up by a factor of a hundred, you will you'll make some money, a modest amount of money in in real terms.
Um now, you know, there there are sort of um at the very minimum, what I I um, know, it's always hard to know where Bitcoin goes from here. It's $43,000 today. Where does it Where does it go? Um, what I what I like to say is that Bitcoin is always the most honest market in the world. It's the most efficient market and it it was it was the canary in the coal mine.
It was telling us that the inflation was coming in the last uh 2 years is it went from 5 6,000 uh up by, you know, a factor of 10x. It it is telling us that the central banks are bankrupt. That we are we are at the end of the fiat money regime. And that's sort of uh that's sort of what it has what it has priced in.
I think the central bankers, Mr. Powell, people like that should be extremely grateful to Bitcoin because um it's it's the last warning they're going to get. They are they they are they've chosen to ignore it um and um and they will have to, you know, pay the consequences for that in in the years ahead.
Let me um let me ask Let me Let me come back to this question. Um, why why has Bitcoin not uh yet gone to $100,000 to a million dollars a Bitcoin? Why has it not yet converged with gold or um or even with the equity markets more broadly? And what what is what is going to you know, what is what is it going to take for this for this to happen?
And uh you know, I I I know that sort of the ways we often talk about um businesses or technologies is, you know, how how great the technology is, how great the code is, how great the math is. Uh you know, how how how how it's sort of innovative. But I I want to sort of suggest that we should maybe think of we should think of um we we should think of it at least in one dimension as sort of a political question.
And it's a it's a movement and it's a political question whether this movement is going to um succeed or whether um whether the enemies of the movement are going to succeed in stopping us. And uh and so I want to maybe end with um you know, an enemies list. A list of people who I think are stopping Bitcoin and you know, they they they they all have many of them have They're sort of a lot lot of them.
They tend to have the sort of nameless faceless bureaucrat perspective which is of course one of the ways they hide. Um but I'm going to we're going to try to try to expose them and uh and and realize that uh that this is sort of what we have to fight for uh for Bitcoin to go 10x or 100x from here. So um Enemy number one.
I I I I think he's sort of um I I I think the sort of the the sociopathic uh grandpa from Omaha is um is is perhaps the most honest and the most direct in it. Um and um and you have to sort of think of it's it's it's of course on some level these people are always just talking their book. It's sort of they have some sort of institutional bias.
Uh it's long, you know, a list of woke companies. It's It's It's It's somehow long this um this uh fiat money system and um and of course um if it if it was if it if the you know, there's always a sense if you're a if you're a money manager, you want to pretend that it's complicated to invest. And uh if if if all you have to do is buy Bitcoin, you know, that's that's like that's like ridiculous.
All these people are out of business. You know, it's uh I mean, there's there was a version this also with gold. They never like gold either because if all you had to do was own gold, um that's something everybody can do. Um but uh there is something there's sort of an institutional bias, a a um sort of a um center left political bias.
Um you know, there's of course um there's of course the um um there's of course the New York City uh banker bias um Jamie Dimon, J.P. Morgan. You can get quotes like this from from any number of these people. Uh and then then I would say um you know, another another one even more obscure, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock where um you know, uh if if you have these sort of large institutional investors, um they need to be allocating some of their money to Bitcoin.
When they manage state pension funds in the US or or or or they they get trillions of dollars in assets. When they choose not to allocate to Bitcoin, that is a deeply political choice and we need to be pushing back on them. We need to say, you know, um you have to you have to get on board on this. And the the the the Larry Fink quote is sort of a representative I think of a whole genre of anti Bitcoin things where uh you know, um you you have to always put it in some context, but pro blockchain pro blockchain is an anti Bitcoin term very typically.
So it's like I love the blockchain, but you know, not so sure about this Bitcoin. Don't need Bitcoin. We can move on to the blockchain. Move along. This is not, you know, not the currency you're looking for. Move along. Move along. And um and uh but you know, if we sort of combine um all of these things, you know, I I would sort of put put the label on um on the sort of uh you know, on on the sort of um uh the the the label they've come up with and perhaps the real enemy is ESG.
Um and um and which you know, I I I I you know, it's always sort of unclear what it means. You know, um you might think of it as not charitable for me to sort of name some enemies here, but I I think that ESG is just a hate factory. It's a factory for naming enemies and we should not be allowing them to do that.
Or um or that you know, of course you can you can sort of always ask the question, you know, what's the difference between ESG and CCP, the Chinese Communist Party? You know, they are they are into social and governance. Um you know, environmental is sort of fake. Uh it's probably also fake in a lot of these cases, but uh but I always think when you think ESG, you should be thinking CCP.
Um and um and there's some there's some degree um you know, and it's it's been a surprise, you know, ESG's been surprisingly inclusive. You know, basically as far as I can tell, the only the only things that are sort of not liked are, you know, some of the some of the carbon industries and then um and then Bitcoin.
And it's because most of the other companies, you know, they are they are subject to political control, especially when they when your companies go public. You know, I always I I always advise CEOs when they take their companies public. You know, there's some good things. You get liquidity. You can You know, the early investors can cash out.
Um um you can get some credibility. But um it's basically taking a company public, it's a it's a de facto government takeover where where some people uh who are effectively government bureaucrats became more empowered. It's the the the CFO, the general counsel, the accountants, the lawyers, the uh you know, the HR people, all these sort of extensions of the state um are given more power.
Uh and and we have to think of ESG as sort of this this vast umbrella thing. And and and we're, you know, sort of one of the one of the um great features of Bitcoin and it's always a question whether it's a bug or a feature, but I would submit that in the sort of more heavy-handed uh statist world, it is far more of a feature than a bug.
Is that Bitcoin is not a company. It does not have a board. Um we do not know who Satoshi is. Um and uh and in some ways all these things seemed extreme in the world of the 2010s where, you know, the inflation was low, the regulations were were not the worst. Um and it seems seems extremely prescient for the world of the 2020s.
And if we had to summarize this in in uh one frame, the finance gerontocracy that runs the country through whatever um silly virtue signaling / hate factory term like ESG they have versus what I would call, you know, what what we have to think of as a as a revolutionary youth movement. And uh and we have to just go out from this this conference and uh and take over the world.
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