It’s Only Bitcoin That Can End Corrupt Financial Systems – Exclusive Interview with Prince

Benzinga – Exclusively speaking to Mike Ermolaev, a crypto journalist who interviews celebrities and notable crypto figures, Prince Philip Karageorgevitch, Hereditary Prince of Serbia and Yugoslavia, explains why Bitcoin is set to be the world’s currency in the future and how it is superior to fiat and other cryptocurrencies.

His Royal Highness Hereditary Prince Philip of Serbia and Yugoslavia is the second son of the last Crown Prince of the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Alexander, and the grandson of Peter II, the last king of Yugoslavia. In 1945, the country’s communist leadership exiled the royal family. Prince Philip, born the United States and raised in the United Kingdom, recently returned to Serbia, where he lives with his family. An active public figure, he works for a Bitcoin company he believes is the best in the world.

Having spent many years in finance, he witnessed first-hand the weaknesses of the current monetary system, leading him to explore alternatives. This is a fascinating story about a blue blood, a symbol of tradition, becoming a passionate advocate for something so unconventional as Bitcoin.

It wasn’t love at first sight

My first question to Prince Philip was, of course, what prompted his interest in Bitcoin.

“Well, the story is that people often discover Bitcoin many times. I first came across it in 2012, but I didn’t buy it. It just appeared people were talking that it would go to a hundred dollars. I didn’t think any of it. I thought it’s just some magic internet money.

Then five years later, in 2017, my best friend invested in it, and he said, “Philip, take a look at Bitcoin. It’s really interesting. It’s got a 21 million cap. It’s gonna be this great inflation hedge and all this.” I was like, “Oh, interesting.” He kind of taught me to get onto an exchange and to secure my wallet. So I thought, “This is fantastic.” I bought some and got into a wallet, and then of course, I got distracted by other altcoins as well. But I was introduced to it then, and I had my first Bitcoin,” Prince Philip said.

Having developed expertise in finance, he saw growing issues with the traditional monetary system. Something changes in people’s lives forever when they recognize a problem and consider what they can do about it. The same thing happened to Prince Philip.

“I worked 15 years in finance, and I always thought things aren’t running as smoothly as they should be. There was just something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And when the pandemic hit, the amount of stimulus that they pumped into the economy to try to keep it alive by just digitally printing money out of thin thin air rang alarm bells to me. There was this feeling like, “This is not right.” And of course, Bitcoin is its thesis. It’s part of that. You can’t inflate it. There’s a 21 million cap. So I was like, “Okay, so I’m going to study more about Bitcoin.”

So I studied more and more, and then all of a sudden I realized that the answer to many of my questions was right under my nose. When I learned more about it and its features, philosophy, I realized, “Oh my God, this is the answer to a lot of my questions.” It also dawned on me that the rest of other coins don’t matter. So, I sold all my other coins and got only Bitcoin. And I declared myself a Bitcoin maximalist at that point in 2020,” Prince Philip said.

A sudden rise in fame among bitcoiners

During a TV interview in March 2022, Prince Philip said Bitcoin is freedom for everyone, and that’s something he wants for everyone. After that interview, he was immediately welcomed by the Bitcoin community.

“During the interview, the host asked me about crypto, and I said, “Oh, yeah, not crypto. It’s all about Bitcoin”. And I spoke for two or three minutes about that. That was then picked up by the Bitcoin community and went viral on Bitcoin Twitter,” the prince said.

As a result, Prince Philip became a sensation in the crypto media, including Daniel Prince’s ‘Once Bitten’ and Saifedean’s podcasts, before attending the Bitcoin Magazine conference in Miami, where he met Samson Mow, who offered him the position of Chief Strategic Officer at JAN3. A major mission of the company is to accelerate nation-state adoption of Bitcoin across the globe. Among other things, it assists El Salvador in establishing Bitcoin City.

“Because I was a Bitcoin maximalist, I wanted to dedicate my life to this. I saw it as a future. I couldn’t say no. Then a few months later I transitioned out of my old traditional finance job. And now I’m full-time into Bitcoin. And now here I’m speaking to people like you, which is great and exciting. My work is now my passion,” Prince Philip said.

The Cantillon effect

In the course of our discussion, I asked Prince Philip what his concerns were with the existing global financial system. It is unclear to the average person how central banks harm economies. This seemed like a question that Prince Philip’s expertise could answer.

According to him, the current monetary system is unfair because it relies on the Cantillon effect. In a nutshell, the Cantillon effect describes a change in relative prices caused by a change in money supply. Every major financial crisis since the 2000s has seen the world’s largest central banks create new money aggressively. After the US exited the gold standard and the Federal Reserve was established, the Cantillon effect favored investors and owners over wage-earners.

“And so the question was, how do we fix the Cantillon effect? Why is it that people closer to the so-called proverbial money printer have an advantage over those further down the money food chain, so to speak? And I thought this was very unfair.

With Bitcoin, everyone plays, but in the fiat world, those closest to the printer have a better advantage. Because when the money gets distributed, they’re able to quickly allocate that money into real assets. These people are intelligent. They know that money is almost fictional. It’s just a bunch of numbers on a screen. But they know that if they put it in a real asset like property, they’re able to secure that.

So this is why property prices have gone up dramatically, especially since the first huge round of stimulus that happened in the great financial crisis. And I was wondering why is it that property prices go up? Because interest rates go down. That gives people an incentive to borrow money to stimulate growth. Then who are the ones who get that low interest rate? They’re the big companies, the big guys. And what about little guys? You know, these are the questions I was asking myself. And I thought, “Why can’t we make a solution to that?” Prince Philip said.

Adding to that, he said: “With Bitcoin, the person with the most amount of Bitcoin plays by the same rules as the person with the least amount of Bitcoin. No one is closer to any money issuance. The economic incentives of Bitcoin are completely reversed in the way that it incentivizes people to play by the rules. It’s really beautiful.”

Fiat value vs Bitcoin value

Another question Prince Philip said he asked himself was what was the exact value of fiat money. “That money is purely fictional. You look at a paper note, and you just see a bunch of art, some numbers and some silver tags, water marks and stuff. And you really think to yourself, “This is a paper, but it’s not backed by gold. And what makes it actually valuable?”

So the answer was, of course, it’s economies that back that. The stronger the economy, the stronger the fiat. But of course, it’s also the stronger the economy, the stronger the army as well, the stronger the fiat as well. And this is why you get down the rabbit hole of how petrodollars work and how many wars have been waged in order to strengthen the petrodollar system,” he said.

“With Bitcoin, its value is subjective, but Bitcoin has the reason why it exists in reality. It has to be cemented to reality. And that’s the SHA-256 algorithm and the proof-of-work. That is its cementation to reality. It has to use energy in order to exist. It’s an energy-backed monetary system. Bitcoin users pass this energy on to other Bitcoin users who transact with it. You don’t want your hard work and energy inflated away by someone, by just adding a few zeros on a keyboard and pressing enter. That’s not going to happen with Bitcoin,” Prince Philip added.

Bitcoin whales pose no threat

It couldn’t help but puzzle my mind as to how Bitcoin whales are different from those big guys close to the money printer in the fiat world.

As Prince Philip put it: “We are still in the Wild West. It is pure capitalism here. It’s the only market that’s open 24/7. It does not shut down. You have whales that can influence the market, but they can’t influence its issuance. They can’t influence the amount of bitcoins being printed. They can only influence the price of it going up and down, but really to a certain extent. This just creates volatility in the short term.

It’s actually just exciting for newcomers to the space where they can get Bitcoin at good prices if they’re just disciplined enough not to play the market and not to be traders. Instead, they can just DCA (dollar cost average) maybe once a week, and just forget about it – put it as automated trading so they can get on with their lives to be productive elsewhere.”

As a quick clarification of dollar cost averaging (DCA), it refers to an investment strategy which invests funds in set increments instead of all at once. It is used to avoid losing too much capital in the event of an unexpected market downturn.

Adding to the discussion of whales, Prince Philip explained that these big players would no longer have an incentive to play the markets over time. The volatility of Bitcoin has already decreased since its inception, and it will continue to decrease.

Bitcoin is more of a discovery than a creation

The prince said Bitcoin is the only crypto that is free from centralized control, making it different from all the other cryptocurrencies that can be classified as unregulated securities.

“They have teams of people, CEOs, and slick marketing teams. They have people working that you actually know. They have pre-mining and these sorts of things that just mean that they’re highly corruptible.

Bitcoin had the so-called immaculate conception. It was more of a discovery than a creation. So, in terms of centralization, you could say that there’s some centralization with mining. When China banned mining in 2021, there was about 60% of the hash. They banned that. Most of the hash left the country. The difficulty adjustment went down. And this was the beautiful thing about Bitcoin. The difficulty adjustment is ingenious. This shows how decentralized it is,” Prince Philip said.

He added that Bitcoin merely became more…