Can Bitcoin actually function as real money—and is it destroying the planet? In Part 3 of our cryptocurrency series, host Kirsten Howe continues her conversation with Jirayr Kembikian, CFP® and Managing Director of Citrine Capital, to answer these critical questions. Jirayr systematically breaks down the seven properties that define ideal currency—durability, divisibility, portability, verifiability, scarcity, established history, and ease of use—then compares Bitcoin against both the U.S. dollar and gold. Bitcoin outperforms the dollar on almost every measure and beats gold in critical areas like portability and verifiability. You’ll discover why no one can walk into Fort Knox to verify reserves, how Bitcoin’s network validates itself every 10 minutes, and why the fixed supply cap means higher prices can never inflate availability (unlike gold mining).
But the real surprises come when Jirayr addresses Bitcoin’s environmental critics. Learn how mining operations now capture harmful methane from landfills and gas flaring, why Bitcoin uniquely utilizes stranded energy that nothing else can access, and how 55% of the network runs on renewable power—advancing clean energy in unprecedented ways. The conversation extends to Bitcoin’s profound social impact: providing financial access to over a billion unbanked people worldwide and offering economic freedom to those living under authoritarian regimes. From Block (formerly Square) integrating Bitcoin into millions of point-of-sale terminals to El Salvador’s adoption as legal tender, Bitcoin is moving from investment vehicle to functional currency faster than most realize.
Time-stamped Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
1:38 Breaking down what makes “good money”—the seven research-backed properties of ideal currency compared across Bitcoin, gold, and the dollar.
3:05 Gold’s fatal flaw: incredibly heavy and expensive to transport across countries, while Bitcoin enables instant, costless transfers worldwide.
5:18 Start listening now to learn more about why Bitcoin’s 21 million supply cap is unchangeable.
5:51 The track record gap—gold’s thousands of years of proven use versus Bitcoin’s 15-year history remains its biggest weakness.
6:49 Survival needs drive Bitcoin adoption in the Global South, whereas in the West, it is adopted as a store of value.
8:58 Block (formerly Square) just integrated Bitcoin into millions of point-of-sale terminals—a massive shift for real-world payments.
10:17 The merchant advantage: significantly lower fees plus immediate settlement, versus waiting days for credit card deposits.
11:00 Lightning Network explained—designed for fast, cheap, everyday transactions rather than long-term value storage.
12:00 The ESG dilemma—energy consumption concerns initially kept sustainably-focused investors away from Bitcoin.
12:50 The surprising discovery: Bitcoin mining operations now capture harmful methane from landfills and gas flaring, actively reducing emissions.
15:31 How Bitcoin mining accelerates renewable energy—co-location with solar and wind projects makes them profitable sooner while eliminating transmission costs.
15:47 Financial freedom for billions: over 1 billion unbanked people gain access to banking, while those under authoritarian regimes escape government financial control.
Get in touch with Jirayr!
Managing Director & Co-Founder
Citrine Capital
CitrineCapitalAdvisors.com
jirayr@citrinecapitaladvisors.com
415.494.8262
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to Absolute Trust Talk. I’m Kirsten Howe, the host here at Absolute Trust Counsel, and we’re so glad to have you back. This is the third in a series of chats that I’m having with my guest today, Jirayr Kembikian. He is a CFP, a wealth advisor. In case you missed my introduction of him in the other two episodes, he is a co-founder of Citrine Capital, which is a San Francisco-based wealth management and tax planning firm. They largely serve tech professionals, founders, and business owners. Over the years, he has developed expertise in the area of Bitcoin as an investment, and that’s what he’s here to talk to us about today.
If you missed the first two episodes, you ought to go back—they’re fascinating. But today, welcome Jirayr, thank you for being back. I appreciate it.
Today, we’re going to talk about how we use Bitcoin. What are we doing with it once we’ve purchased it? My understanding, which was zero before I met Jirayr, is that there are two uses for Bitcoin. One is as a storage of value, and the other is as a currency. So let’s talk about what actually is a currency, and how does Bitcoin stack up against what we are most familiar with, which is dollars and cents.
Happy to dive in here. There are lots of different directions we can go on what an ideal currency should be. So I’ll break it down into what many research reports have explored. Number one, maybe the most important from a currency or store of value perspective, is it has to be durable in the sense that it has to maintain your purchasing power over time. I’ll contrast this conversation with gold, our fiat currency, and Bitcoin. With gold, it’s been around for thousands of years and has maintained purchasing power based on who has owned it. Bitcoin also falls in that bucket of maintaining your purchasing power over time. In comparison, the dollar, or virtually any other fiat currency, has lost and has not been able to maintain purchasing power over time. So that’s number one.
Number two, as we touched on in the previous segment, it has to be divisible. Can you divide up a dollar or Bitcoin? Yes, you can. With a dollar there are cents. With a Bitcoin, one Bitcoin equals 100 million Satoshis. With gold, you can’t—it’s not divisible. You can’t walk around and shave off gold to pay for items.
Right. You either have a chunk of gold or you don’t.
Exactly. The next piece is that it has to be portable, meaning it has to be easy to transport. And again, this goes against gold, because while it has maintained purchasing power over time, it’s incredibly heavy, expensive, and difficult to transport. You can’t send tons of gold across the country or world cheaply and safely.
Right. So from a portability perspective, Bitcoin is superior, and the dollar is also easy, not as easy as Bitcoin, but easy. Another big part is how verifiable the currency is. With Bitcoin, the supply and the Bitcoin network is verified every 10 minutes, and that’s a huge part of Bitcoin. Anyone in the world can access the Bitcoin network, verify transactions, verify the total amount of Bitcoin in the world. No one can do that with the US dollar system. No one can walk into Fort Knox and say, “Hey, let me verify the contents of this location.” With gold, it’s also very difficult to verify how much gold exists in the overall world. It’s also difficult and expensive with gold to verify that it actually is gold. So that’s a big part of it.
The next part is scarcity. Ideally, hard money should be scarce. It shouldn’t be easily printed as currency currently is. With Bitcoin, as we mentioned, it has a fixed supply cap, so that is superior. Gold also gets a positive in this ranking, but with an asterisk, because if the price of gold skyrockets—or rather, I should say, as the price of gold skyrockets based on what’s happening right now—
Yeah, which is happening this year.
There will simply be more incentive and more ways to mine more gold. We might look for gold in more profitable ways that weren’t profitable previously, simply based on the price of gold. That doesn’t exist with Bitcoin. No matter what the price of Bitcoin does, that will not influence how much supply we will have.
There’s nothing anybody can do to create a greater supply of Bitcoin.
Yeah, and the last piece is track record. How long has this form of money stood the test of time? Gold is actually the only one that has, because it’s been around for thousands of years. Bitcoin has only been around for 15 years, so not great from that perspective. The track record isn’t there, and that also deters some people from holding and acquiring Bitcoin, because it’s only been around for that long. That’s a negative.
Yeah, for sure. Okay, so let’s talk about how we go about using Bitcoin as a currency. My understanding is that there are other countries besides the US where it’s much more widely used as a currency than it is here.
This is an interesting fork in the conversation, if you will, because some countries have used it out of necessity. I think that’s an important point to acknowledge. In the West—Europe, the US—we are very privileged from a currency perspective in comparison to virtually all other global currencies. We have a very stable currency. There isn’t substantial risk in having your money seized from you without any proper cause, and that, unfortunately, is not the case in most of the world. So no surprise, most of the world has migrated purely out of necessity, and that largely is the reason why Bitcoin has exploded in adoption in the Global South, in South America, Africa and so on.
That’s an interesting thought process where you’re comparing it as a store of value, which is largely how it started to be thought of in the West. And that has been, in my opinion, solidified, or starting to be solidified as institutions flood into Bitcoin from a store of value perspective. That also logically makes sense, because most folks are not going to accept money until it is actually having the properties of money. We want it to be able to store value properly over time. And that’s also an important acknowledgment that some people, even five or 10 years ago, said, “Hey, this is a failure. Bitcoin is a failure because people are not transacting on Bitcoin.” Well, it will over time. It first has to solidify as a store of value, and then become a medium of exchange.
I get that. Okay, so it is still happening in the world and in the US that people are using Bitcoin as currency?
Yes. It’s a very interesting time that we’re in right now. I want to say it was a couple months ago that Block, formerly known as Square, integrated Bitcoin into their point-of-sale terminals. This is fascinating—millions of point-of-sale terminals. That’s number one. As you kind of touched on previously, El Salvador was the pilot country, if you will, for accepting Bitcoin as legal tender, and that’s been a fascinating ecosystem to see just how it’s developed over time. We’re starting to see more and more retailers, both in the US and internationally, either piloting Bitcoin acceptance programs for payment or implementing these programs. And in most cases, what they’re finding is it’s faster and less expensive than traditional point-of-sale terminals and processes. So it’s fascinating how quickly this is happening, and it’s a positive in the Bitcoin space.
So the credit card processing fee that I pay, if I were to accept Bitcoin, maybe the fee would be a little less?
A lot less. Also faster in terms of how it settles. So not only are you paying a higher percentage for credit card fees, but you’re also waiting a number of business days to have that money deposited in your account. That’s another really interesting point about Bitcoin—its immediate settlement.
Right. Interesting. Okay, have you ever used Bitcoin yourself for a purchase or for some kind of contractual arrangement?
Absolutely, there are all kinds of situations. As Bitcoin continues its adoption curve, there will be more and more ways to pay with Bitcoin. But yes, that is something that I’ve used, and it’s a fascinating technology. There are different ways to use it from a store of value perspective, as we touched on in previous episodes, versus if you’re spending it on the Lightning Network, which the name kind of suggests what it is—very fast and inexpensive. There’s a different way to hold and transact on Bitcoin.
Okay, interesting. Before we go, I do want to touch on environmental and social aspects of all of this, because I know that’s a very important piece of it for you personally. So I just want to give you a chance to talk to us a little bit about that.
So this was what kept me in Bitcoin—my passion for what is in the investment universe known as ESG, environmental, social, and governance factors. Historically, which I think was accurately so historically, Bitcoin was viewed as a negative, a big negative from the environmental perspective, mostly because of the energy consumption, and maybe a smaller point due to emissions. That was one of the initial deep dives that we did, saying, “Hey, we are very sustainably focused at Citrine Capital, and we want an asset class that brings all the unique characteristics of Bitcoin, but we don’t want to have it as a negative in the portfolio.”
Yeah, we don’t want to burn down the environment in the process.
Yeah, and over time, what we started to uncover is Bitcoin is actually a huge positive for the environment from numerous perspectives. Number one, there are Bitcoin mining operations being set up around the world that can consume methane, which is one of the most harmful gases to our environment. It might be from a landfill or from a gas flaring operation, and Bitcoin miners are setting up essentially on-site to capture the methane and use that as energy to power their Bitcoin miners. So they are reducing the emissions. They are in a very unique position to capture wasted or stranded energy.
Some folks might say, “Hey, well, that’s great that Bitcoin is consuming and mitigating that, but what if we set up something else that’s maybe more beneficial?” You can’t, though—that’s the thing. Bitcoin is in a unique position where you can’t set up a hospital next to a gas flaring operation. You can’t build other facilities at landfills. So these are very unique opportunities that Bitcoin has to be able to capture this wasted or stranded energy. It’s reducing emissions as a result of that.
And what’s most interesting, in my opinion, is over time, we’ve seen the amount of renewable energy that’s powering the Bitcoin network continue to grow. Currently, it’s around 55% and that continues to grow over time, and that’s also another fascinating piece on why I’m so optimistic about it. But it’s fascinating to see that it’s essentially the opposite of what the initial critics were saying. Not only is it beneficial for the environment in general, but it’s also advancing renewable energy in a way that was never possible before. There are fascinating ways where Bitcoin miners are setting up next to solar or wind power, and simply from a mathematical perspective, it shortens the profitability timeline for those power plants and makes, number one, the renewable energy more viable, but also more sustainable simply because of having Bitcoin mining on that facility.
So you don’t have the same transmission costs that would be associated with getting it from the plant or the solar farm to where it needs to be, three towns over or three states over.
Similar to the environmental narrative, there’s also maybe even greater good being done or being provided as a result of Bitcoin from the social perspective. The current global financial system is not inclusive whatsoever. It’s often documented that over 1 billion people on our planet simply cannot access the traditional financial system. Think of how your life would change if you were not able to have a bank account or a credit card. You cannot essentially run your business. You can’t live on a day-to-day basis. And that’s what’s happening with over a billion folks on our Earth. So Bitcoin is a lifeline, as we previously touched on, out of necessity for these folks.
Similarly, folks who are living in some level of oppression, living under authoritarian regimes—and this number gets even larger than the previous one I mentioned—this is again a huge lifeline for these folks to be able to transact, to be able to potentially store value and live their life without having the government tell them who they can spend their money with, how much they can spend, and when they can spend it.
Okay, well, Jirayr, I just want to thank you so much for giving us insight into all the things that you know about Bitcoin. It’s been very educational, and I’m sure my listeners really appreciate this. Thank you so much for your time.
It was a pleasure to be here.
Okay, and thank you all for listening as always, or watching, whatever it is you’re doing. We appreciate it. If you like our podcast, follow us, do all the things you know you’re supposed to do, and we look forward to connecting with you next time.
Resources Related to This Episode:
- Absolute Trust Talk Ep. 195: Bitcoin Demystified (Part 2): The 3 Ways to Own Bitcoin https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/195-bitcoin-demystified-part-2-the-3-ways-to-own-bitcoin/
- Absolute Trust Talk Ep. 194: Bitcoin Demystified (Part 1): Why 1 in 7 Americans Own Bitcoin https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/194-bitcoin-demystified-part-1-why-1-in-7-americans-own-bitcoin/
- Absolute Trust Talk Ep. 139: Optimizing Your Portfolio with Alternative Investments https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/139-optimizing-your-portfolio-with-alternative-investments/
- Absolute Trust Talk Ep. 132: Trust Funding in a Digital World: Safeguard Virtual Wealth https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/132-trust-funding-in-a-digital-world-safeguarding-virtual-wealth/
- A Will is Not Enough – Securing Your Legacy with Estate Planning Life can change in an instant. A will is not enough to be prepared. Get free access to our actionable E-book Guidebook #1 and start protecting your legacy today. https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/guidebooks/
- Learn how to comfortably define gray areas and assess your unique needs to build a secure future now effortlessly. Check out Guidebook #2, Estate Planning Beyond the Basics, here > https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/guidebooks/
- Get our free introductory guide to the most used estate planning tool, family trusts, and understand how we plan to help protect your family. Guidebook #3: https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/guidebooks/
- Absolute Trust Counsel would love to offer access to our Incapacity Planning resource page: https://AbsoluteTrustCounsel.com/Incapacity-Planning/. We’ve collected our top planning information all in one place so listeners can find videos, guidebooks, blog posts, and a host of information with tips and strategies on implementing, planning, and protecting themselves and their loved ones.
- We’re pleased to provide a library of e-books to address common estate planning questions and concerns in practical, easy-to-understand language. https://AbsoluteTrustCounsel.com/Resources/.
- ASK KIRSTEN: If you’d like Kirsten to answer your question on the air, please email her at Info@AbsoluteTrustCounsel.com.
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