BTC Sessions - $2.3T GIANT Sends MASSIVE BITCOIN WARNING To The World! | Knut Svanholm, Nik Bhatia, Lisa Hough

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

A $2.3 trillion giant just sent a massive Bitcoin warning to the world, and it’s turning heads across the financial system. Knut Svanholm, Nik Bhatia, and Lisa Hough break down what it means for the future of Bitcoin.FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS:https://x.com/lisa_hough_https://x.com/timevalueofbtchttps://x.com/knutsvanholmFOLLOW BTC SESSIONS on X/Nostr: x.com/[e-mail] private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/—------------------------------SHOW SPONSORS:BITCOIN WELL - BUY BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE/COLDCARD (5% discount):https://qrco.de/bfiDBVAQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCp#btc #bitcoin #crypto

This $2.4 trillion giant just sent a massive Bitcoin warning to the world only a few hours ago. Can you guess who it was? But it's not just the eighth largest economy in the world making a Bitcoin move this week. Russia, China, Pakistan, and three more countries will reveal on today's show, have all made Bitcoin-related announcements just this week. And all of these earth-shattering revelations come at the exact time new data was released today, indicating that whales are currently buying up 300% of the newly issued Bitcoin. So are these nation states the mysterious whales that we can see on chain creating a supply shock? Well, today I'm joined with a phenomenal panel to discuss this and much more,

prolific author of everything divided by $21 million and co-host of the Bitcoin Infinity show, Knut Svanholm, founder of the Bitcoin Lair and author of the newly released audiobook audiobook soon, Bitcoin Age, Nick Batia, and Unchained Capital and Custodia alumni bridging the Bitcoin and U.S. energy sector, Lisa Huff. Very excited to have them all. Stick around. You're not going to want to miss it. miss this one. I am Ben with the BTC Sessions and this is your bullish session.

All right, I want to welcome to this stage, Mr. Nick Batia, Mr. Knut-Swanholm and Miss Elisa Huff. Welcome everybody. How are you guys doing this evening? Quite brilliant. Oh, good. Canute, I've got to do a quick hat tip to you. towering through even though it's midnight for you. What a trooper. Yeah, I think I'm the only one without a time limit except for it being split late over here. Well, Maple, maybe have you pass out by the end. But, well, guys, I'm going to dive right in with an initial topic for us to mull over,

and then we'll get into the reasons why you are all bullish immediately thereafter. But I'm going to share my screen for a second here just regarding what I kicked off the show with. And so, and maybe I'll make us all pretty off on the side of the screen here. So this was just earlier today. Top Brazil official doubles down on Bitcoin Reserve Plan. So Pedro Guerra, Gera, I'm not sure. He's the chief of staff to vice president of Brazil. He reaffirmed that he intends to press ahead with the idea of adding Bitcoin to Brazil's sovereign reserves,

arguing the country can no longer afford to ignore, quote, the most rigorously stress-tested monetary network on the planet. He continued on. He was speaking with the economist, and he said, quote, we're not talking about a hypothetical experiment. Bitcoin has survived 16 years of open-source adversarial testing. If the United States Treasury can hold confiscated Bitcoin and publicly debate how to manage it, Brazil, a G20 economy with a sophisticated payment stack, must at least evaluate whether a strategic allocation makes sense.

And so, I mean, the language there is pretty wild. And for those unfamiliar with, again, just how large Brazil is, it's, again, the eighth largest in the world by nominal GDP, around $2.3 trillion in 2024. for, you know, they're massive. But they're not the only ones that have been kind of mulling stuff like this over. Earlier this year, Abu Dhabi wealth fund revealed they basically had around a half billion dollar Bitcoin purchase there. Some, well, we'll file it under like a maybe development, but Pakistan is appointing the co-creator of finance as an advisor.

for, we'll call it, they say adoption of blockchain technology and digital assets. So, you know, we'll forgive them for that. And same with Kyrgyzstan, same idea. And then earlier this week, we also had Van Eck confirming that China and Russia are settling energy trades in Bitcoin. So the quote here, Bitcoin has become more than just a speculative asset. It is now evolving into a functional monetary tool, especially in economies seeking to bypass the US dollar and reduce exposure to US-led financial systems. Head of digital asset research Matthew Siegel said in Vanek's report released on April 8th,

China and Russia have reportedly begun settling some energy transactions in Bitcoin and other digital assets, a significant step that further drives the narrative of de-dollarization. So a lot of stuff going on there, and again to the point of whales absorbing 300%, basically at the current pace, of Bitcoin being mined three times as much are being bought up, but of course, you know, there's sell pressure too, and retail seems to not really, they're absent right now. Like, there's not a ton of people that are super interested on the retail side. So I guess what I'm teeing up here is with all of this craziness and kind of game theory playing out on this geopolitical side, and,

and retail just asleep at the wheel. Like I feel like we haven't even seen anything yet. So I'm just curious to get your guys feelings on some of these developments and some of the other things that we've seen over the course of the year and this awkward sideways crab market price that we've been seeing alongside it.

It's kind of wild. So whoever wants to dive in here. I'm with you. I'm perplexed. I'm sorry, Nick. At least you go ahead first and we'll go to Nick. it's it's perplexing I don't look at the price too terribly frequently I mean obviously I see it every day but it's not the focus of of my day I you know I so this week I got an email from someone in

Pakistan asking some thoughts on regulatory considerations they know that I'm a part of the Bitcoin Today coalition and you know have focused on some of my energy on that, but, you know, there are things that are developing all over the world. And I said to Ella the other night on the phone, I was like, oh, gosh, I got this huge request from Pakistan for, you know, some guidance on three different points. And, you know, poor me kind of thing, right? And then she said, oh, well, you know, I'm working on, somebody reached out to her from somewhere outside the U.S. And I just thought to myself, you know, like, shame on me for, you know, for feeling like,

oh my gosh, this is so much to think about or, you know, this is, you know, another thing to add to my list to reply to Pakistan. It's like, wait a minute, people all over the world are trying to figure out Bitcoin. Like, this is what we're after. Forget the price. We won, right? We have people in Pakistan who are forming a council to go back with some regulatory guidance. We have people in Tokyo who are getting ready to launch a Bitcoin space this week and have a huge celebration.

Like, we are winning. So I'm not quite sure what's going on with the price. I don't even think it's worth paying attention to. The signal is, you know, my email out of Pakistan. It's remarkable. It's incredible. It's a miracle. Yeah.

Nick, I'm curious, you had something you want to drop in there, too. Yeah, you know, I think we have about $100 trillion of assets around the world that is based on an extreme amount of leverage and several layers to use the layered money framework, several layers removed from anything relevant. and I'm including in the relevance most dollar securities. So what I'm really talking about is most of Fiat is built on absolutely nothing. And so when we think about even the amount of Chinese onshore deposits in CNY, it's about $60 trillion dollars worth. there is so much money in the world outside of the dollar sphere that really needs Bitcoin. The people in the dollar sphere have the opportunity to outpace dollar dilution with Bitcoin,

which we've seen and will continue to see, but the need for Bitcoin outside the dollar system is even greater. Yeah. Canute, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. on everything. Well, I like number go up as much as as anyone else. But I prefer number of people go up, like number of individuals go up before number of nations and number of corporations go up. So like while this whole nation state game theory thing that we see playing out now was inevitable always, I would have preferred if it had taken another decade.

and that people like the little guy could have gotten his hands on Bitcoin before that. There's still a chance since we're doing the crab market thing here. I mean, you're never too late to Bitcoin. I truly believe that. It's going up forever. So you still have the chance to leapfrog or maybe not leapfrog. Maybe leapfrog is the wrong word here. But you have a chance to get a head start on all of these big players because they haven't figured it out yet.

And I don't think they can anytime soon. They can't figure it out on a deeper level anytime soon. Like, they are going to, all these heads of all these institutions that are now trying to get in, they have their learning curve too. And it's going to take a decade before they've really. grok what Bitcoin is and that there is no difference between knowing and owning, for instance, any longer. Like, custodial paper Bitcoin is not really Bitcoin.

They're going to figure it all out. They're going to figure out not your keys, not your coins, play stupid games, win stupid prizers. They're going to figure it all out. And I'm looking forward to it. It's like this last scene of Fight Club, like when the skyscrapers are falling and he's just blown his face off and it's standing there with his girlfriend. and enjoying the show.

That's what I'm looking forward to. Keep your face, Knot. I'm going to keep my face, yes. But the rest, like, seeing the credit card companies go to shit and stuff. Like, I'm looking forward to that a lot. Seeing central banks lose their coins and figuring out that it wasn't coin base, it was some guy. And he now bought an island and split with all your money.

Yeah. I mean, the fact that we have, you know, CZ courting companies and helping them with their policy means that definitely we have a large swap of the population that still needs to figure out why Bitcoin only. That's still coming. Everybody has to learn that lesson over time. Yeah, it's going to take time.

And, again, to your point, you're never too late to Bitcoin. Even the last person on Earth who begrudgingly decides to move from a money that can be persistently debased to one that is sound will still benefit from that point forward. They'll have been through the ringer up to that point, but as soon as they make that shift, things will begin getting easier for them. So again, you're never too late, but you can save yourself a lot of heartache by coming to that conclusion sooner and, you know, doing your research and starting to figure this thing out. So nonetheless,

This show, of course, is why are we bullish? And so I don't want to dwell on this topic too long. I want to shift gears. And I want to hear about what you guys are currently excited about. And so, Lisa, I want to defer to you first. I'm going to bring you up to the hot seat up here. But Lisa, same question that everybody gets in the show. Why are you bullish?

Again, I think I'm bullish because people all over the world are figuring it out. like the show is is is is now over for elizabeth warren i don't know how we get her thrown in jail um i think what she's done really i think what she's done against bitcoin has been nothing short of treasonous um it's been anti-american i think the rhetoric that she has spread is you know negatively impacted and and polluted so many um and it's you know it's had far-reaching ramifications. But I think that that's, I think the shroud is coming down, right? I think Tokyo is opening. Pakistan is considering legislation. People all over the world are, or not only figuring out Bitcoin is sound money, but figuring out how it's just incrementally benefit to, you know,

their life or their business. You know, a lot of what I do is talk to energy companies and one that I've been speaking with the last month is an offshore guy in the shallow Gulf of Mexico, and they have nine rigs that they're going to sell for scrap metal. And I think the man's son saw me on a podcast and said, Dad, we should call this woman, maybe we should be mining Bitcoin on these platforms. Right? Like those type of things are happening all over the world. People are just figuring out how to work Bitcoin or Bitcoin mining into their operational profile. And it's just hugely exciting. It's like it doesn't just have to be, yes, thank you, Greg, Gulf of America in the comments.

It just doesn't have to be. Sorry, there's my alarm. It can be, you know, it can just be a benefit to you operationally, as obviously, as well as the best savings technology on earth. Yeah, I love that. And it's interesting. Again, you've done a lot of stuff in and around recognizing the mutual benefit in and around Bitcoin and energy. And I was talking to Harry Suttick recently and asking him about, well, he goes and there's

And they're constantly going to different grids and saying, hey, like, can we work with you guys? Can we plunk down? And he says that when we tell the grid operators what we can do, they don't believe us. And now we have data. So we can literally go to them. We'll make the case and they'll say, that's impossible. What you're saying does not exist. And then he'll show them the data.

Hey, we can be set up in this much time, which is like, you know, a fraction of what would normally take what they would expect. We can eat up every bit of excess energy and we can shut off at any point immediately when you need us to. And people are flabbergasted. They don't understand how this could be a thing. Yeah, it's definitely a thing. And it's also, you know, creeping into the data center business and the AI business. You know, they at every transmission station at every data center you really I think will need Bitcoin miners in order to balance you know really fine tune fine tune your risk and balance your load so good for us I want Nick or Canute to to dive in here too just in regard to people beginning to to get it the

types of people beginning to get it and and what this means moving forward I did whatever you guys want to jump in first yeah I can I can chime in on the energy thing there three almost three years ago now I was in a meeting with an energy company on the island of Madeira with a bunch of bitcoins like this is the week where we founded the free my day Madeira organization like right now there there's more than 150 retailers on the island except in Bitcoin right and we had this amazing conference called Bitcoin Atlantis a year back. And the funny thing is this first week, the president had organized, the president of the

island had organized a bunch of meetings that this newly formed group of outcasts and misfits with some credentials for some reason were visiting. And one of those institutions was this energy company run by people who mostly spoke Portuguese, and they were all in their 60s and wore suits. And at this particular instance, Jeff Booth wasn't with us. And he was like the natural leader of the group always. So at this particular meeting, there was this pack of alpha males trying to figure out who the real alpha was. And we had Greg Foss throwing dollar bills on the table.

And PowerPoint presentations with like circle diagrams with mining, hashing power and stuff. And we were not speaking the same language as these guys. They were very old school, big mahogany table. That was an interesting meeting. I guess it's easier to talk to private sector energy companies than these guys on Madeira that have been running the same thing for 50 years. Has, do you know if there's been any shift there? Like I've seen the growth of kind of the grassroots, which is, in my opinion, is the most exciting. And I can't wait to get back there and kind of see what's come to fruition.

Even since, well, it was around, it was about a year and a bit ago, like a, you know, end of February of 2024, I believe. I'm going back there, summer of 2026. I'm going to spend the whole summer there and just kind of relax and enjoy the island, which is beautiful. But do you know kind of how things have progressed? I know that there was a meeting in Lisbon that Andre is sort of organized together with a whole bunch of European Bitcoin mining energy company people like trying to influence policies and stuff. I don't know the details of it, but I know there was a lot of great people there.

And yeah, that's, I haven't been to the island since the conference either. So I'm not really up to date with it. I know that they're still having meetups every month. Like the sovereign engineering cohort is still there. So there's a bunch of Bitcoiners on the island. And you can totally live on Bitcoin on Madeira. Like it's working. So dream, right?

Yeah. And when we started this thing, like people sort of expected Madeira to already be orange-pilled and like, oh, you can go here now and spend big. But that's not how this works. Like you have to start somewhere. And it's the same with all of these islands of hyper-bicanization that are popping up around the world, you know, El Salvador and Costa Rica and Prague and whatnot. Same with Madeira. It took a while. for it to take off. But now it's there and it's a part of the ecosystem. It takes work. It's a labor of love. Like you don't just, you know, you don't visit a shop once and, hey, you should accept Bitcoin and then they do and then you just leave.

Like there's a community. There's a relationship that forms there and you need to foster that relationship. And that's how you kind of get people interested and excited and learn. And I mean, same thing here in Calgary with the SAP market. Like it's even with the Bitcoin is you got to give them a boost, right? You got to give them a reason to be excited and to push forward. And you can't just like set it and forget it. It's still early enough that it needs encouragement, right?

So it's about Metcalfe's law. The value of a communications network is equal to the square of the number of users. right so it's a hockey stick curve and sooner or later it's going to take off but it needs that groundwork before it does yeah absolutely nick i'm curious uh your input on anything that we've we've kind of gone down plenty of different rabbit holes here yes i teach i teach uh metcalf's law on one of my slides in my bitcoin class because it's important to understand that bitcoin is a network and it extracts value from the relationships within that network and the value grows as the network grows. So that is why individual adoption one person at a time is essential. And it's at it's at the core of Bitcoin's

growth. The reason that I'm bullish, wait, wait, wait, don't drop it yet. Okay. Well, keep that thought because we're going to go to, I'm going to come to you in just a moment and we'll get your reason for being bullish. I don't want you to. I don't want you to drop it Literally. But if you have any final thoughts on anything else that was said by Lisa or Canute, we can grab those now and then I'll go to a quick breather. Yeah. So without giving why I'm bullish, let me say about the energy thing. In terms of extracting energy out of the marginal unit of energy available and Bitcoin does that better than anything, or it revolutionizes our even understanding of stranded energy or wasted energy or excess capacity for energy.

There's because we don't have unless if you had the battery technology to do it to capture all of that energy, then we wouldn't be able to say, oh, Bitcoin is so revolutionary. But we don't have the battery technology readily available. So Bitcoin is that is that revolutionary function there. And so that is, I think it's a key component to Bitcoin, and it sets up a lot of what I'm feeling bullish about. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we're going to find out specifically while you're bullish.

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Before we dive into Nick's reason, though, we're going to give away some stats. I'm over here on Bitcoinwell.com. Awesome place to stack stats in Canada and the U.S. And if you guys want to play, all you need to do is whip out a lightning wallet and get ready to scan the QR code in my browser there when it comes up. The way it works is when you sign up, buy Bitcoin, refer friends. You can use those points to toss a coin in the Bitcoin wishing well. And every time you do, you have a chance to win up to a million sats, or you can redeem them for some of the stuff they have on the website, stamp seed plates, leather mint wallets. And if you're really,

really keen and you gain 69 million points, you can buy a cyber truck. So good luck on that one. But nonetheless, we're going to toss a coin in the well. And there's a QR code on the screen right now if you want to check out Bitcoin well itself. But here we go. Whoever scans it first steals from everyone else. So be quick on the draw there. 210 sats for whoever grabs it. I'll leave it up there for a few seconds.

And if you miss it, then just go back and scrub through the video and see if you get it. All right. So with that, Nick, I'm putting you in the hot seat. Same thing, same question, cue you up. Why are you bullish? The reason I'm bullish is because I believe the United States is about to significantly increase its electricity capacity over the next couple years. And that is a response to, or that is a function of political changes. And, you know, I'll be the first to admit that it is based in a political.

shift that is happening. But if you take out your opinion on the politics for a second and look at what might be happening over the next couple years, it will unleash so much electricity capacity for the express purpose of AI compute, right? In the national interest of the United States to excel in an industry that's going to capture. the next wave of economic growth. If AI compute is that, and like Lisa said, the intersection of Bitcoin mining in AI compute right now is strong and will strengthen. Couple that with a pro-bitcoin policy and the key ingredient here is the energy-based

deregulation and the red tape reduction for the build-out of electricity in the United States. That appears to be not manufacturing textiles, right? Or even getting back to becoming the steel powerhouse of the world. While those things might be more headline grabbing, this underlying energy buildout in the US with a pro-bitcoin policy, it's a pro-bickoyne policy, it's, sets up an adoption wave that I think really takes us that next leg up to a billion users in the world. And I want to cite the article that you opened with from Brazil that said, if the U.S. Treasury already holds Bitcoin and is debating about what to do with it, then we need

a strategy. It's about leadership, guys. And the U.S. is the leader on a lot of policy. The world looks to the U.S., what should we be doing on policy? What are you guys going to be, what are you guys going to be rolling out in terms of AI? That's what they're going to be copying. And so the Bitcoin policy is another thing that the world will look to the U.S. for leadership. So my take is much longer term in terms of why I'm bullish. But I think the conditions are set up for a strong Bitcoin mining culture in the United States, a strong pro-energy production and usage policy in the United States. And all of that boosts the attractiveness of Bitcoin as this reserve neutral asset that anybody can have access to. So that's the way that I'm thinking about it. And then I roll in my

own framework for analyzing Bitcoin at the Bitcoin layer, we have TBL liquidity, which is our metric. What it does on a short term is measures the conditions for Bitcoin's price. So when our metric goes up, Bitcoin's price goes up and vice versa. So we're able to correlate Bitcoin's price with the existence of credit creation in the dollar system. And the basis of that metric is the size of U.S. financial assets. And so those will grow in this deregulatory environment in a re-leveraging of the private sector once some of the public sector has declined in size. And that should set up good conditions for Bitcoin's price from the mechanical side

due to the credit system, which is the center of my analysis. So the, yeah, the interesting thing for me in and around, again, the energy sector in the U.S., and I mean, I guess as people begin to clue in around the world is, you know, Bitcoin demands in order to be optimally profitable that you find the most efficient and low-cost forms of energy to plug into waste, waste energy that, wasn't previously being used for anything or stranded energy. But it also brings about this revolution in the efficiency of the hardware as well. And there's lessons to be learned there too. And so I like what you're saying in and around Bitcoin and pairing that with a regulatory environment where you can just learn an experiment can contribute to a much, I guess a higher quality of life for anyone in places that are open to stuff like that.

You know, the main driver of our quality of lives is access to, you know, one of the main things is access to abundant energy. Without energy, you don't have anything. So, I mean, I love this framing. I'm curious, again, if Lisa wants to chime in here first, given that we're kind of segueing from part of her topic into yours. I feel like it compliments each other and then we'll get Canood in afterwards as well,

chiming in. Yeah, thank you. No, I'm blown away by Nick's framing. So thank you for that. You're completely right. I pulled out of my drawer this report that I refer to all the time. It's Goldman Sachs at the end of April of 24 put out generational growth in AI data centers in the coming U.S. power demand surge,

which just presents an extraordinarily bullish case for electricity in this country. And, you know, the one of the drivers of national security is productivity, and the driver of productivity is available power infrastructure. And so I think all of these things layer really nicely on, on top of one another. It's a reason to be bullish America that Trump is bullish Bitcoin mining and, you know, bullish energy and that seems to be causing oil prices to go lower. And yet, you know, no energy CEO that I see is upset by it, right? They're all like, they all feel like they just, ah, deep breath. So, you know, I think a lot about the power to, you know, I think a lot about the power

demand and just how exciting that is maybe for our country to come alive again. I drive a lot through Texas and New Mexico and these small towns that are just completely shuttered. And I think, gosh, if we have industries like AI companies, which we're seeing, or I guess Bitcoin companies, but really all companies, I think every company becomes integrated with AI. I think every company will use AI. It won't be just, you know, the obvious Google's or chat GPT. I posted something on LinkedIn the other day that one of the first, actually the first internet transaction type, you know, you could order on the internet was Pizza Hut. It was not

Amazon. Pizza Hut saw this need for you to be able to order on the internet. Like today, that just doesn't seem like a big deal. But if you go back and look at their screenshots of their first website, it was actually pretty pedestrian and terrible, but I mean, good for them. I mean, pizza. It's part of two revolutions in a row, the internet and Bitcoin. Like it's just, it's ingrained in our DNA now.

I know. I was also just going to give a shout out to Wade Hoke, who's in the audience and left, comment yeah ton of energy ready to be monetized in alaska but wade the problem is and i've i've spoken in in trying to work with two different companies that are on the north slope right now again the problem is elizabeth warren and the pollution that she has left in everyone's brain and the pollution that jami diamond creates when he says that you know the 21 million supply cap isn't real and Satoshi is going to pop out of somewhere. Like to me, again, that's treasonous.

I mean, I'm not suggesting they get like Wild West treatment and, you know, taken out back and shot. But like, it's treasonous what they've done against this country to prevent us from having productivity and, you know, heaven forbid that we have things, our kids are able to have better lives than we did. Anyway, sorry, a bit of a ramble there, but... I like it. I want to, again, the thing that I like about this, and I'm going to go to Canute here,

but I just want to say that the thing I like about the AI stuff, you know, starting to also demand a lot of energy is it kind of, now that something else, that other people are using is also demanding this kind of this kind of energy usage all of a sudden it's starting to be you're starting to get a little bit more crickets

in and around the opposition like there's still obviously but I think as we see people be like well I but I don't want to turn off the power because I use AI we're going to get it's going to be harder and harder to argue you can plug in this computer but not that computer.

Anyways, I'll toss it to Cano. All right. I guess I'm not at my why I'm bullish section yet. Not yet, Mr. Dune, I promise. Okay, I'm going to give a hint. I'm also bullish because of mining, but because of a completely different aspect of it.

I suggest to Lisa's, like, why not bring back tar and feathers? I think tar and feathers is a very, a very appropriate punishment. I got to give a shout out to my friend Dave Bradley, Bitcoin Brains on Twitter, and he's here in Calgary. He often says that he's very long on a particular technology.

He's very long on rope futures. He thinks there's going to be a lot of money. So I'll just give him a tip of the hat on that. Anyways, can you hurt sort of rail. There's another word, like, BTC Prague is coming up, and they're always chest pounding about the word that originated from Prague called defenestration, which is when you throw politicians out of windows, and it happens every hundred years or so in Prague.

Like, they throw the old government out, like from the fourth floor. Just see what happens. Bring in a new one. Definestration. Awesome. I love it. Did you have anything that you want to tag on further to? Or do you want, is it time for the segue into your reason? I think it's time for the segue into my reason because it's going to be a bit of a rant.

Okay. So we're going to do that in just a moment. We're going to give a quick final sponsor shout out. And then we're going to come back and we're going to find out what aspect of, mining are you bullish about? So we'll be back in just a moment. If you're in the audience, make sure that you give that like button a slap. And we'll see in a sec. Looking for a simple and secure way to manage your Bitcoin on mobile, Aqua wallet has you covered. It's user-friendly and puts you in full control of your Bitcoin with secure self-custody.

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and help you get set up in a proper, secure manner. But with that, let's, I'm ready for this Canute rant. I think that's, I've been, you know, I feel like I've been waiting my whole life for this. So Canute, take us on a journey. Take us on a journey. Why are you bullish? Well, the most bullish news I've read in a while is that Tether is planning to deploy hash rate on ocean.

And that sounds like gibberish to a lot of people, I know. But what it means is that you may think this or that about Tether. They are, in a way, a shitcoin company, but they're a shit coin company who made like $13 or $14 billion of profit last year. So they're a big player. And they have decided to mine with Ocean, meaning that they are actively fighting spam and actively working for minor decentralization in Bitcoin. And this is a huge deal because this is one of the things that make me bullish.

Another thing is like the Bitax movement and mining getting back to the hands of actual Bitcoin users. And I feel there's a cultural shift here happening where we once again, go back to the basics of what Bitcoin is and admit to ourselves that it's nothing without the decentralization aspect and it's nothing without people actively running nodes and actively doing their work and making sure that this thing works. The 21 million cap is only there because of people. It is protected by people. A Bitcoin node is not a piece of software or hardware. It's a human being who decides. to buy the hardware and run the software the same is true for a bitcoin miner it is not a an asic it is not a hangar full of asics it's a it's a guy or a girl that decides to buy a hangar full of asics and run a particular type of software and in my opinion you can't really call yourself a bitcoin miner if all you're doing is selling hash rate to a bigger pool and you have no idea what kind of block

your your your mining on then you're you're you're you're you're not in it for the Bitcoin gains, you're in it for the Fiat gains, and you're not really a Bitcoiner. You cannot call yourself a Bitcoiner. You're not a Bitcoiner to me and to a lot of my friends. So if you want to get into that particular gentleman's club, you have to be more hardcore and you have to be more ethically sound because you have to realize that the long, this Bitcoin is all about low time preference and long term planning and figuring out. that there you do have an incentive to make bitcoin work long term you do have an incentive to not fuck it up short term like this is yeah I told you this was gonna be

a rant so so let's backtrack back to the the block size wars the block size wars what people think it was a fight about block size and the fight about like the people who figure that Bitcoin should be a store of value on one side and the people who wanted a medium exchange on the other side. And the medium exchange people wanted the bigger blocks to fit more transactions into the blocks. But in reality, it was never about that. It was about control because if the big blockers would have won, it would have been more expensive to fire up a node for general users. And also it would have set a precedent for doing so again. So Bitcoin could have forked again and again and again, making it even more

expensive. And all of a sudden, no one can afford to run a node and you have no decentralization anymore. With the spam issue, which is it's sort of going on now. It's sort of gone away for a while. It was a big issue in 2023. And then it sort of faded away because they ran out of people to scam. but it's still there in the sense that now Bitcoin isn't like demand for using Bitcoin as an actual medium exchange and not just storing monkey JPEGs on a third party server like that is still somewhat of an issue and in my mind Bitcoin needs to be both a store value on a medium exchange and I don't really like the term store of value because value is subject. objective and value is dynamic. It is not something that you can store. So I prefer the term medium of exchange over time and space. So you either exchange with other people or with your future self. And Bitcoin needs to be both to be either. It cannot like it cannot sacrifice one for the other. It needs to function as both, which is also by the way, if I, I,

I hate sharing for politicians and stuff. And I don't really like strategic Bitcoin reserves and all this institutional adoption and all that stuff. I know it's going to happen anyway, but to me, the principles of Bitcoin are more important than number go up. Because I know that all of the other stuff happens because of the principles and not the other way around. So the way I see it is the best thing a politician can do for Bitcoin is to scrap the capital. tax thing so that people can go, don't have to be black market people anymore. Then again, being against black market is sort of racist. And I kind of hate that because this is the thing.

The institutionalization of Bitcoin is sort of like trying to fit a square peg into a roundhole. Because Bitcoin is black market money. And money laundry is like the most beautiful. thing we have from that perspective. It needs to be to function at all because it needs to be permissionless. This means that if it if it needs a stamp of approval from a politician, it doesn't work anymore. There's no decentralization and there's no more Bitcoin. It just devolves into yet yet another shit coin without value. So I think this is this is the proper way to or proper, who am I to dictate that, right?

But this is a sound way to look at the thing. This needs to be organic. It needs to be in the hands of the people. And we are the ones that make sure that this 21 million supply cap is actually real. It's not real by some magic. It's real because people stay vigilant and do their homework and end of rent. Awesome. I've got a few things to tap in here. So let's start on the Pleb Mining thing. I love this push of people learning and getting their hands dirty with mining for the first time because it's once again accessible with just kind of run-of-the-mill stuff. You can get at home and set up on a shelf and just learn. It helps inform you on how. Bitcoin actually works. I've got it's this one it's not plugged in because it's it rattles on the

shelf when it's not when I'm doing the show but like again bidax here just these little things are super fun ways to learn and not only that but there's been a few examples of random pleb miners with not much hash rate occasionally hitting a block and so like you can run it as like a you know, a learning tool, but secondarily as just like a little lotto ticket that's on your shelf. Like screw buying a lottery ticket every week. Just set up one of these. It costs basically nothing in electricity to just plop there. And then if you need that dopamine hit, just check it every morning. There you go. It's a forever, you can check it a hundred times a day if you want. There's your dopamine. But you can, you can, there's so many different options out there. Of course,

There's a bitax. There's forks of it, the nerdax. There's, I've got a future bit over here. There's the brains mini-miner. But there's all these things that you can just kind of set on a shelf. They've got cool interfaces. It's fun. To your point of the graph root, I think that's super important, too.

And that, again, something that's near and dear to me, too. Like the permissionless nature of it, I also, again, like, I've been, living exclusively on Bitcoin, more or less, since 2020. And so that was kind of the impetus for the sat market here in Calgary, which, Canute, I hope you'll attend. It's the Friday night before the Bitcoin rodeo starts. Oh, I hope I make it. I'm going to Miami before that.

So, like, I really hope I can make it to the stats market. Yes, I would love to have you. It should be a good time. But again, like it's, you know, we did it in a way where we want the ability to, to actually just get the things that we need. It's great to have artists and merch and stuff like that. But also it's great to be able to get the food that you need, to get a haircut, to have a dentist,

to have a personal trainer if you want. You can do all those things because we as a community have come together and made that happen in Calgary. And yeah, we host the market just a couple times a year, but then it's the connections that you make so that I know who to call if I need a certain thing and I want to pay in Bitcoin. So again, I love, Bitcoin didn't come about because it got a stamp of approval. Satoshi didn't go to the Federal Reserve and say, hey, I'm creating a competitor.

Is that cool? No, he made it and put it out there. And then the world had to grapple with the fact that it existed. And so I love the, okay, we already did it, world, figure it out kind of attitude. And I am happy that. And then it's nice that both these things can happen simultaneously, like you said. There is never going to be a world where this didn't eventually happen. Nation states and institutions beginning to understand.

And so, you know, when I sometimes see people say things like, oh, Bitcoin is captured because Black Rock got a bunch of Bitcoin or something like that, the point of Bitcoin is that you cannot stop somebody else from having it and using it. And so I just, I can tend to step back and say, I mean, it's just part of the game theory. People that you agree with and don't agree with are going to, are going to figure it out at some point in time and get themselves some. So anyways, end of secondary rant. I'm curious to hear Nick and Lisa chime in here too. Yeah, I'm really excited about home mining,

because it supports the idea of Bitcoin as a global reserve currency and a global reserve asset. I think about the home miner winning a solo block actually like a spark of light that can happen anywhere in the world. And you think about somebody mining a solo block in a corner of the world, that might change a family forever or even a town. You know, the first block one, maybe some of that goes back into hash rate and, you know, some more miners. And then all of a sudden, wherever that miner popped up, you have potentially a whole village built around mining. I'm just, you know, speculating in terms of the inspiration that can come with that type of decentralization. And that is, that's very exciting to me and, you know, something that when I think about Bitcoin being the reserve asset of the digital world, it's based in technology. And so in a technological world, an internet-based world, a cyber world, Bitcoin is that reserve asset.

And home mining is one side or the other side of the coin of that. they're linked. Yeah, absolutely. Lisa, I know you're tight on time here. So I want to, if I can get your take before you got to dip out, is that possible? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I love the black market money name for Bitcoin.

I love it. I love everything that that stands for. I think I don't know if I hold the record for working at Fidelity, the fewest number. of days, but I recently accepted and then resigned from a job at Fidelity over differences of opinion around talking about Bitcoin and what Bitcoin was, because I do not view Bitcoin as an asset. I view Bitcoin very much as a fundamental human right, and I view Bitcoin as being divine. And so I also love the term black market money because, you know, quite honestly, like, fuck the financial institutions.

I actually hate that they're in the market. I think that that is a self-resolving problem, though. I think what happens is that there is someone laying in wait at Coinbase who has been there since the beginning, who knows how to get to all of the Bitcoin. it's in the Coinbase Honeypot. And because all of those financial managers are so lazy and they all use Coinbase, you know, I think some guy does walk away and builds a little shack on an island and lives happily ever after with all the Bitcoin.

And then those financial institutions are without. And then the remaining Bitcoin is among us, right, the people. And that's where it belongs. So I don't really worry about what the financial institutions are going to do because history shows that they always fuck themselves over And this time we're just we're not going to bail them out So anyway, yeah all that to say This has been a great show and I'm so sorry that I got to pop out just I'll stay another couple of seconds Yeah, that was super based based Lisa for the win

The amount of hearts popping from the chat right now, somebody asked if you were single, by the way. I am single. I'm never going to date again. I say this on all these podcasts. Like I tell all the Bitcoin veterans to go find me a nice veteran who knows how to fire a weapon. You know, we'll get chickens and we'll have ammo. And they're like, oh, we can find you. You can find someone anywhere.

I cannot because I cannot date someone who works in Bitcoin. and I cannot date someone who does not understand Bitcoin. So it's like, where am I? Must have Bitcoin, chickens, and ammo. That's the dating profile. Well, this has been super awesome. And again, to Lisa's point here, Bitcoin is incredibly efficient at pointing out fuckery. That's why when exchanges piss around with people's money, they blow up very, very quickly.

And I'll say that, you know, traditional financial systems, oftentimes there's fuckery a foot. And so, you know, I think we're in a situation where all these previous blowups of exchanges, oftentimes it'll tank the Bitcoin price because people don't understand the separation. of the two. But it's just Bitcoin being really good at being open and auditable and being able to point out like there's no bailout. Like you can't screw around for an extended period of time without, you know, it coming home to roost. And so, you know, if there if there is fuckery afoot, then Bitcoin will be pretty efficient at pointing it out. In fact, I'm counting on it. And we shall see. But this is a perfect time. to I know it's it was brief it was it was a it was a tight show but it was a lot of fun and so

Canute Lisa Nick I've had a wonderful wonderful evening thank you so much for spending your time here and getting bullish everybody that's in the chat if you enjoyed it drop a like on the video we appreciate you guys being here and your awesome tirades in the in the chat there and yeah keep your eyes open keep stacking sats but also always keep stacking skills. And with that, we are out. We'll see you guys next week. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions.

This was your daily session. Cheers, guys.