BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Privacy & Scaling Breakthroughs Happening Right Now | Giacomo Zucco

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 051: Giacomo Zucco on Bitcoin's 2026 Boom - ARK Scaling Revolution, Privacy Wars, Cypherpunk Survival, and Why Nation-States Fuel Bitcoin's WinWhat if Bitcoin's biggest... problem in 2025 was too much success—lulling us into complacency on privacy, self-custody, and true adoption? Giacomo Zucco, Bitcoin OG and Plan B Network founder, warns that 2026 could flip the script with global upheavals driving real-world use cases for censorship-resistant tools. In this deep-dive interview on the BTC Sessions channel, Giacomo breaks down ARK as Lightning Network's "missing piece" for massive scaling, why privacy by omission beats obfuscation for cost savings and regulatory deniability, and how covenants could make Bitcoin non-interactive, safer, and cheaper.He unpacks Europe's privacy crackdown, Switzerland's fading safe-haven status, and the spectrum of trust in solutions like eCash, Liquid, and Spark—plus Plan B's global education push, including university courses, high-school node setups in El Salvador, and the upcoming Cypher Tank pitch show. Giacomo's optimistic twist: Bitcoin thrives on adversaries like failing nation-states and unsustainable ETFs/stablecoins, ensuring long-term dominance through low-time-preference building. If you're stacking sats and seeking Bitcoin's cypherpunk fundamentals beyond price hype, this is your white pill for 2026 sovereignty.About Giacomo ZuccoX: https://x.com/giacomozuccoPlan B Network: https://planb.networkCypher Tank Premiere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHGVElfFgbkChapters:00:00:00 Intro & 2026 Outlook00:01:26 Success & Adversity Issues00:02:02 Global Privacy Deterioration00:03:27 Fundamentals Focus Shift00:05:05 ARK as Scaling Game-Changer00:07:31 ARK Privacy & Implementation00:08:26 ARK-Lightning Integration00:09:08 Research & Tech Advances00:10:26 Bitcoin Education Boom00:11:16 Scaling Trust Trade-Offs00:13:20 Security Models Spectrum00:15:01 Future Scaling Predictions00:17:45 Federations & HSM Additions00:19:57 Scaling Enables Better Privacy00:22:44 Omission Privacy Superiority00:27:12 Soft Fork Consensus Struggles00:28:57 Taproot Legacy Lessons00:30:52 Covenants for UX Revolution00:33:43 Europe's Privacy Weakness00:36:08 Switzerland's Privacy Decay00:42:39 Plan B Network Expansion00:45:14 Forum & El Salvador Event00:45:58 Cypher Tank Pitch Show00:48:22 Professional Bitcoin Program00:50:23 Cypher Tank Judges00:51:11 Cypherpunk Ethos Risks00:52:08 Adoption vs. Purity00:53:24 Remnant Strategy Wins00:55:08 Cycles Building Cores00:57:47 Uncompromising Approach00:58:14 Absolute Cypherpunk Growth00:58:28 Low Fees & ETF Impact00:59:24 Optimism on Rivals' Fall01:01:20 Nation-States as Allies01:05:32 Giacomo Links & Wrap-Up⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB🔒 Lockdown your Bitcoin with the BEST gear on the market from Coinkite. Get the 5% Off the COLDCARD visit: https://qrco.de/bfiDBV💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Gary, or Ben at Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io Previous Episodes Iyah May: https://youtu.be/Z1DlI68oZTYFollow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYC#Bitcoin #GiacomoZucco #PlanBNetwork #ARKScaling #BitcoinPrivacy #LightningNetwork #Cypherpunk #SelfCustody #BitcoinEducation #SoftForks #Covenants #Stablecoins #ETFs #NationStates #BTC2026 #BitcoinOnly #BTCSessions #BTC #SoundMoney #Decentralization #OrangePill #bitcoinpodcast

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 I think we also have a problem of too much success. The lack of stress on an anti-fragile system makes the system weaker. I'm very, very bullish on ARC as a concept, the missing piece of the Latin network. The original design was very strong in privacy because it included all the Chaumian blind signature privacy by mission. It gives more incentives for the users and it gives more plausible than mobility. Covenants make your structure non-interactive, which makes it safer, faster, cheaper, way better. Do you have concerns that we lose the cypherpunk ethos along the way,
Starting point is 00:00:36 which even makes things like consensus damn near impossible? Joining me today is Jocamo Zuko, a Bitcoin OG and master educator who shaped the cypherpunk movement through Plan B network, delivering university-level Bitcoin courses worldwide in funding cutting-edge projects. In this episode, Jocamo reveals by Arc is a game-changing scaling breakthrough that's already fixing lightning's pain points. He exposes the privacy strategy that's not just smarter, it's cheaper, and it gives you bulletproof deniability.
Starting point is 00:00:59 And he shows how covenants could turbocharge Bitcoin's UX. Plus, in a shocking twist, Jocamo explains how Bitcoin's best friend is the modern socialist nation state. All right, good morning, Jocamo. Thank you so much for joining me today. Very excited to have this conversation. To kind of kick things off, I wanted to get your outlook kind of for 2026 in the sense that from both a technical or an education side, what are the major hurdles you think we still need to overcome for Bitcoin adoption? I feel like 2025 was not necessarily as exciting in terms of new people coming in as I would have liked.
Starting point is 00:01:31 And what's still holding people back? What do we need to get to work on? What do we need to achieve in the next year? I think we also have a problem of too much success. On one side, for example, things like privacy, self-custody, they didn't face enough opposition and enough persecution in order to be felt as really necessary. We had a little bit of a taste of what could be an adversarial environment for Bitcoin right before the Trump administration changed,
Starting point is 00:02:02 so with the Chuck Point operation and the samurai guys started the persecution, tornado guys in Chittaker Wars. And then we had this, we had stuff like Phoenix and moving out of the US, this kind of concern about the future of Custodal services. But then the dynamic completely changed between the continuing success of the ETFs and now the strategy companies and the new change in the friendly approach of the new administration
Starting point is 00:02:37 in the U.S., things change a little bit for the opposite. Now, this is good, short term, because everybody likes to stay out of jail, except for the people that are already in, but let's say not new people are getting in trouble so far. But long term, that's usually the lack of solicitation, the lack of stress on an anti-fragile system makes the system weaker. So both technically and educationally, I think that in 2025 we didn't have a lot of stress on privacy as we used to, and we didn't have a lot of stress on self-custody, so much so that we wasted a lot of lots of time, me included debating about spam wars and Corr versus Nauts and stuff like that. that because we didn't have a lot of privacy, privacy debates and things like that.
Starting point is 00:03:28 I think in 2036, things may get a little bit better in the sense that even if the U.S. administration is still seen as pretty friendly, we have a lot of deterioration of the situation in the rest of the world. Now, we have, even just recently, we have a lot of instability and appeals that can be connected with people using tools for privacy and tools for decentralization and censorship resistant. We also see the BitChap discussion, which is not about Bitcoin specifically, but is also very telling.
Starting point is 00:04:01 So we have the rest of the world going bad, including potentially Europe and the European Union, which is going pretty bad around here. I'm in Switzerland, luckily, but even Switzerland is not what it used to be. So the situation, the rest of the world is concerning about privacy and self-custody. so that may create a little bit of tension, maybe outside of the U.S. into this direction. Also, I think that even just from a narrative cycle point of view, usually if we assume that the bull run is over and so the focus on the financial gains is going to be slower for a couple of years, maybe three years or something like that,
Starting point is 00:04:38 assuming the cycle theory is still holding up, in that case we will have people going back focusing on the basis and focusing on the fundamentals. which is mostly stuff like privacy, of custody, scalability, stuff like that. Also, even if the narrative was not really there, technically speaking, there was some major change in 2025, namely I'm very, very bullish on ARC as a concept. I think many people see that as a challenging,
Starting point is 00:05:08 as a new, let's say, competitor to the Latin network, but I see that as a new part of the Latin network, the missing piece of the Latin network as is. So the current network that we have, like, what we call Lightning channels, re-appoon channels, they tend to batch transactions in time. That means that a very few users, namely two, me and you, we can batch all the transactions that we're going to make
Starting point is 00:05:37 back and forth through time, which is great. But what an arc does is the opposite. In one single block time, so every block, ARC needs a block confirmation basically. But in one single transaction with potentially just one input and one output, you can badge confirmations for thousands of different users. So these two things are orthogonal and put together, they can actually create the condition to the level of scalability and usability of the
Starting point is 00:06:06 Latineto that we were imaging it intuitively in 2016, but was never realized mostly because the passion through time idea, It's very cool and very useful, but it's limited because the actual liquidity dynamic are not like that. If you are a restaurant and I'm a client and we open a channel, our liquidity will always go all in this direction. And then we will always need rebalancing and liquidity management is always pretty painful. While with something like ARC together, this changes a lot. Now, the reception of ARC has been good, but not really, not really. there was not a lot of hype, I think, which is good, because in some way, I think the lighting
Starting point is 00:06:51 network may have suffered from too much over-hype during the, at the end of the blocks as worse. So we may have over-promised with this idea of lighting, fixing everything already since the day or forever. So the fact that ARC was launched, like the two main implementation, Arcade and the implementation by second, they have been launched during the bull market, a little bit underton compared to the financial news. That's actually a good thing. Notably, since I mentioned privacy, the two implementation of Arc today, Arcade and the one from Arc Labs and the one from
Starting point is 00:07:27 Second, they both are pretty weak in privacy, unfortunately. Yes, I guess it's not the priority yet. They can be made way more private easily, but they are pretty weak so far. The original design that was published when the name was invented was very strong in privacy because it included all the Chaomian blind signature stuff that you will have like in a zero link mixer or cooperative transaction coordinator. But the actual two implementations,
Starting point is 00:08:01 they are basically the same as on-chain privacy. They also have block explorers, which is not ideals. Luckily, the good thing is that I think that ARCS will, as I said, they will coexist and integrate with channels. So they will also recover some of the privacy through channels. For example, right now consider a Phoenix model. In a Phoenix model, right now fees are very low, so nobody care. But as soon as people start using the chain again,
Starting point is 00:08:32 you may have a problem in resizing the channel with Phoenix every time. In ARC, you can have a channel, even a very simple channel, like a Spillman channel, which is an old construct before Dreyapun, and you can easily resize this spinman channel with Arc, which will improve your, let's say, confirmation time, because right now in order to have finality in Arc, you have to wait for a block, like a normal chain transaction. In Lightning, after your finality, you can carry on this finality forever
Starting point is 00:09:03 until the channel is open, but you can just serve two users. So in a way, I think that let me wrap this up. up in this way. I think that much of the research that we have been seeing going on low-key during the last couple of years may start to become really handy now in a building phase during 2026. Another thing that I could mention before I shut up is cross-imposignatory aggregation. There was a lot of discussion about that a few years ago. Then everything stopped, mostly because some estimation by some skilled developers were pretty pessimistic in the savings of cross-input signal aggregation.
Starting point is 00:09:49 But now Blockstream came out a few months ago with a constant size secretar aggregation paper, which is pretty impressive. And with that kind of potential saving in pay join, the discussion about this kind of support may go back to be really relevant, especially because in a lot of. in a non-trivial way, it could interact with the discussion about spam, about the width, within the discount, which was used in order to incentivize a spam transaction. So the two things may actually mix together the pit. So technically speaking, I'm very optimistic.
Starting point is 00:10:26 Education, I think we are in a golden age, actually. Education, luckily education doesn't need a like deployment of production-ready systems and businesses. education doesn't need real use cases today. You just need somebody to be willing to learn for the future. So we can easily build education for privacy, even in a very theoretical way. Of course, it's cool if we have kids using Bitcoin today in a proper way,
Starting point is 00:10:56 but it's also good if you have university-grade researchers, researching or staff long-term. So I'm pretty happy of the way that education, the Bitcoin education developed during the last couple of years, which is also my most direct involvement in education efforts with Plymouth. That's beautiful. My God, Jocchamo, there's so much for me to unpack there. Okay, so first and foremost,
Starting point is 00:11:19 I do want to touch on the interaction between Arc and Lightning a little bit because I've always, I've kind of, I've kind of come to terms with the fact and I think it's a fine position that there will be, in order to scale, that there's going to be some sort of trust trade-off. So, for example, e-cash and liquid. And I'm very fine using both of those for small amounts. I use them all the time. I love Aqua Wallet and Bull App and I'm using bolt swaps in the background.
Starting point is 00:11:40 And eCash has a lot of privacy built in as well. So I can see where these have value and we can scale up on top of them. But I'm curious in your viewpoint then, if we particularly if we could even add privacy to something like Arc, if that could be a component that we're looking to factor in there, will we need to give up trust in order to scale Bitcoin? Well, I think that it was cool for a while to allow ourselves to consider trust in a binary term, like either it's totally trusted or is totally trusted or trustless, but it's actually a spectrum, of course. The problem is we are trusting that a single actor is not controlling the system with how much resource deployment. So what is the budget for the attack and what is the budget
Starting point is 00:12:26 for the system to defend and to mutate into something more decentralized. So to make it to make it more a little bit more accurate, what is the, if you have the centralized part of the system which gets attacked, what is the budget, the cost for users to migrate? Are you going to lose all your money or are you just losing some time to enter your private keys in some other systems? And that's the idea. So it's always a spectrum.
Starting point is 00:12:51 And it's clear that if you have to defend $1.1,000, you are not investing in $3 million for a safe because it just doesn't match unless you are Scrooge Metac and there is a lot of sentimental value on the on the scent. So you invest in security proportionally to the amount. So the idea of having this kind of smart wallet, Acqua is a good example of swapping using lightning, but there's also mini-bits using X. There is a cache and there was a mutiny doing a lot of cool experiments. And there is Blitz wallet doing cool experiments. Now there is also the breeze, SDK, which is mixing Spark with Arc, with liquid, with all
Starting point is 00:13:31 of that. So these are very, very cool experiments. And I think that theoretically speaking, we could have a complete spectrum of security models, where you start with the basic security assumption which just trust me, bro. So it's complete like what it used to be wallet of Satoshi, like, trust me bro. I just give you my money. Then there is e-cash. The cash is a slight improvement of trust requirement because the mint cannot, one thing cannot
Starting point is 00:13:59 confiscate individually because they don't know how much you have. So they can just run away with all the money. And secondarily, you always can prove that you had this cash token that was not redeemed. So they are like provably honest. Like they can run away with the money, but you can prove that, which you cannot do in a database like if Craig and or Bit Phoenix or whatever, they just tell you, you have nothing, you cannot prove much, technically speaking. In e-cash, you have a token that has been that the mint refused to convert, which is more cash-like in a way. Then you move again and you go to something like the state chain, like Spark, which is now very famous,
Starting point is 00:14:38 but there was also Mercury layer, for example, and Mercury wallet is still active. State chain is nice because the coordinator cannot run away with the money, but they can collude with some of the participants to double spend, to re-with basically to, to, to, to, to, to bring back history to rewind time and they may scam you in that way. And that's the state chain. Then there is something like Arc and the Lightning Channel. And as I say, these have like some kind of orthogonal tradeoffs. In Arc, you have to wait for a block to really get finality.
Starting point is 00:15:12 So you have more trust in the short term. But then you can, for example, when you want to exit, you can share the fee of your exit cost with thousands of people in theory. So even in high-fee scenarios, you may be able to do unilateral exit by sharing your fees. In a Lightning Channel, after the confirmation, you are set for life. But if you have to exit a unilaterally, you have to pay the entire fee. So assuming that we get to $1,000 equivalent of on-chain fees, a lighting channel is to close and resize that that becomes pretty burdensome.
Starting point is 00:15:44 Then if we move from that, well, I guess before e-cash and then between E-Kexam, between e-cash and the state chain concept, there's something like liquid. It's basically like a cache with the weaker privacy, the difference being that they cannot do fraction of reserve. A cashew mint can do fractional reserve, while liquid cannot. Your liquid note can always actually tell precisely
Starting point is 00:16:11 the amount of circulating representation of Bitcoin. So this is a progression. And in theory, we could have a lighting network where you will swap across all the security models as needed. So if I pay you a cent, my wallet will understand, and your wallet will understand that I just have to give you any cash token. But if I pay you a dollar, maybe we go Spark. And if I pay you $10, maybe we go Arc and Lightning in Dripoon.
Starting point is 00:16:40 And so on. Now, even if in theory we could have a complete spectrum, I think that realistically, the market may settle into some kind of Goldilocks zones of this spectrum. So there would be some kind of privileged parts of the spectrum. And in my opinion, a combination of channels like Spilman channels, Adriapun and Arc is very powerful. It's a center of this tradeoff between on-chain.
Starting point is 00:17:11 So let me just pit bull here. We may end up with something like I-Cash for very, very small, ARC and Spillman channels for everything in between and on chain for very, very big. When we have these three big clusters, I'm not sure something like Spark or Mercury or Liquid will be needed longer. But of course, the market never behaves totally rationally. And Yosa inertia, like liquid is already used and Spark. It's going pretty aggressive.
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Starting point is 00:18:15 code on the screen to get started right away. One company I like pointing people to when they ask about Bitcoin mining is Abundant Mines. They were founded by Bo and Christine Turner after losing over half a million dollars to broken promises in the mining industry. And they built their hosting model to remove the usual headaches. With abundant mines, you own your machines and keep 100% of the Bitcoin you mine. There's no revenue share, no hidden skims. Pricing is simple. One flat monthly fee covers power, parts, labor, and repairs.
Starting point is 00:18:49 They also guarantee uptime. The machine goes down, their hash rate redirect system routes hash power from their fleet, so earnings don't just stop. And every machine is insured at full replacement value. Everything is hosted in the U.S., powered by hydro, and mining equipment may qualify for 100% year-one bonus depreciation. Learn more at abundant mines.com slash sessions. No, that makes perfect. I mean, I kind of agree.
Starting point is 00:19:16 I think, like, between on-chain lightning arc, and then eCash, like you kind of have the whole spectrum covered, right? Like, you can do a lot of volume on lightning and still be good. And then again, anything massive on chain. That makes, that makes perfect sense to me. And I would agree. It even seems like in that case, like, I don't think I really need liquid anymore. Like, it's very convenient right now because it's implemented and because I can use it.
Starting point is 00:19:35 But if those, if those other methods are kind of inbuilt and kind of ubiquitous throughout the market, I think I'm good. I think I'm solid at that point in time. I did. Well, let me. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Sorry, if I'm being to talk today.
Starting point is 00:19:47 No, no. Go ahead. Go ahead. If you feel to stop me. There is also another spectrum, which is orthogonal to this to a degree. So now we listed the things that the coordinator may do to you with your money. So escape with everything or just double spend. And then there is also the point of who the coordinator is.
Starting point is 00:20:03 And now do you prevent the coordinator from acting badly? And one of those is, for example, the fact that instead of a single key, you have a federation. And this is a model which is used in Fedi for a cash. So let's say like Fedi is like cashew plus a federation. Then Liquid already includes a federation, but it may not, because you may deploy an element side chain without a federation with a single signer. And then Arc doesn't have, Arcade doesn't have a federation right now,
Starting point is 00:20:30 but they are considering to add one. And then Spark has a federation which is an interesting model in which you have key deletion, so even if just one out of three of the federation is good. So you have this federation stuff. And then you have trusted hardware, trusted execution environments, HSMs. This idea is interesting because
Starting point is 00:20:52 delegated at the remote attestation, this is very interesting because if you think about that, Al-Fini, when Al-Fini was invented reusable proof of work, they didn't have the concept of blockchain. So Al-Fini's server was using remote attestation and trusted execution
Starting point is 00:21:09 environment to prove you that he was being honest to some degree. And we can still add this kind of HSM structure on ARC, for example, Arcade is considering to add it, and liquid, together with the Federation, they also have HSMs, which are these fiduciary hardwars. So in a way, maybe there is the cryptographic construction is one thing that we listed before, and on top there is the things you do to the coordinator to make it less trusted, including hardware trust delegation or federation models.
Starting point is 00:21:44 So the total permutations of security models becomes pretty complex. And again, the market will probably just select one. So maybe Arcade, let's say, in three years, Arc implementation with the same HSM as liquid may make liquid obsolete. But they need to reuse at least the Federation model, for example, which Art doesn't have. So that's a little bit more complex to predict. Interesting. Yeah, we'll be very curious to see all things about. I'm also trying to think of the privacy implications.
Starting point is 00:22:14 I do want to touch on a little bit as well, too. Like, I'm, like, I often wonder, like, because we have the, basically the cost of the on-chain fees, you wouldn't necessarily have, like, coin joins and extra transactions just kind of running all the time. But if there's a really low fee environment, if we're dealing with something like Arc and Lightning and e-cash, like, I wonder if it'll reach a point where your wallet
Starting point is 00:22:30 will be kind of, like, constantly mixing some of your coins on your behalf, just to obscure where things are coming from. Like, does privacy get easier as we scale out in these additional layers that we might be even, like, for somebody who's new come into space, it would just be automated in the background. Yes, yeah. I would say that the privacy is almost aligned with the reverse of security to some degree,
Starting point is 00:22:53 in the sense that if you have a cache, that's perfectly private. It's not entirely true because in the spectrum I designed, a normal database like Cracken Exchange, that's private for the outside world, but it's pretty one private for the coordinator, which can leak and will eventually leak. e-cash is pretty private. Liquid, a little bit less so, because the amounts are show many blinded, but the projection graph are not. State chain are, yeah, that's a pretty complex privacy design,
Starting point is 00:23:30 but let's say it's a little bit like liquid to a degree. And then ARC, as it was promoted initially, it was more private, but as it deployed now is less private. And on-chain is very, very low privacy, again, because you have this very strong correlation. So privacy is a little bit all around the place. But I agree with you in general. So I mentioned before the idea of Chisacrosimple secret to aggregation. I think there are two ideas for privacy on Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:24:01 One is privacy by obfuscation, which means my information, my transaction information hit the global consensus layer. so they get replicated everywhere forever, but I hide them into more input, more output, coin join rounds, ricochet, fake pay join, additional changes for to screw up heuristics. Or I hide them cryptographically, like in Monero or in Zcash, so I off-rescale them. So I have very big signatures, very big keys,
Starting point is 00:24:36 very big states like the TXO set of my own. Monero, everything becomes very big. That I think is bad long term, because in that case, privacy is in trade-off with fees. In order to get more privacy, I have to pay more because I put data on chain. If I want to be private, I have to put more data on chain, like to do a new coin-jail round. And that will cost me. So first, users will not do it if they are not really, really committed. And when they're really committed, usually they have a reason to be.
Starting point is 00:25:08 and so they attract more regulatory scrutiny. And you don't have plausible denability. The regulators comes to you and say, why are you implementing this? You have to say because of privacy. And regulators are usually, they're like, privacy is bad. While there is another strategy,
Starting point is 00:25:23 which is privacy by omission, which is, I don't hit the global consensus with some information. Some information remains locally. It doesn't need to go global in the chain. So Lightning or Arc are something like that. Ark less so because they created the Block Explorer, which was not ideal, but I understand why they did it business-wise. But from the point of your privacy is bad.
Starting point is 00:25:47 In Lightning, we create a channel. The information never hits the chain. So in this case, by being private, we save money. Something similar goes to a cash, for example, or to liquid to some degree. But liquid is a little bit more complex. But in a cash, for example, we save money by, we save money. fees or lightning by omitting information. So in that case, if an exchange is, if an exchange implements lightning, the regulator will ask, why are you not writing everything on chain? Well, it's not for
Starting point is 00:26:20 privacy. It's for cost saving and time confirmation timing. You have a very strong plausible than ability. You are more private because you are sharing less information on chain and you are sharing less information because you want to save money and confirmation times. So I think that there are at least two orthogonal visions of privacy. One is actually in trade-off with fees, and the other one goes together, and that the letter is clearly better because it gives more incentives for the users,
Starting point is 00:26:52 and it gives more plausible the mobility to the users and to the providers, of course. Cross-input signature aggregation soft work will go in the second direction, because it will allow the users to omit signature information by getting privacy and also getting a cost saving, let's say. That's very interesting. Kind of all that note, do you think my sense is we're not going to get any sort of consensus
Starting point is 00:27:17 on a soft work anytime soon? Yeah. Unfortunately, I think, yeah, I'm saying this, I'm trying to play this optimistic act because consensus building also requires some level of optimism, but I agree with you. It's very hard to find it. And also, right now, you have the spam debate, which is creating all this proposal that, in my opinion, I have absolutely no legs and no future about soft for soft forks exclusively for spam mitigation. I don't think there will go anywhere. Then you have core people, literal core developers.
Starting point is 00:27:52 They are mostly committed to this kind of consensus cleanup, genitorial softforks, which are useful. I can improve Bitcoin, but they're not feature related. They are more like they are more geek stuff. And then you have the strong support for Covenants, which is not that yet, which is still what strongest a few years. A few years to go seemed like we were very close to reach a consensus. But then consensus for Covenants is still not there, clearly. There is not consensus in how, even if there is a very strong agreement in whether it's
Starting point is 00:28:25 desirable. Most people will tell you yes. But many people would disagree on when and how. exactly. So and now luckily there is there is I heard a few people started to talk about cheese I again and I am a cheese a guy so I would push for that and so I agree with you with this kind of premise the only thing that I can hope for which is very it's very it's very optimistic but I remember Taproot when Taproot was proposed it was a brilliant idea because the idea of must mercilize syntax abstract tree for better smart contract construction
Starting point is 00:29:07 and privacy was already circulating since years and there were three different BIPs, two very known and one more niche not yet assignment. And there was no agreement. And then there was a, there were a few proposals for Schenor and then there were a few proposals for commitment scheme like paid contract and stuff like that. And with one single night, Maxwell and then other people like SIPAA did these guys in the peak of their Bitcoin creativity, they proposed an idea that was putting everything together in a very elegant way. So Tapper, even if most users didn't even understand what it was, it was actually the merging of very or different ideas into one single consistent elegant solution
Starting point is 00:29:53 that we are still starting to almost nothing uses Tappert yet. I use Tapper because, well, but, but, but, But there's also like for a while that wasn't entirely true. Like nobody was using the software. It was activated in 2021. But now I can't say I use it every day because I am a very strong Phoenix user. And Phoenix uses Tapper channels to open and close right now to save on fees and also to save a little bit on privacy.
Starting point is 00:30:22 And I am a user of degrading security multi-sig term lock wallets like Lian and others, and they use Taproot constructively. And the two implementations of Arc, they both use, which I use Arcade wallet in production for to pay for my coffee, Lugano. And they both use Arc. So I can say I do use Taproot every day in my life right now. But of course, it's still very early. But let's see.
Starting point is 00:30:52 You'll see how it evolves there. I'm actually kind of curious when I just double click on that for a second, too, because my understanding for CTV really was coming from the perspective of ARC. I remember hearing arguments that if we had CTV, we could get ARC, which is no longer necessary at this point in time. So I'm not actually opposed to Covenants in any sort of way, but I don't know the use case. Could you give me maybe an example of why that might be beneficial at this point?
Starting point is 00:31:14 Yeah, that's also true for ARC, but really for everything else, including Lightning and Lightning and Symmetry. If we have to, if we want to dump it down to something very compact, But the notion is that with CTB or equivalently powerful covenants, you can make synchronous interactive things, asynchronous and non-interactive, which changes a lot in terms of usability, UX, and also to some degree security. For example, a Lightning Channel, in order to open a Lightning Channel with you, we need to be both on-chain and cosine-consign each other stuff.
Starting point is 00:31:49 That means that I cannot pay you while you are off-chain, and then if you come on-chain after, if fees are low, I wait for you to be on-chain and then I open a channel where I'm off-chain. We cannot do this, which means that we need servers, basically. We need people with servers to stay in between and wait for the, like we have these trampoline nodes with LSP services that needs to stay in between. while even in ARC is the same. If you have to pay with ARC, you need without Covenant.
Starting point is 00:32:24 So what was called Clark, covenant-less ARC, which is what in production right now, you need a large number of people to be online in the same party in order to send money. So this interactivity cost is something that we can tolerate and we can build upon. It's not a disaster, but is a cost. If you have covenants, you can make most of the things non-interactive. So you can do stuff in which I do something here. There is a covenant, everybody signs in a different time, and then you don't need everybody to come together
Starting point is 00:33:03 at the same time for the same round. You have a lot of constructions that are not really similar to arts, but are still very interesting, like cold channels. the channels. If you look up coal channels on in general timeout trees or a different design for payment pools. And even from the point of view of lighting, if you think about L2 channels, that are channels that are very easy on the, they become way better to backup and to be and to be transforming into multi-party. L2 required any suggestion or input, any provout APO. That was a, It's not considered a covenant, but it is a covenant.
Starting point is 00:33:45 Any bravout is a covenant. It's not an op code like CTB, but it is a C-Gesh modification. But it's still a covenant. So in general, covenants make your structure non-interactive, which makes it safer, faster, cheaper, way better as UX. So we can build everything without stronger covenants. I think that the key to understand this is that, A Lightning Channel, Dreyapun Channel today, is a covenant.
Starting point is 00:34:16 It is literally covenant because by creating a pre-signing transaction in which allow you to get out with some hash secret, I'm creating a covenant. But it's a pre-signed covenant. Pre-signed covenants require pre-signing, which is an expensive interaction process. While the covenants that people are talking about like CTV, they do not require. pre-signing. Something similar about vowels and security and security vowels and inerritance processes. Like right now I'm satisfied of the inerritant processes we can do with Leanna and just time locks, but they require a lot of presigning, which means backing up the sign the transactions. And it also means so it complicates the backup process. And it also requires redeposite every now and then on chain.
Starting point is 00:35:09 With covenants, you can have the same, but without the presigning. So with better backup capabilities. So like a future with CTB or maybe CTV and Czechseed at a process from stack, Adel-Ns, this kind of combination, a future like that will probably allow people to have these very strong contracts without complex backups. Like with 12 words, you can recover your stuff. Without provenance, you need to back up the state. and you have this interactivity problem.
Starting point is 00:35:44 Okay, very interesting. So it's just a huge improvement on what we can already do. They'll make it probably easier in terms of adoption. And again, I like the idea of legacy planning behind there as well too. I did want to pivot for one second.
Starting point is 00:35:51 We touched on a bit earlier as well. So we talked about Europe and Switzerland and privacy and things that are going on there a little bit. So two things. One, is Europe as bad as I think it is from everything that I'm being shown in my feed currently? And then number two,
Starting point is 00:36:03 I thought Switzerland was still a little bit of a safe haven. Are things turning a little bit? So in Europe, things are pretty bad in the sense that in the US, of course, the reason overreaching state, as always, there is a creeping state. Maybe there is the most powerful surveillance infrastructure of the planet right now, even more powerful than China. But at least there is a strong cultural resistance. There is the current government party is officially against CBDC.
Starting point is 00:36:32 The concept of cash is still defended ideologically. There is still a very strong rooted ideological defense for the idea of individual privacy. There is this kind of American ideology about that. In Europe, I would think that the surveillance apparatus is maybe less powerful than the US won and the China one, but still is pretty powerful as well. The regulation is almost as bad, the financial regulator, regulation which is not great in the US is also not great in Europe, but it's getting worse. So all these kind of licenses, of course, something as ugly as the BIT license in the U.S. is very hard to come up with, but they're working on that pretty, pretty fast. So, the European Union is copying the U.S. in terms of financial restriction, which also impacts privacy a lot. But on top of that, there is almost zero social and cultural resistance to that.
Starting point is 00:37:27 So there is no public debate in which privacy is proudly defended in a European typical media or, like a political talk show, there is not the party of privacy. Privacy is for bad guys, for criminals, and there is no single redeeming quality of privacy in the public discourse. So that's worse, I would say. Switzerland is better. It's better in different terms. It's better because there is still better regulation. Financial privacy used to be great here.
Starting point is 00:38:00 Now, it decayed very fast from the late 80s and then after 90s. and the Patriotact and the fight between the US and Switzerland, the bank secrecy. So it collapsed. But even after collapse, the general state of privacy is not great, but it's better than the US and better than the EU. Well, better than the US, debatedly because if you have a Delaware company and you are a US citizen, you may have better privacy for outside countries than Switzerland. But let's say that on average is pretty good on privacy in comparative terms. Also, there is some level of cultural, so also, the surveillance infrastructure is not very developed.
Starting point is 00:38:44 We don't have a, we don't have a palantir in Switzerland. Of course, there are crypto AG, stuff like that. But let's say that the institutions in Switzerland are not yet equipped to do that level of intensive. there is still some kind of shy approach to invading citizens' privacy. And then there is some level, not as strong as the US, but it is some level of cultural reaction and cultural defense of privacy. You can talk with these people that will tell you privacy is good, privacy was good, and it's a divided, like in the US, it's divided,
Starting point is 00:39:24 because part of the public discourse in Switzerland is we lost the war with the US, about privacy, we have to give up the bank secrecy to everybody now, France, Italy, Germany. So we have been beaten hardly once. Let's not go back there. So let's normalize Switzerland. Let's become more European. Let's try to become. So some Swiss politicians are embarrassed to be different and they try to push forward to become as normalized as possible. While there is a little bit apart, especially in the public opinion, and also, also a little bit of political representation, which is kind of like, well, but actually, that was our thing.
Starting point is 00:40:05 Like, Switzerland was privacy. So let's go back there. At least if you talk about privacy publicly in a talk show in Switzerland, you are not considered crazy. You may be considered a bit out, not up to date, but not crazy. Like, if you do that in Italy, I mean, I come from there. It's hopeless. When I first got into Bitcoin, I was overwhelmed.
Starting point is 00:40:28 The jargon, the security risks, the fear that one mistake could cost everything. I remember staring at my screen and wondering, are my keys safe? Did I do this right? That experience is why I started BTC sessions. For over a decade, this channel has helped millions of people like you learn how to use and secure Bitcoin. But I realized something. For many people, videos aren't enough. Everyone learns differently.
Starting point is 00:40:55 Some need to ask questions in real time as an expert. walks through their setup, their goals, and their threat model. And certain things like advanced cold storage, inheritance planning, privacy, and node or mining setups often can't be fully solved by watching another tutorial. So I built BTC Mentor. I recruited the best Bitcoin educators on the planet to work with you one-on-one. Real experts, real answers, personalized, hands-on guidance tailored to your exact situation. Whether you're brand new or building a complex setup,
Starting point is 00:41:31 we meet you where you're at and walk with you step by step. By the end, you don't just hope your Bitcoin is safe. You know it is. If you're ready for that level of confidence, then head to BTC Mentor.io and book a call with us today. Okay, good. Well, at least good. Well, you're supposed to them was the last country to go off the gold standard as well, too.
Starting point is 00:41:53 It would make sense that it would have at least some cultural roots and still be like, no, we like cash and hard money. So let's just leave everybody a little bit lower. there. Well, my, like the, my dark side hope in this little moment here is everything going on in Europe and with increasing getting more or well-y and as well, too. We talked earlier about like Bitcoin needing an adversary. That's really where it kind of shines, that the pain points tend to be kind of what motivates people to actually learn about these sort of things and come to Bitcoin too. So my hope is that if Europe is getting worse, at the very least, you might be onboarding some more
Starting point is 00:42:22 Bitcoiners over the next year or so, which does bring me to, I do want to talk about plan B. For anyone that might not be familiar, too, because you got this amazing education network set up here, what exactly are you doing at Plan B? And how is that going? Are we getting any scared Europeans coming through the door yet? So, yeah, so Plan B started a few years ago in the city of Lugano. So it was a very Swiss thing to start with. And it was an agreement between Teder and the city of Lugano and later on Fulber Venture, which is a great venture capital firm in the Bitcoin world, also joined. and it started with a Plumby Forum, which was just a conference. The Plumby Summer School, which was an educational project for getting students from all the world in Switzerland to learn about Bitcoin. The adoption of Bitcoin, the city of Lugano, so a merchant project with more than 400 lighting network accepting merchants.
Starting point is 00:43:14 And a Plambi Hub, which is where I'm now like, here's me. And Lugano Clambia Hub, which is a beautiful building that you should come to visit in Lugano and the Plumby VC fund, which is a VC fund and also a non-profit foundation to give money to Bitcoin things. So it started like very multifaced. And then they involved me and my team more recently. And now we created this concept of Plumby network, which is the idea of not only improving and growing and strengthening the activity here in Lugano, which we still do, but also to expand
Starting point is 00:43:54 that globally a little bit. So if you go on Plan B. Network, you can find also the Plan B Academy, which is an operation that will translate free courses in dozens of different languages all around the world. And we try to boost local pitups, local bid debts, relationship with universities. We wrote the Bitcoin Masterclasses courses, like executive master's courses, in the University of Taipei at DUT in the University of Turin, Polytechnic of Torino. We are trying to work right now. We have some working being done with MIT and the George W. University in Washington, D.C.
Starting point is 00:44:38 So, of course, University of Salvador, we are discussing with Tokyo. So there is also, and, of course, the local university here, Uzi and Supsi of Italian and Switzerland. So there is grassroots stuff with the program, No Nation. We are doing a lot of education in high school, basically. So these great guys are going through hundreds of schools in a Sabador, mostly, to teach students of high middle school how to set up full notes. So non-nation is also a great achievement. Now, the next thing, so this is Plan B.
Starting point is 00:45:14 Next thing is if you're interested to follow, go to Plan B the Network and stay tuned, especially for three things. The first thing is the Plumby Forum, which is started as a conference in Lugano, and it's still a conference in Lugano every October, late October. And it was great last October. But then it expanded to El Salvador, San Salvador. So 30, 31 of January, you can go on, you just search engine Plumby Forum El Salvador and you find it. And then during El Salvador, we will publish the Cypher Tank, which is a wordplay between Shark Tank and Cypher Punk. It sounds better for me because I don't have a good pronunciation of tank and tank. The wordplay is supposed to be that.
Starting point is 00:46:06 So Cypher Tank is a very high-quality production format where some of the best projects in Bitcoin, ask for money, but instead of just doing that through open sets, grants or Geyser projects, we did it with a shark tank kind of format with incredible judges like Palo Duino, Adam Beck, Preston Pish and Matto Dell and Jack Muller's. So all the best judges you can imagine interacting with these young guys asking for support, financial support. So this was recorded already and is going to be published on the 31 of January. Well, it will be, thank you very.
Starting point is 00:46:54 It would be five episodes. So the first episode will come out on the 31. Now, if you're coming to the Plumby Forum in a Salvador, on the second day, the 31, during the lunch break, we will get her into a room on the main stage and we will probably, we will basically do a premiere of the first. episode and then the one episode will be published every week during February and then the great great final with the winners will be published on the end of February and the winners will come to Lugano in March to start a local residency program and I mean I want to keep the tension up so I cannot say what the winners are but it's a very it's a very good it's a very good
Starting point is 00:47:40 I'm very happy about the project I think it would be very nice and it could create a new way to do something that the Bicod ecosystem is doing already, which is giving money to. The Bucar ecosystem is very generous in terms of money, but it's not structured and these startups are a little bit left alone with resources, but there is no strong incubation method. There is not a strong acceleration method. There is not a very strong.
Starting point is 00:48:09 There are residency programs for core developers like chain code, But for businesses and grassroots projects, we are trying to create something as compelling. And then so, the first thing is come to the forum. Second is, stay tuned for the Cypher Tank. If you are not in the forum, just go on Plummeddon Network on the 31 lunchtime, El Salvador time. You will get the first episode for free. It will be published probably on our Rumble and YouTube channels,
Starting point is 00:48:38 but you will see it hopefully everywhere. And then the other thing is that we are studying, Again, this year our Plan B program. Again, if you go on Plan B. Network, PlumB. Academy, you find it. The Plan B program is a program for people that want to start working in Bitcoin companies. So what we do is a generic introduction to Bitcoin to professionals. So the target is not random people. The target is like marketers, developers, lawyers, people with already strong professionality.
Starting point is 00:49:08 We teach them Bitcoin. And then we give them tutoring by Bitcoin companies like Blockstream, BitFinex and big Bitcoin companies or smaller like Brise and all the others. And they give them assignments. And then we select the 21 best developers and the 21 best business developers. And we send them to Lugano for the summer school in June in order to stay in the same building, this building with the mentors and the business people. So this is the introductory lecture for the Plumby program starts on the 3rd of February. I will be in a sabbador still. And I will do from there, from the Bitcoin Beach, likely.
Starting point is 00:49:49 I will do the first introductory lecture that would be free and open. But then everything from there will be paid. That's a premium program. So if we want committed people, there will be tuition, there would be scholarships. Then just to be very ideological, after one year, all the content of the school would be publish online free and open source like we did a year before and the year before that. So eventually all the content finishes up open source, but we try to give some kind of privilege, some kind of premium experience to committed professionals.
Starting point is 00:50:23 That's incredible. There's one. Okay, there's two questions why I want to ask. My first one most importantly, too, because I know you can't give away what's happened with like the cipher tank in terms of like who won and what kind of projects they were coming forward. But of all the judges there, because there's always one, who was the hard ass? Who is the one who played the jerk during the show?
Starting point is 00:50:38 That's our question. You have to see, you have to watch the format, of course, to take your consideration. But Max Cadum from Hoddle-Odle is a boss. Like, he's hard to please. Oleg Mikalski from Fullbrook Venture is not always easy to please. I think Jack Lee was also challenging a bit. But, you know, some judges were very sweet from the personal point of view. Like Jack Mothers is a very sweet boy.
Starting point is 00:51:05 But the team was intense. But I cannot leak anything more. Now you have to see it for yourself. Okay, I'll absolutely check it out. And I kind of want to pivot off that a little bit too. Because there's so much we talked about in terms of like education and we got the cypher tank and then we got consensus as well too. I'm wondering, do you have any concerns?
Starting point is 00:51:22 Like as we're purposely growing the tent, right? We're purposely trying to bring more people into Bitcoin to educate them, to take self-custody, to take control their lives. Do you have concerns that we lose the cypherpunk ethos along the way? Which even makes things like consensus damn near impossible. And the one for me, and I don't know if I can articulate this properly too, but I found myself at the end of last year kind of resenting the suit corners a little bit. And the reason being, it was something along the lines of there is no value for you to talk about in terms of an investment. If we don't focus on unconfiscateability, on censorship resistant, on privacy, like the value of Bitcoin comes from everything that the cypherpunks did and are doing.
Starting point is 00:52:01 And I feel like we've kind of lost that way. It has me a little down. It has me a little concerned at some points. But I figured you'd have a better view of the situation. So clearly there is a trade-off, a general trade-off not unique to Bitcoin between adoption and purity. That's something that every subculture will face, even if you talk about heavy metal or, I don't know, vicar culture. You have the same problem. Either you remain niche and pure and you can feel the purity and also the reason your movement started because your subculture started as an answer to a problem, to an issue, to some defense.
Starting point is 00:52:37 in the world. So you propose something radically different. And now if you stay niche, you don't transform the world as much. If you grow and you incorporate everything, you do affect the world more, but then the world affects you back. And there is a very nice talk in Baltic on a Badger by co-insure about subcultures in general and this kind of tradeoff. Bitcoin faces it just like other subcultures. So adoption or purity. And I found myself in either side of the spectrum because rhetorically, every time we're like, yeah, we have to reach out. We have to do mass, you know, mass adoption. And then sometimes I read articles like the beautiful article by, there was Francis Puyo with the hard path and there was also a Zbesski with the jobs, the remnant taking from Francis. So,
Starting point is 00:53:32 this idea of the remnant, the small niche that should be pure, whatever, like a NOAA's arc, and everybody else, if they don't want to float, they can just die in the water. We build the art for somebody that wants to come. We don't have to back people to come into the ark. So I find myself in both directions a bit oscillating, but usually I think that as a company, you tend to be pious toward adoption and compromise and, and, uh, and, uh, in, uh, that enlarge in the tent. And as an individual, I'm growing into more and more intolerant and remnant every day.
Starting point is 00:54:13 The good thing, I think that the positive conclusion is that you can look at the dilution of the cypher punk ideas in two ways. In relative terms, it's true. It's diluted, for sure. But then you can look at it in absolute terms, and we are freaking winning. So look at it in this way. I was doing Bitcoin meetups in 2013. 10 people in a room.
Starting point is 00:54:40 Three were hardcore cipher pack. One was a curious trader. One was a curious banker, even back there. And one was an e-commerce expert. One just wanted to buy some weed and was there just for that. And you have the 10 people. Now, you do a meetup right now. You have 100 people.
Starting point is 00:55:01 of these nine are hardcore cypherpunk. Now, in relative terms, this shrank a lot. Like, now it is one fenth before it used to be almost one-third. So we had the reduction, we have the delusion and a reduction in our core value. But we were three. Now we're nine. I have more hardcore, badass cypherpunk friends now that I used to have in 2013. way more.
Starting point is 00:55:33 So in absolute terms, we are winning. And that's natural because if you think about the adoption cycles, which also are reflected to some degree in the price cycles, even if I started ideologically first and then I met Bitcoin, for most people is the other way around. They adopt the tools superficially, and then they can grow into the values and the subculture. And usually when you start, you just use it,
Starting point is 00:56:00 just want to get rich quick or to buy weight or something. And then maybe your exchange will escape with the money. So you learn a bit. And then your tax agency will write you with some kind of ex-attory request. And then you learn privacy. And then you also maybe want to, you make friend with some guy that ends up in jail because they just develop a wallet. So you become passionate about the cows. So you can actually, and then you read because people will show you the the Bitcoin standard and then you buy it because you're interested in Bitcoin. But then you read about the Austrian schools of economics and then you are curious about this misuse guy and you may end up reading the human action.
Starting point is 00:56:41 Of course, this is not for everybody. This is a very strict. It's a very narrow funnel. But it can happen. And the same goes with reading up Tim May and the cyberpunk and Eric Eutz and Julian Assange and all the other things. And at the end, you end up with the stronger. core. So I think that as long as the core survives and keeps growing in absolute terms,
Starting point is 00:57:07 we are still better off. Without Bitcoin, the number of cyberpunk people and cyberpunk educated people, cyberpunk developers, and a number of Austrian educated people and also Austrian investors and savers and economic developers would be way, way smaller. It's impossible for us to prevent adoption. Adoption is happening even by national states and seat corners and stock markets. We cannot prevent it. The thing is that individually we should always try not to sell our sauce for it's a low-term preference thing. Let's try to get to maximize the profit for everybody in the long term instead of just saving our soul for a quick background now. So it's just a question of being patient and try to be personally uncompromising, but accepting that from the point
Starting point is 00:58:02 of view of relative weight, the original ideological bunch is going to be less relatively representative. That is probably the most optimistic take I've ever heard. I actually feel pretty good about that, because you're right, in terms of absolutes, we've got more. And I'm kind of with you, I was an ANCAP before I found Bitcoin, but for a lot of people, it's their first introduction to Austria and economics. It's like, oh my God, do I have some books for you? Let's talk more. Okay, I would like you to please save me again, take that wonderful, optimistic energy because there's one other thing that kind of bugs me along the same lines, and I'm hoping you have a great answer for it too. My other fear and concern in Bitcoin is like, particularly over the last year, fees have been unbelievably low. There's not a lot of activity happening on chain. My worry is that basically any adoption that we have had or any sort of like a large proportion of it is just going into the ETFs. It's just going into the Klaus Schwab accounts. It's just being held by custody. third parties that this is the avenue that most people are coming in. And they're not viewing it particularly as money. Right. It's not being viewed with the intent of money or medium of exchange. It's not really viewed as solving the problem. It's only being viewed as an investment.
Starting point is 00:59:08 So I want that beautiful, optimistic answer. My fear is that Bitcoin just becomes the like store of value. It's just another asset that you have in your account, but you never really get past that point to what it can really do in terms of enabling that personal freedom. Tell me I'm wrong. So I would give an optimistic answer by being even more pessimistic because I think that you just initially, but then I will finish up optimistic. So I think that you just listed one half of the reason. I think there are three main reasons. Fees are low.
Starting point is 00:59:40 Actually, let's say four. First reason, we are actually using the Latin network. So the scalability solutions we created, now we are using that, which is good. It's intended. We can also achieve a better process. privacy, so that's good. I personally do spend Bitcoin on Shade very, very rarely this day, unless I have to do something big. I will use lighting also for thousands of dollars and it works. So lighting for the hardcore people, for the hardcore bit corners, lighting is reality,
Starting point is 01:00:08 lighting works. And of course, we created that to prevent clogging on the scarce space and now it's working as intended. Then second point, there was an artificial, but was most likely very realistic and artificial pumping of the fees during the block size wars due to these exogenous bit main lead spam attack. So this is very controversial, can get conspiratorial, but I think there is an element of an artificial pumping of the fees, which gave us a glimpse of the future. I think we are lucky that we are not there yet.
Starting point is 01:00:49 But it showed us where we may be, and it's important that it did, because otherwise we may still be in the delusion that block space would be eternal and free and infinite forever. And instead, it's not like that. And even with lightning, when fees were very high again because of their ruin NFTs and whatever, people that had non-conceptual closure of the Atlantic Channel, they lost a lot of money in fees because you have a channel, suddenly it's, gone with $90 fees. So that's bad.
Starting point is 01:01:24 And it's good that we get reminded that that's the future of a scarce asset like not space. So that's the second reason. The third reason is the reason you are mentioning, which is ETFs and treasury companies. Treasury companies are also a hack because, of course, you can buy Bitcoin, but you can also borrow Fiat to buy Bitcoin.
Starting point is 01:01:45 But if you borrow Fiat as an individual, you will have a very bad rate, but if you do that as an listed public company, you will have a better rate. So if instead of buying Bitcoin, you buy shares in a company that can borrow Fiat very cheaply in order to buy Bitcoin, you may have an arbitrage there. And many people try to use this arbitrage. And also at EF, because they're boomers and they're used to do that and they are not used to do self-custody and stuff. Then there is another part that I think you missed, which is the short-term blessing, but long-term
Starting point is 01:02:18 tragedy of the stable coins. Many people that could, so people don't use Bitcoin for payments, mostly they use it for saving. That's okay. But some people do use Bitcoin for payments and they needed to do it for like for remittalcy, e-commerce, gaming, a lot of markets needed Bitcoin for real. And the alternative Fiat was blocked by legal reasons, not technical reasons. You're underage, you are from Somalia, you're from, you just cannot use pay. PayPal or Venmo.
Starting point is 01:02:50 You are American or 30 years old, you just use Venmo. You don't need Bitcoin. But you are not privileged. You cannot use Venmo. Now, Bitcoin was going, I think, well in that direction. I remember personally a lot of e-commerce dealing with Bitcoin, a lot of remittancy schemes with Bitcoin. Gambling was using Bitcoin a lot.
Starting point is 01:03:13 A lot of industries were using Bitcoin a lot. Stable Coin gave you the same short-term. term delusion of free, well, the same short term freedom in the secondary market for real, almost the same because controlling the secondary market of stable coins, mostly USDT, is legally not feasible right now. So as if you are an African 17 year old boy, you cannot have VEMO, you cannot have a bank account easily, you can have Bitcoin and you can have this kind of of a polygon, wallet or whatever, with years that you on top. And since people are scared of volatility,
Starting point is 01:03:54 and that's something that we can shrug off, but we are privileged because if you can look at Bitcoin long term, and you can look at the four years price cycles, you know that the volatility of Bitcoin is a very good volatility. It's upwards, so that's beautiful. But you need to be able to survive for years. You need to have a buffer. If you are a business that has to pay the providers next month,
Starting point is 01:04:17 and you receive the money from the client the money before now you're 40% down. That's a problem. And also brand recognition of the dollar is still strong. The dollar may be seen as very unstable for us because we know about the devaluation of 97% the central bank, the Fed, we know Eastern economics. We know it's going to upper plate eventually. But for a typical person in Venezuela or in Ukraine, or in Africa, they look at their local,
Starting point is 01:04:51 they look at the Zimbabwe dollar. And they look at the US dollar, well, that's pretty stable. So the brand recognition as something stable of the dollar is still strong. And I think that stable coins, they subtracted a lot of volumes from payments. So it's not as you said that the reason fees are low
Starting point is 01:05:12 is that nobody's using Bitcoin as money. Is that they are using Bitcoin as investment, and as saving and as payments in some specific strategic markets. But in both cases, they are not using Bitcoin anymore. They're using this kind of Bitcoin copies that are this kind of shitcoin-based table coins and this kind of ETS schemes. And I think we have a great, this may seem even more pessimistic, but I'm very optimistic. The reason I am is that we have a strong ally, the best friend of Bitcoin, which is the modern socialist nation-state.
Starting point is 01:05:46 It, go on. The modern socialist nation state cannot stop inflating, cannot stop censoring. And it cannot stop money from hyperinflate and from hypersensor in a, especially under political arrest and political instability. So the idea that suddenly the US dollar would just remain perceived as stable forever. And the secondary market of stable coin will remain free as it is today. I mean, regulators may, the regulators are stupid because they are not selected by great incentives. So to some degree, they're not the brightest, but they're not so stupid. So after a while, they just see that there is a primary market which is regulated and the secondary market, which is totally free.
Starting point is 01:06:32 And they go to Circle and Tether and they just tell them, guys, you have to stop. And they will stop. And if they don't, there's still the fact that one reason, for example, that Teter can provide is great service for a lot of world population almost free is because they get their money from the tibious of their treasury. And if that changes with different interest rates in the treasury, which will happen eventually, that's also something that will stop the party. So I think that short term ETSs and treasury companies and stable coins, they are providing the market, they're giving some supply to a demand, which is ultimately good, but it is diluting
Starting point is 01:07:16 the value of Bitcoin short term. Long term, all these things are not sustainable for several reasons because when the state is threatened it, they will confiscate ETS. They do that with gold. They will do that with Bitcoin as well. And if it's not the state, it's other bands
Starting point is 01:07:34 of criminals, like people may be hacking Coinbase. You get Coinbase belly up. You get like 90% of the ETS insolvent. So it's inherently fragile. So we don't have to be scared about, I think that my optimist is the fact that unstable and unsustainable alternatives are draining value from Bitcoin is not really a problem. We keep building Bitcoin like NOAA's arc and we keep having that ready and we keep educating.
Starting point is 01:08:10 And then it's just by logical necessity. If these stuff are unsustainable because I'm right, they will collapse and we will be ready to welcome them back. If I'm wrong and they are stable forever and we are going to have the perfect dollar forever with zero. So if we're going to have USDT stable in purchasing power with zero censorship on Polygon for the next 300 years, let's freaking use Polygon. I don't care at this point. So it's it's logical necessity. So I'm very optimistic. I love that.
Starting point is 01:08:45 We don't have to be necessarily the fastest or even the most exciting right now. We just have to outlive them and we're going to outlive them. So it's low time preference. Just calm down. You'll be fine. You just got to wait them out. They'll kill themselves. What a beautiful, beautiful note to end it on.
Starting point is 01:08:59 Jock. We'll tell everybody where they can go and check out your stuff. They can follow you. All the good links. Twitter, I'm Jack Wuzuku, but don't follow me there because I'm very controversial and I will probably get you mad. So follow Plambi underscore network. You can also find Plumby Network on. Nostra and other socials.
Starting point is 01:09:17 Plumby.network is the website. You will find all the initiative that we do and a lot of subsite because we have the Plumby Academy, the Lugano Plumby, we have a lot of other stuff. So check it out. And a specialist come to San Salvador and stay tuned for the first Cyfertank episode on the 31 of January.
Starting point is 01:09:37 I'm very excited for them. Hey, you. Yes, you watching the Bitcoin price movements and the latest exciting news. It's awesome to stay informed, but the real power of Bitcoin comes from taking control. Don't just watch, take action. Head over to btcessions.ca slash learn for free step-by-step tutorials that guide you through every major skill you need to know, plus full video playlist for deeper dives on any topic you
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