BTC Sessions - Bitcoiners vs The $XRP Army | Freddie New, Decentra Suze, Nick Bowick

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

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What is going on? Everybody, welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? We've got some great guests this evening. We're going to be chatting about some of the bullish reasons that we have, some of the exciting stuff that has been going on this week. Now, I want to kind of prime the show with a few of the things that have happened throughout the week that we can see as bullish. Michael Saylor talked a lot about some of the things that would need to happen to have Bitcoin absolutely sky. I rocket. And one of the things he talked about was a change to the financial accounting standards board or the FASB rules. And this was a change that allows or actually requires companies when they're doing their reporting to mark digital assets to market. And so because of this change, Tesla reported a $600 million Bitcoin profit boost after that the new accounting rules have come into effect. And that probably looks relatively attractive to a lot of other companies too. So this can be helpful. Also, the Bitcoin reserve bills continue to line up. So we have South Dakota lawmaker proposing two Bitcoin reserve bills.

We have Indiana bill proposing pension fund investment in Bitcoin ETFs. We have Texas lieutenant government prioritizing Bitcoin reserves for 2025. And outside of the U.S., one of the big ones this week, the Czech central bank evaluating a reserve in Bitcoin. Now, Christine Lagarde from the ECB was quick to say that she's confident that's not going to take place. She's obviously trying to wink, wink, nudge, behinds the scenes and coerce countries into not doing this, but, you know, such as life with the ECB. And then we've got an interesting little thing that we're going to be chatting about today. We're going to be chatting about XRP and its supposed interference in and around the Bitcoin Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in the U.S. And so there's been a lot of back and forth

about this. Pierre Richard, and I will share this tab here, Pierre Richard on January 23rd said the biggest obstacle for the strategic Bitcoin Reserve is not the Fed, Treasury Banks or Elizabeth Warren. It's Ripple slash XRP. They are aggressively lobbying against the SBR or strategic Bitcoin Reserve by throwing around millions at politicians desperately trying to derail it. They did the same to attack Bitcoin mining under the Biden administration. Obviously, they want to protect their marketing narratives and push for CBDCs built on their platform. There's been a lot of back and forth over this past week. And we're going to be chatting a little bit about that.

We're going to be maybe doing a little bit of comparison side by side between Bitcoin and XRP. But I just wanted to play this quick clip of Giacomo Zucco, who here is describing in two short minutes why he believes XRP is a scam. So let's take a quick listen before we kick off the show. I read a few things, it was total bullshit. Ripple was a fixed federation, totally centralized, just masquerading as a decentralized ledger, and it was a pre-mined 100% control shit coin masquerade as decentralized asset.

So I wondered why Satoshi this came to me. And then it turned out that Ripple originally was a legit project of routing credit, a little bit like lighting network before Bitcoin, completely legit, born in 2000, 2006 but then the project failed was closed down and these scammers in 2012 took the name of an existing project that was mentioned positively by Satoshi in order to scam people so these are very nasty nasty people Garninghouse is behind most of the anti-bitcoin propaganda about

climate bullshit you know that we now have the school of Satoshi is a beautiful Bitcoin symbol but it was created anti-bitcoin funded by Greenpeace was funded by Garned House in order to to hurt Bitcoin. So they are very nasty. I think that I mean we all hate the Ethereum, yes, it's a scam, it's a tremendous, it's centralized, but Ethereum has a weak spot which is the fact that being fake technology, they have to fake a lot of new technology every year. Like they have to say now we go through a steak and sharding and stuff and second layers and they have to keep lying up this kind of fake technology in order to stay relevant.

Ripple has the strength that they don't have to do anything at all. They just sit on the same budget of 2012, literally the same, and they do some lobbying with banks and now government in order to seem legit, then they do a little bit of pump, and then they go away for three years. So they understood the psychical nature of Bitcoin hype, and so every bull market, Ripple Brothers will come back to try to invest and impact Bitcoin activity. That's said, I think that if you look at the Ripple versus Bitcoin chart, the most damage was done at the beginning.

Now they have a little bit of comeback and then another one now. I mean, long term, five this. Elocquently said by Mr. Jacomo Zuko. Everybody in the audience, thank you for being here. Please do smash that like button. For every 100 likes we get this episode, we're going to do an extra giveaway of sats near the end when we're taking questions from the audience.

So please do that. But we're going to dive in right now. I am Ben with the BT. sessions. This is your daily session. All right. We are going to bring in our guests right away. I want to welcome to the stage, both Freddie and Susie. Welcome, you guys. Thank you so much for being here. Coming to get bullish on Bitcoin specifically, non-XRP on a Friday. And I know it's late for you guys, but thank you for being here. Freddie, can you give yourself a quick intro? Who are you? What do you do?

Absolutely. Thanks very much for having us on. Ben. It's always a pleasure to join people that I've been following for years myself. So I am co-founder along with Susie of Bitcoin Policy UK. I do the legal side of things. So I'm a lawyer by training. Essentially, we irritate the British government and try and lobby for good regulation and good treatments of Bitcoin in the United Kingdom. I mean, I'm pretty bullish on irritating the government. So that sounds pretty good. It's obviously sad that there is a government to irritate, but you know. Yes, exactly. And Susie, I'll toss it to you as well. Can you give yourself a quick intro? So like Freddie said, yeah, I'm a co-founder of Bitcoin Policy UK with Freddie. I'm the CEO.

So I'm overseeing everything at the moment. So I haven't had much time to actually do the other job that I usually do, which is a Bitcoin journalist. And my writing has really taken a hit. But hopefully when we get things sorted, I'll be back up and running because I actually love the writing. and we'll actually be discussing an article that took me over six months to research, which Pierre Rochard tweeted out the other day on this exact subject.

Oh, topical. All right. Well, we'll get into that then. Awesome. Well, we are here to talk about why we're bullish. And Freddie, I mean, the impetus for bringing up that clip of Jacques Mo there and referring to Pierre Rochard and all of the XRP drama as of late. kind of stems from a little bit of why you're bullish. And it's kind of, I'll let you link it together.

So I'm just going to toss the question to you. Why are you bullish and how does it relate to this drama that's going on? Well, essentially, it's around who was behind the drama and how it unfolded this week. And it all comes back to the behavior of Bitcoin is really. So if anyone hasn't been following the drama this week between XRP and Bitcoin, It was essentially out of the massive global Bitcoin of rage against Brad Garlinghouse, which has made me bullish this week, which, you know, just very, very enjoyable from an old-school Bitcoin perspective.

So taking a step back, a lot of this came out of Trump's executive order. So, as we all know, the Trump administration has issued an executive order, and as part of that, there's an effort to assess the merits of a, unfortunately not a solely Bitcoin reserve, but a digital assets reserve, should we say. And as soon as that wasn't specified in the order as being Bitcoin only, you have a massive pile on of other coins and other chains saying, me too, me too, me too, I'm going to be included. And obviously one of those was XRP, as you completely expect.

And Brad Garlinghouse, as most people will know, is one of the of the co-founders of Ripple, essentially XRP as well. And he's been suggesting and tweeting, he's been tweeting out pictures of himself with Trump, suggesting that the digital reserve should include XRP as well. And this provoked an absolute firestorm from Bitcoin is, I mean, I've been in space a long time now, and I can't remember the last time I saw everyone so unified, to the point where people decide to stop being read about Ethereum and say, okay, chat, guys, we're going to have an armistice as regards Ethereum and Cardano for the moment. We're all, everyone, even if you don't like Bitcoin, all of us, we're just all going to attack it.

It was just fucking hilarious. I mean, nothing unifies people like a common enemy. Exactly right. I think my favorite tweet of the whole week was, did you see? was from BitPain. And he said, like, my whole feed at the moment, it's like the end of Avengers Endgame. You've got laser-eyed maxis

suddenly emerging from burning portals, all coming to kick the shit out of Brad Thanos Garlinghouse. It was absolutely beautiful to watch. I'd say that people go on Twitter and just read some of the old tweets from this week. Yeah, it's funny because Brad, yeah, it's like he has the glove, but when he snaps his fingers,

he just evaporates everybody's savings. Or, you know, for Brad, he snapped his finger and he shits his own pants. That's true. It was just beautiful. I want to give some context as to, again, like for those that were around for the 2017 cycle, shit got absolutely insane. And so I was working at an OTC. desk in late 2017 and this was like before the hammer really came down and they were like all right

we got to start regulating in some way like this it was it was pretty wild um I remember distinctly in in December of 2017 sitting in a room with three other desks of like just shoulder to shoulder people, three desks sitting there. I'm working, and each desk just has a cash counter out in the open. And every person in the room that was waiting just had wads of cash. And they were basically kicking down the door to buy whatever went up the most that day. So I remember in and around when XRP, funny enough hit around where it is now in Fiat terms. So like $3.50 or so, you know, I don't know what it is right now. But, you know, it's in that realm.

And people were like, just give me that. Here's 10 grand in cash. I would like nothing but XRP loaded up. Those people from that day in Fiat terms just very recently broke even. So like through the largest round of money printing in our entire lives. They just recovered the fiat value that they had in 2017. Not even like the purchasing power is completely. Yeah, it's not inflation adjusted either.

So in real purchasing power terms, they've lost. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so like just when you measure against Bitcoin, you know, when you're looking with, you know, other, other garbage coins as of late that are new, it's hard to get a good idea of that long-term performance. But ripple, and I say ripple, because they were originally called ripples, and then they rebranded to XRP to separate, oh, like, they just came into existence that we absolutely didn't create them out of

that. Well, actually, while we're on their point, you know, the ticker is XRP, in the same way that the ticker for Bitcoin is XBTC. And so the clues in the freaking ticker, you know, it's XR. because X is a currency exchange and RP, I mean, what the hell do you do now stands for? Yes, exactly. So, I mean, just to give an idea, here is the chart of XRP versus Bitcoin for not, this isn't like just the past few months or a year. This is, this goes back to like into 2013.

Like this is absolutely dismal, you know, like, and people aren't typically piling into XRP, like, in the doldrums down here. And even if they are, I mean, you're pretty much flat, like across the board. But, like, people, when people were kicking in the door and they wanted everything, it was like, it was like here. You know, this was, this was it. Like, you know, in 2017, the craziness in and around there, you know, very, very. very, very end of 2017 as it was getting insane there. Like, that's when people are buying this stuff. And, you know, you get a little bit of excitement here.

Ooh, look, look. It's up in Fiat terms. But look at the Bitcoin performance over an extended period of time. And so, I mean, do either of you want to touch on a little bit of the creation of the asset and where it was allocated? Are you guys familiar with that? The kind of genesis of XRP and how it was, we'll say, released into circulation? Are you guys familiar?

No. Before you tell us, though. Also, I was going to say another thing that united the Bitcoin community that was related to the list was the Scullo Satoci. Everyone got behind that in the same way. And Forbes actually wrote about, the chart that you were just showing, and they actually wrote about it and declared XRP a zombie coin. That's great.

That is great. Yes. I don't know the origin, and I would love to know. Yeah, I want to show the skull of Satoshi first. Again, people that aren't familiar.

So this is the skull of Satoshi. Kind of cool. It was very cool. It's very cool. It became like a symbol of Bitcoin. Like, Bitcoiners loved it. But where did this come about?

It's because Brad Garlinghouse spent $5 million to align with Greenpeace to try to change Bitcoin away from proof of work. And so he commissioned an artist. They commissioned an artist to create this piece. And then put it on the back, funny enough, put it on the back of a truck that was likely like a diesel truck and drive it. around New York. Worth finding the picture is very funny. Yeah. And so they're driving around in traffic to try and change the code.

And everybody's like, well, just change it. Like, go ahead. Fork, fork Bitcoin, write the code. In fact, a fork already exists that is not work. Nobody wants it. It's trending to zero already. Yeah, I can't remember whether it was Garlinghouse or Larsen, Chris Larsen, who was Garlinghouse, a co-founder who put other.

that money up. I think it was Chris Larson. It might be Larson. I feel it might be Larson because he also gave $10 million to Kamala Harris. You're right. You're right. There wasn't the Gowing House. Yeah, he was doubling down at that point.

You know, I've lost $5 million on funding this. It's interesting you mention the skull, Ben, because we actually want, obviously, again, stepping back a bit, the change the code campaign that you mentioned there around, you trying to change the code. Obviously the first thing people said was, you know, well, Chaps, you want to change the code, you know, submit a Bitcoin improvement proposal. This is how you do it. This is the GitHub. Here you go. Submit your ideas for community review. We reached out to the head of the changes of the code campaign and we wrote him an open letter. We asked to try to engage with him. And Susia, didn't you have a call with him?

I did. Yeah, I had a half an hour chat with him. Yeah, he was, he sounded like a Bitcoiner to me. He didn't. He just didn't get it. He really did. I was like, you sound like a Bitcoin. He said, you sound like you should work for Greenpeace, and I'm like, oh, no. But he actually admitted to me that the change the code campaign was not working. Yeah, of course. On that. Yeah, but for him to admit that, and he was ahead of it. It is funny.

It's, I mean, what, again, they're trying to say that proof of work is wasteful. That allocation of capital was beyond wasteful. Like, like, they didn't even, they didn't even try. to actually fork the code. They were like somebody do something. Like, how about you fork the code and then use the money that you got to try and, I don't know, gain support for the code that you forked. That's like, hey, here, look, we forked the code.

This is more efficient or whatever we want to say it is. Everybody come and join the actual alternative that we've made. But again, proof of work is kind of the point. of Bitcoin, it's that you can't create something for nothing. It actually requires energy in order to create more Bitcoin. We're trying to mirror the qualities of gold in that you can't just create it out of nothing. And furthermore, the proof of work is also making it prohibitively expensive to reverse transactions so that you actually have transaction finality. There's a, there's a website called How Many Confs, C-O-N-F-S dot com.

And it shows transaction finality when it comes to proof of work coins comparatively. And how long, how much more time would it take another chain to have the same degree of finality of transactions as six Bitcoin confirmations? So I just want to show, so this is basically how much energy comparatively would it take other blockchains to get the same degree of certainty that your transaction cannot be reversed. And so it's very telling. So here it is, Bitcoin up top. And so this is the baseline, six confirmations on Bitcoin in roughly an hour, right, 10 minutes per block.

Dogecoin, funny enough, Dogecoin is the next closest. and it would take 13 hours and 8 minutes instead of the 1 hour and 6 minutes, like in the most recent 6 confirmations, 12 times slower. Lightcoin, 10 times slower, Bitcoin Cash, 218 times slower. Manero, 183 times slower. Ethereum classic, funny enough, better than Bitcoin Cash and Monaro, 30 times slower. Zcash, 795 times slower, dash, 1558 times slower. Raven coin. I don't even know what that is. I feel like I've heard it in bygone eras. That's 2013, isn't it? Yeah. I didn't even know Dash was still a coin.

Yeah, I know. Oh, man. Remember people buying master notes? So what a waste of it. Oh, God. Dash was over $1,000 at one point, wasn't it? It was. Oh, man. That's, yeah. It is sad. Actually, I mean, we've been laughing about Ripple to begin with, but the initial chart you showed their bed was horrific because there are people. you know, the people who were calling you when you're on that OTC desk. And my own daughters, you know, one of her childminders, I remember her talking about Ripple in, about XRP in 2017. She put a lot of money into it.

And I worry about her. We've lost touch now, but there are a lot of people who would have lost a lot of money. Yeah. Not just in real terms, but in actual terms. And, yeah, we may have been laughing about it, but that really illustrates the kind of damage. that these kind of coins will do. You've already mentioned how do we'll get started.

I mean, I know a few bits and pieces. I know that the first 30,000 blocks of their chain are lost. From Genesis, they don't actually know the original allocation. Yes. I know that I think 50% is still held by insiders. Is that right? So it's a really big pre-mine. Yeah.

So I can, I'm going to simultaneously look up something here as well. But the original issuance of, at the time, they were called Ripples, now renamed XRP because this is totally not associated with the company Ripple. Absolutely. So I'm going to pull it up here. People tend to hold on to it as well until it comes back. So it goes down and then they don't want to let go. They think, and because everything went crazy in 2021, they think that's going to be repeatable.

And so I know so many people that are waiting for it to pump again, you know, when I speak to people and they're like, oh, I've got XRP. It's usually builders or something like that. But then you say that it's not going to come back. You should just swap it into Bitcoin, but they're just sitting there waiting. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the way it worked in when it was launched, the token now known as XRP, there are 100 billion units.

And all of those units rather than, you know, proof of work, proof of stake, like any sort of like issuance, it gradually comes to market and is distributed as people have a way of staking claim to that thing. So with Bitcoin, it's like, no, you have to put an effort. Like you've got to put something on the line. In this case, you have to use energy to validate or not to validate, but rather to basically like harden transactions to make them difficult to reverse and confirm that they are in line with the consensus rules. You need to put forth a bunch of effort and energy in order to then have the chance to win newly issued Bitcoin and the fees associated with it. When it comes to XRP, what they did

is they took the entire monetary base of 100 billion units and they said, poof, now it exists. And then they said, okay, here's what we're going to do. 20% we're going to divvy up to the creators of this token. So Jed McCaleb, David Schwartz. Arthur Bittro, Brito. And so they kind of divvied up the coins, 20% of the coins there. Now, the other 80% was gifted to Ripple, the company, which also these gentlemen were directly involved in. And so Ripple then held 80% of the supply. And the way that it got distributed to the market was Ripple just sold it to people.

they just sold they printed the money out of nothing they gifted it to their own company and then they distributed it by selling it to market so they they don't buy back ripple they're not interested in accumulating it's just like a mechanism for them to make money by selling off their reserves at this point in time um the ripple foundation company however they referred to it. Ripple itself owns a little shy of 50% of the total existing supply. So it's mid-40s, 45, 46%, something like that. And they basically just dump it in tranches on the market. And so like, if things get frothy and it gets a little exciting and you see a lot of upside, you better believe that ripple, the, you know, the people in charge at Ripple are licking their chops, just

saying, okay, when is the opportune time to dump some of our reserves and get a bunch of cash on hand? And that's, and, and, you know, there's even quotes from, I believe, Brad Garlinghouse saying like, oh, without us being able to like, you know, sell the market, like we wouldn't be a profitable company. Financial Times interview. I've read that. Yeah. Yeah. Garlinghouse is on record on the FT saying that, you know, without sales of XRP, Ripple, the company is not profitable. Yeah. I mean, they've got a fascinating business model which we can we can attack later if we like but it's interesting you raise the sale point of

view because one of the again one of the like the bullish tweets i saw this last week was someone saying directly to the garlinghouse mate have you ever bought xrp yourself or do you just sell it obviously obviously he only ever he only sells it gardener's why would he buy something that he created for free and gave him gave for himself he literally only dumps it on the market and so you back to the point I made a couple of minutes ago, it's, we're laughing about it, but it's kind of awful that these people have made money out of nothing or made a monetary asset out of nothing,

which they're pretending has value and they're dumping on people. But that's not just exactly. But you said even Potoshi had to urge his Bitcoin. He urged it with electricity. That's all the other 29,000 cryptos that are out there as well, though, aren't they? It's a million a week, though, I think. Did you see the tweet from Armstrong talking about, you know, we can't list all of the,

all of the new meme coins that are being created. It's something like a million a week at the moment. That's insane. It's insane. So this is actually a very bullish point. Why? Because it's a microcosm of this is like the ICO bubble of 2017. And so what happened there? ICOs initial coin offerings as it was it was effectively a play on IPOs. It wanted to associate with that acronym because, because it felt like you were getting a piece of a company. But what wasn't clear was that these coins in no way were directly linked to the success of the company or entity issuing them. They were completely separate.

It's like, hey, there's a company and the company could be very, very successful, but then there is a coin that just existed and wasn't integral to the operations of the company. And just because if the company continued to exist or do well, had literally nothing to do whether or not the token itself was useful or not. And surprise, surprise, none of the tokens were useful. And so what happened was when it just started to trickle in and people started saying, oh, this is a new thing. ICOs, that sounds official. That sounds legitimate. I need to get in on these ICOs.

It's the future. It's cutting edge. bleeding edge, I'm going to get in on ICOs. And so what happened initially was very few people knew how to do an ICO, how to create a coin out of nothing, how to issue it. And so there was a speculation mania and very little supply. There weren't as many ICOs. Nobody knew how to do them. Well, what happens when there's a huge demand and potential to make money? Well, people started offering services to launch your ICO for you. And people piled into that.

Everybody in their grandmother wanted to launch their own ICO. It was like, oh, of course I'm going to get rich if I launch my ICO. And some people did. But what ended up happening was the supply, not of a particular ICO, but of all ICOs overall, it grew faster than the demand. and what ended up happening, absolute decimation, because everybody was making an ICO and just people, there was no scarcity to it.

Everybody thought every ICO was kind of the same and like they all had the same talking points. And it just the market got completely exhausted. And it was just absolute destruction out of it. And I'm seeing that little microcosm niche, where they were trying to feign that there was utility to these things.

Now we're at a point where these meme coins, it's just an outward admission that these things are totally useless. Like this is just nothing more. Like a meme is a fad that goes on for a certain period of time. Like memes come and go.

They live in a day. I respect the honesty in a way. Yeah. In some way, I think you're completely right. Ben, the idea that you have Bitcoin in the one side, which is, you know, hard, incorpurable money. And then I don't buy mean coins or not interested in them, but I respect the honesty that they are completely naked and open. We're just here to fuck around and make money.

And we are a bunch of degenerate gamblers. And, you know, it's like that there's that great clip with American Hoddle, you know, buying shit coins is nihilism. Yeah. You know, you can either put your money in Bitcoin or you can just gamble the shit away. you know, I may, I put $100 in here. It may a thousand X and I'll buy a Lamborghini or I'll be living in a tent and eating, you know, cold pot noodle out of a bucket. Yeah. I very much respect the honesty that we had just meme coins.

We're just here to gamble. We may thousand X, we may make a lot of money. That's what we're doing. There's no utility to this thing whatsoever. Yeah. I mean, you can't get mad at, you know, if I walk by one of those VLT machines, I don't get mad at it. it. It's not for me. Like I'm not, you know, I don't know, but they don't market to people, do they, in the same kind of way. And the biggest part of the scam is that they pump out all these

articles telling everyone how amazing it is. I mean, we've all read them, you know, like Cardano is better than Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the boomer coin and they try and spin it so that the next big thing's coming and people buy it. They think they're in on something. that nobody else is. Well, I think, and yeah, Susie, I think you're getting to a point of why this is bullish. And that's the differentiation between that, because Cardano and as we're talking about right now, XRP, they're kind of these last remnants of a bygone era of pretending utility. Right?

Like these were previous cycle things. And they're just kind of, they're able to eke along because people, people are looking at the fiat value of them. And so in a world where fiat is meaningless and gambling is the only perceived way of people maybe making it, then the last few of that bygone era, oh, there might be some utility to it. People are maybe going to cling to that for a few coins. And then this new wave is just like, they're marketing it, but they're marketing it

as, hey, look how much more stupid the name of our meme coin is. And so like that, that is the VLT. Like, there's no misconstruing that that hawk coin is going to be the future of finance, right? I met a guy the other day who actually made a meme coin because he had the coolest Halloween outfit ever. How did it go? And he thought it was hilarious. He was like, I love Halloween. I had this brilliant outfit

and somebody thought it was really cool and they made a meme coin out of it. He's now suing Gary Gensler for something. I don't know what, but there's some issue there. If I had no principles, I would make a Royd guy coin and just launch it. Wait, I'm very confused how somebody who made a meme coin sues Gensler, because I feel like Gensler

would have been the one person that prevented him from doing the thing that you, He just did. The whole thing, I can't tell you the ins and outs of it. I was just so kind of, it was a jaw-dropping conversation around, but yeah. I mean, again, being very dull and speaking as a lawyer, I suspect that suit will be thrown out. Perhaps. I want to, I want to bring up one thing.

We were talking about the, we were talking about the ledger, the XRP ledger. Here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, once again. This tweet from him I quite like, I'm dying of laughter. Ripple is killing me. Ledger number 32,570,

due to a mishap early in the XRP Ledger's history, ledgers number one through 32-569 were lost. This lost represents approximately the first week of ledger history. Thus, ledger 32570 is the earliest ledger available anywhere because the XRP ledger's state is recorded in every

ledger version, the ledger can continue without the missing history. A ledger index reset to number zero was deemed too disruptive, therefore number 35, 32, 570 may be thought of as the Genesis ledger or in Bitcoin vernacular, the Genesis block. Can you imagine if we're talking about Bitcoin and we're like, you know what? The first 32,569 blocks, kind of lost those, not quite sure, like the genesis of the entire history of the creation of the currency or what happened immediately thereafter. But everybody has up to this point. So yeah, same, same. I mean, I don't understand as an IT matter how on earth that happens,

but I think that's actually illustrative of quite a dangerous point. And suzie, this comes to your decentralization question. If you try to transpose that to Bitcoin, to try and lose the first 32,000 box of our history, you would need to ensure that they were deleted from every single node running everywhere on the globe, which is borderline impossible. The last time I looked, I think we had 10,000 nodes globally distributed and potentially five or six times more, which are listening only.

To try and do that to the Bitcoin ledger, I think is functionally impossible at the moment. So I think this goes to quite an important and dangerous point around the centralization of Ripple's control over the ledger. As far as I know, there are about 30 trusted nodes, each of which Ripple have to approve before they can become validators. And essentially, you have a blockchain that's entirely controlled by one corporate entity. So there's a good book by Phil Champagne. It's called Bitcoin versus Altcoins. And it's quite good. There is a chapter near the end called Proof of Authority.

And it talks in depth about XRP and how it works. And it talks about rather than, you know, there's been back and forth with, Bitcoin and Ethereum, proof of work, proof of stake. And proof of work, obviously, like, there's no free lunch. You got to, if you want to be part of this, if you want to potentially be rewarded with new Bitcoin, energy required. You can't fake that. Prove of stake. People who have assets can stake them and get richer. So the halves, you know, the halves become the have moors. It's a replica of the same shitty system we've got, basically. Exactly, exactly.

And the other aspect of that is proof of authority. Like the proof of authority, you know, the Federal Reserve, right? So it's proof of stake and proof of authority are two cuts from the same cloth. And so you have XRP and effectively they have a validator system. they have a unique node list. And the thing about Bitcoin is when you run a node, you will very arbitrarily connect to peers. So you will just find whatever, like I'm going to find random peers

and I'm going to connect to as many of them as I can. And we will share information about the state of the ledger. Whereas with the unique node list, the validators must be included in the unique node list. And so there's like a set, most users are doing like a preset, Ripple approved list of validators. It's like it's more of a manual process. Like, hey, I want to connect other validators.

It's not like a, hey, anybody running this, like we're going to bump, bump, like make sure it's more of like a rubber stamped. Like, here you go. connect to these ones. And so in order to challenge consensus, you need north of 20% of validators to disagree. That's when things start to go south. But when you're provided the list of rubber-stamped validators, by and large, most people doing that, you're not going to get challenges to consensus. There is no opportunity for challenges to consensus. It's just Ripple said these are the good ones.

Let's go with these. And so, like, there's not the opportunity for, oh, somebody wants to fork this. That doesn't exist. And so how do you actually get to a consensus with this? Yeah. That's completely right. And you know what? not dominating the conversation about our work here,

but two of the key messages that we always go back to when we're having this kind of conversation with people here is who can change the rules of the network and how much does it cost to attack the network? And in the case of Ripple, that's relatively easily answered. Ripple can change the rules of the network, and there's no cost to attack it

because you put enough core pressure on Ripple the company as a corporate entity and Bob's your uncle. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think to kind of sum up the topic here, why is, again, name of the show, why are we bullish?

For me, this kind of stuff is bullish. Number one, it's like the final gasps of this bygone era of pretending there's utility to any of this shit. And it's just, and it's so, blatant in your face.

When you look at like, how would I have done if I had dove into XRP head first, really at any point in history, you're either flat versus Bitcoin or you're completely underwater. And for most people, like with the hype, people aren't buying in the doldrums of the bear market. They're buying during the hype cycles. They're buying now. Right. And so those people are just, it's a volatile path to owning. less Bitcoin. You may appear to have more fiat for, I mean, depending. 2017 was a rough one for a lot of people. So like you would have been down Fiat even for the past

eight years. But yeah, like it's, it's, I think that's on the way out. And rehashing a bunch of this stuff, like the few that are able to get a few last gasps, we're getting a rehash of, the lessons learned. Hey, like, why is Bitcoin important and different? Why is Bitcoin so unique in its properties, what sets it apart? And so we're getting to have these discussions again at a time where Bitcoin is on the global stage. So I think everybody's getting a little bit of that lesson of why Bitcoin only. And it's a painful lesson.

Like, you've got to touch the stove for a lot of people. It is painful. But you know why Pierre Roche, has been so vocal about this because I actually managed to trace the 5 million, well, the Greenpeace donation to Riot. Through a chain of events, so Chris Larson obviously wants to see the success of Ripple. Ripple paid Greenpeace. Greenpeace set up, changed the code. Change the code supported the Texas Coalition against crypto mining in Texas, which directly targeted riot. Oh, spicy.

And it's all provable. You can follow the chain. Yeah, you know, we wouldn't have attacked these fuckers if they hadn't come to, if they hadn't attacked us first. They, they, these guys, Susie's done a fantastic body of work here following the, following the money, basically. And, you know, I'm a free market capitalist. If Ripple have a product that the market wants, then I'm totally fine with them selling

that to the, the market. But their own their only product at the moment is as PSA's press releases. They announce partnerships with banks. The partnerships come to nothing. But during the period after the announcement, the price of ex-repe pumps. What happens then? Brad and Chris dump it on the fucking market. They sell it to people like my daughter's childminder. I mean, what kind of fucking business model is that? And then Garlinghouse openly admits to the FT, yeah, my company wouldn't be profitable if I wasn't dumping this shit coin on retail. Yeah. I mean, how the fuck does this guy sleep at night. While they're actively targeting Bitcoin, and it's provable, they're actually

targeting Bitcoin. But again, looping back to why I'm bullish, I mean, Ben's completely right, the idea that, you know, two things. Firstly, this was an enormously unified global action by old school. There were people digging up Andreas Antonopoulos tweets from 2014 talking about that. I mean, I've never seen a unified action from Bitcoins. I haven't seen people disunited since before the fucking block size was. It was absolutely incredible to watch. And at the same time, to the point we were making earlier, I think it's a really good illustration of what distinguishes Bitcoin from everything else. If Ripple is in the same bucket as Hawk Tour coin, it's in the same bucket with game, it is as shit as any of those other things. You know, I hate Ripple. I hate XLP much

more than I hit Ethereum. You know, back in the day, I had some, I thought the idea of a decentralized world computer was quite cool. You know, it's the same. kind of idea that Richard Hendricks had in Silicon Valley, if anyone's seen that show. He wanted a decentralized world computer running on everyone's phones and no one could shut down. I thought that's a cool idea. But I mean, fuck knows what Ethereum is now. But again, if like I say, Are you trying to tell me it's not the word computer that we thought or that we were

promised? If it has product market fit, like, again, if you if you're a, if you're a diet of the world capitalist, if something has product market fit and the market decides that it wants to spend money on it, then fair enough. At the moment, the market's decided they want to gamble the fuck out of shit coins and meme coins. It's your money. It's your choice. If you're making an informed decision, you want to spend your money on a shit coin, you do you.

That's totally fine. But you're not making an informed decision, are you? That's the problem. You're being coerced into it and tricked. And that's what's so awful about XRP, because they're pretending that they have all these partnerships with banks and they're going to be this wonderful world of decentralized finance. And that I think is at the heart of why I, you know, Ethereum is not the mother asshole from which all other shit quotes bring.

The mother asshole is XRP and Riffel. That's that. Yeah, fair, fair. I want to, before we change gears and we shift to the next reason for being bullish, on this, I guess tangential to this topic, I reached out to Pierre Richard this past week. and we've got something brewing for next week. It's on Tuesday, February 4th at 2 p.m. Eastern time.

So what we're doing, and I would encourage everybody watching to partake in it, and it plays into why Bitcoin is different and important. So I made a tutorial recently on how to download and run your own Bitcoin node on your own laptop, and then to actually run the numbers, and from the very beginning of Bitcoin's existence, audit all of the transactions up until that very moment and check the exact supply down to the Satoshi of Bitcoin, something you cannot do with dollars or euros or, you know, Canadian moose shekels or even ounces of gold. Or a propie.

basically. Yeah, or pretty much like half the shit coins out there too. And so this is, it's kind of a callback to something that happened a few years ago when Pierre Richard, he ran a campaign called hashtag run the numbers. But it was in regards to Ethereum because he started asking Ethereum, well, what's the supply of, what's the supply of ether? And everybody was getting different numbers. And so he ended up doing a, hey, let's all run this.

let's all run this command in Bitcoin Core at the same time on the same block. And I partook in that back then. It must have been four years ago now or something like that, maybe more. The command is get TX outset info. So if you run Bitcoin Core on your computer, you just hit a button that says open console, and you type in that. And it takes a couple minutes and it checks the entire supply of Bitcoin down to the Satoshi. and then we all came back with the same number.

So each of us with our own individual copy of the ledger came to the same conclusion, this is the supply of Bitcoin. So we're doing that again. So I prefaced it with a tutorial. I recommend everybody go check it out. Just go find it on the channel. You can just search anyone can audit Bitcoin supply. You'll find it.

And it just shows you how to download Bitcoin Core. And then once it syncs up, it does take a day or two. So if you want to be ready for Tuesday, just start downloading it. now. And once you have a full copy of the ledger, it's a couple clicks, and then you type a command, and then you wait a minute or two, and it'll pop out a number for you. And we're all going to do it coordinated all together on Tuesday. So if you want to be ready for that, then go download Bitcoin Core and partake 2 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, and we're all going to audit the supply of Bitcoin together at the exact same time. I think it's super cool. I love that

This is a thing. Can you imagine central bankers, like, even wanting to audit the supply of their currency? It would be very, very telling. Like, I don't know about in the U.S., but in Canada, we stopped reporting certain numbers in around currency supply. I can't remember. And I believe in the U.S., I think they stopped reporting on, was it M3 or M3? too. I can't remember. Anyways, what...

At the moment, Barclays Bank is not working in the UK, so there's like 30 million people who can't make payments right now as I speak. I mean, I mean, I just pull it up while you're talking. So this is, thank you for bearing us with us, say, Barclays. We're sorry for you making and receiving payments today. We know this is an ideal. I mean, this is an ideal. We know that this is a minor inconvenience,

but all of your money is inaccessible for... That's not a joke. You have, you literally, I mean, is there on the screen? Basically, they've said all of your money is inaccessible. Yes, yeah, exactly. David wrong in the chat asked, is there a calendar invite for this event? David, this will be live streamed on the channel at 2 p.m. Eastern time next Tuesday. So just jump into the chat, have your Bitcoin Core queued up, and then follow along all screen share and make sure everybody's kind of doing the same thing as me.

myself, Pierre, and a few special guests will all be doing this together and we'll compare notes. We'll make sure that we all got the same number. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So just show up, have your copy of Bitcoin Core and we'll run the numbers all together. I think it's going to be a good time. I feel like this should be an annual event almost. Yeah. Did you know that Grace said are applying for an XRP?

I mean... Scam is going to scam somehow, right? You know what's super bullish on the ETF front, actually? Susie, I'm glad you brought this up. Is they're launching a hybrid Bitcoin Ethereum ETF, which I think is so bullish. And the reason is you'll be able to directly compare the performance of that one versus only Bitcoin ETF. Yeah, but no one will care because they still buy S&P indexes and 97% of that is shit.

And it's like it held up by 3%. I mean, look at the way that the so that the ETFs have performed against the Bitcoin ETFs, they're kind of non-event. And particularly Ibit, the Bitcoin ETFs are, I think, statistically the most successful ETF products that have ever been launched in history. And no one really cares about the Ethereum ETFs. So like I'm saying earlier, you know, these things need to be tested in the market. If you think your product is better than Bitcoin, make it compete with Bitcoin.

And, you know, none of us here are religious about Bitcoin. We simply use it because it is the best tool. I literally can't sleep without thinking about it. Well, you know, but speaking like in a kind of dull and dry way, we use it because it's the best tool to achieve certain things that we want to achieve at the moment. And if there was a better tool, we would use a better tool. we would use a better tool. We're not precious about that.

But at the moment, there isn't. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Oh, Ben, your audit point, that's why I'm convinced. Because of the way that you can audit Bitcoin, you know, Bricks were considering creating their own currency that was going to be backed by commodities.

And they've obviously got gold and they've got oil and they'll have a basket of commodities that there's no way that they'll be able to audit. Oh, yeah. And there's no way they'll trust each other. I mean, they might have an alliance that suits them, but there won't be any trust there. The only way that they'll be able to do that, I think, is through Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah.

Can you imagine the trouble of, you know, it's one thing. I mean, we already completely lost the trust of a single, a single sovereign nation safeguarding the gold, even for its own citizens to back the world reserve currency. And they couldn't even do that for their own citizens. They revoked the gold pig. Imagine multiple countries trying to coalesce on a singular currency that they claim is backed by commodities. And each country is saying, oh, yeah, we've got those. Don't worry, they're in a vault somewhere. And every other country is like, do you, though?

Because we told ours. Interesting, you bring that up. Have you seen the stories this week around the delay? in making gold claims from the Bank of England. No. So it's interesting looking this up. So slight segue away from Bitcoin for a moment. So obviously the Bank of England holds about 20% of the above ground reserves in the world.

But it doesn't own those. So it custodies those on behalf of other people. So at the moment, a lot of United States owners of that gold are looking to repatriate their bars. And the wait time for your repatriation has increased from a couple of weeks to about eight weeks at the moment. So if you're in New York and you're wanting to get your gold into America, you're now waiting for eight weeks for final settlement.

Can you imagine waiting eight weeks for a Bitcoin transaction? And we get frustrated if a transaction's coming in and like a block is slow. You imagine waiting eight weeks for a Bitcoin block to confirm? Oh, my God. I mean, can you imagine the fees in that shit? Yeah. Oh, Lord.

All right. I'm going to shift gears here. We're going to do a rotation, but I do want to say to everybody in the chat, thank you so much for being here. If you can, please smash that like button. It really, really does help. And for every 100 likes we do get on this video, I'll do an extra little sat giveaway at the end. We are going to give a quick shout out to sponsors. show before we jump into our next topic here.

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I can't wait to get down there. I've been playing a lot more with mining, home mining, all that kind of stuff as of late. But we'll get into that in a moment. Anyways, we're going to give away some sats here real quick. Up on the screen right now, Bitcoin Well. Great place to stack sats in Canada and the U.S. The way it works is when you sign up, when you buy Bitcoin,

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We would love to hear it. But with that, let's dive back into the show. And Susie, I am now looking at you. We are going to dive down to your reason for being bullish. And same question for you. What are you bullish about this week? What's exciting? What's top of mind?

So yesterday I was hanging out with Siri from Heatbit and Frank from Bitcoin magazine. and they both did things that made and that I basically put together and I thought, wow. So home mining, I think, is just going to be huge in the future. And we obviously have an issue with decentralization, the geography of Bitcoin mining. I mean, it's very heavy in the US and China. I think Kazakhstan is probably third. So we do have an issue with decentralization. I mean, forget the software, the hardware and the mining pools.

But if we were just looking at the actual miners, if every home had a Bitcoin miner, a heater in it, I mean, that would be true decentralization. So heat bit has got me feeling bullish. But that also kind of ties into the centralization and institutionalization that we're seeing a lot now, which I do think is a concern, although saying that if Bitcoin can't survive it, then it doesn't deserve to survive. But the innovation in Africa that's happening is how, I would like to see Bitcoin adoption actually happen. And they've got such amazing projects going

in Africa like Bitcoin Akazi, where they're creating circular economies. And they've got educational projects where they're basically teaching people how to code. And I just think that what's actually happening in Africa is going to be the thing that drives Bitcoin forward in the most positive way. I love that. It's, um, can you, so, are you familiar with a few of the projects down there that like have have you um chatted to a few of the people in and around some of the mining stuff that's going on there yeah so the mining stuff is is brilliant so obviously eric at gridless that's huge i mean who wouldn't i just would love to go out and actually see that um but there are loads of amazing projects that are going on there

everywhere yeah it's really hopeful had some nice discussions with as well so I grew up in Zimbabwe myself, and so a lot of my friends are still in the area. Some of the Quantum Hesheam are connected with the guys I was at school with. They work out of Zambria at the moment. Susie and I have been speaking to some of their team over the past year. They're doing fantastic stuff. They're part of Gama, the Green African Mining Alliance, who were at the African Bitcoin Conference in December.

Super interesting guys. And I love that the Can Do, getting. your hands dirty, right on the ground attitude. And Susie is completely right. I have a reservation around the way that mining has centralized around gigantic listed companies, which are very easy to attack and very easy for bad actors, governmental or otherwise, have influenced in one or more different ways. I think, again, Susie, you hit the nail on the head.

If we can integrate mining into things like home heating, it means that Bitcoin is even more unstoppable than it currently is at the moment. when it becomes part of our general infrastructure, then it's completely unstoppable. And that's where we want to be able. Yeah, I love this topic. In and around specifically with the stuff happening in Africa, I find it very interesting, kind of the situation there. You'll have these towns that or little villages that are located near, you know, something

like there's maybe there's some hydro power right maybe there's there's a you know a um uh some sort of a river or something like that or maybe there is just there's an excessive amount of opportunity in and around uh capturing solar things like that uh but it's in the middle of nowhere and so like the the grid itself it would be prohibitively expensive to provide power to people in these areas to even just set up the grid initially. It's like there's not enough people here that are even making enough money to merit in any way creating this grid. But with Bitcoin, you have a buyer of last resort. So the the actual market for electricity of these small villages is kind of immaterial in terms of whether it's economically viable,

it's can we mine Bitcoin with this free resource, with this renewable resource? And then, you know, how much capital is required to just set up the infrastructure? So the equation becomes not, is this small village of very poor people going to be able to front the bill for this infrastructure project? It becomes, is the Bitcoin network going to be able to front the bill for this infrastructure project that is going to help? this village. And the answer is more often than not. Yeah. You can make a number. And satellite internet is absolutely crucial to making that economically viable. So as we know, energy is a relatively difficult commodity to export. The further you send it along power lines, the more and more you lose. And the reason that our civilization is built on hydrocarbons is because

they're energy gents and they're relatively easy to transport to where they need it. The, fortunate thing with a lot of renewable energy in particular is that it is locked into the location of its generation. And it's interesting you say that Bitcoin miners are the buyer of last resort. They're also the buyer of first resort. So to get these things off the ground, your seed capital, you know, if a large provider of electricity grid is looking at a location, you know, if they have a market of 40 houses, that's not big enough for them to make the initial infrastructure investment to build a small run of river hydro plant. So that that village will never be electrified.

If it's too far away from the grid, if it's too far away from power lines, they will be subsisting on paraffin lamps for the rest of their existence. But Bitcoin mining changes that. There's an amazing project in Finland that Terahash have just started where they're heating 13,000 homes

with district heating just off hydro. So because I think with my, It's one kilowatt in and one kilowatt out. So if you're not mining Bitcoin, you're basically just got a dumb heater that's doing nothing useful except for giving you heat. So if you are,

if you're mining from a renewable source and getting the heating and getting the Bitcoin, it's perfect. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, and in and around heat, this actually begins to apply to a lot of different,

areas, myself included. You know, like I've, so my first foray into, my first foray into mining was actually taking an old S9 and retrofitting it with just some different fans so that it wasn't super loud. And then I used a 3D printed case from crypto cloaks, and I did a little space heater for my water. I never do that. It's literally, if you can see. Yeah, that red right there, that's part of the case.

It's an S-9 in that thing. And so I can plug it in and it'll start mining and everything. But the cool thing about all of this stuff is it's very, it's very accessible for people to begin, to begin taking a look at trying to mine from home. And so what I mean here is a lot of people will get curious about mining. They have no idea how to dip their toes in and just test the waters. And let's be clear, like if you're living in a city, you're not doing this because you're going to make a whole bunch of money.

you're not. That's kind of not the point here. But if you have a use for the heat, then you may have a reason to do something like this. And so the S-9 retrofitting thing, like maybe that's a bit more of a project than people want to do. Some people would love it. Other people might say,

eh, that's a little bit too much effort. But again, Susie, you're talking about the heat bit. These are, they're made like in a very premium-looking way. They're not cheap, but you also have a pretty cool conversation piece, and you literally have a Bitcoin miner there kicking off heat for your apartment or whatever. Even a video that I did recently on the future bit, this is an all... Oh, yeah, yeah. I saw that one.

Yeah. And so this is just a device. It's on my... It's over here on my shelf. It's this silver thing. But it's sitting on my shelf here. It's basically this little box. It's, I don't know, it's yay big.

And it sits on the shelf. And it's got this awesome interface. It's super easy. So this is the interface for it. And basically what it does is it runs a full Bitcoin node. So again, back to our previous conversation, this thing that heats my office. It runs an entire copy of the history of. of Bitcoin's transaction base and verifies it.

And then it uses the mempool of unverified transactions to actually create blocks so that if I hit a block, I actually pull it from my own Bitcoin node. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, which is super cool. I love that. Yeah. And so I've got this thing is mining.

I just turned it back on. I turned it off for the episode because it has about the same amount of decibels as your average space. heater. It's on Eco mode right now. It can go up to 10 terahash a second. But it gives me a little... What's the next to a hash you can get? In and around 10.

Yeah, if I push it. But you can also see here on this screen for solo mining, this means that I'm pulling from my own copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. I just turned it back on so the one hour average is low. But what I can see here is number of workers

too. That's because I've got a another small miner beside it. It's called the Brains Mini Miner. And I pointed that minor to my own mining pool that is running on the future pit. So it's all running off of this and my own Bitcoin node that is here on my own device. So what have you got in your pool? Have you got like a Bitaxx and a nerd miner and a heat bit? And it's all like-

I've got a bitax on my desk right here. Nice. That's perfect. That's actually one of my next videos I'm covering. I love them, but I'm a bit embarrassed by your hash rate there. I'm getting 600 giga hash. I mean, but that's the fun of it. It's, you know, if you're solo mining, you're lottery mining, right?

Like you kick off a little bit of heat, you warm up your room if you're using something with a little bit more. And then the nice side effect of that is one, you pay back a little bit of your electricity, if you're planning on running a space heater anyways. And then two, you're basically in a perpetual lottery. And so with this, I can see if I go solo mining, it actually shows me my chances of solving a block. And they're actually not that bad.

One and 644. That's an amazing, for such a small machine and for it to be so quiet, that's extraordinary. Yeah. So like I've got a one in 643,000 chance of solving a block and getting three. 3.125 Bitcoin plus fees. That's way better than winning the lottery. I think that's one in 17 million for the UK's lottery. Yeah.

These are great odds. But you make a really good point there around. A lot of our arguments around mining are supposing that over time, it's going to transition away from purely a money-making activity to a cost mitigation activity. Yeah. So you may not be making money from heating your house, but you need to spend money on heating your house. So how can you reduce the cost of heating your house by using mining?

And Susie, did you, I think, introduced this to Hestia, the French company? Do you remember those guys? Yeah. They didn't give people the Bitcoin, though. They kept the Bitcoin and reduced their electricity bill, which is still a good thing because it's reducing people's costs. But there wasn't the option of keeping the Bitcoin with those guys. But that's a really interesting business model, isn't it?

Because that's a company that, and the idea was that they would put these heaters into your home, and they would essentially give you cash back on your bills. So they pay you cash back in fiat. All new bills. They wanted to put them in all new builds. That's a tremendous idea. But they'd give you cash back in euros, and they'd keep the Bitcoin, which could potentially 10x over the next decade. Yeah.

This is the thing I really love about the accessibility of something like this. And again, you've got your bitaxe there. You know, there's this device. So there's, I guess like we can do a roll call of some of the stuff that's available. You've got your bitax, your nerdax. Nerdax is just a fork of the Bitax. You've got your future bit. You've got, again, like you can retrofit an S9, which is super affordable.

like a S-9 you can get for like 100 bucks or something like that and then buy a couple fans on it. You've got, they've got the Avalon. I haven't tried them yet, but that's on my list of miners to try just like home miners. They've got a heater one and they've got a smaller one too. The Brains mini-miner, which they just open-sourced, by the way, the whole chip, which is really cool. But there's all these things. And how I would think about it is, if you're going to mine from home, number one, Why might you do that would be, one, it's an education project.

You are curious about Bitcoin mining and you want a low-cost way to dip your toes in and see how Bitcoin works under the hood. That's one reason. Number two, you have a use for the heat. You want to just like heat your general, like a small room or something like that. You were planning on just put in a space heater in there. Well, earn back a little bit of your expense that you're putting towards the electricity and get it in SAT. So you could do that. Or number three, you like the idea of a lottery miner.

You'll just, you'll pay for the heat, whatever. You would have paid for it anyways. And you then are entered into a chance where potentially you've got a one in six or 700,000 chance of hitting a block of 3.125 Bitcoin. There's great odds. Yeah. There's a really, really competitive buying a lofty ticket on Saturday. That's amazing.

Yeah, I think it's very compelling. I think that for those curious, it's well worth diving into. And I think that this is a thing that can be regularly practiced. And yeah, I don't know, check it out. I would say. I love this whole thing. Have you played with a heat bit, Susie? Have you figured?

I haven't had a chance to know. It's in Rob's practice. The one that he's got at the moment is it purifies and it heats. So it's like the new one, but I haven't had a chance to actually play with it. No. Do you know what kind of hash ready? We only just got it. It's new.

It's really new. Oh, okay. That's awesome. I see, I see. We're already selling people, uh, straw man and the sold on mining. Um, and this, this is one of the thing, just in this vein that I want to bring up. Uh, solar miner hit a block yesterday for 3.1,25 bit Bitcoin, uh, plus bees.

And it was a future bit. It's a very interesting way that they did this, though. So the future bit, you create your own. Now, a future bit by itself has previously hit a block. Same with Bitax twice. But the future bit that just happened yesterday, it was a very unique set of circumstances. So there's something called Pod 256. But they were out of Nashville at Bitcoin Park.

And they did something instead of a telephithe. where people phone in and donate or whatever, they did something called a telehash. And they said, hey, if you want to support us, we've got a future bit here. It has its own mining pool. Point your hash rate at our future bit and donate the electricity,

the energy that you're using for mining over the course of this telethon or telehash. Wow. And they hit a block. No. They hit a block. They got 3.125 Bitcoin plus fees. Was that one live?

Yeah, it was live. Oh, I've read about that. That's so cool. Isn't that crazy? So they had a Bitcoin node running, piecing together blocks and mining with this little future bit. But then they had other people point to their own mining pool sitting on this device on their shelf and they're monitoring.

And then during the live stream, they hit a block. and got whatever that is, like $300-something,000, because people for a couple of hours pointed their hash rate at this mining pool that was on their own device sitting there. What a cool way to raise money. So cool. I love that. Yeah. Anyways, the whole mining thing is super cool.

It makes mining accessible for individuals again. And again, what they're doing with, like, Bin-A, and the forks of it and Future Bit and the Avalon. All these things, while we're seeing centralization of mining right now with some of the pools, I think that this is the silver lining because Bitcoiners are recognizing it saying, how do we deal with this? And if anything from what we've learned previously with Bitcoiners, when you put an obstacle in front of them,

Bitcoin is quickly start to look at how do we get around this obstacle? And I think this is front top of mind right now. Yeah, I love that. One of the things I think about a lot, actually, Ben, you were there as well in Nashville. Celine Bustani of HRF said, you guys are in this room because you're all fixes. You want to fix things. You want to make things better. And I think that there's a common thread running through a lot of the things that

motivate Bitcoin is, you know, we're tinkerers, we want to, we want to change things for the better and improve things. And Suzy's completely right. I think decentralising of mining is crucially important, but at the same time, I also feel that over time, there will inevitably be a market-driven solution for this. Gigantic mining farms after two or three more block halvings are, you know, halving rewards are not going to be economically viable unless you are either mining from wasted energy or stranded energy or using heat recycling or repurposing that heat in some ways. So I think the trend is positive. It may take two or three more halving cycles for us to get there. But I think the, and it's weird when Susie and I, we know, the UK is an extraordinarily

resistant jurisdiction for Bitcoin for one reason or another. But it's interesting. When we talk to engineers, they get it much quicker than economists do. And that I've always found really interesting and also somebody to be hopeful for because engineers are fixes as well yeah yeah i agree um okay so i'm i'm i'm conscious of time here but i would like to touch on one last thing before we wrap up um uh but susy i i is are there any final thoughts you want to add to your topic here anything that you'd like to point people towards things that you would think are particularly important before we change gears here no i think we've covered everything all right all right fair enough I never want to derail the conversation too much.

Okay, so we are going to, we're going to go into a final topic here. But what I'd like you guys do that are in the chat, a few things. We're going to do a quick shout to sponsors, but I'd like you to, number one, of course, smash that like button. We're well north of what we've got, 116 likes on the episode right now. And across all platforms, we've had well over a couple thousand people tuning in this evening. So appreciative of that. Also, I want you to keep in mind some questions that you may have from myself and the panelists here, because we'll field a few of those at the end of the episode.

We'll pick a couple of the best ones. But we're going to do a quick shout out to sponsors. And when we get back, we'll dive into our next topic. So stay tuned. We're going to be talking a little bit about is El Salvador seemingly moving away from Bitcoin as legal tender? What the hell is going on there? And why might I interpret that as bullish? I like doing some of these gymnastics in and around, well, this could be a good thing.

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If you do want to check out Coin Kite, there's QR code over there on the right hand side of the screen. And if you scan that one, you'll get a discount on anything cold card related if you are in the market to check out some hardware. But I do want to segue a little bit into our last topic here. and it is in and around El Salvador. And so I'm going to highlight something. I'm going to bring up my screen here. And so this is John Denahe.

If you're unfamiliar with him, he is the creator of My First Bitcoin, which is an education initiative that they started in El Salvador. It is now worldwide, this open source Bitcoin education, and it is now actually directly in the schools educating people in El Salvador.

is in an El Salvador, in and around Bitcoin, and it's integrated into the high school system. I was actually at a graduation where I and many other Bitcoiners tested locals on their Bitcoin knowledge as part of their graduation, which is really cool to see. But we all know El Salvador, Bitcoin country, legal tender, but is it anymore? This was from January 30th, just yesterday. Good morning from El Salvador. after three plus years of having Bitcoin as legal tender, yesterday El Salvador passed a bill sent by Buceli to revise that law and rescind Bitcoin's status as legal tender in order to confirm with IMF conditions for a loan. I don't care how much you try and spend this.

This is a huge disappointment. The IMF was the enemy three years ago and they remained the enemy today. The government also, for the first time, since Bitcoin a day program, began skipped multiple days and buying Bitcoin this week. this mean? grassroots adoption and organizations here just got a whole lot more important. They will need your support now more than ever. Waste no time in morning. Organize. And more has happened since then. Day two of Bitcoin no longer being legal tender in El Salvador, some updates. There are a lot of people who seem to misunderstand what legal tender mean and also have the IMF loans work. Bitcoin is no longer legal tender. Anyone claiming the contrary is at

best misinformed. I've attached what the actual law changes are so you can read for yourself that the language has changed removing all references as Bitcoin as money or legal tender, plus the actual conditions such as government accepting Bitcoin for things such as taxes are now prohibited. I've also attached a screenshot of what the definition of legal tender is. El Salvador will not be able to buy Bitcoin with the loan either direct or indirect. He goes in to say this is ignorant cope from a lot of of Bitcoiners, to be honest, yes, money is fungible, but the IMF isn't evil because they are dumb. They set the terms, and it is their sole discretion. The spirit of those conditions are

being met, so on and so forth. And then he says he's unsure regarding the Bitcoin a day program. That's just a bit of speculation. He finishes with saying the IMF is the enemy yesterday, today, tomorrow, and every day. This isn't necessarily about the content of the changes. It's about making a deal with the devil. If you lay down with it. with dogs, you get fleas. And he also followed up with this picture of him. I love this picture, actually, John. He's being arrested.

This is from April of 2002. I was 19 years old and arrested while trying to shut down the annual IMF meeting in Washington, D.C. I feel the exact same way about the IMF today. When I was 19, I was focused on trying to slow the bad. In June 2021, El Salvador announced that they would adopt Bitcoin as a lot of, legal tender world first. I quit my job, sold my possessions, said goodbye to my family, and bought a one-way ticket to El Salvador. Today, with things like my first Bitcoin, I am focused on trying to speed up the good. I mostly like the government here, and in fact, sometimes work with them. But when they

rescinded the law two days ago on the behest of the IMF, without any announcement and seemingly hoping no one would have noticed, I could not stay quiet. The IMF is the end. enemy. This is a hill I will die on. And let's just take a look at that picture there. What a great one. So why, why am I bullish on this? I'm not necessarily bullish specifically on on these developments in and around El Salvador. But I, I am bullish on the fact that this law in El Salvador came about why. Was it because the first person to realize that Bitcoin is great technology for freedom was the government? Absolutely not. That's not the order of things that came to fruition.

What actually happened first was you had a little spot in the country, Elzante, Bitcoin Beach. And that was seated by an individual bitconer anonymously donating to try and experiment. to see if he could create a Bitcoin circular economy just by planting a little bit of money and saying, hey, here's some conditions. I would like you to use this money to develop a circular Bitcoin economy here in the small town and see if it works.

And here's my donation. And from that little seedling from an individual bitcoiner, came a small community, which grew and flourished, which ended up in a president of a nation state saying, hey, we're going to adopt this as legal tender. Now, that legal tender is no longer a thing.

But the important thing to note here is the thing that moved the needle was not top-down approval. And this is from the very genesis of Bitcoin. Bitcoin didn't start with Satoshi saying, hey, Federal Reserve, I've got this thing that I'm making. It's a direct competitor to the dollar. I've coded it up and everything.

Could you give you guys maybe just give that this kind of approval? No. It was like, hey, I made this thing. Everybody go, go quick. And it was this rush of like, this thing exists now. Fucking deal with it. There was no permission asked.

There wasn't even forgiveness asked. It just is, and now the world has to grapple with the fact that it exists. And the same type of trajectory took place in Elzonte. And what happened for a period of time was you had this top-down approval, hey, legal tender, we're going to do all this stuff. But the powers that be are the powers that be. And they don't like these centralized entities that are easily targetable to do these types of things. you know, there's nuance here, like, how bad is this change and everything?

But the fact remains that the IMF is global poison. If you don't know about how insidious they are, I recommend you read Glassstein's book. What is it? Financial repression. Yeah. Yeah, hidden repression. I was screaming at the pages. when I read that book, just so actively angry throughout all of it.

And I kept reading bits of it out to my wife, and she kept up telling me to shut up, because it was late at night, and she was trying to go to sleep. Yeah. Do you know about the CFA? It's insane. When you read, when you read that and how insidious this institution is. And the little glimmer of hope that you get at the, it's just like a breath of fresh air, because you spend the whole time just seething.

And then, like, I won't spoil kind of like the moment, but there's this thing near the end of the book where it's just a, and you see the silver lining around all of this awfulness that has just, you know, been, been forced upon the world. But the point is that the thing that changes the world is, bottom-up grassroots. Why? Because it's all these little individuals and you can't, you can't just point at it and say stop. It's really difficult to hone in on a whole bunch of individuals that are all over the place and say, no, not you, not you, just stop, stop, stop. But if there's a

centralization factor, it's easy to stamp out. And so, yeah, you get a government, oh, Bitcoin's legal tender and we're going to do all this stuff. Well, okay, Let's try and put a lid on that. Let's temper that a little bit. Let's make it an asset. It's more manageable if it's like that. But El Zante, that's a different beast. This is a group of people that actively are living on Bitcoin.

That's their day to day. And I think this is where we win. I think that when people go forth in their country, communities and they say, yeah, it's amazing saving a Bitcoin. It saves you from having to be both an expert in some other field and make enough money to support yourself and save, but also from having to be a professional investor. You can actually just be good at a thing and spend less than you earn. And there you go, because your money is no longer money that somebody can print for free.

I think where we win is where you can meet your day-to-day needs and live entirely on Bitcoin, not through third parties facilitating the transaction. And I will say, thank the Lord for those services that are bridging those gaps right now. But that's not the end game. The end game is for those things to be fully obsolete. It's for you to not have to shift in and out of Bitcoin to a local currency. for you to just be able to survive on Bitcoin entirely, earn it, save it, and use it. And so I think it's so important that people go to their local Bitcoin communities and start.

And maybe it's just one thing right now. Maybe it's, you know, a guy who is, you know, fixes shingles or something. It's some niche thing. Oh, I got to get my roof fixed. I know this guy. He's a Bitcoin. Maybe I'll accept Bitcoin for this. start there, start something simple, but grow it. And so I just, again, I'm going to call out to this.

I encourage people to check this out. But this is what we're doing here in Calgary. This is the sap market. What we did, what I kind of started doing is I went to the local meetup and I said, hey, all of you already know that Bitcoin's better money. All of you have skills. or businesses or services or whatever, the products that you sell, and you earn money, and then you use that earn money to buy Bitcoin, at least in part. Why don't you cut out one of those steps? Why don't you just accept Bitcoin for what you do? It's not going to be all of your income right now, but you will get some Bitcoin,

probably from the local community, and then you can just directly save that. You don't have to go from accepting somebody buying something, and then you selling your dollars for Bitcoin and then saving the Bitcoin. Just save the Bitcoin you accept. And so we started, this was last year in December, and we created a local market. We just recently, this past December, so a year forward, so we did it in 2023. The last market was December 2024. And we had 40 local merchants come together, and we did a market.

And it wasn't just, it wasn't just, oh, hey, we're going to. We've got like Bitcoin hats and stuff like that. But it was farmers with beef and eggs and chicken and pork. It was my barber. It was I've got a Bitcoin plumber. It was I have a personal trainer that comes a few times a week that I pay in Bitcoin. It was I now have a Bitcoin accepting dentist. It was-

Your barber must come every day, Ben. I mean, my barber, and the best part about the barber, and this I consider a huge win, is I talk to him about the market multiple times. And eventually, he came down to the last one. And he just kind of poked around. And the next time I went for a haircut, he was like, hey, like, can you pay me in Bitcoin now? He asked for it wasn't me probing him. It was him asking me to pay him in Bitcoin. Oh, that's awesome.

My tree surgeon keeps on talking about Bitcoin. I need to keep prodig him and get him to accept some tips in Bitcoin, if not the full payment. Yeah. Your tips are too generous, so pretty. I think you tip too much in Bitcoin because the thing is, I don't think they really appreciate what they've got. I mean, when the last event we went to, didn't you give the lady there 10 pounds?

Yeah, we gave a 10 pound tip in Bitcoin, but... Yeah, but that's a lot for someone that probably doesn't give a shit. But, you know, if she held out to that... If she held onto it, but she won't... She'll change phones, lose it, and it'll be gone. Well, the best part about that is you'll know roughly when that happened, and she'll be like, oh, geez, I got... I got a tip in Bitcoin in November of whatever year, however long that was.

And she'll look back five years from now and be like, Bitcoin will be pumping. It'll be like a million and a half pounds. And what was it back then? It should be like, what I got 10? Oh, shit. And then people will start getting, whether it's you or somebody else, who would be getting the text messages and the phone call. Hey, how do I like recover a Bitcoin wall?

I don't know. I deleted the app. I've stopped doing it now just for that very reason. I think that people need to come to you and want it rather than you trying to give it to them. I think this is a common thing. Bitcoiners get weathered. And I mean, I've given away my fair share of sats. And definitely, I agree.

People don't appreciate it. and they forget about it and they lose it sometimes multiple times. I've helped friends recover wallets, which they then lose again. Grateful bastards. I know, I know. Do you remember the Bitcoin forces? Yeah. I never use it, but Gavin was giving away five Bitcoin at a time just for completing a

fucking capture. Yeah. Do you want to hear my Bitcoin horror story of, uh, it's kind of, it's a funny story. So this was 2014. And I had just gotten into Bitcoin started, keep in mind at the time, zero disposable income. So, you know, 10 plus years ago, I did not have any disposable income to my name. But I had gotten into Bitcoin near the beginning of the year. Also keep in mind that the peak, the peak of the previous cycle was late 2013.

And so my first year in Bitcoin was, to paraphrase Bain from the Dark Night Rises, like, I was born into it molded by the Bay Market. You mainly adopted the darkness. Yeah, exactly. I literally was born into an 80% drawdown, it was my first experience of Bitcoin. And so, but at the same time, I recognized, like, all of the, I was lucky enough to have read up to understand, okay, well, I understand what would designate Bitcoin as actually being broken or hacked or whatever.

I understand what it's trying to promise, more or less. And the headlines of like Mount Cox and everything, they did not reflect reality. So I recognized that reporting was wrong. And, oh, Bitcoin got hacked. No, somebody was holding Bitcoin for somebody else. and they didn't have proper key management, they lost the Bitcoin. So I knew that.

So the thesis didn't change. So I just kind of continued on my way. But near the end of that year, there's a company held a contest. And it was something like, why I love Bitcoin. And you had to make a video, you know, why do you love Bitcoin? And whoever won the contest,

they would pay your bills in Bitcoin for a month. but you had to find a way to pay your bills in Bitcoin. One of them was through their service, which is a company, it doesn't exist anymore, but basically they would match you up with somebody who would pay your bill, and then you would pay that person in Bitcoin. Yeah, it was kind of like purse. Purse.com, from back of the day,

where you could buy things on Amazon, a matching service, but for more broad bill payments. And so I entered, I made a video. This is before, I made the channel and I ended up winning. And so I was the person who got my bills paid for the month, but I had to use that Bitcoin for bills. Do you care to venture how much they gave me that month to pay my bills, which had to be used for my bills?

Well, yeah, it was 40. End of 2014. So I think Bitcoin was trading around $150 at the time. Not that time. No, it was, end of 2014, it was in the $4 to $500 one. Okay, so, oh, so before the 2015 bear. Yeah. Five to six.

Ten. It was five Bitcoin. Five Bitcoin. I'm looking at the, yeah, yeah. And so if I'm looking at that in Canadian, Canadian dollars right now, so the U.S., it's 102, 103, something like that. Canadian dollars. That's 600,000.

I'm about 150,000 Canadian, roughly. So, what? Don't do this, man. Don't do it. So for the month of December 2014, effectively, as

of today, my bills were 750,000 Canadian dollars. You lived like a fucking king. My, my, my, my, my,

is just even more, I mean, I can't even laugh about it. I started learning about Bitcoin in 2013 during the Cypriot banking crisis purely academically, and I read about it for years, and I wrote papers on the Cypriot banking bail-in, and I thought it was super interesting, I didn't buy any, I didn't buy any, I didn't buy any, and I was just a fucking moron, basically. Yeah, I didn't buy any for years, I mean, not long had to make a difference, which is why I'm still working a fucking fear job now. I once worked out how much money I would have

if I just stuck grand in when I first learned about it and it was like $70 million. All I needed to do is ape in with a thousand pounds when I first started selling it. And yeah, I'm an idiot. I mean, part of it is too, like at the time, everybody always, you always labor over the fact that, oh, if I could have, you know, if I would have just been able to do it back then, I would have bought all this Bitcoin and Saturn.

But realistically, that's not how it would have went. It's, you know, you didn't have the knowledge and the conviction you have now. And so, you know, back then, yeah, sure. If I could jump. back in time to 2014 me and say, yo, you are about to spend $750,000 worth of Bitcoin on your bills right now. And I think I used it. Part of it I used to buy like Xbox games for me and my friends. And then I went, what else I do? I like bought some gas for the car.

And I got a few things on Amazon. and I think you hear stories about people who bought like 1.5 million dollars worth of weed on silk yeah that's basically I'm I'm halfway there I'm halfway there my bills my bills give it a cycle and that 1.5 it'll be far past 1.5 it might be this cycle in fact you're right though you I think you either would have lost it or you would have sold when it got to a thousand If you bought it 100, then when it hit 1,000, that's a mind-blowing delta. And you would have, you thought, fucking hell, I've 10x my money. I'm just going to go on an amazing holiday.

It wasn't as certain then either. It's your brain back then, plus with the certainty that you know exists now, it was not certain back then. That's so true. And actually tracking it all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, Bitcoin had no market value for two or three years after it started. So, you know, fucking Garlinghaus and Larsen, kicking off with their ex-RP stick, creating a fake money out of nothing, giving it a price.

Satoshi didn't have that benefit. Neither did Hal, neither did Marty Malmy, the original guys who were mining. Bitcoin had no value, and these guys were paying electricity for something that had no value and might never have had any value. That's an extraordinary contrast. And you might have bought it on. Mount Gox as well. You know what?

It's funny, I like matrix my way around Mount Gox because I was too early. But then the other thing that I also like somehow ducked and weave around, have you seen

what is, I'm trying to remember, hold on a second, I'm looking it up. Have you seen the documentary, it's called Trust No One. Oh, no. And so I'm going to pull it up here. I don't know.

So here it is. So this is a documentary called Trust No One. It is about the largest Canadian Bitcoin Exchange called Quadriga CX. I remember a story. This was one of my first tutorials that I ever made. And during the tutorial, I said, I took a segment specifically for this. I said, it is very important that you do not leave your Bitcoin with anyone. It is very important that you create your own wallet.

You withdraw to your own self-custody because that is the point of this. Bitcoin, if you leave it here at any time, this, you know, Quadriga or any other exchange could disappear with your money or you could lose access to it. This was, I think, two years before Quadriga collapsed. It would have been one of my first videos in 2016. and to see a documentary on that very exchange. And I actually forgot that I had put that segment into the video. Again, like, I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

It was so early in making Bitcoin. Like, there were no Bitcoin tutorials, really, at the time. And so somebody actually, and I can't remember when this was, but in and around when it collapsed and all that, somebody found that clip and clipped it out of the tutorial and posted it online and was like fucking nailed it and I was like oh I'm super glad that I actually did that there um it's something that I could have just as easily missed because you know you do a tutorial oh yeah you buy and you know withdraw and everything but like you don't a lot of people you know it's easy to miss some of those little steps in there.

But yeah, like it's just there is there there's such a minefield of crap to deal with when you get into this space. Like, you know, not only just navigating the Y Bitcoin only, which in and of itself is like, if you escape that unscathed, which is happening more often because the educational material in and around that, you know, in the wake of the Bitcoin standard and all of the materials that have come since that moment. If you escape that, it's like the custody, it's the leverage. It's the this, that, and the other thing. There's so many things that you have to navigate that it's like one after the other people are learning. and the reason that some people are able to navigate that successfully is because of the trail of ruin behind them of people learning by touching the stove and that's kind of where

we're at right now is what are we touching the stove with right now I mean hearkening back to previous conversations we're touching the stove with the last breaths of people claiming they have utility with XRP and Ethereum and Solana and all that crap, the few things that have stuck around. And the nihilism of just outright gambling on meme coins and thinking that Bitcoin is no different, it's just a different form of gambling and Bitcoin has a lower payoff versus Bitcoin is the solution to needing to gamble. So I think that's kind of where we're at.

I don't know if you guys have anything to tag onto that. I think two things I'd add from our communications, and again, not to be too dull with FCA, Treasury and so on. The sheer size of Bitcoin's market cap at the moment is a point in our favor. So an analogy that we work a lot with is Bitcoin as meta or Google compared to a newly incorporated company that I, I've incorporated today, I'm the sole director, I'm the sole shareholder, which of those two companies would I be allowed to offer shares into the public? And obviously the risk profile

of those two is enormously different. Certainly in the UK, we have a concept of same risk, same regulation. And the idea being that if two different investments or two different assets have a comparable form of risk, then the regulation for those should be broadly comparable. And like we were saying earlier, the fact that the fact that meme coins are so dramatically different in their risk profile from Bitcoin is actually in our favor and that makes me enormously bullish. On the one hand, you have a $1.5 trillion asset that has been in existence of 15 years that has uninterrupted uptime for 99%. Like I said earlier, fucking Barclays Bank, one of the biggest banks in the UK, is down at the moment. I mean, I can't make payments on my own bank

account right now. I can use my lightning wallet. So, you know, the idea, on the one hand, you have And the wedge issue we're trying to push here is there's a category error between putting Bitcoin and Hawk coin in the same bucket. And at the moment, the UK's regulation is completely the wrong place. But, you know, I think mean coins are our friend here. And, you know, for that, I support them. Long live meme coins, as long as they illustrate the difference between Bitcoin and everything else. Long live meme coin. They don't, though.

People don't get it. That's the problem. I would say long-lived meme coins until they're inevitable, brutal and bloody death. That takes about two or three days. The speed at which shit is being cycled into and out of, this cycle is very telling. You have Trump coin and then within 24 hours, you have Milania coin. this is something visible on a global scale. It is a spotlight directly on how useless this garbage is and how transient it is.

It's like, hey, buy this 24 hours later. It's by the other thing because fuck the old thing. This is the new thing. And people are realizing, oh, this is the culture of what this actually is. Now, the trick is differentiating Bitcoin from that. And that's where the work needs to be done, but at least

will be able to point to this. And again, one of my favorite things this week is the hybrid Bitcoin Ethereum ETF. Because Ethereum has this air of legitimacy to people that are uninitiated. Sorry. It has an error of respectability, which it doesn't deserve. Yeah, but people assume that's, oh, it's the number two.

It's right next to Bitcoin. We call it number two for a reason. Yeah. Nice. There we go. That needs to be a clip for sure. But like, yeah, you have the number two to Bitcoin in terms of market cap, and people assume that it's legitimacy.

But what's going to happen is you're going to look at that ETF and you're going to look at the Bitcoin-only ETF. And then you're going to have a decade from now, it's going to be like, oh, imagine if you had bought the hybrid. Look how wrecked you got comparatively. I don't know what the waiting is for it. If it's 50-50, then God help anybody who buys that. Yeah. We just need more data. No, not immediately.

Susie, you're right. Will people work it out? No. They will not work it out. They will blindly dump money into it. And then through the passage of time, aka through the holding of one's hand on the stove over five to 10 years, all of society will look at that scalded charred palm and say,

wow, let's not do that anymore. So it's going to be a, for lack of a better term, it's going to be a slow burn. Yeah, it's completely right. It's why it's so important to put up the charts of the top 10 coins from, you know, 10 or 15 years ago. You look at the top 10 from 2013. It's markedly different from now, and you have not heard of, you know, eight out of the 10 coins earned in that line.

Yeah, in 10 years time, you're going to say, oh, but I bought the BDC, the BDC, ETF. What did I do? I gouged up my own eyes and scullf up myself. Sorry, Ben, I'm degenerating into horrific profanity here. That's okay. I mean, you did start the episode off with a whiskey and a rum. I've got to hold the canter of rum here, which I'd be totally topping myself up with during that.

There we go. I love it. No, that's great. I mean, so I think what we want to do here, this has been, I think the general theme of the episode, more or less, yes, we spent plenty of time just shitting on how ridiculous all of these things are. But I think the thing to glean from all of this is how unique and different Bitcoin is from all of this garbage.

And like it even comes down to, again, Susie, your topic of, you know, in and around the mining and how Bitcoin is actually. actually helping in different areas where people are just destitute and all of a sudden Bitcoin, because of its unique properties, is able to swoop in and actually subsidize a grid. And because it's proof of stake and because it connects it back to energy, just like gold, for all of those reasons. Otherwise, it wouldn't work. Yeah. Yeah. When you have a copy pasta of our existing system and you recreate that with something like Ethereum or XRP, you're going to have

the same results. You're going to have people in positions of power that get rich off the backs of anybody that puts in real work. They're extracting value from others. And Bitcoin explicitly is designed to do the opposite of that and have it be unshakable in those values. It's very, very difficult. And you can't say that anything is 100%, but what you want is you want the dial turned as much in the direction of being difficult to change from those initial outset values as possible. And people get very confused about the idea of, well,

it's technology, it's tech. I'm in it for the tech. So let's move fast and break things. Now, the, the, the, the, main selling point of Bitcoin is that no idiot can come in and be like, oh, let's do this, let's change it. Because those people can be corrupted and thus corrupt the entire system if they're able to change it. And so the fact that Bitcoin is difficult to change is the innovation. Yeah, it's a selling point. It's not disadvantage.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I recognize there's going to be people that click on this because of the, the, thumbnail. They're going to be like, fuck these guys. I'm balls deep in XRP. But, but like, I'm hoping through some of this that, you know, some of those assumptions are, the problem right now is you go back to the inception of XRP. Who are the people that are from back then that are still an XRP. Well, the people that created it, right?

The people that directly, like that stuck it out for the past decade, nobody that bought XRP at market value is still around being like, this is the next thing. It's going to replace Bitcoin because you've had a decade of absolute misery. Who hasn't had a decade of. of misery is anybody who is on the receiving end of the 100% pre-mine and the gifting of ex-rp directly into their pockets, which they could then dump on retail. And so you have to ask that question.

You know, Brad Gardinghouse, have you ever gone out and market bought XRP? Yeah. Have you ever wanted to own the asset that you created and gave yourself a free? And if the answer is no, then then you have to ask yourself, do I want to buy this myself? And like I've said several times, I'm a big believer in the free market. If you have done all of your research and you still want to go out and buy OXOP, go do that. If that's how you want to spend your money, I believe in the freedom of choice. You want to waste your money.

You go do that. I'm totally cool with that. But has Brad Garlinghauer's ever done that? I think that's an important question to answer. And the other thing is, you know, we hear a lot from Ripple about how banks are going to use their product. The really interesting thing to consider is that Ripple's main product is a product called RippleNet, and RippleNet does not require XRP to function. So you're buying a token that has nothing to do with the fundamental tech product that the company offering that token offers.

So doesn't that make you even question for a moment whether you're actually liquidity or not? Have a thing about that. This is the exact ICO argument. it was companies with a token where the token in no way was it was completely detached from the business and so like the business can continue to do things and function minus the token and so and so like in no way like if xRP is a thriving company in 20 years that doesn't mean that Sorry, it's Ripple, rather. Sorry, XRP and Ripple to me are the same thing because they were the same thing.

But besides the point, if Ripple is a thriving company in 20 years, that doesn't mean that XRP is at all useful to anybody. No, exactly right. And you have to ask, why are you being asked to buy that? Yeah. Yeah. And again, if you decide that you want to spend your money in that fair play, freedom of choice, you go for it.

if you've done your research, like Susie says, you know, if you have done your diligence, if you decide that's a good use of your money, go for it. But I don't think you should. It's interesting because there's a lot of marketing in and around. The separation of XRP and ripple and the the marketing efforts that have gone into both separating and somehow, at the same time marrying those two things, it's very insidious because in one way, they're trying to say like, hey, we didn't create, you know, we didn't create an illegal securities offering.

But at the same time, they're trying to say like, oh, everything Ripple does and every business dealing that we have is gonna have a direct impact on the price of XRP. And that's, it's, it's very detached. in that way. Yes, did they issue a token and then sell it on retail and continue to sell it even though and as they hold almost 50% of the existing supply and that's how they make their money? Yes. And ripple crater to nothing and XRP still exists as a company. Yes, if they find

another way to make money. And so the crazy thing here is that I did an interview with a regional bank back in, God, this would have been 2017, 2018. And this regional bank, they did a pilot project using Ripple, but using their payment rails. And I explicitly asked the person that was the head of this project, okay, so you did this, you did transactions globally using... the ledger and everything. What did you use? And he said, well, we didn't use ripple, like we didn't use XRP, the token. We used their rails and then sent value that way without having to. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. Was that ripple net that they were using rather than. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so they said,

yeah, we use their rails. And then I said, okay, so you do the pilot projects is done. he said we we decided not to use it at all I was like okay fair enough so let's say you did decide to go back to them what would you use would you use the rails or would you then use the token

for the perceived value that is giving you in discounts for transfer and everything he's like I'm out in the mouth we wouldn't use XRP we wouldn't use the token we would use we just use the rails Like we don't. We're not going to in any way use the token. Like we'll just,

while we're not interested in using the rails, the last thing we would do is use the token simultaneously with the rails. And so that kind of really told me a lot about what I need to know. Like they don't give a shit. They're not going to speculate on the token, even if it's for my new periods of time for a perceived like reduction and cost and everything.

They're just going to use the rails. And so, there's no there's no like it's a complete separation like hey we've got rails where you can transfer value through our centralized system and you can use this token that is totally not us but you're going to get a discount or for using again it's just it's just complete trash and so like that was very telling to me back in 2018 hearing that and I hope that people pick up on that again It's just, it's a marketing scheme so that every time somebody says, hey, we're good, we chatted with this bank about doing this pilot project and playing with this,

with Ripple. And people perceive that as my XRP is going to moon. Separate those things in your mind because they're not. You have said that their main product is press releases, right? So the product of the company is a press release and then when they put out press release, the price of ex-repe moons, they dump X-UPR on retail,

Brad and Chris get rich, and then they rinse and repeat. Yeah, that's their business model. Yeah, and then we get another sweet piece of Bitcoin art. Yeah, you know, hopefully in four years' time, we don't need to be talking about these fuckers any longer. In a way, in a way of a bunch of the XRP army funded the piece of that sweet Bitcoin art. The skull of Satoshi was directly funded

by XRP shills. But they didn't pay very much. The actual artist got paid so little for that piece. And in actual fact, it was Troy that spoke to him and then turned him into a Bitcoiner. And he was horrified once he realized what he'd done. Yeah, it's funny. He got he got he was like, wow, there's a lot more nuance to this than I know. I guess I definitely have been completely used in this equation. He came out really well. He came out of it really well, open-minded, nice guy, interested in hearing alternative points of view.

I thought he did a fantastic job there. Yeah. My favorite part about the piece of art is the top of it is the cooling towers, like nuclear cooling towers. and the visual effect was supposed to be, look at all the pollution being spouted off by these things. That's a nuclear cooling tower. That's steam.

Water paper. It's just, yeah, it's super funny. Anyways, we are going to round out, Susie, Freddie. Thank you so much. I want to offer a nice little cheers to you. both. Appreciate you coming and getting bullish with me on a Friday evening. Everybody in the chat, before we round out, I would love to allow anybody in the chat. We'll maybe pick one or two of the best questions that they might have in regarding anything. It could be around BTZ policy,

UK. It could be in and around any of the topics that we discussed this evening. But draw them in the chat. I'm going to keep my eyes on it. Freddie and Susie, you guys can see the chat if you click on chat on the right. If you see anything that you like, let me know. I'm just going to give a quick shout out to Bitcoin Mentor as people kind of queue up their questions and then we'll dive into them. But if anybody would like a free book, then there's a QR code on the screen here, and I'll bring up the screen of this. So, of course, my... company Bitcoin Mentor. We offer one-on-one education sessions if you're looking to learn about practical knowledge and around wallets, hardware, multi-sig, running nodes, home mining, you name

it. We can help you through it. So you can reach out to us at Bitcoin Mentor.io. But the QR code on the screen, one of our mentors, his name is Jesse Berger. And he wrote a book. It's an awesome one called Magic Internet Money. I'll read a little bit about it here. A book written by one of our top mentors Jesse Berger explains many key concepts underpinning Bitcoin in simple and relatable terms beyond the basics it explores topics such as banking, cryptography, economics, governance, and more. This added context highlights how Bitcoin can address many problems facing the global economy and why it is positioned to usher in a brighter future for us all.

And I can say personally, I love this book. there's so many topics that Jesse covers here in such a concise way that I found myself thinking to my as I'm reading through going oh god that would have taken me 20 minutes to explain and he somehow whittled it down to a paragraph and so it's just it's such a nice quick read that outlines a lot of your foundational knowledge in and around Bitcoin so highly recommend if you scan you can get a free copy you just drop an email and you'll get a copy of the book. But it's also a great share

if you're trying to maybe Orange Bill some of your friends and family, excellent resource. So yeah, head over to that QR code and download a copy. So I'm going to, maybe I'll actually I'll leave up

the free book QR code there, but let's check the chat, see if there's anything. So there was one comment that I really loved that I went back to find from World of Rusty and it said, Love How Freddy is getting jealous of everyone's hash power.

That's so funny. I was going to call out World of Russie as well because he said the profanity with the English accent makes it so less potent. I mean, I just want to say, World of Russie, my kids and there's a bunch of them who are all friends, and they do imitations of their parents. And apparently, when they do an imitation of me, it's literally, oh, fucking hell, I'm so fucking annoyed. The imitation that the imitation that the other kids in the neighborhood do of me is of a stream of relatively posh profanity. I've been on the phone to you and you've actually been told off by your daughter. Oh yeah, sorry, sorry. It's funny because so World of Rusty, he is, he's Australian.

And I will say that profanity coming out of somebody from the UK versus. somebody from Australia. It's like an entirely different class of the kind of because I hear you swear and I'm like, oh, that's cute. And then I hear an Australian swear and I'm like, oh, that was awful. That is just vile what I hear. And it could be the exact same sentence. This is how I get away with being such a terrible person, Ben. People think, oh, I'm, I'm, I always, isn't he nice and intelligent? No, I'm actually just a massive asshole. I just have to speak. a really posh accent so I can get away with terrible shit. That's great.

Okay, I'm going to pull up a couple of questions here. So one here from Renewed Ambience says, is the UK policy on Bitcoin slash crypto going to ease or is it going to ease or is it heading in the right direction as currently compared to U.S. products like Fold, et cetera, for getting Sats cashback? It feels like we are behind. So I say that quickly, Judy? Absolutely. That's got your name all over it, yep.

Yeah, so the problem we have in the UK is that the FCA, which is our regulator, has grouped Bitcoin with absolutely everything else. So like we were saying earlier, at the moment, Bitcoin is regulated in the same bucket as like the Hawk Tour coin. So there's no differentiation at the moment between a meme coin on the one hand and Bitcoin on the other. And that's something that we're really working hard to change. It's very difficult because everyone in the FCA is very entrenched in their current position that all crypto is essentially the same thing. And so we have a lot of work to do is an uphill battle to help them understand that there's an enormous difference between Bitcoin and everything else. At the moment, and candidly, I don't think there's likely to be a change until there's a change at the top of the FCA. So the FCA CEO is he's not standing for, he's not looking to retain it.

his position. He is hoping to get the, as we've heard, he's hoping to get the Bank of England job when he leaves the FCA. Personally, I don't think there's likely to be a change until he moves. When he moves, we need to see whether the incoming head of the FCA is a more forward-looking person than he is. If they are, then I think we're well positioned to try and push the narrative and frankly, the academic understanding of the big one is completely different. At the moment, regulated in the same bucket, that is a key aspect of what we're trying to change over here. So I'm not optimistic in the short term, but in the longer term, yes. Nice. All right. There's another question here from Mark.

What will it take for the XRP Army or XRP false news and hype to finally go away once and for all, Bitcoin, country, federal reserve. adoption, bank adoption, exclusively for BTC. So I'll let you guys answer here. I've got my thoughts here, but like what does it take to? I guess we can more broadly say a cryptocurrency that is feigning utility, but in this case, specifically XRP, what does it take for that kind of stuff to go away? What do you think, Susie?

I just don't know. It's a really good question. I don't think I can answer it. I might hazard a guess that, I mean, depressingly, I think if you zoom out, this represents a kind of behavior where people exploit a fiction of legitimacy, like you were saying earlier, Ben, with ICOs, giving you know, a veneer of respectability to something relatively nefarious. fundamentally I think this is something that human beings do as it's just part of our nature Stephen Pinker writes in the blank slate around how many cheetahs a population of honest individuals could support there will always be some cheaters in an honest population

and I think as a human behavior cheating and scamming is always going to be a part of the way that we interact with each other the key thing is understanding as much as you can about the reality of what a how do you understand it how does anyone understand it it's huge and the information they get is wrong how do how did we understand it how do how did you understand it for an example by the example through taking a lot of time and understanding that it needed to be understood but if you don't even get that far i mean take what i've been doing trying to challenge the bbc when with bitcoin exception and they analyzed all of the news coverage for the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the FT, and all the Bitcoin coverage has been negative with a slither of balanced and absolutely no

positive. That's how people are making up their minds. That's how they think they're getting the information. And so if the information that is being put out there is is wrong or hard to find or it muddies the waters and people are time poor, they're just. just don't stand a chance. I mean, unfortunately, yes, and then that's an interesting point, because you need to factor in the consideration that the purpose of news media is not to inform or entertain or educate, it's to get clicks. And people are much more likely to get clicks if they write certain types of articles,

and those are not necessarily going to be the ones that include accurate information. But, you know, we on this call have made, you know, like Bena Seyello, I'm sure all of us have touched the stove and have blisters to show for it. And unfortunately, that is often the way that you need to accumulate the knowledge and understanding and wisdom in order not to make the same mistakes again. Bluntly, capitalism, it's market efficiency. I come back to that relatively frequently. I'm going to touch on one more. Somebody said, BTC sessions.

Has El Salvador mentioned running B. Bitcoin nodes in every household. Not to my knowledge, but that's not to say you shouldn't do that. And so I'll, I guess I'll use this opportunity to, as a call to action for everybody that is tuned in currently,

there's your, there's your QR code, scan that, and you can get to the tutorial on how to download your own Bitcoin. node and audit the supply of Bitcoin. And you can get started. That's your weekend project.

I'm giving you homework. This is the only live stream on YouTube that gives you homework. But go scan that. This is what you're going to do tomorrow morning or even maybe tonight. If you've still got a little bit of oomf left in you for Friday evening getting bullish, you're going to download Bitcoin Core. You're going to let it sink over the weekend. And you're going to make sure you join in on Tuesday.

and you're going to audit the supply of Bitcoin in real time with myself and Pierre Richard. So somebody asked earlier if there's a link for that yet. Not yet. I will set that up over the weekend, but it will be Tuesday, February 4th at 2 p.m. Eastern time. We'll do it live. And we'll have a little bit of chat about Bitcoin and why it's designed the way it is, what sets the sets it apart from other coins and kind of the functionality of all of its kind of

unique factors that set it apart from everything. And then we'll culminate in us all auditing the supply of Bitcoin together at the exact same time, at the exact same block and checking if we've run the numbers successfully if we're able to do it. So yeah, with that, Freddie, Susie, thank you both so much. Everybody in the chat, thank you guys so much, of course. Smash that like button. I appreciate you all being here and being a part of the chat. Stick around.

We're going to give away some sats just to close out the show. But Freddie and Susie, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation. It was a lot of fun. There's three of us. We were down one. And we jammed one out. for two and a half hours here.

That's pretty man, actually, yeah. It's half one in the morning here. Oh, my God. I'm so sorry. I mean, I think that makes it okay for Freddie, given that he's been slamming rum and whiskey all night. It's 6.30 p.m. here. I feel a little bad about the stage of my man.

You're behind, Ben, but you've got some catching up for you. I think so. I think so. But Freddie, Susie, thank you so. I really enjoyed this. What a great chat. I hope you both have a wonderful weekend. Everybody give them a follow. They're in the show notes down below. Have a great weekend. You guys are welcome back anytime. Thank you. Love it, man. Thank you so much for having us on. It was great chance.

Cheers, guys. Talk to you. Bye-bye. All right, everybody. Thank you guys for tuning in. If you can, smash that like button and also get your lightning wallets ready because we're going to give away a few sats here. Of course, we did get north of 100 likes on the episode. So I want to give away some SaaS for you guys for going through the trouble. We're here on Bitcoin Well. I'm going to give a quick click. And again, just as a reminder, whoever scans this first with their lightning wallet is going to claim the free sats.

And they will snipe them from everybody else. So if you get an error, it's because somebody else grabbed them before you. By the way, the QR code off to the right, that is, if you want to check out Bitcoin Well, they're a great place. to be buying Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. So check them out there. But I'm going to toss a coin into the Bitcoin wishing well, and whoever grabs the QR code that pops up first

will be rewarded with 210 sats. Congrats to whoever grabs them. Let us know in the chat or in the comments if you're the one who grabbed them. But with that, we're going to round out here and I will pull that out the screen. Thank you guys so much for being here. Have a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be.

And my call to action, keep stacking stats, keep stacking skills. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This was your daily session.