BTC Sessions - Bitcoin's Imminent Surge! $150k Next?! | Grepples, Jason Hodlers, Gary Mahmoud

Episode Date: January 18, 2025

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Yo, what is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? And with inauguration day, just days away, and plenty of speculation in and around the possibility of a Bitcoin strategic reserve, I mean, this could be a day one executive order. Nobody knows, but a lot of smart people that I consider it to be smarter than me think that that's exactly what's going to happen. And what the hell happens to price in an environment like that?

We're going to be talking about that and many, many other reasons to be bullish. We've got, we've got grepals. I see the chat already. I see you guys in there. I see the degeneracy taking place. So that's happening. We've got Jason Hodlars and we've got the lovely Gary Mahmood from a Bitcoin mentor waiting to tell us how bullish they are.

So let's get to it. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, we're going to dive right in. We're going to bring in everybody on stage. So I want to welcome Gary and Greples and Jason. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. How are you guys doing on a bullish Friday evening?

Very well. Thanks, man. Awesome. Jim, great. Good to hear. It's a bullish Friday. Dude, Grouples, what's up? You've got everybody in the chat just, just,

slinging shit your way. You know, I know prior to coming on, we discussed how long it would take for me to get booted. And I'm aiming for 20 minutes. So that's where I'm at. There we go. It's good to have goals. It's good to have stretch goals.

But really quick, okay, let's get to a little bit of just general bullishness that's been going on right here. I just want to bring up this. This is, And maybe I'll get our pretty faces down below here as well. But this is the New York Times. And this is from yesterday, a first day Trump order, a federal stockpile of Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency industry has pushed president-elect Donald Trump, Donald J. Trump, to establish one,

creating real political momentum behind the plan. And we've seen similar things coming out of individual states pushing for strategic reserves as well. I think last count there were seven or eight where they are at least looking at the possibility. This whole idea seems to be gaining momentum. And as I said in the intro, a lot of smart people. I was surprised. You know, my brain is trying to be rational and say, it's probably not going to happen. But a lot of people that I consider to be way smarter than myself are very convinced that it's either day one.

or like very quickly after getting into office. And I don't know what to think, but it would seem that the market is bullish on the idea. We're sitting at what, 104,000 over 104. We almost got up to 106 earlier today. And when you look at the one year, I mean, it's been a good year. We're up 63K, 152,000 over the one year.

So my question to you, gentlemen, is, let's say this comes to fruition let's say a few days from now inauguration day uh shortly thereafter bam executive order uh there's a bitcoin stockpile that's going to be started upon where are we sitting price wise by summer like how how crazy is that and gary i'm going to go to you first like what what comes to fruition in a in a world where this happens So, yeah, if there's a Bitcoin strategic reserve, if you don't have a girlfriend, you will be getting a girlfriend. And if you already have a girlfriend, your girlfriend will allow you to have an extra girlfriend. I can promise you that.

That's very scientific of you. I think that that's true. Yeah. I mean, it seems surreal that this is even a real. If you went back one year, this idea that this would be even. anyone would be writing about this would be absurd. Now, not so much. Yeah.

You know, the prices are silly. I don't even claim to understand in the short or medium term week to week, month to month. And what even a Bitcoin strategic reserve would be, would we actually be buying a bunch more Bitcoin? And I say we, obviously, I just mean the state, or it's just going to be a little set aside for the coin they've already taken, confiscated from other people. I have no clue.

If I were good at predicting these prices, I'd be a lot richer than I am. Stay humble, stack sats, long term, everything is gorgeous. Yeah, yeah, I absolutely. Regardless of what happens, you should continue to stay humble in stack sats. That's absolutely true. Greples, I want to get your take. Okay, this comes to fruition. Trump gets in, executive order, they start stacking.

What happens in the immediate to midterm that you anticipate? pay. You know, it's kind of crazy because if let's say it does happen. I mean, obviously that's big. But, you know, I'm 150,000 is kind of, in my opinion, is cheap because it's kind of, I mean, just as money, it's a concept. And I've been thinking about this the last couple of days. But, you know, conceptually, Bitcoin and oil.

kind of have a lot of similarities. And I only say that because just, just as oil is when we pump it out of the ground, it's just that it's oil. It has some use case, lubrication of systems and such as that. But, you know, that's just the base.

It's just oil. That's like our on-chain, our base layer for Bitcoin. And, you know, it's not until you send it out. And in our case for Bitcoin, you know, it would be like sending it out

the lightning network. That's when it gets refined and it becomes, you know, instant speed. I mean, the lightning network if you get, if you have the, if you have the opportunity to interact with it is a beautiful thing. And so, you know, I really, I don't know, I feel 150K is a little bearish. But, you know, I mean, are you saying that like my title and my thumbnail that I need to pump those numbers up? I mean, honestly, Ben, it's a, it's a good consideration because I mean to think about it I mean like just just like that that analogy with oil and bitcoin I mean when we knew what oil was for decades prior before we learned how to utilize it and the people that understood how to utilize it early on benefited it benefited the most you know

and that's why I feel like lightning comes in because I mean that is the refinery but the beauty of that now with oil I mean you refine it it becomes gasoline with Bitcoin you can refine it but it's still just that gray, malleable thing. Yeah. It's Bitcoin. I mean, Grinidad running it on a lightning node and you have, I mean,

gosh, it's a beautiful fucking thing. Yeah. But, you know, I'm like, it's still just that gray, malleable thing that we are allowed to,

there's no third party. So I mean, like 150K, honestly, Ben, I don't know, man. You got to get it together,

buddy. I'll take that under advisement. I appreciate it. Jason, I'm going to go to you as well. And I'm going to kind of cue you up as well. This is Polly Market, which successfully anticipated the results of the election. But we're sitting at about a 41% chance being speculated upon that Trump will get a reserve going in the first 100 days. So, I mean, I guess a double question here.

Like, how likely do you think this is to come to fruition and what happens if it does? Personally, I think it's very likely. I'd be on the favorable side of that, of that bet. And where do we go from there by summer? I'd say we're actually going lower than 500 sats per dollar. For those who did the math, I really were over 200K. If I did the math, right? I would have over 200K by summer.

And not by beginning of summer. It's not like mid-summer, something like that. But yeah, I have. And but that's at least. No one really knows where it's going. But yeah, that's my base case, really. Nice. I appreciate it.

Well, I mean, plenty of reasons to be bullish. And we're going to get into our specific reasons because there's more to be bullish about than just price. There's a lot of exciting things going on. But there's a lot of kind of like underlying things that continue to drive Bitcoin forward. And so this show has been running all through the bear market as well. And so I think it's important that people realize there's always a reason to be bullish. And so we're going to be highlighting a whole bunch of them. Now, I do want to prompt everybody in the audience and in the chat.

Thank you guys so much for being here. I appreciate you. I enjoy all of all of the chat and everything that's going on here. We're playing with a little bit of a different format today. We're going to be, of course, asking people why they're bullish. We're going to be chatting about it all together. But at the end of each topic, we're also going to take some questions from the audience. So whoever the speaker is at the moment and whatever their topic is,

if you have a relevant question to what was being said and discussed, then I'll prompt you guys and I want you to drop them in the chat and we'll pick out a couple of the best ones for each topic at hand. So of course, we're going to dive right in. Gary, I'm looking at you first. I'm going to prompt you with the first question. And everybody in the chat, by the way, if you can, smash that like button. We're at 38 likes already. I want to, I want to break 50 super early in the

episode and the more likes we hit, the more sat giveaways we'll be doing. So anyways, Gary, queuing you up with your question. Why are you bullish? Well, Ben, let me just say I'm going to get us up to 39 likes right now. So you're welcome. I am bullish more long term. Like I said, at the beginning, I couldn't tell you a week to week and months to month. And as I talk to people, when I talk about Bitcoin, I say, if you're going into this, trying to make a quick buck, look, if you succeed, you're a smarter man than I am. I don't know how to time the market or do it. So, yeah, it might go 150.

It might go 200. Those are easily possibilities for me. Will it do that? I don't know. But I am bullish long term. I'm incredibly bullish long term. And since you wanted to hear a little bit of a rant, you know, we were talking beforehand. Like, what are you passionate about?

Well, this week, I'm 47 years old. I'm going to be 47 next month. And I just went in for my first Fisher Price, his first colonoscopy, this Monday. And yeah, that, that's a lot. That was a lot of fun because now they're recommending everybody get colonoscopies if you're 45. It used to be 50 was the age. And before then I think it was even a bit older. And the age keeps getting lower and the incidence of early detected cancers are going up.

It's crazy. Whether it's colon cancer or other cancers, it's insane. And it got me thinking, why is that? Why do we live in a world of such abundance and cancer rates, especially in the Western world, keep going up? And so, of course, I was, after reading the Bitcoin standard, I read the Fiat standard by Safedina Amuse. And of course, he has a chapter on Fiat food, which inspired me to read Fiat food here. And one of the things they talk about is how highly processed foods are contributing to medical

problems, such as heart disease, cancer rates, anything like that. And part of the reason why we eat so much highly processed foods in the USA and many other Western countries is because it is the way. for governments to kind of push price inflation aside and kind of get you to keep eating without you seeing that the price of food is going to go up a lot. So the price of beef is going to stay the price of beef. But if you can substitute your food for something highly processed with adding a lot of sugars and not even real sugar, but a lot of corn, you know, corn syrup added and a bunch of other chemicals and that can be put on the shelf longer, mass produced for

cheaper price, you don't see the inflation coming as hard. And this is something that presidents in the USA of both parties, Republican and Democrat, have affirmatively tried to push presidents, politicians, where this is just a way to hide the fact that the printing press is devaluing your money. So my, my bullishness on Bitcoin long term, one of the things is hopefully we come to an age where governments aren't trying to push these gimmicks to get you to think that the prices aren't going high because they inflated the money supply and we can get back to eating more wholesome, healthier foods. And I want to say, this is not something that I've been passionate about for a long time. I'm the biggest junk food theme there is. I'm eating cake. I'll go lift.

I'm like, let me have some hog and does ice cream beforehand because I'm lifting now. So that sort of justifies that it evens out. I'm not like a hippie-diffy-diffy-diff, only holds. But, you know, getting that colonoscopy and being into Bitcoin really got me thinking like, yeah, how much is our food and our health just influenced by governments driving prices through the roof and needing to force a way to hide it, making you eat processed stuff. So that's one reason. And obviously, Bitcoin, you know, fixes this with a whole bunch of reasons long term. Does it help prevent wars?

Does it lessen? I mean, we get into a whole bunch of sorts of things. But, yeah, price going up is great. Other tangential things are great, too. There you go. I like health going up. Health going up is fantastic. And I've read Fiat Food.

Actually, the author, Matthew Lisiak or Lishak has been on the show before he had, he joined the Christmas special this year. And what a dude. So he actually, he read the Fiat standard and he really enjoyed it and he loves Saf's work. But he got to the one chapter on Fiat food. And he was like, ah, this is like, it's a shame. Like the rest of the stuff I agree with. but this chapter just seems totally out to lunch. Like, how crazy is this?

And so he went to fact check, and he found that SAFE understated how corrupt the food system was and what had happened. And so he contacted SAFE and said, like, I can't get this published anywhere else? Well, can I go under your publishing house? And that was the creation of the book Fiat Food. You got to read it if you haven't.

It is eye-opening. I was screaming at the pages at the end of every chapter. with like the revelations of how the food industry, as we know today, came to be. But one of the major underlying things in terms of like how does Bitcoin actually fix this, there's actually a whole bunch of different studies, including done in the U.S. by the government, looking at the cause of violent uprisings as it relates to what people will put up with. And people will put up with a lot of bullshit about, you know, losing their life savings and this, that, and the other thing.

But one thing that they will not put up with is not being able to put food on the table. Shit gets real when people cannot eat. And so there's this recognition that if you're constantly debasing the currency, if the eating habits remain the same, then people are going to notice a lot quicker and thus actually protest and have uprisings a lot quicker. And so a point was made, and there's documentation on this. Again, you've got to read the book, but there's documentation on this where they're like, we have to make sure that food, that people feel full, that people can always get a meal on their table, which means that we need to find ways to mass produce and make cheaper and swap in lower quality ingredients

in order for people to fill their cupboards. And look what has happened. Like you said, when they're tracking inflation, when it comes to food, they're not tracking maintaining your standard of living. If you're used to buying rib-eye steaks all the time and a lot of people, which breakfast, for the average American, if you go back 60 years, it was like eggs and meat. That was like the typical breakfast, even earlier than that. But now it's like processed crap. You're grabbing like the Cheerios and the everything full of high fructose corn syrup and all that garbage. And so if you were to

actually maintain that standard of living in terms of eating, you know, rib-eyes and steak and eggs and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, your costs have gone through the roof. But when you begin to substitute in, well, I'm going to get ground beef instead, well, actually I'm going to get ramen noodles instead and a box of cereal and whatever else, they count that as, well, the consumers aren't wanting those things anymore.

They're subbing in other things. So we can't count those as part of inflation. We're going to count what consumers are actually buying. And that's, you know, how much did that move the needle on what they're spending month to month, not accounting for the fact that people's behaviors are driven by the fact that things got more expensive in the first place. So it's just this ridiculous system where it does not accurately capture the degradation in quality of living that money printing has had. So enough of my ranting, I want to get Greples and Jason in here commenting. So maybe Greples, I'll go to you first.

One, have you read the Fiat standard? But if not, like just any general thoughts in and around health and how Bitcoin is impacting it? I, excuse me, I have not read the Fiat standard. But you can see it. And like you were saying, but I mean, if you, if you're set to one way of living, if that's whereby every week, I mean, I would. I've been on that train. I've felt the pain of ribby prices rising.

And, you know, I mean, if you're on that, it depends person to person. But, I mean, like, if you, if you yourself have a routine that you follow, that obviously you felt, you felt that, well, that's the inflation of it, because that's just, that's what it is. And it hasn't been pretty. and that's part of the reason why I thank God for Bitcoin because it's

you know I gosh I remember two years ago everybody was like oh it's a store of value what do you mean and now it's like hey I bet you're biting yourself in the ass right now because I mean you see it just as I see it we've gosh two years ago we were oh maybe maybe going on 30 now but we were we were 16K man and you know if you if you were stacking at those levels hey more props to you if you were if you had your doubts

well those doubts kind of came and nipped you in the butt yeah gripples i tried bite my own ass just now it's really difficult so it's just as if anybody can do it Gary i am 100% i know i was in the comments but if you're live stream live stream your colonoscopy i'll fucking watch man we got we got to got to work that out i guess well you know You know, after I did it, you know, it supposedly do it once every 10 years. And after I was done, the guy said, we found a polyp. It was non-cancerous. I'm like, okay, great.

I'd just come back in 10 years. He's like, no, we found one. See, I could come back in five. So in five years, hey, maybe we'll do it. Gary is going to get bands put in his butt so the polyps release. But hey, it's, it happens, man. There's just no, we are here with you every step of the way. Yeah.

That could be a, I mean, if you time it right, it could be the Christmas special. for so we'll see but you know going back to with yourself look it's so messed up look I know just I think it was like two days ago they just banned die red dye 43 I think it was yeah yeah I wonder they just banned that in the United States but they have what 10 years of data from from the Eastern Hemisphere saying this this is shit yeah and you know and it just sucks that our government is is It's like a lag in my opinion. I mean, if you, just like, gosh, just like my grandma and grandpa, I mean, they ate the same thing every day.

Day in, day out. But they, gosh, I think my grandpa lived to 93 years old. Yeah. You know, and it's, but I don't know if that's just like the consumerism side of it where it's just like, hey, oh, hey, look at all the options. But, I mean, the options are, and I guess it's the lightweight to put it, but it's poor. Yeah, it is. It's straight poison. And I see Midi in the in the chat here. Red number three artificial food coloring banned by the FDA is a huge step in the right direction. I agree. Like it's just and people I suppose people just don't don't know. And there's like you said,

there's a lot of options there. You go to the grocery store. There's so much stuff. But the percentage of it that's actually good for you is single digits. I'm guessing. It's got to be less than 1%. Yeah, it's total crap. It's total crap. I also like the comment from Tracy. I trade Bitcoin directly for grass-fed beef from my local farmer.

Tracy, so do I. There's a dude named Alberta Hoddle. He has the best beep jerky I've ever tasted hands down. He always comes. We have a local market here that we do a couple times a year called the sat market. He always brings it then. And then I often call him up and I'll buy like a quarter cow. from him and just stalk my freezer.

And there's some other farmers that bring like, you know, beef and pork and chicken and eggs and all this good stuff. So like we, you know, if you can find somebody that creates quality goods and services and food and you can trade with them the soundest money that the world has ever seen for quality products, you've hit the sweet spot. because you're going to them because you're appreciative of the quality of the goods they're providing, and they are appreciative of the quality of the money that you're paying them. And so it's this mutually beneficial thing.

I think what we're going to see in the future is that Bitcoiners, all their stuff just stops breaking because it's actually put together well. Me and my wife have been bitching about this a lot this year. We're in a new build. We're in a relatively new home. We moved in in 2020. And the bill quality is garbage. Everything is breaking.

Everything is breaking. Our dishwasher just broke for the fourth time. It's brand new. It's brand new from 2020. Our stove already broke before we had to replace that. You know, our floor, our brand new flooring is like lifting and chipping off. This is a brand new house. There's things going wrong with it left, right, and center.

So the quality of everything, thing is diminishing because people are trying the the the merchants themselves are incentivized to try and hide the inflation because every other merchant there's sticker shock and if you raise prices too much people are going to be deterred and they're going to buy the cheaper one even though it's crappier quality there people are watching their pocketbooks and so if you don't swap in inferior uh inferior products then you're actually going to to lose market share. So it's just this insidious cycle. Anyways, I'm ranting too long here. I want to go over to Jason and I want to give him a chance to give his take on Fiat food

and kind of the impacts of Fiat on really everything and every aspect of our lives. Yeah, thanks. I haven't read Fiat Food. I haven't had the opportunity yet, but I have read the Fiat Standard. Great book. It was actually the Bitcoin Standard when I listened to the the audio book of that back in 2018. That's when I went from kind of the original reason why I came to Bitcoin. I wanted to end the Fed, very libertarian-minded and stuff, replaced the dollar with Bitcoin. Kind of wanted to fix the world from the outside in, as I like to say. But when I learned about things like time preference, and with time preference comes like eating better stuff and having better materials, just higher quality rather than quantity, higher quality of life,

And I like to say, I came to change Bitcoin, I came to change the world through Bitcoin, through politics. But I stayed in Bitcoin to change the world, you know, because Bitcoin changes us. And so, yeah, I stayed for a low time preference, you could say. But, yeah, so actually, we, my wife and I, we started being interested in health and eating better food and stuff before we even discovered Bitcoin, maybe even before Satow. she dropped the white paper, honestly. We started slowly cutting out sugar.

And my wife had a roommate back in college who was like, like, no, stay away from corn syrup. Stay away from corn syrup. And sugar's bad too. And we were like, seriously, come on. Well, gradually, we went down that rabbit hole. And over and over again, oh, you know, you know, she's right. Okay, she's right again about this and just started learning all about that. And I think it was 2010.

10, we went down another health rabbit hole when it comes to, I'll just gesture like that. You all know what I'm talking about. And we went down that rabbit hole and decided, nope, no more. You know, we have, well, until recently, we had five kids. Now, we have six kids. And yeah, and so we're not doing any of that stuff. And, oh, man, people compliment us on our kids and how well-behaved they are. And I'm sure, maybe some of that is from homeschooling and parenting stuff.

But a lot of it is we're not feeding them drugs. We're not giving them sugar and stuff and they're not getting wired and all that. They're very thoughtful, you know, quiet kids who have really great insights. They're all bitcoins. I'm sure that's not a coincidence there. But like I didn't I didn't talk them into Bitcoin. I just kind of explained it. And they like, oh, so kind of they started repeat it back to me in their own words.

So food affects so much. And, oh, there's a thought I had earlier about Fiat food. You know the old saying, and you'll have to help me out with the origin of this, about cakes and cakes and cakes. Was it cakes and circuses? That's sorry, it's not cakes, it's bread and circuses. That there's a reason why it's not steaks. And I was trying to think of some other version of circuses.

Stakes and podcasts. It's a good thing, a good reason why. is not that because there's too much value in those things yeah yeah and uh oh yeah and so in order just to placate us to keep us happy to keep us from rising up uh we should to have to i guess not be given you know bread and circuses just the basic necessity to fill our stomachs not make us strong um but just fill our stomachs and uh and entertain us rather than uh have us actually become smarter and better human beings yeah the government would uh love nothing more than to have uh people be uh compliant tired uh not thoughtful and uh good little workers um that they can continue to

extract wealth from you are the pod people from the matrix uh they just want the resources um now Gentlemen, I think it's time that we are going to be taking some audience questions. We're going to go to a quick shout out to sponsors of the show. But what I want the people in the chat to do, number one, if you can, smash that like button. We're at 63 likes. I want to try and get us up to 100 by the end of the next topic here. When we come back from the break, we're going to give away.

We're going to do a little giveaway here. Get your lightning wallets ready. you have a chance to win up to a million sats. And then we're going to take a few questions, some of the best questions from the audience regarding the topic at hand. So we'll be back in one minute to do all that. See in a second.

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We're going to give away some sats first before we move on and grab some questions from the audience. But while we're giving away some stats, make sure you start dropping your questions right now into the chat. So I'm pulling up the Bitcoin Well dashboard. If you're unfamiliar, again, there's a great place to be Stag and Sats in Canada and the US. And I will put the QR code off to the right-hand side if you're not already on Bitcoin while. You can scan that and sign up there if you like. But you don't need to be on Bitcoin Well in order to win right now.

Basically, the way it works is when you sign up, when you buy Bitcoin, when you refer friends, you earn points and those points can be used to toss a coin in the wishing well and uh every time you do that you win you can win up to a million sats uh so i'm going to do just that right now we'll toss it in all you need is a lightning wallet and the first person to scan the QR code that pops up from the wishing well will steal the sats from everyone else so you got to be quick so here it goes coin in the well and boom 500 sats to whoever scans it first

if you do get it and you steal it and snipe it from everybody else let us know down below in the chat in the comments wherever you may be that would be absolutely awesome congrats to whoever grabs them so I am now going to peruse the chat

and we'll take a quick look and see who's been saying what here. Let's see. Question for Gary. Do all actors have a CIA handler? No, just an A-PAC handler. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. I mean, you got the mustache vibe going on. I mean, are you somebody's handler? That would be amazing because that would be working regularly. So I would be a much better kind of payday than just being an actor. So yeah, aside from obviously, the stabilizing governments and mass murder.

So it's kind of a, what are you going to do? So maybe I'll just stick to the actor. Yeah, awesome. Awesome. I see another question here. What's your opinion on super backed? And so this would be a general question for anybody I'm familiar. This is another way, basically a way of securely backing up key material for Bitcoin.

Now, I know the dude that created it. He's awesome. You've got a YouTube channel and everything like that. You can just check out superbacked.com, but he's come up with a pretty unique way of creating, storing, and securing seed material for your Bitcoin keys. I personally have not yet tried it myself. So I've got a long list of things to try. It's on the list. There's definitely, there's like layers to it.

There's layers of security to it, but it boils down to it. It's very simplistic in the way that there's like an OS that you host on a machine, and that OS is capable of decrypting the QR codes that you have. But really, you just got to store a QR code, and you're pretty much set and good to go. So I don't have a good opinion on it either way because I've not had hands-on. But, yeah, super, super interesting regardless. Let's see really quick here. I'm, oh, there we go.

Did Grapples go to the party store before, why are we bullish? Stack Chain Signal would like to know. Everybody knows I already did. Everybody knows. Perfect. Perfect. And furthermore, David Wrong would like to know, specifically from Greples, what stops this train? No, nothing stops this train.

Nothing stops this train. It is chew, chew, all the way. Fantastic, fantastic. I'll see if there's any last. Okay, oh, here's one that I want to highlight here. Oh, wait, no. This one. Ben, do you see yourself moving out of Canada?

That's a good question. So what I'll say right now is Canada got a pretty dicey there for a little bit. And regardless of the fact that Sir Trudeau is on his way out, I hope he doesn't let the door hit his ass on the way out, as a matter of fact. But we've got somebody that's pretty much a shoe in to be elected that is indeed a bit coiner. And so that's great. I like that. That will make life easier for a lot of people. and he's also not illiterate when it comes to economics.

So that's also helpful for the country as a whole. But keep in mind that you're always just one election away from, you know, horrible, horrible regulations for Bitcoin. And so I think it is important that you always have a bit of a plan B. And yes, of course, a plan B in your money, but maybe a plan B in terms of your location. as well. So speaking of Plan B, if you're familiar with Katie the Russian and Plan B passports, she is awesome. Her and Jessica absolutely kill it. And they've got a team there that can help people obtain second passports, either passports via investment or passports via your lineage. And, you know, through if you have grandparents from another country or something like that.

And actually, that's exactly what my wife, Lisa, is doing right now. She's got, her grandfather was from Ireland. And if you're from Ireland, you can actually decide if you're applying for that passport just through blood. You can choose whether it's a UK passport or EU passport. Or you can apply for both. but she's going for effectively an Irish slash EU passport. And so that's going to open up some possibilities. It'll also be helpful down the line.

We've got a couple of kids. So it doesn't make it super easy, but it makes it easier for them to get passports. I'm just kind of shit out of luck. So luckily I'm married to her. So that's helpful. I'm looking at applying to the El Salvador passport program that they have for like entrepreneurs and education.

and everything in and around tech and Bitcoin. I think that might be a path. But yeah, absolutely. Like it's in my mind. And ever since the Canadian Trucker protest and everything that came to fruition with that, I've very much been, you know, we've been thinking like, what if, what if? And so it would just be a really nice to have.

And we're kind of, we're testing a note. We're going to go back and check out Madeira again, I think, next year, like 2026, because I quite liked it there. there. But yeah, I don't, I don't know for sure, but I, it's definitely, it's definitely front of mind. All right. And then Chad wants to know, Ben, why are you anti-American? Chad, to be fair, I don't like the idea that once I'm an American citizen, Uncle Sam literally taxes me from wherever I am on the planet. It's one of the like three countries on Earth that does that.

So to me, like, if I go there and then I say, oh, I'm going to live somewhere else now, like I get taxed on the income that I earn in other jurisdictions. And that's not true of most other countries. So a little less of that in my life would be nice. Anyways, we're going to pivot now. We are going to do a rotation. And Greples, I'm tossing it to you next. I'm going to cue you up with the same question.

Why are you bullish? Ben, gosh, there's so many reasons to be bullish. I mean, just quickly, if I can, there's a man from Michigan, my home state, his name's Manuel. He's 14 years old, and he's just getting into the financial markets. And those of us who've been around for a little bit, you know how broad that is. The financial markets are huge, but he showed an interest in Bitcoin. And Ben, anybody that asks me, anybody that asks me, they're like, hey, you know, who do I, who do I go to? I'm like, look up BTC sessions because if that man has seen a rabbit hole, nine out of ten, he's piqued his head down in there.

And he's tried to make something of it because, Ben, Ben, you, you have scaled everything. thing and uh which kind of leads me into like my the main reason why i'm bullish which is uh which is node operations and uh that there's there's plenty of options to choose from you can go with start nine umbral uh parma node uh that's probably just a few out of the many but um one thing i found and uh and ben it was you who uh who helped me start my journey i think it was your your video on an uh on a an ump rule set up on a pie now i had i had set that up and uh you know granted i was running an ln d implementation on a and on eight gigabyte or an eight gigabyte uh pie four and uh i think every week or so i'd have to reboot it and all and then catch up with the network and then it was fine

but uh it was uh with stack chain and freaking stack chain man that there is no single group on on any form of social media and at this point on in the world that is more bullish on bitcoin those guys it doesn't matter if it's 20k 50k 60k we have been buying we don't stop now besides tau tau stops at 100k but that's just tau so don't worry about him uh the the people have lived very freely since Tao has lost his reign but uh you know i got i got thrown into a couple of stack chain chats and uh there was one where it was i mean it was the node runners and they were like hey you know uh i

had a buddy uh buddy in stack chain uh you know recognized i was running a node tossed me into the chats and then then i learned about uh cln like core lightning implementation and uh you know i think i think gosh, like end of 2023 is when I fired up my CLN node. And I didn't really get it like, well, that's, that's a loose statement. Because, you know, I got it set up probably like end of January. But it wasn't until I went to Nashville and I met stack cheners in person that those guys were like, you know, I showed them my setup. I'm like, hey, you know, I'm running a CLN implementation. And I'll never forget it, man.

We're sitting at Stackchain House. I'm at the table and a good buddy. He's like, hey, you know, we changed something within my config file. And I think it was to allow offers. And, you know, he was like, hey, get into it. And I got into it through my little MacBook. And he's like, oh, you know, how do you reboot? And I was like, man, if I reboot, I was like, I have to keep this terminal running.

He's like, you don't have it set up as a system service. And I was like, what? Like, I am 100% you guys. I might, I'm sitting here talking to you guys like, oh, I, I know what I'm talking about. There's so much in that rabbit hole that I haven't even looked at. And what I'm about to tell you, I mean, it's just the surface and it's so wild. He was like, why don't you set him up as a system service? And, you know, he walked me through it.

And it, like, in Nashville, Nashville itself really cemented my guy. my ground points for Bitcoin. And, you know, like, he showed me. He's like, hey, set them up as a system service. You know, here's the things that you can do with your config file that will allow you to benefit from the network. And that's kind of like going back off of what I said. I mean, like, you know, on-chain transactions are like oil. It's, you know, if you have oil, somebody will gladly store it for you.

Just like Bitcoin. If you're going to send it from one on-chain address to the other, that I mean it'd be kind of foolish to say no to that if you're willing hey I'm going to send you Bitcoin to this address and and you say no that's kind of silly and in my opinion but I mean you know it's it's it's it's just fantastic because and then you you get you get a core lightning uh oh geez you get a core lightning implementation set up and uh you know it sounds It sounds complex, but it's really not. It's, and it's why I'm really bullish on episode six return of the pleb of Stackchain Mag,

because, I mean, personally, I have, I have an article in that magazine that walks you through how to set up, how to set it up, or how to set up a CLN node off a clean install of Debian 12, because that's how I did it. And, I try my best. I mean, there's a lot that goes into just that. I mean, it's simple to say, hey, I'm going to run a lightning node, but the work that goes into it. And, you know, with the providers that are available, Start 9,

umbra, node, I mean, they make it easy. But if you actually take the time and learn a Linux distribution, the freedom that comes with that is unparallel. like I'm sitting here in my basement right now Ben and if I wanted to send out a lightning transaction whether it be both 12 both 11 or l and URL nobody can tell me no and uh you know I've been I've been with stack chain probably gosh probably almost going on two years but you know I've had I've had people within that network tell me they look man if you ever tried to send X amount of money from bank to bank they ask you 6,001 questions i've had it happen to me with a 400

transaction now you know god i got a call and i had to answer a bunch of a bunch of shit about myself like hey out of these five addresses which did you live at and i'm like god i got to go back ken you know with the with the bitcoin network it's like hey do you know the address yes i know the address is or do you know the both 11 both 12 yes i know it hey guess what what you're the value that you have transferred from point A to point B is done there's no I mean gosh even right now if I do a bank transfer from one to another it might show up instantly through the apps but I know in the background it's taking three you know three business days and they won't tell you that because they're like hey we want you to think it's instant but

I'm like what they what they show users and what's actually happening is uh as a big lag And with, you know, setting up a core lightning note, man, I mean, it sounds, like I said, it sounds complicated. I mean, you have to extract Bitcoin core from, you know, the GitHub. And it's really just using the TAR command. And then same with extracting core lightning. And then once you get access to that configuration file, if you understand a basic setup to run it on, Even ClearNet, and I mean, and it'll clear net has its flaws that kind of doxes your IP address to the public, which most Node Explorers kind of, you know, show the general location.

But just even that, because I was, I mean, gosh, I think up until like a couple weeks ago, I was running strictly on ClearNet, but I had never had a payment fail. If I decided to send out 200,000 sets, my Node partners, and this is a big thing, know your node partners because you can open a channel to anybody but if you don't have the ability to

communicate with that channel partner it really takes out a lot of the benefit of operating a node because I mean if you know your if you know your node partners like I do I mean gosh I

hit the chat and I'm like hey gosh I think it was just two weeks ago I was like hey I'm trying to install a tour on my node if it goes offline uh you know please just please forgive me and uh you know all my node all my node partners hit me back to like hey take your time and uh i mean a big thing man i i haven't got nashville i had you know that same buddy he was like hey do you have a backup battery for your node and i'm like what and he was like you know a backup battery and i never even thought of it and he was like man it is a it's a hidden gem because let's say you do

lose power out it just you lose power it's not something that obviously it's not something that you want but if it's something that does happen you can be prepared for and like with my setup here i have my node my router um and i think anything internet related on that bad boy but uh if if if you know if shit word hit the fan on my end i have the ability and especially with uh the technology available i and I can SSH into my node through my phone. So I can gracefully go into SSH and be like, hey, I need to, you know, lightning clai stop. Lightning dash stop.

And it'll shut down lightning for me. Instead of having the system just brute shut down. And I don't feel enough people are bullish enough on that. Because I get it, you know, like when you buy Bitcoin, you're, uh, that, that's the big thing. You buy it and it going to either. It sits within. an exchange, which I hope those

who are listening that might not know much about Bitcoin, never keep it, never keep it on an exchange. If that exchange goes bust, you are the liability, you are the exit liquidity for them. If you can have

whatever application it is that you use, verify that the transaction you sent from them happened on chain, it's yours. And that's a beautiful aspect. of Bitcoin. But, man, I

just feel everybody, that's why I wrote my article in Stack Chain Mag Episode 6 Return of the PLEB, and I'm hoping I mean, I've been, I guess you could say I've been shilling the submission link for about, you know, two months now, but just that ability,

that ability to, hey, you can set it up and not have it as a system service. That's no big deal. But to set it up as a system service and have it where no matter what, if you turn your node off and it comes back on, those services start right from the beginning and you can, you wait, you gotta wait like a minute and a half. And then you can type in Lightning Dashclay, get info, get all of the information present for your node,

get your number of peers, the number of channels you have open. And I mean, like I said, I'm just scratching the surface level of this. And that's what makes me bullish, because, Even here I am, I'm like, I'm sitting here probably talking like I'm a giddy school girl. But that's just the surface level, man. And that is why I'm bullish, Ben, is node operations not only within Bitcoin core, but on top of the lightning network. Because like I said, Bitcoin on chain, it's like oil. I mean, obviously you want to pump what you have in your own stash. Just like any oil producer does, they bought more oil.

But once you send it off into Lightning, it's like refining it. You know, Bitcoin on-chain is just that. It's the base layer. It's thick. It's good. It's gray. It's malleable. Now, it's boring.

And it's what is needed for Bitcoin. But once you transact it over to Lightning and you get that set up, It's like turning it into gasoline and wherever you need to go, it will get you there. If you need to send payments, like Ben, if I were to send you a payment right now, by the time I hit that send button, you get the notification. Hey, you received X amount of sads. Oh, yeah. That is, that's a, it's such a beautiful aspect of the network. And I don't think many people are bullish enough about it.

And I feel like that's because they don't understand. understand it, but I'm like if you, it's a learning curve, but if you understand operating it within a Linux distribution, the value that comes from that is exponential. And that is why I'm bullish, Ben. Sorry for talking too much. That's all great. Everybody liked it. So we're good. If we had a sudden dip in people in the chat and people watching, then I would have been concerned. by that. People are digging it. And again, I'm going to echo what you say. Running a node is actually, it's pretty sweet. Like it's, you know, first you got to kind of learn like why, why, you know, why are you running a node? And so, you know, there's a couple different aspects to it. One is the don't trust verify aspect where it's like, if you're not running a node and you have a Bitcoin wallet, then effectively what you're doing is you're asking somebody else who's running a node

to check your transactions for me. Hey, do I have Bitcoin? How much do I have? Hey, can you make sure that this transaction I want to send gets out to everybody else? And so there's one, you're asking them to tell you what their copy of the ledger says. Do you have money? Did you receive money? So there's a trust aspect there.

There's also a privacy aspect where it's like, okay, if I'm asking somebody to tell me my balance and I'm not going through tour or anything, then they're, they get my IP address. And so if somebody's taking logs, it could be like, hey, this person at this IP address has this much Bitcoin. And so that can be an issue. But also when you get these plug and play devices or you construct one yourself, you build one yourself, there's all these other tangential apps that you can be running, like you were

saying running a lightning node and having self-sovereign lightning funds, running a block explore so you can look up your own transactions privately on your own server. server. There's plenty of other little apps. I just wanted to quickly highlight a few that I think are pretty sweet here. Number one, of course, start nine, love these guys. They have plug and play devices that you can get. You pretty much just plug it into your router, plug it into the wall, and then on any computer on your network, you can access it, download apps, install them, all that kind of stuff. These guys are awesome. If you want the simplest kind of iPad-looking version of a dashboard, Umbrol. These guys, again, they've really nailed like the user experience. It looks really, really nice. There's obviously, there's some tradeoffs here. But again, like if it's a choice between not running in your node and running a node,

Umbrole also a no-brainer, my node was one of it was actually the first node I ever tried. And this project is awesome. I built this one just with a Raspberry Pi and set that up on my shelf. That was my first node experience, and it was super awesome. Parma node, I haven't tried yet. I do want to try. Love Parman, Armand the Parman. He does some good work.

Razby Blitz as well. That's another good option. And just really quick, like, here's my StartOS dashboard. And so running a whole bunch of different apps. There's a marketplace where you can download the apps. You get updates and you just click and update whenever you want. And you can, link your wallets to this. So you'd like copy and paste some info from one of the apps,

pasted into your wallet, and now your wallet is checking your copy of the blockchain if you have a balance instead of somebody else's. And my other favorite thing, my current favorite thing on my node is Albi Hub. It makes life so much easier if you're hosting a lightning node. It just, you know, you click on it. It walks you through. It says, hey, like, maybe you want to connect this. And maybe the first thing you should do is open a channel. You can do that right in the interface without having to go anywhere. We'll open one for you. Hey, here, you can use it as a wallet.

Also, side note, see all these little transactions coming in, like, over the past little bit? Those are just people on Noster that are watching this stream live that are just zapping in between, which is really cool. It goes straight to my node. And then you can do connections, like to different external wallets, to, to, like, Noster clients to I've got like an LB extension in my browser where I can use and send transactions. I've got an account on my phone that I can use, but it's all connected back to my

node on my start nine, which is super awesome. So anyways, lots of lots of options out there. Well, if I can, Ben, like you said, I mean, like with Start 9 and I'm well, like I and, you know, parted in my French, but there's so many tired friends. friendly options. There is no excuse to not run a node. I mean, like, Umbrole was my first instance, and man, on ILND, they, gosh, you usually you install Umbrel OS, and it, right from the start, it's like, hey, you know, go to the app store, and you have Bitcoin Core, you have Lightning Node, you have so many

options. So it's like, it's not, maybe, maybe, gosh, what, Bitcoin's 16, you. years old now. For those, whether you've been here, cycles upon cycles, or you're just getting into it, there is no reason why we shouldn't, as a network, as a network of people running on a network of machinery, not be able to run a node. Now, like every, I mean, this is just me and I mean, Stackchain really cemented some it for me but everybody should be running a node even like and then and that's the beauty of the

implementations of start nine and umbole like it's it's so easy nowadays and but but but and at the same time look when i first got into node operations uh you know i was running on umbill and even before then i was like oh you know you know like gosh i think it was like late 2019 2020 you would always see it node runners, node runners. And I was like, oh, super secret shadow coders, you know? And it turned out to know, it's just, you know, like, do you want it to offer? Um, well, hey, we'll download it for you. We'll get toy set up for you.

And you just got to enter in your credentials and boom, you're done. And then learning how to implement that myself on Linux, it's a rabbit hole. but man, it is a rabbit hole that I feel if you are a serious bit corner, if you're somebody who's, you know, not just about, hey, I have X amount of coin and it's worth X amount, but you're like, hey, the network itself, with or without me is going to run, because that's the beauty of it, is you have that option to participate or not. you can you can you could just be the guy that buys keeps it on river cash app wherever um you could be that guy but at the same but there's also the option to be the person that hey

i'm gonna i'm gonna verify the transactions on the network myself and uh yeah that is why i'm I'm bullish, ma'am. I love it. I want to hear what these guys are running. I'm assuming you're running notes. If not, then get out here, guys. Jason, I'm curious. So what's your experience, running nodes?

What have you got going? If you got one going on, what do you think? So my very first note I ran was actually back during the block size wars. I wanted to throw in my vote, I guess, for lack of better term, behind the, smaller blocks and Segwit. And I just ran that on my laptop and just used regular Bitcoin core for that. Then a much later, 2021, I forget, I switched over to using a raspberry pie and just put my node, like you said earlier, Ben. And that's why I still run today.

I just run my node and on Raspberry Pi 4B, I think it is. And that's a Raspberry Pi. It's been a while since I bought it. It's still turned away. Like it's still holding out. Yeah. And it's just juggling. Yeah.

Yeah. I did have to replace it once from a 3, Resby 3 to a Resby 4. But, uh, damn. That's not bad. That's not bad. It's, it's if I can. Yeah. Jason, if, uh, a little Intel I5,

nook off of eBay they cost about 60 bucks right now yeah you you pick that up and then you you mean you yourself uh if you get a little i5 nook that's what i'm running off of i i upgraded to a 4 terabyte m2 mv me and then 16 gigs of ram uh i bd took about 16 hours now my umbral it took about two freaking weeks man but yeah i mean granted hey that was That was on me. I was running it off of an external HDD. It was my own fault for the choke point. Yeah.

That happens. Again, like the hardware, it's dependent on how good the hardware is. It can vary how long it takes to sync the blockchain the first time. But, you know, there's lots of different options out there. And so you can have the low cost and just weight it out or you can go hard and get something a little bit more robust. Again, like the cheap I-5s, they're, again, like office buildings regularly cycle out their hardware. So you can get like these used, you know, good little desktop mini-PCs and repurpose them as nodes and their fans.

Oh, man. I've already, I've already been in talks with my MRO for the company I work with. They have I-7s for theirs. And I'm like, hey, you know, and you're you guys get new office equipment. Granted, they just got a bunch of mouses and keyboards. And I did ask. I was like, hey, can I have a mouse? Because I left mine in Nashville.

And it's been haunting me ever since. And my MRO coordinator, she was like, you know, just like, sure. But you got to sign it out. And I got a mouse off of it. And I was like, heck's yeah. You know, like, sweet. But, um, that's awesome. Yeah, it's just.

I want to hear what Gary is running here as well. Gary, I'm assuming I'm about to eject you from the episode. but it impressed me. What are you doing? Well, given that I am, as Gravles, but I am the tard in the room. I am running a Start 9, running a Start 9-1, because I feel like it's basically like the Apple of nodes. It's pretty much just set up for you and made so easy that even I can figure it out.

So it works. I think now, I don't know, I think you're running a bit of a step up for me on there, right, Ben? Just hardware-wise, but it's the, the same OS and everything? Like you got the same user experience more or less. How long ago did you get yours? I got mine in Nashville. I was like, you know what?

I talked to the folks over at Start 9. They're like, yeah, we're doing a Bitcoin conference discount. I'll pay you for the Bitcoin Conference discount. That's fine. I brought it home with me and I set it up. And one of our other wonderful mentors, Nathan Fitzsimmons over at Bitcoin mentor, kind of walked me through it and helped me out. And I learned, you know, we all learned.

and we're all learning. I'm always learning more and it seems to be working fine. So I'm sure I'm going to continue learning about it as I continue tinkering with it. That's awesome. I love to hear it. Now, I want to pivot here. If I may say, I'm sorry, just real quick, that I've been feeling Start 9 FOMO for a while. Should I move to Start 9, Parman, both? And I didn't know they were there in Nashville. I was there in Nashville. I missed it. Yeah, they are pretty slick. And I do also like the fact that they're kind of prepping, they're building the ecosystem in a way where it's meant to be censorship resistant.

So what that means is instead of like a centralized app store where you download everything, there's a marketplace and you can sub in different hosted marketplaces that other people can host. So if Start 9 got their service shutdown, somebody else could spin up their own marketplace, all the software is open source. You can just run it on any machine. and then you can just say, oh, well, I'll just point it towards this marketplace. There, I can download all my apps and everything. And the grand plan of that is that everybody can host copies of the software for those apps, like a torrenting system so that you, like this, it's like the hydra.

You can't, you can't cut off, you cut off one head to grow in instead. And so, yeah, you just, it's, it's torrenting Bitcoin software on a, an open source marketplace that nobody can truly shut down, which is awesome. Ben, if I can, if I can comment on what Jason just said, I've had, for those running Start 9, I've had a buddy he's ran CILN implementation of Start 9 and LND, and he's told me the backup procedures, kind of threw him for a loop. and it ended up the end result was he lost some sets

but that's the big thing like when I was setting up my CLN note gosh you guys like I said I came from Umbrell to hard hard command lining my commands to to start my note operations but I had when I first started I had you know I had the i bd done i had c ln set up and then where i messed up is uh with with debion uh which is my preferred

uh distribution of linux uh with debian uh they allow you to do whatever the hell you want and i messed up because i deleted ipv6 addresses uh just like i said am a tard gary me and you both buddy get on the stack chain they'll love you if you if you are retarded they were Like, hells, yeah, that's like, I don't know if, this is probably me going on a rant here. But when I first got into stack chain, man, it was a, it was a rainy day on Bitcoin Twitter. I think, I think DSB by yellow, which, I mean, if you know that, Malacca, you know he's a Malacca. But, you know, it's probably like DSB 589. And it was a rainy day.

And, you know, I'm sitting there in a master my heart. dropped a $100 stack join on on chain he's like stack join 100 anybody who wants to stack with me stack with me I was like X yeah you know I got 50 bucks and I prior to prior to stack chain I'd always been you know I mean gosh you you keep what you buy of Bitcoin private whether it be a whole coin whether it be a thousand sets you kept it to yourself you know and stack join kind of broke that narrative. And they were like, hey, you know, it was a rainy day.

My buddy Kobe, he's probably somewhere in the comments being a dick to me, but, you know, I still love him. He comes up and he's like, hey, man, he's like, what are you doing? And I was like, oh, you know, just stacking, stacking some stats. And he's like, hey, we do that. We do that over here. And I was like, what? What? He's like, yeah, man, we're stacking right now.

And I'm like, but what do you mean? You're stacking right now? He's like, yeah. He's like, we're stacking right now, man. And I'm like, what? And go over there and share a shit. Here is everybody dropping whether it been stack chain, you know, stack join five dollars. Hey, I'm going to hit a main block, which if Tao is listening, fuck you, Tao.

And, you know, like stack chain really, really broke the narrative because prior to stack chain, it was, hey, I'm buying Bitcoin, good for me. And stack chain really brought it. out where hey you're buying bitcoin good for you and uh the whole the whole network the whole community has uh has really cemented what um what it is for me to believe in bitcoin and but but going back you know a buddy of mine uh you know he had issues getting on the uh the recover of start nine and uh he ended up saying hey i'll take my loss on my sets that were locked up in channels i I'm going to run an L&D implementation. And, look, man, Nashville, the buddy I had there, he's like, hey, these are, you know, with the core lightning implementation, if you've run it hard strictly command line, there's three files that you need to save.

It's your HSM secret, your emergency dot recover file. And there's one more, and I can't name it off the top of my head. but uh you know he he's like these are the three files and when i deleted my ipv6 addresses and i screwed up i screwed up bitcoin core i screwed up big core lightning but i saved these three files put them on an external drive pulled that drive wiped the node uh my machine is dedicated uh from the install and uh i wiped i saved these three files i wiped the whole note I re-downloaded the blockchain from Bitcoin Core. I reset up lightning.

And once lightning was done being installed, I literally just copy and paste it these three files. Started up lightning again. Once it synced, it was like, hey, this is your node. And I was like, that is my node. You know, like, I go off of my alias where my node is rock. And it popped everything back up. And I was pretty much back on the network.

And at the time, I had a million-sat channel in limbo. And I was able to shut that down, get my stats back. Granted, I lost probably a good half of that on stack chain poker, which we call Packer. But, you know, it's just, I see people who have these struggles through the implementation that they decide to run. And I'm like, but you guys, if you, you say, three files and in my in my my my article for episode six of stack chain mag I walk I try my best granted I'm retarded but I try my best to to walk everybody through from a fresh clean install of debbie and 12 to installing core lightning installing

not one take that back installing Bitcoin core installing core lightning setting both of them up as system services installing tour So that way you have the option to either, you can run it on both. You can run it on Clernet and Tor. Tor. Tor peers can connect to you through a Tor address. If you're on ClearNet, they can connect to you through ClearNet and vice versa. You can connect to Tori Peers. You can connect to ClearNet Peers.

And then as well as having it set up so where if you just plug a USB into your node, you'll use I Notify. It'll watch the emergency dot reggae. cover file which which changes every time you have a channel state change whether sorry ben i'm sorry if people can see the chat it's me in the background grepill it's time to rotate shut the fuck up i told you in the pregame man this is going to be an issue but no like i mean just the ability to have it where it automatically backs up your channel state and gives you that that that power where if you decide, hey, you know what, this machine is outdated, I want to move to an I-9.

You remove a USB, you plug it back in, you re-download core, you re-downcourt, you reintegrate core lightning, and boom, your node, just where you left it is right there for you. That is the beauty of the Bitcoin network. It doesn't, like, the fundamentals of it, you, you can leave your machine and come back, and it's there for you. What else can you say about that? And I'm sorry for nothing. You can't say anything about that because we're going to rotate. I know, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. We are going to rotate, but I want to, I want to ask the chat. If you have questions, get them going, get them ready. We're going to give a shout out to sponsor the show. You guys have been killing it with the likes. We're at 114 now, which means I'm going to do a double giveaway right now as soon as we give a

shout out to the sponsors. So get those questions in the chat. I also want to give a shout out. We did get a super chat there with a question. So we'll be taking a peek at that one in a moment here. But in the meantime, quick shout out. We'll be back in a sec. And then we'll get to the giveaways up to, went up to a million sats. We'll see in a sec. Debify is the best and easiest way to borrow against your Bitcoin in a non-custodial way. Funds are held in a multi-sig escrow where you hold a key, and the platform allows for excellent hardware like the cold card mark four and the queue. You have access to flexible conditions, the best rates, and institutional grade liquidity.

If you're looking to make use of your capital, don't sell your Bitcoin, borrow against it. You can head over to Debify.com to check them out, or simply scan the QR code on the screen. Speed wallet is the easiest to set up and use Bitcoin wallet out there. you sign up, you can of course buy Bitcoin within the app, you can send and receive Bitcoin transactions via the Lightning Network, and you can also send, receive, hold, and swap between stablecoins, aka EUSDT, via the Lightning Network. They baked in a ton of other great features as well where you're able to earn Bitcoin. This can include referring your friends, shopping your favorite gift cards, or playing fun

games via the Speed Arcade. I encourage you to sign up today. There's a QR code on the screen to do so, or you can hit the link in the show notes down below. And when you do, you will earn 5,000 sats as you create your first. All right, we are back in. We're going to do a double giveaway because you guys have been smashing that like button so hard. So get your lightning wallets ready. Again, if you're not on Bitcoin, well, I'll have that up on the side there.

If you want to check them out. But yeah, first person to scan the QR code that pops up after we toss a coin in the well, We'll snag the sats from everyone else. We'll do it twice in a row. And while you're waiting to scan, also make sure you get your questions in the chat because we're going to be taking a couple of them right now. But here we go. Into the well.

And we had 210 sats up for grabs. I'll leave it up there for a few seconds before we move on to the next giveaway here. But I do want to address the super chat here. Let me just grab it. I'll pull it up down below so that we can all see it. It's way up there. The chat is chatty. So we're at.

So A says, hey, guys, would you securely carry your mnemonic seed backup when traveling, especially if you're concerned about not returning and having no one to send it to on paper, metal, invisible ink? So that's a good question. And I would say the way that I would approach, if you're trying to move around with a seed phrase discreetly, there's a couple ways you can attack it. Number one would be to simply add a passphrase. This is probably the lowest hanging fruit. So if you have a seed phrase and you add a pass phrase, you can actually put some decoy money on the seed phrase itself because it functions as a regular wallet. but then you can hide your actual funds behind a passphrase,

which basically creates a secondary, completely hidden wallet. Nobody even knows if there is a passphrase attached. So that's one approach. And I would have a secondary copy of the seed phrase just in case, like if somebody takes it or you lose it or you get it confiscated or whatever, your decoy funds are gone, but you still can re-access that seed in another way. The other way that is, I think, pretty unique. really cool would be something called border wallets and this is something I've done a video

on I'm going to see if I can quickly grab it here but so border wallets what it is I'm just going to pull it up border wallets I'm doing a quick search for it right now the website so I can pull it up border wallets.com so here we go So border wallets, this is a new way to quickly and reliably memorize Bitcoin seed phrases. So what this actually does is you create a random seed phrase. That random seed phrase then dictates how the entire BIP 39 word list, all 2048 words, will be arranged on a grid that looks like what's on the screen right now. then with that information, with that grid that you can create with the seed phrase that you have,

you basically draw a picture. And so you might draw, like it shows a little pattern here. So maybe you make like a circle or maybe you go from one corner with a diagonal and then back the other way, make a little triangle with all of your words minus the last one. And so all you need to do is you can move about with your seed phrase that you have that creates this grid. That seed phrase has nothing on it. That seed phrase is just, it looks blank or you can put a decoy amount on it. But if anybody starts messing around, they're not going to find anything.

But when you get back to a computer, you can get something like Sparrow wallet and you can say recover a border wallet. you type in your seed phrase and then it will show you your unique grid with all of the words organized in a specific way. And people are really good at remembering patterns. So you just draw your pattern in order and then you have your seed phrase. So this is designed specifically for short-term crossing of borders without an indication of what the information you have actually is. So it's border wall. It's really cool. I did a video on it. You can check that out to see further about how it works. Again, simplest answer, add a passphrase. More complex answer, use a border wallet if confiscation or theft or whatever is a high probability

for your situation. With that said, we will take another question here, but I'm going to do another giveaway really quick as well. Into the well it goes, get those lightning wallets ready. 210 sats once more last time we've had 210 210 and 500 before so whoever scans it first snags the stats congrats to whoever does and we're going to do one more question from the chat here so let me pull it up as as I get this off the screen but i have a quick question for you um have you ever done a guide on how to set up crux wallet

Not yet. I do have hardware here. I played around with it. It's going to be, it's on the list of things to check out. But yes, definitely, definitely. Man, crux wallet has been, it's, you know, I don't know too much to get into detail, but I just kind of label it as, it's like seat signer, but it's like seat signer's autistic brother. Like, you know, a seat signer is like, hey, we're going to This is how we do it, and we're going to get you there safely. And Crux is like, hey, we're going to get you there safely. But how we do that is up to you. And, man, if you set up a guide for that, like I said, Ben, I know if you see a rabbit hole, you're going to jump down in.

Yeah. Man, I, yeah, that is one that I personally, I am highly anticipating. Yeah. Yeah, crux is a really cool, a really cool. a really cool project and you're right it's very much um in line with the kind of the the seed signer uh type ethos like being able to create your own uh signing device from scratch from from run of the mill uh computing parts so that nobody nobody knows um that you own hardware uh which is really really awesome so that's that's on my list i did get one of those little you know there's a variety of different

types of devices you can use with it and all that. And yeah, so anyways, I think. When I got, I got gifted one in Nashville and the, my buddy helped me set it up. And, you know, when I got home from Nashville, I, man, the options they give you, you can roll it from a D6, D20. Yeah. The beauty of it is, is that you can store the seed onto the SD card. So, like, you know, I probably have a few million sets in that wallet, but, you know, it's just the ability to, hey, I could just plug and play. And it's just as secure.

Granted, you have to, I mean, yes, you have to trust crux to verify, you know, verify that the address is correct. But I have not had any issues. And Ben, if you decide to do a deep dive on that, you best believe. I will be right there to support you, buddy. I will absolutely take a look at that. There's one more question in the chat here too. Chad wants to know, how do you upgrade the Apollo to the new version?

What he's referring to is the future bit. So the future bit is like a home mining device. I just did a tutorial on it. Here's what it looks like if anybody's curious. It's just this funky little like, It's really sleek. That's the Apollo 2. So that's the newer version.

There was the Apollo 1 and it now has a new firmware. So like all of the, actually, I can even just pull up the dashboard. So you can see, I have the minor off right now because I wanted a little bit of peace and quiet for the episode. But it's super slick, like the dashboard and everything with the new upgrade is really cool. and then you're also running a full node and constructing your own blocks and running your own mining pool and everything all natively here.

In regards to upgrades, if you're already running a future bit, in the top right, there's this little power button and the version will be highlighted and you can click it and it'll ask if you want to upgrade. If you're on the old future bit, like the original Apollo,

I believe it involves taking out the SD card, flashing the new firmware, which you can get from the Future Bit website onto it, and then putting back in and plugging in the device again. Now, don't quote me on that. I'm going to have to double check, but I think that would very much be the case. As with the latest Umbroled major overhaul,

you had to do the same thing where you take out the SD card and format it. That would be my educated guess, but I could be wrong there. Last question here really quick from Evelyn. Also, Evelyn was trying so hard last episode to get the giveaway for the sats on Bitcoin well. And the scanning was, she was getting sniped every time.

So sorry, Evelyn. But I got a question about Albi slash Nostler slash primal. I think I deleted my secret key, but I can't figure out where to check. So if you're in primal, there should be, and let me just double check, I'm pulling it up on my phone right now. So in primal, if you click on your profile at the top left on your mobile, and then you go to settings. At the very top of that screen, there's something that says keys. One will say your public key, the other one will say your private key.

If you're not currently logged in or if everything looks very bare bones and there's nothing, then it may have wiped that. However, if you're on Albi, then that information would also be stored in your Albi account, which you can access from your browser plugin or if you log in to your Albi on getalby.com, you'll be able to grab it there as well. So it just kind of depends how you were using it.

But I doubt it would be deleted everywhere if you were kind of using all of those different tools, if you're using Albi and Primal, it's going to be in one of those two, unless you wiped all of the things at once. So it likely can be salvaged somewhere, but get that in a password manager is probably your best bet, just to keep it secure.

And I'm sure more secure options for Nostra Private Keys will be coming soon as well. With that, we are doing a rotation. Jason, I'm looking straight at you, and I'm going to cue you up with the same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? Well, it's funny that you were just talking about Noster there. And Evelyn, thanks for that question for a nice segue there.

I mean, nice and easy for me. Thank you. But yeah, I am bullish about on Bitcoin because of Noster. Now, both Bitcoin and Noster, I like to say like two sides of the same coin of communication. Money itself is the communication of value. It's how we communicate what things are worth to us. And Satoshi gave us a way of immutably and without censorship being able to save and transmit all of our, oh yeah, any of our value, any of our time, our labor.

Well, we now have the same kind of thing, but now we can communicate words like this, regular communication language, thanks to Noster. For any of you watching who aren't familiar with Noster, Noster is an acronym for notes and other stuff transmitted by relays. And that's basically what it is. It's notes and other stuff, any other data that you can transmit from your phone, from your computer. It goes out to other computers called relays that they relay that information to the others. And then it's picked up by other phones and computers. There's no central authority in charge of Nostr, just like with Bitcoin.

There's no token associated with it, unlike with Bitcoin. And there's no blockchain either because it doesn't need one. And so there are kind of like with the internet. You can get on the internet with different browsers. There are different clients for Noster. So like Ben was mentioning primal and my personal favorite is amethyst, but primal is also a great one. There's a there are a lot of them. Well, one other reason why I'm, well, and how this ties into Bitcoin is I'm very bullish because of the project I'm working on is called Satlantis.

It's like Satoshi and Atlantis put together. And that is a platform built on top of the Noster Protocol. So it is a Noster client like Primal and all the others. And what we're doing is kind of creating, oh, there it is. We're kind of creating, think of it like TripAdvisor meets Google Maps and Yelp and Facebook groups and all of that. And Ben's showing you how you can log in with a NOSTER. extension. Now, if you're not on Noster, this is one thing I love about it. If you're not on Noster, or it's her grandma, she's never heard of Noster. She can actually get on here and just create an

account with a username and password, send us her email address that just helps us to reinstate her account if she loses access to it later. And we will create an NSEC for her on the back end. We won't have access to it. It'll be encrypted and on her machine. But she won't have to know about monster. Now, Ben, if you go to one of those cities, it doesn't matter which one. Let's try U-Bood because I got married. Do you know. Oh, nice. I did not know that. Yeah. Now, scroll down a bit. So look at the feed here. These are all posts that if someone puts, like, if you post something here on Satlantis, it also shows up on primal and Domus and Amethyst and all the others. If you're using, say primal and you were to type in, I had a great day here in

Ubud and you did hashtag Ubud there with a picture because we're building this to look kind of like Instagram. So it includes an image with that. It will then show up here on the Ubud page on Satlantis. That's cool. Yeah. I'm actually very interested in all this. It doesn't stop there.

Actually go to the merchants tab. This is where it connects to Bitcoin, really. Go to the merchants tab. And here we've collected a bunch of merchants from some of our own research, but also we've asked some people who actually live there, or Bitcoiners, to send us information about merchants in this city, in all of our different cities that we have on here.

You can sort them, the local picks. That's like where people who actually live there have sent us a list of their favorite places, places that accept Bitcoin. And we've gone ahead and verified. some that like, oh yeah, they accepted Bitcoin like five years ago, but not anymore. So we've reached out to them and set down. Do you still except Bitcoin? Now, what we're really, the reason why we're really excited about this is we see this as

kind of a sly roundabout way of introducing merchants to Bitcoin and to Nostr, really, because people don't have to know that they're using Noster, and they also don't even know how, don't even have to know. there you go about Bitcoin to start using St Atlantis. But then once they do start using St Atlantis and they start seeing that there are Bitcoiners on there and the kind of things people are posting, it immediately shows them, hey, there's demand for this, for you to start accepting Bitcoin.

And if you want to be like one of these other cool cats here on Satlantis, then you better start accepting Bitcoin too. So it gives them a little bit of FOMO and shows them, hey, here are the people who live locally or people who live locally, or people who might be coming to visit, because it's kind of like TripAdvisor or Nomad List, or you can use it as a directory whenever you're traveling, traveling locally or traveling abroad,

and find whatever you need. And so that will immediately tell them, oh, hey, there's demand for this and start to get them into accepting Bitcoin. And when a business goes ahead and claims their business account on Stalantis, that business also gets a Nostura account. They get an NSEC in the background. Now, if you do this, if you're that business, or if you're, again, the grandma who signs up on Santantis, down to the bottom left corner bend, there's a, yeah, that gear there, right where it says log out between, so right above a logout and BTC sessions there, there would be a little thing that said, like, reveal private key. Now, you signed in with an extension, so that's not going to show up there. So then if the person learns about Noster later and they want to get into it, then.

and they can dig a little deeper here, find their private key, put it into something like Albi or keys. That band, something like that, and then log into Primal and see all their same followers, all the same people they're following, all their posts. It's all right there, but more in a Twitter format rather than a TripAdvisor meets Instagram format. Dude, this is pretty slick. It's been a while since I've checked this out. And I'm quite liking the breakout. Uh-oh, there's me.

I don't know. No, no. But this is pretty slick. I really do like this. And I, there's places again. Like I'm going to BTC Prague and stuff like that. This is super useful. And I'm just thinking of the sat market that we do here.

And I think, what is it, Bitcoin Sab market, sat market. If we could get our, we should probably get our, a bunch of our merchants that are local to here listed on St Atlantis would probably be not a bad idea. We've got, I think over the course of the events that we've had, we probably have had 50, 50 something, maybe 60 something different merchants that have been involved at one point or another in and around, you know, like selling and all that, it'd be great to get them on Satlantis.

And I love the kind of decentralized nature of and the censorship-resistant nature of having that marketplace there. I think that's super cool. But this is, this is like, so how long in the making has Sat-Land been so far? Since the first idea, I think it's been about a year since, since Alexander. Setsky and he was talking about some people last year we or sorry not last year it's 2025 now in 2023 and early 2024 we were working on another project myself and Alex and the rest of the team called the the spirit of Satoshi which is a little bit like a chat GPT but built on everything

ever said about Bitcoin we decided to move on from that and open sourced it so anyone can can still download it from a hugging face and run it on their own machine if they want. But we gave that up to the community and switch gears to St Atlantis. Our whole team pretty much switched over last April or May. So it hasn't really even been a year yet since we went full tilt, Satlantis. So this is really, really early. And I wanted to point out, though, also about the stats market.

Back there on all the pages, there's the merchants tab. but there's also the events tab that you can go to where this for meetup.com. I'm sure we all love meetup.com, that they're high fees and they never, I can attest this, they never get back to you with customer service support issues. But yeah, so we're looking to replace meetup.com and so everyone can just put all their events, their meetups, conferences, SATs, markets, anything like that right there in their city, on Satlantis. And one last thing,

if you look on satlantis.io and you don't see your city, then you can go to any of the cities and apply to become an ambassador for any city. Even if you go into, say, Vancouver, and you don't live in Vancouver, you're not applying to be an ambassador in Vancouver. You'll just apply to be an ambassador. I am actually the one who will get that message,

whatever message you send when you apply, and I'll send you some information to help you get started. And once you're set up as an ambassador, we can get your city up on Atlantis and get you going. That is awesome. I want to get commentary from the other gentleman in the room. Gary, I want to ask you kind of, I mean, what do you think of the idea of having this ability to kind of go anywhere and find not only the Bitcoin events, but the Bitcoin merchants and just kind of plug in. especially via something like Noster, what are your thoughts here? Well, I'm thinking in a future Bitcoin world, in theory, where we're all exchanging and storing value in Bitcoin,

it seems like this would be the natural place to go. It's basically like the yellow pages of the future. I'm probably dating myself by saying yellow pages here. I'm a real man, but yeah, like a global yellow pages. And you get everything there. I mean, it seems like a fantastic idea. The question is, when does it fully come fruition. When is this kind of an everyday thing that people be like, oh, yeah, I'll go check Atlantis. Is Bitcoin so ubiquitous and people communicating on Nostr so ubiquitous that this just becomes the default? Is this 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 50? And not that it necessarily needs to be a global thing for it to be successful. All you need are just, you know, a few people in audit and, you know, you can be running. But does this kind of become the default directory of the

world. I suppose possibly it seems fantastic. I'm going through the website. It looks beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I can say one more thing. Imagine if the, although it sounds like grepels here, because I'm talking so much. But imagine the yellow pages. And yeah, I'm dating myself too. I'm almost 40. But imagine yellow pages where you can open it up and it tells you like, you know, the text is changing on there. And it tells you what would probably be best for you, what you would like most. It's something I completely forgot to say. We haven't built this out yet.

We are, it is in the planning phase. Beyond planning, we're building it right now. Where because of Noster, Noster's social graph aspect of it, like, you know, you can sign to some websites using your Google sign in or your Facebook sign in, your Twitter sign in. Yeah, exactly. But with Noster, you only need your private key. And it works on that website and this client and that one. And so that allows us to, you know, connect you the same identity across all those different networks, all those different platforms.

Well, right now you go to Yelp or Google Maps or something and you look at a merchant and you look, you see it's a 4.5 star rating with 100 something. People who gave it that rating. You rated it. You don't know who these people are. You don't know how they're connected to you in the six degrees of separation. Are they some soccer mom that you've never, you don't have anything in common with? Or are they your next door neighbor? You kind of like, he's kind of annoying, makes those loud noises at night and whatnot.

Or is he, is he Ben here who gave that place a five-star rating? So what we're going to do is take all the, like the web of all the people you follow and the people they follow. and you'll see their reviews for different merchants first. Right there at the top and we'll wait it so that those people, their reviews will apply the most for what you'll see. So if I'm following a completely totally different group of people who have totally different interests, you might see a 1.0 rating and I'll see a 4.5.

We'll see totally different ratings and have a completely different experience for the merchants and just throughout all of Atlantis. And so just giving it that individualized approach that really wasn't possible before. It was kind of possible with the Internet 2.0. And now we're moving into Noster, the Noster world, really. And that's becoming very possible. It's really cool, man. Yeah, that's awesome.

Greples, any quick thoughts on Saldantis, Noster, and kind of how that plays into the greater Bitcoin ecosystem? Is for muting my mic? Yeah. Yeah, I got the hiccups. But, no, I was going to ask Jason, with Satlantis, are you going to offer LNURL addresses for Satlantis? I mean, if I sign up for Satlantis, can I get grepals at satlantus.

com LNURL? Because if that is something that you feel is, you know, worthy, I mean, hell, it has more benefits. fit for not only the network, but for what the project you're building. Now, all the technical details on how to set that up, I'm still probably, personally, I'm probably like three steps behind. I'm just now looking up how to set up BIP 353 for, for my node, because I have a domain that, I mean, if it's something that I.

I have to, you know, I mean, it's an internal thing. If I decide to move forward with it, I have the domain. I can set up the DNS. But, I mean, if you, if you are serious about, you know, expanding satlantis into Nostr, which, I mean, from personal experience, trying to grow your brand in Nostr is nothing like traditional services. It's Nostr.

It's, there's no advertisement. there's no there's no there's no hey this you know uh you know ex post got x amount of whatever likes it's it's it's you and um if that is something that you're willing to implement hell dude i uh i will gladly sign up for one if you're willing to to offer the participants of your network uh as atlantis dot com l and u r i feel like personally that would help not only your network grow, but I mean, obviously it helps the entire network grow because I mean, obviously it's based off lightning, which is based off Bitcoin, which, you know, I mean, for the for the network in general is a net positive. So I'm just wondering if that's something you guys have considered. Because prior, prior to our little group chat that we had, I had never even heard of San Atlantis. So it's something that I'm curious about. I'm not one much to travel. Now, besides this year, it's a little different. But, I mean, the fact that it exists, I was like, holy shit.

I'm like, you know, if you go to a location, hey, I'm here. And I could broadcast that to Nostr. I'm like, man, you should have the ability to, hey, no matter where I am, if it's, you know, within the Sattlantis network, I have a Sattlantis LN URL. And anybody can tip or verify on Noster through S Atlantis. that, you know, it's a legitimate account. I think that would be awesome. And that's my little, my two sets on that, on that topic.

Yeah, well, we are planning on adding zaps onto Satlantis, like the ability to zap people. And we do have the ability where we can, like, we can get a, say, grepels at satlantis. dot i.o as a noster you know nip 05 um but uh i'll definitely talk with the rest of the team about getting the uh um uh an ln URL uh thing set up where you can get the at at setlance dot i o suffix that's that'd be awesome dude yeah yeah would yeah thank and thanks for for bringing that up that's that's really cool i've this whole time i've been like uh joining communities so that I can follow and see because again I do travel around a bunch and so I just want to be kept up to date of some of these places that I'm going to be you know going to conferences

and all that kind of stuff I think it's I think it's a great resource but um we are going to be taking questions from the audience in a moment here and so I want everybody to queue up your questions when it comes to Satlantis, Noster, Noster and Bitcoin, all of that kind of stuff. Colonoscopies. Yeah, that too. I mean, especially colonoscopy. Yeah, I mean, we need the nitty-gritty details of that, I think, is in order. But yeah, please do.

Everybody in the chat, of course, thank you guys for continuing to make this a party. We appreciate it. We're at 136 likes. And I believe we had a peak concurrent viewers of, like a hundred and seventy something on YouTube, but if you look across all platforms, we've had well over, and that's just concurrent,

we've had over 4,200 people tune in over the course of the episode thus far. So thank you guys. Give yourselves a pat on the back. And if you can, smash that like button. We're at 136. I think my stretch goal is, let's get to 150 by the time we get through the audience questions.

And I've got some cued up right here. We're going to give away some. sats right now, but I'm also going to give a shout out to a company that I founded earlier and that Gary is a part of. And so I just want to give a quick shout out to, of course, my teammates, including Gary, over at Bitcoin Mentor. These guys just absolutely rock. I'm so proud of the team. Basically, we put it together in early, well, getting into mid-2024, actually, And it came from a place of I was doing one-on-one education sessions with people online. And I was just so inundated that I just didn't have any time to do anything else.

So basically, we put together an incredible group of educators. Nathan is another one. He's going to be part of the channel along with Gary coming up pretty quick here in February. You're going to start seeing their familiar faces around. But yeah, if you ever find that you've hit kind of your Bitcoin Ludite stage and maybe the free tutorials are not quite scratching that itch and you need to level up, you need some handholding. You can reach over at Bitcoin Mentor.io to check us out and book a session. But also, if you're looking to earn some additional sats over the course of the Bull Run, you can also become an affiliate of Bitcoin Mentor and the basically the way it works is that little QR code on the screen. You can sign that, scan that. You can sign up. You'll get your own special link. Just post it in your social media profile. Share it with anybody whenever they need some one-on-one help. And anybody that books a session through your link, you'll earn $21 to be paid out in Bitcoin at the end of the month for every session booked. So if somebody books 10 sessions, there's $210 coming your way at the end of the month in Bitcoin.

So yeah, you can stack some sats while other Bitcoiners stack skills. I think that's a great way to earn some extra. So, yeah, Bitcoin Mentor.io, and there's that affiliate link up on the QR code there. But with that, let's take some questions as soon as we give away some stats. So we'll get this up here on the screen. And if we, I see we're at like 141. If we can get up to 150 before the end of the episode, I'll do an extra. But I'm going to do two right now.

We'll see if it turns into a triple before we round out. So get those lightning wallets ready. There's another 210 sass. I'll leave those up there for a moment. And I will grab a question from the audience. And I got to do, there was a super chat there. Another one from A. And A asked, the Seed Hammer 2 looks awesome.

I wish more hardware wallets supported Seed QR too. Do you think it's safe to kill? an engraved metal plate with a mnemonic seed through airport security. I keep the 25th word in my head, of course. And then it goes on to say, are you coming to BTC Prague? So the answer to that is, again, the passphrase on top will make it more secure. If it's a metal plate, that's going to be seen through security. They may have some questions for you.

Depends out vague. You can be about it. seed the seed plates that are done by the seed hammer, it has some indication that is Bitcoin related. So I would just be cautious around that. If anything, your seed hammer should be maybe in the location that close to where your seed place are going to be held, like within driving distance. But I recognize that's not always possible if you're doing like a multi-sig and distributing them.

So, yeah, at the very least, if you're transporting those plates and they're part of a multi-sig, in that case, one key will not give access to your funds. So you can take that into account as well. So it's walking that tightrope of complexity to prevent people from getting in, but not locking yourself out at the same time. And yes, I'll see you in BTC Prox. I will be there in June. Very excited. It's such an awesome, awesome event. It's really, really great.

Let me grab another one here. And actually, we'll do another roll really quick. Refresh, get your lightning wall. It's ready. And I'll peruse the chat as I find another question here. Oh, I guess I better throw that in. Okay, I saw one earlier. Thanks, Gary.

Now there's colonoscopy questions in the chat. Great. There's nothing to be. Hey, Ben, can I recommend a question? Yes. In the chat? There's one I saw here from Mir Zen, a beginner with this whole concept of a decentralized social media system like Noster. Because it's unmoderated, how does it combat, bot, scammers, and harmful content?

I wonder if we could talk about that. Yeah, yeah, why don't you give the answer there? I think this is a perfect one for you to chat about. Okay. Yeah. There's actually several ways to answer it. I guess firstly, there's a lot of responsibility put on the individual user, but then also it depends on the app, the client that you're using

and how and what they do with that. And then, so like for example, I know, amethyst will have some things that will, like, you'll be blacked out with a little button that says show content. It's like, hey, are you sure you want this? I think primal has something where, like a setting you can do. I say, I don't want to see adult content or anything else like that. And so, you know, if you don't want to see any of that, then just click that. I know over on Satlantis, what we're doing is all the ambassadors for each of the cities.

and there's at least one ambassador in each city, they act as a moderator for the city. And so they actually have the ability to delete content from Satlantis. Now, it doesn't delete it from Noster. It still exists out there in the different relays, but it does delete it from that Stalantis page. And let me see. Oh, yeah, and then the other method would be there's certain relays that you can choose connect to. There's some relays that say, no, we will not relay any information that has this

kind of content in it. Now, some people will want to avoid those relays, but you might want to connect to those relays intentionally. That's the beauty of Noster. You can choose what client to use. You can choose what relays to use. And then within those clients, you can choose what you do with what you see or what you could see. And so it really does put the responsibility, but the flip side, the freedom on the user, on the individual. like the idea of filtering and being able to choose kind of your own feed rather than, you know, the, the algorithm per se being placed upon you. And so these ideas of finally curating your own feeds, I think is fantastic. And we are seeing that in things like primal and amethyst,

like you can go and you could subscribe to certain feeds that have certain types of content that users will tag as such. And I think that's great. I think it's just a completely different approach to how you're going to go about spending your day. Like if you find yourself, you're on X or something and you're just constantly pissed off, you don't really have as much control over that.

You can start deleting stuff. But it picks up on like if you respond, again, And it, it interprets any engagement as positive and let's serve more of it. So when you see something that angers you and you, you know, repost and say, this is ridiculous or respond to it and say, ah, this was a horrible take or whatever, it's just going to serve you more of that. So, yeah, it's definitely a different approach here. There was a question, and Gary liked it.

Can Bitcoin grant me personal sovereignty, or will I always be a subject to the government? I mean, I think we get to have a little bit of the sovereign individual thesis play out. I think we're starting to see the early innings of that. There's, I mean, unless you're living in a full state of anarchy, there's going to be some form of local governance. but I like the idea of getting back to more local governance because who better to dictate the way that a small community lives than the community itself. And I think that we run into a lot of the issues that we're seeing because you get governments, large overarching governments trying to dictate the lifestyles of diverse people across such large swaths

of land and different communities and different resources and everything. and they're saying, everybody lives this way. Here's the rules for everyone. Like even Canada, like it's 40 million people, which compared to the U.S. It was like one-tenth the size. But like Canada is huge, and the difference from one place to the other

is very, very divergent. And so to say, like, this is the rule of law for everybody doesn't necessarily make sense. And in the U.S., same thing. Like, you guys have a little bit more play from state to state where there's more power, to dictate what the rules of the land are in each state. But I mean, the federal overreach is a very real thing for you guys too.

And it's gotten, in my opinion, a little bit out of hand. So I don't know what you guys think about that. I feel like the question was made in jest a little bit, but I don't know. I think it's worth touching on. What do you guys think? If I can. Ben, first of all, you have a fantastic mustache. I have been looking at it this entire time.

beautiful 10 out of 10 secondly can bitcoin provide you sovereignty i know right now we're we're edging all the time high and for those of us who have been here uh you know six

seven seven years even though we are you know dancing with that all time high it's nothing uh fiat has no bottom so therefore bitcoin can have no top. I can't quote who said that, but that is the truest statement. So even right now, I mean, I guess, I mean, I've seen it out on the internet. You know, everybody's like, oh,

we're in the euphoria phase. You know, it's everybody's like, all of us long term, hard losers are like, yay, which is true. But it is nothing compared to the end game. So even if right now you look at it and you're like, holy shit, it's $105K. It's price, I mean, $100 doesn't even get you $100,000 sets anymore. It's, it's bittersweet for those who have been here. For those who are coming in, just know $100 eventually will not get you $10,000. So I, you, and I, I've explained this to, uh, to, to, to my stack chain group.

Um, you know, uh, personally, and maybe it's just me, but one sat equals one dollar i see that parity coming to fruitation sooner than most people anticipate and uh and that that's the catch especially with like the sbr and everything that's happening in the fiat world um it is it's inevitable yeah so i mean i like what you said there like saying okay well picture one sat equals whatever even even picture like if if you're being bearish. Picture 100 sats equals a dollar. A sad is a sat cent parity. If you think that is ever going to come to fruition, then that's basically a 10x from here. Think of if you had the opportunity to buy $10 for a dollar, how much of that deal would you take? The answer is all of the

money always would go into that. Well, so that's like I tell people, you know, like the people that ask me out in the Fiat world. Like, what do you see what happening with Bitcoin? I'm like, a dollar buys you a thousand dollars of tomorrow's money. Why wouldn't you take that? Why wouldn't you?

And even if you, even if you might not understand all of the concepts that come with it, that right there. And that's like, you know, big shout out to Manuel from Michigan. But like I told his mom today, I was like, I'm like, you know,

no matter who's in charge, no matter if it's Trump, a Democrat, a third party, which if that happens, I mean, hallelujah, a third party getting into the presidency, that would be wild. But no matter who the hell's in there, they're always going to print money. It doesn't matter Republican, Democrat, third party, they're always going to print money. and the ability to say, hey, you know what? And I guess I don't want to say it's like institutionalization, but I mean like a lot of people have been institutionalized to the current form of money management. Like hey, you know, don't save your money because you only get 3% inflation. We say it's 2%, but it's it's really like 5.

you know and uh you know it's it's it's it's about you know it like i like i told uh my coworker uh you know it's about asking yourself what money is because prior to to the daloo uh it was gold bullion prior to gold bullion we used freaking uh rye stones probably before before that it was seashells you know and then that's that's the concept of what money is and if you can understand that in the long term one set will equal one dollar. I can't tell you when, but I can tell you, I'm pretty positive within my lifetime. I'm fairly young. Now, within my lifetime, I will see that. And when that happens, not only is my generation, but generations to come financially secured to where

they don't have to be like oh crap I have to get a high wage white collar job pay $200,000 to tuition no it's and this is what for me it cements it

for me because I'm like you know if if my son decides it you know what I want to go work at just I want to be a greeter at Walmart and I can I have that of power to be like you can you can do that if you want to tell people every day for the rest of your life hey thanks for getting your shit get out uh you can do that and you will not have to worry

financially about the life that you live you can do as you wish and still be secure and that is why uh like gosh ben like i said that's 150k on the title that's ridiculous I'm telling you, man. One set to $1.1 parity is inbound. Maybe this epoch, I can't guarantee that, but within the next two epochs, like, E-Tac 8. Oh, love. Let's just to kind of prove your point in and around, like this sat-sent parody, a

sat-dollar parody over time. So, timechain calendar.com, you can actually hit the little magnifying glass here, and you can search by date. If we go back not that long ago to like 2020, and let's go to like, and this was, in and around March was when we had the like the crash and everybody's freaking out about everything. But take a look. Just I'll cancel it for a sec, but look at how many sats a dollar gets you right now,

957. Let's just see how many you could have gotten in 2020. March, let's do, yeah, somewhere in and around here. Go, how many sats for a dollar back then? 10,893. So like 11 times as many sats, basically. Take me back. Yeah, right?

It's just you don't realize how quickly this slips away from you, the ability to get more sats and like but that but that that directionality of it is forever right like it's just dollars will all they're always be creating more dollars and they will never be creating more bitcoin and so this reality of oh i could get you know almost 11 000 stats for a dollar and you go to today and now it's sub a thousand sats and uh yeah that's that's that's wild yeah it's absolutely to see when you realize, like, you have, in a way you have forever, because it'll always be better to get in Bitcoin than to be in dollars. But it's also these fleeting moments of like the stats are slipping through your fingers. You, you, the opportunity you have today, you will not have in a very short period of time.

And you'll have to take a different lesser opportunity later. but there'll always be opportunity as long as you're making a transition from dollars to sats so see that's where uh i don't feel the general public understands i mean uh eight years two epochs is a short amount of time but the general public views that as a decade and i're like that's forever and it's like no it's just preserving your your value to society through a decentralized system And that right there is so, I guess as, as most people would say, it's not priced in. Because a lot of people don't take that into consideration. I mean, if you would have gotten to Bitcoin, you know, eight years ago, you probably don't really, you know, focus too much on what price is. Like, that is the beauty and that kind of takes me back to what I was saying. It's just this gray, malleable substance. And whether you owned it eight years ago or today,

it's still just this gray blob in your hands. But that blob has the potential to set you not only way ahead of your peers, but in the form of sovereignty, it allows you to do as you see fit. And that is not priced in, in my opinion. Not at all. And I want to say to the chat, congrats. We hit 150 likes. We're going to give away one more giveaway.

I'll do it right now. Get those lightning wallets ready. And in the coin goes and up the QR code, whoever scans it first will snag another 210 sats. So congratulations. Gentlemen, the time has come to round out here. but I want to kind of throw one last question your way. So let's do like a yay or nay on the strategic reserve. One, what do you guys think?

Yay, nay, where you sit? I say yay. Yeah. Yeah, I think it'll happen. Yeah. Grapples? I want to say yay, but I remember back in that. When RFK was talking about it, and I think they were saying that they were going to buy, I think it was like 400 Bitcoin a day.

And it still took them to reach their goals. It took them 20 years. Me and my buddy, we did the math because we were sitting at the stack chain house board. I'm cutting you off right now. That's completely understandable. Gary is going to answer now. Gary, yay or nay on the reserve? I don't know if the ability, the institutional will, the political is going to be there to have a full reserve.

I could see them doing something like, again, some sort of limited thing where it's, we're going to take the existing SATs, existing Bitcoin that we've captured, that we've seized by the government. And, you know, we're going to set that aside and we'll call that the reserve for now. I could see something like that. Ideally, while returning Ross's to him, would be great. I mean, free Ross in the first place would be a much greater victory, in my opinion. I think that's the number one priority. But, yeah, I mean, the thing that I think we have coming is a strategic Bitcoin and shit coin reserve.

I think that's a very likely possibility, which it hurts my soul a little bit, but I will say Matt Cratter had a tweet the other day that I really liked. He was like, I actually love the idea of a strategic shit coin reserve. I would love all of the biggest idiots in government in the room to buy up as much trash as they can so that they can burn away all their money. I would love that. That's a solid take. If the dollars is sinking Titanic, we want all of them on that one light boat with a leak in it. Yeah. Yeah.

Perfect. Exactly. Yeah. So I'm not opposed to that. Anyways, gentlemen, we're going to round out here. I want to thank all of you guys so much for being here. I want to thank everybody in the chat for being here. If you can, make sure you do smash that like button.

If you haven't already, subscribe to the channel and check out all these gentlemen. Their handles are in these show notes down below. Jens, thank you for being here. And until next time, everybody, keep stacking stats, keep stacking skills. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This was your daily session. Huddled their Bitcoin.