BTC Sessions - BTC Sessions BITCOIN CHRISTMAS SPECIAL 2025 — Guests: Mow, Booth, Pouliot + More!

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Join a star-studded cast of Bitcoiners for my annual Christmas special? What were the big moments of 2025? What's in store for 2026? Macro, freedom technology, community and more!Special guests: Samson Mow, Mark Moss, Joe Consorti, Alex Gladstein, Femi Longe, Francis Pouliot, Jeff Booth, Guy Swann, Mike Peterson, Isabella Santos, Joe Hall and much more!------------------------------SHOW SPONSORS:BITCOIN WELL BUY BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6ABUNDANT MINES White-glove Bitcoin mining servicehttps://abundantmines.com/boomersCOINKITE/COLDCARD (5% discount):https://qrco.de/bfiDBVAQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://qrco.de/bfstCnDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCp------------------------------

Debt is growing faster than the economy. Effectively, we're borrowing from future generations. You're a mean one, Mr. Powell. QTQE, American still lose. It's a ticking time bomb that nobody can diffuse, Mr. Powell. We print it digitally. You're a common counterfeiter, and we're on to your room. For spending is necessary.

Did it spark the inflation? It may have contributed. They've contributed a little bit to the inflation. You're a monster, Mrs. Yellen. You're the ghost of Qie past. You printed cash like it was nothing. Now we're paying through the ass, Mrs. Yellen. You're an overpaid toadstool.

Who f***ed the middle class? You're a vile one. Mr. Stama. You're the king of the thought police Arresting citizens for posting memes while criminals get released, Mr. Stalmer! You're truly incredible, I mean honestly, I've never seen anyone. Tank a country with such speed. Your foul one

is the right. A digital euro is your daughter. A digital euro is your daughter. is your dream. Your big brother wearing lubotons, a surveillance fetishizing skunk. Miss Lagarde. The three words that best describe

the EU's economy are as follows, and I quote, Sink, Sank, Sank, Sank, SONC. You're a rata, Miss Vond, Lion, You're an enemy of free speech. You slap fines on X while your own scandal stay out of reach, Miss Fonderlander! The European Commission is an opaque scandal-ridden trashy. Buy bureaucrats, four bureaucrats, you worship the god of bureaucracy,

smothering the people of Europe with your totalitarian fetishes, you regulate instead of innovate, and none of you parasites were elected by citizens. You are anti-freedom and serve only yourselves. But there's good news if you watch this far and we can fight their tyranny. Using common sense and freedom tools to defend our privacy and last but not waste. They're about to print so much fucking money. It's going to break your brain.

And nothing stops this train. So bank, we have the ability to create money digitally that actually increases the money. Hello everybody and welcome to the annual Sessions Christmas special. Very happy to have you all here again. It's been a hell of a year, and we've got some awesome guests lined up for you this year. We're also doing some giveaways, which I'll quickly touch on before we get started

and we bring in our first panel. So first off, I did want to take the opportunity, given the season, one of the best things that you guys could possibly do right now would be to support the samurai developers that are literally facing prison just days away. So if you want to go and sign the petition, there is a QR code on the screen right now. The website in question is bill nkione.org. That's bill and k-e-o-n-n-e-d-org.

And you can head there and you can sign the petition and we'll kind of keep tabs on it over the course of the night and see how many additional signatures we can get. But with that, I want to welcome and get our first panel going. And so I've got gentlemen waiting in the wings to come in, so I'd love to welcome to the stage, Mr. Samson, now Joe Consorti and Mark Moss. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Appreciate you coming on for the Christmas show. And how are you guys doing?

Fantastic. Yeah, doing great. What an awesome trailer that you just played before we came on. That was so good. I think it ended perfectly that they're going to print so much effing money from Walker. I think that perfectly sums up what's happening right now. 100%. So shout out to Carla and her moderately talented husband Walker for being the upside down chin there.

If you want to check, of course, the Bitcoin podcast and a crypto couple on YouTube and give them a follow up. That'd be amazing. But, jents, let's chat all the interesting stuff that's been going on this year, maybe subverting expectations in and around what was going to happen to Bitcoin. The institutions are here. You know, people are stockpiling Bitcoin. Sailor is stacking more with his left pinky little fingernail than I could possibly stack in my entire life on an average Tuesday. So what the hell is going on? You know, people expected Moon.

2025 October was dumpedover. and we're sitting at around 86K right now. What have been the major factors affecting Bitcoin, adoption, price, all of that for 2025 to start? What has come to fruition so far? So maybe Samson, I'll get your take on it so far. Well, I think 2025 has been a bear market. And then we came down on October 10th. And I could see some big players in the space forcing the price under 100K.

So there are a lot of factors that play here. I think the traditional markets, they're extracting value from Bitcoin through various financial instruments. And you have also the four-year cyclores, the people that believe in the four-year cycle that kind of think, okay, Bitcoin hit the peak. 126 was it. And 2026 is a bare market. And then you have to factor in the quantum believers, too, that the quantum computing is about to destroy Bitcoin.

And then there was a third one. What was it? It's not coming to me now. But maybe it was the yen carry trade unwinding. But there's this all, all of these things are sort of a mid-curve, mass market, media amplified and fed sentiment. And the thing about sentiment is it's really the bulk of the market. It is the middle curve, right?

It's not the first principle thinkers that are analyzing and understand Bitcoin, understand the technology, understand the problems endemic within the current financial system. They're just kind of reading the news that looks bad and thinking, okay, well, it's over. So that's kind of the reasoning that I have for the market being in the lull that we're in now. But I see 2026 as being a reversal of that. Interesting. Okay. Well, we're going to get into our ideas of what we think is coming down the road for 2026 in a little bit.

But I maybe want to go to Joe next as well. And say, Joe, what do you see as the major factors that have been affecting Bitcoin over 2025 when it comes from a macro stance? Hey, before Joe goes, sorry Joe, just getting a wind out of you. I hate to tell you this, but I got an emergency that just came up. That's why I've been texted on my phone and I got to jump off. So I was super, super looking forward to this. Thanks for inviting me on here. I love hanging out with Joe and Samson.

It's an emergency. I got to go, though. So sorry about that. That's okay. I hope everything as well, Mark, wishing you all the best. Yeah, we're going to be okay, but I got to go deal with this. So be well. Be well.

See, yeah. Cheers, Mark. Have Merry Christmas. And if there are any other macro affluent friends out there that want to join the panel, shoot me a DM and I'll bring you in here. But Joe, let's go to you. What have you thought about 2025 thus far? What have been the major influences?

What's driving everything? So a couple of things. I mean, number one, Bitcoin is it trades as this high beta risk asset, right? Samson and Ben, both of you guys know that Bitcoin obviously is the apex risk off asset. it's the asset everybody wants to own in good times and bad. Ideally, if markets were trading on perfect information, then Bitcoin would have traded a lot like gold this year. It would have done what gold did, but to a much larger degree than gold,

but it didn't, unfortunately. And it's traded a lot with tech, and therefore it's traded a lot with the fears surrounding what the Fed is doing and the concentration that we're seeing in the broader equity market. If you remove the major AI hyperscalers and the Mag 7 from the S&P 500, it'd actually note that the S&P 500's performance this year wasn't all that great. And if you line it up with Bitcoin, it kind of looks a lot like what Bitcoin's price is done. And so Bitcoin is kind of telling you what risk sentiment should be doing

if it wasn't for all of the AI hyperscalers, all the CAPEX and things like that. You take a look at the equal weighted SMP 500. It looks a lot more similar to what Bitcoin is doing. The most recent move we're seeing today, I'll talk about that, then I'll zoom out. Bitcoin, obviously very choppy for this entire month. Today you're seeing a broad base move downward in equities and Bitcoin. So it's not entirely related to Bitcoin. But this year at large, I think there are a couple of issues. Number one, I think the bull market that would have otherwise been delegated for this year was pulled forward to November 6th of last year when Trump was elected. Obviously, Trump was touted as the Bitcoin president. And so from Bitcoin native perspective,

you can imagine a lot of money was on the line for the pro-Bitcoin policies that were in the way, on the way, if Trump was elected president. That happened. We saw Bitcoin surge from $64,000 all the way up to $100,000 before year end. chances are that may have been reserved for this year. It also has to do with Bitcoin in the way that it trades now and the types of flows that are coming into the market. So rather than these boom and bus cycles have passed, which we're not experiencing anymore, this is why I believe the four-year cycle is dead. These Bitcoin-native factors don't play as much into it is because of the types of buyers that are in the market now. ETSs, namely, people who are bidding systematically every two weeks without fail, right, with their paychecks that are coming in. And also these pensions, these endowments, you see Harvard buying.

They're much more structural buyers. They're much more measured. It's not as driven by derivatives and things like that anymore. So you have a much less volatile market. And the other thing, the other major reason I believe Bitcoin underperform this year is the expectation of the four-year cycle. Samson, this is the point that you were getting at. Even if the Bitcoin having doesn't have as much to do with Bitcoin's price as it did in cycles prior, I believe that it's kind of null in void at this point.

95% of the supply has been issued doesn't necessarily have an impact on price like it used to. People still believe that it would happen. And so you had a lot of limit orders that were placed in anticipation of the four-year cycle happening and next year being a down year. And so they decided to sell. And that's what I believe has correlated to, has caused rather the Bitcoin underperformance this year compared to equities. It's just a game of expectations, right? And when everybody believes 2025 is going to be a banner year for Bitcoin, we had all of these narratives.

October, MoonVember, I don't even know what the one was for December. Chances are Bitcoin has a tendency to do the exact opposite. So I digress there. That's why I think Bitcoin is underperformed this year. But it's looking great in 2025 or 2026, rather. Amazing. I've got a question in regards to some speculation that has been made in and around. And also I want to say a welcome to my co-host with the most Mr. Nathan Fitzsimmons.

How are you doing, man? I'm doing well, team. I'm doing well. I hope Mark is okay. I hope everything's going well. I hope it gets settled and all straightened out. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully that was an annoying thing to deal with and not a super serious thing to deal with.

So we should mark the best. Okay. You had to go buy Bitcoin. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, that's a good opportunity. 86K. I've got to run.

Yes, 100%. Now, there's been some speculation as well in and around. oh, it's OGs dumping Bitcoin. And I want to get the thoughts of Samson and Joe here. Samson, I'll go to you first. Is it just the OGs are outpacing the institutions? What is going on? Yeah, so that was the probably the other one I was going to mention earlier.

Like that was another big narrative probably a month ago. OGs are selling. But the thing is, you can't really tell that OGs are selling, right? I think GlassNode put out something today like OGs are accumulating. So, you know, you can't just look at on-chance. behavior and say this is a certain thing. You can't look at flows to exchanges and say, okay, well, the exchanges got more coins. OGs are selling. I think there are maybe a few individual cases where you can identify, like an address that has been tagged, like Owen Gundin,

and you see, okay, Owen Gunden moved to Cracken, right? And that might be a sale, but also it could have been hedged or it could be something else entirely, right? Like, there are many things that you can do on exchanges, you can use margin to buy, you can borrow, you can do a number of things, right? So I think the whole narrative about OG selling is just part of some coordinated campaign to suppress the price. Like, it's just not knowable in any way, like with all on-chain analytics. It could be people redoing multi-sig, just moving to what they believe to be quantum safe addresses. Like, there's so many things. Just or just. just redoing your security, right? Any on-chain movement could be any number of things.

And you can't say with any clarity that OGs are selling. But of course, the mainstream media loves to grab the simplest narrative and run with it. And people buy it. The mid-curve buys it. Joe, do you have anything to add there? What I'll add there is that even if OGs have been selling and they've been dumping a lot of Bitcoin, they've seen 100 or 120 years, a big psychological level, I think it's a huge testament to Bitcoin's resilience that it's managed to hold up as well as it has, right? You think about Bitcoin's prior drawdowns when we've entered into proverbial, you know, quote-unquote bare markets in Bitcoin's institutional era, which is the era where now, who's to say what classifies a bear market and what doesn't. But Bitcoin's only down, peak to trough, it's actually a little bit up now, 35% from its all-time high.

Historically, when we talk about bare markets, you're talking about a 75% drawdown or more, right? in the depths of 2022, we were down 75%. We're only down 35% now. So even if there has been this massive, very coordinated, very distributed, and systematic selling, Bitcoin is held up extremely well. The only thing that, and you're exactly right, Samson, you can't tell based on on-chain behavior. You can look at long-term holder cohorts, and it is true that over the past week, James Van

Straten just tweeted this out and it came to mind, long-term holders sold over 137,000 Bitcoin, but that could mean any number of things. When on-chain behavior kicks in, they could just move it to a different wallet, right? Any movement of a coin on-chain turns them from long-term holders, someone who's held for 155 days or more to short-term holders. We actually don't know who's selling. The only case I can think of that comes to mind of an actual Bitcoin whale that we know of being sold is when Galaxy facilitated the sale in July of a Bitcoin whale who is selling 80,000 Bitcoin. So I don't necessarily scribe to the idea of OG whale selling. But just to not look at the data and take a step back here, I do think that $100,000 was a key psychological level that did create a lot of selling pressure.

If you think about it this way, when China banned mining back in 2021, when FTX and Celsius and BlockFi and all of these other players blew up in 2022, 100,000 Bitcoin was a pipe dream. It was something that nobody ever anticipated. And for folks who mined on their laptops in 2011 and 2012, and some of the people who've been buying Bitcoin as early as that as well, they never thought through all of that they'd reach $100,000. It stands to reason that once that happened, that proved to be a key psychological selling point. And so that's why we've channeled around there this entire year. That's entirely speculation. That's not data dependent at all. But it stands to reason that that's the case.

And now that we've spent an entire year here, it's hard to argue that anybody who hasn't sold yet is still planning on selling. I think we've seen all of the cell pressure, all of the major cell pressure that we would have seen at this year at this level throughout the year, which sets a great stage for 2026 moving forward. I'm going to correct one thing you said. $100,000 was a pipe dream that nobody believed would happen except for Samson Mal. That's right. I still think half any is right. We're going to 10 million. But anecdotally, just from the OGs that I know, no one has.

has really been selling. Like if you go back a few years, all the OGs I know are already pretty well established. They have everything they need. There is no catalyst at 80k, 90k, 100K, that they need to sell everything and sell it on mass. Like everyone is established. I think a lot of Bitcoin holders have some natural diffusion selling Bitcoin for expenses, but there's nothing in the circle that I know where anyone is particularly selling. I think another contributing factor of those long-term holder days destroyed, Joe, is probably rotation into treasury companies too, like the swapping Bitcoin for equity and a different vehicle for various reasons.

And you might have opinions on treasury companies, but that is probably one of the factors where you see movements of old coins as well. And I think it's just all amplified and misunderstood because people don't understand all this nuance. They just see the headline and that is it. Exactly. There's not a lot of noise and a lot of OGs decided to participate in these pipe deals. So not selling their Bitcoin, but getting exit liquidity or at least liquidity without having to sell their BTC. So there's just way too much noise with Onshane data to determine whether or not these OG whale balances are actually selling or they're just moving to new wallets to participate in these pipe deals. Yeah. Does this have to do

with the in-kind redemption that was allowed? So like people that have fiscal Bitcoin, can move into ETFs or something like that without having to sell and then buy the ETF? Is that true? I mean, potentially, right? It's a more efficient vehicle from a tax perspective. If you're talking about in your 401k or your IRA, for a lot of people, the ability to hold Bitcoin in their IRA or their 401K is much more beneficial from a tax perspective. Whether or not, you know, I'm a big self-custody proponent.

We're obviously building a horizon now. We've built Thaya. It's still going on. multi-sig self-custody company. I'm a huge believer in it, but I would be in denial if I said that I think the majority of people who hold Bitcoin will do it in self-custodial fashion. It's a future I want to realize, but the reality is right now, most people are comfortable holding Bitcoin via an ETF at their brokerage. And so it stands the reason that a lot of folks who were holding Bitcoin in spot fashion, maybe in cold storage or on an exchange are shifting it into their IRA, their 401k

or other related retirement account for tax purposes. That totally makes sense to me. I haven't done a lot of research on it or the flows surrounding it. But again, anecdotally, that that certainly stands the reason that that could be happening. If this is you in the chat, let us know. Otherwise, let us know if you're a hardcore self-custy maximalist. I think I know what the majority of answers will be, but do let us know. Nathan, I wanted to toss it to you. I don't know if you came in and had any burning questions for Samson or Joe, but feel free to let loose if you do. Yeah, guys, I want to get your sense of something because there's been something I'm trying to get my head around, maybe the implications of it as well, too. And this idea, like, to me, it seems like largely, markets aren't really driven by any sort of fundamental basis.

It's not like really investors are looking at the company going, oh, I think they have a great management team and, you know, productivity seems to be kicking up. So I'm going to invest in that. It seems very much kind of momentum and just passive, passive allocation going into like the top seven. So the reason I want to kind of bring that up is I'm wondering if we almost have to have this kind of like, and I hate to use such a kind of harsh term. but like we almost have to kick out the tourists a little bit, almost like to wash out the leverage. And by destroying the four-year cycle, that was one of the most important things that probably needed to happen for us to have that next leg up. So I was just pulling up the chart. And I was looking at, we got silver's hit in 66.

We've got gold is at like 4,300 or something at the moment now as well too. Both kind of going to showing the science at the same time as I saw oil was at 55 U.S. per bail, which for me would show kind of declining economic activity. All right, we're seeing a little bit of this flight to safety. Why isn't it happening to Bitcoin? And I almost feel like, and Joe, Samson, I want to get your take on this. The most bullish thing that could happen to Bitcoin is that it closes the year under the start, which I believe was like 94K, just so that that narrative is done. And anyone who didn't understand why they held it, they never listened to Sands and they never listened to Sessions or Joe

and understood the importance of Bitcoin. They kind of leave, maybe they stopped playing leverage gains and then we're kind of off to the races. Any thoughts on like almost thing to bottom out in sentiment before we can have the next leg up? I think that's right. I mean, what's the saying, Bitcoin looks dumpiest right before it's the pumpiest, right? So you do need to flush it out. And another data point I have is that like this past year, it wasn't necessarily OG selling, maybe some. But it was a lot of more recent buyers, the ones that bought at maybe 70, 80K, taking like a 10K profit off of what they what they have.

And for them, that was good enough. So it is kind of what you're saying. in like flushing out of the tourist. So that compiled with the sentiment, it paves the way for a very bullish 2026 because any movement up, even if we don't get an all-time high, it breaks that whole narrative of the four-year cycle,

which never really existed, right? Each cycle is basically a coin toss. You don't say, okay, I tossed the coin four times and it went to heads, heads, tails, and it's going to do that forever. That's just not the case. And people don't really understand that either. So it just goes to show how difficult Bitcoin is to understand that there is no cycle.

And even all the models, they don't really work. I mean, Bitcoin could suddenly shoot up 100K, 200K in a very short time. And that would destroy every single model out there. But that is exactly what we will likely see because Bitcoin is not a tech stock. It is the replacement of the legacy financial system with a new asset. And you can't chart that. You can't do TA on that. When it happens, it happens.

And you just have to be ready and be prepared. I completely agree, Joe, I want to get your thoughts with you. But I just wanted to add to that, like, the thing that Bitcoin can't still do Bitcoin things, like we just saw gold go on one hell of a run here. And how many trillions did we pile into the gold market cap? Oh, you could easily sneak another couple trillion into Bitcoin in a very short period of time. But Joe, your thoughts? Let me just prime me with that, though.

Absolutely. So speaking of gold, gold is now $30.4 trillion, I think. It reached an all-time high near $4,500. Look, it's insane the amount of flows that have gone into gold. And so to think that this last month, gold is up 7%. The amount of money required to move Bitcoin by that percentage would be much smaller, right? So you take literally 10% of the flows that went to gold and put them into Bitcoin. and instead of seeing a 7% gain over the last month, you see a 70% gain over the last month.

And so it's really a question of rotation from risk on to risk off, right? I think to your earlier point, I think that the four-year cycle, it dying is one of the most beneficial things that can happen for Bitcoin. A lot of traders, mental models, whether we're talking retail or the people who actually move the price, these major head funds and financial institutions, hedging activity, everybody is betting that the four-year cycle will be in place. And so ending the year of 2025 down is perhaps the most bullish thing that can happen. Because, you know, there have been all of these different narratives about what Bitcoin can and can't do.

I was talking to Sam Callahan the other day, who's now at Orange Bitcoin. And we were talking about, okay, you know, all of these, all of these different things that we say about Bitcoin, these cycles and these models, none of them actually hold me away. If you'll remember back in 2021, the narrative was, oh, Bitcoin can't fall below a prior cycle high. And then it did, right? Bitcoin fell from $69,000 all the way to $16,000, the bottom of the bear market. And so this would be another helpful narrative to break to further cement that Bitcoin isn't an asset that you can necessarily track that you can apply this kind of cycle theory to. The one model that I do ascribe to, and this plays into what you were talking about earlier,

Ben or Nathan. And this is also something that you and I had discussed when I was on the bullish bit. I think last week, the week before, is that Bitcoin is much more tightly correlated to the business cycle than previously. And so if you look at things like the ISM, PMI, either for services are manufacturing, which is sentiment in the U.S. economy. If it's expanding, Bitcoin's roaring. If it's contracting, Bitcoin's falling over the last two and a half to almost three years now, sentiment in the U.S. economy has kind of just been flatlined to debt. If you look at the manufacturing and the services sector, yet Bitcoin has managed to rip from $16,000 all the way up to $126,000. So I think moving into next year, not to get ahead of myself here when we talk about

2026, moving into next year now that we have outright monetary easing, we have the Fed cutting, And they've also embarked on a $40 billion a month asset purchase program, which they gave a new acronym to. They're not calling it QI. The runway is clear for Bitcoin to take off here, heading into 2026. Gold kind of sniffed it out first, and now Silver's making its move. Silver's up 33%. I'm looking at my monitor. 33%.

Gold had its move over the last couple of months. It handed the baton off to silver. Sooner later, as risk moves further along the risk curve, as people go from their known things and the unknown things and the more risky things, Bitcoin will have the baton handed through it soon enough. And when it does, I don't want to take words out of Samson's mouth, but Omega Candles may be loaded. Samson, did you see the image for the show, the little poster,

because you're sitting atop the Omega Candle? Thank you for that, Ben. That's great. No problem, no problem. Also, you know, your quote here, there is no cycle. I think that's an excellent, I think that's an excellent meme that we should all partake in from now on. There is no cycle. Yeah. So I'm wondering then, I'm looking forward to 2026.

Like for me, even for Bitcoin to be up moderately in 2026 or to even just, even very moderately, hit a new all-time high, even for a period of time, would, again, that would be the next thing on the list to break the previous assumption of four-year cycles. Again, like going below the previous all-time high in the last bear market, hitting a new all-time high before the halving, all of these different things happening, that would be the perfect complement to this past four years would be everybody thinking 26 is going to be an absolute, an absolute, you know, horrible bear market and we see some new highs. Do you think, do you think that's reasonable in the car at Samson? Like, what are you sussing out for 2026? Well, I've been

bullish for a very long time thinking that we're going to hit a million after the ETF's launch, because the biggest barrier that that removed was the onboarding process, right? You're basically like ETS are like a layer two for boolers, right? It aggregates all the demand and there's no need to onboard with an exchange and get your account set up. You just go with what you've got already, your swab account or your whatever account, fidelity, and you just get Bitcoin. So there is no more barrier to entry to Bitcoin. So when it runs, there is no.

dampener on that. And I think what Joe was talking about, like, gold, everyone thought gold will never have a big move, but gold had a massive move. And Bitcoin can have an even greater impact, because the gold market is not that accessible. And you have to also factor in with the gold market, you know, that that big move is not $15 trillion coming in in the spot market. These market caps move at a multiple. I don't know exactly what the multiple is, but it's a multiple of the cash flow in. It's not a one-to-one relationship. So you discount that with counterfeit gold estimated somewhere like $3.8 billion, then you know that these big asset classes can move. Even Nvidia can move, right? And we've seen that happen. So Bitcoin, when it has its move, I think it will

outperform gold in a, I don't know, maybe like a five, six X multiple because it is global and it is so accessible to the world. But sorry? Sorry, go ahead, Zanzin. No. No. But like I think 2026 is going to surprise people because if you, I did a calculation before. If you look at Bitcoin at even 110K, that's just marginally beating inflation, right?

like 126K is, you know, we're outperforming inflation a little bit. But that's assuming inflation is something like 10 to 11%. So now we're even trading at a discount to basic inflation hedging. So I think we've already bought them. We're kind of like trolling around the bottom of the seabed and people think it's going to go lower and you have all these calls saying we're going to 50. We're going to 10. Why not zero, right?

If you're going to pick a random number of down, pick zero, right? Or negative. Like Peter Zayad. Yeah, whoever it was. Doomberg said 5K. Zahan said negative 5K or something. Yeah. Just go negative, right?

Just go all in. But given if we are right, and we are trawling the bottom of the sea floor, and it's a beach ball under there, it's going to come up very rapidly. And I think you're going to see exactly the same kind of repeat move that Gold had. But it's only going to be amplified now because the news has. which drive sentiment will be like, you know, strategy is overtaken NVIDIA. Michael Saylor is now the richest man on the planet. And that's going to even amplify it even more once people get the FOMO.

I just want to ask quickly, Samson, completely unrelated to global accessibility of Bitcoin. Do you need travel plans for 2026? Any countries that you and Prince Philip might be visiting that you can let me know about? We have a couple. We have a couple. But we can't disclose it yet. But, you know. Family vacation. you can give family vacation plans, no big deal.

All I can say is gradually and then suddenly. I love it. Thank you. Wonderful, wonderful. Yeah, I wanted to chat a little bit about, one of the things we mentioned earlier as one of the kind of domer things that people are pointing to as to a reason why Bitcoin is going down. Actually, there's two, and I want to address them. One of them was the whole quantum thing.

And people, the narrative is like Bitcoin is big trouble. The price is dropping because of quantum, which, again, I think you're right. It's mainstream media, doing mainstream media things, just like picking random bullshit and then saying this is the story here. But I was wondering if anybody on the panel wanted to quickly address what is the actual, what is the actual? What is the actual threat when it comes to when it comes to quantum? Like what should people actually be thinking about and what should people not be worried about? See, this is like aliens.

When the government starts talking about aliens, you know, they're trying to cover something else up. But quantum is basically aliens. It's not a sexy news story to say the US is $38 trillion in debt and they have to roll over however many billions in the next few months, right? People can't understand that, but you say quantum and they're like, oh, that's scary. But, you know, the reality is quantum computers can't factor the number 21. Not 21 million, 21, without heavy customization to the algorithm to the point where you kind of directed the quantum computer to look at the answer, right?

So a general purpose quantum computer can't do that. So why are you worrying about that attacking Bitcoin and crippling Bitcoin? when we have multiple paths, multiple upgrade paths to quantum resistance. And even then, I posted yesterday, like, you're worried about Bitcoin dying. So you're selling Bitcoin for dollars to put in your bank account, which is like a seven-digit number protected by a four-digit pin. You know, that doesn't really make a lot of sense, right? Like, if quantum computers existed, all of the legacy financial system will be,

blown up. I think the reality is this is what will play out, how it will play out. Quantum computers exist one day, five to ten years, maybe 20. Then they go after credit cards, banking, stock markets, everything else. And that just cannot be rebooted. Hackers penetrate systems, just delete data. It's all gone. So not only do you not have access, you just don't have the data anymore. And there was a Netflix show that like showed something like that. Oh, zero day. You guys should watch that. It was funny. But the banking system is just gone and they shut it down and they had to restore data and then turn it back on.

Just imagine that scenario. That would likely drive everyone to transact in Bitcoin. And because that Bitcoin would be the only decentralized network that is functioning and has upgraded in a secure way to resist that. So you can counter that and say, okay, well, gold is better. Gold is quantum resistance, right? So then you have to ask the question, like, how are you going to buy the gold? Like, what are you using to buy gold? Yeah.

Probably will use Bitcoin to buy gold. And then why buy the gold? 96 or 7% of all money on Earth now is just like digital ledger entries, right? Like, it's no physical cash is like a single percentile of all dollars. So yeah, there's, you'll be, if you want to buy. buy Bitcoin, or if you want to buy gold with anything other than Bitcoin, it's going to end up being with

the little bit of cash that there is, or you'll be trading seeds and bullets. I have a circle of friends, like, they're not really Bitcoiners. They know about Bitcoin, obviously, but they always ping me with questions, and they're always the mass market questions. Like, the last one I got was,

what about the Yen-Carrie trade? And any time they ask me these questions, I know that that is like the prevailing narrative in Normiland, and they don't get it. Like, that's not what you should worry about. You should not be worrying about quantum. Worry about the debt. Worry about inflation. But Bitcoin doesn't need your worry. Bitcoin is the danger. I love that. Okay. So I did want to touch on outside of like directionally price wise for Bitcoin, in 2026, what do you think are going to be

the major kind of macroeconomic factors that most affected, whether it be institutions, governments, regulatory worries, or favorable regulations, adoption on the nation-state part. You know, what do you think is going to be most prevalent in the next year? And maybe I'll go to Joe first, then we'll jump back to Samson. Yeah, the thing I keep coming back to is it bottoming out and then a re-expansion in the credit cycle. I mean, look, like I mentioned at the top of the show, you know, the Fed has moved into outright easing, not just outright easing, but asset purchase programs. And if we've seen time and again, there is a bit of a sell-off when the Fed does move into easing, the reason being

they begin easing way too late. So Bitcoin smells it out and it realizes that they have to do more of it. But the reality is that with the Fed doing these large-scale asset purchases, they generally don't go from doing a couple of asset purchases. The program right now is $40 billion a month until April and then $20 billion a month after. They're buying bills and notes out to three years from banks in order to give them reserves. Historically, that's great for risk assets is great for risk-taking behavior. But if there's one thing we've seen historically is that they don't move from doing a small program into shrinking it, right?

They tend to expand these programs, make them more widely accessible. We sought with the bank term funding program in 2023. I'd wager we're going to see the exact same thing now. We're in this situation, and Samson mentioned the debt, where the only way to keep the United States solvent to make sure that we can meet our obligations is to issue more debt and have the central bank purchase more of it. It's an oreboros. It's a snake eating its own tail. And so I think now with the Fed launching its latest asset purchase program, that's going to be the primary driver for Bitcoin and other risk assets more broadly, but largely Bitcoin because of how sensitive it is in the next year.

The other thing that I'm keeping my eye on is the integration of Bitcoin with traditional banking. We've seen so many developments and we haven't talked about it yet on the show, but JP Morgan, now accepting Bitcoin as collateral or at least, I've talked about this with you a couple of times, Nathan. Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan issuing a structured note against Ibit, so obviously not directly Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is becoming very closely intertwined with not just banking, but the fixed income market globally, which is a market that's hundreds of trillions of dollars in size, much larger than Bitcoin is today. Obviously, Michael Saylor is playing his part in creating these

instruments. But he's now meeting with other banks. He went to J.P. Morgan, I think last week. He went to Morgan Stanley today. He posted a picture of himself underneath the Morgan Stanley sign. And so now that these financial institutions are meeting with Michael Saylor, chances are they're doing one of two things, right? Or both of these things. Number one, they're exploring structured Bitcoin products using strategies balance sheet or using Bitcoin that they buy in the open market and bringing Bitcoin to a much wider audience. That's number one. Number two, which I think is even more likely and I think we're going to start seeing it in 2026 is US banks actually offering Bitcoin to their clients, right? Being able to walk up to an ATM, purchase,

Bitcoin. I believe that's going to be a major bullish catalyst that not a lot of people are thinking about moving into 2026. But the overarching theme and narrative is that the Fed is once again re-expanding its balance sheet. Whatever they call it, that's money printing. The net effect of that over any number of months, typically the lag time is about two to three months. You see that show up in risk assets. And so it's what we saw gold do. It sniffs it out first because it's the largest and most widely distributed. Silver moved second, right? It's slightly smaller. And then you have Bitcoin coming up in third, right? It's something that the monetary metals guys don't believe in. They don't think it's correlated whatsoever. But if we've seen one thing historically,

it's that when the Fed expands, it's balance sheet, you see metals move first, you see Bitcoin move afterward. And so heading into 2026, Q1 into Q2, I tend to think we're going to see new all-time highs. It's a pretty great price action. And then underneath it all, apart from the price stuff, because you mentioned we're not talking about price. It would be the direct integration of Bitcoin at major U.S. financial institutions. Damn. All right. Samson, I'm tossing the same question to you. what do you think are going to be the most major factors, 2026, what's going to be, you know, on the top of it? What's going to be the normy thing that you hear coming in through your text messages? Well, first, there's a, there's a third thing, Joe, that Michael Siler could have done.

He just went to Morgan Stanley to take a loan to buy Bitcoin. You could have. It's true. Just the basics. But yeah, like it's I think the biggest thing is probably monetary expansion, M2 and liquidity. And in terms of other things, I don't feel like they have that much of an impact. It's just monetary expansion and dwindling supply of Bitcoin. And while it feels right now, we have infinite Bitcoin and, you know, Sailor can buy billions and billions and Metaplanet can buy billions and everyone's buying

and all these treasure companies are buying that price doesn't move or goes down, I think it is an engineered representation of Bitcoin that can't hold up because eventually there has to be final settlement. And eventually the price will move. And everyone that is short or has sold covered calls is going to be called. And then we'll see the price going up. So it's really just the Omega Candle thesis. Like suddenly one day for absolutely no reason you're going to wake up, open your phone and see Bitcoin. going up with a big green candle and it's just going to keep going.

And then the user's going to report on that. And then it's going to keep going up the next day and so on. It's just it'll just happen magically. And you won't have any particular reason. No catalyst. Mainstream media will be scrambling to find a specific reason. But there is no specific reason. It's just Bitcoin is scarce.

And you can take delivery and have final settlement unlike the metals. And paper Bitcoin has to eventually be recognized. with real Bitcoin and that's it. So is there going to be paper Bitcoin Summer 2.0 or is that, are we going to cancel that season? Well, Bitcoin two summer was like a treasury company's ripping, right? Yeah, yeah. I think the rising tide of Bitcoin spot will lift the Treasury companies too. You're going to see them trade again at higher MNAVs.

And I think that's going to have this self-reinforcing cycle because we have these preferreds now, which they can monetize. And that'll just feed back in. So right now you're not seeing that feedback loop. But all of the pieces, all of the machinery, the mechanisms for that feedback loop are in place. And then you just drop an atom bomb on top of that, like the U.S. buying Bitcoin for the Bitcoin Act from Cynthia Lumas, or another country buying, or another country. issuing strategy like debt via Bitcoin bonds, which we are working on at Jan 3. And that is when you get to half-finney's $10 million a coin. All right.

Well, it could be a very, very interesting next 12 months. And I'm very much looking forward to it. Again, I'm excited to see the tourists flush out every time that I see Bitcoin do a sudden spike and then BART to the side and then spike back down. I kind of, you know, it doesn't bother me in terms of Bitcoin that I hold. It makes me shake my head and just think of the Fiat games that people are playing to see those types of movements like years from now. Grandpa, what were you doing when Bitcoin was still actually being mined when it was sub $100,000?

What were you doing? while I was making leverage bets on the direction of the price. Come on. Terrible time to do it, too. Low volume heading into the end of the year. Everything is selling off. People are going home for Christmas. Why on Earth are people playing with leverage?

Bitcoin shot up from 84K to 90K, 30 minutes later. Someone sold. A lot of short selling pressure got hit. We had a liquidation in the other direction. It's a story we see all too often, and it's just hilarious. But here's hoping for the inverse of October 10th at the Omega 10th. December 26th. What, okay, what's the story with that date?

What is the deal there? Options expiry. Oh, okay, options expiry. Options for the people unfamiliar, options expiry, just a quick little description. So people are selling calls inputs and there's like a lot of notional there. What was it again, Joe? Like 30 billion or 50? Yeah, something like that.

It's a massive amount of. options expiring. And the best case scenario is that Bitcoin is low before the expiry. But after that, basically the gravity holding Bitcoin down is gone because everyone has to reset and rebuild positions. And it's likely that if we do move up, we'll have a big move up. My, all right. Well, boxing day, if everybody, if you're purchasing power of your Bitcoin goes up, maybe refrain from the Fiat shopping. just save it. Although I am a big proponent of Bitcoin's circular economies, but, you know, they just mark

up the price. They just pretend that it's on sale. Like, they'll just pretend it used to be more expensive or just put a sales on on the same old price. So forego some of that BS consumerism for the day if Bitcoin is green. With that, gentlemen, it is time to do a rotation, Samson, Joe, I want to say, I huge thank you for swinging by and being part of the annual Christmas special. Make sure that you guys give Samson and Joe a follow.

Joe, of course, with Horizon and Samson with Jan 3 and my favorite Bitcoin wallet, Aqua. So check them out as well. It takes the pain out of using lightning. Don't have to deal with any channels or anything like that. And it's super easy. So gentlemen, any final messages that you have? Plan accordingly. Joe.

I will say enjoy the next week, two weeks with your family. Get really fat, but not too fat, on the Christmas food. Watch some good movies and relax. Chances are we're not going to see a lot of action in Bitcoin until December 26th. And then things should get a little bit interesting. And that coincides with the Sansa Raleigh inequities, which typically happens in the year in the week after Christmas and heading into the new. year. So I think she'll get exciting. But for the time being, prepare for more chop, turn off your screen, enjoy time with family. Amazing. Samson, Joe, always a pleasure. Have a very Merry Christmas.

Thanks, Ben. Nathan, Merry Christmas. Thanks, Jen. Thank you guys. Awesome. So Nathan, how did you enjoy the first little chat here for the Christmas special? Oh, it's wonderful. It's nice when there's people that are smarter than me that are also bullish, because I could just be a bull-tart this whole time. But as long as they're still on my side, it's like, no, I know, I'm good. I'm totally fine. I'm that left curve gets it right just buy and hold bitcoin amazing um i'm uh i i've got some some great guests coming up but uh we've got a couple things to chat about and get to before uh we do that um so we're going to be talking uh some human rights i just got back from uh africa uh did some stuff for the human rights foundation there went to the african bitcoin conference um so we've got a few people coming in

to chat about that uh our good friend uh uh uh uh uh Alex Gladstein will be popping by to say hello as well some other people from HRF. So we'll chat with them momentarily. But I suppose kind of on that same front, Nathan, we recently had Keone from a samurai wallet on and we had a good chat with him. I did want to, as we're chatting about this, I'll bring up the QR code down at the bottom so people can go ahead and sign the petition to try and get a pardon for these guys. This Keone, I believe, is slated to check into federal prison. Friday, the 19th, yeah, dude. By the way, we're currently at 7,76 verified signatures.

After the next panel, I want to check back and see that there's more. So if you haven't yet, I don't know what you're waiting on. Scan the QR code, go sign the petition. Yeah, yeah. The website, Bill and Kayone.org. Maybe I'll make a little scrolling marquee for that so that people, can see it when I bring it up. But just awful, awful situation for these gentlemen.

Nobody wants to see open source developers being tossed in prison for writing freedom tools, for writing privacy tools, which are so, so necessary in and around Bitcoin, especially as it pertains to, the next panel that I'm going to be chatting with in and around human rights and freedom, people need Bitcoin privacy. It's super, super important. The one thing that I'll say about Samurai wallet, and we talked about this on the show with Keone, was that despite the fact that they went after him and Bill and shut down their

servers, the project was open source. And so his software, what he built, is living on beyond him. And it has been forked. And Ashi Garo wallet and using the Dojo Node, you can now use that. And Whirlpool now exists again in the wild by a, as I believe he said, a very competent and skilled team that have spun it up yet again. this time in anonymous fashion because the messaging we're getting is that if you want to build privacy tools for Bitcoiners,

you're going to have to be in the shadows, unfortunately. No, I completely agree. It's unfortunate that it was always probably going to come to this, and I think it is really important to that at this point in time, the guys that have now spun this up that are continuing the project, that are continuing to push these kind of tools forward, they're taking a risk. That's why they have to hide in the shadows.

They're well aware that they could or will be targeted. on point in time. And that's especially why with everything that's going on with Bill and Keone, that we have to do everything we can to support them. Because I can't write this, right? I can't code. I can't make these walls. I can't build these products. So we got to make sure that the people that do do it, that make sure to build the things that help us protect our privacy, which is a right, right? You should be able to disclose what you do and do not want. There's the, for anyone that hasn't read it, look up the cypherpunk manifesto. I think it's really important at this point in time to go through that, to read that from 1996 or 93, if I'm not mistaken. But

for everything that they do for us, the only thing we have to do is be loud and oppose this, sign the petition, make noise, make songs, make memes, get active, do something so that the next time, because the chilling effect isn't just, it's not just those that use the tools. Somebody might have a great idea for even an improvement, a new software that's even better, right?

They might not build it if they don't feel that the community is there to protect them. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, Nathan, I'm going to bring in our next panel here. What I'm going to do is I'll maybe stick around for a moment because we do have three guests. I don't see the third guess here yet. But if he arrives, then you can hop down and man it from the background and then pop back in at the next break with me. But for now, I'll just let me just kill the graphics on the screen here so we don't have a scrolling marquee for us.

But I want to welcome to the stage to people that I've had the absolute pleasure of working alongside and doing some amazing things with for a number of years now. So I want to welcome to the stage, Mr. Alex Gladstein and Anna Chekovich. You guys, how you doing? Hey. Hey, good to see you. Merry Christmas. Anna, how are you? Hi, I'm good, thank you.

Awesome, awesome. So anybody unfamiliar? Both Alex and Anna are with, well, actually, Alex, it's heading up at the Human Rights Foundation. What would your title be, Alex? Chief Strategy Officer over there. Chief Strategy Officer. And Anna and myself have been heading up webinars, which are human rights defenders, how to utilize Bitcoin. And we've been doing this quarterly for some time now.

So I'm very excited to have you both on. And if I'm not mistaken, hopefully at some point, Femi will be joining as well. And I'll let him introduce himself when he gets here. But Alex, Anna, it's been a big year at the HRF. It's been a big year using Bitcoin as a tool for human rights and freedom. So maybe Alex, I'll toss it to you first. In your work so far this year, what have you seen? In terms of actual examples of people utilizing Bitcoin in their efforts that has been particularly striking to you,

what kind of case studies have you seen? Well, one thing that's interesting, of course, is AI. Oh, I think your audio cut out a little bit there. It sounded echoing. That's okay. That's okay. I'll let you know when it pops back in. That's okay.

You might need to come back in a sec. that's okay but I'll ask on us something and then I'll and then I'll pop back to you um on I'm gonna I'm gonna change gears a little bit uh this morning we just had our final webinar of the year um and we've been doing these kind of over the course of the year I want to give you a moment to kind of outline what we've been doing and um and I'll also you know talk about how this last webinar of the year went in your opinion. Yeah. Actually, I think it was a blast this time.

It was, in my opinion, one of the best webinars that we've done so far. We've had 140 students joined us this time. And I think, Alex, we have you back. We have your sound back. But let's first talk about the webinar. We had 140 students this time, and it was amazing. And the majority stayed till the very end, and we received lots of amazing feedback,

and more and more people realize the power of Bitcoin, more and more activist freedom fighters join us, and we are very excited for 2026. I hope that we are going to have even more students next year. But yeah, and we managed to cover so many topics in just three days. I think it was the best webinar. We didn't only talk about Bitcoin this time.

We talked about Noster, about crowdfunding opportunities. So, yeah, I think this one was definitely the biggest one and the most successful. Yeah, it was really cool to see at times, what, 100, 130, I think as high as that, activists in the room learning about Bitcoin. It was pretty wild. And we took three days. We had many people set up their first ever Bitcoin wallet and received their first transaction.

We taught people also about peer-to-peer online exchanges. So privacy preserving, things like hoddle-hottle. We did a live demo and showed people how to use that. And then we also showed people how to set up their first crowdfunding page using BTC pay server, which was amazing. And then we got to, we had some extra time today. So we taught people about Nostr and showed them kind of the benefits of its censorship resistance, but also as a crowdfunding technique, just being able to receive zaps and tiny lightning

donations on their posts, which was, which was amazing. And we'll get more into kind of what's being worked on in around that. But Alex, I believe you're back on the AirPods there or something. And so, yeah, all good. All good. Well, just to comment on what you guys are doing, I mean, remember, it's not just like 140 random people. It's in many cases leaders of organizations that reach hundreds or thousands or millions of people. So it's a really effective way to do grassroots education and reach massive numbers of new users.

What I was going to say earlier is AI, obviously changing the world. We're all using it. You know, your plumbers using it, your teacher's using it, everybody's using it. But I think what we're interested in is how can it be used to the tool of freedom in line with Bitcoin. And what's really interesting is that Bitcoin helps democratize access to AI because you have platforms like both products like PaperCue. That AI and then also open source versions of that, right, like Routster, etc. Where people can use all the top models and pay in Bitcoin and they don't have to docks themselves. So what's been really interesting to me is to see the rise of these ways and methods.

and tactics to use AI without disclosing all your personal information. And there's also even ways to use AI to purchase tools like Maple, which is kind of like a signal for AI, encrypted access to the top open models, like in your pocket or on your computer. And they have a cool way to do that actually anonymously where you pay in Bitcoin. So I'm very bullish on Bitcoin playing a key role in helping democratize access to AI tools. helping keep them safe and helping be the currency of choice for people who want to use them privately. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

I wanted to, because, you know, many people watching may be unfamiliar with kind of your background, how you came to not only come across the HRAF, but also come across Bitcoin itself too. And so I was wondering if maybe you could give a little crash course in, you know, what is your story and why are you now involved in Bitcoin and involved in teaching human rights defenders? Yes, absolutely. So I'm originally from Russia and I work with Alexana Valny's Anticruption Foundation. I manage finances of the ACF. And we use Bitcoin starting since 2016, even when we've worked. in Russia back then when we had a huge campaign against the Putin's government, against Putin's regime. We were constantly attacked by the Russian government, and they used the banking system to stop us from doing our work.

So basically what they were doing, they were blocking our bank accounts all the time. And we had a huge campaign, we had a crowdfunding campaign, we had millions of followers. and people were donating to us. So the government not only tracked our financial flows, they also punished the donors for supporting us. So Bitcoin was always Plan B for us, the tool that we could use when our bank accounts were frozen. And in 2021, we were labeled as an extremist organization.

We had to leave the country. Now we live and work in exile. The entire organization is in exile. And we keep doing our work. We keep fighting against Putin's regime. But today we still use Bitcoin, even when living and working in a safe environment. And now I would say we rely on Bitcoin even more than we did before because we still send money to Russia to support political prisoners, their family members, to support activists who keep fighting against the regime. There are still some people who are try to do something inside the country and they need our help, but we're all in exile. And there is no way for us to send money to them through the banking system. First of all, because it's extremely dangerous. We are now labeled also as a terrorist organization and receiving money from us is very dangerous.

So we use Bitcoin to support those people on the ground. And we still are a non-profit organization. We still rely on donations. And Russian supporters send us Bitcoin donations. because if they donate to so-called extremist terrorist organization, if they get caught, they will be imprisoned for that, up to eight years. So we rely on Bitcoin donations right now a lot, and this part of our budget is very, very significant.

So we actually invite people, we try to crowd fund, we're mostly in Bitcoin because of how much of Bitcoin we use right now. And I personally, I use Bitcoin a lot. I almost live on a Bitcoin standard. Even if I'm in exile, I live right now. I'm based in the United States. Here I successfully opened a bank account for myself. And just a couple of days ago, I received a letter from the bank.

They informed me that they blocked my bank account. I mean, they didn't explain properly the reason. but it's obvious for us that they did that because I was personally labeled as an extremist and my organization was branded as a terrorist. So American Bank just decided to debank me for that. And now we plan to start a campaign against that because if we don't fight back, it will create this terrible precedent. And other activists in exile who live here in the United States,

they will face the same situation. So Putin labels the American organization, a terrorist organization, and American banks comply with that, and they just block our bank accounts just because Putin said so it is a terrible situation. And this is something that we have to go through right now. So I have quite a lot of experience personally living on Bitcoin standard and managing Bitcoin operations of a big nonprofit organization. Can you, there's a crazy story that you have about managing the money for the Anti-Corruption Foundation and one day checking your account balance. Could you, because I feel like Bitcoiners will be very interested in what happened to you there. Yeah, it's one of the favorite mind-blowing stories. actually one of the stories that opened my eyes when we were working inside Russia.

And I, since I'm a financial director of the organization, and I was making all the financial transactions manually, I was sending salaries, taxes. I was paying for all kinds of services, rents. All payments were done by me. And I had access to our online bank. We had around 300 employees back then in Russia. We had 40 offices across the country, and it was thousands and thousands of payments every day. And one day I had to pay salaries.

So I just casually sit down at my work desk. I opened my laptop. I open online bank. I wanted to start payments. And what I see there on our bank account, there was a negative balance of like the number was so huge. It was like minus 999, 999. It was minus 9.1 trillion rubles, which was approximately minus $1, minus $13 billion. So it was like, I mean, the number, of course, was just surreal. And it was just stupid. I called the bank to clarify the situation. Because of course, my first thought

that we were hacked or someone stole the money. money from our bank account, it just looked terrible, especially when you had all of your savings of your organization in that bank account, and all of a sudden it's just a negative balance. So I called the bank, and they told me that our bank account was simply under arrest. So that's why they just put a negative balance, so we cannot use it. And when I asked them to explain why they arrested our bank account, to provide some documents, because there must be some decision of a court. They cannot just block your bank account just like that.

And they refused to provide any documents. They simply, they couldn't say anything. They just said, your bank account is under arrest. And only after a couple of days, they gave us some documents. Of course, it was a fabricated criminal case against our organization. And on the basis of that case, they arrested our bank account. But they arrested it before they actually had the paper. So basically someone called the bank and they forced them to do that to us.

It was the first time. First time was shocking. But then it happened to us many times. We were prepared already. We were keeping our money in Bitcoin. We actually, after that, we prefer to immediately convert our fiat donations that we received into Bitcoin, just so we keep it in a safe place. Or when we need to send salaries, we exchange it and we immediately spend it.

but we never kept any money in that accounts anymore. And that's how we had to survive. And it was not only against, they didn't only block bank accounts of the organization after some time when they realized that we still find solutions, we still open new accounts or we use Bitcoin. They blocked accounts of our employees, of all of them. And my colleagues, they didn't know how to keep their savings,

because you cannot keep it in your bank account. It can be any time frozen by the government. You cannot keep it in cash at home because we constantly had police raids. And when police comes to your house, they steal all of your money. They take all of your gadgets and cash they find. And some of my colleagues, they literally put cash in a plastic bag, stash a hole in the ground in the backyard, and we're keeping their savings there because they didn't know how to use Bitcoin, probably. So it was really difficult to operate like that, especially when you have a big network, many employees, and you have to pay salaries and people have to feed their children, pay rent.

And, of course, it's the easiest way to stop the organization from operating by depriving them of access to money. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, I mean, you said it here when freedom and censorship resistance are kind of, you're kind of, you're, you said it here. the key things you're trying to achieve, what was your initial reaction was any fiat that we have needs to move to Bitcoin because that's the tool that's going to get the job done. And even instances of physical cash can be in question. So Nathan, I wanted to, I mean, this is your first time meeting, Anna. I've known her for some time. But I'm curious if you have any questions, anything that's coming up for you. Yeah, there's a few things. One kind of top of

Ryan actually just wanted to just mention there as well. For anyone listening, don't think that this is unique to Russia. Let's not forget that in Canada, we had our bank accounts frozen if you didn't like the current COVID regimes. Ben had a little bit of a role to play in that whole saga there as well. But on it, especially because it's a Christmas special as well, too. I want to ask you, and hopefully there's one, hopefully there's at least one, do you have any success stories of people that you've educated with Bitcoin? That it's actually helped. Are there any wins for you guys that we can chalk up on the board here?

a nice story where Bitcoin really has saved somebody or they start to implement it as a tool and it's really made a difference. Well, we always encourage our students to send us their feedback, their success stories. I would say majority of them are just trying to, you know, to test us like, hey, I use Bitcoin now. But yes, of course, since they join our webinar and the next webinar, they invite like 10 of their colleagues or friends or family members. It shows us that it's a success story because they bring more and more people. They recommend the webinar to others. But also we provided a webinar specifically for some certain organizations. After our general webinar, after our quarterly webinar, they reach out to us and ask us to provide an education

tailored specifically for their organization to find a solution for some certain situations. So we did that too. And yes, we have success stories. But many of them, since they operate in dangerous environments, they live under authoritarian regimes. They don't want to be published. They prefer to keep anonymous. That's why they actually use Bitcoin because they don't want to publish. Like, hey, now I receive Bitcoin grants.

So they prefer to remain silent and stay. out of the vision of oppressive governments. So we don't publish the names or names of the organizations. But yeah, of course, we definitely see the success of this project, I think. Yeah, it's interesting the types of people that you meet. There's an event that happens every year where a lot of the human rights defenders and Bitcoin builders get together all in a single location. And often there's 100, 150 people there.

And it's at the beginning of each one of these, each person stands up very briefly and says who they are, what they're working on. And if you ever want to experience imposter syndrome, stand up in that room and say what you do day to day and then listen to at least a handful of other people in the room, say that they've toppled dictators or you know something to that to that effect because um this this room is just absolutely stacked with uh some of the most inspiring people that uh i've definitely ever met

um sessions are you telling me you the stand up after somebody said i toppled the dictatorship You need to go, well, I started a YouTube channel in 2016. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, since I'm on the side of freedom fighters, I would say that you shouldn't feel this way, because without you guys, without educators, without developers, we will not be able to survive without technologies. So it's our lifeline, and it's very important that you help us,

and you shouldn't feel that imposter syndrome, that's for sure. And actually, I think that what HRF is doing, building that bridge between tech guys and freedom fighters is so unique. And it's just an amazing project. It gives us so much power against those bad guys. So you literally fuel us, you empower us with the tools. So we can continue our fight. And without you, we will be, well, we will be.

much, much weaker. So thank you for your contribution. Well, it's it's it's really cool seeing, um, you know, that we, we weren't, um, completely crazy, uh, in and around the usefulness of Bitcoin. It's, it's, it's, uh, very, um, you know, humbling to kind of see the situations that it can be, uh, used in. And, and, um, I've kind of, I've mentioned this story before, but one of the, one of the stories that has had, had a huge impact on myself, one of the interactions that is most memorable for me was going to the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2022 and watching a woman speak on stage from Nicaragua. And she was talking about her husband who was raising a lot of red flags about the current

government saying that it's moving towards totalitarianism and basically running and opposing the government to the point where they one day pulled up through him in a van and he disappeared and he had been put in a Nicaraguan prison and when she was

given the speech she hadn't seen him in a couple of years at that point her name's Bertha and her husband's name is Felix and so she gave the speech and she was begging people to kind of help and

aid her in freeing her husband from a Nicaraghan prison. Later that same event, I actually hosted my first workshop teaching people how to use a Bitcoin wallet in person. And when I watched the talk, she was kind of far away, so I didn't get a good look at what she looked like. But there was a very curious woman in that workshop asking a lot of questions about Bitcoin wallets and coming up afterwards one-on-one. And of course, I later found out that to be Berta. And a funny thing, when people are looking for censorship resistance and, you know, a way to utilize freedom money, you know, for her, she was focused on the censorship resistance. She was focused on the ability to just move money into the country because she didn't have an access.

an easy way to do that, no access to banking locally, converting, all that kind of stuff. And so she had a lot of questions. And through the course of the questions, I casually mentioned the supply cap that you can just print a ton of it, you know, as if she already knew.

She was like, oh, there's a limited supply? Wow, that's super useful in an entirely different. Like, again, just kind of to point out the mindset of some of the, people coming to Bitcoin, some of them are focused solely just on censorship-resistant properties as opposed to in the West where it's looked at as like investment number go up, all that kind of stuff. But the interesting part about this is she started using utilizing Bitcoin, using it as a way to help fund operations and move money and all of that. I attended the Oslo Freedom

form the following year. And I sat up front. the first row and and the first person to walk on the stage was her husband who had since been freed and the first thing they played was a video of him being reunited with his daughter who's pretty close in age with my own daughter for the first time in a number of years and like i i tear up every time i talk about it but like you know i was a wreck as was a bunch of the rest of the room room. But he came out, his daughter came out. They shared a hug on stage, all this stuff. And so from that moment, then we saw Berda at the next HRF event, stateside, and she was becoming an educator in Bitcoin for her community. And then the subsequent event I got to meet and chat

with her husband and her together, who also was becoming a little. a Bitcoin educator in his community. And so to see that progression over the number of the years was so, I don't know, there was just a way, I think because they have a daughter and because I kind of saw that progression bit by bit as like Bitcoin wasn't the central theme of it, but it was a tool in the tool belt along the way. And that was very touching for me. So it's just kind of my anchor in a lot of this stuff that is just,

a reminder of why it's important on a very individual level. So I don't know. I also want to remind you the last Oslo Freedom Forum we had in June this year. And I want to remind you about our workshop and how it looked like. Our room was packed. It was completely full. People didn't have space to stand there and they spent like several hours there's standing not leaving the room and comparing it to the first Oslo Freedom Forum that I visited in 2022. It was also my first time. And I think it was the first time that this Bitcoin community was brought to the Oslo Freedom Forum and this financial freedom topic. And in 2022, not many people could understand there what was going on, why Bitcoin was discussed there and those Bitcoiners couldn't understand why they were brought there,

why they are useful for this community. And just a couple of years later, now it's clear for everyone. And Bitcoin is one of the main themes, the main topics of the event and our Bitcoin workshop was just a blast. And we had so many people, so many activists. And it's obvious to me, it's obvious. that it's getting more and more, people get more and more involved, specifically freedom fighters. Because if you don't have access to money, what else would you do?

You will start finding a solution. You will start looking for an alternative. And Bitcoin is, of course, number one alternative. And it's just they don't know where to go to find information. People feel overwhelmed. there are so many resources and they mostly those resources cover how to make money with bitcoin, how to invest. And it's very hard to find this type of education that we provide at HRF. We teach how to use the technology in a correct way, in a self-custodial way.

Our education is privacy focused. We teach them how to use it in dangerous environments under surveillance of oppressive governments. So once again, this project is completely unique. And I love to see how many people, the progression, how people really value this content right now. Yeah. Now, the program as a whole is evolving because there's been Bitcoin as a major focus. but freedom technology takes many forms

and we're kind of heading up these Bitcoin webinars but there's some other stuff that is kind of joining the fray alongside Bitcoin with some additional programming and education and stuff like that. I was wondering, Anna, if you maybe wanted to just touch on some of the additional things that were implemented at the Oswald Freedom Forum this year, but moving forward to the financial freedom track

is also going to include some other technical tools that are being touched on and used for education for human rights defenders as well. Well, talking about Bitcoin, we don't only educate. There are many different programs. We also provide support to developers, who create privacy-focused tools,

who empower activists with different tools or ideas, those who help build circular economies. HRF provides Bitcoin grants, which is also very unique. There are not too many non-profit organizations that provide grants in Bitcoin. So we have projects like that, and one of my favorite is, of course,

our weekly newsletter. we send an amazing newsletter, and if you are not subscribed yet, I highly recommend you to do so, just so you can see what's happening in the world, how oppressive regimes governments abuse the banking system, how people like me struggle from that, and how Bitcoin actually helps us find a way out from that. But as far as I understand, you also want to touch the AI topic. That's we are. Yeah, we kind of got thrown onto a panel in Azo last time, even though you and I were not,

you know, super technical, heavy AI users, but there is a gentleman that is heading up the AI program, right? Yes, we just launched our AI program at the Human Rights Foundation, which is going to be, it's already very significant. program of the Human Rights Foundation. We also started AI education and we plan to provide webinars. We already released some educational videos because AI tools are also super powerful instrument for activists like me. And I recently actually gave a talk as an activist that uses AI in my organization. We use AI a lot in our work for different projects. And it's very relevant

to many freedom fighters right now, especially because bad actors, bad governments, oppressive governments, they use AI a lot to catch activists, to surveil, to produce fake content, fake videos, and so on. So we must be one step ahead. We must know the technology better than them, so we can fight back. And HRF just launched that program AI for individual rights, and we are going to support activists as well and provide grants for AI tools and builders of developers of AI tools. And you can, there is a lot to talk about that. We can, you can check on the website, HRF.org. There is everything about the program.

I thought that Alex wanted to talk about it, but I'm not sure. Yeah, he is. I just don't want to steal the topic from him. That's right. That's all right. We're, we've gotten probably about 10 minutes left here. And if I can, I kind of want to jump in with one quick one. By the way, guys, I did check it out. I just signed up for the newsletter.

Go to HRF.org and scroll all the way to the bottom and you can put in your information there. So I just signed up for that one. So good in the check out. I want to ask you because the privacy topic has been a big thing, especially with Sam, and all and everything going on there. And so if there's somebody that's making a recommendation or perhaps in an authoritarian regime that hasn't worked with you guys. It hasn't gone through a workshop yet.

Are there any specific Bitcoin tools or privacy tools that you like and can recommend? Is there anything that's kind of a golden go-to? Like, yeah, these are definitely worth putting on your radar, maybe checking out, maybe trying to learn. I mean, I can mention a couple things. And then, Anna, I'm sure you're going to have some things. But maybe on a, I'll toss it you first, actually. And, you know, there's some certain kind of basic. information, common mistakes that a lot of individuals and organizations even make, just making

assumptions about how Bitcoin works. So what are some of the things that we typically touch on with newcomers that, you know, they understand Bitcoin is freedom money, but they don't really understand the underlines and they make some bad moves, perhaps? So I would say that the the main problem that we have, it's not a problem, it's a fact that we have students from all around the globe coming to our webinars. Like now we had 140 people and we asked them to tell us where they're coming from their geography and it was from all around the globe. And a tool that is relevant for someone in some regions, it's just not available in other regions of the world. So for us, it's quite hard to just give one tool for everyone that is going to be available,

that is going to work for everyone. And we, in the beginning, when we just started the webinar, we really struggled to decide what kind of content we are going to give. And in the end, we decided that first of all, we have to teach main rules, privacy rules, types of custody, for example. This is something very important because majority of Bitcoin, users of beginners, they don't even know that there is some difference between custodial and self-custodial tools. No one knows that those two things exist. And it's very important, first of all, to explain how the tools work, how to identify that this is self-custodial, this is a custodial platform, and why you should avoid one. So when they make their own research,

they now can already identify and choose the tool that is best for them. So first of all, we talk about types of custody and when talking about privacy, we demonstrate some tools. And when we teach them how to actually exchange Bitcoin into local currencies, we, of course, focus on peer-to-peer exchanges. We show how to do this exchange. We demonstrate a life exchange. We use a huddle-hoddle platform for that, but we also recommend some other platforms. Maybe Ben will give some other examples. we, of course, we demonstrate how to use cold storage, how to use cold wallets. And when talking about crowdfunding, since we teach nonprofits and they're very interested in crowdfunding tools, we teach how to do crowdfunding in a safer way,

instead of using just a static Bitcoin address that they put on their website. It's better to use tools like BTC pay server that generates a new Bitcoin address each time. And for those who would like to dive deeper, if they reach out to us after the webinar and they want to learn more, we're always open to provide some more advanced solutions for them. For example, my organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, we use Coin Join to protect our donors because, in a sense, it's very dangerous to donate to us. We must, on our side, we must do everything we can to protect the donors. And we cannot teach coin join in the webinar for beginners. It's a quite advanced tool. And those people who join us, they have zero experience in using Bitcoin at all.

So we just teach basic rules, the most important rules. And then for those who want to dive deeper, we are open to explain more. But Ben, maybe you will give some other examples here. Yeah, I think the first webinar that we had was, five days long and I tried to add coin join in there. And we had to talk afterwards and in maybe more polite terms. It was kind of like, what the hell are you doing? This is way too complicated for a brand new person, which was good advice. So, but yes, you know, people going down this rabbit hole, they will learn the basics. They'll learn how to get a basic wallet back it up.

you know, they'll learn how to, you know, we'll do the demo of peer-to-peer trades. And again, we use hoddle-hoddle as an example. But it's very, it's so jurisdictionally dependent because we're getting tons of people from the global south, different countries across Africa, across Asia, across South America, kind of from all over the place. And so when when somebody says, how do I obtain Bitcoin in a private way, It's, I'm from country X. It's like half the time you're like, oh, holy crap, I haven't looked at that one yet. And so oftentimes we'll kind of crowdsource information from the group itself as well, like,

or task them with, okay, so here's an example. You're going to learn the general concepts of how to obtain peer-to-peer Bitcoin, but you're going to need to take a look at what is locally available to you. and then come back tomorrow. Let us know what you found or if you couldn't find something and then we can begin to troubleshoot from there because at the end of the day,

if you are cut off from the existing banking system because you're living under a tyrannical regime, anything is better than nothing. And so even in the most restrictive country on earth that there's no Bitcoin infrastructure whatsoever, think of if gold was banned in a country. If you had a gold coin and you were on the ground, you know that thing has value and you would likely be able to find somebody

that was willing to exchange local currency for that gold coin. You just got to put in some extra legwork compared to some other jurisdictions. So at the very least, you're able to now transport value across borders instantaneously in this censorship-resistant way. and there's just that kind of final mile to get through. So I don't know if there's anything to add to that, Anna, but those are my thoughts there. Yeah, I mean, I see right now comments in the group chat here that we, Peach is amazing peer-to-peer.

Yeah, we teach Peach as well and other tools. We have, like, we now teach three days. Each day is one hour and a half. And, of course, we cover different instruments, different platforms. but as I mentioned before, they could be not relevant for some certain countries. So a month ago, I think we had a webinar tailored specifically for African continents. We only had students from African countries there. So, of course, we just took a moment and made some research and added some tools that are available only for African countries.

So it all depends every time. But what's most important that they know the basic rules, the basic safety rules, that they can apply in the future when they make their own decisions, which tools they want to use. That's incredible. I think it's absolutely amazing, the work that you guys are doing. And it's just, it's one, I wanted to point out sessions, by the way, imagine if gold is illegal, 6102, do we don't, do we don't remember that moment in time?

And then number two, just, you know, we had the macro talk beforehand. But there is, there really is no, there is no, we don't have the macro value of Bitcoin without the underlying freedom aspects. It has to be the censorship resistant. It has to be that you can hold in self-costy with the fully auditable supply. And it's just incredible to see it being used as money as the most we say, adversarially resistant money possible for its intended purpose. It's just something, I think it warms my heart.

It's beautiful on this Christmas episode to talk about this sort of thing. I'm curious, either of you guys, if static addresses have come out in play at all, if anyone's not static addresses, sorry, silent payment addresses are being utilized by anyone at this point in time. Or maybe something like Bolt 12 as well. But of course, for the webinar series, it's probably getting a little bit too much in the weeds. And then both for sessions and for Anna, are there any tools that you wish you had that maybe some developer listening could start to build out? Or anything that you've spotted on the horizon, like maybe we're not using it yet, but it looks really cool and maybe it's promising. One of the things on the HRF website for donations is they've implemented pay join.

So that's an option for donation. So it's like a, the transaction becomes like a fake, well, not a fake, a real two-person coin join, which kind of obfuscates the amount being sent and who the actual recipient is, which is kind of cool. I don't know if a lot of people have used that yet, but super interesting to see. And I know that the next panel we've got Francis from Bull Bitcoin coming on, but they've implemented pay join into the Bull wallet, which is awesome. If you haven't checked it out already, make sure you do. There's a lot of talk of cashew, like e-cash and stuff like that.

It's still early days, but I think a lot of that stuff is very promising. And in the global south, there's quite a push for Fetamint related stuff as well. So there's been chat of that. And I believe Justin Moon, who's heading up the AI section for the HRF, has done some work in and around and has a really good understanding of Fetty as well. So those would be kind of my answers. I don't know if you have anything that has stuck up to you on, or most people are kind of sticking with the basics to start.

Yeah. Actually, it's one of my favorite topics. And I think once we also had a panel, me and you, Ben, we talked about what we can recommend the developers, what kind of tools are missing. And I mean, the market is still developing. And there are lots of tools. And for some certain features, there is like one wallet is great for this.

Another wallet is great for that. And it would be amazing if there was just one wallet that had everything we need, like lightning and Bitcoin and all the languages. And like, because, for example, some wallet is, great but is not translated to different languages. And this is something that not many people think about because not everyone speaks English. And in Russia, many people, majority, do not speak English.

And if I recommend a tool like this very wallet is amazing, it has lightning and Bitcoin, it doesn't matter because if you download it and you don't understand the language, you are not going to use it anyway. And it's very important that the builders, shouldn't live in that bubble thinking that everyone understands everything. And this is one of the common problems that I see. We believe we Bitcoiners, I mean, we live in this bubble thinking that everyone understands the

technologies that we're talking about. But as I mentioned previously, regular users, they don't even know that there are different types of custody. And they don't bump into this content. So they don't know about this. And we should first of all think about the end user. And when you create a wallet and start starting screen says something like get some sets, but end user doesn't even know what sets is.

They know Bitcoin, but they never even heard the term sets. It could be very overwhelming. And it stops people from adopting the technology. And I wish there were more tools that are simple and easy to use. and specifically in our case, since we teach our students and we send them SATS. It's a part of our session number one. On the first day, we download our first wallet and send Sats to everyone. So even if it's 140 people, everyone receives Sats from. Yeah. Yeah.

It's incredible. I'd never even consider the fact that you, like, living in your own, I was like, oh yeah, having it in multiple languages would be something that you absolutely need in in order to push these things forward. And even to honest point there as well, I mean, you might even benefit from having an option of like a little welcome screen. That just gives you a bit of Bitcoin information before you get started. Because most of the tools that I use, you know, kind of loads up and then you're kind of off to the races. No explanation even what a stat is.

Yeah, exactly. I think Anna froze, unfortunately. But if I see her pop back in, we'll say a quick goodbye. But word to time on that panel anyways. And we've got another killer panel coming up. But before we leave this panel, what I will say is please do check out, especially if you're kind of in the human rights space, the webinar that we do. It's every quarter. And you can find it at HRF.org. If you just go HRF.org slash unstoppable, it'll fill in the rest of the thing for you. But there's this all about the webinar and you can sign up. And so on myself and win.

usually in their hosting. And yeah, it's hopefully seen as a great tool for people that are just coming into Bitcoin from the human rights perspective. But with that, actually, before we move to the next panel, I do want to. Oh, and Ana is here. Anna was just chilling for you. I was just saying that people should check out the next webinar. We just finished our last one.

And it'll be coming up. We'll be announcing dates. of in the new year. But do you have any parting words for people before we wrap? Yeah, first of all, sorry for this. I had an connection issue. Yeah, of course, if you know anyone who could benefit from our education, it's designed specifically for freedom fighters, but maybe you can join the webinar and get

inspired to create something for people like us, and we invite everyone to join. So just visit the website that is on the screen right now. And there will be the link to join the next webinar. We haven't announced the dates yet. We are about to do that. So, yeah, I hope that I managed to inspire someone to maybe create tools, to improve the existing tools, to support the Human Rights Foundation and the work that they are doing.

I think it is super important. It's unique and we should keep pushing. We should keep fighting against bad guys and we need your help doing that. Amazing. Anna, thank you so much for joining. And thanks for kind of being the host and helping along through the webinar that I got to be a part of this week. And I will see you before the next one. But have a very Merry Christmas as well.

Thank you. Merry Christmas, you too. All right. We'll see you later. All right. Nathan, I've got a killer panel coming up. Yeah, you do. So it's very exciting. I can see them all backstage. I'll let you guys know who's joining us momentarily. But before I do, I do want to once again mention that, again, the samurai devs are slated to head to federal prison, one of them, in just two short days. So if you guys can take the time to go and sign the petition to potentially get them a pardon.

And if you can hit the website, you can either just scan the QR code on the screen, or you can head to bill and kione.org. And that's where they have not only the petition, but if you want to support the families, they've basically been financially wiped out through this legal process. and so they could use every little bit of help that they could get. That would be amazing. But, yeah, we had Keone on just the other day. And, yeah, if you can share it far and wide, that would be incredibly helpful. Outside of that, on a lighter note, we're also going to be doing some giveaway stuff for the episode. So we've got five gift packages that are going to be going out.

So every gift package is going to get a cold card cue. Every gift package is also going to get a tap signer. And every gift package is going to get some brand new BTC sessions swag. So you'll get a shirt and a hat and your cold card and your tap signer. So what do you need to do? All you need to do is hop over to either my Twitter or my Noster account. and just share the show, give it a share, and then use hashtag Sessions X-Mus 25, and then maybe include a nice Christmas message to all the Bitcoiners out there.

Whoever does that, whoever does a little quote share of the original tweet for the show or the note for the show, and Sessions XMis 25, give a little Christmas wish to everybody, and we're going to randomly pick five winners in the coming week who will all get a package of a cold card cue, a tap signer, and some sessions swag. So with that, damn, we got a good one coming up here. So Nathan, I'm just looking backstage and I'm seeing, I believe, all of the guests here. So that means you're going to have to get the F out. I appreciate it. But if anybody's connection goes sideways, you can always join back in just to balance out the screen.

I appreciate it. But Nathan, we're going to have Jeff Booth, Guy Swann, and Francis Pouliott up here. Maybe I'll get you to join in the last few minutes of the panel just to you're going to have some burning questions, I'm sure. I'm sure. I will talk to you soon. Later. We'll see you in a moment. Okay.

So as I said, I'm going to welcome to the stage, Jeff Booth, Guy Swann, Francis Pooleyott, gentlemen. How are you all doing? Very great. How are you doing? How good to be here. Good to see you guys. Very Merry Christmas. Happy to see you all.

Francis looks considerably warmer than the rest of us. Although, Jeff got the hell out of Dodge. He's not in Canada. So the blizzard that I'm experiencing today is probably quite different from your weather. A little different. A little different. And Guy, you're somewhere relatively warm, I think.

I mean, it's a little cold outside, but that's mostly because I'm a bitch. And it should be, I want it warm here. My brother, though, is actually up in Canada. He went and trapped himself because of his wife, and they're trying desperately to get down to Brazil. Oh, well, they're in the wrong direction. It went the wrong direction. Let them know about north and south. But either way, jents, thank you for being here.

Very happy to have you. We're going to be chatting all things, kind of Bitcoin and Freedom Tech. Sorry, I made you weird there, Francis, I picked it. But, you know, I always value your guys' insights in and around what is going on, what's being built, what are kind of the most interesting things going on. And so I kind of want to start this conversation. I was talking about this at the break before I brought you in. And that is that, unfortunately, you know, we have a Bitcoin builder, two of them that are headed to federal prison very, very quickly here. One of them on Friday, one of them, I believe, in the early days of January, 2026.

and that is for building a Bitcoin privacy tool, Samurai wallet. And so I guess my first prompt here is if this stands, if this ruling stands, there's no pardon, they end up serving out their entire prison term, how does this affect Bitcoin privacy tools and builders in 2026 and moving forward? and what are the lessons to take away from this? Can I start? Sure. Yeah, go Francis.

Go Francis, yeah. It definitely has affected builders in the privacy space. When the news of Keon's arrest was, I think it was somewhere around like May of 2024 or something like that. It was like a year, something like that. I got, I got, I talked to a lot of other developers in the space that were working on privacy software and there was clearly a wind of panic. I was, I personally wasn't like panicking that much, but there was definitely like a wind of panic and a lot of concern. So it has affected the space and we've seen it for example with with Wasabi, you know, the ZK Snacks company shutting down and but I I think that the main lesson that I took away from that is that we need to be smarter about running these kinds of services.

So the thing about Samurai, it's not exactly just like writing software. They were operating a service. They were operating a server, which is different than just writing software, because I don't think there's any risk to anyone that's just like writing code. Operating a server or service is another higher level of risk. And I think why did Samurai need to actually even be incorporated? Why did they need to docks their real identities? You know, they had VC investors.

So they got like a legal corporation. And I think, same thing with ZK Snacks. Like, why does ZK Snacks as a company need to exist as a legal incorporated company? ZKSnax was in Gibraltar and Samurai was incorporated in Delaware? So I'm thinking if I'm operating a privacy focused service I will just have a I will have no corporation I will be fully unincorporated fully pirate and and just fully exit from the the existing legal

system so long story short it has it has had a big impact on the mood but it's of course not dead right was that be for example is crushing it I mean I think Razabi is hitting all-time high in terms of transaction volumes with the coordinator that crew is running. And there's, you know, pay join is being developed. There's cake wallet and bull are working on silent payments and pay join. There's anonymous swap services out there. So it's not like privacy is that at all.

It's just really demoralizing. But I think we can learn from that and really understand that regardless of the administration, the state is our enemy. And we have to make ourselves, we have to isolate ourselves. from potential attacks at like a legal level. Interesting. Guy, I know you were about to chime in as well. Do you want to add anything?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I basically in line with a lot of what he said. And I also just think that general, like, I think about in the context of like BitTorrent is, you know, you go behind a nym and you, like some of these like torrent groups or whatever that were responsible for the leaks, they ended up being very distributed and very, very closed about their privacy. And I also think it'll be really interesting to see basically what comes out of a lot of

different places in the world because I'm talking about talking to a bunch of people and developers specifically that are just not in the U.S. And they come from places where it's just obvious that, you know, you would just go to prison. Like it's not even, it's not really like a question, you know, it's not like, are you running a service? or are you writing a code? It's like, well, no, like you just do something that the government doesn't like and that's just where you go. So I think we kind of have to put that hat on when it comes to people in the Western world and recognize that our governments really aren't that different. They just kind of make, they want the story to look different and, and, you know,

treat them like what they are. And making privacy, all that much more important for the developers and the users and everybody else involved. In addition, I also think we'll get a lot more kind of like, what do you call it? Like kind of like secondary or like side privacy things. Like a good example is just easier ways to use lightning. It's not like a, I'm not like running a service or whatever, but you just kind of happen to get a little bit extra privacy if you're using this tool or if you're self-hosting this and then you have things like ARC where it's like,

we kind of have built in blind signatures and like like getting it where we're actually doing something else like this is the thing that we're providing but oh by the way here's you know here's pay join built in here's here's here's here's the fact that we're we're kind of using e-cash signatures for this thing um and uh i think i think we'll especially the western world will go about it intelligently and in combining these things and i think it was a brilliant decision for both ark and lightning as general tools is like, let's just go ahead and stick in on your routing. You know, like, let's just go ahead and kind of like put in some of these things at the base. So even when we're just developing payment apps, there's a degree of privacy that people just have by default

because it's just what they, that's a right that we all deserve. And it would be stupid to put ourselves on a situation where we have to figure out how to backport that. And I think that's really kind of the way to go is think about everything that you're building, no matter how little or simple it is and think how could I just default, even though it's for this one simple purpose, how could I just make it where there's also this little extra bit of privacy?

In addition, that I'm not running a coordinator or whatever, but maybe I can't tell who's using my app and what they're doing, you know? Yeah, yeah, fair. Jeff, I want to go to you. As time progresses, in my opinion, it kind of stands to reason that the average person by default may not be directly interacting with the base layer and given enough time.

Do we end up in a world where the average person's interaction with Bitcoin is just by default made more private by some of these tools? Or do we slide the way of convenience at the expense? of privacy or custody or whatever. Where do you see this headed? Yeah, one of the reasons I constantly say that natural state of the free market is deflation is to have people realize we've never lived in one. The world has never lived in one.

The U.S. was the closest, and what protected that was the Constitution under individual rights and freedoms, which slowly get taken away, but that imposed a cost on other nations in a zero-sum game. And if you look at those, nations in the zero-sum game when money's broken the same playbook like think about our friends at

hrf and all the people that are hurt by this and we talk about free markets and freedom where ideas matter and we impact each other through that but we don't live in them right they're more productive but we don't live in them and they're exploitative systems and in the worst exploitation when money's broken then laws are changed then then then with the same playbook these people are put into jail because they're a danger to the state. Anybody that's outside of that window is a danger to the state. And so now you have to look at that in a relative world because people think, oh, I'm living free, those people aren't.

And they actually believe, right, that, oh, what about that nation? Well, their rights and freedoms are being taken away, and they don't know it. So I'm getting long-winded answer to get to you this. But what would the free market value? If you look at the Cyphopunk Manifesto, it breached privacy everywhere, right? Because they knew that it was a critical part of freedom in a digital world, right? And in a world that moved more and more digital, more and more technology, it was critical. And they were guiding light.

And then all of the tries to even create Bitcoin, all of the failures, all the tries were kind of out of a bunch of that, same people, right? A bunch of failures inspired the success. And then Bitcoin is coming in layers and the same thing is happening in layers. So every time there's a counter reaction that Francis said from the state, it drives more people to be smarter

to drive essentially no fucking way. We're living free, right? And that smarter me is everywhere. That smarter is, if you have, think about what Fetty is doing. They're showing how this is working around the world where we're in the worst dictatorships. It'd be really hard to go after something that's protecting people in the countries that you want to say that there should be democracies. Right. And so, so now you have, you have, but privacy is critical. And to the answer, I think it looks exactly

like it would look if we're going through a change that most people don't understand. We have to be careful. To be careful in that change. To be careful in that trend, that free market, all of that thinking. And I, I, I, to the people on the stage with me, because they're part of it. And that's why I love about all of these people, right? You and all these people, they are driving this forward. And the only reason this would look the other way, it would all,

we concentrated is if we stopped our agency, if we believed that we didn't have agency and everyone believed they didn't have agency, then it would all be controlled. Otherwise, I have no, this is inevitable, I don't want to say inevitable, because it takes our agency. But more and more people that are joining us because they see they can add their agency into a different world too. just it has to look like this. It has to look, it has to look exactly like this. And we should not think, if you, if we've never lived in a system that looks like we're building, then what it, then what it means is most people wouldn't understand that, no matter who they are.

I, I want to dive into, you know, a couple specific examples of, uh, We'll save headlines that I've seen that give me worry of things going in the opposite direction. And maybe you guys can comment on antidotes to that. So one of the thing is UK censorship laws and arrests over social media posts. I've seen a ton of that. In fact, I can't remember the exact number, but it is staggering how many people have had arrests simply for social media posts. social media posts in the UK this year alone. Do you don't want to say it was like 13,000 or something?

Yeah, yeah, it's 12,000. Yeah. That's unbelievable. And like those numbers outrank some of the more totalitarian regimes on the planet over social media posts. Like there's examples of countries that you would think would be far less free that are doing less to censor on social media than UK. And the other thing that I've seen in yet another Commonwealth country is in Australia, just a few days ago, I want to say maybe a week ago. So while they've been tightening their online censorship laws and around what you're allowed to post, they also just implemented ID requirements, basically age limits on social media, which to the average person is going to be like, yeah, you know what? Maybe it is a good idea to limit children from social media.

which, yeah, like that's a parenting decision and not one that I disagree with. I think that, you know, the less I can expose, you know, my child to the awfulness of social media at an early age, the better. But under the guise of that reasoning, they've implemented de facto idea requirements to utilize social media. So if you're under 16, basically you have to prove that you're over 16. And how are they going to prove that? Well, it's going to be, where's your ID? Where is your proof of, of, you know, address and name, phone number, whatever it may be. But it's going to be a typical thing of like, oh, yeah, we're going to package this and protect the children.

But really, it's about like, how do we make it that you can't go online without telling us exactly who you are? Exactly. And so you pair that with the clamp down on what you're allowed to say along with the ID requirements just to be on social platforms. A system of control has to use fear and coercion to control you. But that's also, I actually honestly don't know why we're fighting it. Because every time we amplify it, right, think about what's happening right now. Bill and Keone are going to jail and you've done a good job that Bitcoiners have. And we're talking about UK, right?

Like what are they doing when it's happening here? Right. And if people should be outraged, it's happening here, right, in the free market. Before they're outraged, it's happening somewhere else. And that should drive a motivation to say, if it's happening here in this tiny area and it's happening there, then what would the free market do? Look at the worst places around.

And what happens, you have an exchange rate that is a currency, and then you have a different exchange rate that's a free market. It always happens. So what will happen because of this problem is, you'll accelerate the fix to the problem. And the people that are getting stuck in the problem and doing this, unfortunately, it's just like the people that don't buy Bitcoin, right?

They're perceiving the world that they're making stronger from that world. Right. And everything is getting worse. And by the way, it will get worse from that really fast. But the other thing will happen too. it'll get way better from the other side. I just don't let it down. I just don't let it take my energy.

It's just nonsense. It's trying to. It's trying COVID. All of this nonsense. There's going to be a whole bunch more things. Every moment they're going to try to get you to stop doing what you're doing, to build, to move to the other side. Yeah.

So as with money, there's going to be an official exchange rate and there's going to be a free market exchange rate. As with opinions, there's going to be an official opinion and a free market opinion. And I'm wondering if you guys. Yeah. So I'm using FETI more and more as my communication tool. Because now I can communicate with friends that I know it's completely secure. right there's nothing that fetti can see any of the guardians can see it's it's completely

secure and i'm doing that because as ai moves faster and faster then people won't know it's me and i need something that is super solid right that is that people know it's me right no one can and no one can break it and that's so these things are going to become critical for people who don't know that they're already critical. Let's chat, let's let's go down that AI rabbit hole because, you know, with the bad comes good, with the good comes bad. There's both sides of the fence, as you said. And so how does one, and maybe from the perspective of everybody here, how does one navigate

a world where, you know, obviously the powers that be are going to have their AI tools, that are going to probably be very effective in trying to clamp down on the average person's privacy and gain even more control of society and help form the opinions of society at large. But there are also open source tools that one can use as well. But how do you balance out when the average person is looking for convenience? It's going to hear the other guys. Yeah, yeah. I know you do a lot of AI content and stuff, so Guy, I'll get in your take.

Okay, so I'll say just on the topic in general and the previous question, necessity is the mother of invention, right? Is that pressure creates the very avenue we need to release that pressure. And in the context of AI, and I feel like when it comes to peer-to-peer, decentralized, key-based systems, they've always been possible. There's always been options, but they've always sucked, basically. And they've never really caught on because essentially the platform or the convenience has always just overridden whatever the potential downside or the risk or the cost is. But I think a lot of the costs are coming to bear because those costs really only get realized after it's so large that you cannot develop these networks outside of them. And so the networks themselves become the tools of abuse. You know, like the network owner just realized when you have, when you have a billion people on Facebook, suddenly you realize you can censor people and doesn't really matter. You don't have to worry about competition with MySpace because A, you already won and B, you can't talk to all your friends unless you're on Facebook. And so there's this feedback. And so there's this feedback. loop of the abuse, the return from abuse as the network gets larger, gets larger, and then the

cost to exit gets greater as well, because you're having to lose your entire network and rebuild it somewhere else. But we also are in a place where FETI, I hadn't even thought about it, and I hadn't even used FETI in a while, but it's a perfect example of the fact that we've got like four or five major options of totally external systems that are increasingly just working, like you would just expect an app or a software environment or a platform to work. And it just does. And the AI, the interesting thing about AI is that AI has absolutely plummeted with all these centralized surveillance in, you know, social media platforms and everybody plugged into

chat, GPT and all this stuff. Like it has basically absolutely plummeted like a like a 95% discount on the cost to, on the cost of tyranny the way this all of this stuff has gone but at the exact same time there's like a 95% discount on the ability to easily build around it

because I am not a developer I've been vibe coding the shit out of stuff like every single day I am building some little thing for my own scripting or my own system and things that I tried to build like seven or eight months ago and fail that because I just ran into a dead end or the AI just kept taking me down this

like stupid route and be like I swear to God we've been down here this is not going to work you know and I just gave up because after you know days of tackling it it didn't work now I'm like I've got to go back and the model's that much better and now now it's just like absolutely producing the things I'm going back to projects that within within a year could not be done are now being done um and then there's tons of stuff that are just it's just working like like keat and the pair stack and stuff like we've been building on this for a while with our pair drive project um and just the idea of just being able to like it's gonna work like i've we've got enough of it together and enough of it in operation like it's it is the way i've got a shitty

version of it but it's the way that i'm getting stuff between my mac and my linux machine because like nothing else works is good like everything else just sucks and and it's peer to peer and it's easy, you know, you punch in a key and you're connected and just share whatever you want to share. And then you add like zaps and just like a social layer to that that you have contacts. Like, PerPass just dropped. Which is the exact same thing for a password manager. And there's no servers. I immediately, I immediately dropped it, I downloaded the new version and got the mobile app this morning.

I connected to my desktop and boom, I'm syncing all my password to my phone. My desktop. There's no platform. There's no account system. there's no nothing like it just works and then a wholesale friend of mine a super sue has been building the crap out of that we're getting that implemented in start nine so you just scan a QR code free net or uh on clear net or anywhere you just connect directly to it and you can you can mess you can do your services you can install new things you're just going to be able to connect directly to it you

don't need a dns there's no setup like you just you boot up wholesale say i want to connect to this service scan it you're connected to the service the thing is is that we're going to be able to build. Again, necessity is the mother of invention, but the engine of building solutions is so much easier. Like, I am participating in building solutions. I can't build. I can't write, I can't write a good solid line of code. You know, I just can't. But I do understand how things are built. I do understand like the architecture and when somebody's sending me down a wrong path and that I need the list of API and all this stuff. Um, like we have the capacity to get around it to a degree that's kind of unheard of.

Like to the same degree of like how much it's made easier from a tyrannical perspective, how easy it is for everyone who gives any concern or has any motivation about it to contribute to stopping it is so huge now. And I can't do such a perfect example of Jeff. There's going to be an official and there's going to be another. parallel world and they're the parallel world is going to just speed up so much it's going to and they're going to diverge you just massively I mean we already live in two different worlds you know like bitcoiners you just talk to bitcoins who are this deep in Bitcoin and see and see their view in the world talk to others that's actually that's why I said guy and you just described

perfectly you have agency Francis has agency Ben has agency what you is like in and nobody's telling you what to do, right? The, and and and as you see different tools to be able to explore, you just use it and you're what you're doing by your work, you're building the fabric of the things that people are going to need as they find out they need it. You're just, it's a perfect free market that's building that, right? And so I don't get fussed with all the nonsense and in clown world, right? Because I know it has to look like that and it has to get worse. Yeah. I'm going to build on what Guy just said.

So I have a lot to say about AI. Just like Guy, I've been on a vibe coding rabbit hole, especially the last five days. I feel I'm a little biased because my mind has expanded so much in the last five days with Claude 4.5 Opus, which I feel like... I'm in the terminal. God, it's crazy. I feel like there's like there's like a leap that was made with this latest model. And I know everybody always says that of the latest model, but I really feel like this one's a huge leap.

So a guy said a very good point, which is that there's a discount on tyranny. The thing is the tyrants never did the discount. They've always had Kalantir. They have billions of dollars. Like whether they are more efficient or less efficient at, mass surveillance and mass control. I mean, they're not gonna, they're not, they're not gonna control us more.

They have an infinite budget essentially. The difference is with the sovereign individual. And I have never felt a larger increase in sovereignty than over the last year, year and a half with the advent of AI tools. And just before this panel, I was listening in and we were talking about people should build more tools and more apps

And did you know how hard it is to translate a full blown wallet? Do you know how long it took us to translate our wallet in Russian, like a week? And then once you have the translation system set up to translate to finish to, I don't know, like 12 minutes, and then we translate to Ukrainian and then it's infinitely translatable. The tools that I'm building are highly dangerous. and potent tools that are the kind of thing that I've been dreaming about building and there's a special type of person that's kind of like guy and myself which is understand that an individual that understands what he wants to build in the

architecture of what he wants to build but stuff where it's like I would need to raise a million dollars to build a prototype for this idea as stuff that you can do now so it is a great equalizer like AI is is really a great equalizer and of course it's going to be used against us, but the government has been using big data and very large scale, very expensive systems like what Palantir has been building for the likes 25 years against us. But now we can, of course, build our own systems, whether it's replacing an army of lawyers with GROC or whether it's filing, writing a thousand pages of legal documents and fighting bureaucracy with Chad GPT, whether it's building privacy tools for yourself, where the sovereign individual has basically an army of bureaucrats, he can hire an army of bureaucrats and technicians behind him to fight these battles.

So I feel like really like my brain, my consciousness has expanded with AI and my capabilities to rig have, my capabilities to rig have. or to avoid capture or whatever it is have really increased with AI. And you know, you said something earlier that I just want to get quickly back to you said, like, are we going to go through this route of like censorship resistance, privacy, self-guesty, like cypherpunk apps or are we going to go more to the convenience route? And it also gets back to this toolkit that has been developed in Bitcoin, which is being augmented with like AI software but which has been gradually building before you know before clock code whether that's the libraries of BDK breeze SDK

ARC lightning liquid and think about like what we've done so far for example what's what's the easiest way to like send and receive Bitcoin payments I would say short of being a custodial wallet it's like bowl aqua breeze right these are and these are very very private by the fall These are like these are so private that I'm actually concerned that they might actually like an atomic swap is kind of like switching from Manero to Bitcoin and back to Manero. You know it's like it's a chain breaking event. It's one might argue that it's from an on-chain perspective, chain analysis perspective,

it's more private than coin join. And what's like one of the easiest ways to hedge your Bitcoin value in US dollars? I would say it's probably but ACWA has done with side swap, you know, like switching, it's a non-constitutional atomic swap from LBTC to LUSDT. And the stuff that made me insanely bullish is when I went to Logano and I really, like, Bull has really dug deep into what is possible with ARC. And of course, Arc is great for payments. It's a great payments technology that has some unique and different tradeoffs from liquid, but what you can do with like the defy stuff, you know, that I used to found it very

cringe but there is a lot of things that you can do which completely eliminates the needs for a state for a legal corporation so I'm very very bullish and I think that again I want to talk to what your previous guest was saying like we need people to build these tools and the capacity to build these tools the cost of building these tools has massively decreased like you know think about what it cost to build Palantir versus what it costs nowadays to build a privacy software. I mean, the asymmetry is insane.

It's much cheaper for us to build tools than it is for the government. And they're not, I don't think they're going to be quick enough to integrate AI really in the way that we are, like, as individuals, as entrepreneurs. Like, you know, they're integrating like IBM AI, you know, IBM-style stuff, corporate AIs. Whereas we're pirates. We're using AI as a as a hacking tool. And so I am very, very bullish on AI for the sovereign individual. And I think it's a wonderful time to be alive.

And I am not concerned. If you were you were chiming in there, I didn't quite yet. Yeah, no, just centralization has never worked, right? Because the cost has to go through. It's one person's idea or group of people's idea that can't, can't work at the speed of the free market. And if more people knew that, right, so think about the number of people right now. And this is why I try to hammer this home over and over again.

And people that are living in this space know it. There's tons of people living in that world that are Bitcoiners, that most of their time is on Twitter, in fear about what the government's going to do. When if they took a day, two days, and started vibe quoting, their minds would expand like I in France. And they would say, I can contribute. I don't have to be a victim.

I can add my voice and I can contribute. And if my thing provides value, I get paid for it too, right? Because it provided value in the free market. And there's billions of us, right? If we would, there's, and there's more and more every day that are making that understanding and they're moving their, time. So it's going to be messy. The part of this is going to be messy is most people don't know when they're giving into the fear. They're talking about the fear every day. And they're inside that

thing that's preying on their worst fears feeding back at it, which is it's the AI. Yeah. I want to say something just on that note is that like for everybody out there who thinks that like they haven't sorted out yet or like AI is not going to give you a like good enough code or something like that, which obviously that's a concern. You know, like you don't want to throw a product with spaghetti code, you know, throwing at you from, from AI. But between Nuster, PubKee, the pair stack, and one of the things that we're doing with PairDrive specifically is we're building PairDrive core so that you can basically

just import it and then anything that you think about with file syncing or creating like a space where there's like you can just. add people and give them kind of piecemeal permissions to any set of files or any lists inside of it. These things, like they're plug and play. Like people already built the building blocks. And then you've got like wallet SDKs. You got Breeze SDK. You got Fetty. You got all of these things. You don't have to build the hard stuff that you have to worry about the security for. You just talk to the API. And we've got we've got self-hosting. We've got peer-to-peer direct connections. We've got blind forwarding. We've got key-based identity. We've got ZAPs. We've got an

entire wallet and payment infrastructure. We have everything that the web even has, like everything to redesign the web. And literally, you can just go vibe code with all that stuff. And you don't have to worry about it because Breeze is going to make sure that the lightning works. And PairDrives is going to make sure that the syncing works. And NOS is going to make sure the identity and ZAPs work. And you can just build it. Like you literally can just build it now. And the As that, I did an episode from like a year and a half ago or something like that, the stupid thumbs up thing, a year and a half ago. AI, I did, I thought I cut this off like five times.

But from sometime, like a year and a half ago or whatever, titled a million new devs, it's going to be more than that. Because after everybody's already built these, the development kits and the, you know, back in libraries and all this stuff that you just call, it's anybody. Is anybody? Is anybody who's willing to just go to Claude and be like, let's build this thing. Here are the tools that I want you to use. Let's just build it.

And we've laid a lot of this groundwork. We've laid a lot of this groundwork in a couple, six more months, a year, more of the groundwork of the foundational pieces. What the hell can't we build? I've watched. I'm streaming from the Freedom Center, which is a kind of like co-working tech, hub in Costa Rica, Bitcoin, Nostr, kind of like digital nomad space. And I have watched two wholly functional apps, one of them which is in production,

which was fully vibe-coded using Marmots on Noster, which is a decentralized marketplace for services like massage, garage, pet sitting, all the kind of stuff I call it Wellfred, which was pretty much entirely vibe-coded using Claude. And I've also watched the founder of Bitcoin Jungle create a fully Noster-based YouTube alternative called Tubester. I hope he changes me because it's so lame to call Stubster. But but, but.

It needs them help a lot of naming things. Yes. Fully using the Marmot protocol, like enter and encrypted like super cypherpoint stuff using, using Claude. And I spent the last three days building something very dangerous. using advanced cryptography, partially signed transactions, crafting transactions from scratch, blinding. And it's fucking real. It's not a joke. This is fucking real. It is not the same thing that it was six months ago. And it's only going in one direction. And it's actually being subsidized right now by, you know, I don't know, the NGO, the public markets are subsidizing.

I think I've burned like $700 of clock credits in like a week, but that probably costs anthropic like 20 Gs. So use it now. No, but it's super, super, super bullish. And when we were talking about like financing, and of course there's, we're not replacing devs per se, I don't think that's what we're talking about now. I think we're talking about unleashing the power

of creative architects and like, it's kind of like, you know, when you're building a castle or something, like you do need the visionary architect to and the planner and the chief to make it work. But, you know, maybe you don't need like all these brick layers. You know, they're just laying bricks. Like maybe the agent can lay all the bricks. And all you really need is instead of having like 500 people to build that castle, maybe you need like, you know, six. Yeah. It's been the big thing is.

Yeah. Sorry, sorry to interrupt. But that I have been hiring and talking to developers that I just, I assess and it's like, okay, you guys are competent and you know how to build this. You know how to build this thing safely and securely. And then I get them a clog code subscription so that they can build it faster. But I'm using their developing skills to trust that, they send the code in the right direction, you know?

Because that's the thing that I can't do is I'll go down the wrong path because I end up having to trust Claude's conclusion on a bunch of stuff. This doesn't replace developers. It just makes them more, you know? Yeah, I fully agree. I think it supercharges the cream of the crop, right? Gentlemen, we're coming to time here. It looks like Francis is frozen in time.

That's okay. his AI. He's busy coding, vibe coding. But, oh, there he is. But, Fred, I'm just saying we're kind of time, but Nathan is in the wings here. And I think, you know, he's been listening and everything. I'm going to give him the opportunity to drop one more question on you guys really quick before we close up. So I'll welcome him to the stage now. But Nathan, how are you doing?

Good, good. Just a nice and simple, easy question, guys. In terms of privacy and self-sovereignty and engineering a better world, are we going to win? Yes. Yeah, quick as yes. Yeah, we're going to win. You know, centralization, Jeff said it best, I think, is centralization doesn't work. It scales in the short to medium term. It scales what does work, but in a world where things are changing so drastically and so quickly, centralization is also insanely brittle. like decentralization is the only thing that actually does actually has the capacity to adjust and we are in yes and increasingly we are in a world that is going to move and change so so so so fast and structurally so fast because we are we're in a fourth turning we're in a structural shift as it is and everything that's holding up the system that was is reaching its end game

Like we're in the debt endgame. We're in the political, like, or in the NATO end game. We're in the like all the political alliances. We're in the idea of all of our platforms and the old establishment, like authority. Like everything is in flux, everything. And it's only going to get quote unquote worse, which is going to open up more and more space to be replaced. Guy, we shouldn't be on panels at the same time because we always say the same thing. Okay, then for...

It's going to get worse. We can just repeat each other. No, but Nathan, it's going to get worse before it gets better. I think that's the number one thing. And there's... And Ben was enumerating some of the things that he's been seeing that are concerning.

There are much, much worse things that I, as a, I guess, Bitcoin CEO have some insight into, but things are definitely getting worse for sure before they get better but of course that is just everything is going according to plan let's just say and and you know you mentioned the fourth turning and we of course are at the cusp of the you know weak men make bad times and bad times make strong men which is us so I am not

concerned Nathan but for myself and for people who are, let's say, ahead of the curve. But unfortunately, I think that there will be a little bit of collateral damage in the near future. And it is our job to create the tools for the normies that are otherwise kind of screwed. To put it simply, I'm not concerned about my kids. I'm concerned about people in the next five to ten years. Interesting. Jeff. Yeah, this is going to be the last fourth turning because these tools actually

make sure that they because the fourth turning was always a rise up of a centrally controlled monetary system against a natural state of the free market which would always have been deflation and it gets worse and worse and worse and then resets through war and we say we'll never do that again and we start it again right this is the end of the fourth turnings and it's the beginning of something totally different most people can't comprehend and what just gives me so much hope is all of you guys, all of the people that are building this. Like they like just it's what a crazy time to be alive. Right.

And more people are joining us every day and and contributing to to this. It's just where would you rather be? Yeah. I do just have one more quick question if it's okay. For Francis Escobar in the corner there, when can I expect the bull Bitcoin home defense drone? When can I order that? Oh, that's a whole other rabbit hole we got to talk about.

And that will be the greatest equalizer of them all. And I wish I had better insight on this industry because it's the most fascinating. I'm going to say that from a technical perspective, it's probably possible now. And certainly, in fact, oh, we've got the cough. Got an audio cut. But, I mean, if anything, he just full on soul. the bull Bitcoin home defense drone. You know, I got to tell you, just even without one that's like got a weapon or whatever,

you know, maybe like a stun gun or something, but just one that like when you press a panic button or your alarm goes off, that launches up and then starts filming. Yeah. It just starts filming and keeps track of stuff and like watches what's going on and like projects it back to somewhere. Like that's a kind of, that's a really dope ad. That's a really tough idea. Yeah.

You know, Francis, it's not just going to film. I'm just saying we can get started and then we could put that targeting thing on the camera and then maybe it has another purpose. I don't know. He's going to vibe code like a swarm of drone surveillance for all Bitcoin or properties. It's coming.

All right, gentlemen, we're going to wrap the panel here. I know Francis cut out, but probably at the perfect time. And Guy and Jeff, great seeing you guys. I hope you have a very, very Merry Christmas. And I'll be talking to you both soon. You too, ready. Merry Christmas, guys. Cheers.

Merry Christmas, guys. There you go. All right. Nathan, quite the freedom tech panel that we had in there. And up next I'm going to be chatting a little bit about Bitcoin community, circular economy, using Bitcoin. Like what we wanted Bitcoin for. Not just, you know, a secondary option to investing in real estate, but how do you live on a Bitcoin standard? How is that going?

Is that still a thing? Are we just leaning hard into ETFs now? Are we just going to all buy treasury companies? Or is there something more? Can you as a Bitcoin or become more? We're going to be chatting about that in a little bit. Nathan, I'm going to toss it to you momentarily as I do a quick run out here really quick. grab a couple things.

But I would love for you to give any thoughts on the last panel, but also remind people about the very important cause that we're trying to support. And before I go, I'll say, remember the giveaway. Make sure that you share the show either from my ex or my Noster profile. I've shared it earlier. Give it a little quote, hashtag Sessions X-Miss 25. And maybe give a little Christmas message to all the Bitcoiners out there.

And there are five gift packages. Each one will include a cold card cue, a tap signer, and some sessions merch. So just give the show a share and make sure to do that. Anyways, thanks to the last panel. Nathan, I'm going to jump here. I will be back in just a couple short minutes. But give your thoughts and let people know about the important cause to support. Absolutely. Absolutely, sir.

So in terms of thoughts, and first and foremost, guys, we've got to go to Bill and Q&A.org. So let me go ahead and see if I can pull that up here quick. Boom, here we go. So remember, especially with the free thing, we have to defend those who defend us. We got to make sure that we're supporting them. So go to Bill and Q&A.org, sign the petition and donate to the families. Let's take a quick peek here, too. Let's see.

We are currently sitting at 7,807 signatures so far. I want to see those numbers get pumped up. Let's see if we can crack 8,000 before we're done on the stream today. And I'm pretty sure I've got the sign the petition QR code for you right there. This stuff really, really, really is important. Now, a couple of things. One thing I actually want to touch on with regards to living on a Bitcoin standard, building out communities.

We just a couple days ago had the sat market here in Calgary. And man, it was another fantastic turnout. This was our Christmas market. This is the chance for all the bitcoins to come together. We had a nice hang out afterwards. A ton of great vendors. There's actually some Bitcoin curious too, which for 2025, I hadn't had too many newcomers showing up and kind of asking questions.

when at different events or, you know, like the Bitcoin conference or things around town. So it was really nice to see some people curious to try Bitcoin, to learn about Bitcoin, to come out and spend some time. So this really is your next layer of defense. If you've got like the money that nobody can confiscate, you got the privacy tools there, the thing that you really need to build out and everyone needs to do this in their own kind of local area, their own geographical spot, is start networking with the other Bitcoiners around you and build this sort of circular economy.

even if it's just a couple you showing up for the first time, it doesn't matter. You make those connections, and that gives you almost like having a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. It's another emergency supply you kind of have there on hand. If at any point in time that, you know, we have, let's say we have another trucker protest here in Canada, and my bank account gets shut off, right? I can no longer access the Fiat system whatsoever. I know a plumber. I know a carpenter.

I know an HVAC guy. I know a rancher. I can get some food. I can buy just a almost everything for. those daily necessities and a bunch of good tradesmen, I can pay directly in Bitcoin, which means I never have to go back and use those traditional fiat rails, which makes me in another way sort of better and untouchable, right? It means that it's another form of resilience. It was so wonderful to see everybody else there. But one of the things that I want to highlight

from this too is that we did, do-do-do-do-d-do-bullet. We were playing around with Bull Wallet, Ben gave a live demonstration, another great one. Welcome back, sir. If you haven't checked it out, but I just want to share with you talking about the tech that people are building and just how phenomenal things are getting. This blew my mind. I had a woman who was working for one of the vendors at the sat market. And the guy that she was working for is Bitcoiner as well. And he came over and asked, like, hey, could you just help onboard her quickly? She wants to buy some stuff, but they're only accepting Bitcoin. So she has to figure out how to get Bitcoin. This woman had never used Bitcoin before.

We got her signed up, we did it at Bull Bitcoin there with Francis, had her signed up to the exchange, approved, funded, downloaded Bull app, recovered with recoverable, and had everything. We had Bitcoin in her wallet. So like from zero to Bitcoin in her bowl wallet there in 10 minutes and 24 seconds because we timed it. And then she immediately went out and spent that at the Sat Market and followed up by buying more Bitcoin. So the tools that people are building, even just on like the everyday kind of self-custody side, the better they get, the easier the easier the onboarding guests, easier the experience get. They got to have a ton of love for people that are building stuff like this. Well said, well said.

And that was an excellent success story from the SAP market. It was. I love that. And we're going to get to chat about the SAP market and more circular economy stuff. Right now, I see two of the guests backstage. Did you want to join in for the beginning of the panel? If the third one hops in, then we can kind of even out the screen. 100%. Sounds good.

Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So on the topic of Bitcoin circular economies using Bitcoin, not just having it as a savings tool, that's what I want to touch on with these guys. And we're going to bring them in right now, actually. So I want to welcome to the stage, Mr. Mike Peterson, Bitcoin Beach. Mike, how are you doing? Good to see you, man.

Good to see you guys. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Thanks for being here. And I see her in the background here. I'm going to let her in. There she is. What is up? Yo, how are you doing? Good to see you. Good. How are you guys? Good. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Very happy to have you. And we may be joined by Joe, Joe Hall, Joe Nakamoto in a little bit. He all obviously has also gallivanted the globe and visited many circular economies and done the Bitcoin thing. So we'll keep an eye up. Guys, thank you so much for being here.

And I wanted to kind of focus this chat on Bitcoin and community and building locally and kind of talking about what that looks like, how it's going, and just kind of go from there and see where the conversation takes us. So, you know, 2025, unfortunately, was the year of paper Bitcoin and treasury companies and ETFs and

all of that crap that myself as an individual. I don't really care too much about. So my question to you guys, as people that are more kind of tuned into the Bitcoin around the street, one

is grassroots adoption failing or is it just quieter and less noticeable than the noise of these bigger players? You want me to jump in first as well? Yeah, I was going to say you should jump in because what you guys are doing in Bitcoin Beach speaks more than any of the noise online. Awesome. Yeah, so it's funny, if you just watch the news, you know, you might think that things have slowed down as far as Bitcoin adoption and circular economies, but it's actually, couldn't be any different from the truth.

We've seen adoption kind of ramping ahead. And I feel like when we started out in El Zante, just because it was kind of novel, what we were doing, and we, you know, were able to get a lot of press interested in what we're doing, you know, from 60 minutes to Wall Street Journal, everything was focused on El Salvador. And so it actually maybe overhyped it. There was more hype than there was real adoption and real use. But now that's kind of quieted and it's not, you know, this unique story anymore. And people stop reporting on it.

We're actually seeing the usage increase. First, in El Salvador, I mean, it's becoming, the tools are becoming easier and easier to use. The number of stores that are accepting are increasing. But beyond that, just the number of communities around the world. And we're working with, it's probably close to 100 communities around the world. We were just in Africa. We saw you there, Ben, for the African Bitcoin Conference. And we had a summit right afterwards that we were meeting with, I think, 13 different circular economies, just at that summit that we brought in, that are just in certain parts of Africa.

And so it's on the ground, we're seeing real things happening, even though the media is not as focused on it. That is super interesting. You said something that the number of tools and in particular, the number of businesses accepting is increasing. And so one of the questions I was going to bring to you was we saw that Bitcoin is no longer legal tender, meaning that it is not mandated to be used and accepted as legal tender in El Salvador. And so what I was going to ask is, what has the that done to the directionality of people using Bitcoin in El Salvador.

But you say you're seeing continued kind of snowballing of adoption. You're seeing more people come. Why do you think that is? I think it's just that these things take a long time to take hold. People are creatures of habit. And so they're used to doing something one way. And it just takes them a while of watching other people use a different tool of, you know, to see people use Bitcoin and just how much easier it is.

And then a lot of the businesses are realizing they're losing clients because people come all the time and say, hey, do you accept Bitcoin? And a lot of times they'll walk away if they don't. And so they're realizing that they need to accept. So just to be realistic about it, there probably have been like a few bigger, like franchise businesses that have maybe stopped using Bitcoin.

I haven't run into that personally, but I've heard some different. people recount that, maybe some different fast food restaurants. They probably weren't getting enough traction to make it worthwhile. And once the law was no longer in effect, maybe a couple of them decided it would just be easier. But we're seeing a bunch of small and medium-sized businesses ramp up, just as the tools get better. And as they start to understand just the value of accepting the world's hardest money. So overall, I would say it's getting easier and easier to live on a Bitcoin standard in El Salvador.

That's interesting. Do you think there's a degree of, and I know it sounds counterintuitive, but do you think in any way before it was almost like, and I'm not saying that it's no longer a stamp of approval, but it sounded official, oh, it's legal tender. And so some people may have interpreted that as like top down kind of forceful, you have to do this with with the suspension of that but keeping it open as an option do you think there's any people that maybe perceive it as like they were they were maybe opposed to it because

they weren't keen on like government mandates but now that it's open they're just kind of like oh well maybe maybe maybe there's something there maybe i'll take a peek i think that's just human nature when we're told that we have to do something i know for myself that's how i'm wired when somebody tells me I have to do something, I'm usually all of a sudden against it, even though I might not even have like a reason to be against it, but it's just this kind of visceral. We don't want to be mandated or required to do things. So I definitely think, yeah, there are some now that they're like, okay, this isn't like me giving into the government. The government's no longer requiring it. But I see all these other businesses, even though they're not being required to accept it,

continue to accept it, maybe I'm missing out on something. And so I definitely do think there is that kind of counterintuitive, you know, push back in a positive direction of, okay, now that we're not required, let's go ahead and start accepting it. Yeah, absolutely. Now, I want to, I want to jump to Issa here. And Issa, you've been, you've been obviously kind of spearheading your own local, I'm going to call it an experience. My friend actually came down and visited you guys as well. But tell me about life on Islo Moheras and what you've been building there

and kind of how it's going. Well, I do want to highlight that every time I go to Bitcoin Beach, more merchants except Bitcoin. I don't know how you guys manage. This time I was there in November, all the places I went to accepted Bitcoin. So that is huge, especially since I know how hard it is to start it and to get merchants to accept Bitcoin, not just being onboarded, but just having them keep accepting Bitcoin, I think that's the hard part.

Well, I think just to jump in real quick, Isabel, I think that the key to that has been the number of Bitcoiners that have moved to L-South. Salvador or that visit because that is one of the challenges. It's one thing to get somebody onboarded, but if you don't have people actually spending Bitcoin and injecting Bitcoin in the community, a lot of times the stores for them, it's not worthwhile or they forget how to do it because it hasn't been in a while. So I think that is one of the secrets of circular economies is to make sure Bitcoiners are spending their Bitcoin and shaming the ones that, you know, that come down and want to spend Fiat. Nothing drives me more crazy than the Bitcoiners that come down and refuse to spend Bitcoin.

It's like you have freedom money. That is a horror thing. And I'm not going to name names here, but you told me somebody who came down to Bitcoin Beach and didn't spend stats. And the name that I heard horrified me. And the next time we see that person, I'm going to specifically call them out on that because of all people, come on. So nonetheless, yeah, like, yeah, you got to, you got to walk the walk.

And sometimes you have to realize that at some point, some person had to say, I think there's some value in Bitcoin. And somebody had to say, I'm willing to exchange, you know, my Fiat or whatever for Bitcoin for the first time. And then somebody for the first time had to buy something with Bitcoin. Somebody for the first time, there are all these first times for Bitcoin. And now the world at large is coming to a place where a lot of people, I won't say most, but a lot of people are beginning to recognize the store of value idea of like, oh, this can be savings technology. That's no longer like a super outlandish thing to say. But the living on Bitcoin, the using Bitcoin in commerce, that thing is still, you know, to some that are,

still in the mindset of, oh, I understand saving. And even the ones that want it to be money, if you aren't using it as money because you want to wait until becomes money, it will never become money. And so you need to be the crazy fucking person out there to be like, I'm going to start working to live on a Bitcoin standard. You need to be the change that you want to see in the world. You need to step out of that comfort zone and change things because there's a million people, people sitting in the wing saying, I wish this was a thing, but until somebody leads by example, not a single person will follow. So it just bothers me so much. Anyways, Isabella and Mike, we interrupted.

Mike, I'll let you finish your thought there. No, 100%. Yeah, Isabella. No, like what you guys are saying is right. My thing is, do Bitcoiners not know that you have your saving Bitcoin and then you're spending Bitcoin? Like, it is not that hard to differentiate the two. Like, it's not crazy. There's a Bitcoiner that always comes to the island.

His name is Bitcoin Larry. And he says it perfectly. He's like, instead of trading my dollars for, you know, more fiat pesos, I just trade it for Bitcoin and inject my Bitcoin to the economy. I'm not touching my saving Bitcoin. Like, that has nothing to do. And I don't understand how Bitcoiners have been taught to never touch it. Like, you can keep stacking Bitcoin.

Actually, in circular economies, you can get non-KYC Bitcoin. To me, I'm like, what is everybody else talking about? But to tell you, like, more or less what we're building, we actually had Paco from Bitcoin Beach come and help out. because help is so needed in BTC Isla. There is so much for us to do. But right now I think we can, I have to celebrate our small wins that are like, you can come to the island and survive only using Bitcoin.

And I'm talking like getting protein, going to this, like there's a super now that's a tiny little supermarket, like an oxo, like a little gas. that accepts Bitcoin. So that was a huge win. There's restaurants. There's like a paper shop, you know, that you can print stuff and buy utensils that accepts Bitcoin.

So we've managed to get to the point where a Bitcoiner can come and fully live off Bitcoin, not comfortably, like not like a five-star hotel type of vibe. But it's a start, you know, before at the beginning of the year, you couldn't do that. So it took us a while. We have over 32 merchants that accept Bitcoin, which is more than 10% of the whole jobs. We have over 130 houses that you can buy, rent, or sell using Bitcoin.

We have the first Bitcoin gym that runs its own node. We're starting next year Bitcoin crash course. So the idea is my motto in life is just you have to try things out and you know you take the ship where everything goes and What I wanted to do my next project is sort of now that we have the foundation of the circular economy We want to take it like another step further and do like three-day retreats of a Bitcoin 101 crash course Where you come to the island you don't have to know anything about Bitcoin. that it's actually better if you don't. We come and we teach you like why Bitcoin, how to use it,

you know, how to store it safely for three days, like an intensive course. And since we already have sort of like the foundation of a Bitcoin circular economy, you can go out and spend Bitcoin. So it's going to be super cool. Like, it's amazing. I love to hear it. And again, you, you, you're saying, again, it's, it's, you were, you were saying, oh, it's, it's, it's, it's not that

much yet, but it's building 10% of the existing merchants. There's, there's, um, I can't remember, uh, what the, uh, what the metric is, but like when, when things are compounding, uh, it's like once you hit 1% then you're like, is it's like you're, you're actually like halfway there or something like that. And so like if you got 10% of the merchants on the island, you're, you're so close to that kind of like critical like, all the sudden, everything just changes. That's huge. It's a big win to be able to do that.

And yeah, that's amazing. And I want to, Nathan, if you don't mind, one of our other team members from Team Sessions is actually here. And I'm going to swap him in here because we just had an event just the other day. And actually, Mike, you shot over some support, some stats for the event, which was massively helpful because basically this was our sixth one. And the first five, I basically just paid for it out of pocket because I really, really wanted it to happen. And so this was the first time where between yourself and a number of other people at our market, it was fully funded on its own. I didn't have to pull out a pocket for the very first time.

So it's kind of become self-sufficient. But I want to introduce you guys to a really good friend of mine and a part of the team at the channel. And also the person that has basically made it, got the sat market to where it is now. And then we also, I got to give a shout out to the guy we just enlisted, who is now basically holding down the fort as well, Francois. but I want to welcome to stage. Art. Art, how you doing, man? Good to see you. Hey, folks. Thumbs up if you can hear me. Yeah, we got you, man. Mike, big thanks for the support from across the pond, or I guess in the pond across the body of oceans and mountains there. Issa, thank you for your work as well. I still remember

an orange pill app. I was traveling around Quintanaru, Yucatan, right? Or wherever I was at the time. and it just shows you where people are. And I'm like, hey, Issa, you know, what's this? And the mojeres, you know? And we didn't end up chatting, but that's the point of community is you get to meet people from across all the world. Yeah, absolutely. And art, I want to maybe get your thoughts on what has come to fruition

over the past couple years here in Calgary, because it's a little bit of a different vibe than, say, Bitcoin Beach. You've got a small locale where you can begin going up and down the street to merchants saying, like, you should do this, you should do this. And same with Isloma Harris, where you've got a smaller community. So you can begin to kind of pick off merchants one at a time. Whereas we're in a city, we're in Calgary, there's 1.4 million people. And so tactic-wise to get this going is quite a different story.

not one that I've seen represented yet in the circular economy kind of world, or at least talked about widely. It seems to be smaller places. But I'm curious if you could kind of detail what we've done, what challenges we've had, what successes we've had. Absolutely. So I'll say three things. First of all, what's worked most well is consistency and replicability, right? So if you imagine having to create the same markets over and over and you're trying to do the same things every time from memory, you're going to exhaust yourself. It's going to take a lot of work. And so what we've been doing is we've been standardizing, this is my inner consultant, we've been standardizing the playbook

for running a market. So every time we just pull up, okay, what were some of the things we did last time, what were some of the comms that we sent? How frequently should we check in? And at the end of every market, at the end of every session, we have a jam, be like, what worked well, send out surveys, get feedback, and get better and better and better every time.

Second is we created an online conversation, so in the form of Telegram, where people continue to drip in feedback, thoughts, questions throughout the year. or we usually host them twice a year, but throughout the year, right? As a place where people come in and add value to one another, right?

Then we also practice what we preach. So, you know, if Ben ever goes out and uses a service, if I ever do if other, let's call them quasi-leaders or like more active members in the community participates in the circular economy, will make note of that. Hey, you know, reach out to this person, reach out to that person. And third, I would say, is maintaining and building personal relationships outside of these like one-stop-shop events. Ultimately, it is the relationships that, you know, drive the commerce, that drive the trust,

and that kind of spread outside to bring more people in. I think that, you know, for a city of 1.4 million, and I just did a fact check, and Calgary is actually bigger in landmass than New York City. Can you imagine how huge that is, right? Damn. Yeah. What that means is that it takes all of us longer to actually come and connect despite living in the same city,

but providing opportunities to have those contact points outside of these markets. And, you know, Ben, I keep thinking to a call to action. What's our call to action? What's our call to action? Do you want to share what yours was, like several markets in a row? Yeah. So we host a market, everybody's all together, it's social, it's fun, and people are transacting with each other.

We do this a couple times a year. But what happens in between, right? Like, do people go home, forget about it? And then six months later, oh, yeah, I'm going to spend some Bitcoin. No, no. Like, it needs to be more than that. It needs to be that this becomes a part of your life, that these relationships are important because you're unshakable if you create these bonds and these relationships with people that are like-minded and, you know, value, value a money that that is sound and censorship resistant and all of those things.

But we want people to use Bitcoin even when there's not an event to lean on. And so my call to action was to everybody, okay, find three other vendors here that are doing something that is very useful to yourself. And your goal is to frequent each of them at least once between now and the next market that we do. And so this is kind of my consistent call to action every market is trying to get people and trying to seed these relationships amongst them so that they will. I want to be confident that if myself, if Art and if Francois were to disappear tomorrow, that this community would still operate and would still forge ahead because of the relationships that they've built. So in essence, we are, you know, like a Bitcoin Tinder.

That's what we're doing. Also, I wanted to draw attention to a comment here. And this warms my heart. But Edgar in the comments on the live show said, you've inspired me to host a sat market here in Minneapolis. We have a local bar who accepts Bitcoin via Square. And they have an events space we can use. Edgar, absolutely please do that.

If not you, then who. And it's those little sparks in every community that is needed to move things ahead. there's probably a ton of Bitcoiners around you that would be super stoked to not only attend but be a part of something like that, but it's going to take you to be the person to suggest it to them. So, yeah. Then I'm curious, do you have examples like, do you have people that are like mechanics or electricians and are people developing relationships where now they're kind of their go-to person that they called during the year? Yeah, there's a bunch of that. So in terms of like Traysman. Plummer. We've got flooring. We've got roofing. We have, I'm trying to remember,

maybe you can help fill me in, but my barber, even though he wasn't at this market, but I assure you, he accepts Sats, and he asked me to pay him Bitcoin, which was a huge win for my ego. And then even beyond that, we've had farmers with beef and eggs and chickens. We've got, help fill me in here for sure i mean we have it goes without saying a bunch of makers right people who create trinkets and tools and coasters and uh people who create uh tech for bitcoin tools like cases for wallets etc right like the usual stuff you would imagine in a market but we also have a tremendous amount of service providers you know we have a person who's a hypnotherapist that person who makes uh bombs and creams and other tools for the body um some

People make clothing. Other people do readings, for example, right? We've had massage therapy, literally at the market, we had massage therapy, which was such a good reprieve after hours and hours of hustling and making friends. We have, for example, I just purchased a session with golf, right? A golf professional who teaches you how to play golf. We have mining outfits, for example, Cryptotherm. We have non-profits.

Yeah, electricians, non-profits. We actually have a lawyer that frequents. Funny enough, the lawyer that is part of the sat market is the same woman who cross-examined Justin Trudeau on his enactment of the Emergencies Act. Her name is Eva. And she's a legend. And she has been, I think, at the past three markets, at least, but she's a huge freedom advocate. And it always warms my heart to see her there.

So she's incredible. We've also got a children's author that's written a bunch of books, and she's a school teacher. And actually, just really quick, while we're on all of this, I want to show just a few snapshots from the event. So here's some of the team sessions here. But we've got Scott. We've got a bunch of the kids that were on stage during.

We had a question session and a bunch of stuff going on. Here's some of the market and people around kind of getting natural. You know, there's the kids being taught about some stuff. Some selfies. We've got some of the merchants here. Again, kind of like heating. And there's a lot of oil and gas in Alberta. So these guys do capture stranded gas.

We have a local person that activates pants made from hemp seed. We've got a whole bunch of different stuff. We had beverages going the whole night. We've got coin cards who does gift cards. And they come and support every single time. We've got tons of stuff. We haven't had guys with retro gaming consoles there, which was super awesome. So my inner 90s nerd was very happy about the Nintendo.

64 and Super Nintendo demos going on. You could buy retro games. There's Eva, the girl that I was just talking about. She is incredible. Yeah, just amazing people all around artists. And there's Francois. So a huge shout out to Francois, this guy over on the right here, who basically made this whole thing possible.

So this was just our last event, but we've been kind of documenting it the entire time. And it's just, it should have been amazing to see people kind of come together and, you know, build something that we're all mutually interested in. And I think that is a huge benefit. Well, I love that you guys are doing that specifically in the developed world because there's lots of examples of circular Bitcoin economies, you know, in the global south. But I think a lot of times people think that it's not applicable in North America or Europe. But really, if we want to be free from government control, if we want to, you know, have our ability to be in, to be in, independent, we need to be using Bitcoin as money.

So I love the fact that you guys are, it's actually a lot more work to do it where you guys are doing. So hats off to you guys for pushing forward with that and showing this kind of real world example of a circular economy even in the developed world. Well, thanks. Yeah, it's, it's really cool. And I hope to see it replicated. Because if we can get people interested in doing it in places where there's still, you

a semblance of the currency kind of working and you know you still have access to banking. If people are passionate about it in, you know, a major metropolitan city where they'll make a trip in and go to the market and they'll make relationships with local merchants just to be ideologically aligned with people that they that they connect with and execute commerce with, then I think that says a lot for what people will do when their situation is, less than ideal. On that topic, folks, it was minus 21 Celsius that day. You had the commitment of people following through, this is minus what, minus five or minus six

Fahrenheit. And people committed to come out on this day. Yeah. Yeah, pretty amazing. And we also had a little jaunt out to the mountains as well out to Banff. It was beautiful. Issa, you were in Banff. last year sometime.

I saw you post and I message you. I was like, are you an hour from my house? And you were with your boyfriend and his friend and or I guess fiance and his friend. And then you came over to chill with myself and Lisa. That was a blast. That was crazy. Honestly, I still think about your steak to this day. It was delicious.

Yes. And I showed up with chocolates and I'm like, idiot, why would I show up with chocolates? That's okay. Pretty fiat of you, but you brought coffee. I'll excuse it. Yeah. No, but honestly, I think circular economies are the way to hyperbeaconization. Because if we don't know what works, then how are we supposed to adapt? You know, it's in small sample sizes where we learn and we evolve and we like change it in however we need to. Yeah, yeah. I think especially in the wallet tools and the hardware wallets and everything that's needed for a Bitcoin economy, I think it gets real world usage in the circular Bitcoin economies. And that's where people realize like what kind of tweaks they need to make, what they need to change as far as

to make the usability better. Otherwise, if it just stays with super technical people, we're never going to develop the tools for the everyday people. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm curious, you guys, when dealing in these circular economies and we're seeing merchants and people frequenting the merchants, what do you guys figure are some of the biggest hurdles to get over when onboarding on either side of that equation,

what things have worked well for you guys, what things have kind of fallen flat? Do you guys have any general advice there? Is there a broad question? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like talk about locally for you, you know, what has worked well for you when you're kind of introducing people to this

and you're saying like, here's a beginner's kind of tool? And does it change if they get more hardcore and they learn? So for me, what has worked and has been the easiest route is building trust. Because I've tried it from different angles. Like the first year I was focusing too much on education and not so much on merchant adoption. And I was trying to get a group of people to care about Bitcoin that didn't care about Bitcoin

and we're probably never going to care about Bitcoin the same way that I do. So once I changed and pivot, I realized I need to gain their trust and I need to show them like, I'm not a bad person. Like there really isn't anything for me that I gain from this. So it was like a lot of time that you have to dedicate and then you have to wait until the right time to explain to them like, oh, can you accept Bitcoin and sort of like build. not do like Bitcoin every time you go there, but change it up. Be like one day you're going to, once they start accepting Bitcoin, you're like, okay, I'm going to pay with Bitcoin today. The next time you pay with cash and the following time you pay with card.

And then you have them like experiment and not be so scared when another Bitcoiner comes and they want to pay with Bitcoin. Another thing is being consistent. I try to ask to the places, like you mentioned, like, is there someone that you were talking about, like, the Sats market where you're like, go to three places that you go to the most because they already know you. Like, they already saw your face. They're already like, they unconsciously, like, they trust you. They know you're not going to scam them. So that would be my advice.

Try to build trust and be patient. Sometimes, like, for example, on the island, many people here rely a lot on cash and they have to pay their suppliers. And obviously, I can't orange bill the suppliers. So there was a case where a bitconer went to pay. Everything went great when he went back again. She was like, I haven't had any sales today. Like, I can't accept Bitcoin because I actually need like the cash to pay my suppliers. So also be understanding of people's situations.

and normally I try to, I always offer them a way out because they don't know Bitcoin all the way. So I try to give them options to, you know, change it to fiat. And 99.9% they will not change it to fiat because they have to go out of their way to change it. So they end up staying with the Bitcoin and they end up seeing it grow. and, you know, lose this fear that it's a scam, except right now that it's crashing and it's like, everybody wants to kill me right now, but that's okay. That's okay.

It's just hardening them. They get through a cycle and they're good. It's character building. Mike, any observations that you have in terms of, okay, new people coming to Bitcoin, either as a merchant or somebody coming to Bitcoin Beach for the first time spending stats, what has been successful from somebody brand new and does it change over time for them as they become more well-versed?

Yeah, I think like Isabella was saying, just getting them actually transacting in Bitcoin, I don't know about you guys, but I really remember my first Bitcoin transaction, like that light bulb went off. And then my first lightning transaction, and it was like that same thing of seeing it like, wow, this is just like immediately, you know, money moving for one place to another without any type of intermediary.

And so I think that not expecting every person to become a bitcoins, like they don't have to be a bitquinor to use Bitcoin. Like I would say like my wife and my kids are not necessarily Bitcoiners. It's not something that they spend a lot of time with, but they make Bitcoin transactions all the time. And I think we need to be realistic that the vast majority of people are not going to want to think about Bitcoin. They're going to use Bitcoin because they realize it's just easier. It's less hassle. It gives them advantages that Fiat doesn't. And so I think that we should actually be happy about that and not try to force everybody to show up for every Bitcoin meetup and to run their own node and to have all those things.

understanding. Obviously, there needs to be a core of people that are doing that, but the vast majority of people are never going to go that route. And, you know, lots of people have used this example before, but, you know, lots of people use email, and they don't know how email works, and they don't need to know how email works. They just know that it works for them, and it's a better tool than sending a physical letter. And so I think that we need to be realistic with Bitcoin, that it's going to follow a similar route, that actually the less people have to think about it, that means the more successful that it has become. And so I think that that's what we found is don't overly focus.

And then also realize people have their journey. Like all of us, it took us several years to really begin to understand Bitcoin. And so we shouldn't expect that other people are going to get it after a week. Like this is going to be a journey. They're going to make some mistakes. But just getting them down the path, like they'll naturally head down the rabbit, over time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So everybody, we're coming to a close on this panel, but I want to give you all the opportunity to maybe do a little bit of like a call to action for the Bitcoiners that you are, you know, that you're kind of witnessing going through their journey. And maybe they're just stuck in that saving mentality or maybe not, maybe they're dabbling, but what would you tell to the bitcoiner that maybe hasn't partaken in kind of being in a Bitcoin circular economy, doesn't have anything

near them, where would you guide them, what tools would you suggest, what courses of action would you suggest? And maybe Art, I'll start with you. Thanks. One thing comes to mind pretty quickly, and this is more for us, you know, folks with a privilege for money that doesn't collapse in front of our eyes just more slowly. And that's spend and replace. Many people have this fear about losing Bitcoin or using Bitcoin, especially when they're

first starting and they fall in love with the fact that it's designed in a sense for a number go up, right? And the spend and replace model is just so easy and snackable, right? It's so actionable that I find that it helps get past that block. that sometimes exists. I'm going to hand the baton on to next person. Yeah. Issa, I'm going to go to you.

And what would you, what would your call to action be for the average Bitcoin or that maybe wants to see Bitcoin grow and become more? Well, I would just say Bitcoin is money. And if we wanted to live up to its full potential, you know, to, for us not to depend with intermediaries and third party. and banks and other people, then we need to start trading it as such. You know, some of us are going to be our own banks

and we're going to have, you know, like have our own node and everything, and then there's going to be others that are literally just going to use it and use it as a medium of exchange. Everybody's going to have a different Bitcoin journey. And I would say, don't be scared to spend it. There has been a lot of Bitcoiners that have come to the island and have spent Bitcoin for the first time.

And that's blown me away because I'm like, guys, we're in 2025. What do you mean? There are places everywhere you go, I want to challenge everyone to try to find a Bitcoin merchant and spend Bitcoin. Because just for that merchant alone to accept Bitcoin is huge. I think it's just, it's up to us as a community to make Bitcoin work. You know, it's up to us now. And, you know, sort of like that pizza moment that happened back in like 20, was it 2010 or 209 with Laslo? Oh, 2010 with the pizza.

2010. Yeah. Pizza day. If that day wasn't going to happen, some people are like, oh, he should have kept his Bitcoin. If he never spent Bitcoin, it would have never evolved. to what it is now, which is a medium of exchange. So I challenge everybody to, I don't know, provide a service or do something so you can get paid in Bitcoin and spend your Bitcoin.

It is not that bad. I promise, like the more you give, the more the universe will give back. Like, we need to get Bitcoin flowing and confuse the IRS. I love it. I love it. Yeah, I mean, I'd echo that. that. It's when you start actually utilizing it day to day, it's, it's pretty freeing. I love it. So Mike, I'll give you the final word. He calls to action for your average Bitcoiner that has yet to become as crazy as the rest of us and utilize it in commerce.

Well, I would just say nothing will allow you to accrue more Bitcoin than moving to a Bitcoin standard. Because when you're living on a Fiat standard, you spend money like it's trash. You spend it on things that you don't really value because you don't really value the money. Once you move to a Bitcoin standard, you really do question what you're going to spend it on. So you're going to spend it on a quality stake or you're going to spend it on a quality clothing item because it's something that you're willing to exchange your Bitcoin for, but you will actually spend less money and thus you will wind up with more Bitcoin. So not only are you helping the Bitcoin ecosystem and moving freedom forward, but you are actually increasing the amount of sats that you yourself have. And so that's what I think a lot of people miss.

They think they'll wind up with less sats. You wind up with more sets when you move to a Bitcoin standard. Love to hear it. Awesome. Well, this has been fantastic. We are going to wrap this panel. But, you know, after this, so I've been sipping away all evening doing the things. fiat thing with my beverage here but uh now the now the true degenerate idiots are going to be

joining the panel i see i see people back they're fingering me uh anyways they are going to be joining the panel and uh and i'm going to stop being so conservative with my beverage uh so um anyway i can see the comments ever come out of me anyways uh isa art mike it's been an absolute pleasure and and yeah keep pushing forward everything you guys are doing very excited to see it so thank you guys and have a merry thank you for having us thank you yeah thank you cheers all right and everybody uh i'm gonna i'm gonna first bring up uh Nathan here uh bring them in before i get the deluge of uh people mad at me for uh for saying calling them degenerate idiots uh Nathan um Are we in consensus, degenerate idiots about to come on?

Yes, the army of degenerate idiots is about to join us. The best army of degenerate idiots, the ones that we love, we talked to the most, that we have our secret back channels and discuss secret Bitcoin things are going to join us for a round of good times. A cabal? A cabal, if you will. Yes, there's a kapal. There's a secret Bitcoin cabal. Yeah, there's one degenerate idiot that I would like to have up first, and this man has been involved. in many a Christmas special. But Tatum, I want to bring him up first. Wait, there is.

Oh, you look good, sir. Can you all hear me? Okay. Yeah, we got you. Let me give me the meat. How are you doing, man? I was doing good until you said that we were fingering you. Why would you choose that verbiage for me flipping you off?

Canadian thing? Yeah, it might have been, might have been. My friend, I've gone to bat for you. I don't know if you've seen in your Twitter notifications, but I'm trying to make a Christmas miracle happen. Oh my God, no way. Yeah, I'm trying. So we're going to get the audience.

You can stop trying. No, no, that's not going to happen. It's all working together. This is a team effort. Who are we going after? So here's the thing. Oh, did you just check your? No, I haven't.

Okay, okay. I have a call to action for the audience because, you know, I sent Tatum the message and said, you got to join the Christmas special towards the entire. And he messaged me. And what he said was, can't wait to join the stream and see Aubrey Strobel sitting in there. Imagine. And I said, it could be a Christmas miracle. And then screen capped that.

And I said, will a Christmas miracle happen? Will Aubrey Stroble pop into today's Christmas special to tell Tatum turn up happy holidays. Aubrey, DMs are open. We'll be live for another hour. Hit me up. Tatum would love to hear from you. I think it would be a true Christmas miracle to see you join this. Tatum's very happy.

I've done this. But yeah, we'd love to. Just go ahead and throw our DMs out there. Why not? That's fine. I was sure nothing is sacred. here. But Tatum, we are going to, before we bring in everybody else that is backstage, we're going to do a quick cut to break. We're going to say a huge shout out to all of the

sponsors of the show and everything. And also, we're going to give one more shout out to the samurai developers and get people to make sure that they sign that petition. And maybe we can maybe, maybe secure a pardon if we raise enough noise either way. We're going to go down screaming and kicking. So we'll be back in just a moment, but we're going to give a quick shout out to all of the sponsors, all in one fell swoop here before we do that. Who said much? Bitcoin Well is the best place to be buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And now with Bitcoin Well Infinite, it's also the best place to be making large buys at their OTC desk of over $50,000.

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With one-on-one onboarding, consulting, and help navigating both Bitcoin and the Bitcoin mining space at every turn, you can rest easy while Bitcoin flows to you 24-7. Learn more at Abundantimines.com. All right, we are back in and we're going to start bringing people up. But I do want to quickly call attention to, of course, Samurai developers, Keone reporting in to his sentence as of Friday, I believe. Maybe I'll bring in Nathan here as well. Yeah, so not ideal. We do not want open source developers going to prison.

And yeah, so what can you do? You can head over and maybe I'll bring up the QR code really quick. You can head over. You can sign this petition and try and get more attention on the case and perhaps secure a pardon. But also the families have been financially wiped out through all of the legal mess here. And so if you want to contribute, you can also do this from the website. It is Bill N-K-K-E-O-N-E.org.

And you can find everything there, or you can just scan that QR code on the screen. So maybe we'll get a Christmas miracle out of this. So please do check it out. Thank you, Bean. Yeah, you're welcome. You're very welcome. And with that, I think maybe it's time we start bringing some people in here. So, of course, we'll bring back Tatum.

You're welcome. I'm enjoying the attire. You know, it's spicing things up. Oh, wait, hold on. Let me unmirre my camera. There we go. You can read the hat. I can't even see what to sit.

Hold on. Legalized. Welcome to that. Get shut down. Thanks for the, why did I ask? Amazing. Okay. All right. So let's just start bringing people in. I want to bring in, of course, Gary. Gary, good to see you. Whatever you're eating. I hope it's delicious. It is salami. Thank you.

Perfect. Lovely. Good on Christmas salami. All right. Perfect. Well, let's just bring them all in really quick here. I'm going to bring in Joey, Walker, Brandon, and Cedric. Gentlemen, happy holidays. Welcome to the part of the show. Walker! My dad! Hey there, son. I was told this was a podcaster's session, which is, I guess Tatum finally admitting he is a Bitcoin podcaster.

Is that true? No. I'm really shocked about it. Like, I got to say, Ben, like we've been friends for a few years. The fingering thing caught me off guard.

And then you sent the DM to the E-Girl. And then you made him show his hat about eating ass in the same. It was like three minutes. That was a hot three minutes, man. Atom's back, baby. I mean, if that doesn't shut down a stream, maybe I've been wrong about censorship. Yeah, but you teach about freedom money and then you're out of here. But legalize eating ass, am I right, guys?

Amazing. Joey, how are you? Happy holidays? Great, man. It's good to see you guys. There is, by the way, a secret Bitcoin back channel chat. That's only half a joke. It's where Nate shows us the latest breaking, changes everything, thumbnails and YouTube tricks.

Both advice and add more flames. Guys, you can't tell them about the secret. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Not secret, if you tell them about it. Here we go. Okay, monkeys out of the bottle now, I guess. Walker, how are you? I played your more talented wife's wonderful piece of content. Great new Christmas jingle, but I did enjoy your upside-down chin.

You know, the chin has become a staple. doing well and you know there's a reason they my wife is my better half right I'm just a long for the ride here but yeah it's you know anytime you can sing about I'm not allowed to swear on this stream right

you can say whatever the fuck you want man if it gets canceled at this point we're whatever I want yeah okay no okay I'll have the back you know anytime you can basically sing about fucking the state it's you know it's a good day and just the the absolutely

fucking totalitarian twats over there at the EU and the UK and a few within our own government are just if we don't make fun of them who will right we cannot let their absurdity go unmocked in my opinion i was a little sad that she skipped over carney um you know maybe he can make it into the next year christmas uh jingle we just only did stuff about like uh just like major nations that's why we just kind of left can it out who cares about that chill we just just we just sovereign nation basically. That's fair. Fair.

Cedric, how are you? It's good to see you. I saw that you were on the stream-a-thon last night with Keone. That was awesome. I wish I could have made it in. But Nathan, I'm glad that you were able to make it in as well. How'd everything go? It was good. I wish we were there to support Tatum in legalizing, eating ass. We didn't get that out last night. I'm still wondering where you got the hat, Tatum, like,

Were you online? Like, I need a legalized eating ass hat. I want to see the face of the person that had to make your hat. That's what I want to see. We were at the courtroom and there was a lot of activists there. And this was the hat that was selling. This is a, I don't fight for many causes, but this is one that's very dear and dear to my heart. And I, I, have you run up to a lot of friction in this area with the law?

Lots of friction. I'm interesting words there. Yeah, like fingering. You're not exempt from this. We got the hashtag go on for Tatum. So like hashtag do it for Tatum is going right now. And I see Satwise already sending that out. So let's keep it going, guys.

Much appreciate it. What does, does Kalshi have odds on? Why do we not have a prediction market about Tatum and Aubrey at this point? It's only been going on for like a decade. Yeah. I mean, I would be, it would be the greatest Christmas miracle of all. if we're able to get Aubrey in here to wish.

I would probably shit myself genuinely. Yeah. She'd love that, I'm sure. Yeah, great, great first impression. Oh, man. Not first, but. Well, you know, we can hope. So if you're out there, yeah, on my Twitter, find that tweet.

Make sure you tag her and hashtag do it for Tatum. I believe the four is a number four. so make sure you get it right because otherwise the algos won't pick it up critical yeah yeah absolutely brandon i also want to say uh merry christmas how you doing that yeah merry christmas to all you guys phenomenal doing it's great to see some of you guys and cedric thanks for you know really doing the you know handling the keoney stuff yesterday that was that was awesome so um bitcoiners doing bickointer things and it's just good to see everyone coming together for a real cause for which is keone's cause but all of us do So, I mean, that was very cool.

I think that's kind of a turning point, I think, that the community needed. And we're going to do it. What do you say the people who say that? Guys, she liked the tweet. Oh, boy. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, boy.

Check the DMs. He's going back off camera. Get a shirt on. Get something on. Oh, okay. He's smoking a joint. Just reply. She replied, ha, ha, ha.

I'm at dinner with friends in New York. Not sure if I can pop on until later. until later. There's, so you're telling me there's a chase time. Wow. She can face time in.

You up. You up. Wow. You can face time. Tatum, why don't you tell her you got some fancy too,

buddy? Let's just bring this conversation into a fancy New York restaurant. That's exactly what I'm in

what I'm sure she's keen on. Can't wait for see my hat. What is the background of this like joke? Is there like what am I,

I feel like I'm missing? something here. Have you not been paying attention to this whole saga? I mean, listen, I'm busy. I don't have time for this. There's a guy on the top corner of the stream.

He's got a vest on. No shirt is. That's about eating ass. And I'm supposed to know about the inside joke. There's too many of them. I'm just, I'm looking at this, this whole stream here.

I'm wondering what the fuck is going on now. What do you mean joke? By the way, the DM with the link was sent. So there, oh my God. It's just a matter of if it happens, it happens.

So who gets to see it? You can see the guest room there or the backstage or can we all see it? Oh, no, no. When she comes on, she will immediately be on the screen. That's hilarious. Whatever the conversation is. A direct link. Just on.

And it could be an absolute disaster. Could be. I have inadvertently ruined this woman's life because there's so many people that just continually tag me in like her post. and then like we'll tag her under my post. Like there were a couple of people I had to DM. I'm like, hey, I don't know who you are. I guarantee you she doesn't know who you are.

Stop tagging me in all these like simpy posts and stuff. But then I'll get drunk and then do it myself. And that's okay. Did you try the Ackman? What did he say? I did. I did it. It worked.

Yes. I sure did. I said, may I meet you at Aubrey Strobel? She said yes. Super. It was probably one of my highest. performing tweets of 2025. That's big.

It's important, you know, in this holiday season to take a moment and be grateful for things. And I'm really grateful that I'm not in the dating market because what Tatum's going through right now is just absolutely awful. Amen to that. It's bad out here. Sad, where are you recording from? You like in your tool shed there? What's going on?

Yeah, I'm in my swamp shed here. Nice. I'm going to eventually maybe get the wall done. I kind of like it. It looks good. I'm in this economy? I don't think so. If you have to hang your AR behind it.

Yeah. There you go. Get a samurai sword or something. Yeah, exactly. A little bit. Start wearing a beanie. They are. Never take it off.

Men will live like this and think that it's okay. It's a toque, my friend. It's a toke. Yeah, right. We can do this every year. By the way, we haven't heard from Gary about the eating ass hat. I'm sure he's got a comment at you about it. I'm going to go change my hat.

I've never tried it myself. The hat? You're a selfish man. I've never tried wearing a hat, yes. No, I mean, the other, the other hole is delicious. Oh, no. What's he got here? There's another hat.

He changed hats. What does that one say now? This was just as Explore a homing national forests. Imagine somebody turning to the stream who's like, who's like Bitcoin live stream for Christmas. I'd love to learn about Bitcoin. I've been really thinking about how inflation is going. There's got to be a life raft. There must be some real deep thinkers in this Bitcoin space.

Wonder if they'll be talking about Austrian economics or what will it be? Privacy tech. So about the other hole. Okay, okay. I was going to go to Urban Dictionary and see what Wyoming Forest meant. Joey Lewis for what Wyoming forest meant. I'm going to take a second. We'll go serious for a second.

I'll start with Brandon. Brandon. In terms of like, if the years almost. almost wrapped up here, man. It's been a lot of fun. We've had a ton of adventures. We got to meet up at the Canadian Bitcoin conference, which is great. From the Bitcoin space or even just you being in it, what was your highlight of the last year, man? And it can't be, it can't be Tatum's hat. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

Well, I mean, we do have some Canucks here. So I do to say that, you know, we did win the USA Canada hockey game again. So that was. It's not there. You're a ringer. We need. It's not even a game. If you play, man. Yeah. I was a good. That was the most American game. I was. ever seen. What was it? Three seconds before the entire rink was fighting. Oh,

that's, yeah, you're talking about the World Cup or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, was that a different? Canada.

Oh, never mind. No, at the, as Brandon's frozen here, we had at the Canadian Bitcoin conference, the Canada versus UA,

USA game of Shini there. But it's a, that's a little bit stacked against us for the Canucks. And we need, Joey, we got to bring somebody in. We don't,

we don't have a lot of horses, man. We got, I think, a good team. like in an actual shinny match, but our goalie is a nuclear engineer. The average age on our team is like definitely, it's definitely got a forehandle on it. And so, yeah, I don't think we have a big chance.

Plus, Brandon played in the NC2As. Like, come on. He showed, I said it at the conference. I think he only comes. Is that Canadian to call it NC2As? Y'all don't call it NCAA? I call it what I mean, I've called it NCAA, NC2A. Okay.

I don't know, whatever, yeah. Never heard it called NC2A in my life. That for me so off guard. He's, I mean, he's played college puck. And so, like, this guy shows up at the rank. He's got a, you know, he's probably got two sets of skates in his bag. That's the tell, right? How many sets of skates you got there, Brandon?

You got two in the bag? Only one in the bag that day. Only one in the bag. Okay. He's got figure skates in there, too. He's got a pair of skates in there you go. See, there you go. There you go.

There you go. No, we had, we never win. We haven't won that game in either year. And both times it wasn't close. So, but it's about the friends you make along the way. That's what we say. We lose 9-0. That's what we say.

Yeah. phenomenal. Canadian. It's why I'm in Bitcoin. A lot of people didn't like that conference, by the way. A lot of the Americans, didn't like it. And if people have been to Quebec City or Montreal, you got to go. Just awesome cities.

Gosh, they're so cool. Oh, Kater is on my 2026 calendar now. Finally. I'm just saying, I'm just saying Alberta, Bitcoin Rodeo. I mean, I'm not trying to steal the thunder from. That's where I'm going. Wait. Wait, we need to talk all camera.

Okay, I've heard rumblings. I know what's, I know what's in development there. I had a DM asking me what I thought about it, and obviously I loved it. So, yeah, we might be seeing you in perhaps even by then the independent state of Alberta. Wow. I support the free Alberta movement. What do you think of that? me?

Go for it, Joey. Why not? I mean, I hope you guys do it, to be honest with you, but don't do it before I move there. Just wait another year. I feel like some sort of a passport program for people who don't suck. Dude, there's like- Mail to Ben's house and say you live here. God, I know.

Dave Bradley apparently has a place where you can smoke inside unheard of here in Ontario. So I'd love to go there and rip us, though. That doesn't exist. What? The secret basement? Shut off. There is no secret anything. There's no secret.

There's no secret cigar shop. There's no secret Bitcoiners podcast. Where is he these days? He's been quiet the last little while. What's he up to you? Oh, he's around. He actually asked me to go for a cigar last night, but it was just, I'm dying from jet like.

So I declined, but I'm sure I will be having a cigar with him very soon. I call him David Bailey to his face in New York. I'm sure he loved that. On purpose? It was, no, completely accidental. I was on a FaceTime call or something and said, oh yeah, I'm just here with David Bailey. And he goes, what?

And I was like, all right, I'll see you. Never, I'm never going to talk to you ever again. I invited you to Calgary, which is impressive. So good for you. Yeah. That conference is good, eh? The Calgary one. I'm going to go try and go this year, I think, as long as you don't have another baby.

It's just, again, you get out here. Also, everybody attending is, like such a based fuck the state like yeah um you know we're gonna have our independence and we're gonna you know eat steak and drill oil and all that kind of stuff different speed out there man for sure yeah the Montreal guys I mean you guys know the French guys out here the separatists like they fucking hate the state too for a different reason entirely uh and they're like hardcore I saw Francis on here earlier looking like a character out of Vice City yeah I love that I can't I honestly can't believe that guy.

He's great. If I could just live my life as free as Francis, I don't know. I yearn for that. He's great. He's great. He's the ultimate, yeah. He's every Bitcoin spirit animal. Exactly.

He's got some great stories, too, that guy from the last few years. Yeah. He's had some fun for sure. Yeah. Yeah. You should absolutely come out to Calgary. We're doing it late June. And it's just, again, like proximity to the mountains.

Like after the conference, we all just like go out. to Banff and just have a hell of a time. Yeah, we see people in the chat saying it was a good time. It is a pretty solid place, too. Like, it's more of a tight-knit, like, kind of smaller event, but everybody there is just pretty, pretty based, and it's a good time. It's awesome. You get to drink Ben's booze.

It's fantastic. He'll invite you over for a party. So Walker, I expect to see you there. Brandon, you're going to make it out. Joey, you're going to make it out. Cedric, I expect you. It's a long flight from Florida. but you're going to come to, I think, for the Bitcoin Rodeo.

We're going to make this one fantastic and have a big bonfire in Ben's backyard. There are directions. That was my name not mentioned in there? Sorry, Tatum. I thought you were already coming. Yeah. Which, get praising, sorry. I just wanted to feel included and you turned it into something so much worse, man.

That's good. Good shit. There's a guy getting mad about the Simp talk in the chat. I didn't realize you could see the chat here. You guys don't get out much. Holy Simp Gooner vibes. You're damn right. Can we pull up that

live room job? I saw that. Was it about the Francis simping? Oh, no. He wished it. It's about the Aubrey stuff. There's some interesting contest being proposed in the chat for anybody who's

watching the live stream. But I'll get it back on track for a second here. So Walker, tell me, what did you love about 2025 in Bitcoin? I love the sideways choppy price action revealing everyone who's a little bit. That's what I liked. I liked all of the pointless fucking infighting, all of the delightful drama because Bitcoin was so boring price-wise that people had to feel some sort of meaning they had to feel

alive by inventing some drama. And I like the fact that now everybody's at least rallying behind something that actually matters, which is the samurai case in getting Keone and Bill pardoned. Because after a year of people being at each other's throats and everyone accusing everyone of being a bad actor for having a different software implementation. they do, which is just frankly retarded. I think it's nice to see, can I say retarded on here? Yeah. It's too late now. There we go. But I think it's great that now people are after all of this chop. And we may, I hope we keep chopping because there are going to be so many rage quits,

so many rage quits, revealing all the people who did not actually perhaps think about the long-term implications of Bitcoin and what it actually means to have a uncensurable, unfuckable, unconfiscatable money. I think it's really beautiful because now we have the people that actually do give a shit about that rallying behind a good cause which is get these boys free, get them a pardon, make sure that they, I pray that they

do not spend any time in jail and if they do, I pray that it is very short-lived. So yeah, I liked the chop because the sideways chop shows you who the real bitcoins are who aren't just tourists. Yeah. You mentioned rage quit there. Can I just give a tip of the hat to the sweetest rage quit. I've seen

in quite some time. A true chef's kiss. So tip of the hat to Mike Brock. Hell yeah, baby. I knew that was going. Can we chat about this a little bit? Mike drunk. You mean Mike suck my cock?

He doesn't even have his camera and he's like he's ripping up all. He has to stop. My camera died and I'm running Linux and can't figure out how to make my other camera work. This is. You're so cool. You run.

I hate the Linux. The Linux. Maxi guys are just the they're honestly worse than Mike Brock I would say like if you ever if the Linux Maxi guys ever found themselves in legal trouble there'd be no QR code okay for you guys you would just be rotting behind bars for sure yeah I I'm looking at Mike Brock right now but somebody fill me in on the way shut up I can't even use your camera all right I'm going to leave it I'll come back y'all keep yeah okay too someone I'm looking at Mike Brock right now but somebody fill me in in the story I think I found a tweet here. He tweeted, but he wrote like a blog, of course, about it. My read on the blog was

people I don't like use Bitcoin. Yeah. That was the summation of it in my view. But I'll let you, who else read his blog code? I read some of it. I just want to, I want to point out too that like bad physiognomy on this guy as well, like doesn't look very healthy. And so, you know, make you this what you will, but tells you something, I think. This is the case all the time, by the way. I'm not just imagining this. Just got, Joey? There we are. There he is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something's a little bit off there. I would agree with that. Let's continue. You know, I think the problem is when you try to, when you try to make Bitcoin like your thing and that you can only use Bitcoin this way and only these types of people should use Bitcoin.

And if people that I don't like start adopting Bitcoin, that must must mean that Bitcoin is captured, Bitcoin has failed, it's compromised, there are bad actors everywhere. Mike Brock essentially just has a more verbose version of the knots argument is what it really comes down to. Like, I'm sure Mike Brock is running knots here. I adjust, guys, I jest. He's probably not being a man. Yeah, me too, you son of a bitch. Yeah, that's awesome. You should run whatever you want. I don't care. I do not care. And it's like, still friends. I know, I know, I know. I love you, man. But no, I, like, anytime you use, like, you should be able to say things simply and get your point across. And if you can't, you probably don't have a very good point. Like if you can't boil it

down to just some basic fucking words to say what it is, then maybe your point isn't that strong. And as soon as he came out and he was like, Bitcoin is for fascists. And it's like, he thought it was this mic drop moment. Like, yeah, Bitcoin's for fascists. I got you guys. Got you good. It's like, yeah, it's for fascists and it's for communists and it's for anarchists and it's for Democrats and Republicans and it's for Antifa and it's for the proud boys. And it's for literally fucking everyone. It's for anyone. It's for anyone. who wants to take the time to learn about it, trying to put your little labels on it and make it your little thing, your little pet project to show just how enlightened you are and you use all your

big $5 words. Oh boy, you must be, you must be smart young man. You must, you're going places. It's like, man, just you don't matter as much as you think you do. And once you realize that, it's very freeing. But until you go through that moment of ego death, you will forever be a victim of your own delusions of grandeur. So look at me using words like delusions of grandeur. So look at me using words like delusions and grandeur. I was saying, I think I can sum that up. Sum that up very succinctly as stay humble stack stats.

I think that's about where we're going with that. Did you, did you see any wonderful people kind of, what do you call it, rage quitting, any terrible takes on Twitter this year? Anybody we should poke fun at? Luke Roman. Yeah, I know. I like him a lot too. What happened?

That was a rage quit, though. No, that was like a fiat like I'm repositioning. Quiet, quiet. He's one of these guys who's been so bullish, and now he's just another one going, I'll buy back in it. What do you say, 40K or something? 40K. Maybe a break, man.

We all know it's only going to 58K. It's not going to 40. That's the floor. That's a floor. It's a magical. God, good. That's a good one said. It just really,

and I really like, I did a podcast with Luke. I really like him, too. He's a wonderful human. I get it. He's got a ton of stuff on his plate. It's a great newsletter. I'm sure he's not looking at everything.

But what was so disappointing, it was like, ah, okay, tourist. Like, you get the argument for sound money, kind of, but you were just another tourist. 2025 felt a little bit like the year of a lot of

tourists. Yeah, very much so. I mean, everybody it's funny because the early narrative was more or less, the institutions are here, they don't F around, they don't like buy and then dump, they don't move, the exact

same as everybody else. Like, people are just as fickle that, oh, it's quantum, I got to dump, it's quantum. It's all the same shit. Like, people, that are running these institutions are basically the same as like the retail DGens of cycles past. We're just seeing it at a grander scale. It's pretty wild actually. Yeah. Yeah. Could you imagine-

The Luke one freaked me out a little bit because like for like a second because I'm like, damn, like I've talked to Luke at length, he knows his shit. Like he's an incredibly sharp guy and has so much of a better handle on all of these different macro things than I do. But it's one of those things where maybe me being a little bit dumber than him, and I am, maybe that's actually a little bit helpful. Because, you know, like, it goes back to like the birth of the Hodel meme. And it is Hodel, not Haudel. Everybody's been saying Hodel.

You've been saying it wrong. You can look at the video of the guy who wrote the initial post, said Hodel, because you don't hold something. You hold it. So you hodle it. Anyway, I digress. You probably say a gift, too. You and you fight our words. I bet you do, Taitam.

Anyway, moral of the story, it's like, you can spot the highs and the lows, Piff, Pop, Fiffy, Wing, Wang, Wong. Like, nope, I'm just going to be in the market. Like, you're not going to get my coins because I'm just never going to be selling them. I will spend and replace them, but I'm not selling them. And you should spend your Bitcoin and then replace it. And of course, tell the IRS. Always. I always tell the IRS.

Eating ass and locker linking, winking at the IRS, this is just going swimmingly. there's actually no taxable event if you just replace it immediately. It's the same. Replace. Replace the expense. Exactly. Just don't pay your taxes. Is that true?

I'm pretty sure there's still some kind of disposition rule. I'm looking at said. I think said no. I'm pretty sure there's still a disposition rule. It's like a 90 day or 30 day or something like that. There's no wash sale rule. Oh, the wash sale. Yeah.

Wash sale rule doesn't apply. It doesn't apply to Bitcoin. It doesn't Canada. It does in Canada. Of course it does. It makes the most sense of anything I've ever heard. Oh, I'm so sorry, guys. you guys in your British crown.

Thank you for your sympathies. Can I quote Francis Pouliot for a second? He had a fantastic tweet and he said something to the effect. And I'm not condoning this by any means, of course, I'm a good citizen. But Francis Poulat tweeted out and he said something to the effect of if you're worried that purchasing a T-shirt or whatever he said, whatever the good was, if you're oh yeah if you're worried that your coffee purchase will uh trigger a capital gains event uh have you tried not being such a fucking pussy

yeah that's that's a take love it ben i remember i watched recently uh i was looking for a clip of something i said and it was on a why are we bullish and i at the end of uh one of them i was like uh you know and just in case you know you know you know, not that I would ever, you know, want to fake my own death or anything like that. But and then I just could continue to like explain how to fake your own death. It's great. This is one for the ages. We'll save that.

How about, I about Steve Hankey, that guy. You got down the thing of like people are raging. He's great. He's great. He's great. I have a whole list. I have a whole list on Twitter of like 100 people. It just says check on.

So like check up on. Are they a lot? Are they okay? And so like just over time, he's like going that list and like, okay, what is this moron? You know, the great Martiz, Peter Spina, Peter Schiff, Steve Hankey, you know, Mike Brock, like, are you guys okay? You know, so.

You do all this checks? Like what do you call like their local PD? Yeah. How you doing? Yeah. Oh, yeah. A little prayer for a lot of. Yeah.

Yeah. No gold bugs ever. Here when you need. Yeah. Simple. Yeah. It's, it's funny. there's there's very seldom the the fiatr that will like bookmark a tweet and and be so confident to come back on it later because if they did given enough time you would have the clapback tweet from the clapback tweet you know like I will I will bookmark some if somebody pisses me off in an interaction I will bookmark that shit and I'll set a calendar event

to certain period of time in the future. Oh, I think I have on December 31st. I actually have several reminders to check in with people who told me the price. And oh, wait. Oh, no, wait. You're going to have to get back to them in, you know, another four, five years. 2026, December 31. There you go.

Yeah. Bunk forward. Yeah, but I missed that reminder. Sorry. Yeah. The funny thing is given enough time, again, like, like the, the Peter Schiff, framed tweet that I have, it just continues to age like fine wine.

And so like, you know, Schiff gets to do a bit of a victory lap, you know, every time Bitcoin dips like half a per day. Yeah, you know, but, but again, like this will continue. I read this.

This is probably the most red tweet on a podcast of all time, over and over and over, by me specifically. But I'm going to, going to read it anyways uh this from january doesn't have it on his wall just keeps it in any given time it's got to be within arms disd i mean framed and gold by the way for those bitcoin bugs excited about bitcoin's 4% rally in 2020 think about this hashtag gold is also up by about the same percentage this year only with significantly less downside risk if this is the best rally

Bitcoin can muster. How will it ever, ever hit 50K, let alone one million? Okay, Ben, you know that on his podcast feed, you can go back to like 2014. And I did it the other day. He had a Bitcoin thing in the show notes. And he's talking about like Bitcoin crashing at 300. It's done. It's done. He can't help himself. That's like a shtick at this point. It's amazing. This guy's doing it for so long. The commitment's been unbelievable. Who's the guy who made that video? It's like, don't invest in Bitcoin because you look right here, it was $2.

And it went all the way to get it just kept going. And then it crashed. It crashed all the way to $86,000. I've met that dude. He's great. He's super awesome. He's like Vancouver or something. But yeah, he's Alex.

Of course he's Canadian. I think one of the things that's amazing about Bitcoin is that it showed me just how many base Canadians there were. Yeah, I never thought it was, I just, I didn't realize. Yeah, but there was, wow. We do have a lot of dogs. Jeff, early this year. I was like, yeah, like, left. I think a lot of us are thinking about it now more than ever.

Just because you can't, like, you can't fight it now. It's, it's too much momentum. Even more Ben is like the great, the great west side of the country there. Yeah. It's, it's hard, man. But I think the Bitcoiners are going to end up leaving. And then you're going to wind up with even more brain drain than you already have. And after, after that starts, like,

there's really no coming back from that. Yeah. I agree, Joey. I get the question for my wife all the time. Like I orange piled her and I, you know, showed her all these things. And she's like, great, when we get in the fuck out? It seems like the only option here is to get the fuck out. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is, again, something everybody has to consider. Like my wife got her second passport just through lineage. You know, I don't have anything good to fall back on there. So I have to look at other options and kind of see what the best path could be. But also, like, we're now having the conversation like myself, my wife is, is how bad does it have to get?

Like, where is? Is your signpost? That's right. Yeah. Because otherwise you're the frog in the boiling pot. And I would argue that I should have had this conversation. We should have had this conversation way early because that that's a lot. That, that, that, I mean, even the truckers, the signpost.

That's a big one. That's a big one. There's bigger ones here, said, like the day-to-day life. Day-to-day life is getting bad here in some places. Yeah. Yeah. When you, like, you can calculate out, like, based on not only what your income taxes are, but, like, where all the other taxes come from.

And, like, I think the average person, the average, like, the median wage, something like that, it nats out to no matter what, you pretty much panhand. like just as the average person. Like you get your income and it might be taxed at 30 something percent. But then all of the additional things, like half of the whatever it is. Gas, liquor. You want to buy a ass eating hat. No more tax on that.

Yeah. Gary and I ran the numbers at some point too. And even like without the tax is priced in USD. I think it's something like the average American salary is in the 80s and the Canadians is in the 50s. I believe that. We've just been getting, like, we've stayed flat while America's gotten richer, and we're just getting poorer every year. You guys know the per capita numbers, not to turn us into a fucking stats pod,

but it's hard to ignore it because the poorest, quote unquote, poorest U.S. states are fucking richer than like Ontario. Yeah. You know, that's that's tough, that's tough feel to swallow, man. Are you guys as poor as Europe, though? The Euro pores and Euro tarts are on a different level, but we're trending to that level, I would say. Yep.

10 years, 12 years, maybe max. We're trying to emulate it. I mean, our PM spends all his time there, Walker. He doesn't like Trump, so he spends his time with the Europors. It's like an incredible sight to see. Yeah, we'll be getting drafted for Ukraine. We'll probably do what's coming up next. I can't wait.

I can't wait to die for my culture-free economic zone. I'm looking forward to it. Oh my God. That was a bar. I can't wait. I stole that for something on Twitter. I don't remember what I saw. You should just went with it.

Nah, I can't. We all thought it was cool. Now it's not as cool. I know, like the vibe has been harsh and I am upset. Yeah. Oh, man. I want to know, Gary, you were down to, you were down to Pubkey recently. You were there.

Nat was doing her book launch and everything. He popped in there. How were all the festivities? That was a while, that was in November, if I'm not mistaken. But how was everything? Yeah, man, it was neat. A lot of people showed up. The place was packed, like just front to back.

You couldn't even move around. And she was there. Everybody had a good time. Met some folks here. Larry Lepard was there, hung with him for Scosh. It's pubkey. If you ever been, it's a tiny dive bar and everybody was having a fine time. And Joey, I have a terrible idea.

We open a pub key in Alberta. How big is pub key, Gary? Like square footage, does it look small? I don't, I don't know. I can't do the math. I measure everything based on like my penis length. so I have to do six inches, six inches, six inches like all the way down. That is so many penis.

Actually, not that many. It was clearly a 1700 by 1,300 cocks. It looks signing in the pictures. I saw the pictures of a square cot. It's very, it's very dive barry. It's more long, though, because they have their event room in the bat. It's more long than wide, yeah, is that you're telling me? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What it lacks in length. Exactly. Like one of those chubby pot. or whatever, yeah. When we were kids. And everyone who's at Pubkey just has the best personality and they're really nice guys. How was it? You guys have had some crazy people.

I say you guys. But like that car has had some crazy people there. Cernan Besant was there? Besson, was it whatever? Like he was at D.C. Pubkey. Oh, D.C. Pubkey. There's two of them. I didn't even know that.

You know that he was there at a D.C. Pubkey? I had no. No, no, I didn't tweet about it. Nope. I could have sworn you, you did. Dad it, son, that's enough. Let me just go ahead and search over here. What if I was the D.C. one is new. Like, that was the opening of the D.C. one

and now they're talking about, they asked for where the next one is. I said, Gary, Indiana, Cotter, Arkansas, hot coffee, Mississippi, and Midland, Texas. Why not Nashville? Well, because someone would expect that. Have you ever even heard of any of those places? I mean, normally you open businesses where people are expecting to patronize them. I think I've never done it, but that would be my guess.

Nashville looks great. Like that would you, like Bitcoin Park over there, it looks fucking awesome. It's pretty cool. I still haven't been to park. No, no. What about the space in Denver? You guys have so many cool things. Oh, yeah.

Wait. I talk about the space. Yeah. Space is awesome. I'm excited to go back in February. And everyone should be on the lookout to come. to Heat Punk in Denver. I think it's in February this year.

It's basically the cool, fun tinkers in Bitcoin mining, just bringing their toys. We had three hot tubs last year that were powered, that were heated by two S-19s in immersion, and all 300-gallon takes were over 110 Fahrenheit. Don't want to ask me what that is in Celsius. 40. There you go.

I already got you covered. But it maintained that. And there was snow all over the ground. And I was like, I'm printing money and also relaxing in a hot tub outside. It is sick. It is sick. Do you a minor, Ben, Nate? Like you guys out there?

No? I do. But I got to upgrade mine because I'm still heating my garage with an S-9. And that's getting expensive. But I'm cheap as all hell. But it works. Call 256 and get one. I got a bug, Tuan to make it happen.

Actually, quick question for my wonderful American friends. I'm going to take advantage of this here. If I was going to move to the U.S., Where the hell should we go? Yeah. I guess that depends. Do you, are you okay with winter or not?

Because that'll like filter out like half. My wife hates it, but I'm okay with it. So let's go from max sovereignty, kind of max freedom or like where you think the ideal Bitcoin or area, regardless of weather. Oh. I was going to start talking about where the best food is.

You're looking at national self. Yeah, like probably like, yeah, especially if like, you got to basically filter out like every, you know, stayed along the Canadian border if you want to, you know, get away from the cold. So yeah, I mean, you know, you get down into. Yeah, yeah. And you can't go to California. They ruin that whole state.

So like, it's just the, they get the most amazing state ever. Like, California has everything. And they just rat, fuck it with politics. Just unreal. But yeah. I think it's down playing it, Walker. It looks like a goddamn war zone. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, everything's okay if you have enough money, right? like that's why the politicians don't mind it but yeah for the rest of people i think i think people are getting pretty tired of it honestly but california sweet it's a beautiful state yeah florida you know what i've got a soft spot for florida i quite liked it um actually uh you know i drove like the keys to the everglades all that beautiful around there um you know don't get eaten by a crock or anything like that but uh gator a lot of bitcoin yeah a fraser to the pilinger

Miami, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there are crocks in the Everglades. Yeah. Yeah, it was a many. I quite liked it. It was a really nice drive checking it out and everything. It's amazing.

That drive from like Key West to the Everglades or Miami. It's pretty wild, a seven mile bridge. Yeah, yeah, Super Bowl. Really enjoyed it. Yeah, all those islands disappear. There's, you know, four feet of sea level rises four feet. Yeah. But it's epic.

Great fishing. By the way, you all better stop driving cars. The ocean doesn't rise. Yeah, they're not by a beachfront property. By the way, I had this pulled up, so I want to make sure I got it to do it. For those that haven't checked out as work before,

we've got the Bitcoin Matrix podcast QR code here. So make sure you scan that, subscribe to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast. And of course, he's covered up right right now, but Brandon Gentile. Let's make sure we subscribe to Brandon Chantiel on YouTube. You got the QR code right there. Check it out.

Wonderful phrase. Somebody scanned it. That's damn right. for everybody who's hanging out. It was me. It was me. I didn't know. Was it really?

We're subscribed to Brandon beforehead. What the hell, Joey? I thought it was playable characters. What happened to that? I saw you change the names. We'll talk more about that. The name of the channel. Don't forget we've got the Bitcoin podcast with Walker.

You can scan that QR code right there and you can sign up for the Bitcoin podcast with Walker. And last but not least, we've got Lenshow with his co-host, Joey, the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. Scan that QR code. Sign up for the boys. Check everything out. They're awesome. You know, I scanned my own QR code.

I mean, the 22 basics podcast is pretty good, too. Oh, we go ahead and get that. Are you still doing that, Tatum? Very, very volatile podcast. Very volatile. I saw rumors about coming back. I didn't, that's why I didn't say anything because I didn't want to dive down these rabbit hole.

This is for frequent episodes. Last one was seven and a half years ago. Yeah. Tatum had me record a voiceover, which I did pro bono for his new show, which isn't a podcast. I recorded with Walker, too. too. He drags me to his creepy Airbnb with Carl, but it was cool that Carl was there.

I didn't feel so weird once I knew Carl was going to be there. He's got a strong, you know, strong sense of just protection. So that was good. I wasn't there along with Tatum. But yeah, Tatum,

what are you doing sitting on these things, man? You got to just, you just got to publish, bro. I mean, I, we don't have enough time for me to explain it, but I do have a decent plan

that I'm just going to stop talking about because I don't know if y'all paid attention but any time I mention a plan it doesn't come back hence my last upload being 25 years ago but I believe that I in a certain time frame

that it's going to happen bulletproof yeah I got a half a point in time Can I get in the excuse? Something is happening. It's probably not even going to be. It better be by block one million. There be before that.

I don't know. I said that there should be a prediction market of if I was going to release the episodes I recorded at Bitcoin Vegas this year before Bitcoin Vegas next year. It's looking like you can make some free money there. You have Vegas episodes and didn't release them? Mm-hmm. So people sat with you during the conference and you didn't put the episode. That's not even the worst.

I would fucking snap. I would snap. I feel I have not published my episode with Lynn Alden from Pacific Bitcoin 2023. Dear Lord. Dude. And I forever, I, I feel. Wait a minute.

Can you just like without, maybe without going into like the, like, I don't, I don't just sort of like deep history, but just like 20 seconds on why you didn't post it? I will focus on the anal-lingus legislation. His activism got in the way. Otherwise known as rimming or tossing south. This is his... That's a phone. I had to Google this or rock it

because I just wanted to make sure I had the right terminology here for its cause. I didn't want to... Yeah, you don't want to offend anybody. You don't water it down, yeah. They're very active bunch, right? You'd pay in the ass if you get it wrong. Tatum, you should just release it, like,

when some huge macro event happens and then release it as if it's current. That's also a hard part about it because a lot of the stuff that I would say and talk about was time sensitive. No, that's even better now. It actually doesn't matter. I don't know if you know.

There's like eight people here. Basically everyone except me you can help you drop a thumbnail. That'll get you 5,000 plays. No problem. You guys are getting $5,000. place. I had to travel

A. B. Not that many bit more. Need to break it to you. Everyone's gone. There's no one watching any of our stuff. We're just talking to each other. What did that one guy say? He's like a Bitcoin podcast.

In the trenches, boys. The same thousand people listening to every single show. Five separate times. Ten times each. Damn. Is that true? Very dedicated audience. Very dedicated.

For some reason, people are still watching this, which is a miracle. Totally. Good number of them, too, which is absolutely wonderful. Shout to everybody in the chat. Has anyone noted that December 17, 2017 was the all-time high of that cycle? Was it really? Yeah.

Wow. I didn't know that. Could you imagine, could you imagine out of that time if you were involved in Bitcoin, any time you were involved in Bitcoin before, say, 2022, what would be the most bullish scenario you could ever have imagined back then? And literally every day this year, there was probably news bigger. anything you would have imagined in 2017. I still remember Pierre O'Sart and Bittstein.

Talking every day about 100K, Bitcoin's going to go to 100K. So December 17, 2017 must have been the B-Cash launch then, right, on Coinbase? Yeah. Yeah, it was. And Cedric, I'm going to, can I tell you what my mid to late December of 2017 was? This was, I was working at an, it was one of my first kind of, full-time gigs in Bitcoin.

So there's a local OTC desk in Calgary. They had like a physical space you could walk into and buy Bitcoin and every fucking shitcoin under the sun with cash. Amazing. So I'm going to set the scene. It's myself and three other dudes. There are three desks in a giant room. Oh, I've seen this video.

There is. There is around, we just moved into the building like a couple months before. It is complete Wild West shit. The safe is around the corner behind a curtain. There is the peak of insanity. Like every person is like, fomo to the max. The year started at a thousand bucks. Bitcoin is round in 20K.

we've done it basically a I think beginning of the year it was like 1200 so whatever it was it was like a 17 X or something in a calendar year I'm sitting there there is no like real record keeping

for anything it's like we you know the bosses had just said we need to at least take a name you would be like I am Tim the toolman Taylor and I'm like we're typing it in to the right and then they would lay down a fucking stack of cash and then every desk had a money counter

because we needed them and so it's just like like sorting through hundreds the bank across the street ran out of cash and had to call head office to resupply them because people would go there take out cash and come across the oh they were using the bank that that's awesome the The room is packed shoulder to shoulder of people holding stacks of cash in like grocery bags or whatever the hell they had. And the only reason that they weren't punching each other out to steal other people's cash is because they were too worried about their own cash. No, Ben. It's because they knew the cash was worthless. Yeah.

It knew that they were breaking out the Matrix. and they were. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Every person that came up to the desk said, give me and then insert the coin that went up the most that day. All of them. Every person, XRP, 350 in 2017, give me 10 grand of that shit. Light coin at $350.50. Can I stack 20 Gs on this? Absolutely, Tim, the tool. man Taylor. That was the vibe in in 2017 in mid to late December. I remember us finishing up. By the way, there's no cameras in this place. No cameras at all. There's no security. You got the security curtain. You don't need it. Insurance company dictates what you need when you have a safe. So like if you have a certain amount of money in the safe, pass a certain threshold, you need a camera plus a certain kind of lock, plus a certain kind of door. So maybe there was a lot of people

using the app, but they were, they were coming. They were ready. They were ready to show up for sure. It was, it was, it was something else. But I remember finishing out some of the nights and it was like the scene in Breaking Bad where there's just like the flat of money. That was that was closing out every night in December of 2017 at this OTC. It was for insanity. Yeah. That's what that's what funneled me into. Man, a lot of this is bullshit. Maybe I should just focus on Bitcoin. That was it. Yeah, that was it. Totally. Yeah. Walker, let's get your take on that wonderful story there and maybe some some nice remarks. Well, 2017 is when I first bought crypto, but I couldn't afford a full Bitcoin.

So I bought a couple of light coins at the, I think I bought Charlie Lee's a couple of his light corn right at the pico top. Probably did. I still don't think like coin has recovered to where I bought it from at that time. I don't know what it's at right now. But in fiat terms. And in Bitcoin terms, I have lost out even more. But that's why I always, I lead with empathy. As much as I like to poke fun at people who are vocally anti-Bitcoin, for people who are Bitcoin curious, but just may not understand the ins and outs yet.

Like, yeah, we all started from a point of zero knowledge. So I'd try to lead with empathy. Like, I didn't know you could buy fractions of a Bitcoin. I didn't know that. So who am I to call somebody a big dumb fuck for not knowing that? Like, I was that big dumb fuck. You know? That was me.

And I bought light coin as a result of it. So, like, you know, can't do much worse than that. You know there's a coin called Pico Coin now on one of these, I can't remember what coin, like, Binance or something? How do you know that? I've, I looked a little while ago at what, I think, I know, I know what Pico, like, if you buy the Pico top, I knew it meant, but I thought it was like an acronym. And it turns out, I guess it's not. I don't know what it means still. But I did find that there's another coin called the Pico coin or Pico token or something like that.

There's no, there's no end to the scam. You can search anything related to crypto and someone. one's got a coin to sell you for a couple of sounds. Someone made runes of me. I still don't understand how runes work, but they made ruins. Quick story. And then I do have to dip, but just talking about shitcoiner shenan shenanigans, I made up a, like, I doctored an old Satoshi email that Marty Malmy had put out.

And I put, like, it was just obviously fake. I was like, hey, I know we have Bitcoin.org, but I also bought titcoin.org just in case, because maybe we should call it tit coin because, like, you know, it's like Bitcoin, but people like tits. And like anyway, like got the domain. Here it is. Obviously very fake. I own the domain, titcoin.org. What?

I know. It's shocking. Good domain. But anyway, so I post this. It goes like super viral, like multiple like, you know, crypto news outlets, right, like, AI generated stories about it. It's got like thousands and thousands of likes, just impressions out the wazoo. And after that, then I start getting people in my DMs being like,

hey, we just launched the official tit coin on Solana. Like, do you want to help? promote and I'm like, fuck you, you fucking scamming fucks. But they just have no shame. And then they were using literally that fake, the fake doctored image that I made to be like, see, look, Satoshi actually, this is the real Satoshi's vision for what Bitcoin should be. And I'm like, you guys just have no shame, no shame at all. And probably if I had, if I did not have stronger moral conviction, I would, like,

I see why people take those, you know, all the fucking dirty crypto money, right? but it's like, man, I, you know, I guess it's like having some morals may keep you poor in the short term, but I think you will be wealthier in the long term by far, because you will not have sold your soul. And there is no price tag on that. Walker, before you dip, I just want to ask, like, for anyone who's curious, why should they subscribe to the podcast? And yeah, you probably should make it about me. So go ahead. Well, you see, Nathan often comes on emergency broadcast live. streams of the Bitcoin podcast late at night. We've got a, we've got a backlog of those still to

release. But I don't know. I appreciate you guys having me. It's always great to, you know, have a Bitcoin podcast. We're Bitcoin podcasters podcast about Bitcoin podcasting. It's my favorite activity. And I would just say, yeah, I don't know. If you want to come and check out my show, I think it's pretty decent. I say fucking retard a lot. So just fair warning, it's not always safe for the kids' ears. But, but you know what? We need more Bitcoin podcast. So if you don't feel like listening to mine, just go out. there and start your own. And you can go to Bitcoinpodcast.net slash gear and you can see all the gear that I use to make my Bitcoin podcast. There is no excuse for not having a Bitcoin podcast these

days. If you have a phone, you can have a Bitcoin podcast. You don't need a fancy microphone. All you need is to get up in the morning with a can-do attitude and say, bucket, I'm going to talk about Bitcoin into a microphone for a couple hours a day. You can just do things. You can just start a Bitcoin podcast until there are more Bitcoin podcasts than Trad 5 podcasts. We don't have enough Bitcoin podcasts. So shout out to the Bitcoin podcasters out there. And shout out to you, Anon, listening, because maybe you'll become a Bitcoin podcaster someday soon. In fact, you already are. You just don't know it yet. All right. Merry Christmas to everybody. I got a dip out. Thanks for having me guys. Appreciate you guys very much.

My dad. Great job. Tatum, good luck with your podcasts. Peace. Thanks, man. Amen. Amazing, amazing. That was the best pitch for Big Quinn podcasting I've ever heard of life. Yeah, yeah, truly phenomenal work there from Walker. Gentlemen, we're going to start rounding out here. Tatum,

I'm sorry to say that this Christmas miracle is not going to happen. I wasn't prepared. Yeah, well, it would have just been really, really, really. I love the vest though, Tatea.

You probably did it is you need to lose the vest next time because that's really going to that'll clinch the deal, I think. I think that's in the cards. But yeah, we're going to round out. And I do want to say a huge thank you to all you guys. Everybody that's been watching through the evening, great having you here. Of course, make sure that you, of course, go. And if you can sign, if I can find, there we go, sign the petition for Keone and Bill, Samurai Wallet developers that are unfortunately slated to be headed to prison very shortly here.

But also outside of that, there he is, outside of that, be sure to check out all the gentlemen on the screen here and all the stuff that they're working on. We've been sharing it throughout the episode. Nathan, if you want to... Yeah, let's make the rounds here. Joey, give me the case for CBP, buddy. Yeah, man, listen, Ben, always good to see you. You guys too, doing a great job over at the Sessions. Sessions team.

Brandon said, Tatum, Gary. I mean, listen, Walker's right. He's joking a little bit, but he's right. Everyone should be talking about Bitcoin more. And so it's a pleasure to do it with some of the best in the biz here. CBP runs every Monday night. We talk a lot of Canada, some clown world. and we've recently introduced somehow a sponsored segment where we compare a Brampton man to another man from Ontario or somewhere else in the country and decide which one is which and a blind test.

It's been very successful and we're selling a lot of product on that segment, which, you know, I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but it's fine. Tune in and you don't listen to my Bitcoin podcast, but you should listen to someone's Bitcoin podcast. Don't go out there blind, that's for sure. If you're doing into the CBP live streams, you'll often find me there in the chat as well. Yeah, it's busy chat. It's busy chat. It's fun. Yeah, 100%.

Uh, maybe we'll go down the line. Yes, Cedric. Yeah. You should listen or start your own podcast. I don't have a case for the Bitcoin Matrix podcast. We talk to the same four people these guys are talking to. It's really fucking good. I'll tell you right now.

I've been listening to it for years. It was hugely underappreciation. for the longest fucking time. I'm glad to see he's killing it lately, but you absolutely need to go and subscribe to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast. It is worth your time. It is worth every minute. Edrick, are you going to message me back about

when we're going to record? Because you left me on red after you asked me to come on a couple months ago. Tatum, I didn't want to say this publicly. I sat down next to you in Vegas. I tried to talk to you several times. I don't think I introduced myself.

You wouldn't talk to me. I don't know if you who I was. I didn't feel it was right mind in Vegas. With a DM after that, but we are starting a petition to keep you out of jail, and we're going to try to legalize the ass here. So we're dedicating the show for the rest of 2026,

saving your ass with me out of prison. Keone's jumping in. Everyone's on board, Ross Ulbric. We're all going to fight for this. You're one of us, so well, maybe not one of us, but we're going to try to keep you out of prison.

Hashtag, do it for Tatum. Do it for Tatum. Yeah. Can you imagine Tatum single-hatterly secures an executive order to legalize eating ass? 50s can't working on a documentary and it's called Tatum Dayton.

It's probably going to go straight to YouTube, though. I don't know. Said wait until the end of the show to drop bombs. Yeah. There's a lot of outtakes and behind the scenes footage with Arbery. So, good luck. She would be so glad that she didn't join tonight.

I still feel like I'm going to have to go apologize to her after this. I don't even know. She knows to never make appearance, but we'll keep trying next year. Let's toss it to Brandon. Brandon, let people know what you've been working on, but that is infinitely better than what's just transpired. Who knows? At this point, who knows?

I know that my my my pod's a little bit I'm definitely more the little more of the revolutionary side probably in me so if you want a little more of that flare to the show then that's that's me but more importantly Merry Christmas to everybody here just Walker said it to and you just we need we need we know over on the system so I mean legit if you have some type of talent inside of Bitcoin there can Bitcoin can use do it because we need the less collateral damage the better the faster we can move this transition along. Let's go.

And sign the, the Keone petition as well. That's the next step, the easy next step that everyone can do. So make sure we do that. And Merry Christmas fellows. Amazing, amazing time. Absolutely. Brandon undersells that his show is phenomenal as well, too. Really, really, really good signal.

A lot of phenomenal guests. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Really quick, we'll go to Gary and Tatum for any Christmas-y messages, things you want people to check out. Gary, I'll go to you first. Gary, show your show. that I'm on with you.

Oh, yeah. Sure. Mentor sessions, Nathan I. I feel bad that Titan kind of gave it away at the beginning of the podcast, but in the interest of being as met as possible, we'll be inviting different Bitcoin podcasters on each week. Oh, man, that means I can't be on it. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no.

Well, you can get that out there. I respect what you're doing. You're just, you know, low time preference. You want to make sure each podcast is as good as possible. You're a craftsman, you know, get it out in 2027. You'll be good. But we're inviting each on for an ass-eating sampler. And we'll be reviewing each Bitcoin podcaster's ass each week.

And so we look forward to having you all on. Make sure you cut your dairy a couple weeks in the past. I'm so glad that my mom just... The Orange Pill Suppository podcast. I'm also just amazed that the use have actually gone up a little bit at the end, which is just blowing my mind. Because people are really messaging other people going to listen to these fucking idiots. You're never going to believe what's happening. It's a Christmas miracle.

Tatum, I'm going to, unfortunately, I'm going to give you the last word. I'll try to round it out. Hold on, hold on. Let's give you the main stage. Where'd you go? Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, there he goes.

Ben killed me. I want to give you the appropriate. There we go. Okay, here we go. Tampling of every restraint format here. Yeah. The last time that I saw Benjamin Sessions, I was, knocking on blackout's door in the middle of new york city i was abandoned that night and i had to

somehow figure out how to make it back to new jersey and my phone was dead i didn't have my wallet that has nothing to do with what i was about to say but i wanted to bring that up because it was just extremely funny and very can and tatum but i do want to say uh merry christmas to everyone follow me on twitter review i'm chilling sorry guys i did do a talk short show. I may still do it. Who knows? I don't know. It's on YouTube. You can go watch it if you follow me on Twitter. I talk about mining and sacrifice convenience. Until then, you're not free. And also, you do not have to be a developer or a finance bro to work on Bitcoin. Whatever you're doing and what you enjoy doing, put Bitcoin on it somehow.

Look at Ben Jessman with wine. Look at the crypto couple with their content that they create, the videos they do. You don't have to be a tech guru or finance guy to give back and work on Bitcoin. So anyway, Merry Christmas, I guess. I love it. I love it. Also, Tatum, the epic, my birthday at Pubkey in New York, end of the night, as we left Pub Key when it was being shut down, and then we were flying our way to whatever the hell bar we ended up at next. I got the most epic like Midtown Manhattan shot of you of all time. It was so sick. That was before I cut my hair. Oh yeah.

Look right here. Amazing. Isn't that amazing? That was good. He's like, come on. I have no idea that that was happening. I couldn't tell you what I'm doing in that picture.

Like what an amazing, amazing shot. So, yeah, it's like probably one of the best photos I've ever taken my life. And it was drunk-ass Tatum in Midtown. my hat and trying to find another bar. But gentlemen, we'll round it out here.

I want to say a huge thank you to all of you and all of the guests I've had over the course of the night. Bro, thanks to you, Ben. You're the one doing the show. Is this clock right here that we can all see this four hours, 40 minutes? Yeah, four and a half hour. Thanks, Ben.

Nicely done. Are you going to cry this year after we all leave again? No. I'm going to, I'm going to go and relax and have a beverage. Have some ass. I'm so sorry for ruining the future. It was wonderful.

Couldn't have ended the night more perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. So, jents, thank you so much. I appreciate it. And, oh, yeah. We'll see you guys for the next one.

Have a very Merry Christmas. Cheers. Merry Christmas, guys. Thanks, man. New Christmas. Oh, ho. And there we go. Thank you guys all for watching very much.

It's been a hell of a year. The show is not done for the end of the year. We've still got a couple more things coming out. So make sure you stay tuned. And 2026 is going to be a banger. So continue to tune in, subscribe if you're not. Although if you just sat through what transpired with the homeless gentleman, then you're here for some reason.

So either way, it's been an amazing year. I want to say, again, a huge thank you to everybody. Be sure to check out the petition there for Keone and Bill. And other than that, we'll give a final shout to sponsors. And I'll also play a little clip that will encourage you to head over to the learn page and continue to learn your self-custody skills as well as some privacy and stuff like that. So with that, it's been a blast. I also want to give a quick.

shout out to the man that always builds my incredible poster for every show. This was done by World of Rusty at World of Rusty on Twitter. And he did a fantastic job putting everybody together in this beautiful little image here. Yes, you know, rough here. We're all working at McDonald's. Either way, absolute blast. So thank you guys so much, and we'll sign off here. We'll see you guys for the next one.

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