BTC Sessions - Experts SPILL The Truth About BITCOIN'S Future! ep465

Episode Date: January 4, 2025

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What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? First one in the New Year. So again, happy New Year to everybody. I hope you all had a great one. I apparently have sparkles on my head. We'll pretend that's from New Year's Eve and not my children. But, yeah, very happy to be here.

It was a hell of a New Year's Eve. I got to visit an on. I got an unexpected invite to a very large sware, as some of you saw. But it was a good time. But I'm also happy to be home and settled for a little bit. Anyways, of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here.

We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can, I'll write it, and we'll do it live. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things. a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right. So let's get right to the thick of it. This is why are we bullish?

We're going to bring in our panel. Two thirds of them right now, but hopefully we'll be joined by the final third in a moment. But I want to welcome to the stage. John from Bitcoin Day and Danny Condon from Blockware. Gentlemen, how are you doing? Good, man. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Indeed, indeed.

We may be joined by another in just a moment. I'll intro when he gets in here. But let's go ahead and give some brief intros for the gentleman on stage. First, John, can you give yourself a quick intro? Who are you? What do you do? Well, I go by three or four different names and wear that many hats. But right now, I am most focused.

focused on the Bitcoin Day events. I'm the producer of the Bitcoin Day events. And we have Bitcoin Day Naples coming up on January 18th. That is exciting. I saw the list of speakers. It looks absolutely stupendous. So very excited for you. I'm sure you're absolutely flustered right now as it comes around the corner. But it sounds like it's going to be a good one. I'll drop it down to Danny here as well. Buddy, welcome to the show. Glad to to have you. Can you give yourself an intro as well? Who are you? What do you do? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm really thrilled to be here. My name is Danny Condon. I'm chief revenue officer at Blockware. We are a Bitcoin mining as a service company. So we own and operate data

centers and we sell ASICs to individual and institutional investors. And we have a marketplace that enables folks to trade A6 in a turnkey capacity. So yeah, I'm stoked to be here. Hell yeah, man. And I've given you guys a whirl as well did a little test video bought myself an ASIC learn the ropes and everything and it was very intuitive uh i enjoyed my time playing around with it so yeah i appreciate you guys you guys are killing it yeah likewise awesome awesome well jens shout out to danny too because i have a few minors up there at blockbird well nice go good time to be a minor yeah for sure yes it would seem um Well, Jens, we'll get rolling before we dive into the meat of the show.

For anybody watching, that is unfamiliar. This is why are we bullish? Very simple premise to the show. Main idea is each one of us has come with a reason for being bullish on Bitcoin, and that can take any form, whatever the person, whatever is tickling their fancy at this moment in time. The flow of the show, really simple. Number one, one of us is going to drop a reason why we're bullish.

It's our chance to rant. and talk about why we're so excited. Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, discussions, comments, questions, whether a rabbit hole, we decide to go down. And then finally, number three, we're going to rotate to the next person until we've all had a turn. So reason, riff, rotate, nice and simple. So with that, I'm going to get started with my reason for being bullish to kick us off. And of course, we're all familiar that today is, of course, proof of keys.

day and, you know, obviously also the birthday of the launch of the Bitcoin protocol as well. And so the reason I'm so bullish on Proof-of-Kee's day, and I see our next guest in the wings here, I're going to bring them up in just a moment, but I'll give a moment to get them settled here. But the reason I'm so bullish on Proof of Keys Day is that 16 years into Bitcoin, the amount of tools and the amount of options that people have and the ability of somebody to self-custody and secure their coins in whatever way tickles or fancy has never been greater. There are so many fantastic options for people to be able to self-custody and become self-sovereign with the tools at their fingertips. And obviously, even 16 years in, it's still early days. We're still building things out. We're still in the process of making them even more streamlined and user-friendly.

But the amount of progress that I have seen just over the course of having started this channel and educating people over the past eight and a half, going on nine years is is staggering. Like there's no options really when I started in terms of hardware. It was all very, very lackluster. And now it's like take your pick of a ton of incredible devices that you can that you can use and secure. And it can go from the simplest little device, you know, you tap a card to the back of your phone to, you know, I'm, I've been around the block. I enjoy things that give me a lot of versatility. So like I'm always rocking my cold card cue. But like the point is the plethora of options out there from beginner to advanced and

configurations from, you know, hot wallets to cold wallets to multi-sig wallets and all of these other options in between is staggering. And it's not letting up. It's going to continue to snowball and get easier. and more fine-tuned to the preferences of the users. And so, again, we've just never been in as good of a place as we are now, and it's only getting better from here. And that's what I've seen in practice.

So with that, we'll expand on that in a moment. We'll enjoy the conversation. But I've got to bring in our other guests here, you know, welcome them to a stage and go to a little intro firmer as well. Maddie, welcome. How are you, man? How's it going, guys? pleasure to be here your voice is so crispy on that nice mic it sounds great day i just got to give you a little compliment on those uh cabinets you got behind you those are really oh yeah i've got i've got a newborn got some family here i'm like where am i going to sit for this one so i'm in like

christmas land over here thank you now mattie i'm i'm i'm a tad jealous because i don't typically have competition for the best hair in the room you might be in trouble bro you might be in trouble That makes me. I'm feeling a little insecure here, but thank you for joining. Before we dive, you were hearing my topic as we were, I was kind of, you were backstage. Okay, cool. So before we dive into that, though, can we give you a quick intro? Who are you? What do you do for anybody unfamiliar? Sure. So I'm the manager at my local 7-Eleven, and I just, I'm just kidding. I'm the CEO of a company called Consensus Protocol. We participate in mining is really our forte. We just recently started some media stuff and, you know, designing some R&D products.

So that's my background. Hell yeah, man. Well, welcome to the show. Glad to have you. We already kind of went down the rabbit hole of what the show is, you know, general idea that each one of us has a reason for being bullish in around Bitcoin. I just dropped mine in and around, you know, how good we have it as Bitcoiners or as new Bitcoiners coming in right now.

How good they have it with the awesome. optionality of how they want to secure their Bitcoin and take ownership of their keys. And so I'm just going to toss it out to the panel at large and whoever wants to dive in first. How do you feel about the state of the ability of one to take ownership of their own keys and their sovereignty and their Bitcoin? I can kick it off with almost like a Y to get the pot stirred here. I think if you almost take a step back, it's like how the plethora of, you know, custodial options, if you will, makes it really, really simple to adopt Bitcoin and then evolve your, you know, custodial journey, right? Because at the end of the day,

we're seeing significant Bitcoin price increase. We're talking about bullish catalysts for, you know, 2025 and years to come. That all comes from adoption. So never before has it been easier to adopt Bitcoin. And that adoption and that custodial choice is something that can evolve. And it's going to be different for everybody. You know, you probably are especially around the holidays, right? You have discussions with family members and friends that are coming out of the woodworks that are like, oh, Bitcoin's rip in. How should I get Bitcoin?

Like a single-sig hardware wallet might. be too complicated for somebody from their initial get-go. But I can say to my buddy, like, you know, and I might take some shit for this, but like you can go into your fidelity account and you can buy a Bitcoin ETF that is effectively a custody solution. Or you can go to Coinbase or strike or, you know, whatever, wherever it might be. And you can acquire and store Bitcoin there. You can get X, Y, Z hardware wallet, right? So I think I'll hit it from like the why that's important because it enables adoption. I had a conversation with a friend yesterday who's not particularly financially astute

that, you know, does pretty well and is like, all right, I'm missing out. How do I get Bitcoin? I gave him the whole spectrum. He's like, okay, I'm just going to start in the simplest possible way. And he hit me up today. Bitcoin's rip, but he's like, dude, it's epic. I'm in the game. Let's go. You know, so I think that it's like, it's just so cool how many, you know, how fast the space is evolving. the tools that people have to diversify their custodial solutions and just get in the game. Yeah. Yeah. And I like what you said and that, you know, there's us as Bitcoiners and myself as a bitcorner, you know, I have a, you know, a grand vision of like where I would love people to get to. But I can't impose that on a person as their initial interaction with Bitcoin.

that's just not how education works. Like you're not going to make fun of a kid who's learning the alphabet for not being able to read the sovereign individual in its entirety on day one. And you're not, you shouldn't at least make fun of an individual for stepping into Bitcoin and going on an exchange and getting a little bit and then being like, okay, what's next? That's fine. The most important part is that we set people on a path where they can and they're ready to be as self-sovereign as possible with the tools at hand and that they just start moving in the right direction. Because if they're greeted with a wall of knowledge that seems insurmountable, rather than starting down that path, they're just going to turn right back around and go out the other door. So you need to give them breadcrumbs and lead them down. And not everybody will reach the end of the path if there even is such a thing.

But the further you can lead them down that, the more successful you are. And I think the way you do that is little bits at a time. We didn't all get to where we're at in a single leap. It took us baby steps along the way. And I think that's super important. Yeah. Yeah, I really like the idea of different types of custody for people, right? Have different risk buckets, different profiles.

So I think the ultimate answer is, hey, you want a little bit on a coinbase, you want a little bit in an ETF. You want to have your self-sovereign funds as well, right? But they all present different risks. And ultimately, you want to be fully self-sovereign. But at the same time, you know, if something happens, you have a stroke or a brain accident or you get hit, you know, you have a boating accident, whatever it may be. You want to have your, or you get, you know, somebody comes to your house to rob you, whatever it may be. You don't want to have all your eggs in one basket, right? So there's different risks that come along with having custodial Bitcoin.

And there's also risks that come along with having non-custodial Bitcoin. So it's important to diversify. We try to educate, you know, we have a, me and John and I, John Helmsley with our local Bitcoin meet up here. And, you know, we educate people to, you know, obviously we want them to be self-sovereign. And we help them with their ledgers or their, you know, different devices. They're cold wallets. And there's something extremely powerful with being able to remember 12 to 24 words and

being able to just have that in your brain and be able to go. anywhere in the world and take all of your like a lot of your wealth with you right but there's also risk to that right a lot of people we see that are coming in that we've taught and you know i've told 15 times hey these words are your bitcoin you know when we set up ledgers with people we make them sit there and read every little aspect of that because you know i i don't want to get that call six months later saying hey somebody messaged me and they said they were going to help me repair my wallet and they asked me for my words or i downloaded a fake ledger app or a fake you know treasur app or whatever and i just typed in my my seed phrase and you know i'll

my funds are gone, right? So there's risks associated with any type of custody, but the optionality at the end of the day is key. Yeah. Yeah, the, the, the, I, and I think the main reason we see a lot of, um, those types of scams, like the fishing scams where people are trying to extract that information. It's just everything is so new and we're so used to in a world where everything was babysat, where everything was, um, you know, take, take personal responsibility for every other aspect of your life, except money. Just leave that with somebody else the entire time. There's no way you can manage that yourself. That is being switched, but because it's in a digital realm, people don't associate it the same way that they would with cash, but they should. They really shouldn't. And the

analogy I use is like when people come to the Bitcoin meet up and say, hey, I lost 50 grand or I lost 100,000 or I lost whatever, you know, I gave these seed words. Is there any hope to get it back? you know and i basically explain to them that it's the equivalent of going to a gas station and you know somebody asking if they can if they can have all of the cash in your wallet that they're going to be right back and give it to you like do you think you're ever going to see that person again probably not right so then they're like oh they really that that kind of that kind of clicks for them but i think until somebody really experiences that it really i hate to say it but you almost have to unless you're incredibly intelligent or a student you almost have to pay for education at least once right

so you really get it for so many people that's the case and it's sad but But with anything else you do in life, I mean, you educate yourself and you have to pay for that education, whether you go to school or whatever, right? Yeah, it's the price of tuition. Like you said. There you go. That's a tuition cost. Yeah, exactly. John, I'm curious to get your thoughts as well.

Well, all this reminds me of my, you know, Bitcoin origin story. I think everybody has the origin story where they heard about Bitcoin and learned about Bitcoin and then forgot about it. And my origin story is similar when I first learned about it. I had no, I tried and tried and tried to figure out how do I get this Bitcoin into my custody? How do I buy it? And I mean, I didn't, granted, I was very distracted with lots of other life happenings, but my point is it wasn't easy at the time. You know, it was 2016.

And I had no idea. And I forgot about it after a while because I just stopped trying. and I hadn't gone far enough down the rabbit hole. And so, you know, the evolution of the products and services that are available to make that easy for other people to onboard now is, like you said, it's very important. And I think the easier that it gets the quicker everybody is going to onboard, that's pretty an obvious statement. But I think that Ben, one thing is that I was thinking about when you were ranting there is that, you know, you are the ideal person to rant about this topic because I know that you built your whole podcast on the demonstration and testing of all these products and services. So shout out to you for that because I'm sure that you helped a lot of people onboard. like Maddie said, he and I help people through our meetup groups, but I don't think we're

reaching nearly as many people as you are. So thanks for that. Very kind of you to say again, but I'm very happy to see the proliferation of new educators and not obviously like in person in the meetups, super, super important for people to be able to have like some hands on, be able to ask real live questions. But also hats off to, you know, the new people jumping in online, starting to do tutorials in and around how to, you know, properly, you know, protect your keys. I think it's super important. Eventually, I think people will begin to understand the implications like that. You know, Maddie, you're talking about the, the, oh, yeah, why would I give a stack of ash to a stranger?

If we're not there yet, like, you know, everybody knows like you're not going to give your social insurance number out to a random person that emails you. But for some reason, just hasn't clicked. Like, there's no global understanding of, hey, a seed phrase is as sensitive as or more sensitive than your social insurance number. I mean, that's what I tell people when I said, you know, this is the key to your money. This is. And I use that analogy. Like, hey, if somebody ever asks you for this, this is the equivalent of like what I just, the analysis. I just gave, which is, you know, giving cash to a stranger at the gas station.

Oh, giving your wallet, like, you know, to a stranger, like, take out your walking out of your pocket with all of your stuff in it. And a stranger says, hey, I'm going to be right back. Like, I'm going to double this for you. Or, hey, that's another one. Like, you know, and I hate to say it. But it's like, I have talked to people who have like been scammed by that video, we're like, yeah, I sent all my Bitcoin to this address. They said they were going to double it. It's like, well, dude, you just paid for your education. You just learned a valuable lesson. Yeah. Yeah. A fool in their money are soon parted. And, you know, that's all. That's a lesson that's as old as time.

Right. I mean, there's no, there's no type of regulation or anything you can do to fix that. People just have to learn. You have to get educated, right? Yeah. You know, experience it or. And you met it. And think like, so I was talking about adoption.

So kind of in this vein, like I really, I'm interested in disruptive technology adoption curves. You can't adopt something unless you're educated about it. And you can't be educated about something. unless you're aware of it. Right. So you can think of it. You can extrapolate that to Bitcoin adoption. Like I'm not going to be educated about Bitcoin if I'm not aware about what Bitcoin is.

You got to start somewhere. And that same thing happens in custodial, you know, solution adoption, in my opinion. And then you know, so become aware, right? And then you juxtapose that with like, okay, well, think about when you started, when you first heard about Bitcoin first became aware of it. Everybody kind of goes through the same cycle. like, all right, number go up. This sounds good.

I'm going to go to the casino. Then you start doing some education. And then you're like, you ever met a really educated bearish bitcoiner? Right? So, I mean, I think these things. Peter Schiff's got to be the closest thing. I mean, I hate to rag on the guy. He has to be.

I mean, after like, it's like, dude, it's been two decades. And like, what are you going to bet you're just wrong? Can I, can I try you guys my, my, my favorite piece of art in my room? And no, it's not. It's got to be like a Peter Schiff tweet quote and then just the price of Bitcoin behind it. It's got to be something like that. It is a framed Peter Schiff tweet. I've had this since 2020.

Wow. So I'm going to recite it to you guys. Of course, the frame is in gold. So this. I hope it's fools gold because he's a gold. It might be. It might be. Now, this has yet to fully.

pay off, but it's already paid off. Like, there's levels to it. And so, like, it just keeps, it's like a fine wine and is aging so well. So this was tweeted on January 6th of 2020. And from Peter Schiff, he said, and I quote, 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 hashtag Bitcoin can muster how will it ever hit 50k let alone one million dollars

he didn't put a number to it man waiting for that future egg i mean i just want to know like what is it going to take for him to be like you know what i was wrong like this actually like you know i never i just i don't understand it it just doesn't make sense to me it's like he's like he's more stubborn than my wife man i mean it's like dude you just like you just keep saying the same thing over and over again for years and like the market just tells you you're fucking wrong over and over and over again like you're literally missing out on the best performing asset in all of human history yes but as long as you and why i mean it's silly as long as he says it with conviction people will believe him and follow him and buy his gold i mean i i think i don't understand it because you can still there's still a use case there's

still a case for gold i mean the case for bitcoin doesn't remove the case for gold right gold has value it's in industrial metal it's it's one of the oldest monies of human history you know it's still has has certain characteristics of money. I mean, you know, gold is still decent. It's still worth having in a portfolio. I mean, you don't have to, you know, rain on someone else's parade or another parade just to sell your parade. It doesn't make sense.

It gets in lots of clicks. It gets in lots of attention. Yeah, I mean, that's really at this point right now. Yeah. That's true. That's true. Yeah. It's funny.

Well, uh, gents, again, again, I guess we'll, we'll put a bow on this topic. Um, but in general, you know, it's never been when it comes to the, the tools that one can use to secure their own coins and become self-sovereign. We've never had it better. It's never been easier.

Of course, there's plenty of room to grow and make things simpler and more accessible. But damn, it's a good time to be a bit coiner. And it's a good time, if you haven't already, to partake in proof of keys or at least begin the steps towards learning about self-custy and seeing what tools are out there and available for you. But with that segue, we are going to do a rotation here to our next guest and our next reason for being bullish. Before we do, I'm going to give a quick shout out to sponsor the show. And we're going to give away some sats coming up next.

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And yeah, let us know in the chat or in the comments if you were the one to grab them. But with that, I'll get this off my screen. And John, I'm going to toss it to you next. I'm going to cue you up with the same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? Okay, well, this may sound cliche, but it's true. So I am bullish because of the people. in Bitcoin. All the people that I interact with on a regular basis, I've never been involved in a

community with people that have such integrity, intelligence, and drive, and the will to make the world a better place. So that just keeps me going, keeps me excited. It's why I love. I love to plan these events because I love to bring these people together. And, you know, at the events that I've created, I know that there are an infinite number of connections that have occurred from that. So it kind of just one person meets one person that they never met before at a Bitcoin Day event. And then they go out and they tell another person that they met that person and then just like, you know, the whole network effect. And, you know, the Bitcoin network is nothing without the people to use it.

So I think that, you know, people, that's it. I love it. I love it. I mean, it's a good of a, as good of a reason to be bullish as any. And in particular, in and around the meat space, like actually seeing a physical human in front of you that appreciates Bitcoin as much as you do, When you haven't experienced that and then you do, it is life-changing because you have that moment of, oh, thank God, I'm not crazy. Or at least I'm crazy with other crazy people. And that's an exhilarating feeling.

That's so true. That's why I love the live events so much more than all the online stuff that happens. You know, a lot of us are living several hours a day on X and YouTube. and podcasts and all that. You know, you can. You can forget that there are lots of other people. In fact, the majority of there are more people in the world who don't know what Bitcoin is and don't understand Bitcoin than there are that do.

And then you get sort of stuck in this echo chamber. But then you finally, you go to that meetup or you go to the event and you're just, like you said, Ben, you're like, oh, yeah, there are. I'm not the only one. Thank goodness. Yeah. Also, it can be tricky, too, because when you're this excited about something, you want to talk about it to the people around you, but let's be honest, like friends

and family, they're more comfortable to shut you down. And so you're much more likely early in your Bitcoin journey, just get large rounds of, I don't want to hear about it, man. Like give it a rest. And that could be deflating in the least when you get in front of somebody who not only is excited about what you have to say, but then reciprocates. It's like, it's a drug. Yeah, totally. And this conversation is reminding me, I don't know if you remember ever meeting me in person, but we did.

I do. You do. Oh, great. What event was it at? I'm trying to. was that Bitcoin, 2023, Miami, and we met at the Swan House. It was like this really brief intro. I knew who you were because of your podcast, but I would have been talking for an hour

with this wonderful woman from Africa who was building a Bitcoin businesses in Africa and educating her local communities. And she was telling me, I need to find somebody who can show people how to use wallets and things. And I saw you standing over there in the corner and dragged her. over to you and I said, Ben, meet this lady. Can't remember the name right now. Was it Charlene? Possibly. Yes.

Interesting. Yeah, I'm trying to remember who I spoke to. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I do recall that actually. That's super funny. Yeah. And I would have had, I would, I'm trying, I think I would have had my wife with me. I don't know if it was that night, but I think she, she would have been wandering around. I'm pretty sure she was standing next to you. Yeah, yeah. That was her first big, big point event. That was actually her first foray into, holy crap, this is a real thing.

25,000 people. That was a bear market conference, the 2023 conference. It was not very well attended, but still, you know, 20,000 people or so. Yeah, yeah, not bad for a bear market, hey? Maddie, maybe I'll go to you next. What has your experience been in and around kind of the local meat space connecting Bitcoiners together? How have you noticed that dynamic over the course of your involvement in Bitcoin?

God, it's been fantastic the past five to 10 years, you know, just meeting people, you know, helping grow the community here locally. John was about a year or two into starting a meetup. John showed up one day and we just kind of clicked. And he's just, you know, I built the meetup to be like a community thing, right? Where people had input and people could, people wanted to get more involved. They could get more involved. And John really stepped up to the plate and just took over like handling all of the management of things.

And, you know, we've probably helped tons of people learn about Bitcoin, learn about Web3, understand the opportunity. learn why it matters, why it's important. We've brought, you know, tons of different speakers, educators. So, you know, I've loved every minute of it to get to know people, to help educate people and to work with John on that. So it's been an absolute pleasure. That's awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, Maddie, shout out to Maddie because he's, he's the one that started the local group. We saw anybody that's listening that happens to be from the Naples, Fort Myers area. We meet once a month. The first Tuesday of every month, we have a, I mean, we meet twice a month.

But the first Tuesday of every month, we have a guest speaker. And the third Tuesday of every month, we just meet at a local restaurant and have a social. So we're on meetup.com and you can find us easily. And we get people from all over. I mean, people drive from Miami. They drive from Sarasota, Tampa, Orlando, you know. So those are always rewarding when it's like, hey, I just came from Orlando to the meetup. It's like, wow.

I live in Colorado. I've been to your meetup. Danny's even been to the meetup, man. Yeah, yeah. Before it was like, it's great now. John helps me. Before it was like, it was just like Maddie pays for everything.

Now it's like we have people that sponsor and come and buy food for everybody. It's like, wow. So Maddie hasn't had to open up his, I haven't had to spend any sats and God, it's been like a year. That's awesome. Maybe longer, yeah. Thank you. Thanks, John.

I don't mind. I mean, it's fine. I really don't mind. Only at yardhouse. other than that, I'm in the clear. It is wild how, and I mean, to me it makes sense. It is wild how people will make these pilgrimages to get to these types of events, to, you know, rub shoulders with other bitcoins and create relationships.

Like, we just had an event prior to Christmas here in Calgary. And so we do a local market. So we're doing like the whole circular economy thing here. We've been building it over the past year. And we started with just the local Bitcoin meetup. And we said, hey, like everybody here, you know, you all, you all think that Bitcoin's better money. You all earn dollars and then exchange those dollars for Bitcoin. And you all have some sort of skill or business or service or whatever that you can offer.

Why wouldn't you cut out one of those middle steps and just like accept Bitcoin directly in the local community here? And why don't we come together a couple times a year to do that? And so this last event that we had, we had 40 merchants come together for a market. And it wasn't just like, hey, like here's a, here's like a Bitcoin hat and like a shirt and stuff like. And like, you know, Bitcoin related merch. It was like, no, there's farmers coming in that have like beef and chicken and eggs. And there's tradesmen that are like plumbers and roofers and people who can do your floor and all this different stuff. There's personal trainers.

there's all these different goods and services that are like day-to-day quasi-necessities for people. And that was kind of the goal for it is to start building that out. And not only that, but we had people that are starting to come in from cross the country. So like from Calgary to Montreal is a five-hour flight and we had somebody come in from Montreal. We had somebody coming from Toronto, somebody come in from Edmonton, three-hour drive-away, Vancouver, or Cologne, like all these places from around the country. And Canada's huge. Like, it takes a long time to get anywhere.

And, and yeah, I was just astounded by the amount of effort people put in to, like, get to this thing. And it's kind of only growing. And so, again, it's just like exemplary of the passion that people have to make these things happen. And it's super exciting. I want to toss it. I don't want to ramble too long. So I want to toss it to Danny as well. and kind of get your take on the topic ahead.

Yeah, I think the last word you used was what was in my mind here. It's passion. So why is the community? Why are the people, you know, why is it so great, right, to kind of opine on John's, you know, bullish point? I think it's because of how passionate folks are. Well, why are they passionate? Because Bitcoin is something that is, you know, it's worth for, lack a better term, being passionate about. And it's about, you know, the further you go down the rabbit

hole, the more passionate you get. And there's lots of different like caves, you know, tunnels in the rabbit hole. So it's not just like sometimes we talk about, you know, getting in like an echo chamber of sorts. But I actually think that there's a lot of diversity of thought within Bitcoin. And there's a lot of passion that people bring, you know, to the broader, you know, consensus around, you know, Bitcoin's global viability, again, for lack of better term. But it's just, it's, it's so interesting and beautiful and unique to see how passionate Bitcoiners are. And it just goes back again, you know, to bring this full circle around that whole adoption curve.

It's like, you can't adopt something. you're not educated. You can't be educated if you're not aware. So what we, you know, have always tried to do at Blockware is provide, you know, significant education resources. We're a Bitcoin mining as a service company. That's how we, we're for-profit business. That's how we make money and we empower others to, you know, to mine Bitcoin. But we have a huge, media and research arm. We provide a lot of insights. We just came out with our 2025 kind of market prediction report. We have a newsletter that we put out every week. Like the community just feeds so much quality alpha into the,

you know, into the ecosystem that it enables, you know, so much potential to learn and increase that passion, which is just beautiful. And it's compounding, right? So I totally agree. I mean, I think like the people are epic and that people make, make a community and communities are what. drive forward progress. And I think Bitcoiners like very proudly play a part in contributing to the community that they care about, which is really unique and special. Yeah. I love that. George, I saw you in the comments. Welcome to Naples if you're here with family. Our local Bitcoin meetup is name is Naples, Bitcoin and blockchain meetup. Cool. Yes, I did. I did see that. And then I was like, oh, maybe they're not talking about the upcoming event. It's clearly the specific meetup.

But, yeah, that's awesome. January 7th, January 7th at the courtyard by Marriott on 41. Oh, we're going to be at a new location. 7 p.m. Yeah. All right, cool. We're upgrading our facility. Wow, wow.

All right, all right. Nice. Nice. Love to hear it. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that, I guess, just to kind of put a bowl on this one, And it's self-evident that Bitcoiners are starved for social interaction and like they crave it. And that great things come of it, right? The fact that there's so many different events and meetups and communities and even like circular economies popping up around the world.

And that people are willing to spearhead these things themselves and just take the initiative and have a if not you than who attitude about. it just speaks to, again, the same word I'm going back to the passion that everybody has for this. And I don't think it's going to let up. I think that the best thing somebody can do if they're looking at this right now is, is one, see if there is an existing local meetup or a regular event that you can attend and go there and meet the people. And if there's not, then you should probably start one. And yeah, sure, maybe it's you and some other dude having coffee for a little bit.

But then it will gradually grow. And I think these local initiatives are, again, some of the most important work that an individual can do if they're not sure how they're going to fit into the Bitcoin space. You know, just start getting people together. And sparks fly when Bitcoiners with different skill sets enter a room. and start discussing things together because you never know what can be built from that. So keep it up, keep rolling, and yeah, keep those events coming. Yeah, can I just give a couple of quick pieces of advice?

Most meetups that I know of, most Bitcoin meetups are listed on meetup.com and on Orange Pill app. Yes, Orange Pill app is great also if you're traveling. If you like, you can stumble into any city on earth, any decent sized city on earth, and pull that up and probably find somebody to go get a coffee or a beer with, which is a pretty unique thing.

There's not too many communities where you can just like not only roll up and find somebody local to hang out with, but also to know that there is going to be at least a few common threads and a few common denominators that allow you to like skip the small talk and get down to a more meaningful connection, which is super awesome. Yeah. So gents, we are going to do another rotation here. again, I'm going to give a quick shout out to sponsor the show. Before I do, I figure it's worth just taking a quick look at where we are in the market right now

over at timechain stats.com. So we're sitting at $98,108 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will snag you 1,019 sats in terms of fees. We're looking at four sats per V-byte for next block. And in terms of Bitcoin mind, we are currently sitting at 94.31% of the total supply mind. That means there's only 1.19 million Bitcoin left. So stack them. Hard to believe. Hard to believe. Yeah. It's hard to believe. Absolutely. Well, gents, we'll be back in one minute. And Danny, I'm looking at you. You're coming up next. We will give away a few extra stats when we get back as well. So just get those lightning.

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There's a QR code on the screen to do so, or you can hit the link in these show notes down below. And when you do, you will earn 5,000 sats as you create your first app. All right, we are back in. We'll give away a few quick sats, and then we'll dive into Danny's reason for. being bullish. So once again, sign-up link is over on the right-hand side, but we'll just get down to giving you some free stats here. So once again, I will drop a coin in the well, unless I have to refresh here. Had it sitting, clearly not ready. There we go. 500 points. Tossing that into the well. Whoever scans at first of the lightning wallet will snag. Oh, 2,100 sats there.

So congrats to whoever grabbed that one. You can gloat about it in the comments. Or, in the chat. But with that, let's keep it rolling. And Danny, I'm going to queue up you the same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? For sure. So I'm bullish. Context. I'm a Bitcoin miner. Our company enables folks, individuals, institutions to mine Bitcoin to get access to the ability to mine Bitcoin themselves. So I am bullish because Bitcoin mining economy economics are very strong right now. And I'm bullish in a forward looking kind of 2025 capacity because I think there's a lot of logic and reason that supports the concept of the economics becoming

even better. Right. And to unpack that and provide a little kind of data there, um, there's two primary factors that, uh, affect Bitcoin mining profitability. And those are the price of Bitcoin. and hash rate or network difficulty. And what we have is the underlying concept is basically the velocity at which those two levers can move, right?

So Bitcoin price can move significantly faster than network difficulty can move. And that's because you run into real world limitations around bringing incremental hash rate online. Right? I mean, bringing incremental hash rate online, you have to get machines for primarily from Asia. You have to build out significant infrastructure. You have to cut, you know, power contracts. And you're also going against the law of like it becomes harder and harder and harder to double. Right. A number gets bigger. You double it again. And we're talking about like real world energy constraints. So the velocity in which mining difficulty can move is relatively slow compared to the velocity in which. which Bitcoin price can move. I think like a quick data point that evidences that is since the U.S. election night, Bitcoin's up like, you know, over 50 percent. And Bitcoin difficulty has increased only 15, approximately 15 percent. And that's after a record high six consecutive positive difficulty increases. Right. So it's just showing what that looks like. And now as I look towards 2025, why am I bullish about Bitcoin mining in 2025? I think we have significantly positive

catalysts for Bitcoin price appreciation. And just to summarize those, potential nation-state adoption or state adoption, institutional adoption, corporate adoption, and retail adoption, all flowing in the right direction. And therefore, I think, you know, that velocity is just going to significantly outpace the velocity in which Bitcoin difficulty can move. So it's a great time to be set up as a miner. And it's a great time on a forward-looking basis to be a minor. So I spent a lot of time in this world. We write a lot of research, put a lot of alf out there around Bitcoin mining, economics, macroeconomics,

you know, on-chain economics. And that's what I'm bullish about. Hell yeah, man. Now, before I kind of toss it to the rest of the panel to chime in with comments, questions, again, rabbit holes we want to go down. I do have a general question that might help some of the people watching this. Again, I'm looking and like between, you know, a few different platforms. We've got like, you know, 3,000 people that have so far tuned in over the course of the episode. And so there's going to be a number of those.

my, you know, my, my stuff while being educational, mining thus far for me has, I've always felt it's my biggest blind spot. And I've had very little interaction with it beyond, you know, some of the entry level, like basic stuff that one might do in their educational journey, you know, tiny cheap devices just to kind of, as learning tools. You know, I've done, I obviously tried you guys out when it came to like a hosted device, things like that. But my question to you that may be helpful for others is where do you think somebody should start their learning journey when it comes to mining? And how does that relate to maybe where they are located and, you know, the experience.

the expendable capital that they've got at their fingertips versus like what they're trying to accomplish, whether it be education or whether it actually be turning a profit or maybe it just be making some money back for heat or something like that. Sure. Yeah. No, that's a great question. And I totally agree like Bitcoin mining. I mean, if you think about it, Bitcoin is, we live in this world where like Bitcoin's everything. But for the rest of the world, you know, because we're still early in the overall adoption phase, Bitcoin is a novel technology. And Bitcoin mining is like an even more novel derivative of that novel

technology. So I totally respect that it can be a little daunting. So we ask ourselves that same questions. Like how do you educate folks? Where do you give people a place to start? So you don't just have to try to jump in the deep end. Blockware we created it's called Blockware to learn. So you can go to blockware solutions.com. You can check out Blockware to learn. It's a module-based, you know, free education course that takes you all the way through a little bit around like kind of what is Bitcoin so we can put it in context all the way to the deep end of like how to choose different hardware models, so on and so forth. So as far as looking for, you know, quality resource that you can just start to get educated, I would highly recommend

checking that out. Great starting point. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, That's a great point. Definitely go to use that resource. And then after you've used that resource, I recommend going on eBay or some, you know, website and just buying an older, used miner, an S9, something like that for a couple hundred bucks, hundred bucks, $200, sometimes you can find it even cheaper. And then you can have that device shipped to. You actually see, feel, realize, try to plug that device into an outlet, right, a 220-volt outlet, hear that thing scream in your garage or wherever and get an idea of how to set up a wallet to that. So that's kind of like, you're not going to be profitable at your home with that,

but you know, you might spend $2 a day in electricity and it might make $1, you know, in Bitcoin to a wallet, right? That's fresh, you know, non-KYC Bitcoin that you're receiving daily, right? And then after that, you know, you can go to Blockware's website and you can buy, go to their marketplace and buy, you know, a new gen, you know, minor. And you can see, oh, you know, I have to pay. pay the first last security deposit. Here's what I'm going to pay. Here's the market price. Here's I got to set up a pool. And you kind of learn all these different things. And you realize,

you know, this is what it's all like. And then once a month, you got to pay your hosting bill. So you got to send Bitcoin from that wallet to pay that bill, that electricity rate. So you kind of learn all this stuff. You know, and then when you're ready to deploy serious capital, you can call our buddy up here, John. If you have half a million or more, you want to deploy and you want to have your own company and you want it to be managed by professionals, you know, hit our boy John. up and then he'll call Danny and then I'll tell I'll tell John I'll say you know hey I know what I know what Danny did in Thailand and we got some blackmail on him and we'll squeeze them we'll squeeze them we'll squeeze those prices down on a big order you know we'll negotiate we'll we'll earn the

keep that way right and we'll deploy for you and there's tax incentive benefits for for buying miners right if you do it under an LLC or a business you know you all that is right off right it's a you can still do accelerated depreciation section 170 all these different things right so So there are certain benefits that go beyond just participating in the network, but to mine as a business. Now, it is, you know, you really got to know what you're doing, right? You have to understand economics. You have to understand where you're at in the Bitcoin cycle. You have to understand machine prices and how machines are changing over time.

So there is a lot of that information, you know, that comes into play. When you have one or two miners, it's not such a big deal. But if you're looking to do that at scale, I mean, there's there's a lot of education that comes along with that, right? Yeah, I'll just shout out real quick. Like, uh, so our whole business is making, uh, you know, very, very simple to my Bitcoin for try to provide that education. And then we partner with folks who make it even easier, right? I mean, once you get educated, it is actually like our purpose here is it.

If you want to go mine Bitcoin, uh, build, you know, at scale, build a data center, quit your day job, you know, find cheap power, so on and so on and so forth. Call me in like three years and, you know, you're not as easy. It's not as easy. it sounds yeah so that's why we're around that's why blockware exists to make it very simple and then we partner with uh you know mattie and john here to make it even more white glove service right because they're providing a lot of this you know real hands on education and it becomes like totally hands off but i think just like blockware learns a great place to start you'll get educated

and then hit one of us up right i mean we love jamming about this stuff and um you know even It doesn't go anywhere. It's great. It's really empowering and fulfilling to have conversations and educating folks about a super critical, you know, part of the network. Yeah. I'll let John chime in to here, too. Well, so there's one.

I have a question for these two guys. Somebody in the comments was talking about a bidax tutorial. I know that the bitax is like, you know, you plug it in your, in your, USB drive and your computer and you know you're like it's a totally playing the lottery way random you're not but I think you can connect the bidax to a pool so that part of the learning curve there's a little bit of a learning that you can get from buying a less expensive device am I right about that? Yeah no absolutely you can absolutely fiddle around with that and play with it and it's a cool little kind of niche toy slash product and a little lottery ticket if you may maybe you know

once every five million years, you'll hit a block of Bitcoin. Sadly, we're not here for five million years. So you're just playing a lottery, right? Which is still cool and fun. I think somebody actually did hit one. One of those actually hit. But you know, again. There's been a few, actually.

There's been a few, really. Wow. Yeah. So I think with the bit acts, I think with the bitax, it's been twice. And then there was one using a future bit that hit a block. Wow. Now, obviously, again, you're not buying one of those devices because you're, you're planning on making a profit.

Like you, when looking at, so I've covered a fork of the bidaxe called the Nerdax. I did one on the Brains mini-miner. And then I also did a video on repurposing an S-9 into a space heater. And so those are kind of the three, four-a-a-as other than, of course, covering walkware and like a hosted mining situation. But when it comes to the first, three things that I mentioned.

The way I would look at those is first and foremost, it's a really cool and accessible way to learn about mining and just kind of like, get your hands dirty a little bit and just see like, okay, so I've got this little device and, you know, it can mine, but how practically does that work? Like, how do I link a wallet and a mining pool and all of that? or if you're going about it in the way where you just want to kind of like roll the dice and play the unlikely lottery of mining a block, which has happened a few times, but just don't bank on it as the reason for buying.

You can at least learn those steps and kind of see it play out. And now when you have pools allowing for lightning withdrawals and stuff like that, if you do want to see it kind of like plop into like a lightning wallet, that's a possibility as well nowadays. So, you know, you can, while you're not going to be making a profit or anything like that, it's a really cool way just to learn and start to figure it out. And then, you know, if you get hooked and you're like, oh, I want to, I want to do this on a bigger scale, then that's where you can continue down your learning journey and go on from there.

right like there's there's lots of accessible ways to kind of just dip your toes in is what i'd say totally agree yep yeah and the beauty of the one of the beautiful things about the bitcoin network is that you know you can mine with with a bitax with one minor with three miners with five miners in your garage in the shed uh or you can go to scale and be like the maras and the uh and the um bit dears and all the public miners and mine with thousands and thousands of computers all at once. And we need all those. The Bitcoin network needs all of those different types of mining operations to help, you know, secure the network and prevent there from being a single point of failure.

So your question was kind of really a big question, like, how do you learn about Bitcoin mining? because what kind of Bitcoin mining do you want to do is the first question. And then how do you learn about that? Now, the starters that these guys gave are great. And I learned by the same way that you did, Ben, by getting my own personal miner at Blockware. And I learned how to watch that and how to understand that. And then I, you know, was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to come and work with Maddie at this curated mining business.

And, you know, I'm learning a hell of a lot more than I learned just mining my own hosting. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of hands-on stuff and you just got to learn by doing. And there's all these little areas and, you know, being in the underground groups and having all the connections and the networks. and it's just something you have to build over time. And it's still a very novel Wild West cutting edge of technology. I mean, you're in the cutting edge of the cutting edge, right? I mean, it's cool. I see Bitcoin Kendall, her comment up there.

Setting up an S9 with me was how my 70-year-old mom finally understood mining. Yeah, I mean, when you're hands on and you really hear that thing and the power of it, and you feel that power and you hear that noise and you're like, oh, wow, I'm trading electricity. I'm adding a cost of production to produce an asset. I mean, I think there's just something powerful about that actual hands-on experience, which is just why I mentioned it. How bullish is it that a 70-year-old mom? That's awesome. That's amazing.

Okay, that is epic. And I'll even, like, kind of extrapolate on that is, so that's how your 70-year-old mom understood mining. When you understand mining, and especially at that granular of a level of, like, seeing one of these machines crank as Maddie. Deb is her name. Shout out. Shout out, Deb. Shout out, Deb. Shout out to Dev.

Your appreciation for the network that is Bitcoin rises significantly. Because you're like, you know, you're going to, well, I had Bitcoin back by nothing. Go to a Bitcoin mining facility. Go to Kendall's mom's house, Deb's house, and go check out this S9. You're going to be like, Kendall, you're about to have a bunch of nerds showing up at your mom's house. People can find them by the noise. And there's 800 X hash. So that S9 for context is like nine terahash.

So I don't, that's too much math for me to do. You know, with a four week old child that's been keeping me up. Uh, but like extrapolate that out by like a bazillion. And that's what's backing the Bitcoin network. Right. And that's a bit of a loaded statement, but you really like, you really get a exceptional exceptionally strong appreciation for the, you know, staying power. of Bitcoin when you understand mining.

So it's worth at a minimum, whether or not you actually mine, understanding the impact that it has is something that I highly recommend for everybody. Yeah, I agree. What else we got here? We got art. Is that like instead of the word croissant, he pad. So I can wrap this up in a nice bow for you. I can wrap it up because one of the best ways to learn Bitcoin mining is go to your local meetup.

and keep going there. And eventually you'll either listen to a speaker that is an expert in mining or you'll meet somebody else there that's mining and you can learn from them. So what do you mean? Art, Art, ass on it. Is it ass on it? Or is it a song? A song, I believe.

A saint. A saint. All right. Bit axes are also an intentional attack vector on the centralization of mining hardware and software. You might have to unpack that a little bit more, what you mean there. So he's referring to the fact that a lot, of the Bitcoin mining hardware and software is closed source. So like when you're dealing with Bitmain, they continue to kind of close things off a little bit more,

like to the point where, if I'm not mistaken, a lot of the new machines, firmware is now much more difficult to change. And BitX is while small, obviously, the whole idea behind the project is, hey, we're going to open source everything. from the hardware to the firmware and all of that, so that at least there's a framework through which people can begin to build miners that are fully open source. Because it's kind of like, we're so used to demanding open source of hardware, of software,

of all this other stuff when it comes to custody. But mining is kind of the area where we could do better in that. area and so bidax the guy who made it Scott 9000 his the impetus of the whole project was like hey let's let's start to put some pressure on to have other mining like chip manufacturers stuff like that you know show them that one it's possible which of course but two to maybe encourage more hardware to and

firmware to be released in that state down the line, which I would love to see more of personally. I totally agree. I live in this world. Same here. Same here. And John's like getting in real fast. Completely agree.

And again, incremental adoption and potentially, you know, like not making it concentrated in basically one country that produces most of this stuff is going to push us forward there. We're so early, right? I mean, you always got to like pinch ourselves. We're so early. If the pie gets big enough, it diversifies and different nations start to, you know, come into the play. And it's just, I think we're moving in that direction, but I totally agree that it needs work.

I love the attention that's being called to it, I think is the big takeaway. So we have three people that are involved in the chip manufacturing coming to Bitcoin Day, Naples. One of our sponsors is Scout Energy and they have two representatives coming, talk about their innovations. and in ASICs. And then Jackie Price, one of our speakers, is also a consultant for a chip manufacturer, or U.S.-based chip manufacturer. So if you want to learn more about that,

come to Bitcoin Day Naples. Awesome. John, where can people find the page for the event? Bitcoinday.io. Perfect, perfect. All right. So if you're in the area, you want to check it out?

Probably should head over to Bitcoin Day.O. Awesome. Well, I guess we can kind of put a final bow on that one as well. I guess just general takeaway. I feel like people should get curious and dip their toes in and start investigating and reach out to Danny or anybody here. And, you know, they can help you on your education journey as well. If you just want to tinker at home, you know, you can check out the few tutorials that I've done.

I do have one, again, on blockware that you can check out. Or if you want like a little bit of hands on with a small device just to kind of see how it works, then you know, you can find, again, I did Nerdax, I did an S9 space heater, and I did the brains mini-miner. And those are all, you know, like weekend projects where you can just kind of play around. And you're not going to be making any stats out of that. But unless you hit the lottery. But you can at least... I mean, I'd rather play the lottery with a Bitcoin S9.

Yeah. Bitax personally. Yeah, that's fair. get some heat out of it too. So it's kind of like you get a little bit of reimbursement on your electricity there at the very least because you're repurposing the heat. So yeah, anyways, with that, stay curious, keep diving in. And again, all these gentlemen, their handles are in the show notes and you can reach out to them and ask some questions as well. So, gents, with that, we're going to do our final rotation. Before we do, I'm going to give away some

sats really quick. I don't have any other sponsors to shout up, but I want to give people an opportunity to snag a few more before we do, and we move on to Maddie. So I'll get my screen up here. Again, get those lightning wallets ready, and I'll toss one more coin in the well here. I might have to do a quick little refresh there. And congrats to whoever snags at first. Coin in the well. Last time it was 2100. I don't know if we'll hit that twice or not. But there's 210. Hey, bigger champion choosers. There we go.

Congrats whoever snags the sats. And what I will also say is that's not the only way you can earn some additional sats, this bull run. I have a team over at my company, Bitcoin mentor. And so we are Bitcoin educators. We do like one-on-one walkthroughs with people when it comes to self-custody, hardware, multi-sig, running nodes, all that kind of stuff. And so I've aggregated a team of just like absolutely incredible people. And so one, if you find yourself in a jam and you're a bit of a Bitcoin Luddite,

maybe you've hit that point in your journey where you learned a few things, but you're wondering about leveling up your security, then you can always reach out and book a session one of those there. But more importantly, if you want to earn some sats over the course of the Bull Run, as you have friends, family, and acquaintances getting curious and asking for your time. If you don't have the time or the skills to be teaching them,

you can sign up with the QR code over on the right there to be an affiliate. You'll get a special link. You can just plunk it into your social profiles or send it to whoever is asking. And every time that they book a session with you, you'll earn 21 bucks in Bitcoin paid out at the end of the month. And that's for every single session that they book.

So if they book 10, there's $210 coming your way at the end of the month. So yeah, encourage you guys, scan that QR code, slap those links wherever you see fit and sit back and stack some stats while new Bitcoiners stack some skills. But with that, I'll get this off the screen. And Maddie, I am tossing it to you. Final person, final guest to the night. Same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish?

Well, 16 years ago today, Satoshi Nakamoto gave us the hardest, best money to ever exist in all of humanity. So I am super bullish about that. The incoming administration here in the United States, super bullish about that. The Trump administration has put people, Bitcoiners like RFK Jr., the new Treasury secretary, Scott Bassent. It will be fantastic. Has specifically mentioned crypto and Bitcoin and has a nuanced understanding. of how it's going to play into the world ahead and where we're headed. Howard Lutnik, Commerce Secretary, I'm pretty sure.

I mean, he said he owns billions of dollars of Bitcoin. And I think yesterday he said every time Bitcoin dips, he's going to buy more Bitcoin. I mean, you can't really get much more bullish than that. I'm a huge fan of the All In podcast. And David Sacks has been appointed the crypto and AI czar. And I've listened to his comments over the past, you know, three to four years about, you know, how bad the current administration was what they were doing behind the scenes and how the industry has just been under attack as a whole, whether you're Bitcoin only or your Web 3, whatever.

I mean, it's just been an absolute onslaught behind the scenes from the SEC, from the choke point architects of the OTC and the FTC, all these different little organizations. There's so many three-letter organizations, it's hard to even keep up anymore. I mean, you know, just absolute insanity, right? So that brings me to the next, you know, point, which is Doge, which is with Elon and Babake to kind of cut back on a lot of this bureaucracy, roll back regulations, give clarity. I mean, I think people are underestimating how bullish they should absolutely be here. At the same time, we've got treasury adoption, whether it's companies like Michael Saylor or Seyler Scientific or Metaplanets.

And more companies are coming, right? I heard something today. They're doing a whole new indecy about companies that have over a thousand Bitcoin on their treasury. And it just makes sense, right? If you want to protect your purchasing power over time, you know, why would you hold anything other than Bitcoin, right? The best performing asset in all of human history. You know, dex volumes at all time high on other networks, right, which means there's more interest in the overall space. You've got to the repeal of the Chevron doctrine, right?

This comes into play with a lot of the tax stuff that's occurring. You know, the IRS is saying, you're going to do all this stuff. Well, they just repeal the Chevron doctrine, which says like you can't just make up shit as you go. you actually it's Congress's job to actually legislate and create the rules you can't make up your own rules right so I expect massive you know deregulation when it comes to all this nonsense and I was I had plan to go before Danny I was going to cue him up with this idea of Bitcoin hash rate Bitcoin security of the network right being at an all time high right which I think is just amazing right and I think Bitcoin is unique in the sense that you think like there's these

huge publicly traded companies and I looked at a stat about it. year ago and I think it said that like actually the Bitcoin network like those huge publicly traded companies were actually their share of the overall Bitcoin hash rate was actually going down which I found to be amazing it was like okay well what does that mean I mean small and medium players own the majority or they're increasing their share relative to the huge you know centralized cute publicly traded miners right so I think that's super bullish for Bitcoin too that's all I got there Ben I mean awesome I got I got I want to go down that, that, again, the rabbit hole, you were listening, like, all of the people in the new administration that are, and also what a cluster fuck, the last administration has been.

And, like, it's been very clear, like, they are outwardly, loudly antagonistic to every. At one point, they proposed a, they were trying to push through a 30% tax just on mining. like yeah yeah i mean like i that would literally i mean so so anti-american i mean i can't even you know put my fingers on it like imagine if they just said okay we're not going to have a i data centers we're going to put a 50% tax on ai data centers or 50% tax on this i mean it just goes against you know everything that america stands for so i mean like that is like you know being fearful like oh my god if they put this through like i'm going to go out of business like all of my machines are going to get sent to russia or you gozlavia or you know paraguay or

or Mexico or wherever, right? It's like, dang, you know, that's like having that existential dread, being an entrepreneur, all the people that I employ and that have families. It's like, you know, I'm sick of like, you know, is my bank account going to get closed again today? Like I, I wake up, like I can't get a loan for anything. Oh, you've got millions of dollars of revenue on your businesses for years and years. Oh, well, I'm sorry, sir. You're in a prohibited industry. That's the term that I heard over and over again, prohibited industry. So I have a feeling that these guys all didn't come up with the same term. So where was that coming from? I mean, that's what I like to know. And my guess is that it was coming from the government, right, which is completely

unconstitutional and illegal. So, um, yeah. Danny, you look like yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, just to open on that real quick, like think about everybody's a lot of headline stuff, which is exceptionally important on how much, you know, how bullish it is with new administration and so on and so forth. But they kind of assume that we're starting from like, okay, it's already chill. It's not chill. So we're starting from like negative 100. And, We're about the blast off to a thousand. I mean, these things have all been headwinds and now they're turning into tailwinds, right? With the administration coming in.

Exactly. It's not just like we're going from neutral winds to tail wins. We have headwinds right now. And we're about to get tail wins. So this swing, you know, there's a lot of like, it's pretty popular to say you're not bullish enough on Twitter. But it's almost impossible to fathom like how insane this can be. And the way I think about it, actually, this is in our report that we just put out, you know, bear case, bear, bear, base case, bull case. What are like some big factors there?

And there's some like bullet points, you know, sub bullet points of these. But look at like the strategic Bitcoin Reserve. And I think like those sub bullet points to that are all these important people that are in these more call it like tactical positions. You know, the SBR gets all the all the headline news. But it's like the people that are being appointed, you know, Treasury. secretary, David Sachs, so on and so forth. You know, like base case, in my opinion there, is that our existing treasury gets turned into an SBR.

Donald Trump does not like to go out and say stuff and then not be able to make it happen. We're talking about an insanely, you know, frankly kind of ego-driven dude that is not going to like allow himself to be wrong. So the simplest way for that to happen is, and I think is the base case is just converting in, you know, our existing treasure, our existing held Bitcoin, you know, in the United States into the SBR and you can say I got an SBR. That's the base case. That's the base case. The bold case is that we just accumulate like crazy. And you can't even fathom the second and third and fourth order effects.

I'm going to take the over on that. A lot of people disagree and think that, oh, it's not going to be that easy. but my inside sources within the government have told me that the votes exist. So I'm hearing that from a couple different sources of people that I talk to that are plugged in politically. And the votes exist to pass some form of SBR that doesn't just include the seized coins. I agree. I think there's going to be some SBR, you know, that is going to be actively purchasing on the market or converting some other strategic reserve asset to Bitcoin, a portion of that. So I think that is in play.

And I think honestly, it would be a disservice to to America, to not have the best performing asset in all of human history, the hardest money to ever exist as part of its treasury, right? It has all this other stuff, oil, gold. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. I mean, it just, it would be a disservice. And whatever country does it first, that really starts ramping up, whatever big country, I mean, all of the other, the game theory is going to play out, right?

If China has, you know, a Bitcoin, strategic reserve, the U.S. will damn sure have it and vice versa. If Russia has one, the U.S. will have it. it and vice versa, right? So if Apple has it, Google has it. You know, I'm going way out there, like on that curve. That's another lever is just corporate adoption. We're talking about, you know, companies of all sizes. Obviously, micro strategy gets a lot of headline because they're doing pretty, you know, incredible adoption. I really think nation states, I mean, I think, and I posted this on X a while ago, it was a thought. It was like, I think nation states are really going to help the world understand this idea of absolute scarcity, like what absolute scarcity really means,

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, again, there's no issuing new shares. There's no printing more. And I think most people just don't understand that because that's just the grift exists in so many different areas of life, whether it's a stock issuing more shares or whether it's, you know, government's printing more money, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't occur in nature. So it had to be engineered by humans and that's what makes it so. But even in nature, you know, gold is like the hardest money to ever exist. Yeah. And gold still can be found in nature, right? I mean, It's not absolutely scarce. Elon will probably have a, you know, a bunch of optimist robots up mining an asteroid in about 10 years. So, you know, the supply of that could be inflated. The beautiful thing about this. And, you know, I'm like, number one, I'm not keen on the idea of governments being able to, you know, print fiat and buy Bitcoin with it.

You know, like, obviously there's an unfair advantage there. But what I am keen on is. is the game theory that plays out afterwards where, like you said, the U.S. gets a strategic reserve, Russia's next, China's next, or vice versa. And what ends up playing out there is when you have nations that disagree and dislike each other owning the same scarce asset, it also means that the efforts of an individual nation or group of nations to try and fork and change the protocol to their benefit is greatly reduced, right? Because what's going to happen?

Who's going to go with USA coin or Russia coin or China coin when the rest of the world was like, we adopted this because all the other money was able to be controlled and co-opted and and politicized and censored? We adopted this to get away from that. who's going to go to the new fork of the censored coin? Like, none of the world other than the one nation that has an interest in doing it. So, like, as soon as this kicks off, my bullishness on the protocol actually being even more difficult to screw with goes through the roof, which it seems counterintuitive. Oh, governments.

But again, like, the main point. point here being is that the world's nations very seldom agree on anything. And so that's our strength here and that's awesome. Yeah, so, well said. Yeah, well said. I would summarize it by saying that nation state, the game theory of nation state adoption encourages collaboration, cooperation, and peace between nations. Yes, absolutely.

The incentives are there to work with your neighbor rather than trying to coerce them into doing something they don't want to or to attack them. It doesn't fix everything, but it aligns this incentives in a way that should reduce that type of behavior at the very least. Yeah. What I'll do here is if anybody has anything that they want to tag onto this topic, before I segue into kind of our final thoughts here, feel free. Otherwise, I'll dive into that. So anybody have anything else they wanted to add here? Or are we good to put a bow?

Great piece to read. If you really want to go down that rabbit hole of kind of what you started, is Bitcoin as a Trojan Horse for Freedom by Alex Gladstein. Fantastic article. One of my favorite of all time. And you can read it in about five, ten minutes, and it's well worth every minute of that read. Yeah, 100%.

Gladstein is very articulate and awesome. And again, happy to have him as a mentor of mine and work alongside the HRF in various capacities, which is that they just do such good work. But yeah, yeah, highly recommend. Well, jents, we'll put a bow on that one. But we're going to start rounding out here. And the way I usually like to finish up an episode is to do just a quick round of, You know, if you have a final thought, throw it in there.

But more importantly, a recommendation that you might have for people watching. And this can come in any form. Maybe there's a piece of content. You want them to check out. Maybe there's a device or an app or something that you think is cool that people should check out. Maybe there's just a piece of general advice you wish you'd had when you started your Bitcoin journey that you could impart on people, a movie, a podcast, whatever it may be. but something you'd like to direct people towards that you think could be useful for them in their Bitcoin journey. And so my recommendation is going to kind of piggyback on the political talk that we were just on.

And so I guess what I'll say to kind of frame it up is friendly politicians, when it comes of Bitcoin are nice to have. That's a nice thing. I can't complain when we have an actively hostile administration on the way out and we've got a much more favorable one on the way in. But also, try not to treat that as, okay, great, we're in the clear. As an individual, as a company, as whatever it may be, this is the time where we have potentially, I mean, I'm in Canada, so we still got

dipshit in office here, but he's on his way out, so that's fine. Either way, when a favorable politician happens to gain office, then treat that as the gift of time. And what I mean is the gift of time to, one, learn about tools that can protect you from, from an actively hostile administration. Two, to build out your local community, to lean on other bitcoins and build those relationships so that you're resilient together as a group.

And three, if you're a developer, if you're some sort of a builder in the space, to build out stuff that is resilient to top-down pressures and much more difficult to regulate out of existence. Bitcoin, the protocol was that upon inception in terms of it was designed not with the idea of coming out and saying, hey, guys, I'm making a currency to compete with the U.S. dollar. Is that cool? No.

It was launched. There was no asking for permission. And then the world just had to grapple with the fact that it exists. So if we're to build tools that once they're built, they just exist and there's no going backwards, that's where it becomes truly, truly resilient. So look at this as a gift of time to build things out so that they're even harder to clamp down upon and control. Use this time, don't squander it, and contribute in whatever way you can while the weather is nice. And so I'll cap it up with that.

I'll send it over to John. John, do you have any recommendations for people watching? First of all, I'd like to offer anyone who can translate the Latin phrase on my shirt, a free ticket to Bitcoin Day, Naples on January 18th. I thought that was just your new pronouns. If you can put that in. If somebody can put the correct translation in the chat, then I'll give you a free ticket. My advice is attend local events.

I said that earlier. That was my bullish reason is people. Get to know the people in your local community that are fellow Bitcoiners and learn from them. There are so many people out there that are doing so many interesting things. And everyone learns from each other, even if it's, hey, I bought this ledger yesterday. and I'm not sure how to hook it up. And a person next to you says, oh, I got mine hooked up two days ago.

I can show you because it's fresh in my mind. Right. So those kind of connections are really important. And that's what our Bitcoin Day events are all about is making those connections. And our meetups are all about is making those connections. So get out there and meet people. Hell yeah. Awesome.

We'll toss it down to Danny as well. Any recommendations for people? Yeah, I'm going to go like kind of kind of. content route on this. I mean, we talked about mining a bit. So and, and to your point, Ben, earlier, I was, I think a spot on like, uh, I think probably most Bitcoiners, which is a small fraction of most humans, uh, don't really know like anything or much about mining. Um, so I, I'd kind of encourage you to just learn. And, uh, I'd encourage you to go to blockworthsolutions.com. And you can hit right on the top, you click on learn. Very simple.

modular-based learning taking you from understanding Bitcoin and mining as like the basic chapter one all the way to how to use our marketplace, right? And I think that's a great resource. That's like a little bit of a journey, but you're talking about, you know, maybe a couple hours, right, where you can get really educated. And then kind of a more micro-quick hit. We just put out our 2025 kind of market review prediction type thing. Yep, there you go. That's our blockware learn right there. But I'd say, and this is pinned on our Twitter.

So if you go to Blockware team on Twitter, you can get a link to download our report that gives kind of what we see from like a macro economic perspective, what we see as going on in the Bitcoin world. We do, you know, we actually do make price to predictions, but we try to base them with bare, base, and bowl and logic to support those. Give that a read. It's like 10 minutes, and I think it's insightful. And then give us feedback, right?

Because to one of the earlier points, the community and the people are so strong, feedback is what empowers this to continue to compound in our collective ability to provide alpha for each other. And this is like the first community-run, you know, individual people-run community that at this scale ever. So let's, you know, help each other out. That's great, man. Also, I love the bear case 150.

Nice. Yeah, right. I will say I'm going to like kind of just tip. And I'm, our, our intelligence team does, you know, puts these together. They're brilliant. Yeah. We've nailed the last two years, right? So like, I'm not one to like walk around pat herself on the back.

But like, we were right the last two years. So get on, get on reading. It's a great. They do fantastic research and it's such a great read. And when I have the time, I read the whole thing. And when I don't have the time, I just, I copy paste it. I copy pasta into woke GPT. And then I just say, give me the, give me the main hitters out of this and make it three paragraphs.

And then I get that. Does it tell you that you're boiling the oceans? No, it's, it's just all their data, all their data, right? And they're like, they've got a great team and they do a really good job with it. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Maddie, I'm tossing it to you next. So keep it with you. Recommendations for the audience. Okay. Something I tell everybody that comes to a meetup, right, is like, what do I buy? What do I do?

What do I do this? And I'm trading and this, this, this coin of a dog and this, that and the other. And, you know, what I really teach everybody. And I'm getting hit up now. Like I've got a lot of messages on Discord and Telegram and all the place. Like, thanks so much for telling me to dollar cost average, right? So the people who did that, who just every week bought $100, $200, I tell everybody, it doesn't matter if it's $10. I don't have much money. I said it doesn't matter if it's $10 a week, right, or $20 a week or $50 a week, whatever, $5,000 a week, wherever you're at, right? There's a number that makes sense for you.

And to just automate that and set up and don't try to time the market and do all this stuff. And, you know, I say, come back to me in a decade and we'll talk about it. Right. And, you know, now I've got people kind of hitting me up saying like, wow, thank you so much. And, you know, their portfolios are just up astronomical returns, right? So that's the best method for most people.

You know, if you're not, if you're not a trader who dedicates his life to learning how to trade and suppressing your emotions and reading, you know, news, like doing all the stuff that traders do, right? Because that's another full-time job, right? It's like a high-paying job that, you know, not everybody can do. If everybody was a trader, nobody would be a trader, right? So traders make money off of the plebs. I mean, that's just the name of the game, right? It's a zero-sum game when you're trading because someone's on the other side of that trade, right? And you're, you know, doing things.

So for 98% of people, the play is to do your fundamental research and then allocate to those fundamentals in a strategic, just dollar cost average, impartial, unemotional way. Every month, doesn't matter if Bitcoin goes up, great. Your portfolio all went up. If Bitcoin goes down, great, you're buying it cheap. So people who took that advice and did that are really seeing rewards. And I think that's just the strategy and the advice to give people. The only other bit of advice I have is if you're interested in learning more about Bitcoin,

Recently, we rolled out our Cypher Punk podcast. And my first guest was the author of the Genesis book, and he's the chief editor of Bitcoin Magazine, Aaron Van Weardom. Fantastic dude. And he wrote a fantastic book. And if you have 10 to 20 hours to kill over the course of a week or two, and you really want to get the people, the projects, the Genesis, I mean, a lot of people think Bitcoin just came out of thin air, right?

It was built on the back of 30, 40, 50, 60 years. of economics and or under even a hundred years of you know austrian economics and you know friedrich hayek and ludwig von niezes and uh different philosophers and game theory and cryptographers and researchers um and libertarians and you know uh the cypherpunks right really the cypherpunks so to kind of close it out if you're if you're interested in learning about all that and really unpacking and understanding things and i think it's a great listen um and to close out on Ben's final point, which where you kind of said, like, it doesn't matter what the economic, you know, or it doesn't matter who's in power, like politicians, right? I believe that

Bitcoin is going to win no matter what, right? I mean, it just helps to have people that are in positions of power helping us along the way, right, and helping themselves and helping everybody else, helping society. Because if Bitcoin wins, society wins, everybody wins, right? People, you know, have a way to push back on corruption and to, you know, protect their purchasing power over time. So I think that, you know, it's much better to have a friendly administration or a friendly government and power, but it's by no means a prerequisite, right? So I want to take the next message of the cypherpunks, which is really cypherpunks write code and the cyberpunk manifesto and this idea of like, hey, let's, we don't need to engage, you know, with what's happening in the world.

We're just going to write code and that code is law and that's that. Well, I think that's amazing. But I also think, you know, later on, there were some cypherpunks that came along and they decided to, hey, let's also push for what we want in the real world too, right? We're going to attack inside the system, but also let's attack outside the system. And I strongly believe that we should attack whether, you know, I believe Bitcoin's inevitable regardless, but, you know, let's make that transition happen faster. Let's get more people orange pill, you know, whether they're government or whoever. Let's bring everybody along, right? Bitcoin is money for your enemies. It's money for anybody, for everybody, right?

friends and enemies alike so um that's kind of my message 100% i love it well gentlemen uh excellent spot to uh to put a cap on the end of the episode i really really enjoyed having you all here uh i felt the conversation was fantastic uh tip of the hat to everybody that joined the show between x rumble noster and of course youtube um we had uh looks like in the realm of around 4,900 people over the course of the episode, tune in, and a number of people over on the YouTube chat over on the right there that we've been watching. So thank you all for being a part. And gentlemen, for you guys that were on the show yourselves, really appreciate the conversation.

Please, everybody, go give them a follow. They're in the show notes down below. And I appreciate it, guys. Thanks so much. Happy New Year. And you're all welcome back anytime. Happy New Year to everybody. Thanks for having us on awesome jam guys.

Awesome. Thanks guys. Thanks. All right. And everybody, thank you for being here. Really do appreciate it. Again, happy New Year to everybody that joined in, watched Partook in the chat, and gave this a share on their socials again. Really, really do appreciate it.

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