BTC Sessions - Govt SHUTDOWN — Bitcoin RIPS (Here’s Why) | Jimmy Song, Julian Figueroa, Daniel Carlin

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

As the government shuts down, Bitcoin takes off—and it’s no coincidence. Jimmy Song, Julian Figueroa, and Daniel Carlin break down why this moment could be a turning point for Bitcoin. From broken trust in fiat to unstoppable math, here’s what’s really driving this explosive move.FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS:https://x.com/jimmysonghttps://x.com/kinetic_financehttps://x.com/CdnBitcoinConfFOLLOW BTC SESSIONS on X/Nostr: x.com/[e-mail] private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/—------------------------------SHOW SPONSORS:BITCOIN WELL - BUY BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE/COLDCARD (5% discount):https://qrco.de/bfiDBVAQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCp#btc #bitcoin #crypto

The U.S. government just hit the shutdown button again, and almost instantly, both Bitcoin and gold did indeed react. Things for Uncle Sam keep looking a little dire on the fiscal front. The U.S. debt spiral continues to be a tad out of control, some might say. And today we're going to walk through some of the numbers and make it clear that the U.S.'s trajectory and the world as a whole, the trajectory. trajectory is just unsustainable. We're also going to zoom out and take a look at what this could mean for Bitcoin in the long term, but also heading into Q4. How are people interpreting this? Outside of the inevitable money printer go burr, as per usual, there is a fascinating data point that makes this October or October unique, something that has happened four times in Bitcoin's

history and just happened again. So we'll talk about that in a moment and what it might signal. But today on Why Are We Bullish to unpack all this and much, much more bullishness. We've got an awesome panel. We've got Julian Figaroa, host of The Exit Strategy on YouTube. Brand new channel you should check out. Jimmy Song, Bitcoin Programmer and author of Fiat Ruins Everything, along with a number of other titles. And Daniel Carlin, organizer of the upcoming very soon that you should probably go to Canadian Bitcoin Conference in Montreal, Canada. So be sure to hit that like button and strap in.

You're not going to want to miss this one. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions, and this is your bullish session. All right, I want to welcome to the stage, Julian, Dan, and Mr. Jimmy's song. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. How are you guys doing? Fantastic. How can you not be excited? Everybody's excited about October.

I always forget what a joyous month it is. but I'm glad to have you guys here. I wanted to start the conversation with you guys just a little bit before we find out why you guys are bullish and just chat a little bit about the latest in this now government shut down kind of what is going on. So government has shut down. This is actually the first time since 2018.

The TIF is over health care policy, Medicaid cuts, a bunch of other things. But really, we know it's just the parties each want to spend money on different things and want to spend as much as possible. So there's going to be some argument there. Now, they did enter shutdown on Wednesday after congressional Democrats refused to support a Republican-led funding plan. And this marks, again, the first shutdown since the 35-day closure in late 2018 into early 2019. And that was during Trump's first term. So when this happened, both Bitcoin and gold jumped and stocks took a little bit of a dip.

Bitcoin were peaking at 117, almost 118,000 a coin, which is nice because we've had a, you know, a little bit of a boring summer. Nothing too exciting going on. But obviously, gold has been having a good year too. Now, I mean, the U.S. budget has long been out of control, but that continues to be the case. Again, U.S. budget deficit forecast to hit a trillion higher over the next decade. This is from Reuters back in August. The current 12-month rolling deficit as of July was $1.9 trillion, a single fiscal year. There's a couple interesting little stats here.

For the first nine of the first 11 months of fiscal year 2025 have been extreme deficits with only a couple months coming with a surplus. Again, from the Fed itself, the debt to GDP is sitting in and around that 120% range, which is not nice to see. But on the Bitcoin front, you know, obviously it reacted to this right away, which I'm curious to get your guys take on Bitcoin immediately going up when the government shuts down, but also in and around something unique that happened relatively unique in Bitcoin's history, which is typically September sucks for Bitcoin. It's almost always been negative, averaging out around negative 4.5%. However, this year we saw a positive, we had an upswing in September, and that has happened only four times before.

And the times that it has happened, we've gone on to have a great end of the year, averaging on the monthly October, an additional close to 22%, November. 18 and December around 13 and a half. And if those averages were to kind of be reflective of what we see through the end of the year, that would put us at another, you know, around 50% rally to finish out the year around 170K. Again, if history were to repeat itself based on those September slash October historical values. So, Just to start the conversation, your guy's reaction to Bitcoin instantly zooming up post-Bitcoin shutdown alongside gold. Is Bitcoin kind of exiting the risk on realm and becoming a bit of a safe haven or the antithesis to trusting the government?

Is it taking on that role in the eyes of the average person now? or do you think we're still going to be a little bit trading like a tech stock here? I'll chime in. And I don't want to be one of those like crying at the casino guys. I think the price of Bitcoin has been kept down not artificially, but just like there's some group of sellers. And I think you can see it with the address movements. That was just a consistent seller of, you know, like really old wallets through the entire summer.

I don't believe it, but I think like Josh Mann or something positive that, like, you know, someone found out how to hack old wallets with like quantum and they were like dumping all that Bitcoin on us. I don't think it's that. But yeah, it's kind of odd to me that we stayed so silent during summer, especially considering now that you really don't have to sell your Bitcoin to access its purchasing power. I don't know what these sellers of Bitcoin are buying instead. You can just borrow against it. It might be harder if you're an OG. You don't want to, you know, give up your K.

But I believe there's ways to borrow against your Bitcoin with zero KYC now, too. But alas, clearly there was some selling going on. I think it's a really good time seasonally as the quarters roll over that people start to look at, like, where their portfolios are at asset-wise. Even with the slow summer, I think Bitcoin is still up 25, 30% year-to-date, a little, you know, under gold. But yeah, I think October is now prophetic. And the buying algos have turned on once again. I don't think that's anything to do with the government. I really think, I mean, it's always nice to see the government fail publicly, but it's also.

Not really a surprise to anyone at this point. You're right. It's 20 up 26% for the year it looks like right now. I'm curious to Jimmy, do you want to chime in here? What's your general thoughts? Yeah, well, what I'm hoping for is that the government shut down created sort of like a bull market for everybody because they're not spending nearly as much, right? And it's a lot of money that goes down to black hole, something on the order of, you know, billions every month.

300 billion, something like that. I'm not exactly sure what the number is, but if the deficit for a year is like 2 trillion, then you're saving like 300 billion every month. So the longer this goes on, I suspect the better everybody does, in which case it'll put Congress in like a really awkward position of their constituents wanting the budget,

the lock on government services to continue. and sort of showing the complete futility of what government actually does and how much rent seeking it has, which would be great. I would love to see government shutdown that lasts at least through the end of the year, perhaps longer. But I'm not that optimistic. I don't think that's necessarily what's going on here. I do think that there's just sort of ups and downs. It's not like a huge move. It's maybe like a few percentage points.

Like talk to me when we're seeing like 10% moves in a day. Then we could be like, okay, yeah, that had a cause. But right now it just seems like, you know, day-to-day movements, maybe anticipation of October or something like that. Who knows? There might be some more structural things. There might be some buying pressure, artificial price suppression. Who knows?

That's always hard to know what's happening. I will say, though, that traditionally, whenever there's been sort of conflict in the Bitcoin space, there does seem to be a bold market. Now, this particular conflict that we've been talking about with Op Return has been going on since April. But the actual implementation, the release of Core version 30 is pretty imminent. We're already on release candidate, too. So there might be some correlation there. I will note that 2013, 2017, 2021 all had different Bitcoin conflicts.

And for whatever reason, whenever you had that conflict and especially as it becomes clear that Bitcoin is going to survive through it, the market gains just so much more confidence and a lot more people hate them. Yeah, bullish on Bitcoin surviving everything that life throws at it. So, yeah. Daniel, I want to get your thoughts here as well. How's October looking for you? What do you think of the shutdown, all that? October is looking pretty good so far and I think even the bull run just started to take off just before October because I was looking at it a few days ago

going, look at this is a bit preempt but I think when you look at you know what Lawrence LaPard has always said is you know when gold takes off that Bitcoin will smell it you know and it'll take off as well and I like Julian I don't think there's really any impact that the Ameri shut down is having, but someone in the market is smelling, you know, something going on. And that's where, you know, gold's 40-something percent this year.

Something big's happening. And Bitcoin's, I think, just catching up. So I hope it continues right through for the next six months. Yeah, yeah. And maybe this is a little bit of, again, we've got. some historical examples of gold getting its run and then Bitcoin following up. So maybe we're seeing the first inklings of a little bit of catch up on Bitcoin's part, much to the chagrin of Peter Schiff, I'm certain.

So that would be fun to watch in the last quarter of the year. So either way, gentlemen, I do want to find out, of course, the main reason we're here, why you guys are bullish. And so I'm going to kick us off here. And I'm going to start with Julian and tee up with the same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? All right. It's a bit of a strange one because the reason I'm bullish is at the expense of a lot of other people,

unfortunately. But it's with all the censorship going on right now in the UK. So if you haven't seen the news, Kier Starrmer announced that they're officially got this digital ID rolling out. I think you can almost apply for it immediately or very soon. and that by 2027 you won't even be able to get a job in the UK, and I would assume not even a bank account without it, which is pretty incredible. It's basically everything that we've been saying is going to happen with these Western governments for a very long time. And it's coming through now really weirdly under the guise of we need this to combat illegal immigration, which is the problem that they created in the first place by essentially, you know, letting anyone come in.

The other side to this too, and it's crazy for Canadians or Americans to see this, but it's so real. There's been, I think, upwards of 15,000 arrests over improper speech in the UK. You will say something on a messaging board or on Twitter. It doesn't have to be profanity. It doesn't even have to be like a threat of violence. You can say, hey, I don't like transgender ideology or I don't like these immigrants from certain places, you only have to use a slur. And there are videos now, I can't throw one up here, of the police coming to people's doors, you know, hours, days after one of these tweets mixed

around. Someone can just, you know, someone on Reddit can just send it to the police. And these people get arrested. And the terms that I've seen, some of these people have been arrested with bail, you know, I think about 80% of them just get out with bail. But 20% of the people that make these comments online get arrested. And their terms are anywhere between 12 to 12. 24 months in prison for making a comment online, expressing their opinion. So the thing that people unfortunately don't get about all this is like you might not agree with the person that got arrested, but eventually if such laws are in place, they come for your side too. Your side is never safe.

And the reason that I'm bullish at the end of all that is that I think finally there are some really strong pieces in place. And I always say that people come to Bitcoin out of optimism or they come out of fear. There are some real pieces coming on the line, especially in Europe, that I think you're going to drive Bitcoiners or drive new people to Bitcoin because of fear. I think people for once, and I wish it would come to the West, and I think it will eventually, are starting to fear the tyranny of the government and its impact on their kids, their grandchildren, their own lives for the next 10 to 20 and 30 years. And the first thing you do when you're scared of tyranny is you ask yourself,

how do I, how do I leave? How do I get out of it? And really, there's only one asset that you can do that with, without worrying about clawbacks and without worrying about the government coming down on you with sufficient privacy. And that's Bitcoin. And I do think a lot of people will be exiting the UK and a lot of these countries that are implementing digital ID. And they'll be coming to channels like yours, Ben, to figure out how to do it.

So I'm bullish on that. I'm bullish that I think the next wave of bit corners will not be coming out of seeking an investment, you know, to kind of like shove all their money into, seeking a million dollars and all these price targets. They will be people who are trying to escape tyranny and the value proposition in Bitcoin will be the freedom, not the price. I like that. I mean, I've seen what you're talking about. I've seen a number of those videos. Actually, just recently in the past day or so, I saw a sentencing of somebody. They got two years for a post.

They weren't a fan of immigration policies or something like that. And, you know, there wasn't, they weren't, weren't like swearing. They weren't inciting violence. They were just basically criticizing policy with some, you know, kind of laying out why. And yeah, the judge, or however they're referred to in the UK, basically said, like, there can be no question that you were inciting violence. And so he basically said, like, maximum under this would be five years, but because you didn't explicitly say to be violent,

which then I wonder how there could be no question that he was inciting, violence. He said, well, bump it down. It'll be two years. So the dude, dude went to, is going to prison for two years for being angry at, and policy, which is wild to me. But, you know, you're right. Flag theory is important. I think especially, I mean, we've already seen that amongst global wealth, like truly wealthy people. They, they, what do they do? they go where they're treated best. Bitcoin is going to give some people an opportunity to do that as well. We see Bitcoiners understanding and talking about flag theory.

We see Bitcoiners even creating companies in and around flag theory. Like Katie, of course, creating Plan B, which is now Citizen X. But same idea. Like have a Plan B. what if things go bad where you are, do you have a second option? Do you have that optionality? So I think that's super important. And you're absolutely right.

Like any country can all of a sudden change the rules and say, hey, you know, your exit cost is 100% of what you own, like all of your assets. But Bitcoin, technologically speaking, does not care about borders. It can move where you see fit. And so this has been already a lifeline for people around the globe in some of the most dire of humanitarian situations. And I think it's going to play an even bigger role moving forward in places that people thought would be okay and no longer are. So, yeah, great, great topic. I'm curious to hear maybe from Dan and then from Jimmy on this. Yeah, it's not a great position to be.

but you know the UK have been going down this road I think for you know for a number of years the it's hard to know where where this all ends up but you know the whole digital ID thing it's it's really it's come to nowhere and try to justify it in certain way as they you know it'll stop the illegal immigration but I mean when you look at the UK there's so many other issues that they address first I mean the health care system is collapsing you know they're taxing people through the risk of living so a crisis is in there so that really to me is one of the last things they should do but and I think people like Julian said people are starting to wake up to this kind of tyranny and think like well this is silly and they're and they're really in some of the

interviews I've seen Kier Starmor being interviewed about you know he's not making any sense in terms of trying to justify. So where this is all come from, I'm not sure. But I think, you know, when I get on to my topic, you know, the theme is kind of similar where people are starting to vote with their feet. They're realizing they're getting taxed through the roof. They, you know, their freedoms are being impeached. It's happened in Canada, it's happening in America.

It's happening in the UK and Europe, you know. And yeah, the options there with Bitcoin to be able to get back some of that. and you know it's driving a lot of people to it. So yeah, I think it's a it's a story slope and a step towards you know driving people toward Bitcoin. Yeah. It's it's funny again the reasoning for the the digital idea. Oh, we're going to we're going to stop the problems with immigration, which again they set the policy in the first place. And and one of the examples of not needing a draconian pen opticon digital ID system is a place like Poland where they're just like, hey, we're like, we've set our policy and we're just going to like make sure the borders aren't like Swiss cheese.

And it seems so far to have worked pretty well. So you don't need a panopticon in order to have like a border policy. It's a little bit like the gun buyback program that they're trying to put out in Canada in regards to that. The reasoning for the program is not even addressing the actual issue. So, like, there's a lot of gun violence and, like, Toronto and everything. And so they're going after people with legally obtained licensed firearms for hunting. And they're forgetting the fact that it's mostly guns being smuggled across the border from the U.S. into the city. So it's like 90% of the crimes that are happening are guns that weren't even in the country legally.

Like they were smuggled across the border. And when asked about it, like the safety minister is like, well, we're going to address that too. But meanwhile, they're going to drop a billion dollars on this program to take Hunter's rifles. So it's the same line of thinking, we're just going to do this because it sounds good to us. and despite all of the facts presented to us, we don't care. We're just doing it anyway. So, yeah, anyways, Jimmy, I kind of stole the mic from me there. I'm going to let you comment on the digital ID, the flag theory, all of that.

What are your thoughts here? Yeah, I'm going to disagree a little bit. I don't think it's so much that people will be leaving the UK. Certainly that's an option. But, I mean, you have to understand. This is an old world country. People have been in like these small towns and stuff for like 800 years or something. They're not going to easily lead.

They have their community there and stuff. I think far more important is what's happening with all of these protests and stuff that's happening in the UK. That's showing sort of like a real appetite to actually like resist all of the stuff that's going on, including a lot of the social media censorship and stuff. But with regard to digital ID, what occurs to me is that the thing that they're doing right now is very inefficient. Like going and knocking on someone's door and arresting them and doing all that, it's horribly inefficient. It's not going to scale in any way. Once you have a digital ID, guess what you can do?

You can go look up their bank account and cut off their financial access. And that's where I think we should be really bullish because once that starts happening, then every, everyone there is going to be turning towards Bitcoin because they're going to be like, oh, well, I don't want my money stolen. So let's go and change this over to Bitcoin. So I think that's the real plan behind this whole digital ID stuff, especially on social media, right? One of the big things there is you have to verify that you're 18 to be on this thing.

And so we need your ID and so on. Once they have the ID, I mean, the financial aspect is going to take over. over so quickly because this is the preferred weapon of government because, you know, you go out with a wimper that way, right? Like it, you can't even like shout and you're like, I have no mouth and I can't scream, right? Like it's going to be very frustrating for a lot of these people in the UK when their bank accounts are shut down the harassment and like just inability to pay rent and all that stuff. that's that's going to be almost more um more effective than like going and arresting somebody arresting somebody yeah like it's it feels like you're being a martyr you're doing something right for the cause and all that but your financial access being completely denied that's that's going to be

some really orwellian crap yeah yeah 100 and it's it's interesting kind of the the timing of all of this. I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense. Like, as more people begin to kind of realize how draconian things are and begin to resist, they're going to push back harder, right? Like the governments, the people in positions of power are going to cling to power as hard as they can. And so it kind of seems like as opposed to somewhere like China where they just, they just kind of roll it out and yeah, you've got digital ID and the CBDC and, you know, all of your money is linked to everything and we're just going to, we've got our social credit score and it's just kind of, they can just do it. I think that in the West, they've got to be a little bit more

careful about it as they roll it out, right? First, it's, okay, we're going to, you know, know, know all of your information and take, take everything and then we'll create a digital ID system and then we'll try to separately say, hey, here's, here's our digital dollar, here's our CBDC, you can start using that. And hey, maybe we could link those two together. And that's super convenient. You don't even, you know, you can just directly have government money here. And then it rolls the social credit score system. And then shit starts hitting the fan. So the tricky bit around that is if they're able to roll out so that, you know, businesses are part of the Panopticon and are roped into that, it becomes more difficult to use your Bitcoin if you

don't have a community. And so I think one of the most important things that you can do is build a Bitcoin or community of people that actually build useful things and provide useful services. Because if you have that available, if you can meet your needs amongst a group of Bitcoiners and everybody has skills to contribute and products and services, then it's really hard to shake that. But if you're one of those people that's maybe watching this, you've never met a Bitcoin or in person. And then all of a sudden, over the next few years, a system is rolled out where it's CBD. DCs, digital IDs, and a social credit score, and all of a sudden you have no access to

even converting your Bitcoin into dollars, that's going to be a hard time. You're going to have to figure that shit out on the fly, whereas at least if you know people, you can start to kind of string together a community and figure it out and have a secondary system that you can lean on instead of the panopticon. So, yeah, I think. think it's important that people do that. I think that's, this is kind of how we hedge against that, uh, I don't want to say eventuality, but, you know, that's definitely what they're going to push for. Um, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I, I'm so conflicted about this. I don't know how far it'll go, but looking back on the last few years, it can go pretty far, pretty fast. Yeah. So,

anyways, Julian, I appreciate that, uh, that, um, that topic. I think. think, again, flag theory and paying attention to what the regulations are, where you are, and seeing the trajectory, it's important to hedge in whatever way you can, whether it be your community or whether it be secondary passports or anything that you can manage to do. But with that, we're going to do a little rotation here. I want to, given that, it's going to lend itself to Julian's topic, I do want to find out why Dan is bullish. We're going to take a brief one minute break and we're going to give a quick shout out to the sponsors here. If you're watching the show, thank you for being here.

If you're brand new to the channel, welcome. Make sure everybody drops a like on the video, and we'll be back in just one minute. 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. Their white glove service gives you $4,000. fast transactions, no slippage, and the lowest fees. You can scan the QR code on the screen or simply head to Bitcoinwell.com slash BTC sessions to sign up today, and you can share your own personalized referral link to earn commissions. If you've been around Bitcoin for more than a minute,

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excellent hardware like the cold card mark four and the queue. You have access to flexible conditions, the best rates, and institutional grade liquidity. If you're looking to make use of your capital, don't sell your Bitcoin, borrow against it. You can head over to debify.com to check them out or simply scan the QR code on the screen. All right, we're back in. We're going to give away some sats quickly before we get to Daniel's reason for being bullish. So if you're watching the show, you already know what's up, but I'm here on Bitcoin well. And all you need to play is a lightning wallet. Basically, when you sign up in your phone, refer friends, all that, you're in points.

And you can use those points to toss a coin in the well and only end up to a million sats every time. So I'm going to do that right now. Whoever scans the QR code on the screen first is going to steal the sats from everyone else. So you got to be quick on the draw. So off it goes down the well. And whoever scans first. Julian, I see you doing it. Don't you dare steal those stats, 482 sats for whoever scans it first.

If Julian gets it, I'm going to be. Oh, I stole it. I'm sorry. I had to do it. That is hilarious. It's so cool, though. I love that. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

We'll do one again. I'll send them out of my Twitter later. Nice, nice. Yeah. Okay, so follow Julian on X and Hill. how to take them sorry he'll send you some sad no that's hilarious awesome uh daniel i'm going to you and i'm going to ask the same question actually i'm going to get you to go into settings really quick and change your uh audio because i'm going to

feedback there so just go to your audio and then uh hit echo can't just a second so all good all good but uh so those of you that are unfamiliar by the way so daniel is putting together the Canadian Bitcoin Conference in Montreal. I was there last year and it was also in Toronto before. Awesome, awesome event. Lots of great friends there. And Julian, do you know what date, what date it's coming up? I got to do it.

Is it the 16th and the 18th? I think so. I'm going to give it a quick plug here while Daniel gets his conference. There we go. It is October 16th through 18th really quick. So I'm just going to give that a quick share there. But, yeah, October 16th through 18th in Montreal. If you haven't been to Montreal, beautiful city.

You should check it out. Pretty cool. But, yeah, I went to it last year. It was awesome. It was in Toronto before. No offense to Torontoians, but I'm glad it's in Montreal. And, yeah, definitely worth checking it out. They've got lots of awesome speakers on the regular.

Actually, Nathan, who joins me on the Thursday show, will be down there as well. They got Francis and Scott. They've got Jesse also on the Bitcoin mentor team. Oh, Jeff Walton is going this week. And, of course, our friend Adam at Bitcoin. Well, heading down. Lots of good people. Seb, Nolan, Will, from Damos, a ton of people heading down.

So make sure you go check it out. well, good. Oh, Larry's going to be there too. That's great. So be sure to check it out October 16th through 18th. Daniel, can you hear me? Yeah, we're going to go. Yeah, we got you. No, no echo this time. It's okay. You just bought me time to chill your event. So that was planned. Perfect. So Daniel, I want to hear from you. Why are you bullish? Yeah, along the same lines as what Julian was saying so I mean it's a little bit on the downer and there'll be some pain for people but I think in the end it'll be bullish for Bitcoin but this week Olivia Chow I don't know if everybody here knows Olivia Chow the famous Toronto mayor

so she came out and and basically tried to blackmail the federal government and said you know we need 107 million dollars from you and you haven't paid you haven't paid your bill for housing of refugees coming into Toronto. And she said, well, you know, the options are we either raise property taxes on Toronto residents by another 2% or we let them go out in the street again and it's going to make the homeless problem in Toronto a bit more difficult. So I think, you know, for me, it's bullish in the way that, you know, Toronto, despite you know an increase in property taxes over the last number of years for those residents I

looked up the numbers prior to this and you know they had a 9.5% increase in 2024 and they had a 7% increase 2023 and 6.9% increase in 2025 so I mean their property taxes are getting getting crazy in there and you know they and they're not seeing any benefit I mean you go to of Toronto and you know it's similar to a lot of other cities in Canada where there are you know tent cities and you know infrastructure challenges you know metro problems and and you know crime and obviously there's famous stories of police departments telling people not to stop anyone from stealing the cars or breaking entering into their homes and they're not able to deal with that and I think I'm bullish because I think for two reasons I think Toronto real estate you know a lot of investors or people who are going to buy or invest in real estate in Toronto they may not know because you know it's not a good investment you're not getting you know any you know a lot of people will possibly be leaving you know and and they'll possibly look at other investments and Bitcoin could be one of those investments.

The other thing is, you know, that big government, people will realize the big government, the governments like Toronto and even the federal government, they're just really inefficient. You know, there's theories out there. There's a guy come to the conference called Joseph Barbudo. I'm not sure if you've heard him the economic long wave. And he has a theory about collapsing governments and when that's going to happen in the next few years. And I think, you know, these are signs that this will happen sooner rather than later. And I think people will start voting with their feet and moving.

And like you said earlier, taking their capital where it's more respected. So that's why I'm bullish. You know, when you brought up Olivia Chow, I think I actually just heard her real voice for the first time a few days ago. Typically, when I'm listening to a clip that has Olivia Chow in it, it's Ben Bankas doing the voiceover, who's the great comedian. If you have not seen those clips, probably worth looking them up. But nonetheless, yeah, I mean, she basically said, hey, federal government, like, you know, we need money for all of the people in the city that have come here and are soaking up the resources. And the ultimatum was basically either socialize this cost to the rest of the country or we're going to force the people living in this city to pay for it. and it's kind of like, well, why does anybody want to pay?

Nobody wants to pay for it. And so it's just this ridiculous kind of ultimatum where it's like, you know, pay this bill or will pay it. It's kind of what she's saying. And I don't know which way it's going to go. I feel like it'll just be, I wonder if the federal government will cave to the, that. I kind of don't think that they will, but maybe it is the liberal government, so we'll see. But either way, this is going to be happening more and more. Like the fact that, I mean, Canada brought in something like, so first of all, Canada's population was like 38 million. And then over the past, I want to say five to 10 years, we brought in four million people or something like that.

like multiple millions of people. Like it's, it was like 10, it's like multiple percent of the entire population in a few short years, which is very, very unsustainable. And we built in terms of houses, like a fraction of what would be needed to even house the people,

could they afford it. And so that falls on the backs of everybody else. And because we have a socialized health care system, again, into that system, the taxes and everything, and it's buckling under the pressure. There's no ability to keep it up. The wait times are insane. I've got a father-in-law who has real, real problems with his back to the point where

they're like, just try not to do things so that you don't paralyze yourself. They're like, maybe we'll get you in in a year to find out what's wrong. and then if we get you in, it'll probably be another year before we do anything about it. This is the state of where, you know, this is where the rubber meets the road

where it's like, what actually happens under these policies? Well, it turns out that everybody kind of gets screwed. And so, yeah, I mean, I would like, I would hope that your average person

would be able to go and say, oh geez this is sustainable but i think in reality it's going to kind of jump back to julian's former point is is the people that are more inclined to understand what's going on are the ones who are going to act and and and figure it out for themselves and so that will include bit corners it will you know a lot of bit corners anyways it'll include you know high net worth individuals that are like, oh, geez, I understand how to balance a budget and this is not looking good. I think that, yeah, there's going to be a lot of that. I hope that it either results in individual provinces being able to decide, you know,

kind of more locally govern or, you know, I selfishly hope that Alberta just becomes its own thing. Dan, you're welcome to visit. Same Julian. Obviously, Jimmy, you've been here. You know the label land. Cowboy hat gets you in no matter what anyway. But yeah, I don't know how this pans out, but I do agree that the natural tendency

is going to be to lean a little bit more self-sovereign if you're not actively dependent on the state yourself. So we shall see. But I'm curious to get chime in's. I know, Jimmy, you're probably not super tied into Torontoian politics or Ontario politics or Canadian politics, but I'm sure that you've got some general thoughts around publicly funded resources being poorly allocated.

Yeah, so I'm thinking through what the dynamics of this are. Essentially, you had a large influx of immigrants, but because of the regulatory regime around home building, you've basically had not a very large expansion of the housing stock. So you've had real estate go up like crazy in Canada over the last five to 10 years. And no one can afford a home anymore. And on those unaffordable homes, you're going to tax even more so that you can handle the additional immigrants that are coming into your country. So this is kind of what's been happening in Canada, at least a lot.

as far as I can tell from the news stories that I've read. I don't think it's necessarily that the housing people will stop investing in housing because the dynamics are still there, right? It's still very hard to build. It's so very hard to, and there's continually more people wanting housing. So the supply and demand of that is not really changing, right? You're not building lots and lots of new homes. So what you get is just a home price.

continuing to go up. So I think what's actually going to happen is either they'll tax more but give some sort of like concession behind the scenes to the city or to the province or something like that. Or either that or they'll just sort of cave in directly and expand the money supply. And I think this is where it's really bullish for Bitcoin because the Canadian dollar has done horribly, horribly over the last time. 10 years. And it's only going to get worse as the more stupid stuff that you spend it on, including stuff like this, right? A lot of rich people that own a lot of property have done

fantastically in Canada over the last 10 years. In fact, a lot of the friends that I have in Canada, they're almost all in real estate for whatever reason because it's so lucrative, right? Like there's a limited stock. And if you can manage to pull building permits or whatever, it's enormously profitable. So I suspect the dynamic that's going to play out is that you're going to essentially expand the money supply to support these immigrants, in which case the Canadian dollar drops even further, which means that Canadians will either want the U.S. dollar or something more, something better than the U.S. dollar as a savings vehicle.

I know for my relatives in Canada, they like U.S. dollars because the Canadian dollar is just so crappy, right? And if I understand how the banking system works there, most of the banks let you keep U.S. dollars in your bank account, which tells you that this is how little Canadians trust the Canadian dollar. They would rather have U.S. dollars despite all the rhetoric around trade and tariffs and all that stuff. You know, at the end of the day, you look at their bank account and you know exactly where it is, right? So I think what we'll have. happen is that the money supply will extend even more as a result of this self-inflicted wound of bringing in all these immigrants like you said ben like this has caused like strain on social

services there aren't enough doctors doctors there don't get paid that much anyway so all my doctor friends from canada have immigrated to the u.s so this is this is an unsustainable situation And really the Canadian government has really only one hammer that they can really wield and that's money printing. That's going to cause more inflation, lower wages, relatively speaking, and more people saying, okay, I need a better savings vehicle because I mean, it's not long before you turn into a Lebanon or Argentina. Yeah, it's just for reference, the Canadian dollar was at par with the U.S. dollar in 2011. And now it's worth 72 cents. So, yeah, do with that. And I think that's still high.

I think it's going to be like 60. Like, it's like that that's way too high for like the level of like just crazy and craziness in Canada right now. Yeah. Yeah. I'd agree with that. And again, it's, I think that. And nobody saves in Canadian dollars. right. I mean, most Canadians can't afford to save. There was a stat that came out the other day.

One in four Canadians is relying on the food bank now to put food on the table. And many of them are going like full days without eating sometimes. Like it's crazy. It's crazy. Anyways, Julian, I'll toss it to you to chime in here too. Yeah, I think, I agree for the most part with Jimmy on I think real estate will continue to go up, but the problem that the Canadian government and economy has is like back in the 90s, we sort of had this choice, let's just say to follow the U.S. to really bolster our technology sector and to not be such a commodity-driven economy. And we sort of just didn't do anything. We're just very apathetic towards that.

And basically what has turned into funding the government has been real estate. So property taxes, capital gains taxes, like it's now, I think almost. If you look at individual revenues, almost 35 to 40% of the Canadian economy is just real estate. And that works if you can get a steady supply of buyers in. The problem is that it's just not happening without immigration. I believe Canada has a lower birth rate than the United States. And so part of this push for immigration, I think, is just to keep the tax revenues flowing. But you're seeing now that there's just no political palatibility for it in Canada.

We're almost always, if you look at things politically, we're like four to eight years behind the U.S. Immigration was the largest issue of last election. I think, you know, Carney skated by this year on, you know, Trump hate, but it will be the largest, it will be the largest issue for the next Canadian election, simply because we have a 17% unemployment rate for young people, and all of their jobs have been displaced by low-skilled immigrants that have come in. And there's all these scams that are happening to you. I don't know if you know about the LMIA thing where basically if you put a job listing out as a Canadian and you tell the government, we tried everything we could, but we couldn't fill it. They will let you fill it with somebody with a temporary work visa, but you have to pay them a minimum of like $30 an hour. So a lot of these companies, like Tim Hortons, they run this scam where they say, we put a job listing out. We couldn't find any qualified Canadians to do it.

We want to apply for this LMIA thing. We'll pay them $30 an hour. and what they do is they actually pay a middleman to cycle half of that money back to the company and then siphoned the other half to a low-skilled worker that they're claiming to pay $30, but they're really taking 15 or 17 an hour under the table. It's a massive scam. You can look up like the LMI thing and it's being busted right open, like it's being busted open right now. Carney ran on lowering immigration numbers and we're seeing that he's just not like carrying through on it.

And I think all this stuff's going to get exposed in a big way. Everyone, like my age and younger, is really, really upset about this stuff, more than they are about the high housing prices now, just because there's no jobs. Who cares about the price of houses when there's no jobs? So you couple that in with everything that's going on, even if the young people do end up getting jobs. I don't think the real estate thing can last forever simply because I think the nationalism or the pedal on immigration will eventually get put on full stop. here in Canada and then you have a lot of housing projects but then you're going to really run out of buyers I think the only thing that really keeps the Ponzi going and I and I think it'll happen is that we have a lot tighter regulations around getting mortgages in Canada the amortization periods are not as

long as the US you have to put I think 10% down in the United States you can do it with 1%. You're going to see all those regulations get loosened in an attempt to keep the housing thing going but I think there's an eventual end to that as well. So yeah, and then on Dan's point really quick, the healthcare thing and getting the rest of the country to subsidize one city, I mean, that's happening in healthcare right now to an extent too, because basically all the money made off of housing is funding the health care, and it's funding the healthcare for people who aren't even really paying into that system.

And it's turned to the point now where, like, if you actually crunch the numbers, and I'm doing a whole video on this, the average Canadian family of four via taxation is only paying about 25% less for insurance than the average American family of four for, you know, middle of the road insurance. And that number is just going to get worse on our end, right, because the cost for our health care is going to continue to go up gradually as we have to build out new hospitals and all this stuff that we're severely lacking behind. And if anything, American health care will probably get cheaper, I think, over the next 20. 20 to 30 years. It won't grow at the same rate that it has been. And I think it will get less expensive over the next 10 years versus Canadian healthcare. And you get to a point where your free healthcare is actually more expensive than your private options down in the States. And I think people will wake up to that and start rethinking.

Forget the States. Go to Singapore or Korea or any of these or Mexico. They're all, like medical tourism is so cheap now and so much better on other places. Yeah, and they actually have all those countries have subsidized health care as well, just not to like the same grift and extent that we have it up here and they don't force single payer, you know, down your throat. So yeah. Yeah, it's on the on the health care. Actually, funny enough, just today, I saw this post from from Bernie Sanders. And and he put out this chart and you said health care is all. already unaffordable. We cannot allow premiums to skyrocket by 75% for millions of Americans.

This is what the struggle is about. And it shows from the year 2000, 121% increase in the cost of health care. So I opted to reply, Byrne, I think I found the problem. I'm actually surprised that it's not higher. I'm surprised to not have higher because if you look at M2 money supply, it's up 367%. Health care's deflationary, right? Yeah, like, I mean, we're getting more efficient at doing these things. And so, I mean, in my opinion, that's kind of a win. Unfortunately, with the money printing, though, that wasn't, you know, that kind of flowed specifically to a subset of people in positions of power.

But in terms of efficiency of what can be delivered for the price, given that the measuring stick is ever expanding, it's actually done pretty well. And in terms of actual purchasing power as a whole versus the total money supply, it's done well. As you said, it's been deflationary, which is the natural state of things when you have a static money supply. So yeah, I mean, it is, it's going to get more expensive here, less people paying for more. people constantly. And it's and you know, you said that Canadians pay on average about 25% less for health care, for like mid-tier health care as opposed to people in the U.S.

But also the quality of care is so different. You go, you go to the U.S. and say, hey, I want to, I need a, you know, my father-in-law, for instance, hey, my back is not okay. And they say, geez, if you do anything, you're going to be paralyzed here. Let's wait a year and find out what's going on and wait another before we do anything about it. There, let's deal with that right away, right this way. So, I mean, it's, again, the systems couldn't be more divergent. And, yeah, you know, you pay the real price.

And there's other problems with, like, the insurance system and stuff in the U.S. And I recognize there's a bunch of crap there. But it's also important to recognize, as Jimmy said, just because there's one thing wrong in the U.S. and there's an entirely different thing wrong in Canada doesn't mean that there aren't places where you can just go and pay a reasonable price for high quality service. And tourism is a very, very real thing. So, yeah. A good thing. Can I just, I want to touch on two points.

that Julian and Jimmy mentioned there and they're interesting. Julian or Jimmy was talking about the house prices going up in Canada for a long time. The house prices actually I think in the last probably five to six months are coming down. And that's going to create a real problem for the Canadian government in terms of those tax receipts. You know, and you know when you talk about the money printer, I think it's, they're going to have to print sooner or later later, possibly to be the base. out some of the condo developers in Toronto and British Columbia. And what Julian was talking about in terms of the, those falsifying those labor market documents,

you know, for the workers, there's been some cases in, and I say some, there's a lot of cases of fraudulent mortgage documents in the GTA as well. So those things, there's a real storm kind of happening, you know, in around the, you know, in Ontario and I think a little bit in BC as well from those two positions where you know it's going to create a real real headache of decisions for the government to make in the next couple months. Yeah, fully agree. It's yeah, it's a tricky it's a tricky thing when it comes to the housing like how bad can it get and what does that do to people what we've been kind of seeing here in Calgary because typically it's like Van

Toronto, the most in demand, but it just gets untenable for the average person there. But what has happened as your guys real estate has dropped off, ours has kind of stayed a pretty decent market because people are moving here because they can't afford Toronto and Vancouver. So it's just kind of like displacing those people. But yeah, I think the amount of people were bringing in. And I do think eventually it kind of resumes the upward trend, especially as Moneyprinted Gober, as will be the case forever.

But nonetheless, both of these topics between Julian and Dan, it's just the system is unsustainable, as with the initial topic as well. And the inevitable conclusion is people move to new more resilient systems. and networks. And that's why we're here, right? So we are going to do a rotation now. And I do want to get to Jimmy, find out why he is so bullish, always so bullish. It can be bullish, not be bullish with that hat, of course, as for always.

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But none of it means anything if you don't learn the tools and you don't learn how to actually self-cust to your Bitcoin. It is so, so, so important to learn the tools for the job. And so I always like to throw up this little page here. This is just a zero to hero page, and I've kind of curated a bunch of super useful tutorials so that you can go through and you can learn what's a wallet. How do I secure my Bitcoin? And once you kind of get those steps down, how do I maybe run a node or some other cool technical things that you can do once you get past those initial steps?

But if you're not currently self-custing your Bitcoin, if you're not currently using your own Bitcoin wallet, it's time to learn. It is super important. So just scan the QR code there or if you want to type in the URL. It is BTCSessions.ca slash learn and you'd be able to find a ton of resources nicely put together for you there. So I digress. Let's get back to the topics at hand and I want to toss it to Jimmy here. Jimmy, same question everybody gets.

Why are you bullish? I hinted at this a little earlier, but basically there's some conflict coming into Bitcoin with the off-return debate. And specifically, it's been brewing for six months or more. And we had this back in 2017. We had this back in 2021 and so on. This one is a little bit different in flavor because the way I see it is that the technical issue isn't that big of a deal, at least to me. And I think there's a bunch of people that have said that to some degree. although there are some people that think that this end of the world or whatever.

But the reason why it's gotten so vehement and so nasty, I think, is because it's more reflective of a left-right divide. And you can kind of see it, like almost from the beginning, the way the core developer sort of dismissed a lot of the concerns that a lot of plebs were coming. It's very reminiscent of sort of like a leftist, elitist sort of like sneering, you know, dismissal of like concerns from, you know, somebody that that's on the right that they, they don't approve of. And that dynamic has been playing out, I think, for a good five, six months. And it's, it's coming to a head. It's almost like,

you know, Core V30 release and like the month afterwards when we'll all be watching the adoption rate of core V-30 is kind of like the election returns after on election day with like Trump versus Camelot or something like that. I really feel like that that's how this is almost going to play out is everyone's going to be paying attention to who's upgrading, who's not upgrading, what's actually happening, who's, you know, like are there people going, you know, switching or not or whatever. And that kind of thing, as I said, has been his historically pretty good for Bitcoin. Like having that sort of like catharsis or, you know,

people disagreeing and stuff like that, it's, you know, you would think that, oh, you're, they're not a united group. And, you know, that means that everyone's going to sell or whatever. I actually think it's, it's indicative in the other direction in that all these people care that much that they're willing to like spend that much time invested into this tiny thing that this is becoming that big of a deal. And to be fair, there is some argument about, what if this sets like kind of a bad precedent and stuff?

And I think those are probably the things that will be paying more attention to. Like how does this affect future soft works or future changes? And what if there's something that the core devs sort of push past all of, the plebs that that don't want it or something like that and that this is that's where i think you get into some interesting territory with regard to how is this going to affect bitcoin in the future are we going to get some sort of fork or something like that so i'm very curious it's always

kind of like an exciting time it feels like if you're like favorite team is playing the super bowl or something so you guys are canadian so maybe like the stanley con final right you're you're all excited like and you're you just can't wait for the game to start that's how i feel right now the game is about to start and i can't wait for this month for like that's the play out nice i this is interesting i've uh we've got the excited we'll call it the excited hockey fan just waiting waiting uh rink side for for things to heat up um you know you're you're talking about uh not and core here It's been interesting watching. Now, I know that this is not like the best measurement,

but there's a fair number of Knott's nose that have come online. And like Bitcoin Core used to be kind of like the above and beyond the reference implementation, but not just taken on an almost 21% bite out of total number of nodes. And Core is sitting sub 79% right now. And I think it lends itself to what you said where the developers are, I'm not going to say not listening, but dismissive of concerns of people that are running the software. And when you get that, you're going to get a subset of people that are upset and potentially run something else as we've seen. And I think of anything, it's an effective way to at least signal discontent with the trajectory of development. Now, I don't lean hard any particular direction in terms of, you know, what I tell, you know, I don't typically tell people what to run.

I've got, obviously, tutorials on how to run both knots and core, and you can run whatever the hell you want. But I do think it is a positive thing that when when people don't like the direction of development, that they have a way to signal that and they have something that they can do. And in this case, it is running different software. And Jimmy, I saw you just shared Clark Moody dashboard here. But right. Node version. No versions.

There we go. Okay, so we've got core 28 is on top with 13.8%. And right below that with 12.5% is one of the knots versions. We've got a few more core implementations, kind of 29, 29, and 26. And then we've got another knots implementation at 8%. And so, yeah, I mean, you've got a meaningful number of nodes that are now running something other than core. And the thing that's been surprising to me

has been individuals being dismissive of that fact as well. You know, technical arguments aside, you know, we've kind of come to know that if you don't have consensus on something, then it's the status quo. And I would say that there's a, fairly large pushback at the upcoming changes for V-30. And yeah, I don't know.

Like, Jimmy, if this goes through and then, you know, I kind of skimmed over the article talking about Luke forking. I don't know how much of that was legit or how much of that was out of context or whatever. But let's say in a hypothetical world where there was a fork. and knots became something else. Would you just sit tight and hold both sides of the fork? Or are you making a judgment call and dumping something? Well, first of all, I don't think Luke is forking.

I think Lola Leeds completely misunderstood the conversation. There's a lot of analysis of that. That was indicative to me of sort of like the leftist sense. of a lot of people on the core side in that they want certain things to be true. So, you know, I'm sure you guys saw with like the Charlie Turk murder, like Stephen King put out this thing. Oh, he was this Nazi and he wanted all these people dead. And then he apologized later. But that's that's the feeling I got from that article.

Luke wants to heart for Bitcoin. It's just like a way to make your opponent look crazy. and it was completely untrue, of course. So if a fork does happen, I think it'll be on something that Core pushes later. But who knows what will happen exactly? Because the next soft fork, I think Core wants to push is, I think, 585 or something like that. And it's like to fix like the time warp attack, which I don't. expect to be too controversial, but who knows, that might become sort of like, you know,

like a fork in the road or something like that. I'm not really sure what, what, uh, what's going to happen there. And again, it's, it's hard to say, hey, I'm going, I'm definitely with this side or that side, because you, you want to know what the arguments are for why they're doing what they're doing. And with something like a time warp attack, that's going to be very, very difficult. to create the kind of blocks to make the thing fork, right? Like it's not like a soft fork where there's a specific type of transaction that's valid in one but not in the other or whatever. It's going to be much, much more difficult to do something like that. So it might not even be practical to have a hard fork at that point because

the mechanism for doing that is going to be just so difficult to pull off without a lot of of mining equipment where you have like 40% of the hash rate of the network or something. So again, like I'm skeptical of that particular scenario happening anytime soon. But this might be the point at which we say like 20 years hence when like a hard fork does happen. Hey, this is when that split started was with this. particular, you know, conflict because there was this divide and that eventually led to this other thing and then, you know, we had it. So that's my gut feeling on it.

Yeah. I, yeah, I think this for sure, well, not for sure, but I think this definitely is a potential for the moment where core is. on the path of potentially not being the reference implementation, like for 20% plus to pop up on a competing implementation in such a short period of time is pretty wild. And for it to not be something in like the 2017 era of like, hey, we're going to hard fork something to a completely different, you know,

consensus mechanism, not consensus mechanism, but like we're going to, we're going to hard fork and change the block size or something like that that's not backwards compatible. It's just like a mempool policy and, and settings and things like that. That is pretty interesting because we've, you know, that, it feels a little bit different than the 2017 era of like, there were, there were real moments where when when bitcoin cash forked and they they did the whole screwing around and got the hash rate up and and got the price up quite a bit and you're thinking

like holy crap are they are they going to do this but i mean meanwhile they're just screwing around in in south korea and and tried to pull the wool over everybody's eyes but this is a little bit different in that it's still trying to internally be the same thing. It's just a different way of pulling people's, you know, I guess taking influence and power away from a single entity, a single group of developers and kind of spreading it out. And I don't hate the idea of having a number of different reference implementations because in the future it makes it more difficult, like you said, of the potential of anyone implementation to do anything really drastic, right? Like it's going to be even just looking at it right now, 80, 20, right now, I think that

if core wanted to do something that was even more drastic, that involved an act, you know, we get to a point where maybe some people believe that a hard fork is, is necessary. And I mean, there is that inflation bug, right? Jimmy, do you remember when we have to deal with that? What's the date? Like, what year? Not the inflation bug, but I think you're talking about the timestamp one. That's like 2104. So that's a yeah, it's a 32-bit Unix time, and that's the number of seconds since 1970. And a billion seconds is roughly 30 years. So 130 years, a hundred and 30 years after 1970, that's like when you get 4 billion and change seconds, which is 32 bits. That's the number that it can hold.

So it'll be around there. And that might have to be of hard for it. Somebody might come up with a way to do it as a soft fork or something like that and increment it by one or something. But yeah, we'll have to see. But that that's going to be a while, right? Like that's at least 75 years away. If anything, though, if we had, say, a singular still kind of main implementation that pretty much the whole world ran, at that point, it presents an opportunity for a select group of people to potentially be influenced to insert some other changes in the midst of that hard fork.

Whereas if you've got multiple reference implementations that are pretty spread out, it's a lot more difficult. to influence all of those separate groups of developers and everybody to run all of, you know, a forced change in there. So, I mean, am I completely off base here? Am I on to something? Like, would you agree or disagree? There's definitely some of that. But that said, like, the problem with multiple implementations is that the code has to be

exactly the same. And this has happened in, like, Ethereum, for example, where one client was just off file. In fact, I think based on the spec, all three did the wrong thing. They were all off by like in a different direction and that caused the fork or something like that. So you have to be very careful around that stuff.

But that said, like, I mean, this is what the lip kernel, lip consensus projects were. They're trying to codify all that and put it into a single library that everyone can use and not have that. But there is something about, sort of using the fact that you're like the main like centralized player to force through certain kinds of changes. And this has actually been Ethereum's big way of controlling everybody else

was they would always put like a difficulty bomb, right, like before their heart works. They would put this huge difficulty bomb. So that would force all of the miners to say, okay, what's going to happen? Because we can't possibly like mine. after this difficulty bomb. So right before the difficulty bomb, the Ethereum Foundation would be like, oh, here's the new client and you have to run it, right? Like, there's no possibility of them, like,

continuing with the old one. And that was how they kind of controlled their ecosystem through something like that. And, you know, if you have a single centralized entity, that's always kind of like a tactic that they could use. And in fact, this is what the Federal Reserve and every central bank does is they tell you, well, this interest rate we're going to set.

And if you don't follow it, then you're all going to get screwed. So it's, you know, this is why we like decentralization. And we'd like to get that a little bit more in development. And I think that that's what this fight is ultimately about. And how it resolves, I think we'll sort of show something about the Bitcoin community. The fact that it's messy makes me bullish. I mean, if it were a clear cut, And everything just rolling according to plan and nobody was fighting, it would be way less bullish.

I mean, Jimmy, I don't know if you knew that I was working at, I was writing Bitcoin-related content for Bitsy, like back in 2019 for a little bit. But I also had to do like their email updates of like, hey, if there's anything important going on regarding, you know, exchange downtime or whatever, I had to do those emails. and right in and around Christmas, there was whatever the update, the hard fork to Ethereum was at that time. And so, like, we were working, it was just like the worst, it was like New Year's Eve sending up,

hey, Ethereum's hard forking, just, you know, you're not going to be able to trade it for X amount of time. And then they forgot, like, the Ethereum developers did the hard fork, and they forgot the difficulty bomb. and didn't like up because they you know what further furthermore indicating centralization uh like so so they forgot the difficulty bomb already they had been able to just like keep on bumping the

difficulty bomb forward which just makes it impossible or like increasingly hard to mine ethereum so that they could prove uh switch to prove of stake uh it was supposed to force them to do that but then they just kept on pushing it later and later because they didn't want to do it yet. So like why even have that? But nonetheless, so they forgot about the difficulty bomb. And then all of a sudden it was like impossible to mine Ethereum. And they're like, oh, shit, we got to do a second hard fork in like a few days. And then, you know, I'm thinking like, oh, man, this is going to be a mess.

How are they possibly going to coordinate that? And it went seamlessly, which meant that nobody is running a first. a friggin node. Like the whole, there's like a few AWS nodes and everybody just like, they called their like two and a half friends and say, hey, this is an update to the latest one as we screwed up.

That's how simple it was. Whereas with this, even just with Mempool policy, we're ripping each other throats out, which is kind of, you know, like in a decentralized network, that's kind of how it should be.

Like, does it add stress? Sure. But it definitely. denotes that this is decentralized. So yeah, I mean, I'm bullish right there with you, Jimmy. I think it's great. I'm curious to get damaged Julian stakes on this too.

So whoever wanted to chime in. Julian, you want to chime in? I'll go quickly, but I, the core versus knots is not something I'm super, super up on. I think when Jim, Jimmy related to Camilla versus Trump, it was more in tune with my thinking. So, I mean, yeah, I want to know from Jimmy, are you nuts? Are you core?

Jimmy? I'm somewhere in between. I mean, I don't agree with either. And I think there's a, like, here's the thing about this controversy that I really don't like. There's a bunch of people on one side that are basically spitting like whatever Greg Maxwell says, right? There's like an almost appeal to Greg Maxwell. And then there's the other side that basically says whatever Luke says. It's like appeal to Luke.

And it's like, you know, 100 voices on X that are really just like proxies for Greg and Luke that are fighting each other to somebody. So I don't like that. I would like more people to have diverse opinions and thinking things through from first principles and actually figuring things out rather than like just, hey, here's the influencer I like or here's somebody I trust like that's completely against the ethos of bitcoin you're supposed to verify not trust so yeah that that that that part of it is a little bit disconcerting to me is how few people are actually like willing to put themselves out there and

say this is actually what I think I think you're all wrong and and I actually respect those those opinions a lot more than, hey, I'm team four, I'm team knots or whatever. Nice. Julian? Sorry, Dan, go ahead. It's like the political scene where you're forced to pick a team. And if you don't pick a team, then you're, you know, people are against you. So go ahead, Julian.

Yeah. It's just a lot of autism on both sides. A bunch of people who don't understand social interactions. and catastrophes everything. And I like Jimmy's likening it to a left-first-right thing because it's just like it's the end of Bitcoin if we run core. It's the end of Bitcoin if we let Luke be a Stalinist dictator. And it's like, oh, my God, there's no room for nuance in this debate.

All I want, all this is illuminated for me is that, number one, yeah, it's kind of probably not a good idea to have this centralized human developers that is so terrible at communicating, which I think core is. But it's also a really terrible idea if the only other alternative is to have a configuration that's maintained basically by one person. So I think Nauts either needs to build itself out a little bit better, not just rely on, you know, Luke updating it every once in a while, or we need a third implementation.

You know, something that that just like I do agree that there is, there should be a power check on Bitcoin Core Develop. but like Jimmy said too, you do need everyone on the same page with this whole thing to work or else you're going to get these weird fork issues. But it's good. It's good that we're having this conversation. I'm just tired of catastrophizing. I've muted the word knots on my timeline.

And it's hard to mute the word core because that one pops up under other contexts. But I'm tired of seeing this stuff. We're not going to be talking about it in two years. It's the same thing with the ordnals thing. I said that back then. I was like, fees are going to go down to zero and they're going to stay that way for a long time. We're not going to be talking about CSAM in two years, so I just don't get involved. Yeah.

If anything, one of the big bullish parts of all of this is that a number of people have learned what it is to run a node. So that's sweet. I mean, I like that. I don't mind that at all. Like people learning, like, what is a node? What does it do? How do I point a wallet to it?

Like, how do I, you know, verify myself? I think that's pretty cool. and whatever you're running to do that, more power to you. Check out my tutorials. And hey, and hey, one of the big components of,

you know, not their argument is that, well, the government can crack down on us if we're knowingly running CSAM, you know, mem pools or whatever, a CSAM relay service.

It's like, cool, that's a really good excuse to learn about ISP privacy and VPNs and Tor and running all this stuff through that. If you actually think the government's going to come,

for you. This is a great opportunity to learn about maximizing privacy at all costs in every aspect of how you host things. So yeah, lots lots of learning to be had, I think. Again, like the more, I don't know, nothing like a good fight to spur on more self-sovereignty. So I like it. Like I said, all these people feel really passionate about their coin and they fight because they care. And that energy, I think, translates to higher Bitcoin price, which is why I'm bullish, right? Like, even during this show, it's going up like 500. Yeah, we're at what. Let's, I mean, let's end everything on a bullish, on a bullish note.

We're sitting, yeah, we're up higher than when we started the show. Yeah, we set the price up, guys. Clearly. Look, it's going up as we speak. Because of this conversation. It's exactly. It's a lot of it. Gentlemen, I want to say a huge thank you to all of you for joining Julian, Dan, Jimmy.

I appreciate you all for those of you that haven't already checked out everything that they're up to. Of course, Julian, the name of your new channel and a little bit about what it is, let people know. Yeah, I started a show a month or so ago, yeah, a little over a month ago called at exit. Well, not at act. That's the handle. It's called the exit manual. and is basically my attempt to collide comedy and entertainment and education around Bitcoin. It's a weekly show.

We're trying to make it the coolest show in Bitcoin. It's super fun. We've had people contribute ideas and all sorts of stuff. We're making all these crazy episodes. And it's going pretty well. And it's one of those things that I hope you can send your friends and family, the ones that are bored of podcasts to finally have something interesting and fun. Watch me get hit by cars and trains and make fun of everything.

religion and race under the sun. That's the show and it teaches you about Bitcoin at the same time. Yeah. If when ingesting your 40 hours per week, make sure at least 20 to 30 minutes of that is Julian show. Six minutes. I don't ask for that much. Six minutes.

So are people going to get arrested if they watch your show? Yes. You will. You will get arrested in the UK. So use a VP in the UK. Yeah. Depends where your VPN's pointing. Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. I'm going to toss it down to Dan again, let people know all about the Canadian Bitcoin Conference. We said the date and everything, but reiterate it. Where can they find you guys? How can people attend? Yeah.

It's in the Canadian Bitcoin Conference is in Montreal on the 16th to 18th of October. You can go to Canadian BitcoinConf.com to get your tickets and check out the agenda. There's a full list of agenda and speakers and sponsors who are there. We have a couple of cool things going on. We have Bitcoin Business Ready Day. We have a couple of corporate events. We have a hockey game, which I think, I don't know if you were both there last year, was pretty fun.

Yeah. We have, yeah, so that's a really, really fun time. We've got the first night, we've done this thing called the Clown World Party, where, you know, everybody, everybody knows we're kind of living in the clown world, especially in Canada and Montreal. So we're encouraging people dress up his clients and head to a few bars. So that'll be fun.

But we've I actually come, Jimmy. I've asked Jimmy to come a few times. He was nearly there this year, but I know he's got a good connection to Canada. Hopefully we'll make it happen soon in the near future. But yeah, really excited. This is the third year and the biggest so far.

so we're happy. Hell yeah. Well, yeah, check it out. Website, Canadian Bitcoinconference.com. Is that right? What's your book? Yeah, Canadian BitcoinConflict.com, yeah. Okay, perfect, perfect.

And lastly, Jimmy, I'll go to you. Again, developer, multiple-time author. What do you want to point people towards? Well, I have a newsletter that I write to, JimmySong.com. I've been posting some vlogs on X, my user handle there is Jimmy Song. It's also on Noster and you can kind of find me under Jimmy's song.

I'm sometimes under trending. So you can hopefully figure that out that way. But I haven't done my podcast in a while. I am releasing my first episode in like eight months tomorrow. So Bitcoin Fixes this. It's available on all podcast platforms. And I will be talking about charitable giving. And what that means under sort of like a Bitcoin standard and how to make the best of the wealth that you're inevitably going to get as a big link.

So, yeah, it should be interesting. And yeah, hope to have more of that content. That's fantastic. New episode. All right. Well, check it out tomorrow. You heard it here first. Awesome.

Well, gentlemen, thank you guys so much for being here. Everybody that tuned in for the show, thank you guys for being here. Make sure you do drop a like. And again, as I mentioned before, I always play this clip at the end. of the show. But if you have not started your own personal learning journey and you don't know how to self-custy Bitcoin yet, please do find that learn page. You'll play a little clip at the end. But it's super important that you become self-sovereign and you hold your own keys. It's the main thing that we push on the channel. So thank you guys all. Jimmy, Julian, Dan, appreciate you guys. Have a wonderful

rest of your evening. Everybody else. Cheers. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This was your bullish session. See you guys. Hey you. Yes, you watching the Bitcoin price movements and the latest exciting news. It's awesome to stay informed, but the real power of Bitcoin comes from taking control. Don't just watch, take action. Head over to btcsessions.ca slash learn for free step-by-step tutorials that guide you through every major skill you need to know. Plus, full video playlist for deeper dives on any topic you like. And if you're ready for the ultimate fast track, scroll to the bottom and check out Bitcoin Mentor.io for premium one-on-one experience with my team of Bitcoin experts to ensure you get it right the first time.

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