BTC Sessions - Jeff Booth vs Simon Dixon: Bitcoin's Abundant Future or Total Dystopian Nightmare?

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 049: Jeff Booth vs Simon Dixon: Bitcoin's Abundant Future or Total Dystopian Nightmare?What if Bitcoin's promise of a deflationary free market utopia crushes the global surveillance state—or traps 95% in a multipolar prison of programmable money, elite control, and endless chaos? In this must-watch, visionary Jeff Booth clashes with geopolitical expert Simon Dixon on whether Bitcoin enforces abundance for all through unstoppable privacy tech like Fedi and Nostr, or merely offers an escape hatch for the few amid dollar demise, AI weaponization, and financial industrial complex capture. From Venezuela's turmoil and Iranian protests to UK thought police and precious metals surges, they expose how centralized custody in ETFs and treasury companies co-opts Bitcoin, risking chain forks and surveillance nightmares. Jeff's optimistic blueprint for agency-driven freedom battles Simon's stark warnings of hybrid systems where the masses "own nothing and be happy," tying into Bitcoin self-custody, decentralized mining, and circular economies as your shield against fiscal dominance and currency wars. If you're stacking sats in a Bitcoin-only world, this debate reveals why privacy isn't optional—it's your path to sovereignty or subjugation. Don't miss the white pill vs. black pill showdown that could redefine your Bitcoin strategy!About Jeff BoothWebsite: https://jeffbooth.ca/Nostr: [e-mail] Simon DixonX: @SimonDixonTwittYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SimonDixon21Chapters:00:01:05 Hook & Guest Introduction00:01:13 Global Chaos Overview00:01:40 Jeff: System Collapse & Deflation00:04:02 Simon: Multipolarity & Dollar Strategy00:07:22 Surveillance State & Resistance00:08:55 Jeff: Control Structures & Elite00:11:02 Fear vs Optimism Messaging00:12:35 Bitcoin Centralization Risks00:14:44 Privacy & Cypherpunk Roots00:16:37 Simon: Banking to Bitcoin Journey00:19:29 Jeff: Parallel Ecosystems00:25:35 Trump's Surveillance Ties00:26:25 Node Risks00:29:30 Bitcoin Protocol Stack00:33:08 Chain Forks & Resistance00:35:40 Federations & Decentralized Banks00:36:43 Imposition vs Escape Hatch00:38:50 Systems Non-Coexistence00:40:02 Pareto & Prison Debate00:42:43 Black Markets & Emergence00:45:21 Gold Lessons & Ethics00:49:18 Free Market Spirituality00:52:03 Thought Traps & Sovereignty00:58:57 Distractions & Community Building01:00:01 Bitcoin's Voluntary Ethics01:01:27 Agency & Time Value01:03:36 Force & Confiscation Risks01:04:46 Privacy Attack Costs01:06:40 Custody Fears01:07:01 Hope vs Fear01:08:29 Simon's Financial Obsession01:10:17 Jeff's Optimism Shift01:13:24 Decentralization Threats01:15:17 VC Journeys01:17:02 Outperforming Bitcoin01:21:23 Spiritual Free Market01:24:08 Decentralized Banks Concept01:24:44 E-Cash & Federation Risks01:29:30 Fedi Privacy Layers01:30:12 Final Advice01:33:50 Guest Contacts & Wrap-Up⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB🔒 Lockdown your Bitcoin with the BEST gear on the market from Coinkite. Get the 5% Off the COLDCARD visit: https://qrco.de/bfiDBV💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Gary, or Ben at Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit bitcoinmentor.io Previous Episodes:Simon & Jack Kruse: https://youtu.be/4Rzv9meq3YgJeff Booth: https://youtu.be/SAHUkj9LbnoFollow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYC#JeffBooth #SimonDixon #BTCSessions #Bitcoin #BitcoinPodcast #SelfCustody #BitcoinPrivacy #FreeMarket #SurveillanceState #MultipolarWorld #Deflation #FinancialIndustrialComplex #BitcoinMining #Nostr #Fedi #BitcoinOnly #Crypto #BTC

The entire world is transitioning to this ginormous global surveillance state. And I think the vast majority will stay in prison. There's going to be a new elite class of Bitcoiners, and the rest are going to owe nothing and be happy. These systems cannot coexist. One has to kill the other. A monetary system based on inflation, which is theft, that lends money into existence, can't exist with the free market. I don't see hyper-bitcoinization as a realistic outcome. It doesn't disrupt power.

And that's where I think it does. I think it absolutely does. I'm living in the optimism every day, and it's unstoppable. Why is it unstoppable? Because of us, our agency. The vast majority aren't going to take agency. They aren't going to hope Bitcoin and self-custody. Hope is stronger than fear.

Today's episode is a must-see. Joining me are Bitcoin Visionaries, Jeff Booth, the deflation-obsessed author of The Price of Tomorrow, and Simon Dixon, the ex-investment banker turned geopolitical expert exposing the elite's dark secrets by following the money. These two brilliant men, on whether or not Bitcoin leads to a bright, abundant future or simply our escape hatch from an Orwellian nightmare as we transition to a multiple-bler world. Do we win or just survive?

The White Hill or the Black? All right, gentlemen, thank you so much for sitting down and having this conversation. Very excited to talk today. To kind of kick things off, I want to start by examining where you think we currently are. And so even just taking a look at things, we got Venezuela, Iranian protest, buying Greenland, continued war in Ukraine, Alberta is leaving, precious metals are ripping, UK thought police, everywhere I look, there's more chaos in the existing system. So Jeff, starting with you, are we witnessing the existing systems collapse? Is this a controlled demolition and restructuring or something else completely entirely?

All of the above. Okay. And depending on your framework, all of the above. So that's why I continually start with the natural state of the free market is deflation. What I'm trying to do is if you agree with that statement. And people say, why do you keep saying that all the time? Because what I watch, what I observe is people nod their head. Yep, that's totally true.

And then go back and give their energy to the other system, which must mean it's extracting their energy and time. Because it means we've never lived in a global free market. We don't know what it looks like. And that would mean all of these other things are traps to grab our attention. And we always fall into the trap. otherwise we would have lived in a free market. And so why I keep saying the same thing over and over and over again

is because it's not resonating with enough people, that they control their time. And now you have a one-way check valve into the AI algorithms, which are the control system that are literally bots that people are fighting with these bots inside this thing, believing their time is valuable, and it's just making it stronger. So I chose a long time ago to know, yes, that's going to happen because human nature keeps on getting like 5,000 years of human nature tells me that that's going to happen.

But I'm going to spend my time doing something very different, doing and building the future that I want. And nobody can tell me I can't. Once you know you have agency and you can move your time, then a whole bunch of people are going to get caught. And so the high level of this is, you know from my book, you know from everything I've said for a long, long time, the system that people are measuring from is going to get increasingly and increasingly chaotic because it has to be an exponential centralization against the force I just said that is an exponential free market. And so what would that feel like? it would feel like exactly what you're describing.

Wonderful. Simon, your response, your thoughts. All right, maybe I'll just give an overview of where I think we are right now. And then there's some really interesting things to pick upon in there. So as we currently speak, I've been talking for a long time about this concept of multipolarity. And that the West is fully captured by what I call a financial industrial complex that has control over the military industrial complex and the technical industrial complex. Right now, the financial industrial complex

is strategically weakening the dollar in order to completely do a strategy of fiscal dominance to pump the stock market as high as they can pump it in a K-shaped economy where the rich are getting richer and the poorer are getting poorer. And in order to manage that transition, they're breaking the Japan carry trade and the Bank of Japan is starting to move the world into multipolarity. By weakening the dollar, they are breaking the pegs to the dollar and the petro dollar is being slowly eroded into a 50-50 split with the petro yuan.

And we are breaking the euro dollar by sucking up all of the dollars that were created in Europe. by challenging the relationship between Europe and America. At the same time, there is a movement to turn, destroy currencies in Central and South America and launch currency wars so that you can have full penetration of stable coin, which are going to be deeply integrated into programmable money, and build a mass surveillance state. Those are the trends that we're witnessing right now. This is all because America became energy independent,

started competing as an exporter. China rose and China built relationships where it could buy its oil because it needs oil and started investing in renewable energy. And so it predominantly bought its oil from everyone it could that it was able to buy all from. Now it's got the largest oil reserves in the world while building renewable energy

in order to bring the price down and get it more independent. And that's propped up the Gulf sovereign wealth funds and countries like Iran. And Venezuela to a certain degree. Now, we have behind the scenes this new transnational capital flow that comes from China money

into Gulf sovereign wealth funds that's partnering with the captured West which is owned by the financial industrial complex they're investing in all the deals right now and behind the scenes we have all powers have decided we're not going to World War III and that they're going to split the world up into multipolarity and everybody has determined

which regions is going to be controlled by who and we are witnessing the theatre we need to see in order to split that world up into this multipolarity. The bigger vision is that we are changing the entire world into energy, rare earth minerals, semiconductor chips, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the entire world is transitioning to this ginormous global surveillance state that's being built, where technology and centralized is going to be weaponized.

And there is a resistance against it, which is decentralized technology. And right now, there is an attempt to centralize as much Bitcoin as possible in treasury companies, in ETFs, in margin loams. And sadly, Bitcoin is co-opted in the custody side. but in the self-custody side, we get to live in freedom. And sadly, Bitcoin won't take on the financial system because essentially the custody side has been co-opted into the financial system. And so all we can do at this stage is do what Jeff Booth said,

which is focus on us, our community, our family, and opt out of the system, exit the system. And I think 95% of people aren't going to do that. And there's going to be a new elite class of Bitcoiners. And the rest are going to owe nothing and be happy. It's kind of where I think we are. Simon, there's actually funny enough inside that thing. I guess where we differ is this.

And I think we're the same. It has to look like this because it's always looked like this. If you said the city of London and say all of the control structure originating from a central bank that says, I'm going to lend, money is going to be lent into existence. And productivity is moving the other way. Then productivity is deflationary. If money is lent into existence, it has to be kept on lending into existence forever exponentially. And that would accrue a staggering amount of power at the top.

essentially pulling strings at the top and everybody would want to be at the top if you watch chamath's interview right 150 people that run in their world i want and not i want to fix it i want to be one of them right from the same from the same system so so i agree with you 100 percent it would always look like that and then you have a new global elite that is the the owners of technology right the stuff we use that is now the industry entire power. And they're actually, some of those people, and I'll include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, everything else. It's just a trade of these old people at the banking cartel at the top for the new technologists at the top, and that's the fight. And all of these other things are

sub things of this, all made stronger by our actions within it, believing that there's some other enemy other than us. Right. And the only thing I take issue with on what you said, and it's actually not really issue, it's because different people will be attracted or motivated to different messages, and all messages need to be heard. So in one thing, I'm celebrating your message to, is hopefully shock people out of it. For me, in a message where everybody's in fear. all the time. Fear does stand out, right? And it captures a whole bunch of views and it locks them in it. But what I worry so much about from that message is it locks them in it. They believe, they want to see it's not them.

They want to believe it's somebody else. They want to believe it's Trump. They want to believe it's Biden. They want to believe it's Elon saving them. They want to believe the banking, Carney is going to say. them. They look at these and they celebrate tons of video, tons of views, all of those things capturing more of their attention, right, from that fear that they're being paralyzed. And you and I both already know, right? There are 5,000 years of human history if we've never had a free market, then the odds of us having a free market are you would expect to be very low. right because it's always been us and we've always been captured gold gets repriced this all the same people at the top but constantly goes back because of our actions within it

and and and so i ask myself in this and as part of and i want to go really deep on this topic very deep on this topic because because this topic lends into everything else and so i'd so push back on different areas but i knew for sure that if Bitcoin was just the open protocol at the bottom, or open decentralized protocol on the bottom, and if people remained in self-custody, that it would fail, right, in time. And why would it fail?

Because the surveillance state and the capture, the move to were for Bitcoin, which most people would be measuring in the broken money, and they would be selling their Bitcoin and centralizing it and trusting that BlackRock and others had their back. I'm not saying these are bad people. I'm just saying that that move, if you couldn't kill Bitcoin,

you'd have to co-opt it through stable coins, through everything else, through the regulatory complex, you would have to. And I knew if it was just that, that the version of Bitcoin that we talk about would fail. At some point,

that system, would with all its energy and its surveillance over us, it wouldn't try right now to cause a chain fork. It would do it at some later date when it's centralized enough and it had enough power to cause a chain fork. And many of people that were formally no way this is being centralized would be caught into the co-option and do that. And you'd have a different control system.

And this is why, this is partly why we created EcoDeft. This is partly why I tuned my energy into, okay, you have to have privacy on top of Bitcoin. You have to have transactions on top of Bitcoin. The infrastructure layer has to exist on top of Bitcoin. And this is like four years ago that the free market and capital started moving into, and probably before that, Right. So what did the Cypherpunk manifesto say? It had privacy in that 21 times in that manifesto. And if you think, I'm going to borrow something that Obie says from Fetty, if Satoshi was walking among us today, you could have power through control or privacy. And why the sufferer punks understood what that means is he could walk around.

us today and we wouldn't know because he has total privacy and for us to to escape this digital matrix we require we require privacy on top of that that privacy because of incredible people fighting for this now it doesn't look appear to be needed because most people are still measuring bitcoin price go up but this is already unstoppable on a layer on a layer three that people rank now could go and create privacy on top of Bitcoin for their communications and privacy. And all they need to do is move. And with every move, more people will move. And so the yin and yang, the creation of the creation comes from the pain of people getting

stuck in this. And that's how the free market has always worked. People believed it was always going to look something like this. What the opportunity to solve that problem for people is what we demand in the free market. And those people are always way in front of where everybody else is. So why it can be know exactly where it's going, right? And know most people will get caught in that. But be totally optimistic is because I'm living in the optimism every day and it's unstoppable.

Why is it unstoppable? because of us, our agency. So I'm in your thoughts on that. I'm curious if you agree with the sentiment that it's unstoppable. Yeah. And so, you know, this kind of comes from, so I left investment bank in 2006. So for 19 years, I've split this, probably split in the middle in two. So when I first left, I discovered how the financial system really works.

And I went into advocacy mode. and advocacy mode was, I want everyone to understand what a scam the financial system is and the Ponzi scheme. And eventually, you get ridiculed. You go through the whole journey. They hate you. They laugh you. It costs you money.

You go through that whole journey. And then I reached the point where I realize there's no political solution. There's no changing banking. I ain't going to change the bankers. Like there's, and so I went to how do I build? the future. And I went through that transition. And so I went and tried to build a non-fractional reserve bank. And I've shared my story. But essentially, the Bank of England chased me out of the country. I had to leave the country. It wasn't possible. And then they said, you've got to put

60 million in the Bank of England. And then you're going to build it on top of Barclays. And they get to create the fractions. And you get to be, you know, the reserves. And, you know, so I went through that. And that bankrupted me just going through that process. I was very wealthy in a career and I was bankrupt. And it was at that moment that I discovered Bitcoin. And so now we're 2011, spoke at the first Bitcoin conference, Bitcoin was $3. And throughout that whole career, I was investing in every company I could find that would help Bitcoin get out to as many people, whether it's exchanges in Africa

through BitPesa or Unocoyne in India or Venezuela or Argentina or Cracken or BitStan or BitStam. BitStamp in Europe, in Bitso in Mexico, you know, and all I wanted to do was Bitcoin was treating me well. And we pivoted the bank into helping startups raise finance in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Now we're at the stage where the VCs came in, and I got that reality. Okay, we built the industry. Now the VCs have taken over. Now essentially they're all banks. They're all co-opted.

They're all launching shit coins. They're all leveraging. They're all doing Bitcoin back loans. They're all public companies. They've all got a bunch of VCs. They're all controlled by the financial industrial complex and regulate. Can I pause you there? Yeah.

And I think it requires that because when we say all, right, it's easy to, because of in-group, out-group bias, it's easy to put that. I can tell you flat out, we think differently. And I own a VC. I'm a part of a founder of a VC and it looks very different. We play against exactly what you just described. But now if you think about your path through this and some of the, we all make mistakes too, right? And if you look at both funding Celsius, getting and understanding what that look like from a bad actor and then what you did to try to allow people to to see the bad actor and help people through through a, through this. And a lot of people still blame you for that or whatever. When it's not you, you invested in a bad actor. And what it really is saying is our own, not yours in this case, but that bad actor, right, motivation, most people will take the money, right, over and over and over again. And the money is such a thing in the financial industrial complex that you're

explaining has always been the money and people sell out over and over and over again. But what I can tell you for sure is not everybody sells out. And if enough people don't sell out and are creating this parallel ecosystem that is imposing the free market, that is adding privacy, is adding payments, everything else, that is a totally different reality. Now, I understand in what you just said how hard it would be to believe that from a world that everyone sells out, right? But I can guarantee you, right? I can guarantee you this is happening and it will not be stopped, right?

And why I can guarantee you that from this, not that the challenge and we could go through some of the risks. Let's go deep into the risks. But my agency in this thing, as well as most of my people I know and spend time with, are moving this forward. And if you didn't measure in price, if you didn't measure in how much is being acquired by centralized, if you measured in what happened last year into adoption, what happened in actual things that actually broke that can't be stopped. opt-trial ready? You go. It would take your breath away. But most people aren't. They're measuring price of U.S. dollar. Yeah. They're getting centralized. Coin Kite has been in the game for years, creating hands down the best and most secure hardware when it comes to securing your Bitcoin. The cold card Q is an absolute powerhouse and my

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There's no revenue share, no hidden skims. Pricing is simple. One flat monthly fee covers power, parts, labor, and repairs. They also guarantee uptime. If a machine goes down, their hash rate redirect system routes hash power from their fleet, so earnings don't just stop. And every machine is insured at full replacement value. Everything is hosted in the U.S., powered by Hydro, and mining equipment may qualify for 100% year one bonus depreciation. Learn more at abundant minds.com slash sessions. Yeah. And so I think we're at the same place because what I was going to say is that I've been through that cycle of advocacy when it was needed, then it's no longer needed and it becomes just analysis. It's like nothing stops this train. I'm not, whatever I say doesn't make a

difference. Like, you don't need Simon Dixon to pump Bitcoin. There's nothing I can say that changes, changes anything because we've hit a critical mass. And so then you move to analysis. And once you're in analysis, it's like, well, I'm irrelevant, but what is actually happening? And so what I try to do is help people understand what actually happening. And then it comes down to the same message exactly what you're saying, Jeff, which is that the vast majority aren't going to take agency. They aren't going to hold Bitcoin in self-custody. And there's only going to be a few people

that experience the freedom that Bitcoin has given. And that is how it has always been and always will be. And it never changes in that sense. And so all of my advocacy, you know, has switched to, look, here's the analysis. This is what the industry is right now. And now your job is to just focus on your Bitcoin in self-custody. You're investing in more decentralized technology that makes things better. You're

running your own LLMs. You know, you're doing self-custody. You're running nodes. You're figuring out how to make payments with Lightning Network. You're figuring out how to support privacy systems. You're creating circular economies with your own communities and figuring out how to be independent. You're supporting your local farmers. You're not buying from these big companies. you're buying from a smaller to whatever degree you can. You're moving your time to Noster instead of Twitter. You're moving more and more. You're part, both the map and the territory of the emergent system being created.

Correct. And you matter. Your time matter. And that's the key. That is the key thing. And I think we're saying the same thing here. The my whole job now is to help people understand. what's happening in the system because it really scares me that there is a massive majority

of Americans that believe Trump's going to make America great again and that he's not actually supporting this mass surveillance day and all his money is being made in the Middle East and that he short the dollar with Bitcoin and the West is on decline significantly. and everything he says is to give people opium that if they actually followed, listened to what he said, versus what he's doing, they would realize that

they're being led down a path of real destruction. And so people need to forget themselves. Yeah. So I would, and again, we get to the same place through different lenses. It's just the matter of, how do you take actionable steps to,

So let's go one step deeper. And I'm just running a node. I'm a public figure on Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is an open, decentralized, secure protocol bounded by energy. And it's just that. It's layer one. And it only stayed layer one. What that would mean by the other actions that we talked about is everything would

centralize. You would hear a version of Bitcoin is it's the best asset. right and and you would regulate to it and you would tie the control system in it and over time it was centralized more and more and more right it would have to right because you essentially you have a broken money system that is that is the opposite of what free market and technology should be making prices higher that has to make prices higher or fail or reset and do it again right and so that would have to accrete more control faster. And if you're part of any part of that, Bitcoin is just an asset, you're part of that without

knowledge of it. That's what you're saying, right? And then that would develop so much surveillance because Patriot Act, all of these things are designed to have surveillance into the thing that's being centralized. That would have so much surveillance. that it would be a real risk at some point down the road to run a node. Right? Because you can imagine at a surveillance state with the likes of Palantir,

everything else, it's moving more and more faster and faster because of AI. The AI should be a productivity driver that everything's getting cheaper in your life. But it's the opposite. But you're operating through that. That would have to create a risk. at some point. And because most people, because Bitcoin moved ahead and then everybody was running nodes and everybody who understood Cypherpunks understanding this a long time ago,

knew this risk and they drove this out and you were one of them and they drove this out and they, and there were too many nodes all distributed around the world to try to co-op, to try to co-op Bitcoin. But if you knew that and you were playing a different game, what would you do? That's kind of what I ask all the time. And all of your control came from stealing from other people that didn't know they were celebrating your control. You would know you do this. That would be the risk.

So how would you prevent that risk? You would have to create, effectively lightning, liquid, spark, arc. You'd have to create a layer that this became a medium of experience. Now you have a different frame of reference. You have part people in a frame of reference as I just want to make money in the in the in in the system of control, right? And you have a different frame of reference that this is becoming a new protocol stack of the world that it's repricing everything and all productivity in it is essentially you have

by owning Bitcoin your part you own a piece of the universe all of us, all of our productivity floating to you. As more ideas flow, it keeps on happening. But for that to exist, it would have to be money. It would have to be, and for it to exist as money against this control system, it would have to develop privacy. So now let's look at through what would happen to human beings through this lens and all of the different time periods on how this would go by. If you first saw it as only a technology and technologies come along that are winner-take-most until a new technology creates a new winner-take-most, you would easily look at Bitcoin and you would say you'd be Vitalik and you couldn't change Bitcoin.

They wouldn't let you. So I'm going to create a new technology and essentially defraud everybody and say my technology is better in Bitcoin and everything else. A whole bunch of people would be believe that because they were really chasing money. They didn't understand it as a protocol stack and they saw it as a technology. And their view of what the new thing was

would influence them. Bitcoin would just keep on marching on. Right? You could, and that would happen over and over again as millions of coins and other people did that, but unaware of what Bitcoin really was. There is no second. Bitcoin. Now you take an asset and a view of an asset, which would be perfectly relevant of money

has always concentrated until we've changed money, and money is always a piece of paper, an instrument on top of that thing that consolidates. And from that view, what is an asset, right? You need an asset backing money because you could never store your money in money. That's why. The asset allows you to disrupt the, and the way the world's always looked, but that would be a really strong mental model for most people caught in that same mental model. And so they would naturally, not good, bad people, just get caught in that mental model and believe that mental model because it would fit with their mental model of what the world would look like, and it would reinforce to them. So now what's the risk to that mental model? And what if Bitcoin wasn't just that,

It was a protocol developing in layers. And that protocol developing in layers added privacy and added these things to privacy, then it would destroy that mental model in time. Because as that mental model gets centralized and people take more risk to the Bitcoin, there won't be less Bitcoin. Here's why. When that comes to do a chain fork to capture, and there's enough people with agency and a privacy and a circular economy.

That group over here will say fuck off, right? You do you. And that coin will go to zero in time. It might take a long time. And that's why I try, for at least for me, I can't give any of this other stuff any credit. Any, it just, it is just, I just, I'm going to go do. I'm going to go to the things I'm going to do in the new world.

I'm going to build there, spend my time in agency there, accelerating that ecosystem. And hopefully more people join. But there's already enough people there, I suspect. Not that some people won't try to change this and everything else. There's already enough people there. Everything I just described will happen in time for sure. because human nature demands it. Yeah, my confidence in Bitcoin succeeded.

It's like, you know, it's 100%. That's unwavering. It's more the mission has changed to get as many people in the community that's actually going to defend Bitcoin the way that it was actually designed. And it doesn't really matter as long as there's enough of us. I would love for you to, for yourself, specifically for yourself, go create a federation on FETI. Because by doing so, you extend privacy into the network. It's almost like completely private.

Your communications are completely private. Anybody that's in your side, your federation is also completely immune. to everything. They have privacy and their communications. They have privacy and their money. And it's another layer on top of Bitcoin. We could talk, but that's just one aspect of this, but you can now imagine. Now, the reason that Bitcoin stayed decentralized and secure bounded by energy is the nose. So now what if you created all of these banks, hundreds of thousands of banks that are all tethered to Bitcoin, but all completely private? and nobody can hack them.

It's impossible to. Every single one is like a node in Bitcoin that extends the nodes into another layer. And that was four years of brutally hard tech to be able to deliver that when it needed to be delivered. And I think most people today don't even understand what it's already there,

but it's impossible. It's open source. it's already literally impossible to stop. I couldn't stop it being on the board if I tried. And so the more people that use it, the more it expands. And you create a network effect into freedom. I want to pull apart there for just a second, too,

because I want to get some clarity on something. Your guys' view on the future and kind of where we're going seems mostly aligned, but I wanted to make sure that I had one point and confirmed, Simon, and your outlook of things, and Jeff, correct me if I get this wrong. I'm kind of interpreting, Jeff, more of yours is that the new system will impose a free market on the existing one. And I'm kind of interpreting that is that like essentially the old system will fall and collapse and will basically everyone will be into the new system. And Simon, from your perspective, I'm viewing it more as Bitcoin is the escape hatch from the existing system, but does not necessarily take out the existing system.

Like they might exist in parallel or it's your way to kind of survive in that time of tyranny. Yeah. So I believe that we're witnessing the fall of the West, which is probably. propped up by the dollar and we're moving to a multi-polar world. That doesn't mean the world collapses. It means that capital flows to a new power structure. And so most people would analyze from the perspective of if America ends, the world ends. That's a very American-centric view of the world.

What it means and what is happening right now is there is a capital outflow and other currencies are being empowered as America's being weakened. sorry, the dollar's being weakened and people are escaping to escape valves. You know, we've got a short squeeze on the paper contracts on silver. We've got the central banks selling off their US dollars and treasury, well, treasuries for gold. And then we've got an attempt to centralize Bitcoin in the key moment. And it's interesting because the short squeeze you get in silver, you've realized that the financial industrial complex built everything they need to short-term

oppress the price of Bitcoin. Obviously, I have no doubt you can't do that long term, and we have, you know, Bitcoin has its moment, but they've built all the constructs to control the short-term price of Bitcoin right now. And we're just witnessing a new set of fiat currencies that will all go through their same cycle and a paper derivative complex built around Bitcoin and the financial powers hedging themselves. So it doesn't matter what happens to Bitcoin, they'll be fine. Just like they are, it doesn't matter to happen with gold, they'll be fine. So I don't see hyper-bitcoinization as a realistic outcome.

I just see it as a way of boycotting the system, exiting the system. And if you hold it in the right way, then you get to stay away from power, but it doesn't disrupt power. I think, and that's where I think it does. Like, I think it absolutely does. It's the, it's the, but that power gets disruptive for us, by us choosing our time within the new system and more people choosing the time. And we're very early in that. And so all of the things you described as people give their energy to those people, not realizing, it's their energy, it's them.

So how can they complain about somebody else when it's them operating in the system of theft? Until they realize that and move to the other side, all of these things will happen, right? All of the things you describe, they're just going to be chaotic. And I can't tell you where or what, how that looks, because it's impossible. I've said that many times, how do you measure, which snowflake caused the avalanche, right? It's going to look like this and it's going to be more chaotic, is this new system. emerges throughout the world and more people can just free themselves but don't know that it can free themselves. Yeah. I guess I see more of a Pareto principle with the, you know, who, what will be

the percentage that will free themselves versus who will stay in prison? And I think the vast majority will stay in prison. But let's go there. I think actually at first that's true. But if you think about your journey to get this understanding, my journey to get this understanding, that I was in prison that I thought I lived in a construct that was a free market that wasn't my own journey. And me decided, so then in that, I have to also realize I was once they. They are the same as me, right? We're all, so I'm no better, no worse, made the same mistakes. It was such a big idea that I'd never lived in a free market, right?

And all of my construct of the entire, that was hard for my own cognitive. dissidents to understand and then let go of and then choose. And so if I had to do it and and spent 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin and what I would do from all of that power, right, and what it would look like on the other side, then then I suspect a whole bunch of people have to do the same thing. And that's, that's us moving our time to the new system. So I'm no better just earlier on that path. That Pareto principle cannot coexist.

These systems cannot coexist. One has to kill the other. It has to. That's why privacy isn't so important. You either live in a world that's a centralized authoritarian control with AI that extracts everything from you and tells you how to live. And I had the conversation with somebody very senior in that technology complex. who was challenging me and I said, well, what are you going to do as all the jobs are gone?

We're going to tax the robots. What? And he actually said we're going to tax the robots, right? So in other words, I'm going to create an infrastructure of control that locks in the infrastructure of control and everybody believes they get a little stipend from that. UBI, high universal basic income, the whole same structure. You hear it non-sufficient. stop inside inside this. But what I'm getting, the person I was talking to isn't actually a bad person. He's just so caught up in this belief system that a whole bunch of people are caught up in. He can't see the other thing happening. But that system that you just described, it can't be 80-20. It's 100% or 100%. Why? Explain why I can't. Yeah, I think, why?

From my perspective, you don't know good without evil. And we're on life, you know, where we're not going to enter into a utopia where everything's good. And the first page, my book, I wrote, I do not believe in utopia. Right. I also don't believe in dystopia. Human in us, in each of us, we have both. Right. We have.

Would you say in the world right now, there is dystopia and utopia. I think it's a matter, I actually truly believe it's a matter of your perspective. Your view is responding back to your view. The world I see right now, the world I see right now and most of my time is truly in love and abundance. Like, and it's, it reflects back. That's true. And we're seeing Palestinians in Gaza that were literally staffed, bombed and, and they still have their faith in God and their, but, you know, you know, so it is, it is, it is, definitely an internal game. But there are people that are living in dystopia because of the currency while others are living in freedom and utopia. What I'm saying is that systems cannot coexist. And why for this system, Bitcoin, to thrive, it has to be private as well. So people move so they're not scared to move into the new system. And that new system takes the control and power from the other system, just like Satoshi by staying private, did. It ultimately kills the other system. But an inflationary system, a monetary system based on inflation, which is theft, you know this,

right? That lends money into existence can't exist with the free market. What is the free market value? It values your service to somebody else. That thing is emerging and it's emerging in the bigger service, the more value you provide, you can get paid, right? And the payment and the amount of money that you make in Bitcoin, then somebody else competes with you to provide more value. The margin itself creates the opportunity for people. So solving problems in that world becomes solving the biggest problems for other people. But those things can't coexist. The two systems. I don't get the coexist part why they can't go-exist. When you say 80, when you say If I may, Jeff, would it be, this is a real oversimplification, but would one way of saying

why it's necessarily win or take all between the two systems is you can't have a prison control system with an open door? Yeah. Yeah. So the, and the more that the control system exerts the power. And if you look at, and I'm just using analogs for this because either there is no one to Bitcoin, we've never lived in a system like this. But if you look at what happens in very authoritarian countries, dictatorships and such,

and you look at their money that people say, here's the exchange rate, there's always a black market rate. Still a sub in the overall system, but what that black market rate is the real rate is telling you what people to people are doing to try to get around it. So now if you have this totally different independent system that's decentralized and secure and private, that and people, and this is where I need to say, what Simon's saying will happen, right, people will get caught. They'll get caught again. They'll get caught. They'll take Bitcoin loans.

They'll get caught in this. They'll give away the Bitcoin. All of these things will happen. I'm not dissenting that at all. But as they blow up over and over and over again and redistribute to the people who just moved, more people will move. And in time, more people will move. And they will see that they can actually spend their time in an honest network that's growing and they'll want to be around.

And it will create such polarization doing different nation states, power brokers. Today, it will threaten those and they will try harder to lock them in. As they try harder to lock them in through all of the same types of things Simon's saying, it will create more value for the people getting out. That's the way the free market works. You will know. So, and so the only thing, the caveat is Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure. And so if that's the only thing that's a caveat, then where would the risks of centralization be?

And that's what you have to explore. When I first got into Bitcoin, I was overwhelmed. The jargon, the security risks, the fear that one mistake could cost everything. I remember staring at my screen and wondering, are my keys safe? Did I do this right? That experience is why I started BTC sessions. For over a decade, this channel has helped millions of people like you learn how to use and secure Bitcoin. But I realized something.

For many people, videos aren't enough. Everyone learns differently. Some need to ask questions in real time as an expert walks through their setup, their goals, and their threat model. And certain things like advanced cold storage, inheritance planning, privacy, and node or mining setups often can't be fully solved by watching another tutorial. So I built BTC mentor. I recruited the best Bitcoin educators on the planet to work with you one-on-one. Real experts, real answers, personalized hands-on guidance tailored to your exact situation. Whether you're brand new or building a complex setup, we meet you where you're at and walk with you step by step.

By the end, you don't just hope your Bitcoin is safe. You know it is. If you're ready for that level of confidence, then head to btcmentor.io and book a call with us today. Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is I've never seen a capitalist economy or a communist economy. It's always a hybrid economy and a degree of socialism. sometimes it's socialism for the poor other times it's socialism for the rich and we have these different models

but I've never seen a free market and the if you look at if you look at for example let's say gold we know the limitations and Bitcoin addresses those limitations but you had gold

you then had you know the a shit coin that was created on top of it called the pound and then they rinse the pound and then they created a new node in the federal reserve and then they created a new share coin called the dollar totally agree that's that city that's that city that's that city that's that city that's city that but if you look at that gold just centralized into fewer and fewer central banks and nodes in the end so so so so you came to the same thing that i can't came to if bitcoin centralizes and this other thing doesn't happen it will fail it or or

And when you say fail, for a bunch of bitcoins, they will feel rich inside the new system of control until the surveillance state makes them not rich too. So in that, you said just like gold did. But what you also said, and this is where it's so important, we don't have a mental model for the free market. Every ism that you just said, communism, socialism and everything else, is a construct from the control system. and all our books tell us, and everything we've ever read in the past, tell us which side we're right on while making the control system stronger. It exploits us over and over and over again, and why we go to war, why we believe it's those people and those people

and why we constantly do this, and nothing changes at the top, which you explore really well, is because we've never actually had a global free market. We've never had something decentralized and secure that imposes, not might impose, imposes discipline that decides. Now, the only caveat isn't how we think about this. The only caveat is it stays decentralized and secure. So now you spend all your time, how do I make sure it stays decentralized and secure? How do I make sure I invest in privacy tech?

How do I make sure that I'm helping people get it? to their agency inside that system. Because it's the only thing that, and then even though we've never had a mental model to describe what I'm saying, that's, that is if you just carried what a free market would look like, that is a world you live in.

Yeah. I guess, yeah, the, you know, the closest to a free market that I've ever lived in is when I was full Bitcoin in self-custody. I moved to an island. I built a castle. I stay, you know, and that's the closest.

But I still have a degree of social contract that the government's going to keep the island safe. Totally. And there's still a certain degree of, you know, I need to make sure that the farmers are working and that the energy comes into the island. And there's a bunch of things that can really mess up my free market. But, you know, and I guess what, the first thing I think is we're framing for now. is that either way, whether I'm right or Jeff Booth is right, Bitcoin still succeeds, right?

It's just we're talking about the degree of success it will have. But there is a real thing that we need to be aware of that either, you know, if I've understood Jeff Booth's forecast right, we all end up there or we don't, you know, but we all need to have a core community using Bitcoin the way it was designed. And investing in all the things that, you know, keep it what Jeff Bruth was just talking about. And, you know, I guess you have a mental model that the superior will win and everyone will end up over there. I'm just a minority will end up over there and it will still be fine anyway.

Yeah. So my mental model isn't in time people will do this because it gives them better benefits. time. But what you described is your castle on the island and everything else is if your castle on the island and you know this, it relies on a central control structure that gets worse and worse and worse. You're not safe with the castle on the island is what you're saying. And it's true. Yeah. And the point to, and you have to look at every through every other model of humanity, right? The free market cannot be exploitative because you choose what gives you more value. And the entrepreneur who solves more value wins, you win and society wins and prices fall.

It cannot. It's impossible. There's no way to create monopolies. There's no way to create your idea of communism or socialism, which are constructs that aren't the free market. Right. Capitalism is not today capitalism. It's crony capitalism that's an exploitation of that same thing with a belief system of a whole bunch of people that think it's the opposite. Right. And so we've always lived in a zero-sum game where you got richer, not by operating in the free market, by exploiting somebody else, right, living in a zero-sum game. They had to get poorer for you to get richer. We took gold, we took Greenland, we took other things. We take countries, we put them in slavery. We put, we're at the top.

And we're so used to that zero-sum game that it seems normal for us. And all our history books are inside that zero-sum game. And it looks, and it feels like we're the good guys because we're the capitalists when it's really just a zero-sum game. Right. And, I'm not sure. like even the whole thing of capitalism being good. Like when I look at the history of capitalism,

most people think of Adam Smith and the wealth of nations. But prior to Adam Smith and the wealth of nations, there was a whole, you know, dark ages in Europe and a golden age of Islam and massive amounts of study into the importance of, you know, the original invisible hand was actually God. It was just changed into a concept. of the free market. And originally the studies before that,

they had the concept of ethics and, you know, what products are harmful to society. And if you look at today, you know, whether it's pornography, prostitution through only fans, gambling, degeneracy, you know,

things that are harmful to the body, all these different things. I think I'm not sure that free market is a, is a, is a reality. It's taken out the concept of ethics and faith. So it's so interesting that you, and I mean this in a very serious way. And this was why this conversation go deeper and deeper and deeper.

Because I see your genius in helping people understand this and what it looks like. But then I see, then I see what would the world look like if it was exploitative at that level, right? And you were in it. all the monopolies were controlling what you thought. I wrote in my book, I watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your, sorry, I watch your words, watch your thoughts, they become your words, watch your words, they become your actions,

watch your actions, they become your character, watch your character, they become your destiny. But what about what influences your thoughts? Above that. And so inside what you're describing right now, influencing your thoughts, things that are making the world worse and worse and worse. All of the things you just mentioned, food, production, medical, pornography, all of these things,

controlled by the same structure at the top. And you just mentioned that that's inside capitalism, and it's not. The whole thing is based on theft, and it would look exactly like you think it looks like from that system. It would have to be. It would have to. It would get worse and worse and worse. So somebody as brilliant as you in this thing, as genius as you, still pulls that system into what a different system would operate like. And that's the trap.

It's so hard to actually pull ourselves out of that system because it's capturing our thoughts and attention. It's capturing our mind from the same thing. And we think we look at everybody else inside this system and we think they're crazy and they think we're crazy. and they think we're crazy, right? And the question comes, if everybody else believes their reality from that same system, then it must be infecting me too.

Where? What does that look like? Where do I actually remove? Where do I step out and stop moving more of my time into that? And what we just described here is why you just know how crazy early we are. Like crazy early. Now that creates two things.

it's too big to deal with. I just put up a wall and I'm going to just live my life in the same thing and go to sleep and night and live in the fear porn. Or I'm going to do something about it and I'm going to create value and I'm going to live in an optimistic world. And each person finds that time in their own time. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a really key thing.

I think the algorithm has driven people to a world where they're fully distracted with things that aren't going to help them and that they can't control. And that's becoming more and more prevalent. And, you know, the more time that people can spend in that, right, it starts with me, then I influence my family and then my family needs a community around me. And what location do I need to be in in order to optimize that? and what's the tools that I need around me in order to have the sovereignty where we can defend against all the things that could be harmful for myself, my community and my family.

And if people spend their time there, they're going to be okay. But most people aren't spending their time there. So the message is heard. If I may, I want to just throw an idea in there because I'm absolutely loving, you have no idea how much I'm loving this conversation, especially because I came to Bitcoin as an ANCAP beforehand, not after the fact. And one of the things that I think is really key to the distinction in why Jeff is putting it as a winner take-all and it enforces the rules there. And where it's coming from is that it's kind of this idea, I'll see if I can illustrate it correctly here,

is that if Bitcoin remains decentralized and secure and it's held in self-custody and it's private as well too there, then that means that any interaction, any transfer of Bitcoin between people has to be voluntary. Right. And so the ethics and morality of voluntary consenting exchange is baked into the base of the protocol. There's no longer a choice to act in a moral or ethical way. You have to because you cannot take it from them. And the net consequences of that, which has never existed in human history before, is phenomenal in the sense. Because when you have real wealth creation, the reason, like all value is subjective.

We all know our Australian economics. We're all good there. All value is subjective. So wealth creation results from when both parties have a perceived increase in in value. And the only way that you would ever exchange your Bitcoin with those conditions met is because you sought an increase in value and they sought increase in value. And so it takes consensual value exchange and wealth creation and bakes it into the base protocol where it's no longer about whether you choose to act in a good and moral way. It's literally enforcing kind of

cooperative ethics on the population at large. And Nathan, if you just carry that forward, that's why it's such a risk to the existing control system, no matter where that control system exists. And what we have to recognize is our time within that system. And if we're spending in that system and we're doing everything in that system, we are the control system. And so it's, as hard as that it was, it's so harsh. But the mental model that you're, what you just described there is also true. Right. And we each in it now it only comes down to agency. It literally comes down to agency. And so I watch even in Bitcoin, I watch people, um, Let's say your amount of time in a day, right?

Let's call it you have 14 hours in your day. And I watch people spend the majority of those 14 hours inside the other system feeding the energy feeding the beast of the algorithm. When and and then I watch other people just do something, move their time. And the people that have moved their time and you're one of them, right? and others that are, those nodes that have moved their time are providing value to other people. Now, you could do that any way,

you don't need to wait for me to do something. You could provide value to somebody else. You could start a meetup group in your own region. You can tell your local store to, hey, if you accept Bitcoin, I'll start paying a Bitcoin. You can start, and then next store and next door. And I'm watching people do this around the world, and they're creating crazy value,

and their lives are expanding. And then I'm watching most people, to Simon's point, a stuck in algorithm. And both choices are available to both people, or any single person, the minute. And so people often ask me, well, why do you feel so confident? Why do you feel just like Simon?

I know this is going to be true. Because I'm not just influencing, I'm both being a part of the world I want to see and influencing the direction of the world I want to see with my most valuable thing, my time. why would I spend my time in doing anything opposite? Simon? Yeah, so I think I'll push back slightly in that I'm not sure maths and code fixes everything

because you can have Bitcoin as it's designed. And somebody, if you put a bunch of Bitcoiners in one environment and another environment, some of them will use the mass and code, build a community, and uphold a social contract. In another environment, they'll put a gun to you, they'll steal your Bitcoin and they'll figure out how to get your private key. And so it can be confiscated because the mass and code doesn't enforce, why would we do that? And so historically how that's been solved is the source. smaller the community, the more accountability to your fellow community. Or you believe you're going to burn and die in hell if you do that.

So you don't do that. You know, and so to me, the free market means that you can just steal someone's Bitcoin and murder them. Can I carry on to that? Because I think it's important. I think a lot of people are stuck there. So it's worth describing there. And I think you're right to or a bunch of this.

But what it does is it imposes a cost to the attacker that is way higher cost today. Because the person could just say, fuck off. They could be murdered, right? But they could say fuck off. The more and more they, in privacy preserving, the more and more they won't know. Like try to find Satoshi today. Right. So the more power they have in privacy and the more,

and that's going to expand faster and faster. faster and it incents an honest network. So all of the things you just described are fear capitalizing on our fear and why we don't want to move there is because the world we've always lived in, inhabited, always was a zero-signed game and that's how you attacked it, right? It always did. It did exactly what you've said and people stayed stuck because they didn't want to be attacked or stayed hidden or but this. Yeah, which is why they put their gold in a bank in the first place. Exactly. Exactly. But this is a different protocol. It's not. gold in a bank. It's words inside your head. It's in its private words inside your head. And

beyond that, it's privacy in this that extends that technology stack, that protocol stack, to something we've never seen. So because we've never seen it and we're a part of this thing we've never seen, it would be hard to imagine that new thing imposing that. But that's what it does impose over time. Now, I'm not saying there's not there's not wrench attacks. I'm not saying that there are anything else. But even those things that will happen on the way through, it doesn't change Bitcoin at all. Still imposes this and more and more people, more and more people that end up having that will move to more privacy. Yeah. But this is what I think the counterforce is that while there's an amazing world of self-custody

and privacy and all the benefits that come from that, the vast majority of people will say, I'm absolutely petrified of losing my key or being ransomed or hacked. And so therefore, BlackRock, you take care of it for me, please. So, and here's the point, and I'd love to dig deeper here. And for you too, Simon, because, and I say this, because you're so genius in this, some of the stuff that you're saying scares people into that. Right. Because they feel like they have no ability, because the power structure,

is so strong because they give it power and it feels like and it matches their perspective of reality today and and and and your message that is that is super important isn't allowing them to move right it might be might be allowing someone to move because they want to yell at the same system like you're essentially if their level of consciousness is angry they will find anger right and you'll act you'll activate them but hopefully is stronger than fear. And if we can, it's hard for any one person to do this, but if more and more people are a path to the abundance, our path to be able to, here's how you act. I know you say to self-custody,

and that's critical, but here's other things you can do to be a part of another node in the network and move your time. You'll anchor your whole message and you'll expand your message. to give the path to all of the people that are attracted to it. Yeah, and I think there's an element of team effort here, and that's why I think we're a good team here. Because, you know, I have an insane obsession. And I don't know if you've ever heard my story, but when my father lost his entire wealth in the financial crisis,

in the dot-com boom and bust, he asked me a question when I was 20 years old. And that question was, I've got no idea what happened to my money. I worked my entire life. Like I got to a self-made millionaire. And now I log into my account and there's nothing there. And I don't know who got my money or how it happened. And I set my challenge to answer that question.

And so I can't stop answering that question. But it's very dark when you get the answer. And Bitcoin took me out of the darkness because I said, look, I can't take down the banking system. I can't change the politicians. I can't build on top of this. Here's all the regulations. Here's all the things. Here's all the barriers.

And everyone that I've seen that even created peer-to-peer lending, they ended up just becoming a bank and borrowing from a bunch of fund managers and doing the same thing. But then there was that, you know, understanding the technology construct of Bitcoin. And so you're right. You know, you take your hat off. And you recognize that there's this solution. We need to advocate. We need to invest. We need to nurture. And I, you know, I, it's, it's about the combination that. And when you're, when you're ready for that, go listen to Jeff Booth.

Because he is living in that world. And I think it's working for him. But I can't get out of obsessing over what, what's going on in this world. Yeah. So it's interesting your part because my wife, my wife said. How can you know how bad this is, or the same as you, right? How are you to investigate this and then I'm a move to another level to pay no attention to it because you can't do anything in it. And I said, when we, young kids, we plan for our escape from a house in the fire, right? Even though we're not expecting the fire, the house to burn down, right? So I know what it could look like. and I could spend, and I know what it does,

and I know that what happened to, just like you, once you chase that down to the sand, and for me too, I went through almost this anger or whatever, and a whole bunch of these other, like, are you kidding? Like this is the, this is, and you think about the death and destruction of it, and that they,

what could be versus what is in the world. And you, and it wants to keep you. there. And I understand it very well because I wanted to keep me there. And I tell the story often that I was on all these boards in the existing financial industrial complex and that, in that world, talking about Bitcoin as an escape, realizing, and it was like, it was like somebody punched me. Like in my own cognitive incidence and everybody's celebrating me and Bitcoin as, as I, I was not congruent to know who I was.

Right. And I felt like, and such a fraud or the, how could I say this and know this and have a hedge against the system I'm making stronger? Right. And that thing in me created, that's why we created EODath capital. Right.

So that, and we're not perfect. We've invested in it. We're going to make mistakes. We're going to do things. I'm going to advance. And, and I'll continue to make,

mistakes, but the change in me that I couldn't see this world from the other viewpoint makes me understand why others can't too, because they're still stuck in the, they're still stuck in the exhaust of the other system. And it doesn't make me better. It doesn't make me worse. It doesn't make it just, it's such a, such a hard thing to go through, especially when you're, because I'm exactly like you. I went, I followed that down. watched what it did to people in my family. I watched what it did to my parents. Watched what I did to other. And those were the winners. What about the people in Africa? What about the people in Palestine? What about the people that are the losers of that?

And I was a part of it, right? And your construct in that. And so now when I said agency, it's our agency. Right? And once you know, once you know, something, now do you activate to do something about it? Yeah. I want to, I mean, I want to, if I may, Simon, just want to jump in and please I'll get your response as well too, but on that note of what do we do about it, I'd love to know, because we basically were looking at decentralization, secure, and privacy. And so, Simon, please, I do want your response, but also if you could touch on, what are the threats or risk for decentralization and what should people do to actually help enforce it or improve it? Yeah, I'll answer that. And then I'd like to ask, um, move the conversation

in a direction that I think Jeff's got some experience in as well. Let's do it. Well, you know, anything that centralizes. So one development team, you know, you should have competing development teams. You know, one implementation on those. You should have competing implementations on those. An ETF is just issuing you an IOU. You don't have any Bitcoin.

in anything that a treasury company, a shit coin, an alternative, a crypto coin, anything that's not Bitcoin in self-custody is a centralizing force. A miner that goes, if all the miners go into one country, we had everyone in China predominantly and now, you know, 40% went to America. If they all become public companies, that's another centralizing force. You need private versus public. You need geographical diversity. You need sanctioned countries and non-sanctioned countries mining.

You need countries that hate each other mining. I believe that if multipolarity and competing fiat currencies creates a better environment for Bitcoin. And so at every layer, you've got developers, you've got nodes, you've got mining, you've got the companies that become influential. and then you've got the things that are built on top. These are all a constant open source boardroom of spectrum that we are either getting more centralized or more decentralized,

but as long as they all don't go centralized, we've still got Bitcoin. And we always need to attack that spectrum. One thing I wanted to discuss with you, Jeff, is something I've went through, I went through. You've probably been through this journey in Venture, capital as well, is you go through this phase where you want to invest in things that make Bitcoin better and further the mission of what you're trying to do. And then suddenly you get into the

reality of now I'm dealing with humans that make bad decisions. Now I've got counterparty risk. Now I've got someone that needs venture capital funding. Now Silicon Valley can change the mission. now I've got somebody that wants to go public and now they need finance from the Tradfai players now they need to work with a bank and then you go through and then they need licenses and then you've got global licenses or you got a company that can get hacked

and you end up going through and this is the journey that I've been through I look at my portfolio of over 100 different investments that I made and I look through them all and just say boy do I wish that was Bitcoin and self-custody, every time I have to pick up a call or emails someone or do something else. And you go through this phase where, do you know what, I can't be bothered to make another

investment, but I have to because I really want to support the next phase. But it comes with all these hassles because Bitcoin and self-custody is, I don't have to deal with any of those problems. Yeah. So you were, what I would say is your version of that, you were earlier in Bitcoin than I was. and your version of that, Bitcoin couldn't move into a payment rail at that time, couldn't about privacy, it couldn't be the protocol stack I'm describing. So that meant if you were on top of it at that time, you were just either centralizing Bitcoin

or part of the financial regulation that would have to look like that. I came in at a different time, and I knew all of these things would. happen and I look at Bitcoin as my hurdle rate and I would never invest in anything in Bitcoin unless I could beat my hurdle rate and the only way to beat my hurdle rate is to acquire more Bitcoin by doing doing that. I'm not saying there isn't risk of venture investment or person changing their mind or doing a bad job or execution. But my only way it's functionally is to is to accrue more of Bitcoin and on the balance sheet. And if you said tail risk of a government attacking that, remove the tail risk from that as much is as best as you can. And the only way to do

that is provide value in Bitcoin terms over what's there. Now, they all won't work. But I actually cannot believe the growth rate, how many of the companies are already profitable in Bitcoin terms by extending the protocol and what that looks like. So what I think we're seeing is early stages of a new financial economy by acquiring more Bitcoin by providing value in the free market. And I can't tell you, some are going to blow up, some are not. But I'm so far, far out of 17, 18 investments in seed and in Series A, nothing has failed. I think, and a bunch of these companies are already profitable growing extraordinarily quickly.

Some of the numbers would blow your mind and they couldn't be those numbers unless people were paying in Bitcoin and moving this. Now, some of it too is unstable coins, but these companies are Bitcoin companies. And some of these are that even if somebody wants to pay. here, they have the rails to do it, to change over over time. And this is going to be, and I can, I'm watching it with most people in the financial complex, right, trying to, and not just financial, you should see some of the things I see at all different levels, government, three letter agencies, trying to, everything, come, come at, come at

this. I have a view that, and I'm, and I'm, that is very different than this. This is a protocol imposing this. This is what I'm doing, period. I can see the attack vectors. I can see those that are trying to attack, those that are trying to attack that don't know they're trying to attack.

They're just trying to make more money. And I'm watching it all play out, but it doesn't matter because I know what I'm doing. And each of these things is building more adoption and more roads and more, and more easier on ramps and everything else. And it's not just us. It's other people, open source community, 1031,

other Bitcoin companies that are all doing the same thing. Nathan, BTC sessions, Alex Gladstein, like the amount of people all over the world that are adding their voices to this network. It's just, it's exploding. And then you go to these circular economies and you see they're buying local foods and it looks so much different than the paradigm of the control structure, and it's getting easier and easier and easier. Yeah.

But I do totally understand because if I was in your paradigm when you were investing, the protocol wasn't there yet. Yeah. There's a degree of, again, this is where I think it comes back into the more spiritual conversation of something else other than the free market. Maybe this is encapsulated in the free market. When I discovered Bitcoin, it meant so much to me. And I was like, well, I just want people in Africa to be able to use Bitcoin.

Who's helping that? And so I found Elizabeth Rosiella and she was helping that. And so what are you doing? And she told me about BitPesa. So I invested. And then I kept saying, well, I want that in India. I want that everywhere. And that was kind of my original thing.

But then, you know, it got a bit more professionalized. We had a, we allowed other investors in. And then we had responsibilities and fiduciary duties. And then it got to the inevitable conversation that, well, I could have invested in Bitcoin. So are you outperforming Bitcoin? And I'm like, well, yeah, and that's why I kind of want to get back to where I am right now. Because I could imagine myself reinvesting in some of these projects that you're talking about. but it would have to be from the altruistic way.

But actually, yeah, that's my point with you. I don't do it because it's just a gift. I would probably, with my own money, I would do that no matter what, right? Because I wanted to expand this. I'd do the same thing you were doing and everything else, and it would be altruistic. In fact, coming on this podcast, it's my time, right? I'm doing it because I want to give back to the community. And that time is important.

But it is not altruistic. And all the LPs in our fund know our thesis. And we are like resolute in our thesis. We and we are going to outperform Bitcoin by providing value in the free market. Or we're not, or you shouldn't invest in our fund. And every single thing I think through that and the same thing. And now where would the opportunity exist, right? You know how monopolies get broken.

They get broken from the bottom up. So now all of these people that are, building onto this technology is on a protocol stack. You can now Bitcoin, Noster, Lightning, Fetamint, and you can create an entire community without building one piece of code by plugging into other people's great work and extending it.

And so it's going faster and faster and faster and it's costing less and less and less. And so why these companies are turning profitable really quickly in Bitcoin terms is because the cost gone, right? They're not, and I know that didn't exist before, so it'd be hard to see. You're making it, but it exists now and it's moving at a crazy rate. Yeah. The bit that out of everything you said that really stood out to me and my mental map was when you said, you know, think about these, these network of nodes that we're building banks.

And immediately that just stood out to me. Yeah, you know, people need to understand because I tried to build a bank. So, you know, if we need to build this network of banks, and that's what we are, essentially, this decentralized network of banks. And the word is a stupid word, given what we're doing. It makes sense to people. You know, and we need to see every node as contributing to this decentralized bank. And let's talk about some of the risks of cashew, or sorry, of cashew of of fetament or or or or or e-cash generally let's say what this can i just say i'm not i'm not familiar with these projects i'm not like if anyone's watching it like this is jeff saying i haven't done any due diligence on it so it's not an enforcement but i'm learning in real time so

so uh going back to how finney he talked about what banks would look like and i think and he talked about what banks would mince. Essentially, e-cash mints would look like on top of Bitcoin. One problem with e-cash at the time, it was invented before Bitcoin is crazy attack-proof cypherpunk technology, but it only centralized. What Fetamint did is created a federated e-cash that essentially allows, let's say it's the three of us or five people. You were able to create nodes, guardians, they call them guardians, that would act as

protection against the next layer. So they would be eCash, but you would put in Bitcoin that would be converted to E-Cash, that would give complete privacy. And now where's the risk factor? There's a couple, right? What if those nodes got found?

What if those nodes conspired against you? and everybody operating on top of that is completely private. None of the nodes can see the transactions. Fetty is the company or Fed a Mint is a protocol. Can't see the transactions. It's completely private. And communications are private on top of it as well. But the risk is what about those five nodes?

Or if you had in a cashew mint, it's one node, right? They could rug pull you. Right? Or the five nodes could get it together and rug pull you. Another risk is, though, if they're not going to rug pull you, but they're totally, they're really great nodes. What stops if everything's centralized

and there's only one fetament or one bank, then all of those people would eventually be found as money transmitters from the surveillance state, right? And so it provided huge risk. So now how do you avoid those risks? How do you create those risks?

All of those nodes have to be private, right? And so they can't conspire against you. You can create your own with your friends or family and everything else. And if you created a family one, five people, three of five multi-sig in this, anybody on top of your family, they're not in an AI world that you know it's your family. Right. So no way to, and you know specifically it's them if you want to talk to them. You also know anyone they add to it is completely private communications and everything else. And so now being able to set those up at scale in a privacy preserving way allows every single person to take privacy.

Like you could create one literally in five minutes right now on FETI. If you don't want to use FETI, you could go to FETA and everything else, but you could create as open source. You could create one that essentially your bank. You would not want to tell everybody it's yours or your bank. but you couldn't control it if you use the ones because how it sets up as a whole bunch of anonymous private users that are also OG Cardians and Bitcoin that don't know each other that'll put you and four of those together so you couldn't Rugpole. And so the more of these there are, imagine there's 10.

Imagine there's 100. Imagine there's thousands, hundreds of thousands. Every single one that is created creates almost another layer of nodes to the Bitcoin ecosystem, but in private, operating in complete privacy. These things inside the Federation, it's all e-cash. It doesn't have the fees because it's all e-cash. Gateway to, and that's where I say you can put things together, gateway to enough. other federation moves through lightning, gateway to anything in the physical community and everything

else moves through lightning. And you wouldn't know the difference. It just operates. It's just, it's become, it's become my primary wallet and one of my primary communication devices for people that are close to me because it needs to be in a world that's centralizing faster and faster over here. I need to get out and I need to protect more and more what's happening. And if I'm not mistaken, Jeff, too, just for Fetty in particular, the chat is powered by Matrix in the background and the ID is powered by Noster as well, too. So you got that layer of protection on top of it. And again, what Simon's hearing for the first time, because he's not inside that, right, is, and I'd love to get you more inside. And that's not just Ferry.

There's a whole bunch of privacy tech and a whole bunch of different paths to be able to what we're talking about. And there's more and more all the time. What is it what I'm talking about though is the resolve to the problem that exists because of what you talk about that had to exist to prevent what you talk about. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we've given quite a lot. What have you got anything else you wanted to go through?

I will. Yeah, there's one more thing I'll just throw in it. It was nice to be at the end on Faddy there because the last thing I wanted to end with, of course, is that common call to action. What advice do you have for people? How can they protect themselves? And particularly, we talked a lot about privacy. So Simon, I'll start with you and then Jeff will go to you. If there's basically anything that you want to make sure that you're imparting on the audience,

that like go do this today or check out this tool or something that you think would be beneficial for all of us themselves and the Bitcoin network. Yeah, I think I spend a lot of time on X and I've got an Oster account, but I still end up where the network effect is. At some point, we are building our social credit score. I'm very aware that I am. I know what I'm, you know, I know this is going to come back to, bite me in a big way.

So we need to figure out how we're going to manage that transition because it's the centralized tech is is becoming incredibly problematic. You know, so, you know, I think the big, the big thing for me is that I wish I could believe that everyone ends up here. But I still believe that it's going to be a few and then we're going to be in a hybrid system. And one of the things that's most painful for me is it's a journey I'm going through and maybe, you know, to know that I'm going to be fine because I prepared for this, but the vast majority aren't. It gives me a bit of pain. And I know that gives really bad ideologies like communism and all sorts of crazy, stupid things about distribution of wealth and things like that.

But it's an internal battle that I'm going through. And so, you know, I really, really want as many people to just be owning a bit more Bitcoin and self-custody every single month, get off zero, and just go further and further out and just continue to grow that journey. Because wherever I go and I spend a lot of time with the people that have a lot of questions, it's a lack of solutions that is the big problem that people are experiencing right now. And so Bitcoin as self-custody has always been like my, this, you know, we have to become more sovereign. And this is a thing that worked for me and it was work for many other people.

And we need more and more people to do it. And so just please, you know, own more Bitcoin this month than the previous month. Tune out from the price. and just recognize that the worse the Bitcoin to gold price gets or the Bitcoin to dollar price gets, then the more time you're buying yourself to prepare. Now, I'm fully prepared, and many people I know are fully prepared. But if you're not fully prepared, then the longer the time frame you have to prepare into this, the better off you're going to be.

Jeff? Yeah, I think Salmon does a really good job in exposing that and why, you need to be in self-custody. And I think that, so I'd just add on to that, you can move more of your time when you decide to move more of your time. And when you move more of your time, when you start spending in it, when you start to see what's happening in these, as you move more of your time and create value in that more of your time, you'll be amazed at what happens to your time. Beautiful. I do just want to add quickly, Simon, maybe on a podcast, maybe at a pub. I'd love to have a pint and talk more about the things that are bothering you because I think

I got some white pills that might be able to at least offer a little optimism. Okay. All right. Simon, tell everybody where they can follow you and then Jeff the same. Yeah, I spend too much time on X, but that's where I do most of my content. And then every week on YouTube, I do Simon Dixon Live, where I do this week in Bitcoin and Tech, this week in macroeconomics, and this week in geopolitics. And all I do is follow monetary flows to show how everything that they're telling you.

you is a lie. And just when I follow the money, it tends to give you about a year ahead of what actually happens. Jeff? I'm rebuilding the website right now and partially the reason I'm rebuilding my website, jeffbooth.ca, is just tighter message here and where people can find me. So I've left most of the social media that most people are on and I'm on Noster. 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.com for premium one-on-one experience with my team of Bitcoin experts to ensure you get it right the first time. Don't wait, secure your Bitcoin future today. Hit the link in the show notes or scan the QR code on the screen. If you enjoyed this episode with Simon and Jeff, please do like and subscribe. It really does help out and check out the previous episodes with either guests by clicking above.