BTC Sessions - Major Coinbase HACK & Cover-Up EXPOSED—Worse Than You Think | Matt Hill, Brian De Mint, Ant

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

A major Coinbase hack & cover-up has just been exposed, and it’s worse than you think. Matt Hill, Brian De Mint, and Ant join BTC Sessions to break down what really happened—and why it could shake trust in the crypto space.FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS:https://x.com/_MattHill_https://x.com/BrianDeMinthttps://x.com/2140dataFOLLOW 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 Coinbase data breach could be worse than we originally thought. Officially, they do admit that up to 1 million users had their sensitive personal information compromised, names, addresses, financial details. And it wasn't a technical hack. It was an inside job. Coinbase employees were bribed handing criminals direct access to that treasure trove of data. But now some customers are coming forward suggesting the real number of people affected could be much higher. And if you listen closely to CEO Brian Armstrong's recent statements, there is something off in the language, we'll say. A careful choice of words that makes you wonder is Coinbase hiding how bad it actually is. This isn't just a minor slip-up, nor is this type of thing limited to Coinbase users.

It is a symptom of a broken system where KYC surveillance laws force companies to hoard your personal data, turning it into a ticking time bomb for both your financial security and your personal safety. So how deep does the breach really go? And how do you build the skills to take back control of your own data and privacy? Today on the show, we have Matt Hill, CEO of Start9 Labs, making sovereign computing accessible to the masses. Brian DeMint, author of Parallel, the Bitcoin Social Layer and Head of Marketing at Orange Pill App,

and Ant the creator of Time Chain Stats, a one-stop shop for all your Bitcoin data metrics. So stick around. Our panel is going to discuss this and much more today. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your bullish session. All right, let's welcome to the stage. Matt Hill. Oh, he was in and then he's out. Matt Hill, Brian DeMitt, and aunt gentlemen. Thank you so much for being here. How's everybody doing?

Doing great. All good. Excellent, man. So good. Awesome. Awesome. And you, you're doing good, man? Doing great. Thank you. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Jens, I'm going to tee us up with a little bit of conversation to get ourselves kicking here. I just, again, I'm sure you guys have all heard about the the Coinbase thing. I'll get us off to the side here. But again, basically, Coinbase employees bribed to give away personal data of customers. It's looking like it could cost Coinbase in the realm of $400 million. And a lot of it is in the realm of fishing attacks and people being social engineered into giving up their data because they knew that they were Coinbase. customers and I want to point out well let's actually first give a quick little listen to Brian Armstrong himself just not the whole thing but a little bit of

what he had to say so let's take a listen here hey everyone I want to make you aware of a disturbing email that we received recently at Coinbase it was a ransom note demanding twenty million dollars in Bitcoin in exchange for these attackers not releasing some information they claim to have obtained on our customers Now, we like to do things transparently here at Coinbase, and so I'm going to respond publicly to these attackers by saying, no. We are not going to pay your ransom. In fact, I have a few next steps in mind that I'm going to share at the end of this video.

But for the rest of you watching, wondering what happened, we did an investigation here, and these attackers have been approaching our overseas customer support agents, looking for a weak link, someone who would accept a bribe in exchange for sharing some customer information with them. Now, our support tools have limited access to customer information. information. There was no passwords or private keys or funds accessed as part of this. But customer support agents do have access to personal information like name, data, birth, address, etc. And attackers still want access to this information because it allows them to conduct social engineering attacks where they can call our customers impersonating Coinbase customer support and try to trick them into sending their funds to the attacker. Unfortunately, they were able to find a few

bad apples. Our systems are designed to mitigate the impact of something like this. So less than 1% of our monthly transacting users had their records accessed. But this is still unacceptable. And I want to tell you what we're doing about it. So first, First, any customers that were socially engineered as a result of this incident, we're going to reimburse them. There's more details on our website, on our blog posts, about the reimbursement process. You can read more there. Any customers who have been impacted by this or have been notified at this point. Number two, we're hardening our systems around customer support to make something like this much more difficult in the future.

And third, we're actually relocating some of our customer support operations as a result of this. But the last step is maybe the most important, which is that instead of paying this $20 million ransom, we're turning it around. We're putting out a $20 million award for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of these attackers. So I'll stop it there. And just really quick, I'm going to show just a couple people that have been victims of this. This guy here, QW, was likely the victim of this data breach, got a number of calls from scammers pretending to be Coinbase. The scam roughly goes like this. And this is just one example.

Is it likely this data could be floating around multiple people. They text or call you saying that your Coinbase, that your Coinbase, account got compromised. They pretend to do a bunch of personal info verification. They ask you to withdraw your coins to self-custody. They help you set up a Coinbase wallet by giving you a seed phrase. And then once you made the transfer, they take all your coins since they also have a copy of said seed phrase. We also have Tomer here saying Coinbase claims to have over 100 million customers. So this data leak could include over a million people. No idea if it's from the leak, but I'm getting text messages and calls from scammers who know my name and email address too,

claiming to be from Coinbase. And the more interesting one that I want to show here from Julian here, I'm calling bullshit on it. It was just 1% of customer. As I posted a threat about this last week, have I identified 25 plus other people who have been a part of this too. It looks like basically anyone who set up a Coinbase account five plus years ago. And he said, again, in the language, 1% of monthly.

transacting users. And he does point out that this technically, if you're looking at the language, could be, so this could apply just to people that have logged in and transact in the past 60 days. Outside of that, we don't know exactly what the metric could be. So there's some funky language going on there as well. And I guess in general, the feel here for me is Evan sums it up nicely. KYC is the illicit activity. So in general, Matt, I'm going to toss it to you first. I mean, what are your thoughts in and around the Coinbase data breach? Yeah, go ahead, man.

I mean, I don't have a lot of specifics to say about this particular breach, but I'm on record at least a dozen times in the last 12 months and then countless before that even of just saying that this is inevitable, this is just another Friday. I don't consider this to be some big, some big event. This is really just to be expected. Any database that is storing valuable information of any meaningful number of customers is eventually going to be breached. These databases are ultimately secured by people, right? Cybersecurity. is all about layers. You just put more and more layers in front of the valuable or attractive information. But ultimately, these layers must be capable of being traversed by humans,

otherwise they are useless. And so breaching any database, whether it's Coinbase, Target, Equifax, or the U.S. government's, you know, agencies, the key to effectively accessing these databases is simply identifying the people who have that access and socially engineering them, or just bribing, threatening, blackmailing them, right? And so, you know, I put out a statement about this, and it's basically, you know, my summation of it is, you know, obviously sarcasm. I said, It's a good thing only overseas support agents are capable of being bribed, blackmailed, and threatened. Can you imagine if VPs, executives, and DevOps engineers were also susceptible to such attacks? Coinbase and other high-value data stores would be extremely vulnerable.

This is my way of saying that, you know, this is child's play. This is nothing compared to what's going to happen, not only to Coinbase, but to other high-profile third-party custodians and data stores. If you are storing customer data en masse and that data has any value whatsoever, you're going to get breached because eventually the person who has the keys is going to get, it's going to get had one way or another. People are not perfect. Yeah, I fully agree there. Brian, I want to get your take on this as well. I mean, I imagine you've seen the news. I imagine you know a lot of Bitcoiners, obviously. know the Bitcoin social layer. Do you personally know anybody affected? Are you getting texts? Like, what's what's your read on this? Yeah. I mean, when I got into when I got into Bitcoin, uh, I think my first bitcoins were purchased through Coinbase. I'm I was a coin base customer. I don't currently hold any funds there by the grace of God. But so my my first,

my first thing that I thought of was, you know, that's that's actually kind of scary because that's not just your so what they steal your Bitcoin. That's that. sucks. That's a big deal. If it's your your physical address where you live, now you're not just taking on the burden of your coins being lost. You're physically endangering your family perhaps or they're physically endangering your family. So I like I said, the great thing was this was so long ago. It was actually an old address. It was an address I lived out years ago. So I wasn't concerned for the, you know, for my family's sake in that sense. But that there's probably lots of users of Coinbase who their families are potentially at risk.

because it's not even as think about how easy it would be if somebody does show up to your house and want to get funds off of your Coinbase account. It's not like your your private, your seed phrase or something like that you can hide. They know that you have a Coinbase account. They can have you open the app with a gun to your head and say, scan your face and give me your coins, right? Like there's all sorts of security layers that we as Bitcoiners can do in the event of a $5 wrench attack for non-coin base held Bitcoin.

But we can't do that with Coinbase. If somebody forces you to open your Coinbase app on your phone, you're in danger. Your family's in danger of that. Now, one of the big glaring things here is that they said that their people got bribed. What a fault in their security method that they didn't have secret shoppers of their own employees that were going around. Part of their security protocol should be having fake people trying to bribe their team members that would have any kind of customer interface. This should have been something that was preemptively done by Coinbase saying we're one of our security weaknesses is people getting bribed if they have access to any kind of user information. They should have somebody on their security team acting as bribing you know, acting as somebody that's trying to bribe team members.

This would serve two purposes. It would catch the bad actors and it would also put it out there that team members would realize if somebody calls me and tries to bribe me. This is just part of our security protocol. I should disregard that person. So actual bribes coming in would have been disregarded as well. And then the last thing I would say here is they said, you know, just the timing of this, you know, I think I know it's been brought up. I think you brought up on your show yesterday. But Coinbase added the S&P 500 and then days later this happens.

Clearly this is something they knew about. They were waiting to release this information. Like I said, I was a point-based customer. So my information, my phone number is still with them. I'm looking at my phone right now. I have a text dating back to April 4th where it says, hey, we're Coinbase, please do X, Y, and Z. So that was well over a month ago. I was going to get texts about this.

They knew about this. This is something that was front and center. They were keenly aware. They got out of the SB 500 and now they're doing it. So for them to say it's only 1%. Your word means nothing now, Brian Armstrong, because you've been proven to not tell the whole truth about this. You're not truthful on the timing.

you're not truthful in the quantity or the scale of it. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you also brought up, again, the personal safety part. There's been a lot of, there's always been examples, but there's been a lot of recent examples of physical threats. I mean, the Ledger CEO got abducted and got his finger literally cut off. Just the other day in France, there's a video of, I'm not sure, it was like the CEO's, I'm not sure which CEO,

but of some like crypto firm, his daughter and her like three-year-old daughter on the street were attempted to be abducted by three masked armed gunmen. They tried to throw them in the back of a van. There's a video of it. And one of the guys drops their gun and then some people on the street go to try and help and then the guys take off. But like it is scary as hell. Broad daylight.

And then I believe it was just, I want to say like a couple months ago. there's some streamer girl we were talking about yesterday. Now, this one hardly largely her fault, but she flashed a screen grab of her Coinbase account. She had like a couple hundred, like it was like millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. She's like, should I buy, should I sell or hold? And then armed gunman literally went to her house. Her boyfriend shot one of them because they're in Texas and that's what you do. but but still like people need to realize the real world implications of of flashing this stuff

around and it's and it's it can be scary so um aunt i want to get your thoughts as well sorry for interjecting there but any any general thoughts on the whole situation and and beyond yeah thanks i mean generally you guys are saying it k yc is the crime uh causes worse problems than it solves You know, I mean, it's going to continue, I think about this Beauty on article from a while back called something around like Bitcoin adoption and Conway's Game of Life, where he tries to illustrate the futility of KYC systems in a full functioning Bitcoin economy. And if you can imagine like a blob, like a growing blob where the center is, you know, Bitcoin users trading freely amongst themselves. And, you know, the outside of that blob is Fiat users in the legacy system. Then there's this kind of rim in between where this type of activity exists. And for a long time, you'll see Bitcoins' opinions around, you know, the dangers of using these exchanges.

You know, you can get Bitcoin only a few ways. It's like you can earn it, you can mine it, you can steal it, which hopefully you don't do, or you can buy it over the counter at one of these, you know, KYC exchanges. And, you know, it's almost like it's highlighting in 2025 the need for more systems and services that, you know, empower you to earn or mine Bitcoin. This KYC is dangerous. You know, I would say on the user level, just it's a reminder to check your privacy. Anytime you see this stuff, people come into this space, you know, bright-eyed and

and innocent and then something like this happens. And even if it doesn't affect them, you have to take notice. They have to check their setups. And I guess the last thing I would say is right now you'll probably see, I haven't seen them yet, but in other events in cybersecurity, you'll see these sites that'll come up and they'll say,

check right here to see if you were hacked. And this is a failing on the company. And when they get hacked in a lot of ways where communication is vital, important, but these can also be further attacks where, you know, you're on some site and you're entering your information to see if you were hacked. And now you're just making your situation worse. So be careful, everybody. Yeah, 100%. I see there was somebody in the chat. They had a number of questions. A number of them I also don't have the best answers for in and around.

you know, regulatory compliance, you know, is the FTC going to get involved? All of these different things. I don't have good answers to this. And then just the ramifications for Coinbase, if you say like a U.S. customer or just a general customer of Coinbase was physically attacked because of this, I don't know what the fallout for them would be in that instance. honestly, that's above my pay grade. But just in general, you've got to take into consideration how you're obtaining and using your Bitcoin. We were sharing on the show and probably be useful for people today as well. But there's a little QR code that I'll put off to the side here.

But this has a bunch of different stuff that can help. in and around just educating yourself what tools are available. And just in general, when it comes to non-KYC, what options do you have when it comes to onboarding, like getting yourself Bitcoin? In Canada, Bitcoin Well has good options for non-KYC with cash vouchers. There's Hoddle, Hoddle, there's Robosats. You can run your own Robosats instance on a Start 9, which is pretty cool. there's also BISC

and then just in general, peer to peer at your local meetup if you begin to meet people there. Those are all options. And then beyond that, again, just like host your own data on a start 9. If you're getting down that rabbit hole, learning about coin join and other

options for spending that help with your privacy, there's a lot of rabbit holes you can go down. So, you know, start learning and don't let don't let perfect be the enemy of better. So start learning and start figuring it out. But anyways, gentlemen, I don't want to, you know, we spent 15 minutes on this.

So I'm going to segue into our bullishness. Of course, this is why are we bullish? And you can interpret it many different ways. People have many different reasons for it. But Matt, I'm going to be tossing it to you first for the evening. And I'll tee up. Same question everybody gets. Matt, why are you bullish?

All right. Yeah, it's sometimes hard to find that right now, actually. There's a lot of problems to be solved, but I suppose that's always the case. So obviously there's been a very recent kind of scuffle in the Bitcoin world around, you know, what appears at first glance to be a core, Bitcoin core protocol developer problem. And then there's this, okay, we'll abandon core and go to knots. And this is the very high-level simplistic view of the whole thing. And it's actually an incredibly nuanced and very important debate that really should take place and has needed to take place for a while.

And I'm very happy that this functioned as a catalyst for people to start wondering what the role of nodes are. Right? Like this has caused people to really question their prior understanding or lack of understanding around what a Bitcoin node is, why anyone would want to or should run one, what role they play in the Bitcoin network. And more broadly speaking, what role do they play in Bitcoin the emerging geopolitical monetary phenomenon, right? not just the peer-to-peer network. And so, you know, this is something that I have talked a lot about, thought a lot about. And at the conference, in a couple of weeks, we'll be giving a pretty thorough talk specifically on the nature of Bitcoin's political architecture. Okay.

So, you know, in the U.S., we have three branches of government. You have the legislature, the judicial, and the executive. and they are supposed to have different and somewhat balanced powers. Each branch has a tool at its disposal, one or more tools at its disposal, that afford it power, political power. And the idea is that if any one branch begins using its tool to an excessive degree, that the other branches can check that power by, you know, ratcheting up their use of their own tools. And this is great. This is good, you know,

architecture for governance. Balance of power, division of power and balance of power is very important. And Bitcoin, unlike the U.S. governance model, does not have three branches of government. It has five. And it was Andreas, Antinopoulos, who, you know, the godfather of all who really laid this out originally, at least that was where I heard it from, and have since, you know, really made it, really integrated it and understood it and made it part of my, my worldview, and in particular, my understanding of Bitcoin politics. The five branches of governance in Bitcoin are protocol developers. This is not just Bitcoin core, though they are by far the most powerful constituency of protocol developers. You have wall.

developers. These are people who don't make the core node software, but they make the wallets that people use to store and transact. Often they must connect to the protocol software in the form of a node. You have exchanges, right, on-rance and off-ramps, how people acquire or sell Bitcoin to and from Fiat. We hope that one goes away eventually, right? But it is a temporary and very important branch of government right now. Then you have the miners. Miners are often the first one that people think about when they think about Bitcoin governance, right? Like who controls what Bitcoin is and what the consensus rules are and what constitutes a valid transaction they think of minors. And to a degree, miners do have a significant say in that around those areas.

But and they are a very powerful constituency, too powerful in my opinion. And then lastly, you have no hard. operators, right? These are the people, so to speak, right? The equivalent in Bitcoin is the people, which in the U.S. government, that is the legislature, right? They are elected. I suppose the executive is elected as well. But yes, they are supposed to represent the people. Okay, it's the people embodied in a representative body. In that sense, you could think about like start nine, umbral, nautil, other kind of platforms or technologies that facilitate node operatorship as being sort of representatives of the people because we are

what make it possible or at least easy for most people to run the software and to choose which implementation to run and also to configure it with ease. But ultimately it is the people, the node operators that are the political constituency, even if they are in large part represented by their choice of platform. And throughout Bitcoin's history, there have been a couple instances where the people have made their voices heard, okay, the most prominent of which I would cite as the 2017 block size war, where ultimately the fate of that was decided in part by the Bitcoin core development team.

in collaboration with the node operators, right? There was a huge push for a user-activated soft fork, UASF, which was encoded and promoted and kind of recommended by Bitcoin Core and then carried out by the people. And everyone chose to update to this version of Bitcoin. And it was kind of forced upon the miners and upon some, you know, other node operators who wanted a different future for Bitcoin. The wallet developers just sort of had to go along with it because they had to follow the protocol consensus rules that the people had chosen. But, you know, and those who didn't forked off, they became something else, right? They became mostly Bitcoin cash, but also BSV.

and Bitcoin marched on. And that was the node operators that sort of had the day there. It was their victory to a degree. Bitcoin Core played a major role in that as well. But the node operators really carried the torch. And there's a lot to be learned from that, right? When any single political constituency, any of the five that I listed, have a strong push in any direction, they can't be ignored, okay?

But in my opinion, the strongest of those five when acting in unison is the nodes. Everyone has to toe the line if the nodes make a decision. If all the nodes in Bitcoin, if all the people, right, this is the people. These are the what it's all for, right? It's for us. It's for the users of Bitcoin. And the only manifestation of that is node operatorship. You can hoddle Bitcoin without running a node.

But you have no voice in Bitcoin's future, right? If your role in the Bitcoin ecosystem is to buy Bitcoin and hold it in cold storage, great. You're doing good. That's fine. You're way ahead of most of the planet Earth. But you don't have a voice in what Bitcoin becomes, what Bitcoin is and will become. The voices are embodied in the nodes. And so I am bullish because over the last week,

this scuffle that came about in large part due to, I think, some well-intended but misinformed or out of touch members of Bitcoin Core. So I think is an honest mistake, at least in many ways. Combined with, I think, some intentionally kind of misleading gaslighting or even malicious angles by others, I think they made a mistake. whether intentional or again, whether well-intended or not, ultimately there was a political mistake made. And that was that it brought this whole thing to the surface, right? Like trying to eliminate the cap and even the setting itself for oper-turned data size caused a lot of people who had never really thought about Bitcoin politics before or even why they were running a node or if they weren't running a node, why they might. want to run a node to start asking these questions. And so what it did was it galvanized a major,

if not the most important political constituency of the Bitcoin ecosystem, which is the economic node operators. Many of the people who are running nodes are not economic nodes, and that's something that is kind of a tangential point that needs to be talked about. But it caused them to ask questions and it caused them to wonder what a note is, why they should run it, how it works, how does Bitcoin work? Who does get to decide what a valid transaction is? Who gets to decide what a standard or non-standard transaction is? Does it matter at all? These questions are being asked. And so without me even coming in here and like taking aside, I'm very happy that everyone is talking about this because the more understanding there is around Bitcoin, how it works,

and what its politics are, the more effective the various constituencies can act, effectively, that they can act. And so I kind of have a front row seat to this because we get hit up, at least in the last week, daily and in mass by people who are like, I want to be a part of this. Like, I want to fight. Get me in the game, coach. You know, like, how do I do it to sign me up? And I'm like, this is encouraging. Bitcoin is still alive and well, right? Like minor centralization

is a real thing and it's gone very far and, you know, the politicians are here. And, you know, many years ago, a guy that I have great respect for in Eric Voorhees had stated, buy Bitcoin. It's the best investment you'll ever have until CNN and CNBC tell you to. And then it's time to sell. And they're telling everyone to, right and and again i don't buy that statement uh hopefully right like there's there's larger forces at play here and i but ultimately the involvement of the politicians and their support and backing in my opinion is it is not a good thing okay it makes me very suspicious um and it also uh creates risk around bitcoin's evolution now that there is big money involved right the optimal way to kill a thing that you

don't like is not to compete against it or, you know, destroy it. It's to buy it, right? It's to get the founders to sell out, right? Like, I think a lot of people who are involved with Bitcoin and who people who I respect and are great, if given the choice between, you know, you get Bitcoin's perfect future, but, you know, it's going to be 20 years before there's any meaningful return on your investment, or we're going to make, you know, you're going to be, you're going to be worth millions and millions tomorrow, but there's going to be some compromise on the way Bitcoin works. I think the vast majority of people go with option B. And that is not a good thing. But again, what I've been seeing, and I have a very front row seat to this over the last couple of weeks,

is very encouraging. People are here for the revolution. They're not just here for a number go up. There's a lot of people who are, and they tend to be the loudest. But there's a lot of kind of closet cypherpunks out there. I hesitate to say cypherpunks because that does require that you code somewhat, but the cypherpunk ideology is alive and well. And I'm just really happy to see that. I'm happy to see the people recognizing that they have power agency over the future of Bitcoin and are asking the right questions to figure out how they can unite and get their way. Yeah. It's a good sign. So, yeah, I've, I like.

watching this play out in that, you know, without going into the nitty-gritty of what was, what the change proposed with Bitcoin Core was and like how it function, there was clearly contention around it. Like there was not a consensus of users saying, yes, absolutely, there's a good idea. And thus, the back and forth and the debates and everything. And so what we kind of saw was, again, individuals being galvanized into saying, okay, well, I'm not going to run that. And everybody's able to run whatever they so choose.

The interesting thing that I found was, and maybe I'll just quickly show here. Now, Bitcoin Knotts is like the, you know, currently the one being touted as the alternative because it gives a configurability that was going to be removed from Bitcoin core. I do want to clarify that too. Yeah. Yeah. And so

what we've seen over here on, this is Clark Moody dashboard, but over here on node versions, we've seen knots go from very, very low to, yeah, like 8.5% of all running notes. Now, you did specify,

some of these are going to be non-economic nodes. And clearly, the vast majority is still some form of core. But this is up significantly. Like, if you look at the number of knots nodes, like it just hockey sticked up. And so it's just what it does is it points out that there was not consensus for this particular thing. And there was some movement from core on how that is going to work. Because originally the configurability around this particular parameter was just going to be removed outright, but now it seems that it's going to default to being more or less wide open, but you'll be able to configure it yourself if you want to at this point for it.

So that's an interesting shift that people voicing their opinion by moving what software they're using, it seems resulted in this shift from Bitcoin core. So, yeah, Matt, you wanted to clarify something, though. Yeah, and just to follow up on that one sentence is that is political power. That is what it means to have political power. And I think people are intoxicated by it. Right. I think it's like the only way that most people, just being honest here, the only way that most plebs are ever going to have political power in Bitcoin,

I'm not talking about like personal empowerment through holding Bitcoin, escaping inflation, all that. I'm talking about political power within Bitcoin. The only way that the vast majority of people are ever going to be politically meaningful in Bitcoin is to run a node and to choose the consensus rules and any policy rules that they want to endow into their node. That is your way to be political, just like in most democratic systems, your way to be political is to kind of make your voice heard and vote. Well, in Bitcoin, it's kind of the same thing, except your vote is a little bit more reliable, right? We don't have to worry about, like, cheating elections. Like nodes are verifiable. But yeah, it's your vote.

Your node is your vote. And if you don't run a node, you're not a citizen. And if you do run a node, you are a citizen, and that's how you vote. You vote with your software. You vote by choosing which implementation or version to run and by configuring it in certain ways. The one thing I wanted to clarify, and then I've used up my time, is that not. the difference between knots and core is not operturn. Okay. Opper turn is actually kind of this like sideshow thing. It's actually not that important

in its own right, okay, because there's all these other ways that that data is being, you know, put into the blockchain and into the UTXO set. And the operatern one is actually one of the more benign and positive ways to do it, which is kind of the argument of why core is removing is, they want to encourage that, even though the encouragement is not going to work because the other one is cheaper. It's a very nuanced debate. Okay. But ultimately, the question that we should all be asking is not whether or not to lift the limit on operturn or disable it all together or anything like that. It's do filters work at all? Should and if yes, we should probably be adding more filters, right?

So like does antivirus software work? Does anti-mowler software work? For decades, the computing industry has decided, yes, they do, but it's a constant game of cat and mouth. You have to constantly release new antivirus software as new viruses are discovered. And people need to update if they want to be immune from that new malware virus. And so it's no different in principle than what we're seeing with Bitcoin. If people do not want to see this stuff in the network or on the chain, and that's a big if, because again, some people want to, right?

But if you do not, the question is, if acting together, if the nodes are acting in mass together, can they, prevent, not eliminate, but can they deter or prevent certain types of, quote, spam, if you believe that this stuff is spam? And we have empirical evidence from 10 years of history with OpperTurn itself demonstrating that 100% with certainty, you can. If all the nodes agree, if they're all running the same filters, right? The super majority of nodes are running the same filters, they work. And so if they work and if the node operators want to be filtering other types of transactions, what Bitcoin Core should be doing is not removing more benign forms of encoding data into blockchain.

They should be adding filters for the more dangerous ones, which is what Knott's does. People think that Knott's is just like, oh, no, opertern is smaller and enforced. It's not just operaturn. It's inscriptions too. not filters out inscriptions as well. So it actually adds more filters. And Core had the opportunity to put those filters into Bitcoin Core because the PR, the code was written. The PR was ready to go into Bitcoin Core two years ago.

And they rejected the PR. They said, we don't want more filters. We don't want to give people the ability to filter out these types of transactions. That was one thing. And then now it's like we're actually going to remove other filters. So what's happening is in the eyes of many people, it's going in the wrong direction, right? The filters are being removed rather than added. The operative one is just the catalyst that caused everyone to talk about this.

And we should be talking about it. And in my opinion, personal opinion, we should be adding more filters. It's not really moving old ones. So for anybody that's trying to figure out how to actually do any of this, whether you want to run core or whether you want to run not, Obviously, check the channel. My actually original video on Start 9 is running core and shows how to do that. My video on Umbrol shows how to run core. I have a video on how to run core on your desktop.

But then I also, and I'll throw this up there, you can go and see the opposite of that. How do you run knots on desktop, on Start 9, on Umbrole, and it walks you through any of that. So whatever side of this issue you're on, whatever you believe, there's resources for both. And so go figure out what you think is best and run that. And that's how we get to consensus. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see how things play out over time. But yeah, become active, actually be a part of things. and if only for just to learn how things actually work,

it's always good to be better educated. Jens, I want to open it up to Ant and Brian here. Maybe Brian, I'll get you first and then I'll go to Ant and then we'll do a rotation on topic. But Brian, go ahead. All right, man. Well, thanks. It's cool getting to hear from you guys on this because it is.

It's such a nuanced topic. But to the point of the show of why we're bullish, I it's it's just it's the exact same thing in line with the coin base hack like why on a bullish show obviously you do news throughout the week and stuff but why are we talking about the bullishness of a coin base hack why are we talking about the the politics and why is this why is this so bullish it comes back to the old teleb idea of being anti-fragile what what is anti-fragility well and uh being fragile means you're easily broken the opposite of fragile is not hard the opposite of fragile is anti-fragile.

It means that something that breaks. And once it breaks, it gets stronger. Or once it faces stress, it gets stronger. Teddy Roosevelt, he had this famous line throughout his life. He called it he abided by the strenuous life. He gave a lot of the credit for his successes. He wrote dozens of books. He was a, you know, he was a multi-term president, all sorts of things.

Had a lot of success in his life, whether you liked him as a president. or not. He was just kind of objectively, he did a lot of things. He credited the strenuous life, meaning going through hard things, refined him and made him a better person in his view coming out the other side. We see that day in and day out. Bitcoin is only going to be the thing we needed to be in the future if it goes through these things now. Our children's generation and what Bitcoin needs to be for them, it won't get there unless we go through these politics and we go through the murkiness of this stuff. And we go through the nuance. One of the comments, said, thank God a channel like this is giving a topic like this time to marinate.

And we're going through the nuance because, yes, it's easy to just pick aside, knots are core. What are you running? And just people get lost in the sauce on that. The positive thing here is that Bitcoin will be better tomorrow because of what we're going through today. It's like the revolutionaries of the past. Our forefathers fought and we get to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Hopefully we get to do something like that for the future generations.

We get to be the ones that wrestled through the early years of Bitcoin. They're going to continue to have to wrestle. They're going to continue to have to participate in the infrastructure, in the political five, you know, five branch infrastructure of Bitcoin. But hopefully, like our forefathers gave us principles for governance, hopefully we can give those principles of governance and pass those forward to future generations. Here are the things that we thought we thought through. Here are the things that we wrestled through.

And you guys now have precedence for the decisions you're making 25 or 50 years from now. with regard to Bitcoin and how it works. I love that. Love that. And I'm going to also toss it to you. Thoughts on kind of everything discussed here. Matt's, Matt's topic, Natscore, anything you want to throw in. Yeah, thanks.

I've appreciated the conversation. I mean, I have to kind of add on to what Brian was saying. It's these are these are kind of reasons why I'm bullish is, you know, there's all this fighting going on. You know, once again, the lines are drawn and the people. that you followed that you thought were, you know, on the same page as you maybe now have different views or expressing different things. And it's like making you question your own views. And everyone's just, you know, there's a, I'm seeing lies. I'm seeing truths and half-truths

and misinformed statements. Like it's just all of the above. And it's just interesting to watch. Like, you know, you remember back in the day, you guys, you know, 2017. And, you know, they would talk about one day if there's any kind of a shit coin use case or if there's any kind of you know anything of value in that that bitcoin would eventually absorb it or you know whatever and now it's fascinating that here we are and you're kind of seeing that i'm observing shitcoiners trying to push bitcoin trying to uh you know spread their lies in this community and and foment uh various distrust at the same time I'm also seeing people trying to be good like good actors trying to protect Bitcoin from their perspectives and what they feel.

There are people that are, you know, recognizing that when all this dust does settle, you know, at some point, people have to recognize that they are in this battle right now. They have to start making these decisions for themselves. And whatever happens, the builders, around Bitcoin are going to run with it. And we're going to see a lot of activity around Bitcoin because of whatever fruit is gained throughout this type of a battle, provided it doesn't destroy the whole thing. You know, you'll see people taking whatever fruit there was and then building things around it.

Some of it, if the scammers and spammers, whatever you want to call it, get their way, might be scams, might see this shit. stuff tried out on Bitcoin. And in some ways, we're going to have to just wait that out, I believe. We're going to have to see it play out if that happens. And those scams will, I believe, personally, be seen as such at some point, as we've seen on shitcoins. It's just another round of this edge activity when you think about that blob of Bitcoin adoption that I mentioned earlier. And so, yeah, that's why I'm bullish. I'm just, I know that it's, if you're new here, it's probably freaky to see all this fighting, but at least in the time that I've been here,

uh, this fighting has resulted in overall bullish long term. I'm bullish on the builders in this space, uh, building new things for Bitcoin, uh, based on whatever happens. I just wish the lying would stop personally. Fair. Fair. Again, I, it's, I like that you said, if you, if you, if you, if you just got here and, uh, and it seems a little

contentious. I mean, welcome to Thunderdome pretty much. This is more or less the norm. It reminds me of that groundskeeper Willie meme of like, it's like Bitcoiners and Bitcoiners, like the worst than cats and dogs. I hate those bit corners back and forth and Principal Skinner. Jeez, you Bitcoin are contentious bunch. You just made an enemy for life. I think it's very much. that in Bitcoin. Everybody's so passionate about this thing that they found that they think is going to, and I would concur, is going to fix a lot of things and they want to defend it in the best way they see fit. But because of that, yeah, there's going to be some heads being butt. So, nonetheless, we are going to change gears here. Again, if you guys are curious, scrub back.

I'll show the QR code for those node videos near the end of the show as well. But we're going to say a quick shout out to sponsors. They're going to come back. Brian, I'm going to find out a little bit more about why you're bullish on the other side of it. So we'll be back in just one moment. 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 fast transactions, no slippage,

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and again we're talking about no kyc earlier uh if you're in canada bitcoin well has some solid options when it comes to no KYC with cash vouchers. I did a video on that. So go check them out. You know, great way to non-KYC your way into some Bitcoin. But with that, I'm going to toss it over to Brian.

Same thing. Why are you bullish, man? What's top of mind for you currently? I'm so freaking bullish. And I know this one's close to your heart bend. So I'm eager to hear your perspective on it. But the steak and shake thing,

I've never been to steak. and shake. I was on a Twitter spaces earlier with people that were like all over the country. And I'm like, okay, for sure, somebody went out and knows a local steak and shake that they can go to and buy a burger with Bitcoin, right? No, nobody on the space happened to live. I'm like, they have over 400 restaurants. Like how is nobody near a steak and shake? But anyways, if you, if you're on, you know, Bitcoin Twitter, you're going to see plenty of people that were going and showing the receipts and stuff. So it is happening, which is cool. But the fact that a mass massive chain of restaurants is now kind of bending the knee to Bitcoin. I want to say

bending the knee because they're, they're, you know, Bitcoin advocates, but I guess just a way of commerce bending the knee to Bitcoin. I think that this is huge. You know, we've talked about this a lot, Ben, you are a huge advocate of a circular economy where you're at. We've, you know, we've written a book on, I say we, there's Canutes fan home and Daniel Prince and I. You were quoted in there multiple times. So it's kind of like you wrote the book, but parallel right over my shoulder of the white book here, right here is about parallel economy. Seeing this happen, I think is really, really cool. The way I look at it is for those who want to think about Bitcoin gains, which is kind of like a nasty word to say right now, and it sounds really dorky because we're

just so, we're just so like off put by this idea of Bitcoin gains and we don't want to talk about the price and stuff. If you want to maximize your return from Bitcoin, I think one way to look at it is look ahead to the next phase of Bitcoin. The typical trajectory of things turning into money is a four-part progression. Money tends to start as a novelty, so whether it's gold, seashells, whatever, starts as a novelty. Then it turns into a store of value. Somebody says, oh, hey, I can actually retain value in this thing. The third phase is it usually acts as a medium of exchange.

And then the fourth phase would be everybody adopts it. It's now a unit of account. If you looked at Bitcoin as a store of value, which was phase two, it's kind of the phase we're in right now, if you looked at Bitcoin as a store of value when it was in the novelty phase, when somebody traded 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas or when there was something like a Sats faucet or a Bitcoin faucet where you could go solve a Kapska and get five Bitcoin every single day, that's the novelty phase. But if you had the foresight back then to look at Bitcoin, look ahead and say, you know, if this is money, it's going to be a store of value.

And someday every Bitcoin is going to be worth $104,000. You had a pretty significant return on where you were putting your time, energy, and money or your time, energy, and currency at that time. Now, I would say the same thing's true for those who are looking, we're in the store of value. We're in phase two right now. Those who are looking ahead to stage three, which is the medium of exchange, and now we can argue over whether medium of exchanges today because of stake and shake or this is just

kind of like a test run. This is kind of a beta test. Maybe medium of exchange is 10 years from now. We can argue over when that or we can debate when the actual medium of exchange is going to happen. All I'm here to say is if you're looking a phase ahead, it seems like there's a pretty significant upside for you to participate in that. The one last thing I'll kind of mention to hopefully kind of land that plane would be like, if you look back to the internet economy, there were guys who bought and sold domain names,

right? You could have bought pets.com or business.com. You could have sat on it for a couple of years. You could have huddled Pets.com and then sold it and become rich. You could have sold it for, you know, bought it for a million dollars and then sold it for $15 million. You could have huddled and made some, you know, made some dough, got rich. But then there was other people who built the internet economy, right?

You have the Bezos and the musks, the guys that built commerce on top of the internet. They built payment rails on top of the internet. They saw, okay, the internet. It's novel. People are using it. But really where this is going is towards a, there's going to be commerce. There's going to be an economy on the internet. Those guys didn't just get $15 million and get rich.

They got vastly wealthy. They made like life changing wealth, $300 billion, $400 billion, $400 billion, because they saw ahead an extra phase to realize that commerce is coming. And that's the big play. So my suggestion here is for, for Pleb's, like, like you and I just to sit back and hoddle, like Matt said, you can do that. You're ahead of the rest of the world if you're sitting back and hoddling. But if you can afford to look ahead and to see the medium of exchange value proposition of

Bitcoin, you might be significantly ahead of the game. So when something like stake and shake happens, to me it validates that thesis that Bitcoin will actually be a medium of exchange. I've always thought that that's the case, but there's plenty of people who doubt that out there, it just kind of reinforces it. It puts a few more arrows in the quiver of guys like me who are advocating for using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange because, you know, you got guys like Bernie Sanders. I don't know if that clip that was circulating of him recently saying, oh, you can't use Bitcoin for, you know, to buy it, to buy a sandwich or, you know, that type of argument,

we've, we've really nerfed that, right? The fact that you can buy coffee, you can buy a hamburger, you can buy French fries, tallow French fries, apparently, or like the big deal. now. You can do all of those things. So what's the argument now? What, what are the barriers to making Bitcoin a medium of exchange? They're fewer and fewer. Sure, there are some. There's tax implications. There's people not wanting to, you know, spend from their stash. Sure, there are some objections. But at the end of the day, we have a path towards making Bitcoin a medium of exchange. And we're seeing it, I think, play out in front of her eyes. And I'm pretty bullish because of that. This is a thing that's kind of near and dear to me.

It was a couple years ago when I think it was Swan was kind of raising the alarm bells. Like, hey, if you're going to be buying Bitcoin from us or selling Bitcoin through us and you coin join, they're saying if you directly coin join before or after using us, we may be forced to shut your account, kind of doing the like wink and nod. like if there's a hop, then like, then you're okay, but just be aware there's, there's problems and we're being kind of forced into this. And a lot of people went and they were shooting the messenger over it. But I was like, okay, okay, but, you know, they're giving you guys a heads up. And also, what are you doing to actually fix the problem? And the way I see it is you don't fix the problem by bitching about it.

you fix the problem by actually just using Bitcoin in a circular fashion. Use it in your day-to-day life and actually build communities where you don't have to rely on somebody in the middle to actually use the medium. And so that was the birth of what we've been doing here in Calgary, which is the sat market. That moment was, okay, fuck it. We're just going to do things. And so we did. And so now we've got this burgeoning circular economy here in like a large city of 1.4 million people.

And we just started with the bitcoinsers and kind of six degrees of Kevin baconed out from there and built this thing that we have. And we run it kind of a couple times a year to make it something special. But then we all know each other and we can get stuff for Bitcoin. And that's a lot harder to clamp down upon than having to rely. on on and off ramps all the time. And so I think this is kind of the most unshakable way of being able to utilize this tool for freedom that is Bitcoin is actually using it amongst each other. And so, you know, the goal with the sat market and, you know, with the stuff that you're

talking about is getting others to act as well, getting others to start doing this. Because if not you, then who? So, you know, my end goal here with the sat market is to not just do it in a selfish way where, and it is fully selfish, because I've been living on Bitcoin for five years now. And so I want to be able to do it directly rather than rely on jumping through hoops to make it work. But also, I want to see it replicated elsewhere. And so, like, we want to put together a manual of what we did so that other people in, in, in, larger cities can begin to replicate it as well. But, you know, shameless plug if you're in the Calgary area or if you want to visit Calgary for the first time, come to the sat market. We got a thing

here. I just plunked it together, but that'll take you to the website. And yeah, you can come for free and come visit our little local market. It leads into the Bitcoin rodeo, which is a conference that happens over the weekend. But come to the sat market and just come be a part of it and maybe take some notes and bring the idea back to wherever you're from and do it yourself. But like this to me is true resilience is actually using Bitcoin permissionlessly peer to peer with people that you've created relationships with. So sorry, Ben, can I cut in real quick on that? I think it's so cool to see it in action. I mean, what you guys are doing is tremendous.

And I know one of the things that people are thinking when they're sitting there like, oh, yes, I get it. That's cool for you guys. but I just can't, I don't want to part part with my Bitcoin because I don't want to have less Bitcoin tomorrow than I have today. That idea just plagues people. Think about it like this. In the fiat economy, you, if you're doing things right, at the end of the month, you have more fiat than you had last month, right? You should be operating at a cash positive. You're trying to earn more money than you spend every month. I don't know why so many Bitcoiners think that that wouldn't occur the same way in the Bitcoin economy. If you're providing more value to the

economy than you're extracting from it, then you're actually going to end up with with more Bitcoin than you started with. And when you have more Bitcoin connections, when you spend with other people, those tend to be people who also spend Bitcoin. And so it's plugged you into the circular economy. So if your reason selfish, I mean, Ben is saying his selfish reason, right, to plug. But we, we all have aligned incentives. And so you can count on everybody acting selfishly. If you just want more Bitcoin, start participating in the Bitcoin economy. Because whatever people are paying you, fiat for, people will pay you Bitcoin for that same thing. And then just the other objection that people have is like, well, I don't want to pay capital gains tax on the Bitcoin transactions and all

that kind of stuff. Guess what? When you spend Fiat, you always spend it at a loss. We're complaining that when we spend Bitcoin, we have to pay capital gains. That means we we spent it at a higher value than we originally got it at. It's the inverse of Bitcoin. It's the inverse of Fiat. So we only get penalties. quote unquote when we've had a gain on Bitcoin. So why is that a problem? Like you, if you sat in dollars, you would have 100% taken a loss. Would you rather have minus 1% or would you rather have plus 10% minus 2% to offset? It's one of those things where it's like when you actually play through it and that's what you guys are doing with the stats market. You guys are

running through it practically. When people practically see it, they see the effects of it and the effects are very, very good. So sorry for running that back, but that just tends to be The pushback I typically see. I don't want to win the lottery because I might have to give some of it back. That's like that that's that's kind of the reasoning. Yeah, again, I think it's the other thing that I get is why would you spend the good money when you've got bad money? And my answer is I don't have any bad money anymore because I don't hold any. So yeah.

And I want to give you a chance to chime in. Then Matt and then we'll do a rotation to to get our final reason. Any thoughts and around using Bitcoin? Yeah, it's funny we're talking about this. Earlier today, at seven hours ago, I was reading these things too. Like, this stuff is going around and people are asking about spend and replace again and all of this. And it made me think about how just that concept was, you know, a relic from another time when it was important for folks to understand the true value of Bitcoin. And so this concept of like spend and replace and, you know, like all these mantras that we.

have and follow around here. There's a lot of truth in it, but then in practical, you know, day to day, it, you know, it doesn't always work out that way. If you're lucky enough to spend some Bitcoin and then quickly replace it, like, that's awesome. But I wrote that on Twitter that that spend what you need and save what you can doesn't really roll off the tongue, though. You know, it doesn't, I mean, that's kind of what you should be doing is just trying to live, you know, tight by your means and not going crazy, putting everything on credit and, you know, all these ills of this fiat abomination that, you know, we've recognized as Bitcoiners that other people are slowly waking up to. And so, yeah, spend your Bitcoin. I mean, that's, you know, the key.

I mean, we can hold it. People don't want to spend it right now. I think part of what you all touched on is the tax implications and things like this. in the current environment, there's, you know, it's not incentivized for people to spend as much. Whereas at the same time, we're in this appreciative, appreciation, accumulation phase of this novel asset that is kind of forcing people to hold it versus spending it. So you kind of see it from all sides. I think the answer is, again, it's the builders. It's more things that, you know, create and use that Bitcoin circular economy.

economy. I just went live. I'm going to plug my thing here, if you don't mind, Ben. I just went live with my new project, Time Chain Arcade. You guys know me for TimeChane Stats. I've had that for a long time, and I did BTC Lexicon and, you know, BTC pay plug-in and some other things. But this is my latest project. I'm very happy about it. It's Time Chain Arcade. I really wanted to recreate a feeling of, you know, a retrograde. style arcade based around Bitcoin, you know, educational concepts, you know, technology, culture, just different things. Each game in the arcade, I launched with eight titles. I have six more coming that, you know, I'll share later. But each game deals with various aspects of Bitcoin. And so, you know, I have amazing stack machine, which helps people learn how to code Bitcoin script. I have mining tycoon where you start with a tiny, you know, CPU and you try to work your way up to, you know, a big operation, you know, nonce hunt where it's you versus hash corp and y'all are racing to find the nonce, you know, each level. We have the

get wrecked simulator, which is, you know, step right up, test your luck, but don't get wrecked. You know, everyone thinks they can trade Bitcoin. And while I'm not advocating for that, I'm clearly not in the game, it's really meant to show you, you really can't win. And so, you know, just some other fun games that I have. I've got Satoshi Scramble, which is like a word hunt, no, not, a node runner, which is, you know, you are the Bitcoin lightning transaction and you're running from, you know, trying to get confirmed, but, but you don't want to get, uh, you know, you don't want to run out of moves or get hit with a force close or bad actor. There's different things that can, you know, interrupt your progress. We have trivia night, which it's like 300-something Bitcoin

questions and a spinning wheel that, you know, you can try to get your high score. And we also have a simulation called Banhammer, which was, you know, earlier, I referenced this article by Beauty on and this and this blob, this growing blob, you know, based on Conway's Game of Life. And Banhammer is a simulation that represents that. And it's a gamified version. So you can play with it. You can add different, different like properties and conditions in the game. You can even go run old scenarios like, you know, the COVID crash and see if you can reach hyper-bitquinization from those terms. Overall, it's just kind of like a fun place for people to come, play some things about Bitcoin, learn a couple of things, have some fun. And every play is just one credit. One credit is

250 sats. So it's about 25 cents, a play at 100,000 Bitcoin. The idea is, again, you're there in front of a bunch of glowing machines. You've got a slurpy in your hand and a quarter in the other. and you just want to play a game. We have a global leaderboard. So, you know, if you get the high score, you know, it's you versus the world, essentially. And so that's going to be exciting to see play out. And you can also unlock a bunch of achievements. There's all different kinds of achievements you can unlock and share on Twitter and whatnot.

So I think it's going to be a fun experience for people. I hope people really like it. I'm going to, I'm still like fixing some things. I literally just went live. and you're the first person to even show it. So thank you. But I'm going to be fixing things over the next couple of days. I think, you know, the idea that you have to pay 250 sats, like I would love to take a quarter.

I would love for people to come in and just like swipe a visa card and, you know, give me their quarter. But it's not really about that. I want to support Bitcoin's, you know, spend use cases. So here's what we've been talking about. today, building things in the space that, you know, incentivize people to, to spend a little bit of Bitcoin, have a little fun, value for value, in and out, and you might learn something. You know what you need to do is I would love to see a physical old school arcade machine game with like the actual D-pad and like the buttons and everything. And then you come up and you pay

you send sats to the machine via QR and then you choose your game and you should have that at conferences. That would be incredible. And yeah, that's the thing. It's so funny how we just have this like kind of hive mind around here. You know, I just went to Bitcoin Plus Plus in Austin and I was speaking to a gentleman showing, you know, talking about this. And he said the same thing. He's like, I've got this machine. Let's let's meet up. And he can give me the same. same thing you talked about. It has a screen and it has a little D-pad and the whole bit. So we'll see how that goes. I like it. I like it. That's awesome, man. That's awesome.

Okay, gents, I'm going to, so, and just to clarify, before I take a quick little breather here and come back, aunt, this is, this your main, this is, this was your focal, this is why you're bullish, correct? Yeah, this is it. I love it. I love it. Everybody should share it about it. You know, we touched on it earlier. I forget, I guess, I guess Matt had mentioned the five, you know, different actors or groups of actors in the space. And I just, I, it occurs to me that when you come into Bitcoin, like I'm a dev, you know, I'm a coder. When I come into Bitcoin, when people come into Bitcoin, you know, it's almost like this kind of like burning fire. And we're all kind of just, you know, describing how it, you know, what we get out of it. And what that manifests as, as developers is it usually shows up as like wallets or exchanges or, you know, data dashboards. I made time chain stats back in the day. Like, you know, it's, it manifests in these ways because you want to express something about Bitcoin. And if you can help the network, that's great. In this case, it's, I think it's something extra,

it's something novel where it's not any of those things. It's an arcade. about Bitcoin. And I'd love to see more products like this, which are just using Bitcoin. You know what's cool about these games is that they're using the Bitcoin data in the game. So for example, real quick, in Get Rec simulator, like obviously you're pulling in the data, the exchange rate and you're making your predictions. I mean, that's using the real live exchange rate. You're going to get wreck based on what's really happening in the real data. Same thing with the blocks. You don't have to just make predictions on price. You can make predictions on blocks.

And it's the same thing. It's coming from real block data. It's not something fake in the game. In mining tycoon, it's really fun. So in mining tycoon, you're mining along. You've got your hash rate going. You've got your operation, wherever you are. You're cranking along.

And you're either going to be solo mining or you're going to be mining in a pool. And if, you know, if a real block comes in while you're playing the game, that triggers like several events throughout the game. And so like if you're pool mining, there's a chance. Did your pool get that block? And if they did, did you get any of it? They might have kept it. You might have not gotten the rewards. You know, there's like just different things that can happen. If you're solo mining, you'll get a chance at that block based on your hash rate. So I'm really trying to use real data in the games. And I just think it's a really cool thing. I love this. I love this.

Okay, we're going to come back in just a moment. I'm going to do our quick final show to sponsors here. But I want to get some thoughts on Matt on both the circular economy as a general and also, you know, this gamification of learning in and around Bitcoin as well. But we'll be back in just a moment for our last little run here. Looking for a simple and secure way to manage your Bitcoin on mobile, Aqua Wallet has you. covered. It's user-friendly and puts you in full control of your Bitcoin with secure self-custody. Aqua also supports lightning and liquid network, making fast, cheap Bitcoin payments and asset transfers easier than ever. Plus, it even supports stable coins giving you ultimate flexibility.

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You can head to coincite.com and use code BTC sessions for discounts or simply scan the QR code on the screen to get started right away. All right, we're back in. I'm just playing some games off to the side here. Matt, I want to get your thoughts really quick here. Oh, I'm getting sounds happening. My bad. Matt, I want to get your thoughts here again on some of the stuff in and around just the circular economy in general, Brian's topic and this gamification of learning with Bitcoin and just building things in general in Bitcoin, kind of where we're at, where we need to be, what you're seeing that you enjoy. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, I love to see the medium of exchange use case gradually, slowly arise for Bitcoin. It is expected to take a long time. Anyone who thought that was going to happen overnight was kidding themselves. And I think that there's two major driving forces behind that, which Brian touched on and you reiterated on one of them, which was that you just don't have fiat anymore. Right. So part of part of the way that Bitcoin will emerge as a medium of exchange is not because people will, you know, to be honest, kind of altruistically spend their Bitcoin, even when it's not the thing that they should be

spending in terms of their own kind of personal financial interest, you should spend the thing that you don't want to hold, the thing that's losing value, right? That is the rational thing to do, but it's also the rational thing to do to not have any of that at all ever again. So at some point, you're going to have to spend the Bitcoin because it's all, the only thing you value, and you actually make better purchasing decisions as a result, right? So this can have some corrective behavior in kind of an over-consumptive society as well. well, which I think is kind of a derivative benefit of sound money. So that's one. And the other one is that people demanding to be paid in Bitcoin. It's on the consumer side. It's not on the

spender side. It's not like I have dollars or Bitcoin. Which one should I spend? Well, this is in my financial best interest, but this is kind of what's best for Bitcoin. So I'm going to sacrifice it and do that. That's a thing. And some people will do that. Some will go all in on Bitcoin and only have that to spend. But the real. driving force behind medium of exchange is going to be people saying pay me in Bitcoin. And then you have to spend your Bitcoin, even if you would prefer to spend your dollars, you have to spend your Bitcoin because you want the services from this person. So that's really where the demand is going to come from.

And I think that's very natural, more and more people are going to want to be paid in Bitcoin. There's also a third, which is just the convenience of paying people in Bitcoin when they are especially international contractors. So Start 9 works with, you know, you're familiar with our community tech program. We have, you know, 10 people from all around the world that do technical support for us in our community channels. And it's like, I can't pay them in fiat. That is just not, it's not convenient enough, right?

Like it's way easier for me to pay them in Bitcoin. And so I do. Even though I would prefer not to spend the company Bitcoin. So anyway, so it's happening. It's going to happen. And it's just, it's going to happen naturally. And those are the reasons why. Yeah.

Yeah. I think you're right. The pay me in Bitcoin thing is, is what will probably primarily drive it. And for me, that's absolutely the case. I now penalize people for paying me in dollars. That's right. On a Bitcoin discount is a fiat penalty. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. Because honestly, like, you know, being in Canada and dealing with people from around the globe, like, try again. getting a friggin wire transfer half the time. Like I actually, the last time somebody tried to pay me with a wire, it was just like that we didn't know what it just got frozen. And I was like, guys, guys, please, can you just pay me? And they did.

And they did. So, you know, it's, I think, I think it comes through, you know, penalizing fiat payments. It comes through incentivizing Bitcoin payments. It comes through the convenience. And then again, people gradually just having less and less dollars to even spend. Even if I wanted to pay my bills every single month solely in dollars, I don't earn enough dollars to do it. You know, 90% of my income or more is Bitcoin. So, yes, I must spend Bitcoin.

And I'm okay with that because, as you said, it gives you better spending habits. Everything that you buy, a bit more thought goes into it. It's not that you don't spend money. It's not that you don't enjoy your life. It's that you say, is this worth it? And sometimes it's a yes. And other times it's a no. Less trinkety crap, more incredible experiences with your family

and products that will actually last you a lifetime. So, yeah. Yeah. To wrap up here, any final thoughts from Brian, aunt, in and around anything that we've covered today. Brian, I'll give you another last word here if you want to chime in on anything that's been said. I mean, guys, we're here for it, right? Oh, I don't know what the heck I just did.

I'm playing games over here as well. So I mess some stuff up, but it's my time chain. My time chain arcade was playing some noise. That thing was freaking addictive. Guys, go play the video games. They're so much fun. I didn't know this existed. You said you just launched this ant.

That's what I'm seeing like behind the curtain. I'm less behind the curtain than these guys as well. But in Bitcoin, there's things being built for lightning adoption, for making security better, for making education better. Everything's being, things are being built right now that most of us just don't know about. There's functions that we're like, oh, I wish Bitcoin could do this. I guarantee you that's being built right now. So if there's anything to be bullish on, it's that progress is being made every day.

We can't take our foot off the gas pedal. We can't take our eye off the prize like Matt was talking about. our responsibility is to participate in the governance, but there's plenty to be excited about. And I'm genuinely excited because every day I see something that I didn't know existed and it was pushing Bitcoin forward. Awesome. Awesome. And you get the final word here.

Anything else you want to leave us with? I just say be careful out there. That Coinbase news should be an eye opener for everybody. 100%. Everybody needs to do their best to stay as private and self-solve. as possible, you know, guard your data, self-host your data, start learning about that, and avoid K-Y-C every chance you get. The other thing that I'll say in terms of self-custody, we are, I am given away some ways for you guys to self-custody as well. I'm given away a cold

card every single month from the website. So all you need to do is, is sign up for the newsletter with any email that you so choose. But there's the website. You just scroll down a little bit. There's a giant cold card, and you can drop an email in there every month that you are subscribed. You're automatically entered to win a cold card. And when you win, we'll just shoot an email. And then you can head over to coincite.com.

We'll let them know that you have won. So you don't even have to give us your info. And CoinCite deletes your data on the regular, which is the right thing to do. So anyways, guys, feel free to head over, sign up for the newsletter. Follow all of these gentlemen, all their information is in the show notes down below. Check out Start 9. Check out Brian's book, Parallel, and the Orange Pill app. And check out Time Chain Arcade.com and play some educational and fun Bitcoin games.

With that, gentlemen, thank you so much. for being on the show. I really appreciate you guys getting bullish with me on a Friday evening. And everybody else, if you enjoyed the show, make sure you give that light button a tap.

Have a wonderful evening, you guys. Everybody watching StackSats, but also Stack Skills. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This was your daily session. See you guys.