BTC Sessions - Quantum Threat, AI Data Dangers, and Privacy Erosion | TC

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Mentor Sessions Ep. 045: Bitcoin Privacy Erosion, Quantum Myths & AI Data Threats | Time Chain Calendar Creator TCWhat if the Biggest threat to your Bitcoin isn't AI or Quantum computers, but ...your own lack of knowledge? Time to level up. In this must-watch episode of BTC Sessions, anonymous Bitcoin trailblazer TC (@Meditation_Man), creator of the revolutionary Time Chain Calendar, exposes why privacy is Bitcoin's endangered lifeline—handing over your data to social media and governments isn't just careless, it's handing enemies an asymmetric edge that could wreck your stack. He debunks quantum FUD as overhyped mythology, reveals how AI devours your personal info into manipulative models, and drops actionable secrets like running your own node for true sovereignty, mastering UTXOs to slash fees and boost privacy, and why Nostr is the decentralized shield against censorship. From $5 wrench attacks to regulation by prosecution horrors like the Samurai case, TC warns normies: Bitcoin isn't just "number go up"—it's your stand for freedom in a world rigged to control you. If you're stacking sats the best thing you can do to level up your security is to keep learning! Dive in now for the tools to protect your Bitcoin forever.Key topics: Bitcoin privacy, quantum myths, AI data dangers, running nodes, UTXO management, Time Chain Calendar, Nostr privacy.Support Time Chain CalendarWebsite: https://timechaincalendar.comApp: Search "Time Chain Calendar" on App Store or Google PlayX: @Meditation_ManChapters:00:00 Teaser & Intro00:01:12 TC's Name Origin & Privacy Importance00:02:35 Privacy as Endangered Species00:04:46 Privacy vs Secrecy Debate00:05:47 Social Media Addiction & Data Risks00:07:28 Asymmetric Information Advantage00:08:43 Trust in Society & Tech Pitfalls00:10:44 Future AI Dangers00:12:47 $5 Wrench Attacks & Privacy Street Smarts00:14:19 Basic Privacy Tips for Bitcoiners00:16:30 Nostr as Privacy Tool00:19:51 Samurai Case & Regulation by Prosecution00:23:20 State Power & Black Pill Realities00:26:14 Why Run a Bitcoin Node00:32:23 Node Setup & Empowerment00:35:22 AI as Learning Tool00:39:15 Difficulty Adjustment Explained00:47:19 Time Chain Calendar Demo00:57:24 Hash Rate & Mining Power01:02:02 UTXO Model & Management01:12:51 Sparrow Wallet Tools01:14:13 UTXO Set Size Concerns01:18:15 Quantum Myths Busted01:25:17 Learning Resources & Conversations01:29:50 Events, Privacy Trade-offs & App Features01:37:41 Where to Find TC & ClosingPrevious Episode:Mentor Sessions Ep. 044: Bitcoin Freedom, Government Adoption Risks & IMF Criticism | My First Bitcoin Founder John Dennehy: https://youtu.be/miWc1mymTa0💰 Supported by @BowValleyCU — Tired of big banks? Join Bow Valley Credit Union, run by freedom and sound money advocates, as Canada's only traditional institution directly integrating Bitcoin for seamless, no-hassle transfers, no rehypothecation, self-custody withdrawals, insurance, auditability, and ideal corporate balance sheet integration. If you or your business is in Alberta, switch today! 👉https://qrco.de/bgGaIQ⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at abundantmines.com/boomers💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Gary, or Ben at Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit bitcoinmentor.io Follow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYC#Bitcoin #BitcoinPrivacy #QuantumThreats #AIDataDangers #BitcoinSecurity #TimeChainCalendar #Nostr #BitcoinPodcast #BTC #BitcoinNews #PrivacyErosion

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Quantum computing is sort of mythological in most people's minds. It's kind of this unknown superpowered monster that's out there. Watching what's happening with AI, I think there's some really unexpected, difficult things ahead. It's going to come back to bite some people. Privacy. I think it's one of these things that's an endangered species. It's really a perfect storm in my mind of dangerous landscape to be operating in. You have to learn best practices.
Starting point is 00:00:30 to keep yourself safe and to keep ownership of your Bitcoin. You have to become as knowledgeable as you can in order to even think about something correctly. The best thing that you can do for your Bitcoin security is continue to learn. Meet TC, the incredible anonymous Bitcoin creator behind Time Chain Calendar. In this episode, we explore why privacy isn't just a luxury.
Starting point is 00:00:50 It's your last line of defense against a world engineered to strip you bare and use your data as a weapon. Quantum computing, genuine threat or overhyped FUD, and the asymmetric info war where AI fees. on your data, giving your enemies an unbeatable edge unless you flip the script. Plus, TC breaks down key technical details of Bitcoin you need to understand in order to protect your stack. Hey, TC, thank you very much for joining us today.
Starting point is 00:01:14 I got to say, really great job with the mustache. Better than mine. I'm going to get mine up to your level. A few questions right off the bat. TC, why'd your parents decide to name you TC? Why is privacy so important to Bitcoiners? Because, you know, number go up. We're all making money.
Starting point is 00:01:31 and what's your Social Security number? Oh, wow. Thanks, Fed. I appreciate all those questions. Yeah, no, I think that, well, the name TC just came out of a fascination with the word time chain. I know when I first sort of encountered that word, and as context-wise, it was kind of an alternate to the ever-popular blockchain, which we hear all the time out there. And in my sort of education around Bitcoin and learning how Bitcoin works and some of the history,
Starting point is 00:02:07 you know, really time chain is a powerful and useful word when thinking about Bitcoin. And so I kind of embraced that. And the handle on Twitter evolved to that direction. And at some point I called myself TC. And then just by chance, as I produced my website and my apps, I came across the the name time chain calendar, which acronyms to TC as well. And so it's just kind of meant to be. Very cool, man. I feel like Magnum P.I's friend was named TC. I'm pretty sure that was the case on the show. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. But I feel a kinship now. I have my Magnum mustache and have my
Starting point is 00:02:45 T.C. right here. So this is really good. Yeah. No, look, hey, and also to your question about privacy, I think it's one of these things that's an endangered species in our time that we live in. Freedom, privacy. These are things a lot of people have, for a variety of reasons, decided to not really care too much about. And I think there's a lot of manipulation as far as perspective out there that encourages you to let go of that. No, no, no, no. You would only need privacy if you're a criminal of some sort. Why would you even think about that? And, you know, all the sort of areas of fear in the world and all the buttons that have been pushed over the last many years to make people afraid and happily hand over freedoms of all sorts. So I think it's a really important topic.
Starting point is 00:03:37 I think that we deserve on a fundamental level. We deserve our privacy. We deserve our freedoms. And so I think as a bit coiner, it's something you should really ponder. And you may decide, you know, it's totally fine to, you know, put your name and your face out there. And, And you may also on the other side to side, you know, maybe you want to try to preserve that longer. I don't think a lot of aspects of privacy are going to last forever in the world that we're in. But, hey, you know, you got to take a stand somewhere. I think you're 100% right.
Starting point is 00:04:11 I think both Nathan and I would agree with you if I could just speak for Nathan on that, you know, as much as we had a little fun time ragging on you at the beginning, what are we doing here if not to try to, it sounds grand, you know, change the world. Otherwise, what is Bitcoin except just another tech investment, you know, for number go up? And that's great. Number go up is great. I'm not going to turn that down. But there should be something special here that we're trying to do to make this a better place.
Starting point is 00:04:37 We have privacy. We have long-term thinking. We have better relationships with people. If not for that, what are we doing here? Indeed. I want to kind of elaborate. Sorry, Gary, I was going to interrupt for one second. I kind of want to elaborate that a little bit too.
Starting point is 00:04:51 So, T.C., when you're thinking out privacy, how are you kind of define it separately from secrecy. And then additionally, you might not have an answer. And maybe it's kind of the same as mine. I'm wondering if when you, when you think this really started to go in the wrong direction, because I agree that like the lack of privacy and this complete like open transparency about our own personal lives has been really kicked off. I want to say from about the early 2000s here. I think it was the following 9-11. And then also kind of with the popularity and growth of social media, which almost feels like a side-up if you put the two side-by-side together. So I'm curious from your viewpoint,
Starting point is 00:05:22 where with privacy, how do you kind of think about privacy in the abstract sense compared to something like secrecy? And additionally, where do you think things culturally went so wrong? Because I think this, I feel like this used to be the norm, that it was assumed that you were entitled to keep things to yourself and could reveal them as you wanted later. But it's gone almost like completely the other direction where the, almost like the presumption of innocence is lost there as well. Your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, it's a deep topic. It's one of these things where, you know, if you pay. paid attention. If you've been an adult in the last 20 years, you saw the advent of all of these
Starting point is 00:05:58 trends. The social media is really, really powerful. I think everyone can kind of relate to the addictiveness of it. You know, you're dealing with the currency of attention. And this is dangerous from the point of view of, you know, people are very incentivized to give out more information than they would otherwise because they get the endorphin rush and all the little clifes. and all the likes and all the sort of, you know, the currency of social media back for, in exchange for the information they're sharing. And it's one thing when you're just taking pictures of the food you're eating. It's another thing when you're literally documenting on a day-by-day basis,
Starting point is 00:06:40 the growth of your child. This is what really freaks me out is thinking about the next generation that has grown up with their parents. They didn't decide to do this. their parents from the time they were a fetus in the womb posting pictures of them. And you think about the collective result of that as far as data that's just floating around the internet. We've learned about shocking behavior of the social media platforms.
Starting point is 00:07:10 Remember all the stuff that came to light about how Facebook just takes all this information, resells it to all kinds of third parties. There is such a pipeline that this data. data ends up going to that's so far outside of your scope. And the other part is that, you know, once it's on the internet, it's out of your hands and it's going to circulate infinitely. There's an even freakyer aspect of it when you look at the AI wave that's happened in the last couple years, because now this data is becoming sort of the food that's feeding the development of these AI models. And who knows when something you innocently posted for your friends and family a decade ago,
Starting point is 00:07:50 turns into some kind of liability in your real life. It's a daunting thing when you realize how dangerous the internet can be and just simply giving out personal information is the vulnerability. I talk about this all the time. You know, my parents' generation, older people, they just don't have these concepts
Starting point is 00:08:13 and they're regularly, oh, let me just give my name and my email address and my phone number and my address because this is a good cause I want to support or something like that. It's insidious when you look at the good intentions that people are operating with and the downstream vulnerabilities and dangers that can result from just the way the internet works. Yeah, it's completely mind-blowing. And it's funny.
Starting point is 00:08:39 It almost reminds me of lobbying in some sense where on the individual level, you feel like the information you're giving up might not necessarily be that valuable, but in aggregate over a long time and for a lot of people, that is hugely valuable information. I'm reminded of, I could be getting a case study a little bit wrong, but I think it was like the game, the board game, group game, like one night a werewolf, something along those lines.
Starting point is 00:08:57 One of these kind of situational games you're playing, but it was either developed for or used in studying that a minority with asymmetrical information had the advantage over the majority that did not. And if you think about it even from that perspective, that means that if they're collecting all your data, they're concentrating it into their models, right? And if they have access to it and you don't,
Starting point is 00:09:17 that puts them in a huge asymmetric advantage. I mean, you can even just tell if you're going on Amazon or anything these days, they got you pegged. They will show you the products that you didn't even necessarily realize that you needed. And it's, I don't know, T.C., why do you think that, one, do you kind of share that sentiment that it's not only just from like a product placement standpoint, but it's a huge asymmetric advantage and probably a tool of manipulation, if not now and in the future? But why do you think that most people are still kind of asleep at this?
Starting point is 00:09:46 Are we crazy? We're just crazy Bitcoiners on the internet? It's a whole aspect of trust in society. You know, people have not been raised to really think critically through these things. We've seen the rise of these internet platforms as at first have a novelty and how quickly they've become essential to our everyday lives. If you think about online banking, you think about the social dynamics and social. media, these things have just become so integral in a relatively short amount of time. And so people haven't had the time collectively as a society to recognize where the pitfalls are
Starting point is 00:10:31 and start educating people as they encounter this stuff. It kind of feels like, you know, kids these days just, here's how you use an iPad and here's how you go to the web. And where is all the sort of caution? Where is all of the, you know, education around sort of the minefield of dangers that are out there? It's up to parents. A lot of parents are just too busy working. So it's just a perfect storm of, you know, people need to interact with this technology.
Starting point is 00:11:03 And they don't have the time to even think about it critically for themselves, let alone teach the next generation about all the sort of nuances of it. So it's really a perfect storm in my mind of just dangerous landscape to be operating in. The kids, I like to think they're going to be okay. But watching what's happening with AI, I think there's some really kind of unexpected, difficult things ahead as far as, like I said before, all this personal information people are putting out there, it's going to come back to bite some people for sure. What kind of things are you thinking of? What kind of examples might you be able to give me? Well, I mean, look, relative to Bitcoin, we hear about $5 wrench attacks.
Starting point is 00:11:57 You know, I mean, there's real dangers out there just simply from the point of view of, you know, you might make public who you are and what kind of wealth you might hold or what assets you might hold and you know it's just it's too easy these days for people to come and show up in meet space and suddenly you're you're confronting something that you never imagined you would have to deal with so it's it's it's just simply common sense like it to me there's kind of just this digital realm of street smarts that you have to evolve i think privacy absolutely fits into that because that's the fastest way that you can just, you know, on the flip side, remove yourself from some of these dangers.
Starting point is 00:12:43 It's just don't put yourself out there fully. Don't fully volunteer information you don't need to. So that's kind of the way I think about it. I know that as you proceed in the real world on the Internet, there's only so much you can do totally privately. You're either participating or you're not in some respects. I love that the Bitcoin community has some embrace and some sympathy for this idea of let me just stay a little bit anon. I can adopt a different identity.
Starting point is 00:13:17 I can not share my face and we can still interact, get to know each other, develop relationships, transact with one another. So it's kind of a brave new world in a sense. You have to understand the nuances of the nuances of the. this landscape, which means digging into the technology a little more, certainly with the internet. And hey, that's a wonderful perspective and framework for Bitcoin as well, because that's another technology where you have to learn best practices to keep yourself safe and to keep ownership of your Bitcoin. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:55 Well, T.C., let me ask you this. I mean, as much as I do appreciate the Guy Fawks, Unabomber look, I suspect that there are many people in the Bitcoin space who will not be donning a mask all the time. So are there that you could think off the top of your head, like maybe one or two or three of like the most important basic things that any kind of regular average Bitcoin or could and should be doing to preserve some basic level of privacy? I think it's kind of steps. It's shades of gray.
Starting point is 00:14:24 And you know, you want to kind of walk yourself to where you ultimately want to be and realize that you start out with perhaps all the cards in your hands. hand. And then as you continue playing, you're maybe revealing more of those cards. So I don't think it's a bad thing if you start out in Bitcoin, maybe create some new accounts, pick a new name, and you can make a little cartoon character, a little AI image for yourself. And that's a fine place to start. You always have the option to show your face, share your name, your real identity down the road. I think that's really, really what it comes down to. It's it's taking a real time to recognize that's under your control.
Starting point is 00:15:12 You don't have to just share that stuff right out the gate. I think that's kind of the thing that the older generation misses because the entire understanding of the internet was maybe introduced to them through Facebook where you put your legal name and you connect to the legal names of all your other people you're connected with. You know, the culture on X, I think, is a lot more friendly to this idea that, you know, you're, what you say and what your ideas are is what really matters. The credentials, your association with something out there in the real world is, is really a shield that a lot of people hide behind. And perhaps there's something more meaningful if you just omit that and you make your ideas or maybe your work more speak for itself.
Starting point is 00:16:03 Agreed. I think that's fantastic. Just stand by your ideas. Let the ideas do the work. And whether they're good ideas or bad ideas, let them be sorted out, you know, kind of in the general sphere of discussion. That's beautiful. I wanted to ask T.C., were there any going to specific tools that we're able to use?
Starting point is 00:16:21 Is there anything? It could not be necessarily related to Bitcoin, but Bitcoin or even just online digital tools for privacy that you like or think are worth checking out? Oh, for sure. I mean, there's tons of Bitcoin-specific stuff. I think maybe since we've been talking so much about social media, I think you can't have this conversation without mentioning Noster. It's really a powerful technology, a powerful network.
Starting point is 00:16:46 It's so much more than social media, but a lot of people are still experiencing it kind of as a social media experience. And what's really cool, yeah, I mean, I'm in there every day. It's amazing how much of that same social media experience can be had there. But it's also a real revelation when you realize, ah, this identity that I am acting as is really a public-private key pair. And it's something that I own. And the way the network is constructed, it's not a centralized third-party tech company. it's a open network of voluntary participants.
Starting point is 00:17:26 And these are mind-blowing concepts. They're incredibly helpful to realize, hey, in the context of this is a voluntary network, this is a force of people around the world that are choosing to run these relays to get these messages around. So I have a feed of messages when I open my app. Maybe I should take a little more interest in that.
Starting point is 00:17:47 Maybe I can run a relay myself. And also in that context, it makes even more sense. Maybe I should take my time and not immediately put out my real name and my face, and I can participate and find the people that I want to associate with
Starting point is 00:18:03 the information that I want to read each day without having to do that. I think it's an opportunity to realize there is another way. Attention all freedom-loving Alberta bitcoins. Tired of the Big Six Banks freezing funds, blocking transactions, or slamming your account shut without warning or
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Starting point is 00:19:52 All right, let's jump back into the episode. Beautiful. I completely agree too. I think that almost the social media aspect of Noster actually feels like the tip of the iceberg. Like there's so much more that you could possibly do there because you've almost got this decentralized message network with the built-in identity from the public private key pair. So for even, I was just playing around with LBHub earlier today. And the fact that I can use Noster Wallet Connect is a way to get to my node and relay
Starting point is 00:20:16 transactions, I think is wonderful and beautiful. And again, it's, it's almost like it feels a little bit like a sandbox tool, almost in the same way that the internet did at the beginning, that there's some amazing creative way of using this infrastructure that I can't even possibly conceive of. Some entrepreneur is going to come along and build something incredible. Like the idea, like, you can even just take a Noster event hash and you could use that, like, you could tie that to a Bitcoin transaction or some other things. Well, you can sort of have information in parallel in another decentralized way. So I agree that like there is so much there in terms of power and also the additional privacy with Noster. Even in Australia recently, TC, I don't know if you caught this.
Starting point is 00:20:56 In Australia, it if you're, I'm pretty sure you probably could get, still get gender affirming care, but I won't touch on that. If you're 16 years or younger, you either to be 16 years old or 16 and younger, you can't use social media anymore. And it's gone to this complete nanny state. And I think you would probably share my sentiment that this seems like an awfully convenient way to get everybody to provide ID and age verification for all the apps that you're using in Australia. And I've heard some crazy things regarding what is it, like the Five Eyes in Australia being a little bit of a hub for data collection that just threw up red flags for me. It's something that we need to pay attention to. It's something that we should be aware of. One thing that I want to
Starting point is 00:21:35 touch on and I'll kind of get your feedback on all of that was we just had Keone go unfortunately report to prison. Like it's unbelievably tragic what's going on there. If you haven't already, go to Bill and Q&A.org, sign the petition, donate to the families. Don't donate on change.org. Donate directly to the families. There is a link there. We need to keep this message going. Privacy is unbelievably important. But what you said earlier in the conversation that really hit me was this idea that it may not be what happens with what regards to what you said now. It's something that comes down the pipe later. And even looking at specifically the Samurai Dev's case, they had sought legal counsel, they thought they were well within the rules. And this came back to bite them later, despite them thinking them playing by the rules, playing within the bounds, and adhering to what was expected of them,
Starting point is 00:22:21 I don't want to be a complete dumber, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that your thoughts or opinions or things that you might be saying now are within the scope of acceptability, but they might not be in the future. And if it's a permanent record, that could absolutely come back to bite you in the ass.
Starting point is 00:22:37 Just any thoughts on that, T.C. Yeah, I mean, look, we have a similar daunting, complex landscape when it comes to government and legal systems. And it's kind of just an amazing thing to take a step back and look where we are in history and how crazy this got throughout the 20th century and now look in the 21st century, how this is emerging. You know, the case with the samurai guys is an example.
Starting point is 00:23:05 I like this phrase. I just saw this actually on Twitter this morning. It was regulation by prosecution. You know, you basically had these prosecutors decide, hey, we're going to disregard the fact that these guys haven't broken any specific laws. And in fact, the regulators said that they weren't even, you know, potential targets for this kind of charges. You have enough political will and the government's going to do what it wants to do. So this is really the world we're living in. And again, it ties into everything we've said so far about privacy and everything we've said about how the internet works.
Starting point is 00:23:49 Because, you know, the tech companies are going to do what's in their best interest. And that's not the same thing as your best interest as a user. The governments are going to do what they want to do for their best interests. That's not the same best interest for you as a citizen. So this is the reality of the world today. And again, it is tough to not be a dumer about it. It's overwhelming in some regard. And I honestly think that's the.
Starting point is 00:24:12 the biggest reason why so many, we call them Normies, by boy, so many Normies don't really pay attention to Bitcoin. They don't pay attention to, you know, the things that they ought to is because so much is happening, so much is changing all at once. And most people are just trying to pay the bills and put food on the table and survive their day. And it is overwhelming. It takes a ton of effort to crunch your brain and use your critical thinking, to gather information, to verify things yourself. It's wild. I mean, honestly, I think that's why the Bitcoin,
Starting point is 00:24:47 we don't like the word community, but the population of Bitcoiners around the world is an incredible group of people to connect with because these are all people that have really embraced this journey. Down the rabbit hole, let's collect this information, let's verify things, let's activate our brain cells. Things are not what they seem. and they're worth fighting for.
Starting point is 00:25:12 Freedom is worth fighting for. Truth is worth fighting for. Privacy is worth fighting for. So it's really devastating what's happened to the samurai guys. I'm hoping that gets corrected after the fact. But honestly, it's just a, it's a little bit tough pill to swallow to realize, you know, this pendulum keeps swinging politically.
Starting point is 00:25:34 Who knows who's going to be in power four or 10 years down the road who, you know, makes it worse. So it's just you got a, you got to kind of fight for yourself in some ways. It's that feeling that no one's coming to save you. And you've got to take an interest and you've got to discover what are the actions to take to protect yourself, Bitcoin, you know,
Starting point is 00:25:59 taking an interest in privacy, taking an interest in these alternate networks that you can use to communicate without censorship. It's a big deal. Yeah. No, and you're right. And I think I'm forgetting it already, but you called it, I guess, regulation by prosecution. And that's exactly what we have here because, okay, let's say you solve this issue. Let's say Trump pardons him. Well, the damage is done. You know, if I'm somebody who can write code, which I'm not, I'm an idiot. But if I were, I would say, well, okay, yeah, he's at
Starting point is 00:26:30 jail. But, and maybe I believe that Trump is trustworthy, newsflash, he's not, none of them are. their politicians. But let's say I believe that he is. What's stopping the next person from coming at me? Even though I've done nothing to break the law, some agency is going to come after me. So maybe I'd never want to even take the chance in the future. It's stifling. And I'm sorry to say, to some degree, there is a black pill element to this that it seems Bitcoin is the only way to solve it to take power out of the state's hand. Because as much as I respect your attempt for privacy, and I think you're doing a great job of it for little I know. We had a previous guest on here who has said before, if the state wants to come after you, if they want to target you, they will get you,
Starting point is 00:27:10 no matter how private you're trying to be, no matter how much you're trying to get away, they have unlimited money, they have near unlimited guns. So you're kind of at their mercy unless we can actually take power away from that institution. Sorry. Yep. Cool. Well, great podcast, guys. On that wonderful note, see you all later. Okay. So there are a few of the things I really do want to discuss today. And particularly, like, I want to talk about beginning, it seems like the general population, speaking of normies, has been ginned up in terms of fear a lot lately. And I do want to touch on those things, particularly quantum and maybe a little bit on spam and forks as well, too, because I'm getting a ton of questions from people not in our Bitcoin, not community, global
Starting point is 00:27:50 collection of people who like Bitcoin. The other thing that I did when I touch on first, because I think it's really important. It's poorly or understated often, particularly even like in the podcast space. We were talking about privacy. Privacy is a way to protect you, which also means protecting your Bitcoin and protecting your stack. And I really do feel like as much as like number go up and the marketing stuff is tons of fun, that one of the best things that you can do in Bitcoin for yourself is continue that learning journey, to dive into the tools, to understand how the network works. Because if you don't understand how the Bitcoin system comes together,
Starting point is 00:28:22 how are you possibly going to have conviction in this thing? If you can't begin to grok it at a high level, what's going on. And then additionally, more Bitcoin has been lost than been stolen. And even when it's stolen, it's usually a con because that guy had asymmetrical information that you didn't have. The best thing that you can do for your Bitcoin security, I think, is continued to learn. So, T.C, I want to go through even like some of the, you do have a lot of newcomers coming to the channel. Some of the kind of, we'll say frameworks around major components, kind of the fundamentals to make sure you have an understanding of how the Bitcoin system works. And I'll pull up time chain calendar in a second here, but even just to kick things off, why would someone run a node?
Starting point is 00:29:01 This is such a good question. I mean, to me, before I dig into the node thing, everything you're saying is just resonating with me. I'm a huge believer that you have to become as knowledgeable as you can in order to even think about something correctly. You know, our brains work in mysterious ways, but I regularly discover that there's a, you know, sort of a framework around every topic.
Starting point is 00:29:31 topic. And maybe when you start out with a new topic, your framework is really not defined. And that's what makes it feel so mysterious. And then as you discover more, as you learn more, as you get hands on, you're informing the development of your framework. And then ultimately that is the basis of your conviction and your understanding and allows you to take topics, whether it's, you know, filtering and spam or quantum or any of these things and you can actually maybe think about it in a useful way or maybe you identify oh here's a new corner of my framework that's not really clearly defined now I know what to dig into and study a little more and let me define that okay so why do you run a node running a node is running bitcoin there's a famous tweet from hal finney where he says
Starting point is 00:30:26 simply running Bitcoin. That is running a node. Anyone in the world can download the Bitcoin software and run it. There's a command or two you have to tell the computer, and all of a sudden the Bitcoin software is running after you've downloaded it. It starts connecting to other nodes on the network. It creates peers. It creates a connection to those peers.
Starting point is 00:30:52 And it says, give me block zero. And then it downloads that. Okay, give me blois. block one. Okay, give me block two. And just automatically starts building the entire chain, the entire record of every single transaction in every block for the entire chain. Right now, we're at block 929009. And it's just incredible to think the entire lifetime of Bitcoin is just these blocks coming together filled with transactions. Those transactions are all individuals out there voluntarily using the network.
Starting point is 00:31:28 There's a special transaction in every block that issues the new supply of Bitcoin and also gives whatever transaction fees that were from transactions in those blocks to the winning miner. And it's just incredible. This entire system operates basically with people running nodes.
Starting point is 00:31:47 So why do you run a node? Well, you know, you have a Bitcoin wallet. Maybe you have some Bitcoin. Do you want to know how much Bitcoin is in your wallet, that requires a node. You got to look up on chain. What are the transactions associated with these addresses? And what does that amount to? And you want to be able to stack some Bitcoin, and you want to track an incoming receive transaction? You need a node to tell you, hey, that's in the Mempool. I see it there. Oh, now it has one confirmation. Oh, now it has two
Starting point is 00:32:18 confirmations. A node is telling you that. You want to send permissionlessly. You might have heard about these amazing properties of Bitcoin. It's censorship resistant and it's sovereign and you can transact with anyone in the world without permission. Well, that's because you broadcast your transaction and nodes circulated around. So you want to run a node for issues of sovereignty and permissionlessness. You want to run a node for issues of privacy because guess what? If you're not running your own node, you're using someone else's. The use case that really hits hard for me, I remember. it was right when I decided to let's light a fire under my ass and let's like figure out how to do this is when I realized just checking my balance on a wallet means I'm querying someone's nodes somewhere.
Starting point is 00:33:08 I'm not running a node yet. So I'm asking someone else, hey, check out these addresses and tell me how much Bitcoin's in those addresses. And I just gave some personal Bitcoin financial information to that who knows who it is in some cases. So you run your own node so that you have your own copy of the time chain inside your node. You want to check your balance. You can do that completely privately on your home network. You don't even make any communication to the internet to anyone else to check your addresses. You don't make any queries to anyone else.
Starting point is 00:33:43 Hey, please, would you broadcast this transaction? You just broadcast it with your own node. So it's a super powerful thing. And it's a really important thing to realize this. This is what Bitcoin is. Anyone can download this software. Anyone can run it. You can run it on pretty much any computer.
Starting point is 00:34:03 You know, the only real needs are for a big enough hard drive to fit the whole chain of data. But it's super empowering when you start doing this. You run your own node, and now it just feels good. I can check my balance without asking anyone else. I can track my own stacking transactions and when I do need to do a send transaction, I can broadcast that from my own node in the network.
Starting point is 00:34:29 It's super powerful. I completely agree. And the other things I absolutely love about it as well, for me, I always have kind of this framework of like the be your own bank. And I very much feel that like banks are both verifying and keeping a record as well as having the vault. And if you only have the vault and self-custy is important,
Starting point is 00:34:44 do not leave it on exchange, take self-custity. But if you're not verifying yourself, it's not, you're missing out of half the job of the bank. And secondly, it's a wonderful, like we're talking about education is one of the best things you can
Starting point is 00:34:54 do for your own Bitcoin security and defenses, setting up a note is a great way to learn. To try and figure out what it's actually going on here to play around with it is a wonderful way to learn more about how the whole Bitcoin system works together. Gary, did you have any thoughts or comments on that? I run a note. It's great. Nathan helped me set it up. It's fantastic. And I mean, it makes me feel good like I'm part of the system. I'm one extra, you know, node here that I'm keeping track of it like everybody else. It's part of my responsibility. But yeah, I make sure I check my wallet through my node. I send a transaction through my node. Yeah, I like the idea. Obviously, maybe not everybody has the luxury of being able to do that yet maybe. I mean,
Starting point is 00:35:35 I did mine by the start nine. It cost me like 500 bucks. But like you said, it doesn't have to be on one of these prefab machines. You can find a way to, you know, it's just a copy of the ledger. That's all it really is. You just need enough hard drive space, like you said. So yeah, I'm down with you. Everybody, go run your own note. Do it. Damn straight.
Starting point is 00:35:55 Okay, I'm going to pull up, go ahead, T.C. Oh, just real quick. I just wanted to say, you know, there are these fabulous tools out there, like Start 9. Umbrel is a pretty good company, too. Like, you can buy an all in one, you know, it shows up in the mail and you plug it in, and you're good to go. But it's also really empowering and edifying. to realize is this is really just software and you can get any computer one of my favorite notes i have
Starting point is 00:36:23 three different notes at this point i'm about to fire up a fourth but one of my favorite ones is just a little intel nuck it's just a little cheap uh pc computer i found it for just under 200 bucks on the internet i got a two terabyte hard drive for about 60 bucks uh you know and then hey you know we're living in the area in in the era of ai hey chat gpt how do i wipe windows off this thing and install Linux, just follow the instructions. Hey, how do I download Bitcoin and run that? Follow the instructions. Boom. Done. And it's like incredible. You can do it direct. You can do it on a budget. Most people these days have an old desktop or laptop lying around. Revive that damn thing, wipe it clean, install Linux on it, download Bitcoin and run it. It's that simple.
Starting point is 00:37:10 I just want to quickly jump off that tangent for a second there as well too. Yeah, in the age of, I don't buy into the AI fear either. I don't think it's going to completely wipe out jobs. I don't think it's, I think at some point in time, we'll probably plateau for a little bit here as well. Like, it's not going, nothing goes on like a linear progression,
Starting point is 00:37:26 but it's unbelievably powerful as a tool for self-education for people. Like, it's just going to increase the productivity and skill set of people. And to your point there, yeah, there is so much that you can do, including setting up a note or installing Linux or exploring, who knows whatever else out there, by taking advantage of these large language models.
Starting point is 00:37:44 I think that is a place where they serve a purpose and they're a wonderful tool. And it's not, it's not going to be something that like, you know, all of a sudden, like you as a developer, it's like one developer can now have put out so much more output,
Starting point is 00:37:57 doesn't rely on a team or outsourcing. You still need someone to overview, make sure it's good and there's good design, but it can help level up one person's skills. That doesn't mean that eight others go unemployed. It means that they might also spin up eight different other software applications or something else as well. It means there's going to be more services and wealth created for everybody.
Starting point is 00:38:13 It's just talking about. about FUD and AI, it's the creative destruction that we saw in every kind of like the industrial revolution and just in modern cities. Like it's a natural progression. We have a new tool. It's people are people who still work guys. It's not going to be like the, uh, let was say, unemployment apocalypse. I just curious have any thoughts on that and I want to go back into the technicals. Um, I, I think that it's a, it's a, it's a, you said it beautifully. It's just a tool. Um, and it's a fabulous tool, especially for knocking down learning curves on, you know, there's all this technical stuff out there.
Starting point is 00:38:45 And the answer usually just depends on asking the right question. And I think that's what AI is really beautiful for is. Take a moment and think about what really is the question you have. And like I said, when it comes to running a node, I knew I wanted to do two things when I got this little computer. I wanted to wipe windows off that thing. I have no interest in running windows. I wanted to make it a Linux computer.
Starting point is 00:39:08 And I had never actually done that before. And so I just typed that question in. And it was a couple commands. to run and next thing you know, I got a Linux computer. So it's just one of those things where, you know, you, you're going to train your brain to think in the right way. And I think AI really is wonderful when you stop treating it like a genie that just has infinite knowledge and you just ask it all kinds of random questions and goof off with it.
Starting point is 00:39:32 I think when you're trying to do something concrete and you have a real task you want to accomplish, that's when it shines. So, yeah, I think it's an important technology for people to get hands on. haven't so far, it's time to catch up and familiarize yourself with what it does. Give yourself a good task to accomplish and see how much it can help you accomplish that task. 100%. I completely agree. Even on that note, too, even on the node note. So my previous note that I was running, I really cheaped out on computer parts. It was running into some problems. But I was getting, again, I have some, like a very little coding experience. I can kind of read through
Starting point is 00:40:08 things a bit, but I had no idea what the error codes were throwing me what they meant. I took them. I throw them through AI, throw him through Grock. It's like, hey, what does this error code mean? And I'm able to work through and understand stuff because I don't have to have, it's an easy way to help me parse through the information so that I can act and I can make decisions. I got that bad boy back up and running now.
Starting point is 00:40:26 I got some new parts, and we're good to go. We're off to the races. So I agree, really powerful is a tool to implement. I did want to jump back in. So again, I want to go more into like the quantum and spam stuff before getting there. The website, so timechain calendar.com, and we have the app as well too,
Starting point is 00:40:40 is incredibly powerful for laying out the stats, and what we're seeing in Bitcoin. And I think when most people look at it, it just kind of is going to be Greek the first time you're coming by. So I want to at least take a minute to explore. Because again, if our knowledge is part of the main fundamental understanding of the system as part of our security, then let's break down some of the things that we're seeing here. Because I'll tell you, T.C.
Starting point is 00:41:00 And this is the first one I want to start with. Whenever I'm talking about Bitcoin adoption, I'd be curious your overall thoughts on it this year as well, too, is that I kind of explain it like we've had the Coca-Cola moment in the sense that If I go to any room, like I go to a room 1,000 people and I ask them, have you heard of Bitcoin? Probably 99, 99 out of the 1,000, if not the 1,000 have heard of Bitcoin. They know the name. The brand has kind of penetrated into the culture, particularly, at least here in our Western nations.
Starting point is 00:41:30 However, if I were asked that same group of 1,000 people, what is the difficulty adjustment? I would be surprised if one out of 1,000 would be able to tell me what the difficulty adjustment is. They know Bitcoin exists. They have no idea how it works or the components of it. So even if there's to kick things off, I see it looks like we got 367 blocks left before the next one, TC. What is the difficulty adjustment? And why does it matter? If somebody only cares about price, why should they care about the difficulty adjustment? Wow, that's one of my favorite questions. We might have to go back after this question and answer some other questions. But The difficulty adjustment regulates the pace of blocks on average over a long period of time.
Starting point is 00:42:20 It may surprise people to know, especially after they hear what if you get into Bitcoin and you're a new Bitcoiner and you've just started your journey, you may encounter this little nugget that blocks happen every 10 minutes. Bitcoin's audits itself every 10 minutes, every 10 minutes, every 10 minutes, every 10 minutes. Okay. Bullshit. It actually doesn't. There's no mechanism that governs the timing of a block one to the next. That little green circle inside right underneath the big number, it shows us to work.
Starting point is 00:42:50 Just coming up on 10 minutes, and when it reaches 10 minutes, it doesn't mean we get a block. There's another circle on there. You see all those little teeny tiny squares going around in a circle in white and that kind of fades to gray. That's a visualization of the last 24 hours of blocks. Does that look even to you every 10 minutes? You can see these clumps. You can see these giant gaps. We had almost a 40-minute gap between blocks while we started this pod.
Starting point is 00:43:18 So the truth is that Bitcoin doesn't have any mechanism to govern the pace of blocks from one to the next. A block can happen in a second. It can take two hours to happen. It's over an average, over a long period of time, it regulates the pace with changing the difficulty. You can think of the difficulty in a whole variety of ways. Maybe think of it like the current that swimmers are swimming against. Maybe think about it as the size of a bullseye if you're sitting there throwing darts and you're hitting too many bullseys.
Starting point is 00:43:51 Let's make the bullseys smaller and you'll hit them slower or let's make the bullseye bigger and you'll hit more of them faster on average over time. It's a pace regulation mechanism, the difficulty. So the difficulty adjustment happens every. roughly two weeks. The red circle on the time chain calendar is showing you that cycle. We're just a couple days away from the next adjustment. You can see the indicators at sort of a 930, 10 o'clock position there on that circle, right?
Starting point is 00:44:18 So when it gets to the top, that is when the adjustment hits. That happens every 2016 blocks, which if they were 10 minutes is exactly two weeks. Of course, it's not going to be exactly two weeks because we're dealing with randomness here. And the blocks right now, if you look in the right side of the interface there, you can see average block time in the third row there, 10 minutes and nine seconds. So we're operating currently in the last almost two weeks. We've had average 10 minute, nine second block time on average. Some of the blocks are just a couple seconds to the next. Other ones take much longer.
Starting point is 00:44:56 On average, 10 minutes, nine seconds. So that's slower than the target 10 minutes. and when the difficulty gets to the adjustment after that two-week period, it's going to decrease the difficulty because we need to make it easier to find blocks because they're taking longer than our intended 10 minutes. There's another interesting related data point on the bottom right hand of that right-side column where it shows you since Genesis, nine minutes, 36 seconds. That's almost 17 years of a completely random process.
Starting point is 00:45:29 and we're just a little bit faster than 10 minutes over that entire 17-year period. And it's the difficulty adjustment that does that. Because every time we have this roughly two-week period come to an end and we've had faster than 10 minutes, the difficulty is going to go up. So what happens is more and more people try to mine Bitcoin. The blocks come in faster and faster. The difficulty adjustment adjusts to make it harder to find a block. and over time that continues.
Starting point is 00:46:01 And that's what the difficulty adjustment's doing. It's making sure that we try to stay close to 10 minutes, which in my mind, I get this romantic notion that Satoshi really cared that the issuance of Bitcoin happens over multiple human lifetimes. The whole issuance of the supply is going to take 140-something years or something like that because of this difficulty adjustment.
Starting point is 00:46:24 Whereas if we didn't have a difficulty adjustment and you have this increase in the number of people competing to find blocks, probably the whole 21 million would have been issued already in the first few years. And so it's a stunning and very important aspect of Bitcoin's design, this pacing mechanism of the difficulty adjustment that every roughly two weeks changes kind of how hard it is to find a block. And that ends up making the issuance of the supply take place over 100 years. You know, we've had 95% of the supply issued already.
Starting point is 00:46:58 It's going to take another 100 years or so to finish the remaining 5% of the supply. That's, you see, I've got to say, yeah, sorry, Nathan, I've just got to say what you said, you know, it's not going to necessarily exactly happen at exactly 10 minutes. I was really, really hoping that block is going to be mine at exactly 10 minutes. Yeah, and you could see, it's a 14 minutes and 20 seconds now. Yeah, look at that. We're looking now at the new mobile app. which was just released a few months ago.
Starting point is 00:47:29 So basically, the time chain calendar is a website at timechain calendar.com. And it's also an app for iOS and Android. If you go to the app store or the Play Store, you just search for TimeChane Calendar, and you can download it for free. And you get this lovely little dashboard. These circles are showing you these aspects of Bitcoin's design,
Starting point is 00:47:49 the red circle we were just talking about, the difficulty. We touched on that circle of little tiny white squares. That's a visualization of the last 24 hours of blocks. The one with a little orange arrow right at the top, that's the most recent block. If any of them have a little red arrow, those are empty blocks. And then we see that green circle. It's changing color now to dark green.
Starting point is 00:48:11 That's the 10-minute expectation of the next block, and it changes colors. If it goes all the way around, it starts turning dark green. And then if it keeps going, we still haven't hit a block. It starts turning orange and eventually red. it's sort of imparting a little bit of anxiety about, hey, I was told these blocks are every 10 minutes and it's been an hour. You know, so, you know, and then the average block in the mobile app, it's right there in the bottom right corner, 10 minutes and nine seconds you can see. And that's a really cool thing to keep an eye on because as we approach that difficulty adjustment, it's going to translate directly to the next change in difficulty. And you can see next adjustments estimated to be one point something percent that's happening in two and a half days.
Starting point is 00:48:50 So it's awareness of the actual workings of this technology and this network. And it can be profoundly informative and have a great positive impact on your understanding and your conviction in Bitcoin to just engage with these things and notice them and have an awareness of them. Yeah, two quick things, if you don't mind, Nathan, I just want to touch. And one with the difficulty adjustment. A little plug to my friends over at Free Market Kids. I first learned about the difficulty adjustment playing one of their board games, hodle up. And, you know, it's one of those things you can hear about, somebody can talk to you about. But when you actually just physically played even for just like 15, 20 minutes and see what actually happens,
Starting point is 00:49:31 it really can upclick in your brain. If you're one of those people, it just learns from physically doing something. And, you know, the other thing, I have to ask you because it not just the information that time challengeer, time chain calendar conveys, excuse me. But it's the way it looks. It's so aesthetically pleasing. Just visually, it looks fantastic. Do you have a design background?
Starting point is 00:49:55 Sort of no. No. Yes. I don't know. I spent the better part of two decades building websites. I learned how to do web development on the fly. I never went to school for computer science or any of this kind of stuff. We just got a new block.
Starting point is 00:50:13 Saw it. You can see it in my eye. So, So that line of work doing front-end web and actually building websites for different people, I was basically under the tutelage of a really hardcore design guy who imparted me with certain nuggets of design concepts. And so all these years later, when I finally started putting this project together and the website's been out for about three years, you know, before I built the first version of
Starting point is 00:50:45 the website. I just had a little napkin drawing or I, you know, I basically wanted a web-based block clock. You know, the block clock hardware from Coin Kite. It's really legendary. It's amazing. It's a brilliant piece of hardware. It's a beautiful thing. It doesn't always update right exactly when the blocks hit because it has a different sort of method of fetching its data and updating what it's showing you. And as a web guy, I said, you know, hey, if I did a web, version of this kind of thing, I would know the moment a block hits. So I kind of fiddled around with the concept because to me, I realized quickly like, I want to see, where are we in that having cycle? That's the orange one. Hey, if you bring up the app once more, let's just go through
Starting point is 00:51:35 the circles here because it's actually really interesting and very informative. The very first version of the website just had two circles. It was the orange and the red and the big block hide in the middle. That big number in the middle, that's the latest block added to the chain. Really simply, you can think of block hide as how many blocks have been added since Genesis. So it's 929,010 blocks have been added since Bitcoin started all the way back in 2009. And then the orange circle is showing you the halving cycle. So you can see. See, it's about, what is that, about a five o'clock position, if it were a clock, the orange indicator is down there.
Starting point is 00:52:20 So we're almost halfway through this halving cycle, which is 210,000 blocks. And that's roughly every four years. So here is now a visualization, and you can see where we are in the current halving cycle. The red circle we talked about, that's the difficulty. That's roughly a two-week cycle. So just there, you have a two-week cycle in the red circle. inside of a four-year cycle in the halving circle, this is nested timeframes.
Starting point is 00:52:50 It's basically what a calendar is. If you think of a calendar is, you know, here's the day inside of the week. Here's the weeks inside of the month. Here's the months inside of the year. It's nested timeframes. So, TimeChane Calendar is a visualization of the nested timeframes of Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:53:06 It might be a little tricky to see through the screen share, but there's a little dark orange circle outside of the orange circle, that's the entire supply of Bitcoin. So we've been already almost 17 years. We got another 100 years until that circle completes. And so you have this lifetime of Bitcoin supply issuance on the outside. And then inside of that, a four-year cycle of the halving. And then inside of that, the two-week cycle of the difficulty.
Starting point is 00:53:35 And then inside of that, the last 24 hours, distribution of the blocks, all those little squares. and then inside of that, the expectation of 10 minutes for the next block. So it's an interface that really designed itself in a way out of this concept that I came up with of I want to see this workings of Bitcoin's protocol from the perspective of these nested timeframes that visualize the important aspects of Bitcoin I want to see. I'm sorry, I could see this somebody just being going to watch. Like this is how we just tell time in the future. Gary, the watch is coming.
Starting point is 00:54:14 It's coming. I actually had to build the mobile app first because I did a proof of concept with the Apple Watch app. And I needed the data to be coming from the mobile app. So I actually realized I needed to build a mobile app first. So I spent the last year plus building the mobile apps. The watch app is definitely going to come soon. One more thing we haven't done.
Starting point is 00:54:37 Grab that little slider, the little handles blinking. at you at the bottom and like slide it to the left. And this is a really cool thing too. This visualizes us traveling back in time through the time chain. You can go all the way back to Genesis, all the way on the left.
Starting point is 00:54:56 A neat thing is that supply, the dark orange circle on the outside moves right in time with the having cycle. So you can see if you just roll to the right. And it actually might be easier to see on the mobile app. I don't know if you can share the mobile app and do it there. But it's really cool to see the having in relation to the supply. So if you grab that little slider there, yeah.
Starting point is 00:55:21 So you can see that little circle on the outside moves as you slide the slider to the left. You can see the supply rolling back. And this is a really cool visualization just to kind of maybe use as an educational tool to teach some new people this concept of the supply issuance and the havings. You know, to me, this is the how. We talk about $21 million. It's another meme in Bitcoin you learn early on. Oh, there's only $21 million.
Starting point is 00:55:55 Okay, false. It's actually less than $21 million. But how is there a fixed supply if this is a digital thing? Well, the having is how you understand that and to be able to visualize that and see the connection between the having cycle and the supply issuance, it's helpful to kind of fine-tune your mental model thinking about these things. So that's kind of the whole point of a timeshane calendar. It's beautiful. I want to point out too, like, even from like, let's go back to the number go up perspective. The having is how you're having that fixed supply, your scarce asset, right?
Starting point is 00:56:32 And then it's still being issued. So I always visualize it as kind of like trapped in time, where there's goals like trapped in the dirt. It's trapped in time. We have to get to it, but it has a completely inelastic supply that unlike gold or any other sort of commodity or resource, if gold price shoots up, all of a sudden there's some mines that are now profitable, we'll get an increase in supply. The supply will respond to the demand. If there's an increased demand for something, the supply will respond. Bitcoin, because the difficulty adjustment, it can't. The supply is not only fixed and capped, at under 21 million, but 21 million, but it's not only fixed and kept,
Starting point is 00:57:07 but the issuance of it is completely fixed as well. It's completely inelastic, which means it can only respond to demand, which from the asset perspective is actually really, really fascinating and makes it a completely unique, one of a kind in both perspectives, from scarcity and from the issuance there. A couple of things, I do want,
Starting point is 00:57:25 we are going to get to the quantum stuff, I promise, but I do. There are a few other things I want to point out that I think are really interesting for people to observe here as well, too, is if I scroll down on the mobile app here, I have pulled up, we can see that currently the hash rate is sitting at 1.053 Zeta hashes per second. And I don't think people who have not explored how the mining process works,
Starting point is 00:57:45 what the miners are actually doing, appreciate just how incredible and how much power that is. So I want to show, it's going to be, I might have to unmir my camera. I'll take a look at it later, but I want to write it out. So for context, see if I can pull it in focus. That's the number. We can see how to get that to focus a little bit.
Starting point is 00:58:02 Should you use the black marker. It is 1.0. I had it at 1.0507. Sorry. But it's 1.053 times 10 to the 21. Hashes per second. It's a lot of zeros. It's a lot of zeros.
Starting point is 00:58:17 That's why we say Zeta hash. And, you know, until just a few months ago, we were looking at Xahash. We were looking at hundreds of X a hash. And, you know, it's basically this thing where you're looking at orders of magnitude as far as a number. You're just talking. about, you know, factors of a thousand. You know, we were in XA hashes and now we're in Zeta hashes. And it's just a phenomenal huge number.
Starting point is 00:58:41 Honestly, to me, it's the most bullish chart in Bitcoin is the hash rate chart. You look at the all time of the hash rate and it's a beautiful parabola. It's so, it's so volatile if you zoom way in. But when you zoom out, it's just this incredible parabola of demand. It's basically this is a way to turn the demand for Bitcoin into a metric. You're looking at the actual participants on the network. We talked about nodes. Well, there's these particular nodes that are mining nodes.
Starting point is 00:59:18 And there's a bunch of people that run these hashing machines and they point them at pools. And it is just this global population of people, not a community, this global population of people that are actually in fierce competition with one another. At this very moment right now, it's been nine minutes and 33 seconds since the last block and all these machines are furiously attempting to find the next one. And it's a massive competition. And that's sort of the security backbone in a way of the immutability of the chain. There's this aspect of uncertainty or there should be anyways about who's going to mine the next block. And because of that, we have some decentralization That's actually one of the areas there's a threat of centralization trend in Bitcoin is how few the number of pools that hit the majority of the blocks.
Starting point is 01:00:11 To contradict that, we hear about, and we've heard about it a lot recently, it's really encouraging solo miners that hit these blocks. That's the other end of the spectrum where you have literally an individual whose machines find the block. and now that individual just got the block reward and the fees from those transactions. And so it's such a beautiful rabbit hole to go down. But the main thing that new people should look at is understanding this is a reflection of real activity by real participants that are making the system work. The miners, just by virtue of their incentive to get more Bitcoin, are healthy. helping other bitcoins get their transactions added to the chain and added to this immutable record.
Starting point is 01:01:03 And they're also helping that supply get issued because every block issues another chunk of Bitcoin right now. That subsidy number in the top left corner, 3.125. That's every block. 3.125 new Bitcoin gets issued. That's new supply coming out. And so that mining activity does those two very important things. Helps the supply get issued. Helps those transactions get immutably added to the chain. It's an incredible thing.
Starting point is 01:01:35 And maybe you never touch a miner. Maybe you never meet a minor. But hey, you can keep an eye on that hash rate and you can get a sense. Wow, look at the hash rate today versus a few months ago versus a year ago. it's an incredible real reflection of the absolute conviction of people out there that are investing real capital and pursuing getting more Bitcoin. Beautiful said. I wanted to add to for anyone again, because I know there's a lot of newcomers that show here, just to give you a simplistic view is how I kind of envision what's going on here. To take it to a very simplistic standpoint, when we say that there's 1.053.0.0.0.
Starting point is 01:02:18 Zeta hashes per second. What the miners are trying to do is they're trying to guess a valid header. You get the right, you get a valid answer, and then you will get the minor reward and all the fees. So to give you an idea of just how big that is, that is basically 1.053 times 10 to the power of 21. So we're talking on 21 zeros of that. They're doing that many guesses every second, but they will only, on average, find a block every 10 minutes. So even with that many guesses to find a valid answer every second, it will still take on average 10 minutes. That's how much computing power is behind this thing.
Starting point is 01:02:59 And like TZ said, furiously competing to try and get that block reward. I want to pull up on the mobile one in particular because I want the transition if it could. I was taking a look here and I love that on the mobile version. We also have the UTXO set size down at the bottom. which gives us a wonderful little pivot here. So TC, for someone who's not familiar, when I see this 12.91 gigabytes of the UTXO set at the very bottom, we're going to have the cover quickly as well too.
Starting point is 01:03:26 What is a UTXO? Why do Bitcoiners need to be concerned themselves with them? And how do we feel about the size of this UTXO set? Wow, another incredible question. UTXOs are basically the model of how Bitcoin moves and how Bitcoin exists when we say, it's in my wallet or it's on this address. You're talking about a chunk of Bitcoin, and sometimes it's really hard to just find the right words to think about it.
Starting point is 01:03:59 Let's use a metaphor of, and maybe this is not the best metaphor, but let's think about some gold. You have a chunk of gold, and it's a particular weight, and you could in theory melt it down and split it into smaller pieces. You could also melt down multiple chunks of gold and melt them together into a larger one. UTXOs are essentially chunks of Bitcoin.
Starting point is 01:04:23 So if you have, let's just talk whole numbers for easy thinking, if you have one Bitcoin on an exchange and you withdraw it from the exchange and put it on one of your addresses, congratulations. You just made a new UTXO on the Bitcoin. network that the Bitcoin network agrees in consensus that it exists on that specific address that's controlled by your C-phrase, your private key. So the UTXOs are basically
Starting point is 01:04:52 information about chunks of Bitcoin and it can be any size. They can be as small as one Satoshi and they could be as big as I guess 21 million Bitcoin. But you're basically going to have your chunks of Bitcoin that live on your addresses controlled by your private keys. And that's kind of the model that you want to start building in your head. That's a very simple surface level concept. And as you get into it, you're going to encounter all kinds of nuances. There's issues of something we call coin control, which is basically deciding,
Starting point is 01:05:30 how big do I want this chunk of Bitcoin on that particular address? Maybe my one Bitcoin is too big of a chunk. And maybe instead of withdrawing that, one Bitcoin to one of my addresses, I should withdraw 0.1 Bitcoin to 10 different addresses. And then you've created 10 different chunks. Those are 10 different UTXOs. So this is basically the high level concept there. The UTXO set is a fascinating and super important thing based on how Bitcoin works currently. Side note, there are other implementations of Bitcoin that don't necessarily use a UTXO set, like Lib Bitcoin.
Starting point is 01:06:08 by Eric Voskel, he's actually really active on Bitcoin right now, or on, sorry, on Twitter right now talking about, you know, his new implementation where they're actually not really dependent on a UTXO set. But that's another story. The point is, is the UTXO set that everybody talks about is essentially a list of all the spendable UTXOs. So I gave you the example of you had a Bitcoin on an exchange and you withdrew 0.01 Bitcoin to 10 different addresses. Well, In this list are those 10 different UTXOs because you created them. And because they are considered spendable by the network, they're part of that list. Now, you know, you take one of those UTXOs and you send it to someone else.
Starting point is 01:06:57 Well, that 0.1 Bitcoin UTXO that you sent, it's now removed from that list. And in doing so, that's no longer considered spendable Bitcoin. So this is one of the places where your mental model of how this thing works really helps you think about it. Bitcoin is really an incredibly simple data structure in a way. And it's kind of counterintuitive because we want to think about the words we use make us think about, oh, send me that Bitcoin. You don't actually send anything. Nothing gets sent.
Starting point is 01:07:31 What happens is this UTXO that you previously had that was considered. spendable by the network and it was part of that list of the UTXO set when you send it quote unquote send it it's just no longer considered spendable and a new UTXO of the same quantity is created where you sent it to so it's just actually a elegantly simple system but it's not intuitive to people because we we use words that make us think about you know how cash works oh i got a $20 bill and I hand it to you now you have it well bitcoin works a little bit differently has this UTXO model and the UTXO set is essentially the list of all the spendable ones. So that 12 gigabytes, what was it in the UTXO set?
Starting point is 01:08:16 12.91.1, yeah, I got 12.91 gigabytes UTXO set. So that's how big the list of spendable UTXOs are in Bitcoin. So as more little chunks of Bitcoin that are considered spendable exist on the chain, that set grows. if more people spend maybe, so transactions have inputs and outputs. Say you do a transaction where you take 10 inputs, you take those 10.1 Bitcoin UTXOs that you created, and you send them all to a new address.
Starting point is 01:08:49 You just reduced the number of UTXOs because you went from 10, and those are now removed from the UTXO set, and a new single UTXO that's one Bitcoin arrives at some other address. So now you have less information on the UTXO set. So it doesn't always grow. It sometimes shrinks because of the type of activity that people are doing if they're consolidating many smaller UTXOs into larger, fewer UTIOs. You're getting less items in the list.
Starting point is 01:09:20 So I don't know. I hope that wasn't too complex. I hope people can follow that description. No, I think that's wonderful. Yeah, in my mind, too. Like one of the, it's funny because I find that the gold analogy for UTXOs is very powerful in terms of like specific sizes melting down recasting you can also use those to kind of think about privacy if you're moving through a coin join as well too it's a whole
Starting point is 01:09:39 bunch of people melting down recasting gives you some built-in privacy there as well additionally we're thinking about that utxo management you basically have like two kind of pulls that are balancing out there one would be the the the fees side because in bitcoin looking at those wonderful blocks the fees are determined by the amount of data that we have to include a whole bunch of small pieces or from the privacy side. If I have a giant UTXO and I'm sending it without doing anything beforehand, I'm revealing that balance to someone because it's like handing them a million dollar bill, right? They have to give me the change back. For context, too, for anyone who might not be familiar, because these things, you're right, they see, they're fun, but you have to shift your
Starting point is 01:10:16 framework on this. You can think of the fees in Bitcoin that you're paying. We saw them earlier on the screen. They're currently at two sets per V-byte that I'm seeing. The fees that you're paying in Bitcoin have nothing to do with the amount of Bitcoin that you're sending. have everything to do with the amount of data that you're including. You can think of it as like Gary and T.C. and Nathan all go to the bar and then we run up a tab. We're going to hang out. We're going to have a couple drinks. We're going to have a good time. We're going to run up the tab. At the end of the night, when we go to pay the bar tab, we can pay with however we like in cash, but there's a fee for every piece of money that we have to use. So if Gary picks up the tab with a $100 bill, he's going to pay a lot
Starting point is 01:10:48 less than fees. If I try and pay for our bar tab using a bag of dimes, I'm going to pay a lot more for fees. And the same thing applies to UTIXO, so you get that kind of balance. And then the other I could explain how. Go for it. Do it up. It's back to this idea that Bitcoin transactions have inputs and outputs. And the inputs each need to have a signature. That's why it costs more. That's how it costs more when you pay with the bag of dimes versus the $100 bill.
Starting point is 01:11:18 In Bitcoin, every input has to include a valid signature as well. So when you have multiple inputs on a transaction in Bitcoin, you got a lot of more data because you have signature string for every single input. So the ideal thing in the future, as far as cost efficiency of transacting on chain, is ideally you're going to have one input and one or two or three or however many outputs. You don't have to have a signature with the outputs, but the number of outputs does add to the amount of data. So the cheapest transaction is a simple one input, one output transaction. And that's the minimum amount of fees that you'll pay
Starting point is 01:12:00 just purely based on the structure of your transaction. So then the coin control framework or perspective says, let me size my Bitcoin on chain in a way that in the future, I don't know what I'm going to be doing or what I'm going to be spending. I want to give myself some optionality. So hopefully I'm only using one input to this transaction. and that gives me cost-effective efficiency in that future transaction. And then there's also, of course, all kinds of privacy concerns with which UTXO you choose
Starting point is 01:12:35 to use. So it gets complex quickly. But that's a really cool thing to kind of like upgrade your mental model. Oh, okay, every input to a transaction has to have a signature. And that's the how of why it costs more to use multiple inputs. And one of my favorite things on that as well, too, for anyone, one of sparr-a-wall is one of my favorite by far. But what I absolutely love that they have in there that Craig Roy, Craig Rock, Craig Rock, my way, I'm blank on that for a second. Craig Raw.
Starting point is 01:13:02 Has in there. Thank you. You know what it was? My brain wanted to say Craig Wright, and my left side was like, no, don't do that. That's very wrong. You know, I got stumbled up for a second there. Craig Raw, wonderful man. And Spar-Walt is one of my favorite by far.
Starting point is 01:13:15 I love it on desktop. But one of the things I love from an educational standpoint is they've used it before, and you've seen that little diagram. at the bottom and didn't know what it was telling you. When you go to send Bitcoin in Sparrow, it will give you, once you have all the information in there, it'll give you a visual representation of exactly what your transaction looks like. You got your inputs on the left hand side and you got your outputs on the right, including a little hand for fees, which isn't technically an output, but I'm not going to bother touching that, as well as if you're sending or consolidating, it'll give you, or there's change coming
Starting point is 01:13:41 back. It's a great learning tool for, again, switching that framework, switching that mental model for looking at what your Bitcoin transaction is, because realistically it's an inputs and outputs and signatures, and it's a message that we're relaying to the network. Now, that was fun. By the way, I never get to have these conversations. This is great. Taking a bit of a step back there, too, you may disagree.
Starting point is 01:14:01 But with the UTXO set, if we have a whole bunch of small pieces of Bitcoin, a small bunch of UTXOs that need to be included in the set, that's going to balloon the size of the information that we have to keep. We're creating more. We're dividing and creating more and more. Is there any concerns with the size of it balloon? looning. It has gone up a lot over the last, I'll say, in two years. Yeah, I mean, look, this is a hotly debated topic, and there's a lot of people that feel very strongly about it. And I'm
Starting point is 01:14:33 going to try to thread a needle here and just be sort of objective. And let's look at it technically. Yes, there's resource constraints. There's resource usage on whatever machine you're running a node on. You know, you've got to store the chain data, which is all the blocks. That goes on your hard drive. And then the UTXO set couldn't go in memory and in your hard drive. You have different methods of indexing. It can get complicated and there's a lot of possibilities. But just on a high level, more data means more resource usage on whatever machine you're running the node. So the people that are, you know, very upset about the growth of the UTXO size will say things that are, you know, it's going to require more computer resources in the future. So,
Starting point is 01:15:20 you know, the future node runner who never even has heard of Bitcoin yet, who's going to be running a node in the future, they are going to be burdened with needing a computer with more resources because this list of spendable UTXOs grows. That's not a false statement. How much you are concerned about it and how much you are worried that Bitcoin is going to be damaged because of it, That's the part I think that is debatable. And I think that what we see over time, I mean, if you're somebody who uses computers regularly, which honestly should be most people these days, you should notice that your computers have a lot more processing power, hard drag space, memory, all of these resources over time. When I look at the computer, I'm speaking to you on right now versus the one I use 10 years ago, it's just night and day. I think also there's the aspect of the cost of some of these computer components is actually going down in time.
Starting point is 01:16:18 I mentioned earlier my Nuck node that I got where the computer itself was less than $200. The 2 terabyte hard drive was like 60 bucks. That's amazing. I remember spending hundreds of dollars on hard drives that were a fraction that size years ago. So it's just one of these things. It's a tricky subject. it's definitely something to keep an eye on. Honestly, that's why I put the data on the time chain calendar there.
Starting point is 01:16:45 And in that mobile app, you can watch that thing. That 12-something gigabytes of UTX-O set, that was 13-something gigabytes just a month or two ago. It's actually come down. I watch that stuff. I say, oh, interesting, it's coming down. That means that the type of transactions that have been added to the chain recently are combative, or they're more of, you know, you're combining UTXOs, so you're reducing the total number over time.
Starting point is 01:17:13 And it's interesting to just pay attention to. So it's just more of that Bitcoin awareness that you cultivate and you maybe care about. Maybe you don't. Maybe you're worried about it. Maybe you're not. But it's informative. And it gives you perspective about what's happening on this network.
Starting point is 01:17:32 I mean, again, we didn't, I didn't say it explicitly, but all these things we've been talking about, how amazing is it? There's so much stuff to pay attention to that's not price. There's so much data here that's relevant to Bitcoin that helps you learn how Bitcoin works, which we mentioned already, is so important for your knowledge and your conviction in Bitcoin.
Starting point is 01:17:58 And so instead of being a sort of a leaf blowing in the wind, depending if the bulls or the bears, are winning in the market, how about pay attention to all these incredible aspects of how Bitcoin works, educate yourself, you know, get higher definition in your mental models, and now you can think about these topics, these different aspects of, you know, concern or even FUD that come up at some points. You have now a way to think through it and have meaningful feedback for yourself. I think it's great. That's beautiful. All right. So the other one I want to want to talk on because I don't know about you, but I've gotten a lot of questions about this lately
Starting point is 01:18:38 from normies, from no-coiners, or from very early or still kind of new in their Bitcoin understanding, new in their journey, or new even just exploring the technicals. T.C. Should I be worried about quantum computing stealing my Bitcoin? Wow. It's such a, it's such an exciting one because quantum computing is sort of mythological in most people's minds. It's kind of this unknown super powered monster that's out there. And it's easy to feel helpless because you just, you don't really understand quantum computing exactly. I got to, you know, raise my hand and say,
Starting point is 01:19:17 I'm no quantum computing expert. But it, again, same theme. It really helps to kind of maybe understand some of the how of how Bitcoin works a little better. And then you have some way to kind of think about these things. that maybe gives you a little more comfort. So, you know, I want to point out something that Adam Back said that was like an absolute flashpoint on the Twitter conversations around this.
Starting point is 01:19:45 He said Bitcoin doesn't use encryption. And then there was just this explosion of different people commenting on it. And, you know, there's a fair amount of sort of misunderstanding and people missed the context of what he's saying, you know, from a high level, from a very sort of basic level, you're like, okay, wait, I thought this was cryptocurrency and isn't it using encryption? And, you know, if you dig down in,
Starting point is 01:20:14 the security model of Bitcoin is that you don't ever put your secret, your private key on the chain. You put a signature that was produced by your private key, and it's trivial for anybody to be able to say, oh, yeah, that's the valid signature. So this is a valid transaction or not if it's not. The sort of surface area that this topic touches on is one where a lot of people are thinking about,
Starting point is 01:20:47 okay, well, this algorithm is going to be cracked by quantum, and that means that Bitcoin's going to break. And it's helpful to me to remember, oh, yeah, it's not really depending on encryption. It's the hashing and it's the fact that the private key never is made public, that it doesn't really create those vulnerabilities. You can, of course, get down in the weeds of, oh, okay, if you use Bitcoin in a certain way, you expose the public key. And there may be certain types of quantum computing in theory in the future where a public key can be reverse engineered into the private key. I have a lot of doubt about that, but it comes down to also how you conduct yourself on chain. Satoshi wrote in the first year of Bitcoin.
Starting point is 01:21:39 He said something in one of those forums about, oh, yeah, of course, you don't want to reuse an address. Use a new address every time. And we get, you know, we get this amazing, you know, seemingly infinite number of addresses with a wallet. It's actually, it's something like four point something billion receive addresses with a private key, thanks to the hierarchical deterministic style wallets that we use. You have like four billion receive addresses. Why would you ever reuse one? So it's kind of just comes down, I think, partly to learning best practices.
Starting point is 01:22:17 And then it comes down to also just kind of updating your mental model. So you're like, okay, actually, this is not an encryption. cracking vulnerability. This has to do with, you know, the way Bitcoin works, it's not really got the surface area that this current version of quantum, the kind of like parlor tricks they're having it do. It's not like a imminent danger. Now, you know, decades down the road, yeah, I mean,
Starting point is 01:22:47 we're going to see Bitcoin upgrade its signature schemes. Look, we've seen that already in the almost, almost 17 years of Bitcoin existing is that we have so many different types of addresses and so many different types of signatures already. Taproot brought in some new ones. There's people that are looking at, our taproot address is actually more vulnerable in some ways. It turns out, I think from this point today, if you operate on Segwit addresses, like most people do. Most wallets default to that.
Starting point is 01:23:22 You know, and you use best practices. You don't reuse your addresses. You do that thing we were talking about before. You know, you put a UTXO on an address. And when you transact, you use that entire UTXO and send it and maybe get change back to a new address. And a lot of the wallets do that out of the box too. So that you're not reusing the address and even exposing your public key on a subsequent
Starting point is 01:23:48 transaction. So all this to say, best practices of how to use Bitcoin as far as what kind of addresses your wallet uses and how you transact with UTXOs, you can kind of sleep well at night knowing you're not the most vulnerable as far as that surface area of Bitcoin. And then also just understanding a little bit more about how Bitcoin works. And this is not just a question of, well, you know, they're going to crack Shaw 256 at some point and Bitcoin's broken. That's a false statement. And you hear a lot of people saying that kind of stuff. So I guess, you know, someone could dive down the quantum rabbit hole and very quickly understand more about quantum than I have currently. But just these couple of concepts keep me sleeping
Starting point is 01:24:35 well at night. And I'm able to kind of view a lot of this stuff as the fud that it is. who knows what is going to be the dangers that Bitcoin's facing 20, 30 years in the future or even 10 years in the future. But as it stands right now, there's not some imminent danger that, you know, one of those fancy lamps that Google's running is going to, like, break Bitcoin. That's not what's happening right now. Gary? Well, yeah, T.C. you're so knowledgeable just across the board on so many technical things related to Bitcoin. I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who are just like, wow, I mean, this guy's amazing. where would you recommend people go
Starting point is 01:25:12 if they want to try to learn some of this stuff on their own? Any good books? Any good podcasts? I don't know if you guys ever heard of this guy, BTC Sessions. I had to throw that in.
Starting point is 01:25:24 No, thank you. For real. BTC Sessions is YouTube channel is just a wealth of how tos and how to use some of this stuff and he does such a good job at explaining the concepts as he's going. So that's a really fabulous resource,
Starting point is 01:25:38 of course. I also, whenever I get asked this question, I have to shill my personal favorite book, which is 21 lessons by Der Gigi. It's a fabulous book for a starter. This guy is just amazing. Der Gigi is, I think he's, I might be German. English is not his first language. And yet the guy is just an absolute brilliant author. The way that he writes this stuff, it's so easy to understand.
Starting point is 01:26:07 That book is fabulous because you can. literally read the whole thing in an afternoon. It's short. The chapters are all three, four pages each. And what it does is it breaks it down 21 chapters. There's three sections of seven chapters and it covers sort of the economic and the philosophical and the technical aspects of Bitcoin. And if you read that book, you're going to understand Bitcoin a lot better than when you started. That was one of the real game changers for me when I was early in my journey. You can also get the free PDF version of that. online on this website.
Starting point is 01:26:40 I think it's daregg.com, D-E-R-G-I-G-I-I. Anyways, that's a fabulous book. Yeah, I really think the other thing I would, I think is worth mentioning is that it's really helpful to just participate in the conversation. I think my understanding, which I'm constantly working on
Starting point is 01:27:02 and is constantly getting overhauled, has to do with the fact that I'm constantly talking to people. I'm constantly seeking, conversations with people more knowledgeable than myself, I'm constantly asking questions. And when I see something that is touching on, like I said before, your mental model is going to have these dark corners. You see one of these dark corners. And it's like, oh, is that something to be worried about?
Starting point is 01:27:26 Oh, is that something I'm missing? You know, be proactive and go after those dark corners and illuminate them and start working on it. The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is nobody understands it all. It is very complex in some regards. It's also really simple in a lot of regards. And I think it just has to do with start just asking the right questions. That's another theme we've had here in this conversation.
Starting point is 01:27:51 You know, how? Oh, 21 million Bitcoin. How is it only 21 million? Oh, every 10 minutes of blocks. How is it only 10 minutes per block? Or how is it not 10 minutes per block? this is what has guided me towards what I've done with time chain calendar because I'm just basically manifesting these questions that I've asked myself into a visual interface that you can interact with. And that's really the point is that you know, you want to be curious and you want to just be open minded and trying to learn constantly.
Starting point is 01:28:28 And I think there's really a powerful thing about opening your mouth and talking because it gives you an opportunity to put those concepts that are bumping around in your brain into specific words. And there's a really powerful thing that happens in your brain when you do that. So the more you talk about Bitcoin, the better your thinking is around it, the stronger your mental models are around it. And so I think that's really the answer. go out, you want to read books, you want to watch podcasts, but find some other folks to talk to, whether it's on spaces, whether it's at meetups. You actually, if you get the courage to jump up and ask your dumb question, you may find out you were just one step away from it no longer being a dumb question or finding that nugget of information or that particular perspective that
Starting point is 01:29:20 just opens up a whole new level of understanding for you. So that's what you should do. That's right. And we've all had dumb questions because all of us kind of came out just kind of learning about this raw. So nobody got into Bitcoin knowing everything about Bitcoin. Like you said, there's still things that you don't know that none of us will ever know fully for sure. I think the meetup is a great idea. I've gone to mine. Speaking of which, D.C., what's the closest meetup to you? You have such good questions, Fed. I love it. No, I'm not going to answer that. But I will say I do try to go to. you know, some of the conferences and some of the bigger events because I have personally found them to be a fabulous way to kind of make connections with people on a deeper level. There's a, there's a much more dynamic kind of conversation happening in meet space, mainly because you're not dealing with keyboard warrior effect. and you know when you meet somebody in person that sort of really um toxic troll uh is not there and you're dealing with a real human being uh and you can have you know prolonged uh focused conversation where people aren't distracted and it's not fragmented into what fits into a tweet you know
Starting point is 01:30:40 um so so i find a lot of value in that um but again it's a personal choice uh i think going to physical events whether it's a meetup or a big conference that that touches on the privacy issues we started out talking about. And you have to decide for yourself, you know, what are the tradeoffs? But certainly, to me, I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole so hard. I found it necessary to participate relentlessly in the online conversations, go out in the world, find the people around me that I could talk to about this stuff. and have that conversation in an ongoing basis,
Starting point is 01:31:25 learn constantly and just keep updating those mental models. And, you know, it's really interesting thing now all these years later, you know, you look at all the newer people who are freaking out because look what the price is doing and you just kind of shake your head and you keep watching, oh, look, interesting. The next difficulty adjustment is going to be the fourth one where we're getting a decrease in difficulty in a row. You know, it's a whole different perspective when you're,
Starting point is 01:31:50 start actually paying attention and develop your awareness of Bitcoin on that deeper level. It's a more meaningful thing, I think, for your life at that point. T.C. One last thing on my end before Nate rounds us out. I just want to make sure we fully cover your app here. It's a great mobile app. If you get a chance, download it. You can download it for free. And there is a subscription plan. You can pay monthly or yearly. But there is a few kind of cool features with the subscription plan. And one of them is you can use the account. to block stamp and price stamp your special moments and add real-time data to video recordings. And that seems like really neat thing to me.
Starting point is 01:32:28 I got to know, are there any, and I'm not doing this to be fed, you know, whatever. Are there any like special moments that you have just want to speak generally that you're like, this is a really cool thing that I now have that I can cherish, whether it's a photo or a video or like, yeah, this is like a really useful thing that I can kind of put on there. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. There's also an art gallery on the website. I bring that up because artists are some of the people that have been getting in the habit of noting down the block height on a piece of art they create. There's also a thing if you're on social media in these Bitcoin circles on Twitter or Noster.
Starting point is 01:33:05 You know, it's another thing when children are born, people really are excited to say, oh, that was this specific block. Bitcoin is this new monetary system. It is this incredible decentralized opt-in network. It's also a profoundly interesting timekeeping mechanism. And this comes back to the word time chain that really resonated with me so much and ended up being part of the name of my products. Bitcoin blocks are experience. globally. You know, we have normal time that we pay attention to, the Earth rotating on its axis
Starting point is 01:33:49 and orbiting around the sun. And we have a traditional calendar that we follow. And when things happen that are important, we're about to have Christmas. We're about to have New Year's Eve. Think about what's going to be happening in about a week or so. New Year's Eve around the world. In time zone phases, New Year's Eve happens. And it's experienced in all those different time zone. Whereas when a Bitcoin block happens, that is global moment. When the having happened and my website crashed, that was a moment experienced by everyone all around the world simultaneously. So I'm actually really interested in this aspect of Bitcoin as well, this time chain where your moments are demarcated by the blocks that are happening on the chain. and then when you think about these really meaningful personal life events that happen,
Starting point is 01:34:44 to actually associate them with a particular block is perhaps even more meaningful than just a calendar date. It's a more specific moment in time. We have on average 144 blocks every day. So one specific block is actually a very specific moment in this like universal time that we experience. So the camera feature is kind of a really neat way, really roundabout way to answer your question. The camera feature is a neat way to kind of like bring those things together. Here's the block height and it's live. It's being supplied by the data feed that's on the app.
Starting point is 01:35:21 And you snap a picture in the camera feature in the app and you're capturing something around you, something that's happening, something in your life that's meaningful. And you've got the block height stamped right onto the resulting photo. It also does video. You can do a couple minutes of video so you can live stream a video. And if the block height changes while you're recording, it changes real time on there. You've also got the little price widget on there so you can see the price feed. I got some really cool feedback from some of my Bitcoin buddies.
Starting point is 01:35:53 They're like, yeah, the block heights are awesome. But, you know, I really remember the prices. I remember 58K. I remember these things. So that's another angle where you can basically superimpose Bitcoin. Fiat price on to your moments as well. It's a really just kind of a new concept. I added it to the app to explore that. And that's one of the sort of native features that are behind the subscription. The subscription is my monetization. I'm trying to turn this into something that will pay my bills
Starting point is 01:36:27 and help me survive in the Fiat world that I'm in. I did not want to. to put the time chain calendar, the main circles interface behind a paywall. So the app is free to download. You can enjoy that dashboard for free. I have these other really cool little, you know, goodies like the camera, push notifications about blocks and price thresholds that get met. You've got widgets, beautiful widgets that bring that information, you know, to a surface level. You don't even have to open the app and you can see what block height it is or how close we are the difficulty adjustment. On iOS, they let you do lock screen widgets, which I have on there, too.
Starting point is 01:37:10 So if you subscribe, you can have the block height or the blocks remaining to the difficulty adjustment or the price right on your lock screen. You don't even have to open your phone. You can just glance at it and you can see. So the whole theme is just Bitcoin awareness, this information getting surfaced, becoming more a regular part of your life. And then all the stuff we talked about just follows just a better understanding, a stronger conviction and a real closeness between your life and this thing you care about.
Starting point is 01:37:41 That's beautiful. Thank you, T.C. And I love time chain calendar. In fact, in the earlier episodes, we used to pull it up every time as well, too. You did. Sure. I did. Yeah, I did have their longtime fan, value for value. Guys, go out there, check it out with that, T.C. Where can they find you? Where can they get the app? Where can they check out timechained calendar.com? But I may just given it away. Yeah, the app on the App Store, the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, soon to be at some more venues, the Android version will be packaged up and will be available on some other alternate app stores at some point.
Starting point is 01:38:14 But for now, it's the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. You just search TimeChane Calendar. You'll find it by the time you get to the C in the word Timechain. And then the website at TimeChane Calendar.com. It's been over three years. It's been there. That's always going to be free. And then as far as socials on the Twitter X thing,
Starting point is 01:38:35 you can find the project at at TimeChane Cal, just TimeChane CAL. My personal Twitter is Meditation underscore Man, long story. And then you can find me on Noster, just at TC, or the Nipo 5 is TC at Timechain Calendar.com on Nostr. So it's basically X and Noster are the main platforms for the socials. Yeah, use the website, download the app, start filling out your mental model. Start getting closer to Bitcoin. Let's fucking go. Let's do it.
Starting point is 01:39:14 I love it, D.C. Thank you so much. And thank you for not reading out your entire NPUB like Gary. This is wonderful. We'll talk soon. Thanks, D.C. Cheers, guys. Hey, you.
Starting point is 01:39:22 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.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
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