BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Ant, Bitcoin Island, Decentra Suze ep324

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

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Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? All new guests this week. Very excited to have them on. We're going to be diving into it. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen.

So I defer to my good friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. Friken thing sucks. Yeah.

If you have not already, like, subscribe, share, all those things, help get this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is Timechain Calendar.com. Right now, we're sitting at $24,643 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up $4,058 SATs, 91.88%. 91.88% of all Bitcoin have been mined.

And in terms of fees, looks like right now next block 15 sats per V byte, even if you're willing to wait a bit, still nine sats or so. And there's about a 260 megabyte backlog in the mempool. So nothing being purged currently. But, you know, use that RBF if you need to be conscious. Shout out to sponsors to the show,

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Check them out. CoinCite.com. You can use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store. Up next, we got Nunchuk. These guys are working on assisted multi-sig and inheritance planning. I've done a full tutorial on how to use it. It's pretty badass. And one of the things that jumps out to me most about it is it's non-KYC.

Up until now, if you wanted like a collaborative multi-six situation to make yourself kind of, you know, eliminate those single points of failure and have like a just-in-case key, you had to give up an arm, leg, an ID and your firstborn child to do so. Well, no longer you can just go and do it with nothing more than an email address and pay in Bitcoin. So that's pretty badass. Check out the video if you haven't seen it. And just as a regular day-to-day wallet, it's also pretty awesome. So yeah, go back, check those out, nunchuk.io.

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So with that, enough of my rambling. I need to bring in my guests, get you guys introed. So I'm going to be bringing in Susie and Bill. Welcome to you guys. Thank you for being here. And there we go. So we are going to be diving into Why Are We Bullish? Thank you guys for being here.

We're going to do a quick round of intros just so you guys can let people know who we are, what you do, and then we'll dive right into the show. So I'm going to jump to Susie first, and I'm just going to ask, who are you? What do you do? Let people know. Hi, I'm Susie. I live just outside of London. I'm a writer-researcher. I was previously a financial analyst and I've just become obsessed with Bitcoin and I just love researching and writing about it.

Awesome. Well, thank you for being here. I saw a great discussion that you had about CVDCs recently and you knocked it out of the park. So yeah, glad to have you on the show. We're going to jump down to Bill and I, same question for you, man. Who are you? What do you do? Glad to have you on the show.

We're going to jump down to Bill and I, same question for you, man. Who are you? What do you do? Okay, this is Bill on Bitcoin Island. There's like a huge... Yeah, so I'm the person on the ground that's making Bitcoin Island happen. We've got 250 businesses on the island that are accepting Bitcoin today here on Borikai Philippines. That's awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you.

There's a bit of an odd delay here. So we'll sort it in the background. but glad to have you on the show. And yeah, thanks for being here, man. And lastly, we're going to jump to Ant. Dude, I've spoken with you in spaces and listened to you in spaces a bunch. But first time on the show. So welcome, let people know who you are.

Yeah, thanks. I appreciate having me up. Yeah, you know, I mean, a longtime Bitcoin lover, hardcore data guy, you know, I'm fascinated by the system. I mean, you know, I came for the number go up technology and like stayed for the numbers. Like, you know, I'm the creator of timechainstats.com, which is a free resource. You know, there's no monetization, no ads. It's just kind of a site that I made for myself that, you know, started out for like kind of a way to keep everything as I was learning about Bitcoin back in 2017.

But and yeah, it just keeps growing. And I also am the creator of VTClexicon.com. That's the sister site, if you can call it, the companion site to time chain stats. So yeah, thanks for having me up. That's awesome. I'm glad to have you here. And yeah, you've put out some great stuff,

some great resources there. Again, I just had the timechancestats.com up. There's BTClexicon.com. If people are unfamiliar, go check out those websites. They are fantastic resources. But we're going to dive in. Again, thanks all for being here. But anybody that's watching that may be unfamiliar with the show,

this is why are we bullish? Very simple concept for the show. Basically, all the guests come with a reason why they're currently bullish, something that they're excited about in and around the Bitcoin space. Pretty much anything that tickles your fancy, whether it be an event, an app, something that you're working on, an experience that you've had. It doesn't matter, but people get to come and chat about what's on their mind,

and then we get to discuss it. And so the rotation of the show, really simple. We're going by the three R's. Somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. Then altogether, we're going to riff on that reason. And then finally, we're going to rotate for the next person until we all get a turn. So reason, riff, rotate, simple. So I'm going to get us started today.

and then we'll go from there. But I've been kind of diving into something that I find interesting. And I don't want to get overly bullish on it. But I think it's just another example of things that are coming down the pipe that if people choose to use them are just another way to use Bitcoin that can help with scaling, help with privacy and a variety of other things. And so this is around the idea of Fetamance and Chaumy and eCash and stuff like that. And there's definite tradeoffs there. But I just kind of wanted to show what I've been tinkering with this last little bit. And you'll forgive me if my explanations around some of this stuff are not totally perfect.

But effectively, what you can do is you can. The idea behind a lot of this is infediment or the example I'm going to show here, cashew is another kind of implementation of this, is you can effectively have Bitcoin managed in a small community, like amongst people that you trust. So like perhaps you know people that we're just never going to take self custody in the first place. Like they're just, they're so far removed from getting down that rabbit hole. but you do not want them just leaving their stuff on an exchange. So maybe the next best bet is to have a type of either family or community model

in which there can be like an Uncle Jim or a federation of Uncle Jim's in your, in your community that would manage a bediment, which from a user standpoint, effectively somebody in your community, they don't want to hold self-custody, but they can use something where they effectively gain from the privacy and scaling of fetament because everything within the fetament that sits in that kind of community fund, you can transact with anybody in your community instantly for no fees. there's near perfect privacy in all the transactions. The people that actually manage, like if it's under a multi-sig, they cannot see who owns what.

So even the people actually managing the on-chain Bitcoin cannot see who owns what. And then you can also transact from community to community or fetament to fetament via the lightning network. So it's not just domiciled in one place. You can actually intermingle with other fetaments. I'm still kind of, there's a lot of stuff to take in with it, but I'm still wrapping my head around a lot of it. So I just kind of want to quickly show what I've been playing with. So some people might be familiar with LNBits. It's basically like a toolkit that you can play around with different apps and create your own little apps with lightning.

And so you can set up a cashew wallet and you can fund it with lightning, a lightning transaction, And then you can start sending transactions that are done via Chaumian eCash, which is pretty much entirely private and is instant and cost no fees. So like this is an example wallet that I have here. You can fund it with lightning. You can withdraw with lightning at any point. And then you can then transact from person to person with eCash. So I've got two wallets here. I've got one on LNBits.

and I've got one on this one, which has a fantastic name. It's called Nutstash. And so let's say I wanted to send some e-cash. I could go and I can say send e-cash and I want to send 100 sats. I then have this token that I can copy and send to somebody. And that person basically goes to their wallet, hits receive and paste it in, and then hits receive and it's now in their wallet. It's instant. It shows up. It's entirely private. There's no like on-chain trace of it. So you're kind of hiding in a crowd. And at any point if somebody wants

to pull out of the mint via a lightning transaction, you're actually hidden amongst the crowd of everybody in that mint. So there's no indication as to which person actually withdrew. So I found it very interesting. And this one here, this nutstash thing, it actually allows you to integrate with Nostr. So you can actually pay individuals that are on Nostr with Chowmian eCash, which is entirely private. So like, for instance, here's Jack Dorsey's. I can just grab his NPUB.

And right now it's a bit clunky because you have to translate it to hex. So you have to post in somebody's NPU and it kind of converts it. Eventually, you'll just be able to grab. their NPUB. But I can then hit send. I can put in an amount, 100 sats. And, oh, I guess I should change my mint. Which mint do I want? You have multiple mints, by the way. You're part of multiple communities and they can transact in between. But anyways, I want to send to him. I'm going to put in, Oh, I guess they did add support for NPUBs. Anyways, I'm just going to hit send, and I'm going to confirm my other confirmation shows up on this other screen.

But yeah, so I just sent Jack 100 sats in an entirely private show me and eCash right now, which he'll get a DM for or he'll get a direct message for and he can redeem it that way. but if he had like the nutstash wallet, it would just show up. And actually, as an example, before the show, I actually put a note saying that I would be talking about this stuff. And I said, if somebody wants to go ahead and send me some e-cash, and there's, yeah, there's Calais saying that, hey, I just sent you some. I can jump into my wallet here and I can see there's an inbox. and there's two different transactions from, if I didn't know, no idea, but I just received, there's 21 sats, except that's now in my wallet. There's eight sats except that's now on my wallet.

So you can privately send Bitcoin in this kind of layered approach within a specified community. You can run your own mint or you can be part of a mint managed by people that you trust. There are trust tradeoffs. It's important to note that. But I just think it's kind of cool to see these things that are being built atop and integrated easily with lightning and then integrated easily with things like Noster. There's a lot going on in the background right now that I think a few years out, people will be like, where did all this stuff come from? And it's kind of interesting to be seeing it before the world notices.

So that's why I'm bullish. I think I'm just excited about tinkering with new things that people are working on that the world at large has no clue about. And Xiaomi and eCash with Lightning and via Nostr is one of them. So I'll open it up if anybody wants to dive in, comment. First of all, has anybody here either heard of or used eCash on via Lightning? Bill, Bill, you have. I'm, I'll just ask, what has your experience been? I haven't been able to use it.

I've only heard about it, but here on the island, we have a fairly small community, like I said, 250 different businesses. And I'd like to see them being able to save on-chain through something like this. I've just not really understood it. I end up going to talk to people. and show them how to save on chain. And I think they understand it. I need to go back and check on them in a month to make sure.

But if there was an Uncle Jim on the island so they could be self-sufficient on this and know that they're saving, that would be a pretty great solution. Yeah, I love the kind of in-between, like, again, helping people like Uncle Jimming for somebody when you know, and it doesn't even have to be a permanent thing, but being like an interim uncle Jim for people and helping them along their Bitcoin journey, I think that's a valuable thing to provide. And then, you know, some people will move beyond that and move into self-custy for themselves. And then other people that maybe that ends up being their last stuff along the journey, but at least it's better than just full leave your money,

with a single entity that you then have to trust. At least you can kind of remove single points of failure with a mechanism like this. And I'm curious, your thoughts on this stuff. Are you for it? Do you have reservations about it? What are you thinking? Thanks. Yeah.

I mean, I believe that you should have an adversarial stance in all things in Bitcoin. You know, everything that comes up until you fully understand. it and then maybe try to understand it even more. Right now, I really like it a lot from what I've read. And I don't fully understand it as well as I can, as well as I should or could right now. But it is exciting. I think that, you know, I'm from Texas. There's a lot of farms around here in like small communities. And that's where I see like a lot of potential here for something like this where, you know, people don't really think about it a lot. But in small like little, you know,

ranching communities, you know, they all know each other, but their access to the legacy financial system is, it can be difficult or, you know, even non-existent sometimes, you know, or even predatory in some ways. And seeing something like this, you know, the right platform, you know, with the right user experience, I think could be really major for, you know, like the local ranching communities. just other communities small around the world, obviously. But that's what I think right now, close to home. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll jump to Susie as well. Again, I don't know your experience with this kind of stuff, but like just from a kind of seeing that there, do you have initial impressions? Like, where are you at with this kind of stuff? The first thing that popped into

my mind was whether or not it would be able to give you some non-KYC Bitcoin. Oh yeah, like you could you could easily be able to clean it up. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. You could easily be able to clean it. I mean, you could have peer-to-peer markets with this type of stuff very simply. I mean, it's the same, again, like there's a lot of already kind of peer-to-peer non-KYC solutions to be able to buy Bitcoin. Like I mentioned hoddle-hoddle off the top of the show, but like there's RoboSats, there's BISC, there's

There's even just like, obviously, you know, direct in person. But you could easily integrate like a Xiaomi and eCash version or have that as an option on one of those markets and be able to exchange whatever other value for, you know, Xiaomi and eCash stats or lightning or on chain or whatever else people want. But yeah, obviously the interface right now is not going to be the simplest for people. I know. I just saw your mate, David. We have to give a shout out to David, by the way. You guys won't be familiar with this.

But David is the biggest fan of the show. For the longest time, he came every single week, every Friday, and would watch every show. Sometimes he was here hours in advance. He hates Bitcoin, but he's always here. And he took a little hiatus for a while, but I'm glad to say he's back. He has some important messages for everybody.

He said, market does not look good for Bitcoin. He said, this is the top. He also said, normal people will never understand this. That cart doesn't look good. And then I think he finished off with grandma would never use e-cash. So David, I appreciate your input. I love you. Please never leave.

Please never change. And you're always welcome here. So hats off to David. He is the mascot of the show. Thanks for being here. He's a great, great guy. Nonetheless, I'll kind of leave it there. I'm going to, and now I'm seeing more, more pop-ins of, of, of sets coming through the e-cash here.

So I'll say a quick shout out to everybody on Nostr that's probably watching this now that is sending shooting off sats. I appreciate it. I will spread the love. Thank you for experimenting and learning with me. And with that, I will wrap up this topic so that we can get into yours and we'll give it a rotation. So again, cheers everybody in Noster.

Thanks for partaking. With that, let's do a little rotation. here. Just due to the order of people on my screen, I will jump to Susie first. And I'm going to set you up with a simple question. Why are you bullish? I'm bullish because the mainstream media, and not all of the papers, are starting to finally report accurate information about Bitcoin. I don't know if you saw one of the first city AM articles that I wrote about the environmental benefits. Have you come across that one? I believe I did, yes. So I was totally shocked.

First of all, the fact that they allowed me to express an opinion on central bank digital currencies, which was exactly what I thought. I mean, they clipped a few bits off, but it was pretty much what I wrote. And also that they were allowing me to report on the environmental benefits. I mean, I saw your show yesterday where you were talking about all the fudge around it, and it's just, it's nonsense, and it's crazy. if they just understood, it would be amazing. And that's why I'm bullish, because I've had a few articles published by a mainstream Citi-A-M, London business paper that has actually been reporting facts.

I like this because it's kind of like, you know, Bitcoin begins with, you know, a select group of people. There's certain types of people that gravitate towards it first. and those typically aren't the mainstream type of reporters, you know. But a lot of people begin to understand it, like as they're exposed to it more and more and they have multiple touch points. And it's kind of hard to be in and around Bitcoin and not see benefits. Even if you're looking at it in a way where you're saying, I don't like that person that's using it for this particular instance,

it's kind of hard when you're around it for long enough to deny that it benefits a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And so it's just kind of like an inevitability that eventually people that are journalists that do get it will eventually put out content and that content will be so much more coherent than the dribble that does not understand how Bitcoin works. And when it's kind of laid out there and contrasts and compared and you look at how how Bitcoin continues to just tick, talk next block and people begin to see benefits of people that they know or hear stories

of benefits for maybe people on the other side of the globe, it gets harder and harder to be a detractor. I'm wondering, did you experience, like earlier on, did you experience pushback for this type of stuff you wanted to cover? I just published it on my substack initially because I didn't think that anybody would cover it. And all the articles that I'd read in all the other papers, they didn't know what they were talking about.

It's for us to all experience that, haven't we, where we read it and you're like, right, okay, this journalist actually hasn't done their research. They don't know. And in the need of, I'm always being told we need to provide balance, but unfortunately there isn't always balance. And balance is just a journalistic trap because you can't balance a lie. So it's like when you're talking about central bank digital currencies,

it's almost like writing balance on junk food. It's convenience. You can't, okay, well, let's provide some balance. I can't. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's really difficult when you're reading. And when they started talking about the road map for brick coin,

I don't even like saying it. It's awful. When they were talking about the road map of Bitcoin, I was just, I was totally shocked because I went up to London on a night out and I was in the pub and I was asking people, do you know what central bank, the digital currencies are? And I'm like, no, haven't got a clue. So they published a roadback on it today.

Our government published, the Bank of England has been researching it for years. and you don't know what it is. I haven't got a clue. And that's because when you actually read all the articles, I read articles in various different news outlets, and they were all pushing the good side. But there is no good side. The only good side is that it's going to be sold as more convenient.

And that just drives me insane. So when they actually agreed to publish it under the guise of balance, I was actually really relieved and that is why I'm bullish because finally they're publishing accurate information. That's good. I'm curious with the panel if anybody wants to jump in

and around how you see the trajectory of kind of reporting in and around Bitcoin because I mean, we all know it's been horrendous up to now in a lot of instances like the good reporting on Bitcoin has been in the very absolute minority of cases.

But how do you think it goes from here? Do you still think that there's just going to be major pushback and nobody's going to know what's going on for an extended period of time? Maybe I'll go to Bill first if you want. So this conversation made me think of the idea that reality is that which refuses to go away when you stop believing it. And I've been in different communities throughout the years. And as I faded away from them, whatever we were discussing and enjoying in that community,

just kind of disappear. I don't think that's happening with Bitcoin. If you don't believe in it, you still hear about it. You still see it. So, yeah. I don't think I can hear you. I think your mic is off. Oh.

Can you hear you? hear me. Yeah, sorry. I can hear me, but here we go. You got me? Okay. Yeah, sorry. Of course, in the narwhal. Did I go deaf? No, I was being idiot. Sorry, there's multiple mute buttons and many of them were hit. Anyways, uh, uh, I was just saying, I think you're right. Everybody's going to have their moment where they are the Peter Schiff of Bitcoin, where they're saying like it's, it's going to die. It's going to zero. Um, but hopefully, the average person gets to go past that because they see it enough times to realize and concede that maybe I was incorrect in my take. Now, I don't think Peter Schiff is one of those individuals, which is why he's the perfect example.

But yeah, everybody's going to, it's kind of undeniable. Like the people that said that the internet was a fad, they don't exist anymore. So I think it's similar with Bitcoin. It's just going to be it. people push back until it's absolutely undeniable. And yeah, I don't know. Ants, what do you think here? Yeah, I think people are probably going to think I'm wearing a tinfoil hat on stuff like this.

But, you know, like they used to say, or they'll say history is made by the victors. And there's different things that you've heard like that. You know, I believe that we are in the midst, you know, that Bitcoin, represents this battle between humanity versus the central planners, like at its core. Like that's where I am in my journey at this point, right? Like a lot of other people that we know. I've also worked in the news media. There was a back in the old days, you know, I was working in that industry.

And, you know, I can tell you, from my experience, you know, the news is told by either the publishers or the advertisers. You know, every pretty much every article that's out there, it's very rare to get like a real unbiased news source. And we're told that we have a free media in the West, but you can even tell there, if you read between the lines, you can see the advertisers' influences and things like that. Given that I believe that we're in this battle between, you know,

where we are, I think that it makes sense that my next conclusion is that a lot of these articles are being driven by these powerful people who are anti-Bitcoin at their core. And either they don't know about it or they're threatened by it or, you know, they want the clicks at first. I mean, listen, you know, Bitcoin and monetary Darwinism is at its, you know, core an incentives game.

And so that's, when I read these articles, I have to ask myself, like, who's the owner of this outlet? And what have they said in the past? And where have they, you know, because. everybody in the Bitcoin network is an actor in this network. And, you know, where do they stand, essentially? Where's the money? Who's paying them to write this dribble?

Because some of these media outlets, you'll see, are continuing to put out the same type of fud almost on like the four-year cycle along with Bitcoin. So that's kind of where I am with it. I am happy when I see good reporting about it because we do need it. And the legacy system still does exist. So, you know, there's going to be this bridge between, you know, the old world and the new world. And having that, you know, real voices about Bitcoin are important. So I do like seeing stuff like that.

Some of these people do have good articles. Most of it is driveled to me. Yeah. How much do you think is just because it takes so many hours to really get your head around it? And some of these journalists just don't have the time. They don't put in the effort and they don't, they don't, it's hundreds of hours, isn't it? You've got to read and just absorb so much information to actually come to it with a clear, coherent, balance, word of being, approach. And I just don't think that they can.

They're just like article, next one, article, next one. So it's a time for thing too, isn't it? Yeah, and I mean, part of that is the incentives of Fiat land, right? Like you were saying nobody wants to put in the effort to research it. Yeah, because everybody's so high time preference. They want to quickly read some Cliff's notes. They want to go find Digiconomist and get some bullet points and then write an article about it and pump it out and then have a handful of ads on it and get the clicks and then move on to the next thing.

They don't want to actually understand it and do investigative journalism and actually speak to experts that are in and around the space. They want to just, you know, what's the most sensationalist thing I can write? And then I'll put that out. Even if the article doesn't even reflect the title, it's like, you know, Bitcoin's boiling the oceans and then like there's nuance in the article. It doesn't matter. They just want people to see the headline and the picture and then share that. And people form, they don't even read the article. They just form their opinion based on the title.

But then it's also got to get through to an editor. So then you've got to send it to an editor. And then they've got to understand it and agree with it. And if it doesn't fit the narrative, they're not going to say there's many different layers as to why this information isn't making it through. Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, like, again, you,

you there's the saying show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. I mean, that applies to people living in a fiat denominated world as well, where you just got you got to be quick, you got to pump things out, you got to get eyeballs, you got to, people don't care about quality. It's, it's quantity and, and attention. Yeah, so this is what we get for the time being until a bunch of low time preference people, do it better. And so hopefully that's coming. So yeah, anyways, anybody have any final thoughts in and around like the whole journalism piece? Anything else you want to add in or should I give it a

rotate? All good? All right. I'm going to rotate then. Susie, thank you for that. Thank you for that topic. I'm glad you brought it up. And again, people watching, if you haven't seen some of the pieces and some of the stuff that the interview that you did recently go her well everybody here their twitter handles are in the description but go check out susie and and and see some of the stuff she's been doing and and hopefully you can help some of that proliferate more than the dribble that we've been seeing elsewhere but with that let's do a little rotation and again this time I'm going to jump down to bill and I'll just line you up with simple question why Why are you bullish?

Okay. So one, there we go. So I'm bullish because of Bitcoin in the Philippines. There's a few aspects of that that are really doing great right now. So strike and coin corner out of the USA and out of the UK are using Pouch. p.h as a lightning service provider. So that means out of either of those apps, if you were to go to send global and then choose Philippines among the different countries there.

They can send to any bank account or Dominique E wallet in the Philippines so that the receiver side doesn't need to know anything about Bitcoin. In fact, through Stryker coin quarter, they don't even really need to know about Bitcoin on that side either. But they can send money from America, UK, EU, directly to the banking system instantly. with no fees, just some spread on the exchange rate. To put this into context, every day, 100 million U.S. dollars is sent from overseas foreign workers to the Philippines.

That's 100 million a day. The reports I've seen show that about 7 to 10% of that is lost to fees. So I want you to imagine the Joker in front of a giant, pile of money that gets fed on fire every day. That is what's happening. And if, you know, people understood that this was available right now, they could be saving that money. And one of the really great things is that would not be concentrated into one industry. It would be spread out among the working families all across the Philippines. That benefit. So that would be really rate and the other aspect here in the Philippines is Bitcoin Island where I'm at right now.

We've got 150 businesses that accept Bitcoin today. I live basically on Bitcoin here on the island. It's entirely possible to go do your groceries, whether it's at the locals market, the wet market, or at more Western-style grocery stores, a little tinier ones here on the island. If you're coming as a digital nomad or a tourist, there are hotels, there's all kinds of restaurants, bars, services. You want to get a tattoo in Bitcoin? You know, blockchain is forever, but ink is close. And things like that. So all of that is available here on the island today.

And I'm hoping that all of you consider coming to it. You can see right there under my name is Pouch.P.H. retreat 2023. That is a conference being thrown here on the island so that you can come for three days and live on a Bitcoin standard. That's awesome.

I saw what you guys are doing down there and I looked at the map of all of the merchants accepting Bitcoin. I mean, for the size of the island, it's insane kind of what you guys have been able to do. And I watched a video of you talking about kind of your process of how you go to the merchants and how you try to onboard them.

And I think it's unique in that Bitcoiners are notoriously bad at being able to be concise and not cramming too much shit into an initial conversation with somebody. And you even allude to it when you're talking about like this is this is kind of the process of like how we go to people and say like, hey, do you want to, you know, accept payments this way? Here's the benefits. And you just kind of lay it out quickly. And then at one point you said at this point,

if they express interest, or they say, yeah, let's do it. You now have to shut up because people don't like, if you start saying more and being like, and then you can run a node and then you can do this, they're going to be like, holy shit, no, this is too much now. Like they've already said yes. what the fuck are you doing?

Just let them and just take them through the simple process of getting them started out the gate. And then you're done. And then you can build on it from there when they get curious. But like take the W and get the fuck out the door so that people can like so that you've actually got the W and it doesn't turn into an L. And I think it's so important to have that mentality of like this I myself, did not even gain interest in Bitcoin in a single day when somebody mentioned it. It was a long process of first getting interested in it and then second, actually learning about it. And I didn't have somebody with a fire hose to my mouth.

I took it in bites. And you need to realize that the goal of like, getting somebody to do something perfect on day one, well, well, you know, I can respect people being like, it would be better if it was this way.

The reality is, is that people will learn in bits and pieces. Not everyone will get to like the whatever people envision as the perfect bitcliner, but you can lead them down that path. And they're likely to go further down the path if you pace it in a way where it's digestible. But if you do too much, much too quick, they're going to stop at the foot of the path and go no further. And so I loved

that chat from you. And then the other thing that I wanted to say about what you're talking about about the international kind of like remittances and everything, you know, I've seen some pushback on on Twitter in and around like, oh, this is just like fiat and all that kind of stuff. I get it. I get people that are purest. Oh, just just use just. Just use. just use Bitcoin. But at the same time, like, part of me is thinking, I mean, screw you, man. Like these people, if they can use Bitcoin in a way where maybe they don't appreciate the value of Bitcoin yet, but it meaningfully impacts their lives in a positive way by using the network, then fantastic. They will then become curious as to why that is possible down the road.

So yeah, sure. If somebody's still using dollars or I can't recall the currency in the fill. I have been to the philipos. Pesos. Okay, so it is Pesos. Yeah. So if they're still in pesos, whatever. But again, it's a step down the path.

And if that's their first step is just you're using the network to benefit you to get more of your remittances. is there's so many people from the Philippines remitting home. I worked on cruise ships for a while. And so much of the staff was constantly like they go abroad and they're sending money home. There's so many, again, my wife's a nurse and so many of her coworkers are from the Philippines and they send money home. And it costs them an arm and a leg to do so. And so if you can get as close to 100% of that value back to your family and you get to use Bitcoin to do so and it benefits you. then I don't know.

I just find it kind of silly to shit on that idea. I think it's a positive thing. And sure, if we can get some of those people on a Bitcoin standard afterwards, then fantastic. So I want to open it up to either Susie or aunt to maybe comment, add questions, whatever you want.

So maybe Susie, if you want to dive in. So I think it was a couple of months ago, but time goes so quickly, so it could have been six months, I don't know. But bridge to Bitcoin helped on board my husband Rob's osteopathic practice. So, you know, we talk about pubs and restaurants, but he's an osteopath.

And because he started taking Bitcoin and he was on the Bitcoin map, a chiropractor, and another osteopath contacted him and asked him. And that's how it spreads to an out as you can spreading into healthcare. That's awesome. The path to Bitcoin guys are awesome. I did have them on the show a while back. I saw that show, yeah. Yeah, yeah, they're great. And they've they've onboarded a ton of like pubs and and and merchants in and around the UK. They're they're doing some good work. I'm super impressed with what they've managed to do.

They're amazing. And I think I think they do it all for free as well. So if anybody does look, I'm not retorting, sorry, but I retweeted their, their fund to send donations because I think any help that they can get. It's great. because they need to keep going because they're making such a difference for adoption. Are they on Geyser Fund? Is that's what that? Okay. Yeah, I thought so. Yeah, the Geyser guys are doing a lot of stuff there too. Yeah, and besides the point.

But yeah, that's great. I love them. I want Ants take on this too. Like, had you heard of Bitcoin Island and everything down there before? No, this is the first I've ever heard of it. I just, you know, I think my main questions that I have around that is just, you know, what does it look like for the kind of the local adoption? Like, you know, what are you seeing? And what are the, what is your biggest challenge, you know, when you're trying to

Orange Pill? Like, what's your, your biggest success, most successful ways in doing it? Okay. So one of the biggest challenges is getting access to the person that can say yes. If you go into a store, the owner is usually not there, and the employees protect access to that person. So you end up walking around a lot looking for the people that can say yes. Once we get and are able to talk to them, the value proposition is pretty clear, even though they more or less see it as an e-wallet that foreigners can use. That's really the extent of it. I don't even mention Bitcoin in the pitch until about halfway through. And it's only when I say, yeah, the foreigner probably has a Bitcoin wallet and they can scan this QR code.

Bitcoin is not that important to their usage of Bitcoin. When one of us is trying to explain to our grandmother how to use the internet to send funny cat videos, I don't talk to her about TCPIP. it doesn't matter. Bitcoin does not matter in this case because it's purely a utilitarian thing. They'll come back later. You know, one of the businesses I onboarded now, she is one of the first members of Match My Stacks, which is a Bitcoiner process where she can save on chain and a guardian angel out there will match her contribution up to about $10 a month and that will keep going on until she ever withdraws. Then the game is over. So now she has a real reason to learn about self-custody to start saving in Bitcoin. She has a 50% cushion on the downside for doing that. And so it's a great little program and I was able to go into her bar and

explain to her how important these 12 words were and give her a real reason to do it. And you know, an anonymous Bitcoin or in the West, skip to Starbucks and helped adoption. So that's all great. That's awesome. I, it can be difficult, again, to, to, if you go about it a certain way, it can be difficult to, to get people to say yes, especially, I mean, in the West, it's a lot more difficult, I would say. But the way that you're going about it, when you just, again, it's, it's a payment

mechanism for them and then it's potentially more later. I think in that situation, it makes sense for those people for that to be their first experience. In other places, for other people, it might make sense for something else to be their first inroads to Bitcoin. And it's such a personal thing how you first come to Bitcoin. And it's entirely dependent on kind of your situation. as to what that is. And so, yeah, I mean, I guess something is going right there in terms of you being able to

onboard that many people. How many merchants did you say you have onboarded there? So we have 250 businesses. About 100 of them are going to be tourist oriented and the rest are more locals. They'll gladly take you up on it. but we kind of keep them in a different category, if you will. The tourist-oriented businesses tend to be a little bit bigger, a little bit more better organized, and get more traffic from Bitcoiners.

So they are far more reliable. The local businesses, they might not have anyone come in yet. And so their family-oriented businesses, someone might have signed up. up in the family but didn't train and tell the others. We go through and sweep the island every now and then and, you know, either retrain or kick them off the map if they've done that. Some of these businesses are mobile and they were there when we signed him up, but they like the shade over there better than we can't find him again. So yeah, that's one of the issues with the more locals businesses. Now overall, one of the big things that we're dealing with

and why we're having this convention is to get spenders. As people come and are spending, that encourages more businesses to sign up, encourages people to keep training and retraining as staff changes. So you guys coming here, buying some mojitos and drinking them toes up in the sand, is really part of the revolution. We're not asking you to get your pitchforks. Just get a drink. I love that. And to add to the question there,

to give people an idea of, you said, you know, 100 kind of core, like, businesses that are focused towards tourism, but then overall, like, 200, 250 businesses total so far, and that's constantly kind of, there's a flux and flow to it. But in terms of putting that in perspective to the size and population of the island, can you kind of lay that out for us?

Yeah. So there's the island itself, which is, I think about 10,000 people living out here. But for the tourists coming to the island, there's a thin part of the island where, you know, everything, tourism happens. It's about a 10-minute walk across. And then the tourist area, if you were to walk along the beach, probably a half hour, 45-minute walk. And most of everything a tourist wants is on that half-hour, 45-minute walk down the beach and the 10-minute walk across the island. So you're really talking about everything being on maybe an hour walk to, if you weren't stopping anywhere, to go past everything. I mean, that's not time to stop and talk to people.

I think of a sense of how long it would take, take, walk through the tourist-oriented part of the community. That's, that's cool because it gives a better perspective as to how, how densely packed these merchants that are accepting Bitcoin is, because it's like, you know, you say, oh, Bitcoin Island and God knows the size of the island. And it's, you know, oh, I got to take a, a two, I got to drive two hours. to get to this one coffee shop. And I got to, no, but like that sounds like you'd be able to walk down that kind of strip

or across the island. And you'd be seeing multiple businesses. You'd encounter a lot. Yeah. I always know that we're doing pretty well when I, any course that comes here, I give them the 5,000 sat tour if they reach out to me. And when we first start, they want to take a picture. Oh, Bitcoin except I got to take a picture in front of that.

about 15 minutes later, they're like, whatever, they're everywhere. And so they stop thinking it's a novelty to take a picture in there. I've stopped thinking it's a novelty to pay with Bitcoin. Like, yeah, this is just what I do. This is normal. And I'm living in the future here. I really believe that. That I've got this tiny little community here that is what the rest of the Philippines and the world

is going to look like in the future. So having this island is a great test bed for pouch and software and other Bitcoin community ideas that want to come set up shop here. You've got a mecca in the east for Bitcoin here, and we really want people to start coming and using it. That's great. Yeah, I love seeing all this play of all these little smaller kind of ground up community movements.

I think it's important. And I think over time, obviously we're seeing more and more of them pop up. But I'm I'm also loving the aspect of the kind of circular economy thing that you're creating there because at the end, you were mentioning how, okay, well, there's more kind of local community type people that are running businesses that

are accepting it. And so you get a situation where if there's enough, then, then, tourist businesses that are getting a bunch of Bitcoin coming in through, they could potentially just go, again, they don't even have to convert it locally. They could just start accepting it and just holding the Bitcoin and then going down to the store and purchasing whatever they need from their local merchants as well, like the more

kind of, I guess, local economy that they're dealing with. So yeah, I'm super curious. Also, I've heard, I've not been to Borikai, but I've heard it's beautiful. Well, I was over in El Nito for a while. So I spent, I think I spent about 10 days over, and Porta, Porta Princessa, I believe. So I spent some. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, the name of it is Porta Princessa and El Nido.

Yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful place. If you get the chance, go over there. But now I've got another place to go to. So I will try to get there. I won't be able to make it this year. but if anybody is again, check that link that Bill has posted there. Yeah.

So I don't know if anybody has any final thoughts here. Otherwise, I can do a final rotation here. I don't know if anybody has any final thing that I want to chip in here. All good. All right. I'm going to give a rotation then. Bill, that was awesome. Thank you for filling us in on that.

And I encourage you guys to go and watch. maybe bill you can read well wait you got banned from twitter never mind we'll find it for you later uh anyways there's a great chat that uh that bill had uh around his his pitch um that he uses where can people find that pitch that or the the pitch deck or like your your methodology that talk that you did so that was recorded on stage at else albedo adopting bitcoin 2022 so if you just look up Bill Hill adopting Bitcoin, then you're going to find that video. It's just under 10 minutes of what our pitch is, why we say what we say. Awesome. Yeah, definitely watch it. It might help you fine-tune pitching your friends, maybe, or at least help you streamline a little bit.

Nonetheless, we're going to do a rotation here. Keep the comments coming, by the way. Just so you guys know, David says that Grandma likes her leather wall. not a Bitcoin wallet with secret words. So thank you, David. Yellow did reply and say that a Bitcoin wallet can be leather. Why are you so biased? Jesus. So anyways, we're going to do a rotation.

I'm going to finally jump to Ant here. And again, I'm just going to tee up with the same simple question. Why are you bullish? Yeah, thanks. And I really like to hear about what Susie and Bill are working on. You know, pretty exciting. I think that as far as grandma's not going to use it, you know, I agree with Bill that, you know, on some level, on the one side, you know, you abstract away this thing as it goes along. I was alive to see the internet rise and also the rise of the mobile phone.

I mean, this, you know, you abstract these things away, these complexities away and you get to a point to where your grandma's playing farm bill online and whatever. And it all just goes away. not to mention the fact that, you know, anybody who's, you know, 13 years or younger was born into a world where Bitcoin has always existed. It's just simply always been here. And at some point, they're going to be grandparents. And so, yeah, you know, I just like hearing what you guys are working on. And I agree with you guys. I mean, for me, I mean, I hope I have something to add like the people before me.

I mean, from, you know, I besides building time chain stats and BTC lexicon, you know, I'm just kind of. a common pleb here, you know, I hang out on spaces a lot in this cycle, but, you know, very quick, you know, I won't go into like my whole history or anything like that, but, you know, just from my perspective, you know, I was, I'm like old school punk, you know, I grew up with no parents, you know, just I was either homeless or, or, you know, in and out of foster care, you know, foster homes, you know, I was from a early, early age, like battling against the system and, you know, the corrupt central planners, you know, since like the late 80s, you know, early in my career in 2008, right, you know, 2009, right, when Bitcoin was, was, you know,

coming around, you know, I was early in my career, I was seeing these things like, you know, the too big to fail and, you know, all of that and, and the Occupy movement. And, you know, I just kind of miss Bitcoin a little bit, you know, and for several years. Like I saw it early on around like, you know, 2012-ish and then just continued to ignore it for, for many years, you know, and like a lot of people that I've talked to, it just, you know, Bitcoin just doesn't seem to go away. It just keeps you, you ignore it for a while. And at some point for everybody, you reach that point where you just can't ignore it anymore. So, you know, yeah, that was me, you know, and then, and I didn't have spaces back in, back in my day, you know,

it was, you know, you'd just be on Twitter, you know, kind of all alone going through this bear market and now, you know, two up, two down, you know, I've seen two bulls. I've seen two, you know, I'm in my second bear. And I think that, you know, the biggest thing that I'm bullish on is just, you know, the people, you know, that I've seen. And besides the developments that are, you know, obviously the big things with Nunchuk and the great products that coin kite builds and, you know, the things that Strike is working on and Azteco and Nost are, all. these developments are really, really awesome. You know, the global events like we've seen in Canada and Lebanon more recently, you know, juxtaposed against what's happening in like El Salvador and Nigeria.

I mean, like all of this has happening on the world stage. And at the same time, this, you know, if you steep it back down to just hanging out on Twitter and being in these spaces, you know, the people that I've seen in this cycle, you know, the class of 2020, you know, through 2023, You know, it felt like, and maybe it's because of the spaces, maybe it's because of all the work that, you know, all the education people like you were doing, you know, on on videos like these and, and people just kind of continuing to tell the never-ending story with this thing, you know, Cafe Bitcoin. We're on there every single morning talking about this stuff and examining Bitcoin news and everything and talking to everybody. For me, from my perspective, as someone who came from the last cycle, like it feels like people were a little, you know, know, faster to the concept of Bitcoin only in this cycle. And I think that, you know, early on, I would see these spaces. And of course, we still all get a lot of, a lot of these things wrong.

You know, we, we, we, there's a lot to Bitcoin and, and, you know, as much as we may know, there's still so many things I personally get wrong. But it's like, it's been fun hanging out with everybody and seeing everybody kind of grow together. And in this cycle, you know, now there's been some really big developments that, you know, when I, first came into the spaces back in like kind of 2021 like mid time mid year uh you know it was big bull run and everybody was ecstatic and you know people were talking about never having another bear market again and we're never going to have another 80% drop and like just all these crazy comments you know and that was one of the things that got me on spaces by the way because i was like i had to correct

some of these people live in the bear market that i had come through but anyway you know like this group, this cycle, I mean, seeing things like, for example, you know, again, back in my day, but I mean, the price fluctuations and especially for the people before even me were, you know, below 10,000. And now, I mean, it's like the swings between 69 and 20 are like very large, you know, depending on how you're looking at it and depending on where you came in, you know, the fact that we've had spaces, the fact that we've had the FT, FTX contagion and, you know, watching all of that melt and burn and, you know, in front of everybody. But yet it's still like TikTok next block, you know, and I think my personal favorite part of it is just watching these models break, you know, this cycle.

You know, coming out of the last one, it was all about like plan B's, you know, big model and all these different things. One of the things that I held on to still was that the all-time high. once it breaks it, it doesn't ever air. It hasn't ever come back down below it, the previous one. And so when that one fell down, I remember thinking to myself, okay, like we've been hanging out with this with this new class for a little bit. And like now we're all kind of like, oh, geez, newbies, like people who've been here for a while, like everybody's now back on square one because like the models are all falling

apart. You all have to like face. What do you know about Bitcoin? What do you believe about Bitcoin? Like, why are we here? And it's happened in this cycle. And then, you know, having the, like just kind of watching the game theory play out on the world stage, you know, like I said, looking at things like El Salvador and Nigeria, you hear these stories about, you know, what's happening. But a lot of people don't recognize that or it's not really highlighted that in El Salvador, you know, it's like government, you know, like they support it. But in Nigeria, they're trying to get you to use their CBDC and like, they're still heavy Bitcoin usage. So you're seeing it play out in two different arenas, you know, and the game theory is like fascinating to watch. Meanwhile, over here

in the West, everybody is fortunate enough to be wondering, like, is it a scam? Is it going to fall down one day? What's going to happen? And it's just, it's interesting to watch how it all plays out. And, you know, you see these stakes are like bigger each cycle it feels like and in this one like in the last one it felt like the biggest thing that could happen besides like a major you know exchange falling down would be like you might get ripped off by your paid group leader or something like that but it was all kind of like local small stuff now it's like really big like institutional money like crashing and burning it's it's like really big so these are like very big scales the the the money is bigger.

And so then I'm just kind of bullish about, you know, what does it mean for the 2024 actors, 2028 actors? I don't know. Is it, is it which one of those cycles is the one where, you know, the governments really start fomoing in? Is it? And the institutions and the, you know, the big money had, you know, like retirement funds and all of this stuff that we always talk about.

Like, like, what, what cycle is that going to happen in? And then where is America and all of that? And where is the West and the Five Eyes network and all that? Because it makes me feel like, you know, you have, is it either, you know, are they seeing what's happening in El Salvador, either as like a test case, like, oh, what's happening down there? Or do they see it like I see it, which is more like the paint in a floor is filling in, like around them? And, you know, it's like, when do they jump in? So, yeah, really excited about that.

I just think that this class has been through the ringer a little bit. You know, this has been a long protracted bear market. I'm excited about this next cycle and about these new people coming in. Yeah, a couple of things that I honed in on there. You mentioned the speed at which people kind of gravitated and understood Bitcoin and Bitcoin only. And that's definitely a phenomenon that I had not seen. previously.

There was a guy, so I do like private one-on-one sessions when people need a little bit more hand-holding. And so there's a guy I was working with last week. And he was like, yeah, so I came in about a year in change ago. And yeah, I kind of came in and like did, you know, did the Coinbase thing and, you know, kind of got put through the ringer there. And anyways, so now I'm, and this is like, over the whole course of a year, he's like, oh, I'm, I'm Bitcoin only now. I've got my, my, my, my node just arrived, my start nine embassy. I'm setting that up.

He's like, I got like my cold card and, uh, I'm setting up. I, I just need some help setting up a, a multi-sig to secure everything. And I, like, the trajectory of like his learning. It was like, within a year and a bit, he understood. stood the value of Bitcoin. He didn't want the riff, rap of trying to like trade garbage. He honed in on like, oh, I kind of want I want to, I don't want to trust. I want to verify. I want to run a node. I want to link my wallets to it. He's exploring multi-sig. He understands what's

going on. He just wants a little bit of handholding and like nodding and saying, yes, you're doing it right. But like the amount of knowledge that this guy was able to parse through in a single year in Bitcoin, I could not even fathom having been where he is. three years into my Bitcoin journey. Like when I started, I thought I knew what I was talking about, and I did not. And I mean,

I guess you can always say that about any point in the history of your learning. You know, you always hopefully know more than you did previously. But yeah, it's been so quick for so many people. And the humbling of everyone that has been around because, you know,

I was one of those. people where I was like, yeah, it tends not to drop below the previous all-time high. Like, that's probably not going to happen. And then while that just dissolved and you're right, it makes you question, well, if the only reason you were here is because you thought that the fiat value of Bitcoin would not drop below the previous all-time high within a cycle, then maybe you left. but at that moment, if that was your reasoning,

then you then have to question, yeah, why am I here? What do I actually know about Bitcoin? Is my conviction still just as strong? Am I still as convinced about what is being done here that the price, despite the fact that it dipped below my expectations, is in truth irrelevant in the short term?

And luckily, a lot of people were able to just weather that and say, whatever. It doesn't matter. We know what's we know what this thing is. We know it will continue to be here. So let's just ignore the short term and continue on. So yeah, very well said. I think a lot of people learned a lot of things this past cycle. And I think the the learning curve is exponential. And I'm excited to see what we'll see next. I want to ask Susie maybe. what do you think that we'll see in the coming cycle? What do you think will rhyme and what do you think might be some new things that we come across?

It kind of links back nicely to the reason why I'm bullish. I mean, when I say that I published three articles, two on CBDCs and one on the environmental benefits of Bitcoin in a London city newspaper that goes out to two. two million people a month. The reach is insane. And that's a lot of people that are being exposed to information, correct information, that they wouldn't have otherwise been reading.

So that's exactly, it almost feeds, it's a full loop, isn't it? Yeah, 100%. I, uh, Rossi, you were saying, the institutional implosions that we kind of saw this time around do you think

it gets this for Ant but do you think it gets bigger in scale in terms of implosions this time around? I mean, I'm no economist but just from, you know, gut reaction and from me sitting on the sideline and watching it with my popcorn,

I mean, it feels like, yeah, you know, in the next cycle, if it is these, if it does continue the trend of being bigger money each cycle and bigger stakes each cycle, then, you know, I mean, these legacy players still exist and they're still going to try to run their scams. There's a whole bunch of people who haven't come in yet from that arena who are, who would love to run their re-depoffication scams all over again. So we'll see it again. The hope is, though, that the other line is trending. If you put it on a chart and you see like what, we've been saying that, you know, it feels like people are getting to Bitcoin only faster

with each cycle. And I believe that there comes a point where, you know, you're, you're getting that option at work to take Bitcoin as a part of your payment. You're going to the vending machine and you're seeing the Bitcoin option there. You know, it's becoming everywhere to to the point to where people are, you know, trending upwards on that, on that line. Then, yeah, it's like it, you'll have it on both. sides. So that part's pretty exciting. And then, you know, the idea that you get to Bitcoin

faster, like one of the people that I follow that I love a lot of beauty on, you know, he, he had said a while back, I'll mess it up, so I'm just going to paraphrase horribly, but that Bitcoin needs to rid itself of the guy Fox mask. And as a, you know, like an ex punk rocker or whatever, like the idea that that, yeah, at some point, you know, like what serves you at some point in your development may not always serve you. Like you're, you know, you get to a different growth, you know. And so, you know, part of that plays into that as well where, you know, you get to a point where people come into it right away like Bitcoin only.

It is just money, you know, it's, it's ubiquitous. This is the money that you're using and there's nothing like creepy about it or like shady secret coders or any of that other garbage. It's just Bitcoin, you know. That's why good information is important, though. yeah absolutely yeah and perhaps that will help them

get there quicker yeah I hope so yeah it's um yeah bitcoin's definitely it's it's no longer a baby it's maybe in its awkward teenage face right now

you know it's going it's going through some stuff you can see the potential yeah it's a little emotional from time to time yeah I think I think we're there um Bill what do you feel, what's your feeling for kind of this next little bit in Bitcoin the next few years?

What do you think that we'll see in terms of, you know, similar narratives playing out versus maybe some new things that we haven't seen before? Well, in some ways, this is my first cycle. I came to Bitcoin later than I probably should have. but, you know, I've definitely read the history, just not experienced it. Like, those 80% dips don't look that bad on a chart, but they feel a lot of different when you're on the roller coaster than when you're in the line watching the roller coaster.

I guess I'm seeing things play out here, and that's what I'm kind of thinking about right now. Like, we are getting news coverage, and whether it's on CSNBC or the different articles that get written about, Orichai, and so on. And businesses are coming to us to sign up. Or even better, they're not coming to us. They're just signing up. And I see, oh, hey, I recognize that name that just signed up.

Let's go talk to them. And so they are self-onboarding slowly. but instead of me out pounding the sand, they are coming to us. So there's been about seven businesses that have proactively signed up without someone going to visit them. On this island, I mean, you know, those are all tourist places. It's nearly 10%. You know, seven's not a lot, but it's a start. You build so, I guess adoption is a ladder.

the first part is have a positive outlook on Bitcoin and you see it enough on this island that that is happening. Then it's signing up for a wallet and then accepting payments in your business. And someone just asked me, instead of using pouch that converts it to pesos automatically for me, can I just keep the Bitcoin? Like, all right, you know, we're on our way. There's your win, right? Like that's exactly what we're talking about before.

Like their first inroads is, oh, these are easier payments or, you know, this will make it easier for people coming into my shop to pay. But then, oh, maybe I want, maybe I want to keep the Bitcoin. And yeah, that's a fantastic thing. And, you know, a lot of us, myself included, think Bull Run is coming soon. And now there's all these businesses that have money coming in. and Bitcoin is going up. I'm looking forward to some calls. Yeah, that's what I'll end up having too.

It'll be, you'll be inundated at the top. And then, and then, you know, those people will earn their stripes through the following bear market. But, you know, that's maybe, maybe again, to answer a little point,

we lived on all the, all the models, the last run. But I don't think a super cycle is yet in our near future. So yeah, we'll see how that plays out. Anyways, guys, I'm going to start rounding it out here. The way I like to end the show usually is just do a quick round of any final thoughts that you may have. So anything you feel like you didn't get to say or just like anything you want to sum up would be awesome.

But then I also want to give the opportunity to everybody to recommend something. And that's something, it's really loose what it could be. It could be a website, a podcast, a book, a video, an application, a device, something that you found useful somewhere in your Bitcoin journey and that you think people should check out in any way, shape, or form. So whatever that may be, feel free. All kind of just round out by saying, I kind of love the progression. of progression and trajectory of Bitcoin, kind of honing in on Anst last topic, but it ties into

what was said by Susie and Bill here is we're seeing progress. And yes, it may, you know, when you're in Bitcoin for a long time, it may be like, oh, is it going to happen yet? But in the grand scheme of things, Bitcoin has not been around for a long time. And a lot has happened in the past 13 years. And so, yeah, each kind of cycle, yeah, you get the hype and you get the noise, but there's a lot of important, very valuable things being built as well. And the world kind of witnesses those in those cycles. They witness them in those bull runs.

And they may not fully recognize the difference between value and noise. but they kind of get it all at once and then the noise eventually goes away. So you're getting ground up adoption. You're getting better quality of information. And you're getting a quicker learning trajectory from the people that are exposed to Bitcoin to the point where they're able to go through experience and learn from all the mistakes that we all made over the course of years in a single year or less. And that's awesome.

So that's where I'm going to kind of leave it. I think everything is accelerating. And then we'll start to kind of feel that more in the coming years. In terms of recommendations, with my topic, I was just going to say, if you want to check out how to do and play with the Chalmy and eCash, number one, I'll say like both the wallets that I mentioned, like very, very early in that. So like don't send a ton of money like me. You can send like a couple of thousand sats and play around with it.

And if you lose it, you don't need to shed too many tears. But like the one is you just go to LNBits. Just Google LNBits and you'll find like a wallet you can set up. The other one is called nutnutstash. Dot app. And so that's just you can quickly set up a wallet in no time at all. You can fund it with a lightning transaction. You can send like a thousand sats over.

And then you can basically start sending to other people using Chalmy and eCash right away. If you want to try sending to yourself, you can create an LNBits one and a nut stash one and then just send back and forth and kind of see how it interacts. I'm going to make a video on it this coming week. So if you need to wait for that, that's fine. But if you wanted to play with it right away,

go go Google those things and play around. I'm going to toss it to Susie and just any final thoughts, recommendations, take it away. No final thoughts, but a recommendation that I have is the illustrator that has been illustrating a lot of the articles, it's Slackr X and you can find them on Twitter, SlackrX3. And you can see in the background, I've got the pictures here

and they were done especially based on my articles So they're very specific and they work for Bitcoin only. Oh, awesome. Sorry, where can people find them? Slacker X3 on Twitter. Slacker X3. Okay, awesome. Everybody go check them out.

Yeah, that's awesome. I'm going to have to take a look at that afterwards too. You really should. Honestly, the illustrations are absolutely amazing. The detail is phenomenal and the skill is second to none. That's fantastic. Well, that's great. I love encouraging physical artists to continue creating.

Bill, I'm going to toss it to you. Final thoughts, recommendations. Take it away. Okay, so, of course, I'm going to recommend coming to my retreat. The URL is there. But I should probably talk about something else. LightSats is this tipping mechanism where you can pre-fund tips, print them out, and then hand them out.

And one of the good things is if they don't like those sats in whatever time frame you set, you get the sats back. And that has a bit of proof of work in it in that, you know, I'm not there getting them to sign up right now in front of me and just accept the money and maybe it goes somewhere, maybe it doesn't. By the time I hand this to them, I leave and then they can. decide to onboard themselves and accept their first bitcoin, then that is some proof of work and that's someone that's probably going to use it. And if they're not, I got the Sats back.

And later they will remember that generous Bitcoiner that tried to give them free money and didn't actually have to give it up. So I see that as a good thing. One of the things I want to do is I'm playtesting them here. These guys, are really responsive. You know, at first they had QR codes. Most Filipino do not have a QR reader but they know how to use on their phone. So very quickly they went to a three-word entry onto a web page much more usable for this target audience. And so I printed those out, handing them out, and if this goes well in trial, I want to have these for the people at the the convention to be able to pick up and hand out to the world here on Bitcoin Island.

That's really cool. I like that they hone into the needs of local communities of like, oh, this makes more sense here. Yeah, that's great. And lightsatsats.com, I've played with it before, actually, super useful. It's a lot of fun. So yeah, check it out if you haven't already. And I'm going to jump to Ant. Finally, final thoughts and recommendations, take it way. Thank you. Thanks again for putting on a good show. I'm happy to have been a part of it and thanks for inviting me. I think that for some recommendations, I think that I just want to do it in two ways. First is just kind of my basic orange pill pack. I think that the two pieces of really the three pieces of reading that I recommend the most for people starting out is, you know, and even

for people who've been in Bitcoin for a while, because it's about, you know, you have to understand money. is, and they're all pretty much available online for free, which is shelling out the origins of money. That's one of those that I keep giving out to people and, you know, should definitely go read it if you haven't. And then, of course, the Bitcoin standard, old but good, oldie but goody. And then even it's kind of basic to say it, but the white paper itself. Listen, I said earlier in the show that I had ignored Bitcoin for many years, a large part of that was because I didn't take the time to read the white paper. So, you know, it's not some big mystical document. It's, you know, that's hard to understand.

It's nine pages and it's really easy to read. So definitely check that out. As far as like the products that I really like, I like what Nunchuk is doing. I really love that, you know, the product that they have. And then coin kite, huge coin kite fan club. And then, of course, what they're doing at Azteco. I love those, you know, those companies and what they're working on. And as far as websites, of course, I've got to throw in my plugs for BTC lexicon.

and timechainstats.com, you know, I built those sites out of a laborer love for myself. You know, like I said, coming in in, you know, 2017, there was a lot of different, you know, information all over the place. And, you know, as a web developer, it's easy for me to throw it all together into one spot. It's deceptively deep in the amount of stats and data that you can play with. And I have a really big update that's coming a long time in the works, but it's coming actually very soon now, so very excited about that. It's going to catch a lot of people by surprise. And my whole thing is that, you know, this data is really important. It needs to be out there for free, not behind paywalls, not behind user accounts where people are selling your data to see it.

I mean, any of that kind of stuff. So, you know, these two websites, no shit coins, no sales, no ads, other than me or people who use it, who I'm so grateful for, they tend to pump it a lot. no copyright, no user accounts. And then, of course, if I'm not on those two sites, then definitely, you know, I'm checking out timechain calendar.com, which is, you know, my buddy's site. But that site is so awesome. Like, when you first look at it, it's like, oh, cool,

look at all these, you know, numbers and dash, you know, like dials and stuff. But when you really start scrubbing, you know, on the bottom and going through the blocks, like it's really cool. And it's packed with information. So definitely check this out. It looks good on, on, you know, all the different screens and stuff. And then of course, you know, it's BitFeed, but you have to go to bits.monospace. Live.

But I absolutely love BitFeed, a big huge fan. And of course, I can't leave out priced in Bitcoin21.com. Yeah, there's so many good, uh, database websites that you can parse through all kinds of interesting Bitcoin information. And I'm glad you brought up a bunch of them there. And I mean, obviously the ones that you put together. two and the one that TC did. Yeah, they're all great.

So thank you for bringing those up. I've got one last recommendation I got to throw out there because I forgot. I said I was going to do it. And I see a couple of the DGens in the chat that are responsible for it. So we all know our good friend, Yellow. They're doing Project Yellow over on Geyser Fund. And yeah, you could basically get a plushy that is yellow. so I have purchased

and through which you can support the meme factory which consists of yellow and Greg Zaj and Big Sean Harris and Becca the world of rusty they're all over there anyways if you enjoy the hilarity that ensues when they do their pods and when they're on Twitter and you just like

the idea of having a hilarious yellow plushy somewhere in your house that they are putting through a factory then yeah feel free to do that or if you just want to drop a few sats because you think you like them, then be sure to do that. I will have my yellow whenever it gets created, but it's over on guys are fun. Guys, I'm going to say thank you so much for being part of the show. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Thought it was a lot of fun. Really happy hearing about everything you guys are working on. And of course, all of you are welcome back anytime. So have a great night. See you later, Ben. Thank you. see you guys later all right see you

and everybody watching thank you so much for being here thank you for joining in the show thank you for being in the chat David so glad you could make it out love you man of course if you want to help

of the show you can do a ton of things you can like subscribe share all those things help get this content in front of more eyeballs you can go and check out the previously mentioned sponsors down below So coin kite, nunchuk, start nine, hoddle, hoddle, they're all there. Other thing I wanted to mention, if you're thinking about coming down to Miami,

this is going to be my fourth time going for the Bitcoin conference. I went to the first one, 2019. It has grown quite a bit. It's quite large now. It's almost overwhelming. But there's just so many bitcoins in one place. It's like you just run into everybody. And it's a lot of fun.

Anyways, May 18th through 20th in Miami. Beach, Florida. 150 speakers, 15,000 attendees, 2,000 companies, a ton of stuff. Lots of, lots of satellite events, pleb party put on by Anders and Pubby. All kinds of good stuff going on. I'm going to be down there for like a week. So yeah, anyways, B.TC slash conference. You can use code BTC sessions for 10, yeah, 10% off.

I'm doing my cold card workshop down there as well. So that is, I'm going to be doing a four-hour. deep dive. So you can basically show up with and if you want, you can like buy a package through the website here. So you get your cold card when you get there or just bring your own. But nonetheless, it is a four hour deep dive that basically goes from the absolute basics, like setting up, backing up using air gaping transactions, all that kind of stuff using a sparrow wall on a new desktop. But then we dive deeper into some of the more advanced functions like using BIP 85 and having like all these sub accounts, which you can use for family.

members so you can Uncle Jim for them, maybe a little bit of multi-sick. We'll try and cover as much as we can, but it's four hours and it will be robust. And by the time you get out of there, you will know the cold card much better than your average PLEP. You will be above and beyond them. Limited tickets because it's a small space. I'm renting out some office space there to run it. And it will be on Wednesday the 17th.

So the day before everything kicks off for the conference. So anyways, you can check it out. just head over to my website, BTCSessions.ca. There's a little in-person workshop. I'm very proud of this image, by the way, this hilarious cartoon of me explaining the cold card. Anyways, you can click on that and get all the info there. With that, I'm out.

Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. If you want to help out the show one last way, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. Strike.comme slash BTC sessions. You don't need strike to use it. Just go there, type in an amount. hit the tip button. You'll see a lightning invoice, or if you prefer, tap to the right, you'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code. Have a great night. I'll see you guys next time. This has been your daily session.