BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Arsh Molu, Ella Hough + Mick Morucci Discuss Bitcoin's HUGE Impact on Humanity ep365

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

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What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. Very excited to have everybody on this Friday. A couple newcomers to the show and a returning guest. I hope all of you have been having a great week. This should be a good one. I was away last week in Nashville for an event with the Human Rights Foundation at Bitcoin Park. And it was awesome. It was a lot of fun. And maybe we'll talk about that a little bit today. But it was a good time, but I'm glad to be back. Glad to be live with everybody. Of course, if you haven't already, give this a share. But before I talk about that, this is live. Anything can happen. So in the instance that it does, I defer to my friend Bill here.

We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. 5. The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, please do.

Like, subscribe, share. All those things, they really help a ton getting this show in front of more eyeballs. That little like button is just right down below there. If you tap it, it really does help a lot. Anyways, guys, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Hottle the Bitcoin.

Before we dive in, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is timeschain calendar.com. sitting at $26,592 per coin. A single US dollar will grab you, 3,761 sats. In terms of fees, a little bit of a bump lately. We're looking at 48 sats per byte next block. If you're willing to wait a little bit, 16 sats per byte, but I wouldn't count on that. And in terms of Bitcoin mined, 19.49 million of them have been mined.

That's 92.82% of the entire supply. Shout out to sponsors to the show, hoddlehottle.com if you're stacking sats and you have some priorities in mind like peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custy, no K-YC, you can get it all here. Sign up with nothing more than the email address,

choose your currency payment method and amount, and start browsing offers immediately. You can also check other peer-to-peer lending in which nothing is ever re-hypothicated. Links are down below. And of course, when you do get some non-KYC stats, you're going to want to secure it with some good hardware. Coin Kite has you covered.

The cold card mark four is my go-to hardware wallet has been for a long time. I've got all their other goodies too. Tap, signer, sats card, block, clock, open dimes. Come soon, cold card Q1. So if you want to reserve that or pick up anything else I mentioned, head over to coin kite.com. You can use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store.

Backups, of course, are important. This week I dropped a tutorial on the seed door. This is a steel backup to protect your seed from the elements, fire, water, corrosion, all of that. and it is robust as hell. They've got a starter set that comes with everything. It's pretty crazy, actually, giant mallet and stamps and positioner and everything. And anyways, you can check out the video on it.

It's pretty awesome. I thoroughly enjoy it. And yeah, I feel pretty confident storing my seas with it. So you can check them out. Cdoor.io. There's links down below depending on your jurisdiction where you can pick it up. So you don't have to pay exorbitant amounts for shipping. Couple last ones, nunchuk.io has you covered with multi-sig, assisted multi-sig with their honey badger.

Basically, you set it up on your phone. It walks you through the entire thing. You can use a ton of different options for hardware like tab signer, cold card, and plenty of others. At the end of all of that, you have a multi-sig in which Nunchuk holds one key and you hold the rest. It has baked in inheritance planning. So your sats get to your next of kin, if anything should happen. And the whole thing is no K-YC. So that has you fully set up and ready to go.

Check them out. I've done a tutorial on that as well. And last shout out of the day to Start 9, your sovereign computing solution, where you can use plug-and-play devices to run your entire Bitcoin stack like Core, Lightning, mempool. You can host your data, files, passwords, photos, all of that. And they've got everything from entry level up to what I'm running, which is the Start 9 server pure.

Anyways, guys, I'm going to stop my renting here. You can check them out at start9.com. but in the meantime, let's get our guests in and get rolling. So I want to welcome to the show. I want to welcome Ella and Arsh and Mick. Thank you guys so much for being here. Very glad to have you. I think some introductions are in order for those that are watching that may not be familiar.

So I'll toss it over to Ella first. Ella, do you want to give yourself a little intro, let people know who you are? Absolutely. First, thanks, Ben, so much for having me. on. My name's Ella Huff and I am a junior in college, but the real reason I'm here is because I'm a project lead at Generation Bitcoin, along with Arsh, where essentially our mission is to help educate Gen Z about Bitcoin and then also help them eventually work in Bitcoin. So not just learn about it, but really become innovators in this space as well. That's awesome. I love to hear.

I think we definitely need to put time into educating as many young people in and around Bitcoin as possible. So noble cause. I'm happy that you're on it. Awesome. Ars, I'll toss it down to you. Can you give yourself a little intro? Definitely, yeah. Thanks for having me, Ben. As Ella mentioned, I'm the co-founder of Generation Bitcoin. And I also work at the Human Rights Foundation, where I work on our financial freedom program. That's awesome. Yeah. And so I first met you what in Pacific Bitcoin last year, I think? Is that right? Briefly, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And then we've since seen each other at a handful of HRF events, which is awesome. So I'm glad to have you here. I guess it's been a long time coming. So, yeah, thanks for joining me, man. And Nick, first, this is your second time on the show. Last time was an epic one. I'm glad to have you back.

Can you give yourself a little intro for those unfamiliar? Yeah, of course. So good to be back. Can you hear me all right? Yep, I got you loud and clear. Yeah, so I'm Metamake, co-founder and CEO of Geisweer. Fund. It's a platform for creators to launch their projects or ideas and fundraise through their community. Hopefully, you've been utilized it, so we'll love to also hear at some point.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you back, man. And yeah, so this should be a good chat. We're going to just dive right in. into it. First, those unfamiliar with the show. Format's pretty simple. All of us come with a reason for being bullish, something that we're excited about in and around the Bitcoin space. It can be really anything that currently has our interest. But the run of the show is effectively, somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. That's their chance to rant and get whatever they have in their mind off of their chest. And then number two, we're all going to together, riff on that reason, chat, figure out what little rabbit holes we want to go down.

And then number three, we're going to rotate until everybody has a turn. So really simple, reason, riff, rotate all the way through. So I'm going to get us started today and with my reason for being bullish. And very broadly, I guess I could say the Bitcoin builders have me bullish on the projects and the amazing apps and services that they are busy creating. But I wanted to shine a spotlight on somebody that I've known for a long time who seems to have pumped out, like just low-key pumped out a whole bunch of stuff in the past little bit that has kind of blown me away.

And some of it hasn't, has not even been fully public yet. So, but I mean, it's not meant to be a, secret, but I can talk about it a little bit here because the talk wasn't televised. So I want to give a shout out to Francis Pouliott and what he's doing with Bull Bitcoin. So anybody that doesn't know Bull Bitcoin or maybe doesn't know specifically what they do, I worked with Francis at Bull Bitcoin for a year, year and a half or so. And effectively, what it is is, you know, it was one of the the first Bitcoin only exchanges that existed. So he was one of the first to say, no, no, no, we're not going to be dealing with any of the other riffraff that's been happening. We're

just going to focus on Bitcoin. But prior to it being called Bull Bitcoin, it was called B-Y-L-L-S. And effectively, it allows anybody in Canada at the time to pay any bill that they wanted. They were able to plug in to the payment rails in in Canada. And in Canada, there's basically like a single tel pay is is kind of responsible for pretty much any bill you would pay. So they were able to plug into that and then provide a platform where you could say, hey, this is my account for this particular bill. And I'd like to pay this amount on it. And they would just say, okay, here's a Bitcoin QR code, scan it and pay that amount and we'll handle the rest. And your bill is paid within 24 to 48 hours, which was already wild.

But then he went and he did all this stuff like adding lightning, adding liquid, adding all of these different things. The whole thing, if you're buying Bitcoin from them is non-KYC in certain instances if you want it to be. he also was the first exchange to implement coin join as a privacy feature anytime you you send coins to them. So in this post here, he said, Bull Bitcoin started as the world's first Bitcoin bill payment business. 10 years later, thousands of Canadians user services each month for everyday payments, privacy focus, extreme speed, instant exchange rates, lightning enabled. So he goes on to say, you pay a credit card. bill on chain, no K.C. Next day, the payment appears on your statement with no mention of Bitcoin. You try chain analysis on your transaction, but it disappeared into a coin join or pay with lightning,

not even a transaction ID. And then he says, the American slash European mind cannot comprehend this because it's just, it's not, it's not available in other places. So, you know, first off, hats off for that. But he also dropped this bomb. earlier in the month, which is being able to buy Bitcoin with cash through any post office in all of Canada, which is crazy. Like you can walk in with like up to a thousand bucks per transaction and up to $10,000 a week and just go and you literally open up an app on your phone and there's like a QR code. and the person at Canada Post doesn't need to know at all what it is.

They just scan it like a regular product. And then it'll say on their screen, how much does this person want to deposit? And you just, you tell them how much and you give them cash. And then you've got money in your account. For me, it was like 10 or 15 minutes later. They never hold Bitcoin for you. So the moment that those dollars are allocated to your account, when you hit buy Bitcoin, you must provide a Bitcoin address.

and then it's after that it's in your custody minutes later. So that's the other bomb that he dropped. And then just the other day, all the sudden, because you know, Francis is in Costa Rica now, all the sudden it just got leaked. And then he was like, I guess I better write a blog post. Bull Bitcoin is now all over Costa Rica. And you can just go anywhere. And they've integrated with this kind of national payment through the cell phone kind of thing.

and all you need to do to send somebody money in the native currency in in Costa Rica is you use bull Bitcoin, you type in the person's mobile number, and then you send a lightning payment. And that person will get Costa Rica and Colonas into their account like in in seconds. It's it's completely wild. And then beyond this, the other thing that I want to give a tip of the hat to was he did a talk at the Canadian Bitcoin conference talking about kind of the infrastructure he wants to build around a mobile Bitcoin app for Bull Bitcoin, which would effectively be the same rails that they have for funding an account but never having custody of the Bitcoin because when you hit the buy Bitcoin button, it would just show up as a Bitcoin balance in the app. But the app is actually self-custody, but it's kind of blurring those lines because the dollars are in the custody of bull Bitcoin. But the second you hit buy, it sends an actual on-chain or lightning transaction to the wallet that resides within the app.

And it's actually yours. And on top of that, you can import hardware wallets and send directly to that. So like it's all just in one. and you're kind of basically directly onboarding people to self-custody without them, you know, they'll obviously guide them, but without them fully knowing they're just suddenly self-custodying. Yeah, so anyways, long and the short of it is, I know this is a long rant, but like Francis is just one example of the passion and hard work that are going into Bitcoin apps and resources and

hardware everywhere and if this is the kind of work ethic and the kind of head down, let's get this stuff done mentality that is happening across the Bitcoin ecosystem, then holy hell, I can only imagine what this looks like in 10 years. So

I guess I'll kind of wrap it there but I'm just going to kind of generally open it up to you guys and say, where do you feel we're at in terms of the Bitcoin builders that are out there? Are you excited the direction that we're going? And maybe as a secondary question is, what areas do you think need some more attention in this kind of TLC to help them along? So whoever wants to jump in with your general thoughts, I'm happy to take them. I might quickly hop in first because I think Ars and Mick are going to have kind of more to say on this subject for the Geyser Fund.

But so my initial thoughts on this is so often in my day, people tell me, you know, Ellen, nothing happens in Bitcoin. Like there's no developments. It's kind of stagnant. And this is just, you know, even further proof that no, there actually is a lot happening, you know, all the time everywhere. So I think that's very exciting. And some takeaways from Nashville, people, were saying we have to get people to start using Bitcoin, not just kind of keeping it like stationary. So these apps are helping with that. And then also the UIUX aspect. Like how do we just make this easier for people? And so it sounds like he's clearly trying to do that and think about that. So I guess those are my two cents and I'll hand it over to Ars and Mick to kind of expand. Awesome. Yeah. So I think I think from like a funding perspective,

Especially, like, there was, I mean, there was a point in time where a lot of, you know, Bitcoin and its apica systems were not as easy to use, right? And we're still, like, nowhere close to being fully usable, I feel like. But, you know, like, I mean, the developments that we've seen with a lot of open source, you know, payment processors, a lot of wallets and stuff like that. Like, it's definitely advanced to the point. So definitely bullish on Bitcoin builders. I feel like there is more and more projects that are, you know, coming out of the space that are that are really important to kind of keep an eye on. Yeah, I totally, totally agree.

Yeah. Yeah, great points here. I think my thought, my first thought, what immediately actually was, and I saw him on a chat here, was the meme that Yellow always talks about, which is, guys, let's build, right? Let's build. I don't know if you guys have heard of it. It's just hilarious.

It's just, you have to just say that you're building. You're not building. You just, yeah, let's just build, guys. Anyway, the other thought was the announcement of Coinbase saying that they're going to integrate with lightning. I think that's a very interesting, you know, development, mainly because I think the foundation, the business model changes, right? goes from being we make money by having people trade crypto right to we make money by having

people spend Bitcoin on like them yeah right so this all of a sudden creates a new in a new set of incentives for Coinbase to actually enable Bitcoin adoption at merchants at consumer retailers and so it's big right it's big from from that perspective. Obviously, you know, we know their history. We know we can't really trust them, but it's good for Bitcoin. Yeah. And then I would probably just say just that, you know, guys are being part of it.

You have, you know, this, I mean, great protocols of double Bitcoin and lightning that I've been built. And you have these infrastructural builders, you know, great, great companies like OBDC pay server, like voltage. that helped to kind of really lay out the foundations for them people in platforms like Geyser, but there are many more. You know, there's fountain. There is a wave lake and stack renews. All these tools are like Bitcoin and Lightning tools that actually allow you to use Bitcoin, not just to buy and hold, but to actually use Bitcoin in the online economy while you're listening to podcasts and so forth.

So that's something I'm really hopeful for and bullish on. But also, I'd say that the final thing is probably just the development of Noster. And what's particularly exciting is just that it makes it so much easier for builders to build. You know, just because you don't have to run a backend server or connect to Google Cloud, you can just build an application that sits on top of a relay directly. and build a tool on top of that. And so just the ease of building will result to just so many more tools, so many more applications.

And that's really, really exciting. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And yeah, you're right, in particular, the stuff happening on Nostor, I can't keep up. There's so many, like I have no idea where to start. I feel like, I think I've done. I think I've done three different Noster videos. And every time I've done a Noster video,

it's like, like the first one I did was near the beginning of the year. And it was hideously out of date like three months later. Like all of the interfaces, everything was just like so completely different. And there were so many more tools that were easier to use that I had to make another one. And like now even that is like, you know,

the stuff you can do and like the how it looks and everything is, is so different that yeah it's it's it's wild how fast those things move but um you know kudos to everybody that's putting in the work for it yeah it's amazing um so so i want to um i don't want to spend too much time on on my topic here uh but i do want to get to your guys topics so um i'll kind of put a bow on this one but anyways uh francis you're doing a killer job and the rest of the builders out there keep it coming. And I'll have plenty of material to cover in videos. But we're going to do a rotation here.

And so I'm going to actually toss it to Ella first. And I'll cue you up with a simple question. Why are you bullish? Thanks, but okay. So I'll preface this with this is definitely going to fall into the rant, a little unformed category. So I'm going to talk through it. Bear with me.

And then hopefully I can go back and refine it. But I, so about a year ago, I wrote a piece of the coin mag and question is Bitcoin the key to the universe. And I said yes. But I don't think until like maybe last week or the week or until the Michael Dunworth podcast came out on Peter McCormick where his question was basically, can Bitcoin help us solve the unsolvable problems? I didn't know I could be more bullish on my answer that the answer is yes. So, okay, so this is the rabbit hole that my brain is kind of down at the moment. But if I had to say it succinctly, I would say that I'm bullish on Bitcoin because it gives us the wisdom and the insight to kind of solve the unsolvable problems and actually is the key to the universe. And I'll kind of explain that.

So for the first part, I think Bitcoin just generally, like the values it has, it allows us to take more responsibility for ourselves, to start ask questions, it's kind of like a catalyst almost for first principles thinking. And not just kind of like maybe throw in the towel or kind of give up some of our agency on what is right or what is wrong or what opinions we have. So I think just the fact that it kind of reinvigorates the spark in us to like ask questions. and think differently is a very strong case for being bullish. But then to bring it back a little bit to what Michael Dunworth was saying, and I highly recommend people go and watch this podcast. I've watched it a couple times since. But Bitcoin kind of allows us to solve the hardest problems we have out there

because it kind of unifies everything through its emphasis on numbers, specifically like prime numbers and energy. So kind of at the end of the day, we hear all the time, Bitcoin is just math. Bitcoin is just numbers. And so that's kind of what I had in my article. But, okay, so this is where it's going to go a little off, not as concise here. But basically there's this idea almost of like bridge laws. And we have, you know, biology, chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, all the different types of sciences.

And there's an idea of, you know, what bridge laws, how do all of these different fields talk to each other? Like, what is the common threads almost through them? And numbers is kind of what he, one of the things he says is numbers are like our purest form to transmit meaning. Like language can get a little abstract, especially when you're switching to different types of languages. But Bitcoin, because it's based on numbers and on energy, I think it allows us. to connect a lot of different dots in fields and kind of reduce friction as we think about different problems. And, you know, what do we know in one field that we don't know in another field? So it helps us connect dots.

It also helps us like collect them because it's just making us be more curious, making us ask more questions. And then I think maybe the final thing I'll say in this is he also made the point that we've been in kind of the information age. but we're starting to go into the energy age. And so Bitcoin, we know it's created and secured by energy. Bitcoin is the ultimate energy thing. You know, if we're going into the energy age also, that's very interesting. And let's see, what else was I thinking about this? So, yeah, basically, Bitcoin is the key to the universe

because it helps us solve these problems that propel us forward. It's problems maybe we don't even know yet, literally because it's based on numbers, prime numbers, because it's created and secured by energy. And then I think because it allows us, maybe most critically, to just adopt a low-time preference to actually stick with the hard problems and solve them. So there's my rant. There's kind of like the rabbit hole my brain is down. But I find that all incredibly fascinating and very hopeful for the future and where the future is going.

I love that. I it's I think I think I think I what I like about it is it's

it's it's kind of a different way of thinking of the whole idea that Bitcoin is because it's based on numbers it's it's kind of this distilled form of truth and we've kind of lost that like

you know when something as fundamental as the way that we kind of communicate our values, like you know, you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into going to a job every day, and then you earn a money that you then put into action and you expect some of those values to kind of be reflected back at you by society because you put all this work in. But then there's somebody behind their curtain that can press a button and undue vast amounts of the work that you've done and all of society's done. And I think that's maybe a reason for a lot of the discontent that we see in society.

So getting back to a more truthful value communication layer can kind of propel us forward as a people, as a society. So yeah, I love it. And yeah, on the language topic, I guess, this was totally like another tangent. article I wrote. Like I don't even think anyone's read it. But basically kind of how language only gets us so far. And even like we're all speaking English right now, but like Ben, you just nodded to kind of signal that you were hearing what I was saying. Like we still lose so much meaning, even when we're speaking the same language. And I think to your point, like Bitcoin just gives us the values that even if it's kind of ambiguous, like we know the values of, you know, I, I respect what you're trying to do, inclusion, empathy. you know, private property rights, liberty peace.

Like it kind of gets the core values across and it allows us to speak to like all 8 billion people because Bitcoin is for everyone and we all will interpret differently, speak different languages. But just to your point about getting values across and language, I think that is very powerful and kind of untapped at the moment in Bitcoin. And it, you know, might take another century. But it's just very interesting to think about. That's awesome.

Maybe I'll toss it down to the other gentleman if you want to dive in, comment, question, whatever you feel. Sure, happy to. I mean, all this talk of languages and universal languages reminding me a lot of the Tower of Babel episode and the Bible episode and the Bible, right? Where probably you guys all know it, but it's worth, I think, reminding ourselves of the, of that quote where I had here. where the world spoke on language and had a common form of speech. And as people journeyed to East where, they found a plane in the Lamb of Shinar and settled there, blah, blah, blah. They wanted to build the Tower of Babel.

But then the Lord came down and said, if they have begun to do this, and as one, people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them. Come let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another speech. And so the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the earth and they stopped building the city. So, yeah, is God going to come down to us and divide us? Not that we've reconnected the world in a single language. As again, communication is so integral to coordination of people towards a common goal, right? Like as soon as you lose that.

So, I mean, we're getting cosmic here, but there's that idea of the great filter. Like if, you know, there, the idea is the universe is so vast that we should have seen aliens already. I don't know if I count the paper mashay that were just revealed in Mexico as aliens, but nonetheless. The idea is that there could be a great filter, some sort of limiting aspect or some sort of difficult thing to get past that may be preventing other civilizations from reaching us. And if that's true, then either we're the first ones to have passed it or we have yet to encounter it. And so there's been, I've had discussions where people were saying to this kind of tune is, is Bitcoin the great filter? Is that the coordination and communication layer necessary to bind us enough as a species to move forward and transcend where we're at right now? I guess we'll find out.

Anyways, Arsh, sorry to queue you up with some crazy cosmic thing. No, I just got a reminder that I have to go reread that article. There was a lot there, Ella. No, I mean, no particular thoughts, but yeah, great, great article. It's nice that kind of ideas resurface themselves. I don't know. It's like working back in the subconscious. But you don't need to read my article again.

I would say just watch the podcast. Michael does a much better job than me. But yeah, it's just fascinating to think about. Yeah. When you think of kind of the consequences of not having kind of a, or moving away from a universal value of language, language of value rather. Like we had a gold standard,

but it was easy to pervert that by by having it represented in various forms. And the physicality was a shortcoming. But do you feel like we lost things in that transition to what we've had for the past, I mean, 50 maybe more? years? Do you feel like, you know, what happens when we get away from that, that mutual understanding? Yeah. So I think I kind of have to give Jimmy Song credit for this idea that I'll share, but I guess he talks a lot about like what are the values in our money, kind of like moral money versus immoral money. And I think the money that we have now, Fiat, is just very immoral money and kind of

value and meaning corrupting money. And I think Bitcoin is a much more moral money, more kind of pure element to just transact value or, you know, what, because essentially we're just trying to connect values or needs early. And I think Bitcoin is just a much pure kind of catalyst or kind of embodiment of that. So I hope that kind of answers your question. but I definitely think the money that we live with now kind of just embeds us with or just kind of corrupts our ability to transact in the most kind of ethical pure way. Yeah. Nick, I want to toss one more thing your way since you went the biblical route. I, you know, I'm not a religious person myself, but I think through Bitcoin I've kind of come to have a greater appreciation.

of people that are religious because of some of the ethical alignment. And I didn't quite understand this idea of religion paired with Bitcoin, other than the fact that we're Bitcoiners and we're all in a cult. But I didn't understand kind of where this draw came. because we have books. Again, like Jimmy Song, thank God for Bitcoin, and a number of others wrote that with him. But do you kind of see those parallels in terms of morals,

like why those two kind of sets of ideals come together? You only ask easy questions, don't you? Goodness. I mean, where do I think? stand in this, first of all, I guess, yeah, I don't know. I like to entertain. I like to learn from history. I'm not necessarily a religious person myself either, but I do think there's a lot of wisdom

and maybe even historical references that we can draw upon that match with what we know, what science is getting to today. So, you know, just looking at the history of our civilization and how it, geological and archaeological history seem to map a lot with some of those early historical references. But so so where that with that then maps up with Bitcoin is it's really a personal thing. I think you know I think it I've seen I seen Bitcoiners go both routes. You know, see Bitcoiners go actually there is there is no there is no good. God. That's just a type of God is just a type of, you know, like again, fiat, like the word fiat,

right, comes from decree, right? And so my God is decreeing. And what if we were to not accept that? And then I've seen other Bitcoiners just, you know, go down the, you know, God for Christian thing. And I don't know. I think and to that, you know, know, I think what's important is that it elicits different experiences that people can learn, different perspectives, I would say. But I guess what's important is that, and actually I have written an article about this. It's called Bitcoin as divinity, which is basically a way of saying, and trying to actually reject seeing Bitcoin as a religion.

trying to actually warn of the dangers of that. But at the same time, acknowledging that there is something, if you look at the word divinity and how to define something divine, it's something basically that cannot be understood, that is beyond comprehension. And so if you look at the history, we've always assigned, actually my background is in anthropology. So I was fascinated with this idea that, you know, back in,

time, people would ascribe sanctity and divinities to certain aspects of their lives that were crucial, but they didn't necessarily understand. So they would assign divinity to everything, right? They would ascribe divinity to the sun and to the seasons and to the and sacredness to these things because they were, because they relied on them and also didn't follow understand them. And so where, so again, and also, and therefore, what it does is that it creates a tradition,

a ritual, a cultural ritual for respect, respecting that thing, right? Respecting, you know, if you're in ancient Egypt, yeah, the sun and the river and the cats for the matter because they killed pests. And so you then go about, religion becomes essentially rituals that help the that has a function, a cultural function to help humanity thrive.

So you don't have to read the entire Bible, but you have to be, you know, through culture and religion that, you know, cats are good because they kill the pests. I don't know, this is a bit of, it's a functional, functionalist school of thinking. And it's not always correct. But I think, from this sense, I think that religion is an as positive for humanity and a good thing. But we also have to question our masters, right?

Like the biblical story say, you know, God that divided us up into having different languages for some reasons. So, yeah. answers, I don't know. I'm just, yeah, learning. Hoping to learn from you guys. What do you guys think? Yeah, I mean, I want to, I want to toss it to Arish to get any, any last thoughts on this. I just wanted to, I guess the one thing that I was going to say in and around this was, you know, historically, I definitely understand religion was, was a, a wonderful, way to get people to, again, to synergize and work towards a common goal because they were looking for not just for themselves, but for their children and for their grandchildren and for, you know,

generations to come. And so they would build these amazing things that maybe they wouldn't see come to fruition even within their lifetimes, but they would put in the work to, you know, to have something for future generations to enjoy. And we kind of got away with that, when once the, away from that, once the money broke. But I think that the interesting part about Bitcoin is,

is you're seeing such a diverse group of people come to it, right? Yeah, you know, you had the, the early stages of kind of like the, the cypherpunk and then libertarian kind of groups come to it. And then we've kind of had like the more, I guess, like traditional, I suppose right wing kind of, you know, right leaning people come to it. We now got a whole sect of like progressive bitcoins coming to the space.

You know, we've got human rights advocates and political dissidents. And we've got all of these different things all coming to Bitcoin. So it kind of leads me to believe as, as. diverse as the number of opinions are in Bitcoin, we've all settled on the idea that Bitcoin is a better way to organize than what we've currently got. And it may be as or more powerful than some of these other institutions that we've had in the past. It might actually finally bring these disparate groups together so we can work together as a society. But, I mean, Arsh, you are, you know, you're busy working with various types of people from around the globe using Bitcoin. And, you know, a lot of those people are very, very different, different walks of life.

Do you think that Bitcoin is kind of taking us to a place where all of us can work together more efficiently? and despite our differences? Yeah, I mean, even going back to politics, really, I think Bitcoin being a form of apolitical money to where it isn't really matter, you know, your politics or, you know, how you identify on, like, the political scale, a lot of people, you know, who we work with, they're kind of all over the world,

they're on different political skills. But we can all agree about Bitcoin. So I think, you know, that's very powerful. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. Well, I mean, and we'll get to see it play out in the coming years. And yeah, you've got you've got kind of people from all over the place and all over the political spectrum coming together, which is a unique thing to see. So awesome.

All right. Follow up on that, though. Because what you said, there. there Ben also reminded me that that's the problem, right, is that when you have a group of people forming together and, right, maybe you have an original point of conversion of, you know, of strong belief in something. What we see in history, though, is that that too gets co-opted, right? And then it becomes a religion and then it becomes mandation and then it just becomes

abused by certain people in power to take it over. And so that's the idea of seeing Bitcoin as it might be good. You could see it. You could argue that, you know, see Bitcoin as divine, but also don't create a cult around it or religion because it'll get co-opted. And in any case, it's something that, yeah, don't create any kind of institutions around it. Like, you know, we've seen with all sorts of religions being co-opted in the end. Yeah. do we get to a point where somebody uses the wrong app and they're ousted from society?

Custodial Bitcoin. Yeah, exactly. Sorry, you get kicked out. We're going to close you off from the walled city. Yeah. No admittance to the Citadel. I'm sorry. Yeah, well, I guess we'll see.

No vegetables. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Excuse me. Did you just ingest something that wasn't fake? Not allowed. Anyways. Yeah. So again, I love the topic. I think it's super interesting. And yeah, well, I mean, we'll see over our lifetimes kind of how it starts to play out, I guess. But yeah, with that, I'm, I guess we'll put a pin in this one and we'll move on and do a rotation. again. And so I'm going to, Arsh, I'm going to toss it down to you. And again, same question coming your way. Why are you bullish? Yeah. I think recently it's been physical spaces that make me very bullish. And you know, you guys already know where I'm going with this. I think, I think the national event that we had last week was an amazing reminder that when people, with the same or similar ideology,

and with the same mission come together, people from all different walks of life, people from all around the world. So, I mean, we have this event. You know, we co-hosted it with Bitcoin Park. And Bitcoin Park does an event called grassroots every year where they bring together, you know, BitDev organizers from all across the state,

Bitcoin community organizers, et cetera. So we thought to do the global version of that, called the Global Bitcoin Summit. So basically, what ended up happening is we invited close to 100, activists, entrepreneurs, developers, educators from all around the world from 56 different countries. so every continent decides

Antarctica and it was really cool because we got to spend you know two or three days together and got to share ideas about different topics in Bitcoin

so it's it's always refreshing because when you see people online or when you see people not very often and when you come together in a room you can kind of form new ideas and new initiatives to help get Bitcoin to the people who need it the most.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, was there something that stood out for you? Like, did you have a favorite part of the weekend or a favorite presentation or something that happened that you really liked? Yeah. I mean, so like the way that we formatted it was, you know, there was people coming off, you know, planes and they, they spent 30 plus hours.

hours getting to Nashville, right? So we didn't want to bore them with, you know, just a bunch of talks and panels. So the whole day was meant to be very interactive to the point where we only had like one panel per day, but instead do lightning presentations, which, you know, which which you did one of on education and do workshops and breakouts and stuff like that. So, I think, you know, that was really the best part of it. I don't have a particular favorite, but I really did enjoy the format that we tried to do it in. I know you had a particular favorite. I wanted to pass that back to you. Yeah. Well, there's a couple, but, okay, so there's a girl named Lisa, Nifty,

who did a session, and it was called the Bitcoin LARP. LARP, those unfamiliar stands for live action roleplay. But it was so well put together. Basically, you had groups of people, you know, sitting at little tables. And they were effectively doing the roles of what a Bitcoin node and eventually what a Bitcoin miner would do to relay transactions to and from other nodes in the network. And so you'd have different roles where you'd be, you know, you had your your, your, your actual blockchain of confirmed transactions. And, and, and, and you'd be doing the transaction IDs and nonces and I and all of this stuff.

I was, I was relaying information through the gossip network, which were two, two strings of yarn between me and other people at other tables. and any time we had a transaction or did a transaction, you had to put it on a little, put it on a little ring. And like you write it out and you put it on a little ring and then you'd let it go down the line to the next table. And the other person would have to take it and put it in our mempool and let everybody else know that they've seen this transaction too. And then, you know, then we did like a mining competition and you're just putting in random nonses to try and guess the block and everything. And like it was it was wild and it was such a such an interesting and informative way of doing it.

Also, I learned something there, which I'm ashamed. I did not know how this worked. I didn't know that the way that fees are allocated in any transaction, I didn't know that was just merely an omission of, of, of, sending that Bitcoin to any particular place. So like when you're doing a transaction, the way you pay fees is you just say, I've got this much Bitcoin in a UTXO and I'm only going to send a portion of it to this address.

And whatever's left over, that's what the miners kind of scoop up in that. I didn't know that. I had no idea that was how it worked. And that's why the number of Bitcoin that exists is. some weird, some weird like long, super long decimal is because miners can accidentally not scoop up those omitted sats. And so there's been instances where there's been mistakes and it's just like, well, the block has been mined and those sats are just gone forever. And it's just because miners, like, they make a mistake and they don't scoop up the omitted, uh, sets from particular transactions. So anyways, I learned something new.

And hats off to Lisa for running a killer session that taught me a lot. And yeah, what an amazing. She must have put so much work into fine-tuning that whole thing and getting it to work. And I loved the organized chaos that took place in that room. It was amazing. Yeah. So I didn't actually get to like sit in on that session. you know, because we had a bunch of other tasks and items that we had to do.

But Lisa actually, one of the first times that she did at LARP was with Generation Bitcoin in New York over a year ago. So we had, you know, probably like 15, 20 people in New York City. And it was a very, like, interactive way to learn about. about nodes. I told me so she should make it into like a game and like try to like sell it. But she has, I mean, she has so much, so much stuff that she does. I don't know how she does it. That would be a hell of a strategy.

Like that, that'd be an, like, because obviously there's like, there's a degree of chance with, with the whole mining thing. But like, what a, what a cool way of, again, just having a group of people in a room and being able to do that. And again, it really does help wrap your head around what nodes do, what miners are doing. And I mean, I guess I wonder what the goal would be like just to accumulate the most Bitcoin, but then you have expenses that you have to pay.

So you got to send transactions to make sure they go through and they get mined. And yeah, it's, it was, it was so unique. So I'll definitely partake in that one again. Yeah, it was really cool. I don't know. maybe I'll talk Ella you were there did you have did you have a particular thing over the weekend there that you really enjoyed that that you had a lot of fun with yes well actually I was initially going to say the same thing as you because I was in the LARP session also and yeah that

that was just so cool and I think good news is she actually is going to produce kits and so that people can then go and buy them. And I'm working with her right now. She is going to be kind of up in where I go to school and she might come and leave that session. So fingers crossed because I think it's just so cool. So I loved that. But then I also loved just like all the little moments you couldn't plan for.

Like if you're just holding the door open and you look behind to like see who it is and you can just strike up a conversation or you're, I don't know, just in line at the buffet to get food or you're just walking from one place to the other. So I loved all that because most of the time Bitcoin just exists in the digital. Like our Bitcoin community doesn't often get to come together. And so our shit was so special that you and HRF at Bitcoin Park could bring everyone together or many people together to actually just be in a space and just kind of be in community with each other. So I really love to that. And thank you.

Did your eyes gloss over a little bit when we went around the room and everybody stood up and said, what they are and what they do? Yes, 100%. Yeah, all the time. And at the dinners that you all planned and, you know, you're just sitting and you sit down and, you know, you look and see who you're sitting across from. Or who's on the bus with you or yes, absolutely, the whole time.

I felt like the smallest fish in the pines there. It was just so cool. I had a moment on, I think it was the, The Saturday, I was, I was sitting at the hotel just grabbing a coffee before heading out somewhere for a meal. And I'm sitting there and this guy comes up and sits down and says, hey, Ben, didn't really get to introduce myself, but nice to meet you. It was Julian Assange's brother. And I just about lost my mind because I hadn't really spoken with him before. and I was kind of shy to say anything.

But like, what a nice guy. And then just sitting there and like having a casual conversation being like, oh, wow. Your brother is like one of the more impactful. Again, like his grace the headlines of newspapers everywhere is, is world renown. and infamous in some people's eyes. And again, to be sitting there with somebody that is fighting to, like, free a family member from, you know, basically spending his life in prison for, you know, leaking information about government corruption was wild.

Again, and like that's, and Julian Assange is such an early part of Bitcoin history as well with WikiLeaks. Like that was the first major instance of, you know, Satoshi, like the whole Hornets Nest quote. Like I fear that the swarm is coming towards us to have that. Like that was super impactful for me. Just like I, yeah, I kind of couldn't believe that I was, you know, sitting there chatting with this person. And these are the things that happen at these events. And it's it's a big deal. So yeah.

Yeah. Mick, I know you weren't present there, so I feel like I don't know. But yeah. Yeah, all I can say is I'm jealous. But it seems like it was awesome. And I'll have to check out this really cool larping thing. Yeah. Make you definitely strive to be there next year.

We're going to probably do it again. So I think I think it'd be great for you to also connect. Because I actually, a lot of people there had like Geyser projects and stuff. So I think I think that was really cool. Yeah. Cool, man. I think it aligns pretty well with the goals of the HRF because like Geyser in and of itself is such a fantastic way to fund a lot of these projects that are just, you know, open source. you know, people donating their time to build this stuff.

It's one of the ways that they can hopefully make it work is using tools like Geiser. So, I mean, it kind of seems like a natural fit to me, but I don't know. I'm not in charge of the HF. No, we've, Nick and I, you know, we're even talking about like a potential partnership between HF and Geyser, which I will follow up with on. offline. But no, I mean, it's just like, as far as the granting space goes, right, like Geyser is doing something that's truly unique. I got to be on their board for this round of grants, this past round focused on education initiatives from all over the world and online projects as well. And, you know, say there's a, there's a meetup that's, that's kind of present there, right? And they just kind of need, you know, money to get lifted off the ground,

make a website, get some, you know, pizza beverages or whatever, right? Like, typically, like, these people don't need, like, $25,000, $50,000. Like, a lot of the, a lot of the, you know, organizations that grant money in the space, which there's not many of, they typically do it at a larger capacity. you know, 10,000 upwards of $100,000. So I think the concept of microgranting is, is very special and very important. And, you know, as guys are coined, right,

like just letting the sat flow. Like, it's not about, you know, like getting, you know, like a Bitcoin or two Bitcoin, right? Like, I mean, just getting a couple million stats goes a long way. And you can easily distribute that among different projects. unfortunately a lot of the organizations don't have the capacity to do microgrants to that level so i think you know a collaboration to that extent would be would be really really cool yeah let's do it i love it signing live i got i i i i was down there in nashville i got a

notification on my phone uh i got a tweet that i got a little micro grant which was super awesome I was pretty stoked about that. I think I got like 150 bucks or something, which was really cool to see that anybody gave a crap enough to upvote it. But yeah, it was super awesome. Again, what a useful thing for people to get their work in front of people. And there's so many awesome and talented people that are submitting projects on there. You know, all of the sats.

We need all of the sats showering on some of those amazing creators. I mean, there used to be a time, right? Like, even, you know, as someone who, like, follows projects and vets projects and stuff, there used to be a time where, like, you can look and be like, okay, like, there's X amount of projects ran by this person. It started here, now it's here. Like, you actually, like, knew all the projects that were going on. And I felt like, yeah, like, there was more projects that came on, but it had to be similar.

But even sitting in on like the round five of the grants for Geyser, it was just like so many new projects that like I had no clue even existed, right? So it gave us some some insight at HRF as well to kind of see what these projects are doing. So yeah, thank you. Thank you again, Mick, for inviting me on. Yeah, thank you for helping, yeah, and doing the evaluation. and yeah, that was, thank you for participating, man. I love it. I love it.

Well, I mean, with that, I think, Mick, I should probably send it your way then and do our final rotation. And again, I'm going to queue it up with the same question. Why are you bullish? Take it away. Yeah, so Arsh stole my thunder there. But I'm just... I'm just joking. So, yeah, I'm bullish, as I said, with Bitcoin educators.

We just had this grant round five focus on Bitcoin education in education and Bitcoin communities. And it was exactly, as I said, just mind-boggling how much is happening that I didn't even know about. And what's really, really interesting is that you see these projects connecting with each other, learning from each other, taking from each other. And I think you have four different communities, for example, using Mi Primaz Bitcoin's Diploma in their community in Germany, in a classroom in the United Kingdom, in in African schools like I think African Bitcoiners and I think there's a few others so you see the these these kind of Lego pieces being built

like the diploma from your primary Bitcoin starting to kind of see themselves in other communities and that's you can basically with that start seeing how this can scale You can start seeing how Bitcoin education can scale because we have this really small but powerful building block that can be replicated and scaled up. And you see people starting these projects just with an idea. And this is where, you know, guys are, why we started guys in the first place is because we realize, well, everyone has ideas. right and the hard part is how do you get it started how do you take an idea from just being an idea to actually being okay i'm going to do it and it's it's you know gyser just makes it compresses the the challenge and effort of of taking that first step and so with that project and and now

we have over 800 projects on geyser 70 projects applied for the grant 55 won a grant and and and the powerful thing of the grant is that it works at these different tiers right so whatever point that you are on your journey there is a small grant for you so the tier three was yeah 150 dollars won we had a second for 500 and also one for two thousand five hundred dollars and and everyone could you know could essentially um kind of ramp up their their work and And a lot of it is also just connecting these communities that are, as I said, all over the world we had. Is it worth me sharing quickly here? I think I can present.

Is it a presentation? Yeah, yeah. I think it'll pop up for me. Yeah, I don't think I can actually. Do you want me to pull up just like the Geyser Fun page? Yeah, that sounds good. Or even just the tweets thread. I can actually yeah if you send if you send the the tweet thread link in the show notes or in the private chat I'll pull it up for you as well

perfect so yeah so so basically what you get here is yes if you can on top right you can probably see the grants are there perfect so that's the one so so there you have um yeah basically projects from Yeah, we got the board, the sponsor, shout out to Blink for making it happen and some Bitcoin anonymous Bitcoins. But then here, yeah, you have these in Africa. You have an exorbitant number of projects that have won a grant, so many different communities. And, yeah, again, you can start seeing how these are just like the seeds that are being, that are being seeded. But you have the same also in Asia, right?

We have, again, all over, you've got Hong Kong. You've got, I think you've got something like 40 different countries here represented. And, yeah, Europe, South America. And some of these are just people that were like, I want to make this happen. You know, it's going to be small. But we want to start having a community space, doing education. And we can just take the open source, Mi Prima Bitcoin curriculum and start. and start using it.

And we can just plug into Geyser and start receiving donation from the community. And so, yeah, so this Geyser grants ends up being a very powerful thing that works for both starting to kind of get that initial bit of funding, but also more importantly to connect you with the rest of the network of the community, learn from them, be inspired by them, and kind of be part of that learning process. So yeah, it ends up being, you know, a lot of work for us, a lot of operational work, but it's, you know, also there we got a lot of help from Lee, who is helping us organize the grants. So that showed out to Lee. And yeah, it ends up being such a powerful way to kind of bring the community together.

And yeah, I mean, there's a lot to say, but that's kind of the gist of it. Yeah, that's what, again, what a great tool. And like when you, when you go in to Geiser and you take a look, even just aside from the grants, just that all of these projects that are so incredible. I mean, my first Bitcoin is, is, I remember chatting with them at, I think Bitcoin 2020 or maybe it was 21 even. And it wasn't quite a thing yet. And to see what it's become is wild. But, like, again, just the ability to go in and choose like, oh, do you want maybe look, filter by education, community, culture.

Again, so like just looking at the education stuff here, again, some of the most funded stuff this week. And you can, you know, toggle all these settings. But it shows you all these great projects that are going on. the decou of Bitcoin, the guys in France, what they're building is amazing. It's such a well-refined, again, educational track. It's awesome to see. There's just, there's so much going on.

And there's, again, there's Anita. Anita was also down in Nashville. And man, what an awesome educator. She is. Paco was down there. He's crazy. Yeah, definitely. But I love them.

Yeah, good crazy. The me premiere guy, guys were there as well. And it was very cool seeing how a lot of different, it's been translating to so many different languages and stuff now as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like there's so much. Again, you've got Max DeMarco, amazing filmmaker. I think Julian is on here as well, aka Kinetic Finance,

and he's doing really amazing video work. There's just a whole bunch. There's me. Yay. But there's so much going on that, oh, and I'm glad to see Urban Hacker is getting a little bit of funding for his. He's got like a cool retro video game thing to teach you about Bitcoin that he's put in together.

But there's, yeah, there's so much there. that you can dive into. And even if you're just browsing through and you wanna see, kind of, you're just curious about what people are making and what kind of interesting tools or fun things that you can check out, just go to geyser.fund and just poke around.

And you're gonna, you're gonna come across things that you're like, oh wow, I didn't know anybody's working on something like this. And there's a lot of really cool stuff happening. And I can't recommend checking out this page, more because man, there's some creative people out there. And if you're a creative person also, you should probably get on Geyser.

Maybe I should make a tutorial around how to do that. Oh man, we have to do that. That's, yeah, we should do that for sure. Yeah, I think that's maybe that's something next to that we should probably do. Yeah. Great idea. Yeah.

And I'll just say that, yeah, you know, right now Geyser is, you know, the front page is, you know, just seeing what's there and searching. It's quite, you know, basic, you know, which is hope to find a project or discover. But, you know, in the next month, you'll see a lot more happening. That's not just discovering, but really interacting and engaging a lot more. That's cool to hear.

Awesome. For now, like if somebody wants to start playing around with Geyser, Do you want to maybe kind of give like a TLDR of what they need to do to get started? Yeah, sounds good. So it's really, it's really guys is built for, for everyone, right? So if you are a hardcore bitcoiner and you want to keep full custody of your of your Bitcoin and have an uncasodio project, you can just plug your node. Currently, it just supports L&D and ClearNet.

We're still working on the other options, but doing so would be quite easy. In fact, in that case, Gaser will be free to use. We don't charge to any creators that are connecting our node because we want to incentivize that. We want people to use our nodes and reward people that are helping secure the Bitcoin network. And that's, once you do that, you just connect your node or your lightning address.

And so you can just plug in your lightning address and then you'll get all the stats to receive directly into your custodial or non-custodial wallet. So, you know, this is, you know, I think 97% of projects right now use lightning addresses, which is to say that, you know, not everyone runs a node, but everyone uses Bitcoin, right? so many people can use Bitcoin and leverage Bitcoin and think of all the people and, you know, around the world, right, from the Philippines to India and Nepal that don't have access to crowdfunding, right, that now can use crowdfunding thanks to Bitcoin. And we just make it a lot easier for them to quickly get set up and have a page.

But then, yeah, once you plug in your node, you can just have a few, say a few things about the title of your project, the one-liner, the description, and add also some tags so that you can be searchable, add links, and then you're off to raise it. It takes one minute to create a project, and then maybe a few more minutes if you want to add a little bit more texture, and then you're off. It's really, really quite straightforward and smooth.

The project goes live automatically, and then we just do this. some basic due diligence to make sure that it's not like an impersonation to make sure that it's not you know committing fraud or you know is you know not like a endorsing violence or anything like that so gyser still is you know a platform for now in a sense that it's you know we still have a terms and condition and we still have to respect the rules if you are looking for a full-in-on-custodial experience. It still suggests other options like maybe using Noster or using BDCPay server. Those are also fantastic options, but Gaza tries to really push forward the easy to use,

you know, leveraging Bitcoin, plug-in play kind of solution. Yeah. And yeah, but going forward, we, yeah, we also have more plans with Nostra that I'm happy to discuss more if you like. Oh, that sounds interesting. Huh. I might tug on that string. I was just going to say, again, if anybody feels hesitant about, you know, diving on there, again, like you're saying, you can, you can connect your note or you can just plug in a lightning address. And if you don't have a lightning address, just go like blink is a great, easy, on-bron.

boarding solution for so the blink wallet you download it and and right away they'll give you your own lightning address and if you just sign on to geyser and plug that address in it just looks like an email that's all you need and you'll you'll get you'll get the the sats directly to your wallet and then i should also say that yes that's custodial but it's it probably won't be long before we start to see non-custodial options that also have lightning addresses. Oh, can't wait for that. Yeah. Yeah.

That's going to be a huge. That's like a game changer for everybody where you can basically download an app and open it up and then just set a lightning address. And then anybody in the world can send you Sats non-custodially via lightning immediately. That's that I feel like is the next evolution for. for Bitcoin where people can just say, yeah, I just got, I've got, you know, and all the complicated bits are in the background and you don't need to worry about it. You just have a lightning address and all of the channel management and everything is just defers to a lightning service provider and you're set.

That's going to be great. Yeah. So I heard mention of Nostre here. I don't know what you're at later today. I can't say too much. it's part of a of a bigger announcement we're trying to make going to be making next few months it's it's really trying to you know

leverage what NOS to provide trying to right and let me just kind of maybe highlight the problem all right the problem right now of platforms like Geyser but you know traditional kind of web two platforms is that their moat is to is to kind of you know, you know, bring, bring the users in order to, you know, monetize mainly through advertisements. The guys, there's not the case, right?

So the problem, it all really stems with the problem of monetization. So the platforms make money through advertising and therefore how you make money is that you bring them to your platform, right? Now, Bitcoin solves that, right? Because now with Bitcoin, you can monetize from this activity taking place, not just on your platform, right? Because money is now interoperable. So, you know, if a user uses a Geyser Lightning Address and since funds from Noster,

Geyser can still monetize a small percentage. So that, so the whole monetization kind of via bringing people to your platform isn't as useful, first of all. Second, creators end up suffering a lot because they create content on a platform, right? And then they have to send people to that platform for them to consume that content. And so you end up in this world of SEOs,

where you see this image SEO, and you have to click there and go to another website. And that just creates a lot of friction for the viewers of the content, for people that are, for the communities, who end up feeling a lot more friction of having to go from one place to another.

And also secondly, just the problem of ownership, you know, of the data, the data ends up, that content ends up being basically stuck in that platform. And it's not really yours in the first place either. And so we think Nasser really solves the problem of, you know, cross-platform content and content ownership.

And so we're taking some steps in that direction to which I think will really help creators reach their community more and get more engagement of the community. So right now, Geyser is entirely about making it super easy to fund other, your creative, or get funded, but we've done basically zero in terms of enabling engagement to happen. And the reason for that is we didn't think it was appropriate yet because it just didn't feel right to just, you know, build something, the old school way where, yeah, just, you know, I mean, right now we have these entries, but yeah, we sort of kind of realize that it's different to do so in a platform versus to do so in a protocol level.

So yeah, so expect some big changes, but cannot say more than that at the moment. Very interesting. Well, I will be watching. I'll also be watching on Nostr to see what pops up and what kind of hints I can find. But yeah, that's very excited. By the way, this is also streaming live to Noster.

So there's some nostrils that are watching right now. curious about that. So that's super awesome. All right. Well, I think now comes the time where we start to begin to round things out. And what I usually like to do near the ends of episodes, unless, of course, Ella or Arshy wanted to add anything to what Nick was talking about, thoughts, quick things you wanted to touch on. I kind of just had two big takeaways from all the great work that you're doing. And I think the first is just that it puts into perspective just how global Bitcoin is and just how much is happening around the world outside of who might be in your local community or what you kind of see in your local area. And then the second is it's like

validation for your hard work. I think from past experience I've had in kind of a funding sponsorship role. Like if you don't have anyone to kind of place value on the work you're doing, maybe you almost self-select out, but what you've created is a way for everyone to receive that validation of the work and really just kind of have that motivation again. So those are just my two take-a-ones. Awesome. Awesome. I don't know if, Arish, if you have anything that you wanted to tag on before we round out. Yeah, no, I definitely think it's making, you know, the crowdfunding space more interactive. Like typically there's, you know, people who get grants from like private organizations. it's typically behind closed doors.

I have a lot of fun going on Geyser and just like donating to a project. And then they had this, you guys have this like tweet bot where it was like, you know, like, you know, at Arsenal donated 21,000 stats at this project. I'm not sure if that's still a thing, but I remember from like early on days and the UX is very simple. So I think as far as like onboarding people to donate to projects and to set up their own campus. campaigns. This is definitely, you know, an amazing solution to that. So props to you guys and the whole Geyser team for sure. Yeah. Thanks, yeah. And yeah, also definitely props to the great team behind behind me, you know, with the guys, including Stelios, Salzal, Alejandro,

and Travis and Al-L. And Lee. How well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Again, another, I guess, throwing back to my initial reason, another great example of people building cool things. So love to see it. All right. So I'm going to start rounding out here. What I like to do at the very end is just do a quick round of if you have anything that you didn't get to mention that you want to quickly mention. But more importantly, if you have a recommendation that you'd like people to check out. And when I say recommendation, I usually mean, really anything that you think people could get value out of, whether it be a book, a podcast, a video, an application, a piece of hardware, general life advice, really anything that you think will provide some value to people watching now or later listening audio only. Yeah, please let them know.

So Ella, I'll go to you. Any final thoughts, recommendations you might have? Okay, I hope it's okay. but I have three, but I'll be quick. So I think the first one, go watch everyone, the Michael Dunworth on what Bitcoin did. If you just kind of want your mind to be blown a little bit, just go watch that. Second, this kind of audience or people in school, any type. There's another good podcast I'd recommend.

It's on Bitcoin Fixes This with Jimmy Song and David Perel, I think is how you say the last name. but essentially the TLDL, like too long didn't listen, is don't be so focused on the utility of your curiosity. So in school, you're kind of, okay, this is the subject, I need to, like, this is why I'm learning this, this is the utility value of whatever I'm learning. But the takeaway from this is like, just be curious. Don't be so focused on what am I getting out of my curiosity. That's number two. And then number three, and Arshk can expand is we're launching a Bitcoin student clubs network. So if you're a student watching this or know a student, and you want to be connected with a group of students learning Bitcoin studying about Bitcoin,

or you have a Bitcoin Club, and you're also kind of looking for funding. We're going to also be with the network once it gets up and running. So that's a new project. Definitely be on the lookout for more information. But yes, thanks so much, Ben, for having me on. That's great. Thank you. And what a great. great initiative. I think, again, having people that are, you know, currently in school, go and start learning about and hosting meetups and creating clubs to learn about Bitcoin is a fantastic thing. So, yeah, that's great. Arish, I'll toss it to you again. Final thoughts and recommendations, anything you might have? Yeah. Just to piggy about it,

off of Ella, I mean, there's a lot of people now, especially coming into the space, I say in the past, like, year or two, as far as, you know, like more college and high school students goes, and we're seeing more, you know, Bitcoin clubs and people who are curious about Bitcoin. I know that that definitely wasn't the case, you know, a few years ago when I started getting into Bitcoin. So I'm glad that's like ever so changing. So yeah, I mean like under generation Bitcoin, we were, you know, going, we were looking at clubs and we were looking at colleges and stuff and, you know, thinking about like writing proposals and like for like independent Bitcoin majors, which Ella actually did to her own school. but instead of dealing with, you know, all the bureaucracy and, like, the timing and everything, we decided to take a step forward and, you know, kind of sync with, like, already existing blockchain and crypto clubs to kind of say, hey, you know, like, you should circle back to Bitcoin. Because a lot of these clubs started on the foundation of Bitcoin.

But as Ella mentioned earlier, Bitcoin is somehow. in some way old tech now, which is totally not the case. So I think going to them and offering, you know, a community and resources where we can be like, hey, like, you know, start teaching about Bitcoin. There are some resources here, some funding.

You know, if your club is reading a cool book that you like about Bitcoin, let's, we can try to arrange to have that guest speaker come to your class and talk to you guys about it, you know, online in person, and whatever the case may be. And you'd be surprised. There's a lot of already existing the blockchain crypto clubs

or clubs that did exist at one point, but they've just kind of been passed down and there's something happening there. So I think extending the footprint, like on campuses and even high schools all throughout the world is a very underserved thing. right now and there's a lot of opportunity in that space for sure. Awesome, awesome.

I love it. I'll toss it one further down to Mick and again, any final thoughts, recommendations you want to toss out there. Go ahead. Yeah, I'll just have two recommendations. One is definitely listen to BTC sessions, very high signal, great guy, great guests. So definitely that did that. And yeah, and then go to Geiser. Go to Geiser.

I'm going to shill it. Support your favorite creators. You know, they are the ones that are the true heroes, you know, that are pushing Bitcoin signal forward. And also, you know, everyone is a creator. It's really about bringing your passions with your talents. And everyone has talents. And there will be a demand. for that intersection between talents and passions

because the world is big and the internet connects us all and there will be a demand for that particular niche. And then when you do, Kaiser could be a good place to start. So yeah, so happy to hear your feedback. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, Metamake 14 or at Geyser.com. fund. Awesome.

Well, guys, I want to say thank you to all of you for taking the time for being here on a Friday evening joining me. It's always the best part of my week getting to hang out with some Bitcoiners and chat about what we're excited about. So again, appreciate all you guys. Are you guys, who's going to be down? Are any of you going to be in L.A. in a couple weeks at all? No?

Yeah, Ella, you will be? Okay, awesome. Ars are you down or no? Not this year. Gladstein will be there, though. Okay, cool. Awesome. Well.

Shouldn't you be in school? I know, I am. I know, I know. I know. Thank goodness I have friends in some classes to help. But yes, Bitcoin's important. Just wondering if you were actually in university. I'm just kidding.

That's all part of learning. conferences are so critical. Ever since Bitcoin started being a role, like we've always been a bad influence-jugging Elean to like conferences, like she's being natural. She's going to Africa later this year. So I think it's definitely great. But yeah, thank you again, Ben, for having us.

Yeah, no worries. Yeah, thanks for being here. and I'm sure I will see all of you before long at some event if it's not L.A. So thank you guys very much. Have a great weekend. You too. Bye. See you guys.

Awesome. And everybody watching, thank you so much for being here. What a blast. What a great group of people. Yeah, we're going to be seeing each other. I was saying L.A. Pacific Bitcoins just around the corner. Man, that's coming up quick. What is it?

But two weeks today, it'll be the second day of Pacific Bitcoin. Holy. That's, yeah, that's coming fast. Anyways, that's going to be blast. I'm very excited for that. So, yeah, anybody unfamiliar that's in L.A. It was a really good event last year. I really enjoyed it.

And, yeah, it was, what was? It was in the midst of the FTX collapse. And that was an interesting framing as we were there. And yeah, what a great time. But high signal, lots of great speakers. So yeah, if you're around, make sure you say hi, well, you're down there. If you still need tickets, I believe you can use code sessions on PacificBitcoin.com. And that'll get you like 21% off.

So yeah, anyways. Also, if you're going to be down, I'm doing my workshops. my I've got two workshops going on. I'm doing my tap signer workshop, which is we're going to be learning about a couple different things here. So effectively, what you'll be able to do is you'll learn how to use Nunchuk wallet, a mobile. You'll learn how to set up and use a tap signer.

And then you'll learn how to use multiple tap signers to create a multi-sig wallet. So I'm going to be doing that on the Saturday morning after Pacific Bitcoin. And then in the afternoon, I'm going to be running my cold card deep dive. So that's everything like setting up a cold card, using it, doing transactions, doing air gap transactions, wiping the entire device, and then also restoring it, and then also diving into some of the advanced features. That's a beast of a workshop. It's like four hours long. So you'll walk out of there knowing a ton about the cold card.

Either way, both of them are happening on October. seventh the Saturday in the morning and the afternoon. And last time I did my workshops in in Miami, I just did the one, but that one totally sold out. So if you want to come, get in before they're gone. I think there's there's six left for the multi-sig one and there's five left for the cold cards. So coming quick.

Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap it up there and I'm going to say thank you so much for being here. Of course, please do like, subscribe, share all those things. super important. They really do help the show. You can also hit up the previously mentioned sponsors. They're all down in the show notes. And then if you really liked what you saw, you can always hit up my website, btccessions.ca.ca. There's tons of free information there,

ways to book me for one-on-one sessions, all the workshop information. And also, if you want to drop a tip, my Geyser Fund pages there, which we got to talk about a little bit today. Anyways, guys, I'll wrap that there. And I'll just say thank you so much for being here. Have a great weekend. And I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This was your daily session.