BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Bitcoin Bens Council Meeting ep349

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

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Yo, what's going on, everybody? How have you been? Very excited to have everybody here today. We've got... This is going to go so poorly. We've got an assembly of fine, benevolent gentlemen that are ready to come on the show. It's been sad for me the past couple weeks. I've been traveling.

I'm not been able to actually have a live... why are we bullish? It really got me bent out of shape. So we're going to get rolling here. And I think you guys are going to get a lot of benefit from this one. So I can't wait. We've got a solid group of gentlemen. Let's get this thing rolling.

Of course, this is live. Anything could happen. So I defer to my pal Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Fuck it. Do it live.

I can, I'll write it. And we'll do it. live. The fucking thing sucks. Yeah. If you haven't already, like, subscribe, share, all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the Ben Sessions.

This is your daily Ben. What the fuck am I doing? Oh, God. Tuddle the Bitcoin. All right, before we bring in everybody, let's take a look at where we are in the market. Right now, this is, if I can get it up here, this is, This is timechain calendar.com. We're sitting at $30,866 per coin.

A single U.S. dollar will pick you up. 3,240 sats. In terms of fees, I mean, given that we've had a little price pump, really not that bad. Even with the MMPL backed up by like almost 1.1 gigs, we're sitting at around 23 sats per bite next block, even if you're waiting a bit, still around the same range. It is purging anything below around eight and a half sats. per byte. In terms of Bitcoin mine,

92.43% of all Bitcoin have been mined us, 19.41 million of them. And then before we bring in everybody, shout it to sponsor the show, hoddle, hoddle.com. If you're stacking SaaS and you've got a few priorities in mind, peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custody, no K-YC.

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Everything there. If you're looking to get beyond just single-sig and you're looking to dive into perhaps multi-sig, Nunchuk have, I mean, first of all, Nunchuk Wallet by itself is awesome, but they have the Honeybadger assisted multi-sig. And basically, they will hold a key as like your signer of last resort. You hold three other keys yourself. Super easy to set up on mobile. So things like the tap sign of the cold card and a ton of other hardware options work for it. Again, really simple to use. It has baked in inheritance planning so you can make sure your stats get to your next of kin without having to worry. And one of the best parts about it, also non-KYC. So unlike other options on the market where you have to provide all

your personal information. This actually doesn't require personal information for you to sign up and make it work for you. So love the Nunchuk guys. They're killing it. Check them out nunchuk.io. And last one here, shout it to Start 9, your sovereign computing solution. I've recently consolidated. I had five nodes running because, you know, make tutorials.

And so I had a ton of stuff going. I've consolidated down to a single option. I'm now just running my Start OS or I guess my Start 9. Start 9, Server 1, as it is now called. But they just dropped a whole bunch of different options out there. Server Lite, Server 1, Server Pro, or Server Pier. Anyways, basically you've got your entry level all the way up to your Pro Star, host your whole life on the thing.

And it's pretty badass, I got to say. They are really knocking out of the park. They've got a ton of updates coming down the pike. And yeah, you can host everything here. Bitcoin Core, Lightning Node, Mempool. dot space join market you host data like files photos passwords nostrilis nostrilis nostrilions you can kind of do it all so check them out they're killing it um and yeah start nine dot com anyways i'm gonna stop renting i need to get uh my my how would i how am i going to pun brethren

i'll let these guys i'll let these guys decide anyways we're going to welcome to the show Ben and Ben and Ben and And last but not least Ben Ben, Ben's welcome. How are you guys? Doing good. Good, thank you. Great, man.

Awesome. Well, Ben, it's good to see you all. Let's maybe do a quick round of intros to further specify what kind of Ben you are and what you do in your Ben time. So maybe I'll toss it to DeWall first. Dude, do you want to give yourself a quick intro? Who are you? What do you do?

Sure thing. Yeah. So I'm Ben, like everyone else. Bitcoins since 2010. I've been working in the space since 2017. Also on zero since 2017, that is zero feet. So probably best known at the moment, though, as the father of Sam, the BTC kid. Awesome girl who was just on stage in Prague recently. So, yeah, check her out on Twitter if you're not following her. already, you probably should. A proud father moment.

I've got to say, you know, she got up in front of a lot. I mean, Prague was a large conference and she killed it. And that's awesome. I heard, you know, a lot of people were saying pretty great things. So hats off to young bitcoinsers making strides. So kudos. Kudos to you for excellent dadding. No worries.

Let's toss it down the line to Ben Ganyan. Dude, can you give yourself a little intro? Yeah, happy to. I'm Ben Ganyan. I'm also known as Hastro override. I'm the chief mining officer over at Bid Farms, a publicly traded Bitcoin Mining Company. I've been mining full-time since 2015.

And I've built Bitcoin mines in Taiwan, mainland, China, the U.S., Canada, Paraguay, and Argentina. Damn, dude. You've been busy. And you've spent a little bit of time in my neck of the woods. you've been kind of in and out of Calgary here and there. I don't know where in the world you are now. You don't need to disclose it if you don't want,

but I'm sure we will be crossing paths at some point. So, yeah. I'm actually, I'm in Costa Rica just a couple hours north of Bitcoin jungle. Ooh, that sounds much more attractive than being in Calgary. It's a bit nicer than Canada. Yes. Yes, I can attest to that. But yeah, awesome.

All right, let's toss it over to Kiwi. Dude, give yourself a little intro. I am Ben, first and foremost. Been in Bitcoin since about 2017, working with Amber App. We're a few hats over there. Some of the main benefits is the customer support, helping people with self-custody, nodes, wallets, minors, the rest of it. And recently became a junior dev as well. Damn, that's awesome.

That does sound like there's a lot of benefits over there. So, who does? Awesome. And we'll toss it down the line one last time to Schmidt, aka Bueno. Yeah. Most people call me Schmidt. I was trying to play on the bend and figure Bueno. I've got a few people calling me that.

So I'm in Canada, the East Coast. I was raised in Nova Scotia, but I live in Resada in New Brunswick now. Very much a pleb, about a year and a half. half into Bitcoin still in the learning and that kind of stage. So definitely a little bit of imposter syndrome hearing some of the amazing things that some of these people have already done. But happy to be here. Dude, glad to have you. And it was nice to actually hang out in person at the Canadian Bitcoin conference last week. I had a good time. Did you enjoy it?

I booked that ticket without realizing it was Father's Day. And my first, father might be a bigger bitcoiner than I am. And so it was pretty serendipitous. And we had just about the best father's day you could have had. Yeah. We got out. We had a good steak dinner with a bunch of us. And yeah, it was a good time.

So I'm glad to see you there. Awesome. All right. Well, Ben's, let's kind of get the ball rolling here. I mean, first of all, I have to, I have to already be giving a shout out to the chat. that. Christopher from Amboss is in there, just like making sure that he makes note of every single pun is noted.

And then what are the benefits? Ben's yellow wants to be a part of this. He's very, very, uh, just for saying, Moybin, Ben nonstop. Ben, there's another Ben in the chat too,

Ben Allen. awesome. So very excited for this gathering. And maybe we might even have some other Benz join us later. But we are Legion. We're here. We're bullish. And so the theme of the show for why are we bullish, really simple. We go by the three hours. Number one, somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. Anything that's top of mind that you're excited about in and around Bitcoin doesn't have to be price. In fact, it seldom is in a lot of these shows. After somebody drops a reason why they're bullish. Number two, we're all going to riff on that reason, comments, questions, whatever rabbit hole we decided to go down. And then three, finally, we're going to rotate until

everybody gets a turn. So reason, riff, rotate, we're off to the races. I am going to get us started. And so just for context, I was just traveling. I hit up three conferences in a two-week period. I went to Prague. BTC Prague was amazing. I went to Oslo for the Oslo Freedom Forum put on by, I mean, the financial freedom track put on by Alex Gladstein. And then I was in Toronto for the Canadian Bitcoin Conference. All of them were fantastic. It was awesome seeing everybody. It really kind of like invigorated me to get, pumping out content and tutorials and all that kind of stuff. But I wanted to focus in on some of my experiences with the Oslo Freedom Forum. And I wanted to focus in on some of my experiences with the Oslo Freedom Forum.

I guess the spillover from Prague to the Oslo Freedom Forum. And so one of the more impactful things that I kind of experienced between those two things was I had the honor of doing a keynote in Prague. And the keynote talk was about the Canadian trucker protest, namely what happened, how we set things up in haste, where we basically fucked up. and then what tools are available to us now to correct those missteps so that when it's actually an instance of lives being on the line, how do we correct so that 100% of funds get where they need to go and it's done relatively privately and safely?

And so I basically did kind of a walkthrough of all of that onstage in Prague. And there were a few really great people there that I had met previously at the Azo Freedom Forum that were in Prague. One of them, her name is Luda. She's wonderful. She does a lot of work on human rights violations in post-Soviet states. And she actually used, it was the Canadian trucker protest that clued her into, oh, wow, Bitcoin can actually work when the legacy financial system fails me. And she was trying to get protective equipment just for civilians into Ukraine as the as things were kind of kicking off there. And she found that just like getting protective vests and like helmets so that people didn't, you know, debris or get shot or whatever.

Just getting that type of stuff into the country was going to take weeks. But then she looked at the trucker protest. She's like, maybe Bitcoin will work. She got everything in on day two of the conflict. So it was like it probably saved a lot. of lives just by utilizing Bitcoin. And so in talking about it in Prague and saying like, here's what we did. This is kind of where things were done poorly.

This is how I wish it would have been done and correcting for that. I had a lot of human rights activists approaching me in Oslo saying this is actually perhaps a solution to some of our problems. And I also had people that were already utilizing Bitcoin as a a way to protest and adversarial or fundraise and protest in adversarial environments, realizing that their setups were not up to snuff and that they might want to make adjustments and shift from a singular Bitcoin address to solutions like BTC pay server and coin join and other option and multi-sig and things like that.

And so I think we're on the cusp of people. kind of one, waking up to the fact that Bitcoin can step in when, you know, this top-down financial system fails them. And two, that there are lots of tools to even further improve on just like using Bitcoin willy-nilly, which is like kind of the typical, oh, we'll just get a Bitcoin address. You can improve upon that quite a bit by just familiarizing yourselves with the tools that are available today. And three, it's all going to get a lot easier to be secure and secure and private with Bitcoin as time goes on.

The tools are going to continue to get better. So that's kind of why I'm bullish, why I'm excited. And I'm again, what Gladyssin has done with his financial freedom track at the Oslo Freedom Forum is impressive. And it's still, I like it because the event itself is not a Bitcoin event at all. Bitcoin is just there because it's a useful tool to be used in the background. And not everyone there gets it. Some people there oppose it.

But I think over time, it'll be harder and harder to ignore. And it'll become more and more clear why it's important. And I think it's important that Bitcoiners inject themselves into spaces where we understand that can be helpful and just fight that uphill battle of getting people to realize what this thing is capable of. So anyways, that's where I'm at. I'm going to open it up to you guys, comments, questions, wherever you want to take it. Go ahead. Well, I was just curious what is some of the pushback that you have heard when you're at those events. Like you said, not everybody's four. So I'm just kind of curious what are the concerns? Yeah. So the concerns stands.

from almost kind of like a Western perspective of like, well, bad people will use it as well, right? And there's not a realization of the tradeoffs made with the top down system. If you live in a place where the government is relatively sensible and is not going to just like trample on human rights and mass and you have a top down financial system, then society more or less works relatively well, and then they can also clamp down on the little guys that are doing bad things, right, quote unquote, bad things, however they define it. But in the inverse, when you're dealing with a tyrannical government, if you still have that top down financial system, that means that all the little guys that are pushing back against that also can be

stamped out. And so I think it's more so, because, not even a question of if you want this to be the reality. It just is the reality now. Bitcoin exists and the world has to grapple with it. I think it's them parsing through the reality of it's a level it's a level playing field for all now. And also a lack of recognition of, you know, in a top down situation, a bad government always always has access to financial to us because they get to control the financial rails in that in that environment. And so everybody on the lower ends of that is at a disadvantage. So yeah, I think it's it.

I even had a conversation with somebody saying like, well, we see a lot of ground up stuff. But if you could do top down and then just prevent the bad people, that's, that's what we're in right now. That's the system. And so if you want to benefit the people that are like the most disenfranchised, that need those tools, then it's basically a level playing field or nothing at all. So, yeah, those are the pushbacks. I'd be interested in, you know,

how much do the people pushing back against it actually understand about it? So, you know, like, do they have a lot of misconceptions, or do they actually understand it pretty well, but still, you know, pushback? They don't understand it at all. Like, there's very little. And it's not like most of the stuff I've been, encountered isn't isn't too much of a pushback

because it's being they're seeing the benefits for some of the speakers there that come from areas where they know that the government is bad and you know Roya Mabub who lives in Afghanistan who basically was running the women's robotics team

no women were allowed bank accounts and she couldn't figure out how to pay the women that were working for her and she started using Bitcoin in like 2014 or something like that. And then the Afghani government was like, okay, well, so obviously you need to die. And like basically threatened her life.

But it was a mechanism through which she could have financial freedom in a system that basically said women are not allowed to transact without the permission of a man. And so they hear these stories. And so they're like, okay, I get it. I get how that's useful. But they have yet to grapple with how that's possible. and they have yet to grapple with the fact that there's also like an ongoing kind of ESG

narrative that is kind of conflicting with that like oh divest from things that enrich people that you don't like but also having a financial freedom for them like a financial freedom track with Bitcoin if you divest from that because a bad person can use it it means that you lose all the benefits of financial freedom for the little guy. I think there's just a lot of people need to really change the way they think about all of this stuff. And it's going to take time. That's fine. It is what it is.

It sounds like permissionless sort of censorship resistance with number go up. It just means that nation states and institutions and stuff will have to bend to our will. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, pretty much. It's like as I was saying, there's, it's not a question of if people want this. It's a question of, you know, how are you going to deal with it? Because it's here.

It exists. And I mean, you can make it onerous or you can make it a bit of a pain in the ass to access it initially. But once people are in the Bitcoin ecosystem and utilizing it and kind of forming perhaps circular economies and actually transacting with it, like once you're in that ecosystem, you can't stop it. from the outside, like you're already there. You can just slow people from getting access to it is kind of my read on it. I know. Ben Gagnon, do you have any thoughts on, I mean, just Bitcoin in general as a tool for the little guy to use? Yeah.

You know, obviously that's a big part of what is for you. And I think it's interesting that we talk about in a totalitarian government, what's going to happen. And we had a situation here in Canada where we had a totalitarian government come and step down and say, hey, you can't do this and freeze bank accounts because they're donating to protesters. And then, you know, when people started donating in Bitcoin, the day after the Canadian government dusted off a four-year-old piece of legislation that had been on the shelves in 2018 and threw it at our industry. And so they said, you know, anything that they could do to throw at Bitcoin, they're going to do. they're going to do it. And they proved their stripes, you know, during the Ontario trucker protests very clearly, you know, this is a pretty, you know, in the grand scheme of things, a trucker protest is a very inconsequential, you know, event for a major government in the world.

And this is how they responded to it. How are they going to respond to something when it actually is threatening to the government? You know, they're going to come down even harder. And what we've seen in the last about a year and a half because we put together a coalition of basically every single Canadian Bitcoin miners, except like one or two, who are mostly focusing on the U.S. now. We all came together. We engaged with government and said, you know, look, you guys have no idea what you're, what you're doing.

You've never consulted with us. You've never consulted with industry. Do you understand what the impacts of this are going to be? And there's like, oh, yeah, you know, we used to work for Google. we understand Bitcoin, we understand mining, we understand the tech. And you have these conversations for weeks and months, and you know, you'll get into these hour-long sessions. And, you know, five minutes before you're up, there's say, actually, you know, do you

have a photo of a Bitcoin mine? Because, you know, we haven't actually seen one before. And so, you know, this is the kind of level of sophistication that we're dealing with here with politicians and bureaucrats and the people are fighting against us. You know, obviously they want to cramp down on it. I think it's really easy to be really comfortable in the West. But that I think has been changing over the last couple of years, especially with COVID, really accelerated that move where people realize that, you know,

hey, things are not, you know, as rosy as they once were. Things are not as comfortable as it once were. We need to start opening our eyes because, you know, this train is coming. But the more we push with government and the more we push with politicians and regulators and bureaucrats, the more we're very clear that they just have zero understanding of the underlying technology or the industry or what's actually happening. We have every good data point on our side, like every single good data point on our side. When it comes to like the only thing that you can say against Bitcoin, I think there's two. And there's the, okay, criminals use it, which I think we all know is a pretty nonsensical argument.

I mean, every single U.S. dollar is covered in cocaine. You know, you can't say that about every Bitcoin. You know, what are criminals going to use to transfer, you know, huge amounts of cash? They use the $500 euro dollar bill because it's the most concentrated form of physical cash that you can have. That's what they use. They don't use Bitcoin very often. Bitcoin is for very minor things. And then the second thing is on the ESG and the environmental.

And it's very clear that they have zero understanding there. but people are really starting to get wise. I even had a podcast with Dig Economist like two weeks ago. And that made me bullish because I've been wanting to debate Dig Economist for years. And I got him to admit that his model is broken. And it's especially broken when the price is going up in a very, very rapid environment. And that's when people care, right? Nobody looks at, hey, what is the environmental impact when Bitcoin down at 16K?

everybody is saying, hey, we're at an all-toom high. What is Bitcoin's environmental impact now? How much energy are we consuming? And that's when these sort of things start breaking down. We got them to admit that. So that alone, getting Dig Economist to admit that his model breaks down in bullish environments, that makes me bullish right there because that is behind every single piece of environmental fud, every single one of them sites, Dig Economist, everyone.

That's amazing. I was listening to that actually on the plane. And, yeah, again, to kind of hear just circular arguments. And he did, I don't know, I felt, I felt like you were very concise in your criticism of his model and pointing out all of the inaccuracies around various things. It's funny, though, because I think I saw something on Twitter today of him doubling down on his per transaction. everything like it's like it's like it went in one ear and out the other but i mean i he's got one stick you know and um he's got a very you know focused audience this is all they want to care about he's giving them exactly what they want to hear right but uh to get him to admit out of his own

mouth that his model is faulty and it breaks down especially when people most care about it that's a major major win for me a major major win i think for for Bitcoin miners everywhere because the energy thing is just nonsensical. That's that's fantastic. I love that. Yeah, I mean, again, the ESG thing, it's an interesting, I mean, I think a lot of people don't think through, especially in regards to Bitcoin mining, they don't look at, I mean, they don't look at any of the data, really.

They just look at the quick sound bites from Digiconomists and don't even question. and how those conclusions will come to. But nonetheless, I'm going to, so what I'm going to do here, I'm going to round out, you know, I just wanted to quickly touch on what I was excited about, Oslo and all that stuff. I'm going to finish that up here.

We'll cut that, and I'm going to do a little rotation. I'm going to actually toss it over to, let's start with Bend a Wall. And I'm going to cue you up. Simple question. Why are you bullish? Absolutely. So I think what's making me bullish recently is,

what I'm seeing with all of the kids getting into Bitcoin. So, you know, you look at what was, you know, you go to a conference a couple of years back. And occasionally there'd be some, you know, some adult who'd brought their kids along. But their kids were basically just kind of playing, ignoring what's going on. Just this last maybe six months to a year, I'm seeing all of these kids actually talking about Bitcoin. So, you know, at BTC Prague, there was the generation Bitcoin guys. So a bunch of late teens talking about, you know, how do we get more Bitcoin into schools? How do we get more Bitcoin, you know, into colleges, universities, that kind of thing.

So, yeah, there's that side of things. Then, you know, the younger group, so, you know, my daughter Sam was hanging out with Sam Prince and Sam Day. So we had like three Sams, which is a bit concerning for us Bitcoin Ben's. It looks like there might be some Bitcoin Sam's coming up in the next generation. But, yeah, those three and a couple of others, you know, they were helping to sell these NFC tags to people there and taking payment in Bitcoin, writing the NFC tags for people. So, you know, understanding what's going on.

And, you know, that's what's making me really bullish is just seeing, you know, the next generation actually knowing what's happening. Because, you know, again, I'm going to have to say my daughter said it best on stage. You know, she got up there and she said, do you want the next generation to be bitcoins or do you want them to not be bitcoiners? you know that's that's worth thinking about it it's awesome to actually those kids were killing it with their so anybody that wasn't there they basically had these little pins that you could buy and you could encode your noster n-pub to it and so then to add somebody you just go up you tap your

phone and it would auto open up whatever nostir client you're running and go directly to their profile so you could follow them and they were charging stats for them and it was like the best product you could buy. Like it was, they must have raked in a ton of sats. I actually had one at home. I forgot to bring it. So yeah,

anyways, what a great idea. What an awesome thing to, to put out there. And again, I'm super bullish on the next generation of Bitcoiners. All of them now, like any kid,

any kid born after 2009 has never known a world where Bitcoin didn't exist, right? Like, it's just been a fact. of life. There's no, there's no hurdle to get over to be like, well, this is a different money from the money that I grew up with. No, this is, it's been parallel the whole time. And furthermore, you've got one set of infrastructure that's failing and one set of infrastructure that's being, becoming more strong, easier to use, and is becoming more popular. They're basically seeing

the growth of one form of money and the failure of another in their adolescence. That's bullish as hell. So I don't know, I'll open up to everybody else. But yeah, a great, a great topic, Ben. I don't know if you want to add anything else before you pass it to everybody. I'd just say, yeah, you know, that whole thing about you're growing up with one form of money versus the other, something I've noticed, especially with my kids. So, you know, I've got two. I've got Sam and also her younger brother. And with them, one of the things I really love is when you teach an adult about Bitcoin, you have to help them unlearn the current process. You know, you say, okay, in Bitcoin, it works like this, unlike what you're used to,

you know, don't think about banks and, you know, it's paired to pair. So you're teaching these things with kids, you don't have to do that. You can just teach them how it works without having to try and, you know, break this false, break this understanding of how Fiat works. And that's actually, I find, you know, a really, really great way. And, you know, they learn it far easier than anyone knows how the Fiat system works because Fiat's this giant, complex mess. 100% well other guys want to jump in here i'm glad to hear that because uh you know one of the things that i notice every time i i meet bitcoiners or go to a conference is you know we are some of the most motivated passionate intelligent you know people around and you don't see that anywhere else like

like you literally don't see the passion and intelligence and really the drive of people uh the conviction of people in any other industry you don't see it in accounting you don't see it in legal You don't see it in finance. You don't see it anywhere else, but you see it in Bitcoin. So we're attracting some of the brightest minds. And hopefully we're attracting some of the brightest kids too. And I really look forward to becoming a Bitcoin boomer. You know, like let's bring on this new generation.

Let's move me aside. You know, let them take over. It's very, very bullish. Awesome. Any other gents want to dive in? Any thoughts? Yeah, I've got a cousin, Kyle. He's the eldest in the wildest in the wildest in the wildest.

Eliza Suther Schmidt. And he's bred a very smart kid, my nephew Cameron. And I was nipping at him a little bit about Bitcoin. And it's going to go to zero because he's worried about his shoe sneaker collection. And he knows the price of everything. He knows the price of everything. And then so I got him to clean my golf shoes. And so you don't need to pay me.

But I gave him $10 versus Satoshi's. And a week later, he was telling me about the money printer. You know, and so to DeWall's comment there, they don't have to unlearn this. Like, we don't get taught about the Fiat system. We just all of a sudden lit it. And it's usually kind of something that you don't yet really understand or know what's going on. But we do know that we're on this hamster wheel. And you're wondering how.

how you get off. And so, you know, just to the comments of the kids, they don't have to learn this mess. They can go straight to the to the facts, follow the math, and they can understand Bitcoin. He's, he, so I got him on shake pay. So I hooked him up on shake pay. And now when he goes to school, he gets all of his friends to give him money. And he goes and buys the lunch. And he collects the Satoshi. So nice. Kids already running a racket. Awesome. Yeah. Love it. Yeah, it's very interesting that, that again, like the struggle of trying to get somebody to even recognize that the existing system is not the only way to do things, right?

Like that's, that's an initial struggle. Like, they're like, well, no, this is how it works. This is how it has to be. There has to be 2% inflation. Otherwise, the economy would implode. That's just how it works. It's how it's worked for, you know, my entire life I don't care about before my lifetime. Yeah, people don't realize that this is the experiment.

Kiwi, what do you think? Well, you know, without 2% inflation, no one would have chairs or roads. So there's that to consider. I think it's very benign work that you gentlemen are doing for the kids. You know, Greg Foss would be happy. I love it. I love it. Yeah, I mean, we've already got the next generation of Bitcoiners.

To cap off bullish on Bitcoin kids, a lot of you guys are familiar with our good friend, Steve Barber. He has been adjacent. He's been supportive. And those that know, no, his son is named Ben. And if that doesn't make you bullish, I don't know what does. So hats off to Mr. Barber. He's got an honorary seat on the board until his son comes of age. So, you know, he gets to represent his son through adolescence with the high counsel.

So awesome. Now, wait, does yellow have something to say here? Aren't you concerned by the fact that if 10 times the users are on board, a majority of them, boomers using Bitcoin centralized and clean by changing how the majority use it? they change Bitcoin itself. Hmm. Thoughts. So like if most people are just using custodial Bitcoin, does that inherently change Bitcoin itself?

I'm inclined to say that the economic reality of custodians and the nature of of the ability to settle quickly and the fact that. that most Bitcoin has already been mined. And so like these institutions will be trying to like capture, you know, a non-majority of coins because a lot of them will just never end up at institutions. I think it doesn't inherently. I think, yeah, there's, there's going to be risk to people using those systems because not your keys, not your coins. But yeah, I mean, in the interim, I, yeah, sure, there's going to be issues with stuff like that.

going to be re-hypothecation, there's going to be all of that. But I think that there's also going to be huge missteps. And at some point, a reckoning comes to any institution that dares to offer up IOUs that aren't one-to-one with Bitcoin. So, I don't know. Thoughts, gentlemen? I think that everyone for us gets those touch points through convenience, right? A lot of people will be like, hey, use wallet a Satoshi or what have you, some sort of

centralized or custodial model. But that's just to entice them and meet them at their map of the world. It has to be relatively easy initially so that they can play with it and see the benefits of it. And then that takes them down their own little hero's journey of realizing that not your keys, not your coins. If it's on someone else's platform, then it's just an IOU that you don't really own it. So I don't see it as a big threat. It is been entertaining, though. Nice.

Yeah, no, I'd second that. I mean, basically, I think there's different kinds of platforms that onboard people in different ways at the moment. And, you know, some of them do a better job of pushing people towards self-custody than others. You know, especially a lot of these sort of gambling casino type exchanges with all of the, you know, chipcoins and so on. It's just, you know, those don't, those don't onboard people to Bitcoin. They onboard people to gambling with Bitcoin being one of the things that there's, being gambled with, but not really to Bitcoin itself. But something like Wallets of Satoshi, it's equally as custodial as a casino, but it's a very

different kind of thing because it's letting people, you know, receive and spend Bitcoin directly, easily and so on. So that's when people actually then start investigating and saying, oh, you know, this isn't my Bitcoin. Okay, I need to actually figure out, you know, how do I make it my Bitcoin? How do I actually get things off? You know, of course, and because it's a Lightning Wallet, it'll interact nicely with, an actual self-custody system.

So I think there's nothing wrong with custodial systems inherently. It's more there's something wrong with the wrong types of custodial systems. Yeah, I think a lot of it is still just the Fiat brain applying their thought process to what Bitcoin is and not being able to understand that on the network, like the ledger, the network itself equalizes all participants. And so not being able to understand that there will, you know, obviously there will be banking in the future, but you do not need to have a custodial, somebody in custodialship of your Bitcoin. So again, and I'm not George Gammon, the rebel capitalist, he talks about the re-hypublication and how Bitcoiners don't understand that. I just don't think it's connecting to him that, like, the protocol level disregards this paper of Bitcoin.

if it's going to be a fork. And so it isn't Bitcoin, and a lot of people are going to just learn that lesson. Bitcoin's a total free market. Like, you know, different solutions apply to different people. You know, the great thing is that it's all voluntary, right? And, you know, well, one transaction may make sense for base chain. One transaction might make sense on Lightning Network. For other transactions, people will want to use custodians. And, you know, for, I know with our company, we're publicly traded, we're audited by Big Four, you know, they, the auditors want us to use as a custodian. And now, you know, that is maybe not, does have certain counterparty risk, of course, when you're using a custodian. But if you don't have that intermediary stepping stone,

there's no way for larger institutions to adopt it. Like if it wasn't for custodians, micro strategy wouldn't be allowed to buy Bitcoin, right? And so, you know, we have to understand that It's not like just because there are custodians out there that, you know, manage Bitcoin. It doesn't mean that you have to put your Bitcoin with them, right? It's just an option for some people for them to use it. And, you know, it is going to bring greater adoption. Like it already has. Sorry, me a button.

Anyways, I was also going to say to, sure, there's a short term or midterm kind of risk of lots of people, you know, piling into like a BlackRock ETF and, you know, a bunch of Bitcoin is store there. But like the Bitcoin, the true Bitcoin user person that is self-custying that, you know, Yellowhead commented like, you know, Bitcoin price goes up from that, but at what cost? True. But at the same time, the individuals that actually decide that Bitcoin is better money and say, I'd like to earn Bitcoin. and I'd like to, you know, or the merchants that say, I don't want to accept anything other than Bitcoin because I recognize that my money is trash and it's being devalued.

Those people aren't really affected necessarily by the ETF because they're receiving Bitcoin directly or you're living on Bitcoin or you've forged relationships where you're transacting in Bitcoin. And the people that are utilizing the ETF and say, well, what if I want to use this and they realize like it's a black hole? Well, they're going to step out and start transacting in the Bitcoin economy, not the IOU economy, I suppose. So it'll probably take some time to recognize that. But I mean, many people, there's a good base of people that do get that and that will be able to communicate that well. And the rest will come to economic reality in due time.

I don't think that these ETFs and stuff will go away until it's kind of clear that the money is broken and that's a common narrative. And they'll probably still exist for some time after that. But I think that you just get people utilizing Bitcoin in different ways. You get people that are using like an investment vehicle. And then you get people that actually go on a Bitcoin standard. And in terms of freedom will go up, it doesn't affect me if somebody wants to play. fiat games with investment vehicles. Another way to look at it is, you know, if BlackRock and, you know, they've got their

ETF or in the fine print, they can say they can give you any forked version or something. It's going to leave a trail of bodies wrecked, but Bitcoin is anti-fragile or to only highlight the benefit of not your keys, not your coins further. And at the same time, while they're issuing paper I use to all the institutions, all the Klebs that have already front run them for years will continue to buy up that Bitcoin and actually self-custody it. So plebs over institutions, everything as usual. Agreed. Agreed. All right. We're going to do a rotation. Ben, I don't know if when you were talking about, shit, Ganyon. I don't know if when you were talking about the, when you went on a little

rant earlier if you were kind of diving into like the dig economist stuff if you were already diving into your reason or not or did you have another thing that you wanted to touch on i mean i think it's just very bullish for the for the mining space it's pretty interesting time you know when we're so close to having that actually things are trending up quite well you know we've got hash rate has grown 48% this year it only went up about 46% last year so we've already seen six months more growth than we saw in the previous 12 months. And, you know, hash price in terms of revenue per tarahash is still up 25% this year. So even though the network has grown 50%, mining economics are better, part of where prices are still incredibly low, miners are starting to actually organize and put their arguments forward.

We're starting to gather better data. And we're actually countering a lot of the negative press and a lot of the negative opinions about us. And Digiconus is part of this. So, you know, when you look at, at what is the space for Bitcoin security and the market? I mean, things are really bullish right now. We've got good prices. We've got the actual like the Ordinals thing, which proved that there couldn't be a separate, you know, just price discovery layer in terms of transaction fees

that will give miners even better security and more incentive to further secure the network. There are so many good things happening in the mining space right now. But mining's kind of generally seen as I think a little bit boring. And so people don't really pay too much attention to it unless you are full into the weeds like I am. But this is the key that drives everything. Like if we're not hashing, we don't have Bitcoin. And unless the incentives are there for us to continue to secure the network, you know, that does jeopardize the future.

And right now the incentives are incredible. So people are growing incredibly fast. Hasht rate continues to decentralize. and we're starting to see a lot of traction take place, especially in the United States, especially conservative states, where they say, you know, we're pro business, we're pro development, we're pro jobs.

We understand how this integrates with the electric grid and how this actually provides benefit to the electric grid, all of the electrical consumers on that grid. It creates rural job growth. It creates all these different benefits to these communities. This isn't a negative. This is all around, a positive. And, you know, we even are starting to get even Dems now who are starting to

understand that, hey, Bitcoin is not the enemy here. Bitcoin actually provides a lot of the goals and the tools, you know, that we're looking for, right? If you, if your thing is, is emissions and Bitcoin is actually really good for you because this is the only, the only economic incentive in the world to reduce your energy waste and reduce your emissions without a government subsidy. It's the only one. And, you know, getting rid of that economic incentive to reduce your waste is not going to reduce waste. You know, it's going to increase waste. And Dems are starting to understand that. And so it's appealing to them. It's appealing to Republicans and conservatives because of the rural jobs, because of the greater amount of utility growth, because of the greater profitability. like people are starting to understand now.

I think because of what Bitcoin miners have been pushing so hard on is that this is, Bitcoin is not the divisive issue that everyone thinks it is. It is the unifying issue. It is the only unifying issue out there. Like you can't look at any other issue out there and be like, oh, yeah, I can see how these two people will get along. It's like, no, Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin, we are the unifying political issue. It makes me incredibly bullish in terms of what we're going to see. both in Western countries, policies, but also just in terms of the industry and security of the

network. So much investment is pouring into Bitcoin mining right now. I've got a question for you in and around decentralization of mining. So obviously, the China mining ban had a big impact on that because there was a ton of hash in China, which then, you know, kind of filtered out into other jurisdictions. I think at last count, Well, last thing I heard of around 20% of hash is perhaps maybe still within Chinese borders. But we've seen obviously a huge ramp up in hash within the United States. Do you think that there's a possibility that at some point in the future, the United States captures a similar amount of hash rate to what China previously held? Or do you think that ship has sailed and it's going to kind of more filter out to other parts of the globe and become more.

decentralized than it is now. I don't think anybody will ever have a market share like China had in the past. I mean, that was, that was an incredible market share, depending on who you ask or what metrics you're looking at, is like 60 to 80% of the market was within mainland China. And it makes a lot of sense. Like I grew up in China. I was born and raised in Hong Kong. I built mines in Taiwan and mainland China have operated there.

I speak Chinese. Like I understand that. aspect of it. You know, when China banned Bitcoin mining, they didn't really do it to ban Bitcoin mining. They did it because people were using Bitcoin mining to circumvent capital controls. Right. And this is something that people don't understand. Like, oh, it's about the ESG.

No, China really doesn't care. China is the number one producer or the number one builder of basically every energy source. You know, and that's coal, that's not gas, that's nuclear. That's wind, that's solar. Like, it doesn't not matter what your energy source is. China's the largest builder of new electrical generating stations. They're also the largest operator of currently operating electrical generation stations. And the largest consumer of electricity, like far far.

Nobody else even holds a candle to that. So thinking about, like, you know, what's going on there in mainland China, like, this was all about capital controls. And now you start seeing in Hong Kong, we now have positive developments for crypto investment. And this is something that has been a long time coming for Hong Kong. Hong Kong is the gateway for Chinese money. And now that that is opening up in Hong Kong, I think what we're going to start to see is that that is going to represent an actual legal proxy for Chinese to start investing in Bitcoin again. It's not going to be mining in China like the same way it was. That's a completely different business now.

But you're going to start seeing investor dollars coming back and they're going to start flowing into Bitcoin. And in terms of what they're doing with like the hydro miners, like the hydro miners are, I think, largely what's enabling a lot of the Bitcoin mining in China because now it's not being classified as Bitcoin mining. It's being classified as heat generation. That's something that I think is going to have a lot of impacts, both in the U.S., Canada, everywhere else. can electrify your heat and you can recycle these inputs. Like this is an all around win. And I think that's the vast majority of what's going on in China. There's definitely some people who are operating under the table.

But there are very large scale heat projects going on with microBT and Bitmain, residential projects, hotel projects, office buildings. Because this is the legal way to do it. I don't think we'll ever see another country dominate like China did in the past. I think that's very positive as well. You now see like UAE's investing. Russia has major investments in Bitcoin mining. Canada is huge center still.

United States has grown a lot of traction. Paraguay and South America is really starting to open up to people. You even have, you know, smaller countries like El Salvador were developing it. I think the more Bitcoin gets spread out across these countries, I think the better it is for the security of the network. I think also the better it is for the security of the world, you know, that all of this hash rate is actually spread around

and not in one country has too much of an overt influence over the others. So I think this is incredibly positive. Any comments, questions from the other bends? Got everybody awestruck. I did have one other question I was going to ask in and around mining. does it become completely and I guess this might take us down a little bit of a rabbit hole but in terms of home mining

is that a reality in the future? What does it look like? How might people interact with Bitcoin and mining if they can't mine from home? What does that kind of ecosystem look like? does it exist? Oh, absolutely exists. I don't think home mining ever goes away.

I mean, where people get wrong about Bitcoin mining is they think that like, hey, I've got electricity, I'll just plug it in here. It's like, no, that's not really what goes into a mining operation. You need to be very, very selective in terms of your electricity and your inputs. And really, if you look at like, let's say a normal distribution curve of electricity, you don't want to be mining here in the dead center you want to be mining here on these like tail ends where you're monetizing some level of inefficiency and on the low end where the power is really cheap obviously that that makes it direct sense but even on the high end where the electricity is

really expensive that's what incentivizes people to say hey why don't i use bitcoin mining to generate my heat now like why don't i use a bitcoin miner to heat my hot tub because i'm paying 16 cents you know for the electricity, even if it's not profitable, at least I'm getting something back. Right. And you can plug in an S9 and you can generate that heat. It's not profitable, but it's cheaper than just generating the heat already. Right. So this is a way that's not going to go away. I think especially, you know, with with like things like S-9s and the different kind of firmware, if you're just using it for heating purposes, like you can buy an S-9 as a heater for less than you can buy an actual heater and it generates a revenue and it gives you KYC stats and

you know like why would you not do that? I think it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. I don't think it goes away. But you're not going to see you're not going to see home miners competing with like a bit farms, you know, in terms of scale or cost. But you are going to see Bitcoin mining being used to monetize this kind of tail ends of people's economic scenarios where they're trying to recycle their energy inputs. They're trying to leverage what they already have to get a greater return or a greater yield. And, you know, the Bitcoin going into heat thing is huge. Like, we just have that thing that blow up on Twitter and TikTok the other day of that spa in New York who was using Bitcoin mining to heat this spa in New York and people are freaking out about it. But, you know, do they have a better

solution? Is their solution to just power the spa with the hot air that they spew on Twitter? I mean, you know, Bitcoin mining is a far better solution than anything else that they have. We're really starting to see that roll out. People are going to do really, really cool and interesting things with it. And I think the Bitcoin kids are going to figure out even more creative ways to integrate Bitcoin mining into their homes and into their lives. Yeah, I can attest to the home heater. I have a wife-approved space heater in our living room now built from an S-9. and I just got like I I think all in buying an S9 and getting the fans to swap out so that they're quieter and then like a nice 3D printed case I think I you know maybe like 250 bucks or something put it all together plug it in I get probably I don't know but obviously I'm not running it in the summer I don't need to but as soon as it gets cold again I'll just plug that in you know not have to use the

space heater that I would normally be using. And it pays me back a little bit each month. I don't know, 10, 20 bucks, something like that. It kind of varies. But yeah. Are you solo mining on that? No, I'm not. Maybe I've been lucky solo miners over the last two years.

There's been like three or four lucky solo miners who found blocks on hash rate. They should have never found it. And maybe that's, I don't know, I've got a couple of conspiracy theories on that. But hey, I'd rather plug in an S9 in solo mine than buy a lottery ticket. Yeah. I mean, that's what it is. It's just like a forever lottery ticket, right? You just plug it in.

You're already paying for the heat anyways, and you might hit the jackpot. Exactly. Why not? Why not? Your space heater might end up paying you a few hundred grand or something. Yeah, I think it's great. Have any of you other Benz tried any? I mean, the S9 heater for me was like my first foray into mining.

I do have an M30 plus and a black box outside. I got to get my, I got to get my breaker. kind of done to be able to handle that and I probably will use it to heat a garage or a you know maybe extend the seasons in like a greenhouse or something we'll see batting around ideas any of my wife's super interested in it have any of the other bends at all dabbled in mining are you kind of not yet a CPU mined in 2010 but that's a bit different um no with uh with current mining um Now, I've been actually looking into next year. We're planning on moving house, and when we do, I'd really like to actually set up a proper water heating system.

So get, you know, all of the water heating for the house done with mining. That's kind of the plan, but, you know, it obviously depends on where we move and how much control I've got over that sort of thing. But that's the plan. And you can shower in sets. Yeah, exactly. That's the best. Chesterver here saying the only thing hotter than a minor exhaust is Ben Ganyan's take. Makes. Amazing. And then Yellow was saying there's a rumor a while back about Tesla incorporating a miner in their wall batteries to balance out electricity usage and battery health and their solar roof. We've got to see usage like, are we going to see usage like that in the future? I don't know. What do you think?

I don't know. I'm pretty bearish on Doge mining, so probably not. I did the same as you been. I had an S-9 and then an M-30S, heating the garage and stuff. I did one of the DIY black boxes, which was cool. Nice. Oh, that takes skill. I'm not much of a carpenter myself to build my own black box. I only deal with imaginary intangible things.

Not so good with the thing. I actually, I first did it. a cabinet file where I cut out holes and had the miners blowing air out the holes. And so you could open it up and check on them if need be and all the ventilation in the back. But again, a lot of effort to just heat the garage. Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's cool though. My wife saw the, the minor heated hot tub in Miami and she's like, can we do that? So that might be, that might be in my future. There's a couple guys local that have been doing a lot. lot of immersion lining.

So. Need them. Spars. Yes. Yes, exactly. All right. So we'll see. I'm going to see how that goes.

But anyways, let's go for another rotation. I'm going to actually, Kiwi, I'm going to keep it with you. I'm going to, I'll just cue you up. Simple question.

Why are you bullish? Super bullish on the Bitcoin Benz, building Bitcoin better. I think it's a very benevolent group. And the ventrification, of the Bitcoin sector has really benefited from it. So super bullish about that.

You came prepared. You came with the receipts, man. There are a lot of good Bitcoin. Maybe let's rattle off some of the Benz. I mean, there's Ben Price was on Simply Bitcoin earlier today. He's talking about the Bitcoin company. Have you guys used that? Yeah.

Yeah. They're basically like, you can get gift cards, visa cards, all kinds of stuff with Bitcoin. You can also get sats back and rewards on a ton of stuff. Like if you're using voltage or something to host a note, I think you can get like 21% off. There's all these like pretty awesome deals and sats back deals that you can do. So I mean, he's been killing it.

And he started that with Ben the Carmen. But I think Ben the Carmen is now primarily focused on mutiny wallet, which is another cool project like on chain and lightning and yeah i i barely i think i got into the i don't know if it's available to the general public yet but uh low key i got i got into the closed beta because i was ben uh he he gave the a okay in the background uh it was actually talking with somebody in oslo and they were they were uh related and they were like had mutiny i was like oh, I want to get in there. And she sent a quick message.

And then she said that, she said, Ben the Carmen was in the room. And he said, he's a Ben. He's in. So I got, I got approved for the closed beta. So, but yeah, it's pretty, pretty nice looking project. Well, I'm trying to think of the other. But also about like Ben Ark, who did the Bitcoin POS. We've got Benderwall from Swan, Ben Gagnon, with the mining stuff.

Bueno here. know here, me from Amber App, you doing all the tutorials, you know, and to speak of the ventrification further, like even simply Bitcoin trying to get the whole tip going and stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the first step to Nico just legally changing his name. I think that's that. We've got to be careful of that, though, because we also did see Joe Rogers try change his name to Ben Rogers.

And he is part of that Benymus party with Schiff and Tucson. on. So just be warned. Be careful. Yeah, we got we got to be careful about letting Rogue Benz into what about I mean, there's definitely some out of consensus Benz that maybe don't have

that guy's got to go. Ben McKenzie is clearly like if the OC didn't do it I mean clearly his take on Bitcoin is already I don't know. I don't even consider him a ban at this point i don't know about you guys leave his bit boy and his bin coin those are forked versions they have nothing to do with us yeah the the the the world reserve currency

of bends everywhere is the sat and any deviation from that is outside of consensus rules so i think that's how we got to are we sats or we bits is it bits or sat is it bits or sat Are we going to cause a civil war here? Is this where it happens? Where the bends fork from each other? I don't know. I'm a Sats maximalist. Every time I see bits, I think it's not going to happen.

I don't think, I don't think, I feel like Sats is the, is the denomination of the people. And I also, the reason I lean towards Sats is, because we already saw, because there used to be millibits. And millibits was used as a mechanism because people were like, well, one Bitcoin is starting to be too large of a denomination. And okay, fair. Like nobody deals in the decimals really anymore.

But then millibits, like eventually a milibit is too large of a piece of a Bitcoin. It doesn't make sense as a denomination. So you keep on moving. Like how many times are you going? going to move people down the decimal places, say this is the new one that we use, instead of just going with sats. Like, sats now, I remember being in Indonesia. And I remember one sat was one of their Indonesian rupee.

And so it was already par there. So one sat already made sense there. And that was in 2016. And so like when you have par with a sat in another country, then I think that, you know, already you have currencies that have been devalued so much that sats just kind of make sense because they're already dealing in large numbers with the numbers of currency units they're using. So, you know, I think we just commit to the lowest denomination. And then anything subset, we can deal with if we need B. But, you know, sat sent parity.

That's a ways out. You know, sat dollar parity. will be a great moment. And then when we need decimals for sats, I mean, we've already made it. So yeah. But I'm interested to hear to the contrary. I'm a bit maybe even confused when you say a decimal on a sat. Because I remember speaking to nude about this

and he was telling me how we'll be able to split sats. Is that what you're referring to right now? You can technically have a fraction of a sat on the lightning network. You just have to settle the channel you just have to settle the channel in whole sats. So like a lightning channel can denominate. You can have, what is it, milliseconds that they're,

yeah, Msats. So yeah, you can have a fraction of a sat sent via the lightning network for sure. So I guess milasat, what is the division on that? Like we have eight decimal places. Is there already a predefined or I guess I'm still? Yeah, at the moment,

is just millie sets. I was literally 1,000 for the sat. That's the smallest amount on lightning according to the current specifications. But there's technically nothing stopping you breaking it down smaller. On whatever second layers, anyone wants to build in the future, you know, you can always break it smaller as long as when it gets settled on chain. It would, it has some mechanism for rounding to the nearest sat or whatever the case may be. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's, I mean, just like Bitcoin, Again, like you get into the, I'm sure when we need to start using decimals on sats, there will be tons of fun around it. Like, oh, it's not as, it's not as finite and scarce as they said. It'll be the whole, what's her name, Francis Coppola argument, the infinite pizza argument.

You can just cut slices forever and solve world hunger. Yeah, we'll see some of that, but such as life. But yeah, basically on chain, it always, like, the SAT is the lowest denomination, but off chain, you could technically lay claim to part of a SAT as long as later on when it settles on chain. There's a mechanism where, yeah, you're rounding to the nearest SAT or whatever. Not without going too much of a rabbit hole here, but it's kind of funny. People talk about insets at the moment, like milliseconds as being, you know, somehow less secure because you can't, you know, necessarily promise them with the on-term. settlement. A, who cares about less than a sap right now anyway, but B, it's actually true of much larger amounts as well. Basically, anything larger than the dust amount, or anything smaller than the

dust amount, I should say, you know, you're not going to be able to necessarily settle that on-chain anyway. When you close out your channel, you know, you're paying more in the fees to close the channel than that amount that was sent. So you actually, you know, you actually have a much higher low limit of trust in a single lightning channel anyway. So whether we're talking insats or whatever, yeah, the on-chain settlements actually count. I think of that as like my Fold app where I've spent the last two years hitting religiously the free lottery wheel without ever spending any money on the Fold app. And I'm now just so I have a thousand SATs away from being able to withdraw.

it's it's taken me two years but I mean that's that's basically the same thing just got to take longer to close I love it awesome all right any any final thoughts on anything anything Ben related in the bentrification of Bitcoin before we round out where you met another Ben Ben Harper at the conference and what were you Luxor I think yeah and he He didn't tout it or anything, but I believe that is the son of a former prime minister of ours, if I'm not mistaken. So, you know, having that, so I don't know his backstory or anything like that, but, you know, one degree of separation away from someone that's ran the country.

It's pretty interesting. It's great. And he's in the High Council of Bitcoin Benz. He's actually been a huge part of the Canadian lobby against the tax legislation. And he's been a huge part of that because he understands how the processes work. He's probably the single most important person for fighting the Canadian tax lobby. How poetic would it be if like I don't know if Stephen Harper or former prime minister actually stacks stats himself and holds some Bitcoin.

But how poetic would it be to have Trudeau who shut down people's bank accounts be be bookended by Bitcoiners running the country. Like before and after Bitcoiners running the country, that would be kind of hilarious. But I guess we shall see. I'd say there's about a coin tosses chance that our next prime minister in Canada is a bitcoiner. I mean, again, I would say caveat,

never trust a politician. But given the choice, I would also say I would prefer the guy that seems to get Bitcoin and has like Jeff Booth and Greg Foss in his ear to the dude who just shut down everybody's bank accounts. So, you know, take your pick. But again, if Trudeau were to get in again, I would just view it as all right, well, I guess this. this just accelerates Bitcoin adoption because people realize how screwed the system is. So we'll see. The sovereign individual thesis playing out. Yes.

I think so. I think so. Awesome. Do you have a list over there, Kiwi, of just Benwors that you're trying to crank through on this call because you've got some good ones over there. Yeah, just coming off the top of the dome. This is impressive. I don't know.

I feel like you need to provide a list to the panel next time so that we know we all can replace words on the regular. So many obvious. You need to be an benefactor of good words. It would be beneficial for all of us. Amazing. All right. Let's do one more rotation.

Schmidt, I'm tossing it to you, and I'm just going to cue you up. Why are you bullish, man? Well, again, I'm still relatively new into this space. So kind of my, one of the catalysts for me to, to understand. understand Bitcoin was the trucker convoy. And so this whole idea of censorship resistance. And so that kind of was one of the reasons I went down the rabbit hole of learning about Bitcoin. And so I guess tying that to the idea of self-custody.

And I'm trying to wrap my head around what other asset do we have that truly has self-custody? that is not handcuffed by the network itself, the regulators. So like what, you know, I'm a real estate guy. You know, obviously I'm subject to property tax. And if they don't like what I'm doing, that property is not my property anymore. So gold, again, self-custody, but you're kind of subject to that network. we now have the ability to self-custody, this digital asset, and become a sovereign individual. That's kind of a roundabout way.

One of the main things that was so difficult was realizing what it meant to be a citizen of a country. You're subject to the rule. So Bitcoin is self-custody. Bitcoin is self-reliance and becoming a global citizen. And so I'm still new, but that idea has me bullish. It definitely, I mean, it's been eye-opening in Canada. But I mean, the world at large kind of saw, you know, depending on what their local news showed, kind of saw Bitcoin.

And I've had many people come to me and say, yeah, that was kind of my touch point that made me dig a little deeper. Because there was always this assumption that like, oh, I'm in a first world country, you know, nothing like that would ever happen where they go and they just blanket, shut down bank accounts and do different things. And again, whether you were a fan of the protest or not is irrelevant. There have been people that have been able to zoom out, even if they disagreed with the protest,

and say, oh, wow, if this can happen to a protest I don't like with a government I do like, the inverse is true. And they realize, like, this is actually, all this top-down control. It means that me as an individual, my ability to be sovereign and control my money is actually is quite fragile and can change quite quickly if I fall out of line with whoever happens to be ruling the country at the time. And this is pretty true just about everywhere now is the precedent that has been set. So yeah, it's a pretty unique situation to have people coming to Bitcoin because of this large kind of globally visible movement that was the largest protest in Canadian history.

So I don't know. Like what I'm curious maybe Kiwi like what what did you see of what was happening here like outside of, you know, the Twitter sphere and stuff like that. Were you getting much in local news? Was it was it being shown much or was it pretty quiet? Because you guys had had a lot of restrictions down there for a good period of time as well. Yeah, it was kind of funny because. Canada was just like further along than New Zealand was, but they were implementing the same sort of stuff. And so it was just funny to get people to like draw their line in the sand knowing that this is where it was going.

And so for us, we saw a lot of that truckers stuff, but that was in the sort of like freedom movements and stuff like that online. But yeah, it was so funny because it would be like, no, we're not going to do segregation. no we're not going to do vaccine passports that's conspiracy theories you know this shot is a hundred percent effective okay it's 95 percent effective okay it's sydney okay you need you need one extra one okay you need two extra ones okay it's an annual thing and we're segregating and doing vaccine passports so like we saw the writing on the wall so hats off to the truckers and stuff standing up and showing ways that we can overcome that um we didn't get much local sort of news about the Canadian truckers that I was aware of.

But that's also because 2020, I saw that writing on the wall and got out of New Zealand. So I wouldn't be the best one to answer that question. Sorry, brother. Fair enough. I was just curious about what was seen elsewhere. Ben, were you even in the country last year? Me? What's the name?

Sorry, right. I left Canada when May 30th, 2021. the exact date. I left Canada. And I haven't been, I haven't lived in Canada since. I've been back since, but I haven't lived there since. I fled off to the United States and now I fled off to Costa Rica. But, you know, we similarly to what happened with Canada and the Tracker protest, we also saw that on the geopolitical stage here with Russia and sanctions, right? And, you know, you've got the situation where Russians trusted that their money was safe in these foreign countries. They trusted their assets were safe in these foreign countries, and they found out that they weren't.

And so all of a sudden they say, well, why do I have any money in USDA or anything like that if it can just be taken away from me at any point? And so actually, you know, it's not something that you hear about because Russia has become like a black box ever since Ukraine happened. But Russia is one of the largest destinations for Bitcoin mining equipment. They are an energy nation, a huge surpluses of energy. And if you're going to put sanctions on them taking away their assets and you're going to try and limit their ability to sell their energy abroad, guess what? They're going to plug in Bitcoin miners and they're going to sell that electricity online. And that's something that we've seen. And so the more that governments clamp down, the more that Bitcoiners are just going to just circumvent and work around.

And, you know, the beautiful thing about government bureaucrats is that they're just incompetent. you know, never, never underestimate the incompetence of a government bureaucrat. And they'll never, ever be able to keep up with the pace that Bitcoin and Bitcoiners are moving at. And so that that also makes me incredibly bullish because there's just no way to stop us. I love it. Yeah, the geopolitical stuff in and around. I mean, you've seen now different countries come out of the woodwork and say, let's, let's de-dollarize. Let's get away from the the dollar in response to the freezing of Russia's reserves, right? Like, you have, I think it was Indonesia was one of them.

And they're probably at very little risk to have stuff frozen, but they're still looking and saying, ooh, you know, if we get on the wrong side of the U.S., there's no guarantee that we have access to reserves. And, I mean, I think that's a legitimate concern. Like they changed the game when they said, like they didn't even freeze stuff. They didn't freeze Russian assets during the Cold War. No. Like these attacks are undermining their own authority and their confidence, right?

Like Trudeau undermined his own authority. And now the U.S. government is undermining their own authority. And the only thing that's going to do is it's going to weaken the U.S. dollar. And relatively speaking, that is the tide that brings Bitcoin up. the weaker the US dollar it gets, the stronger Bitcoin becomes. It's a perfect inverse relationship. Yeah.

It's been super been interesting to like see Russia get cut off from that and then, you know, all of the bricks sort of stuff because of that subsequently. But then it's like you're just going to the same issue of having to trust like a collective of countries to act in good interest, which is worse than trusting one. and then also like building these gold reserves and i don't know if you guys saw it but there was i think like a billion dollars worth of gold came from perth australia um and it was just gold plated tungsten that they sold to china and so it's like not only does gold not solve this but neither does bricks and so they'll inevitably come to the same conclusion and just get the price they deserve which is

awesome yeah go ahead shaman yeah i was just curious because it's I was listening to Greg Foss earlier today and he was talking about Russia and how potentially oil, etc., will be priced in Bitcoin. How far off do you see something like that energy being priced in Satoche's? I don't think we're that far off, to be honest with you. You know, Russia has already approved the trade of international commodities being settled in Bitcoin. I don't know, I've followed it closely enough to know how those transactions have actually happened or whether or not they've actually happened. But I don't think that's far off. And when you look at, especially Bitcoin mining and what drives our profit, like it's lower cost energy.

You know, everybody seems to focus on higher efficiency machines. Sorry, a higher efficiency does not undo high electricity prices. It just doesn't. If you want to be a low-cost competitor, you have to have low-cost energy. You can't just have high-efficiency machines. And the inevitable path for Bitcoin is to go to marginal source electricity. It's those units of energy that have zero demand, zero otherwise use, and zero cost for generation, right? To generate one extra unit of energy, it doesn't cost you anymore, right?

The plant's already built there. the financing is already in place. Like to generate one extra kilowatt hour out of a hydro damp doesn't cost you a cent. Right. So that's where everything's going to go. And if things got to start priced in, it makes sense that you say, hey, how do you actually value this marginal cost to electricity when you're applying Bitcoin mining? You know, you're going to start measuring in terms of the value that you're getting out of

the Bitcoin network. And then if that happens, and you're after starting, well, you know, what's the relative cost if I sell to the Bitcoin network versus if I sell to the grid or other consumers. It's going to get harder and harder to balance the FX volatility risk

between the two different currencies. And I think there's going to be an incentive to just move everything over to Bitcoin over the long term. And it's like energy makes perfect sense to be priced in Sats, especially that energy that is underutilized, overlooked,

wasted, you know, that marginal cost electricity, those marginal units of electricity, those should absolutely be price and sets. If you were going to put a specific date on the Petro set, what time frame would you get? Specific date on the Petro set? Perhaps an hour. Let us know when that... Maybe a blockade.

Yeah. I'd say it's probably somewhere in the 2030s. I think we're going to start seeing decent amounts of commodities being traded in Bitcoin, probably sometime in the 2030s. I don't think we're going to see it this decade. You'll probably see small pilot programs or small transactions, but I don't think it's going to be a very active market for another decade plus. Yeah. Interesting. Now, the real question is, when do I start pricing my services and sets? I don't know the answer to that question yet.

It may require some repricing over time as people cannot afford things, but that's okay. All right, gentlemen, I want to start. Sorry, go ahead. I was actually just going to say pricing things and sets. I actually already do. So aside from whatever main job I'm currently doing, I run a small consultancy, and I've been writing invoices in sets for, you know, like four or five years now. Yeah. So basically, if you have a set price in sats, is there like a threshold where you're like,

maybe I got to adjust prices and stuff like, like, how do you handle it? At some point, yeah, but I leave it go for a while. So, you know, my one invoice could be worth, you know, three times as much before I'll think about actually, you know, dropping my prices. Yeah. Interesting. All right. I think I might have to consider pricing and sats for the next little bit here.

All right, gentlemen, I want to start rounding out a bit here. What I like to do at the end of every episode is I like to do a quick round of any final thoughts you may have, anything that you forgot to get off your chest, that you want to let people know about that they could benefit from, whatever that may be. And then also, if you have any recommendations and what I've been by recommendation, It could be really anything, like a book, a podcast, a video you saw, an article, an app, a device, you know, really anything or just a life experience that you think could help people out. So I guess I'll start off. Final thoughts. I mean, it's been a long time coming to have the Ben's in one place. and I hope that again it was beneficial for all and yeah it's been a good time so I will say

you're all welcome back anytime I hope to have another council meaning too I hope the other bens are proud of everything that we've accomplished here and and we'll have another another round of this soon I'd really like to just have like a free-for-all where it's just like a full screen of bends and we just kind of shoot the shit. I think I can get 10 in here at the same time. I think we should try for that at some point. I think we should go to 9. You have a hard cap at 9, so it's ben 9.

Ah, there we go. God, you are on fire. How do you do this? I think, I think we need to appoint you to like, I don't know what leg of government that would be, but it would be, you know, like, overseer of Ben puns or something like that, like in the office of puns, I don't know, you need to be some sort of a efficient.

We'll find out, you know, let us know what he should be. Sounds like another good use of taxpayer funds, doesn't it? I think so. Yeah, we'll raise funds. We'll extract funds from all the bands. Wait, what have we done? Anyways, yeah. Okay, perfect.

So in terms of recommendations, I was actually chatting to somebody earlier on today. And he was asking me some questions around like, what do you say to people who think that we need, you know, basically a lot of misconceptions about economics and, oh, we need inflation in order to have the economy function and all these different things? And I said, give this book a read as kind of like a starter, a primer, and then you can kind of fall down some other rabbit holes. But it'll give you like kind of an overarching view of a better way to think about the economy. So economics and one lesson by Henry Hazlett, it's a short read. It's basically the same concept reiterated in different ways throughout the chapters. And it just kind of gives you like an overview of framing how you think of. of economics.

And yeah, it was a good one. So anyways, I recommend that economics and one lesson by Henry Haslett. Yeah, that's it. So I'll rotate over. Maybe I'll toss to Duol. Final thoughts, recommendations? So, yeah, yeah, this has been a awesome stream. It's so fun having so many bends on you.

Every time you just say, hey, Ben, and everyone's like staring with one. Yeah, it's been good. two small things. One, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out at in Prague, my daughter announced that July this year is Bitcoin Kids Month. Every single podcaster, maker space, meet up, company who can possibly think of doing something with kids, do it in July. You know, podcasters, that includes you, Ben, get kids on, you know, figure out who you can

get on, talk to them, you know, maybe even get a kid as a co-host if you can. So that's a call to action there, get kids involved, make things happen. As for a recommendation, I've been reading a lot of books recently and just finished this one, which is the heftiest read I've had in a while. Bitcoin, a game theoretic analysis. It's got graduate written there, and that's no joke. This is basically, you know, just full of, you know, actual math. So, yeah, but if you're into, if you're into heavy math, this is actually a really, really good book.

Interesting. I hadn't heard of that one. That's all right, then. Add it to the list, I suppose. Awesome. All right. Let's toss it over to Ganyon. Thoughts, final thoughts, recommendations.

Yeah. I mean, final thoughts, I think we're in a very, very, very strong position here rolling forward. I think we've passed a lot of the, the, the, the FUD. and the malinvestment. I don't think we fully wiped out all of the malinvestment, but I think we wiped out a good chunk of it. And I'm incredibly, incredibly bullish for that. In terms of recommendations, I always recommend Alice Shrugged, which are the Bitcoin books before Bitcoin. So Alice Shrug and Fountainhead by N Rand are always good books. And I know there's still plenty of Bitcoiners out there who have not read them. So go out there, read those books. They're like Bibles for Bitcoiners. And

And then also I also recommend the Bitmex research blog. Like the Bitmex research blog is probably, I think, the most accurate blog out there. It's very overlooked. But especially Arthur Hayes pieces, like that guy is spot on almost every time. And definitely, definitely worth paying attention to that research blog. They don't put out stuff every day. But read what they put out because it's worth your time. And with that, I'm going to jump.

I've got another call here. I'm running a couple minutes late too. But it's been great being with all of you, Ben. Thank you so. Awesome. Thanks, man. Appreciate your time. All right.

Let's toss it down to Kiwi. Final thoughts, recommendations. Yeah. Final thoughts is the Fiat Benz are dying. Long live the Bitcoin Benz. Super bullish on Benz. And I would recommend two things. First one being the Bible.

Many haven't read that. You should probably read it. The second one being seed signers. They're awesome. Use them. BTC sessions has some amazing tutorials with them. I'm building one and teaching a person how to use it a month. So if you want to get into it,

you want a free seed signer and get shown the ropes. That's awesome. Seed signer's badass, I've got to say, really interesting what they built there. And it gives you a unique view into almost like what Bitcoin is. And it kind of changes the way that you think about interacting with Bitcoin and what hardware is and can be. So yeah, pretty unique there.

Awesome. Tossed to Schmidt. You can lead us out here. Final thoughts, recommendations, man. This book made its rounds about a year and a half ago. Or again, I guess, yeah, the changing world order by Ray Dalio. That was a really, really eye-opening book for me. kind of explains how we got here in a nutshell the past, you know, five, 700 years kind of starting with Denmark to Britain to the U.S.

and obviously China is kind of his call. But I think what he misses is the technological revolution that Bitcoin is. but it was definitely very eye-opening and almost laid a framework for me to before I got really into Bitcoin. The second book I read was Safe, the Bitcoin Standard. And I just kind of felt like this book was going to be the first book to kind of, again, lay that foundation. And it's not a very benign book.

I got my first Ben pun in there. It's not an easy read. It's not gentle. but it's it would be a my my best batter the sovereign individual would be my best non-bitcoin bitcoin books to recommend love it awesome yeah it's interesting about the Dalio thing i think uh bitcoin may be the thing that derails the the the thesis he's operating on there um but we'll see we'll see anyways gents uh we'll round it out here thank you guys so much for coming uh you're all awesome and you're all welcome back anytime.

We are Ben. We are a Legion. Expect us. He dropped it off. Good to see you, Jens. Yep. Take care. All right.

Everybody, thank you guys so much for being here. Sorry, my internet kind of crapped out a little bit there for a second. Anyways, guys, thank you so much for being here. Of course, as always, like, subscribe, share, all those things. They help a ton. getting this content in front of more eyeballs. You can also hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Those were Hala Holo, Coin Kite, Nunchuk, and Start 9.

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