BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Bitcoin Dips Will Get Bought Like Candy ep139

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

In a week of mercurial Bitcoin price action, new ETF applications, continued global instability and more people demanding to be paid in Bitcoin, today’s panel guests talk about what has them feeling bullish. Jonathan Chester: Founder & President at Bitwage https://twitter.com/JonChest Crypto Mags (OR: Magdalena Gronowska): Self-described Bitcoin addict with a vast array of entrepreneurial experience across digital asset management, carbon & electricity markets, business growth, innovation, and more. https://twitter.com/Crypto_Mags Peter McCormack: Podcaster, filmmaker, and host of The What Bitcoin Did Podcast https://twitter.com/PeterMcCormack Jimbo (AKA Jimbo the Consensualist) : Author of "Orange Coin Good: The Value of Bitcoin" https://twitter.com/jimbocoin SUPPORT THE SHOW: LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $25 free https://bit.ly/397rlLN Get Wasabi wallet for Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Cobo Vault: secure your Bitcoin! https://bit.ly/2GgMFlH BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/ Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions Telegram channel: https://t.me/btc_sessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is up, everyone. Welcome to this show. We have an exciting one. We have a great panel today. I hope everybody's having a really good Friday. This, of course, is the Why Are We Bullish show, where we have a panel and we discuss the reasons we're feeling bullish as of late.

So very excited to have everybody here. As always, this is live. So who knows we may experience the odd technical difficulties. so I always like to play this little clip really quick beforehand. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live.

The thing sucks. We'll see. We'll see what happens. Anyways, guys, welcome to the show. As always, this is Why Are We Bullish. I'm Ben with the BTC Sessions. And this is your daily session. All right.

So before we get the panel going here, of course, let's take a look over at the bitbo.io dashboard. We're sitting around $35,330 some odd dollars. Took a bit of a dip today, but of course dips are a joke. So dips are getting bought up like nothing else. As far as what you'll get for a U.S. dollar, one U.S. dollar will buy you $2,835-ish sats right now. If you want to get a transaction through in the next block, you're looking at 136 sats per byte. If you're willing to wait an hour, you can drop that to around 56 sats per byte. So still busy, still a backlog in the Mempool.

You know, we're in a bull run. So of course, 88.58% of all Bitcoin has been mined. That'll be hitting 90% later this year. And yeah, I think I think that's good for all of our metrics today. A quick shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.io, where you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services. Of course, they've got their Bitcoin back loans. They've saved my butt a few times when I needed to get my hands on dollars, but I didn't want to sell my Bitcoin because that's taxable. And I was worried about having a buy back in at a higher price.

Of course, they've still got their Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts with interest rates of up to 12.25% annually paid monthly and their B2X offering, which uses the same loan mechanism to buy you some more Bitcoin if you're feeling super bull. Links down below. If you want to check them out and you end up getting a loan, then they'll give you $25 into your savings for free. Kobo Vaults, one of my regularly used hardware wallets. I love it because it's totally air-gapped. You never plug the thing into anything internet connected, all done via QR code.

This keeps the keys to your money safe and offline. Secure element, it is open-source firmware. And, of course, it works with a lot of my favorite wallets. So Bitcoin Core, Electrum, Blue Wallet, Specter, Sparrow, Wasabi. And it's pretty badass when it comes to multi-sig setups. I've done a bunch of videos on that. So be sure to check them out. Links down below.

I'm using the pro just for a reference. I have the fingerprint scanner and the rechargeable battery. Now, you guys know I'm all in on Bitcoin. I live on Bitcoin. I earn Bitcoin. But I do have to live so I need to get things somehow. One of the ways I do this is Bitwage. so you can grab just about any imaginable gift card there and you earn sats back in the process.

So if you're living on Bitcoin like me, it could be an option for you. And finally, if you're backing up a wallet, you might not want to jot that on a piece of paper because, you know, not fireproof, not waterproof, and you might accidentally throw it out. Not the case if it's a solid piece of steel. So consider something like the bill foddle over at privacyprose.io, solid steel tiles, you slide it in and you sleep soundly at night. With that, let's start getting into our panel here. We've got some awesome guests here.

I'm going to start bringing them in one by one, one, two, three, and potentially four in a minute. But welcome, welcome to my wonderful panel here. We've got John, we've got Mags, we got Jimbo. I'm going to go down the line and let you guys quickly introduce yourselves, let everybody know who you are, what you do, and then we'll get going on the actual show. John, I'll let you start. Who are you? What do you do?

Sure. Yeah, I am the CEO of Bitwage. Bitwage is the leading provider of Bitcoin payroll invoicing services. We've been around since 2014, done over $100,000, $100 million of transactions, 50,000 plus onboarded users. And some of the offerings that we have, is either companies that want to offer Bitcoin payroll, Bitcoin 401k or international payroll, we'll sign up. Also, people who want to get a part of their wage in Bitcoin, they can sign

up and we'll give them a direct deposit account. And this works for any companies paying them in the U.S. EU, UK, whether you're in the U.S. or you're anywhere in the world. We actually have employees in over 100 different countries. So, been around for a long time, seen actually three different bubbles. I guess you could say that this is a bubble, although I would explain maybe later why it's the beginning of one. But yeah, that's a really good idea. Awesome. If I wasn't already getting paid directly in Bitcoin, I would be on bitwage like a fat kid on a smarty for sure. Let's pass to Mags. Megs, let everybody know who you are, what you do. Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Meggs. I'm currently consulting with MetaMesh on whether it's regulatory digital assets more recently

into mining but we also provide multimedia services. I've been in the industry for about three years. You may know me from such hits as the bankruptcy of Quadriga, who I represent all affected users. I've been appointed by the Supreme Court to be an inspector. I also about a year ago helped 3 IQ launch their Bitcoin fund on the Toronto Stock Exchange. And the fund just recently hit $1 billion, which is also pretty bullish. But before I went down the rabbit hole, I worked in the area of economic development, carbon markets and electricity markets for 10 years. Awesome. Well, stoked to have you here. And let's pass it lastly to Jimbo. Let us know who you are and what you do.

Hi, well, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to be on the show. I really appreciate it. My name is Jimbo. I go by Jimbo the Consensualist on social media. Bitcoin Space has author of this book, Orange Coin Good, which is a book for pre-cointers and tries to explain what Bitcoin is and how it works in a way that is more appealing than maybe some of the very technical or very libertarian, excellent literature that already exists. So trying to reach a more broad audience. That's who I am.

Cool. That's great, man. All right, panel. Well, welcome to the show, guys. Stoke to have you. Anybody watching, we may have an elusive fourth guest popping in momentarily, but I think he may be on British time. I think, oh, he's backstage. Hold on. Let me bring him in. He's not backstage. He's lying to me. Anyways, yes. Okay, so we're going to get into our panel and we're going to dive in. So the, basically, the way that the show works is it is, why are we bullish? And we're each going to be giving a reason why we are feeling bullish at the current time. It can be any reason. It can be any reason.

reason we like. And then at that point, we're all going to riff on it and then we're going to rotate. So we go by the three R's, we say, RIF or sorry, reason, riff and rotate. So I'm going to kick this thing off because last week on the show, I felt like I didn't really get to, we didn't really touch on it. And I was surprised. I thought somebody else was going to take the topic. And so I didn't take it.

But now I will. So this is long overdue. I'm sorry to Mr. Jack Mallors. But what he is working on with Strike is phenomenal, some of the stuff out of him. So strike effectively, being able to send internationally using Bitcoin as payment rails is pretty life-changing for a lot of people, I imagine. And how he's kind of taken Bitcoin and used it as a base layer. financial infrastructure for people that are still tied to legacy finance and still want to use

legacy finance. He was taking U.S. dollars, sending them across the ocean to Europe, having them instantly converted to euros at zero cost. He also showed himself streaming payment to an employee every five seconds. So it was like a drip of money across the ocean, live streaming cash. Pretty phenomenal what he's building on there. And I'm very excited about this idea just as a general concept, but with Strike as a bit of an example here, of this technology inversion, kind of like what we saw with the internet,

where we saw initially everything going over the phone lines, but then the infrastructure once built out for the internet, actually became the base infrastructure for the phones to tag along to. And I think we're starting to see that with Bitcoin. I think we're starting to see that as a base money and a base payment infrastructure, Bitcoin is far superior to anything we have in terms of quick settlement and transaction finality. You just can't get it anywhere else. And I think in the coming years, even the people that opt not to hold Bitcoin the asset itself

will be using the network without even knowing it. So I'll leave this now. I'll start passing it down the line with the panel. And John, you with Bitwage are kind of on the same wavelength here where you guys are giving people options within legacy finance to then kind of opt out of legacy finance into Bitcoin. And so I wanted to get your take on kind of this technology inversion that we may be seeing coming up. So take it away. Yeah, sure. I mean, actually, we've been doing things like this for many years.

So we also use Bitcoin as a rail to get fiat currency from one country to another country. And it's been quite popular. And actually, one of our leading use cases. And what we're seeing is essentially that companies that are coming on board to pay their employees and their workers, around the world, they're sick of the traditional wire system. And they're looking for alternatives. You know, albeit there are different alternatives out there that do work well in certain cases, right? I mean, transfer wise is actually an interesting non-Bitcoin use case. And it's good to think about what's happening there. They have this issue where, you know, they're able to send money very

fast. And the way that they do it is they hold a bunch of dollars and they hold a bunch of euros between U.S. and Europe. And they're not doing an international transfer at all. They're just moving money from one account in the U.S. to one account in Europe and never moving between their own accounts that maybe are holding tens of millions of dollars. And the big problem there is there's a huge cost of capital to do so. You know, you got to have millions of dollars just sitting there not doing anything. And so in U.S. to Europe, that, you know, maybe that works. But if you're talking about countries that have high fx risk, right, where, you know, in, for instance, Brazil, during the pandemic, we saw 30% loss of value in its currency.

So if you're holding millions of dollars, you just lost 30%. And so the big advantage of Bitcoin has here is you do not need to have that capital sitting there. And therefore, it allows you to do smaller or bigger-sized payments, not just between US and Europe, but really globally and be able to compete with this sort of methodology that transfer wise and others have come up with. I was muted. I'm sorry. Usually I don't even mute myself. But we're going to continue to pass it down the line then. I just wanted to say, of course, Pete, welcome to the show.

I'm sure everybody saw him pop in. but Peter, for those people that are currently watching the show that may not know you, can you just give a quick intro before we move on? Yeah, hi, I'm Peter. I'm a fellow podcaster. I live in England. Yeah, those are all true things. I'm glad to have you, man.

I was sat backstage like on the other link, and did the link change? Maybe. I don't know. Could have been my bad. The link invite isn't for him. Yeah. Oh, really? Huh. I don't know. Maybe I was just being dumb. But anyways, we're all here now. I'm happy. So I just, I want to just to fill everybody in. Obviously, Pete, love your show, what Bitcoin did. If anybody hasn't listened to it, worth a listen for sure. Pete, basically, we were talking a little bit about what Jack is doing. with strike, what Jonathan here is doing with Bitwage. We're talking about the idea of a kind of like

a technology inversion like we saw with the internet, you know, going from over the phone lines to the phone lines going over the internet and this kind of taking place within Bitcoin. So we're just going down the line here. I'm going to, I'll pass it to Jimbo first on this. If you want to talk a little bit more about this, any of your thoughts on the subject, then we'll head to Pete and then Megs. Oh, sure. Thanks. Yeah, it's kind of interesting the world and the lightnings from a strike. I'm a big of lightning, but I honestly don't use all that much.

It's interesting my... You might be cut there a little bit, Jim. That's all right. It might have dropped out. No problem. No problem. I think it's just a little bit of technical difficulty. I'll jump to Pete first, and then we'll come.

back to Jimbo and NCF connection improves. Pete? Yeah, I think it's really cool what Jack's doing. Very impressive. The thing I like about it most is that for me, I'm still not 100% convinced we end up in a world where everybody is using Bitcoin and it becomes a unit of account. I'm still not convinced on that. If it does happen, it may be decades away.

I still expect it to be quite volatile. for quite some time. And I also just still expect we'll have sovereign currencies. But I do consider Bitcoin still a very good savings technology. If you're patient enough in the short term, it might not be so. But if you can get through a four-year cycle, usually you're in a position where it's become a very good savings technology. I've always liked the idea of having a wallet,

which is a combination of Bitcoin and pounds. If I can very easily send Bitcoin or pounds around the world, and I can very easily convert my pounds into Bitcoin in a single wallet. It's kind of what I've always wanted, this kind of banking infrastructure I need. It does solve a problem for me as well, strike. All my sponsors are pretty much in the US, and if they pay me via bank transfer, the exchange rate I'm given by the bank is never the true exchange right,

and I'm losing thousands of pounds a year, if not tens of thousands a year. I'm also paying staff who live in Australia, the States, over the place. To have a technology allows me to be able to pay people with no fees. Be paid with no fees is great. And the ability just to flip between Bitcoin and pounds is really cool. So I think it's really neat. I think it's an amazing thing that Jack's done and I'm very excited to start using it myself. You got to go all in, man. You got to all my sponsors pay me directly in Bitcoin now. I do that. Yes, I've taken it as a sizable risk of holding the Canadian dollar. I do not like holding Canadian dollars. So basically, I'd say 90% of my income

is Bitcoin at this point. Obviously, I'm a little bit more okay with the volatility. I've been around long enough to kind of just accept that that's part of it. And I think intuitively over time, once you kind of get around that emotional trying to time things too, I found I'm a little, maybe not perfect, but a little bit more intuitive in terms of like the kind of four-year cycles as to, oh, I can do things like fix up the house around this year instead of, you know, in the middle of a bear market. I think, but it's definitely changed the way that I think about every. everything I do and how I spend my money.

And I'm more inclined to save when I'm living on Bitcoin and converting the bare minimum to dollars for any bills that I might need. But yeah, it's been an interesting change because I only really started living basically 100% on Bitcoin back in September. So it's been about four months now. But yeah, interesting ride. But I'll pass. I'm transitioning.

I just want to say I'm transitioning. in and it's a difficult transition because you kind of have to get your head around a few things. So for about six months, I've been gradually transitioning the company reserves into Bitcoin, which has obviously worked out very well because it essentially started from about, I think it's about $10,000 Bitcoin. It doubled the profits for the company for the year, which is a very interesting thing. But, you know, time the market wrong and it could have half the profits. what I do now is I whether I'm paid in Bitcoin or dollars or pounds it doesn't really matter

but what I do is I always leave kind of like a month and a half cash flow in the bank and then everything else just goes into Bitcoin because it's really a long-term savings account for the company as well but if a bare market hit I don't know if I would do the same because I don't know what your cost structure is like but I've got seven seven people work for me now so it's a bit too risky to do that I'd rather get those fees paid, but I'm gradually getting there, gradually. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, there's a lot to take into

account when you've got multiple employees. I've got, I've got an anon on, on, Twitter helping me with show notes and stuff and he just, for each show, he just shoots me over a lightning invoice, which is kind of nice, but, yeah, yeah, I don't know.

Let's jump to Max. Max, what do you think about, kind of what people like John at Bitwage, what people that are kind of helping either convert people from traditional finance or building infrastructure that kind of brings them together or makes legacy better. What have you seen? What are you liking?

I think we keep hearing this criticism that no one's using Bitcoin. It's really expensive. And that's something in addition to other myths that we still need to face. but I think we're past the point where that's any kind of credible argument, especially with what Jacks built. One of my big aha moments personally was when I actually tried to send money to the UK. And it had been my first time, and it was kind of when I was just starting to get into Bitcoin. And I saw the amount of money and the time it spent to arrange the transaction,

the time that it took to get there. And then I sent Bitcoin within that same week. And I was like, holy shit, like just when I was starting getting in. And I felt a bit of that magic. And I think, you know, we're Canadian. So we have a lot of friends or colleagues who have people that live from all parts of the world. And, you know, we hear these stories about sending money, whether it's an emergency and whatnot. And I think the fact that you can eliminate these kinds of fees from, you know, traditional Western Union.

And I think it's a bit of an equity issue too because people that use that typically are low income compared to, for example, you know, Canadian salary standards. They're sending small amounts of money. So the chunk that gets taken out is a lot more. So I think it is a very useful technology. And hearing, I don't know if it was your podcast, Peter, where Jack said that he actually managed in some cases to find better FX rates. I think that's pretty tremendous to be able to do that. And so I think, you know, Bitcoin's come a long way, both as a savings technology, but also as a technology for payments.

And I'm really excited to see where this is going. And just generally where lightning's going, there's some pretty cool stuff in the lightning gaming space that's happening. So I think we're on the right track. You were mentioning to me the other day, and I'm sorry that I haven't been on it yet, but the mint gox thing. Oh, yeah. I've been doing that since I think at least the fourth Minkgox.

You can win free Bitcoin, guys. So what is it? Tell everybody what it is. Yeah, sure. So Mint Gawks brings together a whole bunch of different games where you can win Bitcoin. So there's first person shooters. And they recently partnered with, you know, AAA game. I think it's, is it Call of Duty?

It's one of the big, big first person shooter games. And you can actually win Bitcoin using it. But then there's other games that have been developed since, anything from like little silly games on your mobile where you like bounce a little ball and you collect stats along the way to the one that I've been playing a lot is the Bitcoin rally. I think Peter, you have been extended a challenge. So they basically recreated Mario Kart and you go along and you collect real Potoshes that you can take off at the end when you collect them from your lightning wallet.

But also the really neat part is they make it interactive. So the audience can actually, through lightning, send a little, you know, like the little mystery boxes in Mario Kart. They can create their own. So when someone's racing, you know, Ben can be like, hey, I want to send one. And the person can grab it and then, you know, send the equivalent of whatever, the blue shell or power up. So you can actually interact with the audience. Sorry, or and vice versa with the people playing the game. So I think it's really neat where that's going.

And I see a lot more creative types of gaming happening that you, like, for example, I'm thinking what you could even do is in VR. Like, you could have like a money tree and you can actually like try to collect this like money falling down or like stats coming down. Like I think it's really cool where it's going or like everyone can think safer in VR. Imagine like every block you hit is a Satoshi. So you're like, damn, I want to hit all of these. Can you, if you can build me a VR. a little environment like that. By the way, the VR stuff with Bitcoin has been pretty cool.

I just got one of those Oculus Rift things, and I was diving into, I can't remember who created it, bit paint or something like that. I mean, the campfire. So I guess we'll see you on Saturdays and restless in VR. I will try.

I'm going to try and get there. But I did see one thing that I really like is Gigi's 21 lessons is built into a virtual environment. And you can you literally go down the rabbit hole and read passages from his book and like go through this maze of and you're following a little white rabbit as it runs away. It's it's pretty cool. Yeah, BitPaint created a virtual world that now has become public and he's had 20,000 people that aren't just necessarily Bitcoins coming in. And he's got a little bit of history and links that you can like then follow if you wanted to. and it's just a really pretty world.

So people want to hang out there. So this is how we get everyone. Yeah, I'm sure that'll be how we get them. Okay, cool. So I want to say there's 125 people watching live. If you guys want to smash like, give this a share that helps bump this in front of even more people. I see you guys in the chat. I'm going to start pulling up more of your messages in the chat as they pop up.

But what I want to do is move on to a new topic. I'm going to pass it to John to live. let him to let him rather to let us know why he's feeling bullish what he'd like to chat about a bit. Sure. Yeah. So I think that why I'm feeling bullish kind of starts with a history lesson. And what we've seen for many years now is various forms of sort of economic and monetary instability causing price rises of Bitcoin, both locally. And globally.

And I might walk you through just a few different scenarios of this. I think maybe the most fun ones were happening in 2016, the beginning of 2016, just so happening to coincide with the start of that price rise, there was a big market crash in China. Right. And so this sort of instability there can almost be seen as instigating a price rise for Bitcoin. And later on throughout the year, at the end of the year, we saw a demonetization of the top two bills in India. And that was a major issue since this was the most used mechanism for exchanging money in India. And the price of Bitcoin rose locally by 40%.

So this is sort of going to something that Mags brought up earlier, which is how sometimes you can get better rates. And that's because oftentimes the price of Bitcoin can rise locally, but it can also fall locally, right, compared to the global average. And that causes what I would say is the true exchange rate as opposed to sort of like an exchange rate controlled by central banks. You know, for going on, you know, Venezuela, everyone knows about Zimbabwe also had like a 2x increase of the price of Bitcoin, and it's been like that for years.

In Brazil, I think in 2018, which was during the bear market, they had this huge political scandal that happened. The president basically was put in jail for corruption. And the price of Bitcoin also locally skyrocketed 50%. In Argentina, you see a divergence from the local exchange rate, which is the non-official exchange rate, called the blue dollar rate. And as that difference between the blue dollar rate and the official rate change, the price of Bitcoin grows even higher locally. So you see all these things happening. And now you fast forward to today.

And what we're seeing today is essentially, you know, the highest rates of inflation of the U.S. dollar. And while this is not hitting necessarily the prices of products, all that money is going somewhere. And it's basically going into assets, right? The stock market's going crazy. Gold is going crazy. Gold increased $3 trillion, right? and Bitcoin as well. So this is why I'm so bullish

is because that's not stopping. That's continuing to happen. And I think we're going to see this trend continue with that. Awesome. If Pete wants to tag on here, I think Jimbo is just going to switch out his connection here. But Pete,

if you want to tag on to anything that John was saying here, feel free. I missed the question at the stance. Oh, it was just, we're talking about, he was talking about a little bit about how India, when they, when they, they basically more or less tried to ban a lot of the exchanges. The price actually went up and how there's not local governments trying to toy with this thing. It's really not having a ton of effect in the long term.

I was just wondering if you wanted to tag on to any of those sentiments. Yeah, I always think, like attempts to ban Bitcoin is bullish for Bitcoin. It sends a clear signal that it's working. I also think we're all starting following this COVID situation where we've all been locked down in our homes for whatever reason that is. And I'm not one of these people who are completely angry think we've been oppressed and the government's completely wrong. Look, there is some complexities around this, which I kind of understand.

But at the same time, I think a lot of people start to realize, actually, I can live wherever I want. I can certainly if you're fortunate enough to work online like a lot of us do. You can work anywhere in the world, work in the Cayman Islands, in the US, in London. Anywhere there's got an internet connection, you work, you can work. And suddenly you start to realize, hold on, I can live somewhere that's got a beach and not pay any tax. What the fuck am I doing? So I think there's going to be a lot of locations which are going to be very friendly

And I think it's an opportunity if one country particularly is particularly As particularly strong legislation. So for example, the UK is starting to shut just feeling very inclined to leave. You know, why don't want to stay here and pay 40% tax? Working in an industry which the government is unfriendly towards when I can go somewhere And it's hot all year round, probably be healthier, happier, surrounded by happy. people. So I always think it's quite bullish for Bitcoin when government's talking about banning it. I personally know high net worth individuals moving to the Caribbean, who are Bitcoiners.

And I don't know if you've been following because Canada is not as, you know, on the front stage as the US. But the government is contemplating things like a wealth tax or even just reducing the capital gains tax. So right now, if you have a capital gain, only half of it is taxed, but they're thinking of changing that either to all of it is taxed or maybe somewhere in between. And we'll see if that comes to pass. Yeah, they're talking about a wealth tax. Well, no, they're talking about cap gains here. And I think I've heard rumors of a wealth tax.

I actually, look, if you had to solve the problem and you were going to go into it via tax, and this will really piss off a lot of people. But I was like, well, why not just do a 1% wealth tax? Just do it 1%. clears the debts of COVID and we move on. And I know a lot of people, I would happily pay that. Yeah, if everyone had to pay 1%, everyone who's paying the 1%

can probably afford it. And we can kind of, like, move on as a country. And I don't sound like a hypocrite there, because at the same time I'm talking about leaving because I don't want to pay tax. But it's more, I don't mind paying tax. I'd rather not. What I do mind is overburdensome and oppressive legislation.

That's more like, to drive me away. I accept we live in a society. I accept that humans want to organize themselves. I think wherever you go, if you break down a government, you're going to end up replacing it with something else, which has some kind of governance structure and hierarchy and levels, and it's got to be paid for. I think that's just natural. I just think smaller nations and smaller economies work a lot better, and I'm more inclined to move myself. What a big ramp on I think. No, I think I kind of like the direction that the conversation is going. It's interesting. It does lend itself to some of the concepts in the sovereign individual, but it more on kind of a

gradual scale of starting to, like even just yourself, starting to jurisdiction shop. And, you know, what happens when we have, you know, thousands of Peters moving out of the UK, taking their global media empires with them? and the UK goes, oh, well, maybe we should look at creating a better business environment for people like these. And then you start to have actual competition between jurisdictions instead of treating your constituents like your subjects instead of paying customers. So, yeah, I think with the global money, we'll see more of that. I mean, San Francisco is seeing that brain drain already, right? There's a lot of people now leaving San Francisco.

I mean, the city itself has had a lot of problems over the last few years. I like the way Balaji talks about this, is that the actually, the kind of vote with your foot is a lot more effective than the vote with the ballot. And, you know, San Francisco and California is quite a liberal place. And it feels like it would always stay as like a Democrat state and have quite liberal and progressive politics, whether it's on a local or state level. And if I say anything, which is, if any of my understanding of U.S. politics is wrong. I apologize here. But the point being is that you can't really change anything. with a vote. But what you can do is you can jurisdiction shop. We've seen what the mayor of

Miami's doing, trying to incentivize people to come in. We've seen what's happening in Miami. Now that companies can actually base themselves anywhere and people can work from anywhere, I think this is actually going to be a bit of a game changer. I think we're going to see people just where do I want to live? What do I want? What lifestyle do I want? Where can I pay less tax? And I think that's going to make, that's going to force states and force states to kind of change the way they work and the way they operate. I think San Francisco is going to really struggle. An interesting point you were saying, you can't change, you can't really change that much with your boat. But actually in the United States, they've really determined that money is voting, right?

And, you know, I think that that that's a, that, in that form of voting that you, you can't actually change something. And one good thing about Bitcoin is you control your keys, then you control your vote, right? Comparatively, you know, when you have your money locked into a system where essentially someone else controls it for you, the people that you are trying to change and vote for

also control your ability to do that vote. So I think that sovereign money is going to enable people to have votes that actually matter can't be controlled. I like this because this is playing, John's initial concept is now gradually turning into what I know Jimbo had as a topic. And so I think this might be a good opportunity to segue into Jimbo and his reason for being bullish

because it has a lot to do with what we're talking about. I will just say before we jump into your reason, Jimbo, we've got 150 some odd people watching live, smash that like button, give this a share, get in front of more people. And I'm looking at the chat too, so I'll continue to bring up some of your comments here. But Jimbo, take it away. I think you know what I'm talking about when I say that this has a lot to do with what you wanted to chat about.

Yeah, I was thinking that. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, perfect. Okay, great. Yeah, the thing that makes me bullish about Bitcoin, and this is more of a long-term thing, because we're kind of at the beginning of this. But what Bitcoin does is it fundamentally changes the returns on violence. The problem with violence is that sometimes it works.

If you go and you rob somebody on the street, you get the thing that they were carrying, if they were carrying jewelry, for example. If you go and kill the farmer, you can take their land and you can have the farm. As a result of the fact that violence sometimes works, we create defense coalitions. We band together and we say, okay, well, we will all come to mutual aid if there's an attacker. right? What Bitcoin does is Bitcoin changes the model there. So the only way that you can move Bitcoin is if you have the keys. And so if somebody's intransigent and don't give you the keys, you can't take their Bitcoin. You might still be able to hurt them, but hurting them only hurts the person. It does not change the balance of who has the wealth. Right. So whereas everything else becomes more abundant, food becomes more abundant. Our ability to house and clothe people has been improving over time. It might not seem that way. But I think if you look at the long arc of human, human you'll find that quality of life, generally speaking, in most places at most times, does improve over time. So everything else is becoming more abundant, but this one thing that you can't take from somebody if they're willing to die with it, this one thing you can't take with violence.

So it fundamentally changes the balance of power. And this is a power that has not been with humanity since the advent of basically agriculture. Because ever since agriculture, you can't get up and leave and take the farm with you. Like if you leave, whoever was attacking you get, but that's not true with Bitcoin. You can leave and take it with you. And all they can do is kill you, but they can't take your Bitcoin. I love that. Yeah, that's great.

Again, a very succinct kind of summary of a lot of the concepts discussed in the sovereign individual. I love the idea of diminishing the return on violence. And this plays out on a global level, even in terms of war as well. Obviously, there's real world resources, but you can, it diminishes that return in a couple of different ways. It also prevents a country from just continuously funding said wars too if everybody else is dealing in a finite reserve asset. So very interesting.

I'm going to start passing it down the line. I do want to give a quick shout out to Paul. He dropped a super chat and he said, if Jonathan adds lightning, he'll be a visiting bitwage. So John, let's do it. All right, all right. I got to check out. Let's, you can, you can jump in if you want to chat about Jimbo's,

uh, uh, concept of returns on violence and, uh, I don't know if you've read sovereign individual, but feel free to comment as you please. You got me, John? Oh, what? Oh, yeah. I was going to, if you wanted to add on to, uh, to Jimbo's concept of, uh, around, uh,

returns on violence, even on a local and even regional level. Sure. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, I, I, One thing that I think is going to happen, I'm kind of spinning it a little bit. One thing that I think is going to happen ultimately is when governments are trying to vie for control, let's just zoom out to like some sort of like crypto dream. Right. And crypto is really prevalent and used everywhere.

I think that a way that governments will try to get control back is that they're actually going to become minors. I think that this is their response. to what Jimbo's talking about is actually governments are going to try to control cryptocurrency by becoming miners and will become the major players because they have an additional incentive beyond economic. They have a political and power incentive. And that's going to happen. But as you can see from Jimbo's hat, there is a proven alternative that will at least keep

governments from having full control, which is nodes and user-activated software. works. I think Yeah. Yeah, just this idea of um, nation state adoption of Bitcoin. I keep thinking,

yeah, but come on, really, why? Like, I can't see like the US or the UK. I just, like,

I just feel it's so far off. Um, but one thing that does cross my mind at the moment is that we are aware that essentially Venezuela has been mining Bitcoin. Um, you know, not the most. not in the most fair way. I think they've been stealing the mining equipment of the locals.

And is it right that we've just heard that Russia is essentially moving into mining? There's always rummly. Iran, too? They're basically... Iran. Iran has it around? But the point being is like these countries have actually just realized we've got access to low cheap power because we control the power. we can mine the stuff.

It's worth a lot of money. Yeah, it's a way for them to make money. The interesting thing is that as Bitcoin grows, they start to get a competitive advantage. And it's a bit like, I think about it a bit like how the US, when I think, was it Denver, was it Colorado was the first state to legalize weed?

And then all the other, is that correct? I think so. And then all the other states started seeing how much money they were making in tax revenues. There was like a billion dollars. are like, oh, holy shit, yeah, yeah, and it just suddenly changed. I wonder if it was like other states will start seeing,

holy shit, look how much money they're making. We should maybe be doing this. And that just creates a bit of an arms race within Bitcoin. And I think one of the dangerous things there is that you don't want Western nations to get too, well, let's even say superpowers to get too far behind because they'll have more, they're more of an incentive to kill it rather than to become part of it. Yeah. It's just, I don't know if anybody saw this, but Kentucky,

just put up a bill to reduce tax burden, like I believe it was sales tax on anything to do with electricity and are trying to basically have them be a state competitor in terms of attracting mining to their state. So I think you're right, Pete, that it could be a ways off. But I think over time, what Jonathan's saying about countries mining perhaps themselves, you know, I don't think it's, I don't think it's an out-to-lunch idea. I think it will take time to get there. But, you know, when you see, it's interesting because when you see corporations diving into Bitcoin right now,

whether it be, you know, people starting up mining operations or people put, putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet, those companies may experience themselves becoming more significant in terms of economic impact than many countries that they reside in, just from the gradual appreciation of Bitcoin over time. Like you look at Michael Saylor, what he was able to stack at what I would consider cheap prices. years out, if he holds on, if his company holds on to that amount of Bitcoin, he's going to be better off with his company than a large number of countries. And you may have instances where countries are never able to stack as much as individual companies. And in some cases, some OGs that were around super long.

So you have this weird inversion where you have the potential of an individual having more than a country. Of course, some people look at that in a negative light, but the one thing about Bitcoin, that is the great equalizer, other than if you were lucky enough to get in super, super early, is in order to really see the benefits of Bitcoin, you have to utilize it. You have to spend it in some way, shape, or form. And just because you have Bitcoin, it doesn't guarantee that you're entitled to more, unlike if you're well off in the legacy financial system. if you have money, more money flows to you more or less. So, yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'll pass it to Mags here if she wants to tag on anything. Yes, I also want to kind of connect it to what we talked about earlier about individuals,

jurisdictional shopping and companies. So I worked 10 years in economic development where we were, you know, trying to attract new investment to Canada. How do we, and trying to figure out best ways to, whether it's, you know, bring foreign direct investment or make the companies that we have more efficient. So, you know, reduce their costs, regulatory burden. So seeing this starting to play out, specifically targeting mining is really fascinating in Kentucky. Wyoming's been doing regulations for, I think, for a long time, not for a long time, compared to everyone else that are very

attractive for crypto companies, but seeing it kind of play out into the energy space is interesting. Now, New York has had more general policies that were supportive to bring in miners, but not specifically. So seeing that is interesting. But I think what we have now is both places where how do we attract companies who are now remote, but how do we attract individuals that governments have to consider? And sorry, I lost my chance of thought. I think I'm happy that they're recognizing this. And I think if we have to kind of look at, you know, traditional industries, right,

we used to have very resource-based economy, especially Canada, right? We have, we're blessed with resources, you know, mining sector, steel has become, you know, is quite large. And, sorry. No, but that's about time. And so as we shift to kind of this knowledge and innovation-based economy, we really have to shift our thinking in terms of what industries do we support. If we look at Alberta, they're struggling because they have traditionally been very one, single industry that's been played out that the government traditionally supported,

and then you have the lobbyists that just keep that going. And they're in a rough spot right now. And it would be quite beneficial to kind of both take advantage of the resources that you have. Or just diversify, just like, you know, we talk about diversifying our portfolio. You diversify your economy towards these tech sectors that will, you know, we are fundamentally changing how the financial system will work. Like these, this decade, I think, we will see. and we're already starting to see it.

But I think any country that kind of recognizes this or state level actor like Wyoming and tries to take advantage of it, I think that that's where governments need to go because they need to not only now attract a tax base, and I know we don't like saying that, but basically, you know, it's individual citizens or actual companies. And so now they're competing for both in this remote world. Yeah, I echo that. I think not only is it, will it long term be dangerous for individuals, companies, and potentially nations to not have Bitcoin as a bit of a reserve, but also it'll be dangerous for countries

and jurisdictions that are not Bitcoin friendly because, again, like that, their brain drain will be very real and people who see friendlier places where they can go and take their wealth and take their knowledge and their innovation, they will flow there. And in a remote world, such as we live in now, that's becoming more and more possible all the time. So what I'd like to do now is, Mags, I know you just had the mic, but maybe you just want to segue into, I guess it could be considered, it's kind of on the same wavelength. I know your topic in that it's something that Canada has that the U.S. is yet to allow. So maybe you want to dive into your topic while you're bullish here.

Yeah, so I think we don't have it yet, but we might beat the U.S. to the punch. So I'm particularly feeling bullish this week because an application has been filed to the Ontario Securities Commission, which is kind of the Securities Commission that everybody looks to in Canada. We don't have a federal level SEC equivalent. And so an ETF, a Bitcoin ETF has been filed. And I'm feeling bullish because I think 2021 could be the year that we finally get an ETF. I think, you know, legacy industry, that's something that we've been trying to get for a long time.

And regulators have criticized on a number of reasons against it for, you know, citing concerns about fraud and manipulation. And that's kind of echoed both in whether it's an exchange traded fund, but also when the Bitcoin fund was launching in Canada, there were similar concerns about manipulation and liquidity issues. But as well, what I think is really interesting, so 3AQ took the Securities Commission to court because the Securities Commission actually said no, Bitcoin is. not in terms of an asset that people can invest in retail consumers, it's not in the public

interest to invest in it. So when they took it to court, they won where the judge came down and said, actually, it's not up to the Ontario Securities Commission to decide whether an asset is something that is good or not as an investment, just focus on regulating, you know, are these criminals that are launching products? Are they following the rules? So I think, you know, Van Eck also filed an ETF in the US and this, at the end of December. And so while we have had a number declined in the US, we've kind of got a race on and that's great.

But either way, I do feel like we might get one because a lot of the concerns, whether it's custody or manipulation in markets or illiquidity, we've come a long way. And what Canada does have is this 26-page ruling around, you know, why it is in the public interest, basically, to invest in Bitcoin for retail. And so I feel like this could have a good chance to go through. And I think to one of the reasons, and I know it's not as big as some of the other ideas discussed. It's not as groundbreaking.

But I think having more options for people to get into Bitcoin, you know, not everybody, and I know you talk about this a lot, Peter, on your show, not everyone's ready yet to, you know, have their own private keys to, so I think having various options is beneficial. But tagging in back into the tax issue, because I know I've also seen a lot of comments today in the chat, one of the really cool things in Canada that you have is something called a tax-free savings account. vehicles like, you know, any of the Bitcoin funds that are trading now, Galaxy also launched one. So there's two, there's gray scale and potential ETF, is that investors can hold these investments in their tax-free savings accounts, in their retirement accounts, in their children's education savings accounts. And, you know, it just provides a way to access to allocate towards this asset class in a different way. And from the tax-free perspective,

if you, so every Canadian now has about $75,000 that they could put into their tax-free savings account. So let's say you just went all in on Bitcoin, which, you know, that's not what we, you know, you could say, yeah, yada, yada. But I'm just saying, like, let's say somebody did that last year at, you know, the lows, what was like $4,000.

US, you could 10x and any gain in there, or even like long term, hold it there for 10 years, the benefit would be you would not be taxed on that gain when you take it out. So I think, you know, having various different options for participating in this asset class or investing in it is great for everyone. So I want to see more of these kind of products. And just a quick plug, actually. bit wage actually offers a 401k investment

directly into Bitcoin that's pretty sweet direct Bitcoin 4.1K. Right now it's beta and we're only doing it until 4101K the bitwage itself offers it to its employees and it's you know I think it's going to be I'm really jealous because

we talk about you know cutting out all the middle men but yet we still need to have a and a fund manager and, you know, then they have a custodian. So there's all these fees going to all these players. We could just hold Bitcoin in our tax-free savings account or at least cut out one more middleman and just go there at custodian. That would be the day. Yeah, I always grapple with this because I think about, you know, tax implications down the road.

But at the same time, I'm such a, you know, hold it myself kind of person that I can't. But I recognize how somebody like my dad, who's more traditional, would lean towards something like that. It seems like Pete has wanted to say something here, too. I've got to shoot. I've got to go and take my son. Sorry, I'm going to head off. Sorry, I couldn't stay the whole night. Great to see you.

That's all good. Keep smashing out. Everybody check out what Bitcoin did. Can I just say one thing before I go? How short are our memories that we're all like, Bitcoin's at $35,000? This is bullshit. I'm looking at the chart. I'm like,

oh, God, it's so boring. Yeah. No, it's 0. 035 million is what it is. Yes.

Yeah. All right. Peace out, guys. Love you. All right. See you. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Megs, what I was going to touch on here. Yeah, I'm always, I look at these products and I'm like, oh,

you know, that'd be kind of, kind of cool to have something in a tax-sheltered, uh, vehicle, but then I'm, I'm, then I kind of roll back and I'm like, wait, the whole reason I got into Bitcoin was literally to get myself away from legacy finance. And I have very much done that. But as I was saying, I recognize how people that have grown up their entire lives with the way things are and are not likely to make that technological leap of even understanding what a

wallet is, will still be able to benefit in some way by getting exposure to this. So I think we just kind of have to take the wins where we can get them. But I don't know. Jimbo, what do you feel about funds and things like this? Are you kind of on the same wavelength as me where you're like, cool, but no. Are you super against? Are you super for? Oh, the funds? I guess I have a, so I have have a traditional 401k like many people and the only way that i can get bitcoin exposure is indirectly through things like gray scale or uh you know master now um yeah but that's it micro strategy but but those are kind of the only options so to the degree that it helps me get price exposure in my um 401k jailed funds that's nice i tend to think that the gbtc price premium is due to the fact that

it it's a the premium is about as much as it would cost you to extricate yourself from 401k land, given the fact that it's not an easy swap. So it's not easy to get BTC, like spot BTC in and out of GBTC. There's like a lockup. I'm not familiar with how it works. So because it's hard to get money in and out, and you can't extricate yourself from the 401k land, that's why, in my opinion, it commands a 20% premium. Once there's an ETF, oh, sure, go ahead. You raised a really good point that I meant to bring up. So all these funds, It's Grayscale, you know, CI Galaxy, 3IQ's fund. They all traded a premium.

And just looking over the last week, it's been about in the 20% range. And this premium happens because so a fund launches and it's kind of like an IPO. They raise money. So let's say you raise $100 million. And then Bitcoin is bought. And so that is then listed on the exchange. So it does hold the underlying asset, but it's a closed-down fund. So they're not necessarily, it's not a continuous buying process with, you know, demand versus supply.

So what ends up happening is people like us who are like, hey, yeah, damn right, I want to stick it in my tax-free savings account. That is the only way they can do that. So then there's an additional premium over the net asset value. So the value of the Bitcoin held by the fund, that extra premium represents a demand that people that just want to keep buying it. So the reason why an ETF would be amazing is they're buying on a continual basis versus, you know, some of these funds that maybe are buying in on, I don't know, maybe every three months, they might do another opening. And so I'm expecting that premium to decrease,

which is really better for retail. Because so if you're an accredited investor, which really means wealthy investor until, you know, maybe the regs are changed to be more beneficial. So if you're a rich person, you can just directly, without the premium, put money into the fund. But not everyone can do that. So it provides more access and a fair way to gain exposure to these products.

But I think too, generally, I understand, you know, people like hold your own keys, these funds are a scam. I get where they're coming from, but I think it is an issue of access. It just, you know, maybe your grandma or whatever, she says, hey, stick it in. It's a lot easier for her to manage. And I think about it the same way as, you know, as we shift to this digital world, we do kind of have to think about issues of access. And for example, old people, maybe they, like they're just,

used to going physically into a space and putting, you know, depositing their check and our world has really changed. So we have to, it's a really tricky way to balance the shift towards digital, I think. I think you'll see old people being categorized in 20, 30 years as the ones still using Bitcoin ATMs. Maybe that'll be. This person went to a physical location to get their Bitcoin. Maybe that's where it goes. Maybe not. Maybe not. John or yeah, go ahead. I want to sort of make a point about sort of the centralization of Bitcoin. And I actually think it's it's bound to happen in multiple different ways. And I think you can actually make an allusion to the US dollar, the cash dollar. So the cash dollar itself,

even though it's produced in the centralized way, has some form of decentralization right in terms of i have my piece of cash someone has to put a gun to my head to take it uh there's no intermediary right so when you do transactions though now you don't do it with the physical cash you do it on a on a centralized online middleman service right and uh that makes it more efficient right there's nothing inherent on the cash bill that makes it efficient right the cash bill isn't achieving so many transactions per second it's vizzi Right? And I think that this is actually going to happen with Bitcoin.

I think that there will be essentially electronic tokens pegged to Bitcoin, but on centralized systems, right? We see it in decentralized systems. We see it on Ethereum. And I think that that exact thing is going to happen. And so what you're going to have is you're going to have your savings accounts, you know, the ones that you really care about will be your coin, you know, you're going to hold your private keys for that.

But when you're trying to do everyday transactions, when you're trying to do coffee, sure, there is lightning network that exists out there. And it's very cool. It's still hard to use. I think that there will also be centralized alternatives for sort of these daily transactions that people are just going to use because, you know, they're old fashioned. Yeah, go Jimbo. Yeah, I'd like to speak to a little bit. So part of what I think makes Bitcoin so difficult for a lot of people to comprehend. is that it's the first thing that you can really own that is digital.

Nothing else that has been digital is something you really own. So if you buy a gold ETF, you don't have gold. You have somebody else's IOU for gold, right? And our entire system is based on these dematerialized things. You don't have the thing itself. You have somebody's promise of the thing itself. When you have a bank account, you don't have money. You have the bank's promise that you have some money.

And even the bills that we're now talking about, the fiat currency, it's not redeemable for anything. It's somebody's promise that it's worth something, right? Everything is based on promises. Nothing is real. But Bitcoin is real. You can run your own node. You can have your own keys. You can have the thing itself. If you run your own node and you have your own keys, you are a sovereign member of the network. There's no need to dematerialize it. There's no need to represent it with somebody's promise. You can just have the thing itself. Lightning Network is that. Liquid is not. Liquid is another promise. It's somebody else's promise on top. Right? W, whatever it is, WBTC, that's somebody else's promise, right? But you don't have to do that. You can go straight to the thing itself. And that, that I think is the revolution of Bitcoin. So I know that everybody really wants to dematerialize it. They want to use IOUs and credit, but you don't have to anymore. And that's, that's in my opinion, the real revolution.

I think, and I want to tag on to what you're saying, I think what we're going to see is, I, I lean towards what Jimbo said on this in terms of, my preference. The whole point of Bitcoin and the whole need for a decentralized sound money in the first place was the failings of the gold standard where it was an abstraction of gold to accomplish that divisibility and easier transferability. But that failed because there was trust involved there, right? They said there was X amount of gold per X amount of dollars, but then quickly found out that was not the case. And over time it happened on a nation state level where you had an entire country renege

on the convertibility of dollars to gold and put us into a multi-decade spiral of fiat currency being printed, which we're seeing like the absolute extremes of in the past year. Now what I do think will happen though is people will continue to try to build these kind of abstract. actions and tokenizations of Bitcoin. The difference being they're welcome to do that, but now there's a real cost because there's no final, no lender of last resort to come bail that out.

If you hold a bunch of Bitcoin and you have a token that is pegged to it one to one, and you fuck that up, there's nobody's going to come and fix it for you. You have to get the Bitcoin or you have to go out of business. And so while I think it's going to happen, well, I think people will use stuff like that. There will also be very real cost and it will either fall upon the shoulders of the business or will fall upon the shoulders of the individuals that are using those tokens, probably both. And because of this, we'll see kind of a return to an amount of reasonable risk taking instead of the excesses that we've seen over the past number of decades.

I think obviously things got way out of control, and they haven't been fixed since the financial crisis in 2008-2009. It's gotten exceptionally worse. But what happens when we start seeing mainstream, you know, approved, regulated funds, and what happens when there's the first major breach of something like that? I don't want that to happen, but there will be real cost to it. That'll probably be the reason for the next round of FUD and Bitcoin is over in like

2025 when we're flirting with multiple millions of dollars per coin. You know, the world will be ending when we drop from 10 mil to five. But yeah, I think there's real risk there. And I think... Did you see Lop's tweet? He said he's heard that at least there's one. fund where it's split three ways across a piece of paper. Like that is called up.

Oh my God. See, this is the kind of shit we're going to see, though. We're going to see the companies that have been dealing with this stuff for a long time that understand the nuances of security. And it's not to say that they're beyond the reach of having things go sideways on them either. Everybody's susceptible. But you're going to see the banks. or the traditional financial institutions that are like,

we can do that. We got this. We're not going to, you know, we can just figure it out. And then they fuck up way worse than anybody else could. And yeah, I think it's just a house of cards waiting for a flick. And that will come eventually. I just don't know when. I don't know if anybody wants to add on, take it away.

Those honey pots just keep getting bigger. So big. Can you imagine gray scale? You imagine somebody getting into grayscale. And like, what do you do at that point? Like, obviously, the market takes a massive hit. Do other fun, like, at that point is, does everybody start going, oh, shit, I have money in a fund. How secure are these guys?

Are they leveraging? Like, what's going on? I think, again, it brings consequence to poorly managed security. And we haven't seen a lot of that until recently. until money became natively digital. So I don't know. Small enough insurance in some cases. I know some funds have insurance.

And now I don't know whether the insurance covers stupidity. Like, you know, how you store it? Well, duh. But in some ways, you know, the more better insurance. And there's like a reinsurance industry against that. Because I think, you know, as this asset crass grows and these funds start to get into like trillions of dollars, maybe. be or 100 billion, etc.

Then that's where it gets really risky on the insurance side. And well, and the insurance is denominated in a dollar amount, correct? Yeah. And so when does it get to a point where these funds become so large that if it were taken down, you couldn't even print enough money to buy the Bitcoin back? That's really good. Yeah, that's a good point. Like look at Mount Gox, right?

It's been, what, seven years now, six years? And those people that, like, Bitcoin's appreciated so much that you're still probably getting more money out at your percentage that you're getting out than what you originally put in, even though it's a fraction. And so, like, same thing, bankruptcy proceedings in Quadriga, right? Like, that's been happening for, probably it'll maybe two-year process in the end. And, you know, Bitcoin's come a long way since. And, you know, those people that get their money, they're going to be like, damn, I'm going to take that and buy back. It's so much higher now. Do we see, do you think we see real-time proof of reserves because of an instance like that?

Do you think that becomes like one person does it and then it becomes a standard? Like, what do you guys think? Yeah, I do. I think the industry is moving towards that. And I think it's almost like competitive advantage if you do. that. In Canada, it is bit... Who's doing it? BIPI is doing proof of reserves, one of the first exchanges to do that. Nice. I mean, you know, obviously, but proof of reserves doesn't mean that they can't lose money. It just sort of throws whatever. It means they haven't lost it yet, right?

It's here to be lost. You know, there are some, you know, stable coins, I think. I think stable coins need to need to kind of do that too. You know, I think that the a lot of the industry is, even if we don't necessarily think that they're the future is actually kind of reliant on that. I mean, you look at the top exchange and you have essentially stable coin pairings with Bitcoin, right? I mean, that's a whole other risk vector. It's like what if what if the stable coins, you know, failed? What happens? to all that trading that's happening on Binance, which is like, you know, one of the most liquid markets. That's a, I think another, another sort of risk that that exists on the market.

That worries me. Let's, since you're on the topic of tether, this and stable coins and everything, everybody always is seeing, I think, you know, back in 2017, like the, the biggest, maybe not necessarily. fud, but I, maybe a little fuddish was, was around, oh, they're just printing billions of tether specifically to run up the price of Bitcoin. That was like the conspiracy theory at the time. But I was having a conversation with somebody today about this. And my reasoning as to why, even if that was the case, even if somebody just was like was on the tether printer just burying away and buying up Bitcoin.

It doesn't, to me, it doesn't really change the value of Bitcoin because that's the actual finite asset that is out there. It'd be like Venezuela printing boulevars and buying up gold with it. It doesn't detract from the finite nature of gold. It detracts from the viability of their actual native currency. And so all they've done is they found a loophole to get gold out of somebody else's hands and into their own. And so when I think about tether quote unquote fud and printing and stable coins being pumped up to purchase Bitcoin, I mean, don't sell them your Bitcoin if you're worried about that because then you'll be left with bags full of imaginary dollars if that's your position. So I don't know. I'm sure you guys have heard a lot of the fud around that kind of stuff.

I don't know if any of you want to touch on it. Maybe Jimbo or John, you haven't chimed in on that yet. Yeah, I mean, I don't have a really strong opinion on Tether or really any of the other quote unquote stable coins because they're not stable and they're hardly coins. So, I mean, like all the money that exists is created as credit and debt anyway. So how is USDT really any different than US dollars? Because a bank could just make fresh dollars and, you know, they don't have any reserve requirements anymore. So yellow, they could just buy Bitcoin if they wanted to. So to me, it's not really any different.

It's just more of the status quo, the quote unquote. stablecoins. Yeah. John? Yeah, I mean, of course, you know, it wouldn't have any long-term effect on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the honeybatcher, right? It's going to keep going no matter what. It's really just a short-term thing and people getting burned because the, you know, I don't want anyone to get burned. I mean, obviously there are these cycles and these new people that, you know, they buy at the top and then they lose a lot. And that, that's, that's, sucks. I mean, you know, if they have a, the willpower, be the financial capacity to hold until the next cycle, then then I'm happy for them. And that's, that's mainly my, my, my fear there.

But of course, long term, it has no effect on it. I mean, Bitcoin and stablecoins are completely different things. Stable coins are just, you know, a different version of something that we already have. Bitcoin is the only digital money that you can truly own. It only, so that's never, that's not going to change. And I think that, you know, as things like, so, so I sort of see, you know, a potential outcome for Bitcoin being like, the global reserve currency, a situation occurring where essentially the faith in the stability of the U.S. dollar gets shaken, right? And what are people going to do when that happens? I don't know Bitcoin is the obvious answer. But when you look at alternatives, you're like, okay, well, Chinese Yuan is the biggest competitor,

but who trusts the Chinese government's prediction, right? Okay, what about euros? Well, we don't know if euros will be around in 20 years, right? That's kind of an unstable thing that's happening. So then you go to some old standards, like gold, right? But of course, if you go to gold, you can only trade. you know, representations of it.

And that's where Bitcoin is going to shine. Is that going to happen this year? Hopefully not. I actually hope that the dollar doesn't totally crater this year. I need more time.

Yeah, but, but I think that that will, you know, that that's sort of the trajectory and the possible, the possible reasoning there for the long term. Yeah.

Yeah. Mags, do you want to tag onto that at all? Yeah. Will the U.S. dollars, greater this year? Is it all over? Is it happening now? That's being a little bullish. No, but on the Tether side, I mean, Nick Carter's done some really good analysis on that.

So if anyone wants to learn more, definitely go there. And I think one of the things that stood out to me was what he thought where, let's say, Tether kind of implodes. Yes, you know, people, it will shake people's belief maybe in digital currencies, but that could actually be a good event for Bitcoin because people will flee to a relatively safe asset. So instead of all these tether pairs, which has grown quite a lot since, you know, people used to be a lot more Bitcoin versus this this or that coin. Now, you know, people will flee to Bitcoin. So it could be good in some ways. Okay. Here's what I want to do. So we're going to start rounding out here. But I want to, because I think we've got some differences of opinion on one thing here.

And so I'm just going to, I'm going to leave this down to a showdown here for, we'll do it in like a pitch style. But it's going to be Bitcoin only or crypto. And so I know that. myself and Jimbo likely lean towards the Bitcoin will kind of be what it is. I'm not sure, John, you're probably somewhere in the non-confrontational crypto land and Mags maybe perhaps you might be leaning that direction, I'm unsure. So I'm going to, I'll do kind of my pitch as to, because there's a bunch of people in the comment too. There's a lot of individuals coming into the space right now.

They're trying to kind of see what's what and understand everything. So I typically try to lean people towards Bitcoin specifically. And a reason I do that is for a few reasons, but it has to do typically with the infrastructure that Bitcoin is built upon and the kind of promises that I see is falling short of pretty much everything else in the space. You know, Bitcoin, while not cheap to transact on the base layer, that wasn't really the initial reason for it being created. It was kind of created as an opt-out of government currency, as a way to step out of the

irresponsibility of traditional financial systems, of traditional central banks. and it achieved that through its decentralization over time. It had an actual fair launch. It remains easy for those that want to do so to run a full node and actually verify the actual protocol and things like the supply itself. And I think that long term, even though alt coins will likely continue to exist because people just like,

speculating on things or experimenting. I think that in terms of value, Bitcoin will gradually, and I could be wrong, but I think Bitcoin will gradually trend towards being viewed globally as the world's scarcest asset, and thus over time, everything will trend down in purchasing power

in terms of Bitcoin and Satoshi's. So that's kind of where I sit on the spectrum. I'm happy that there's competition because then interesting ideas can be had and then we can just put that on top of Bitcoin. But that's kind of where I sit. And it's not that I think that there shouldn't be altcoins, but I do see value in Bitcoin that I don't see in other areas. So I just wanted to get your thoughts on this. So maybe let's start with John. Then we'll go Jimbo.

Then we'll go Mags. Okay. So my general hypothesis is that, Let's take it a step back. Like, what's the value of a blockchain? And the value of a blockchain in my general hypothesis is censorship resistance and digital scarcity. These are the two most important things because I think that the concept of smart contracts is purely only to enable something that needs censorship resistance and digital scarcity to exist and do other things. But actually are less efficient than a centralized database.

And so most things outside of Bitcoin do not fit my definition of something that needs censorship resistance and needs digital scarcity. If it did, I would be willing to accept that these things are valuable. So while I believe that Bitcoin is sort of the best, money is the best use case I've seen so far. and Bitcoin is the money use case. But I'm open to other things. I am actually skeptical on a lot of other things, but I don't outright hate them. And also, our business, we offer more than just Bitcoin,

and that's a market demand thing. I mean, people are not ready to have their full wages in Bitcoin, but people are ready to have part of it in Bitcoin. part of it in a stable plan, right? So, so there, there are use cases today for it, even if maybe the fundamental doesn't make that much sense. So wait, let's jump to Jimbo. What's, what's your kind of prevailing position? Obviously, you wrote your book. Maybe you want to tag on a bit. Oh, yeah, sure. So, yeah, not to show my book too hard. The book is called Orange Coin Good. I was originally going to write a much longer book, and I realized that nobody wants to read a 600-page book.

So I decided to break it up into four books. The first one's Orange Coin Good. That's 150 pages. The next book's going to be called Bitcoin, not Shitcoin, which is where we're going to discuss at length this particular topic. But to really shrink it down because I don't want to take up mag time. I want to give everybody time. Bitcoin is really three things. It's a programmable money.

It's a computer network, and it's a social phenomenon. on, right? The programmable money part exists on the blockchain. It's public data. Anybody can make a copy if they want to and fork it. In fact, there are websites that will let you, like, you know, build your own fork of Bitcoin if you want, and you can just start one up. You can clone, you can make your own computer network. You could spin up a whole bunch of AWS nodes or Azure nodes. You could make as many nodes as you want. So it's not just the money and it's not just the network, but it's the people. The people of Bitcoin, the bitcoins are ultimately what imbue the project with value. It's because people, value that network and they run their own notes and they hold the Bitcoin, that's what gives the whole system value. So as far as like altcoins go, as I mentioned, you can copy the code. It's open source. You can copy the ledger. It's all public data. It's simply too easy to make shit coins that were ever going to be free of them. People will just make them. And to Ben's point, people like to gamble on stuff and they feel like they've missed the boat. Like, oh, you know, Bitcoin is already, you know, 0.035 million dollars per coin. You know, I feel like I'm

the boat, I want to gamble on something else. What's the next thing? So of course, we're going to have that. But at the same time, Bitcoin is a computer network. If any other altcoin came up with a new feature, and that's what a lot of these things have is new features. Let's say that there's a new old coin that comes into existence, it has some new feature that Bitcoin hasn't adopted yet. And let's say it's really gangbusters is really great feature. Well, Bitcoin can adopt that feature and keep its database. And Bitcoin's existing ledger plus new feature is way better than feature plus shitcoin token. Right? So there's no way to, you know, that an altcoin can, in my opinion, long-term beat Bitcoin at being money. And that's what,

that's what this game is all about. That's my two sets. Awesome. All right. Let's let's jump to Mags. Mags. Where do you sit on the spectrum? So I want to kind of continue with, you know, both your lines of thinking. And I think like primarily, you know, Bitcoin as money as a store of value is your best option, you know, whether it comes from the scarcity element, unseasurable, uncensurable. But I think it's very difficult to have everybody in the whole world just make that choice. And I think to go along with the socialness, I think if you look at, we all have tribes. You know, traditionally it's been countries. Now we have tribes, whether it's like Facebook groups or like, you know, people are going to clubhouse or whatever. So I think, you know, each of those tribes will have their

own maybe medium of exchange or currency. And so I think it's really hard to remove that tribal element from it. And we already see that in our space. And to your point, Jimbo, about Bitcoin can eventually, you know, implement any of these great ideas. And I think that's right. But I think we'll still see people experimenting because it takes Bitcoin is the way it is because it's a long process.

People can't just suddenly change it and then, you know, and, you know, And it's a fight to have any kind of change. And that's good because it means there's certainty. And so if it were easy to change, it probably wouldn't be what it is. And so people will experiment. You know, there are things like, you know, crypto-composables and non-fungible tokens and where you can, you know, do all sorts of elaborate things. And it's not being done on Bitcoin.

I think people will continue to do that and push the boundaries of whether it's, you know, the financial system or digital art. And so I think there'll always be people that want to keep pushing things fast and breaking things and, you know, scamming others. But I think, you know, it's a good innovation playground to see what is needed as we kind of shift our society forward. And if that is an element that we decide as a society that now in this digital world we need, we can't eventually implement it.

But I think it's really hard to just have everyone shift to the Bitcoin standard at least, you know, in the next few decades. Yeah, I think, and I think that over time, you're right, like there's always going to be projects that are spun up and people tinkering. I think it will take, I think it will take some time for the public at large to kind of treat other projects accordingly, though. Right now, Bitcoin is kind of lumped in with everything. you know, you see like Coinbase adding literally every coin.

And when you sign up on a lot of larger exchanges, you're kind of inundated with, you know, you came here for Bitcoin. Here's a list of things to actually speculate on. And so a lot of people's first foray into Bitcoin is gambling with the coin that they just bought. And I think over time, you'll kind of see a shift away. from that as people realize that, you know, the brand new project that just started isn't necessarily worth $10 billion market cap. I think it will go away from that and people will start to realize most of these projects are what they should be considered is penny stocks, right? Like you might have something that does okay.

You might make some money, but like people shouldn't be dumping billions of dollars into these things. And so, yeah, I think it'll be a gradual shift there. And Bitcoin kind of just stays as this mainstay of what a perfect, not perfect, but what an excellent store of value and scarce digital asset should be. And then there'll be other things. And Bitcoin can adopt features gradually and carefully over time if they have enough merit. So that's kind of where I think we're at. But I was actually surprised.

Most of us are pretty close on the same wavelength. So yeah, cool. There are around 150 people odd, some odd people here. Make sure you guys smash like, give this a share. Yeah, I think we can start rounding it out here. I wanted to say, guys, thank you so much for being on. Really enjoyed chatting with you all. John Jimbo, Mags, always a pleasure.

If you guys, I'm going to go down the line really quick. If you guys want to give one quick last who you are, where people can find you, anything like that would be great. So let's start with John here. Yeah, you can check out my company, Bitwage of Bitwage.com or my Twitter at John Chess. Should I check out Bitwage, get paid in Bitcoin, get your international payment on Bitcoin.

with that good stuff. Awesome, awesome. Jimbo, how about you? Hey, I'm at JimboCoin on Mastodon and increasingly less frequently Twitter and Telegram. And my book is called Orange Coin Good. You can find it on Amazon. Awesome. And Mags, how about you?

Hi, guys. You can find me on Twitter, Crypto underscore Mags. We're also starting up an educational channel. Don't worry, Ben. We won't be too competing with you. Not allowed. But no, it's because it was like fun, educational content, primarily Bitcoin. Just, and maybe, I don't know, more female friendly.

Right. I hate my viewership, my female viewership is up to 12%. Whoa. I remember when it was like nine or something. I know. But we have a sister channel too for anyone who's Spanish speaking. It's BTC and Español. Bitcoin, it's all about Bitcoin, the longest standing Spanish.

Spanish speaking channel. Check that out too or if you have family that wants to learn about Bitcoin in Spanish. But yeah, so we're starting to transition some of that content

into English on Metamesh. Sorry, metamesh. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Sweet. Well, everybody in the chat,

thank you very much for being here. I'm going to just drag out people's audio and video. So again, guys, thanks for being here. I'll just do my quick outro

and head out. So cheers everybody. Everybody watching, thank you for being here. As always, you guys are awesome. Love having you. Lots of people in the chat today. Thanks for contributing. As always, if you really liked what you saw, you can always do a few things.

Like, subscribe, and share. Those really help because it gets this in front of more eyeballs. If you want to help with the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsors I mentioned in the links down below. That was Leden. That was Cobo, Bit Refill, and, Privacy pros for the Bill Fottle. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin Lightning Network tip.

It works. It's here at my tippin.me page, t-p-p-p-in.me slash at BTC Sessions. With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful Friday. And I will see you next time for your daily session.