BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Brian DeMint, Dave Bradley, Mike Cook ep411

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

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Yo, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish in a slightly different location today. And I'm flanked here by the, what's your title again? I am widely known as the strongest and best-looking Bitcoin entrepreneur in Canada. The strongest and best-looking Bitcoin entrepreneur in Canada. And also the premier of our province has a good quote on your website. What did she say about you? She said very simply, Dave is very handsome.

Okay, perfect. So, I mean, we just want to establish that off the top of the show, so everybody knows. But hope everybody's having a good week. Hope everybody's stoked for the having. It is very quickly going to be upon us here. So we're going to get going. We got a couple more gentlemen in the wings ready to join us pretty quick. But of course, this is live.

and in a new location with an entirely new setup for this week. I've never used any of this stuff, so we'll see what happens. But with that in mind, this is live. Anything can happen. I defer to my friend Bill here. Live. Okay. We'll do it live.

Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. And if you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things. getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we bring in our guests,

quick look at where we are in the market right now. And if I can get my, there we go, Chrome tab, there we go. So we're pulling up. I'm janecallender.com. And simultaneously, I'm going to be pulling up the live chat. So everything that you say from here on in will be live for the world to see. Also, I love that lightning goats is in the chat. I feel like we're now kindred spirits because ever since I did the live stream with Nico and OptiOn simply,

and we were getting to pay to feed goats live on the internet with lightning payments in real time. You know, there's a special moment for me. So lightning goats, good to see you. But in terms of the market, we're sitting at 64,3009. $99 U.S. dollars per coin. A single U.S. dollar will grab you 1,5333 sats in terms of fees. You are looking at 61 sats per byte next block, 12, 12 sats per byte anytime. And in terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.69 million of them, that's 93.75% of the total supply.

And we are, looks around two hours out from the halving. It's looking to hit somewhere around 608 p.m. My time, which is mountain time. So 808 Eastern. So we'll see. Blocks, it really can happen any time now. So we get a few quick blocks that could be entirely different. Before we dive into the show, we'll just do a quick shout-out to sponsors,

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All right, we are back, and it's time to bring in our other guests. I want to welcome on stage Mr. Brian DeMint and Mr. Mike Cook. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. And, of course, one of the most handsome and strongest. entrepreneurs and in uh bitcoin entrepreneurs got to be specific in canada dave bradley uh that's obvious yeah obvious i i guess it requires no introduction i suppose uh so gentlemen good to have you uh let's do a quick round of intros who are you what do um dave i'll all that you take it first then we'll pass it down the line yeah as you mentioned um other than being the strongest and

best looking bitcoin entrepreneur i have been involved in a number of different companies um we'll recently Bitcoin Well, one of your sponsors there where I am currently advising on the board and then I have a bunch of other balls in the air. But nothing to talk about there yet. Awesome. Awesome. We'll toss it down the line to Mike. Dude, first time on the show.

Welcome. Do you want to give yourself a little intro? It's great to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me. I am a co-founder and managing mentor of Bitcoin Mentor, which I expect to talk out about a little bit today. So it's great to be here. Awesome. Good to have you, man. And Brian, good to see you. I think I maybe saw you in passing a little bit in Madeira recently, but it was a busy time. But it's good to see you, man. How are you? And let people know who you are what you do.

Yeah, man. It was, yeah, Madera was crazy fast. I just because of like family obligations, I was in Madeira for 40 hours. And I live in California. So I ended up being 50 hours, excuse me, about 50 hours 32 hours of travel for 40 hours in Madeira so the tradeoff was was all right but yeah i stopped by a few of your seminars and i was like in the back like trying to distract you and stuff but i think you're you're just such a pro you were dialed in um but yeah a little bit about me um i wrote this book behind me called bitcoin evangelism uh it's a it's a you know it's it's an introductory book for for bitcoiners um that that you know hundred hours that you need that initial hundred hours obviously you need 10 000 hours of study but that initial hundred

hours. I think we can consolidate it into that resource right there. That's going to tee you up really nicely to read those, you know, those Bitcoin standards and things like that. I have a book launching tomorrow, which we talk to talk about in a little bit called Parallel. And I am the chief marketing officer for Orange Bill App. So I get to be the hype guy behind connecting plebs in real life all over the world. So there's a lot to be excited about. And that's why I was I asked Ben if I could be on the show this week just because I am freaking pumped. It's all crescendoing with the with the having. Couldn't be more pumped about that right now.

I mean, it's a beautiful time to be alive. The mechanism that Satoshi built to get people excited. I mean, he didn't build it to get people excited. But matter of fact, it gets people excited. It changes the game every single four years. That's happening in two hours. What an amazing time to be alive and to be on Ben's show. Well, I'm glad I'm glad to have you, man, and glad to have all you.

So we're just, we're just going to dive into it. And also, a quick shout to everybody in the chat. I see Doug and Ryan and Kay and Chris Kay and David. David Wrong, of course, always a welcome guest. But we're going to dive into it. Anybody watching that's unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish, very simple premise to the show. Number one, each one of us has a reason for being bullish.

It can be whatever we want. And the flow of the show is, first, somebody's going to drop their reason for being bullish. What are they excited about? Get that off your chest. Give a little rant on it. Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, comments, questions, whatever rabbit holes would go down. And then number three, we're going to rotate to the next person until we have all had a turn. So with that, I'm going to start off with my reason for being bullish this week.

And it's in and around, I suppose, like a scale. mechanism for Bitcoin, but also a privacy mechanism for Bitcoin. And something that I began to see proliferate in little spots in the Bitcoin ecosystem the last little bit, one of which was in Madeira. And then more broadly speaking, within Mutiny Wallets, which is a mobile lightning wallet that you can get from the App Store, but you can also like side load it and everything like that. They're a pretty cool project. And then possibly a bit more locally in the next few months here as well. And that is, is fetaments. And so I'm kind of interested in

again, just in the context of I love that there's there's this, obviously with tradeoffs, There's this cool new mechanism where you can have a community pool of funds that allows people within that pool to have instant and free transactions that are basically perfectly private between anybody in that mint, including the people running the mints, are unable to decipher who owns what. but then also that the entire ecosystem is cross compatible with lightning. And so you can send just from like a FETI, so FETI is the app, a FETI wallet, out of it to any lightning recipient or to anybody in a totally separate Fetament via the Lightning Network. And so we're starting to see a little bit of this in the wild. And one of the cool things I noticed the other day, which is kind of the impetus for this, is within my, and I'm just looking right now, but within Mutiny Wallet, for those that have played around with it before, they've integrated Fetamins in the background as an easy initial

onboarding mechanism for newcomers to Lightning. And the reason for that is if you're a brand newcomer to Lightning and you're receiving your transactions for the first time, to do it self-custodially right out the gate, you're going to incur charges for on-chain fees to set up Lightning channels. And that can be pretty cumbersome if you're just doing your first dollar or two worth of transactions. You're not going to want to set up a, it's pay $10 to open a channel to only have $2 of that. spendable within the channel. And so you've got to kind of have these step functions of, okay, well, maybe I'll do something that has like a slight compromise until I build, you know, previously it would be just straight up custodial lightning where there's like one entity just holding all your funds or sit

your ass on the exchange until you have enough money. Now there's kind of like this middle ground with fetaments where it's like there's a community pool of funds. There's a multi-sig governing it has interoperability with lightning in and out and you can kind of build funds within the mint. And then what they've done in mutiny is when you go in and I won't be able to accurately show this here because I don't have the full setup. But nonetheless, by default, your initial transactions, especially smaller ones, are going to be directly into a fetament. And then at any point, there's a swap button that says, hey, you can swap this now into your own lightning channel and have full custody of it. And so it gives people that ability to not just rely on a singular trusted party, but kind of, you just spread that out a little bit.

So multiple people would have to rug you at the same time at least. And then you can build that balance and then get it into your own channels if you want. And so we saw this also in Madeira. They have a, for the conference they had their federation and they used it for the conference, but they decided to keep it. And so now the island of Madeira or the Free Madeira Project has their own fetament. And now within Mutiny as well, there's a section that says manage federations and it used to be blank, but now there's a section that says discover federations.

And there's a bit of a reputation system where people within mutiny wallet can go and vet particular federations and say, hey, I will put my reputation behind this federation. I think it's a solid one. And so it gives like a little bit more, you know, nothing is for certain, but it gives a little bit more. It makes it a little less scary to enter a federation. I would still say everything's it very early, and so you want to tread lightly and minimize your exposure. But like as an initial onboarding for somebody just receiving the first few bucks via lightning, I think that's a pretty acceptable tradeoff. And I think it's miles better than just like a singular like wallet of Satoshi or something like that.

So I quite like it. And also I like the prospect of the fact that there, from what I hear, there's a possibility there may be like a fetament setup. I mean, I would love to see one set up for the Calgary area because we're doing that circular economy and we're doing the sat market and all that. I'd really like to see that happen locally so that local vendors could be part of a fetament

and be able to privately pay peer-to-peer instance, you know, like in the community pool. So I hope to see these pockets pop up around the globe, in little communities and grow and then interconnect via lightning and lightning being the glue that holds it all together. So I know that was a bit long-winded, but I'm just super interested to see it proliferate and see when the state inevitably hates it, how resilient it is. And we'll see how that pans out. I don't know, Dave, do you think it's, we'll hold up against that or no? Yeah, I mean, in the state that it's in right now,

Bitcoin and the Lightning Network would not be well set up to hold up against the state, I think. There's way too many coins and the custodians. The Lightning Network is mostly in custodial wallets or not working that well. And so I think there's a lot of changes that need to happen. And like, yeah, hopefully Fedomint's like, you know, functionally it's not dissimilar to the Liquid Network. and using lightning in and out of the liquid network, the difference is this would just allow people to set up their own version, their own federation a lot easier.

And that's where I think it becomes a lot harder to crack down on is once there's not only like many players within the federation, but many federations that you can choose from. And if the liquidity between the federations is good, and you know, you start to say, hey, this is a federation with the majority of its members are in a country that I don't trust, maybe I should use a different federation. Yeah. So, you know, the Canadian Federation might be a little, we might need some keyholders

outside of Canada. They like to shut down bank accounts and things like that year. So we've got to add your bets, I suppose. I think there's also a very good point worth considering that is one of the main things that keeps us safe, I think, from the major overreach of government. we're seeing it all around the world is that these people are very bad at everything. And we'd be in really big trouble if they weren't, right? So, you know, the more complicated you make things, the harder it's going to be for them to crack down. Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, I think the disbursement of this system. And again, there's going to be Francis Pugliad always makes a good point where it's like when everybody can create a mint. everybody will. And that means there'll be some good ones that may be over time build reputation. But there's also going to be some horrible ones that rugpole. And so you've got to kind of balance that risk and, and again, minimize your exposure to them. Or like, if you begin to build trust in one over like an extended extended period of time, then maybe it will seem perceptively a little less scary to do so. Yeah. It seems as though the, the fetaments are a little bit more

easy to access, like a sort of a gradual accessibility to eventual full self-custody. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It's a nice inroads where you're not having to say like, oh, God, I got to, you know, especially when fees really spike, oh, God, I got to pay $20, $25 to open a channel just to get my first transaction. Yeah, you don't want to be dealing with that. And so to have that in between, I think.

that's a positive thing. I don't know if, Brian, did you, I mean, you're down so briefly, you probably didn't get a chance to play with the Fetty app while you were there, did you? No, I didn't. I know a lot of people were talking about it. Did you run a demo on it as well? I didn't, but I'm thinking that I probably should next time. I think that's going to be one of the the main things that I'd really like to cover. But I mean, it's pretty cool. So like within the app, you know like you can like there's there's the fetti app but then you can also like the the mint for Madeira you can use it in that app or you can go to mutiny wallet and you can just basically says like either scan the QR or paste the the code of the mint that you're joining and then once you're

there it just pops up and it kind of looks like a regular bitcoin wallet or lightning wallet request and send. But you can have contacts, you can have chats, you can have integrations of like within the app, other apps. So like built into the Madeira one was like bit refill and the Bitcoin company. So you get gift cards. They had like an AI assistant where you pay in SATs per computation. They have like Geyser Fund for donating to different causes.

They even had like the schedule for the actual event. baked into the Feddy app, which was kind of cool. And so, like, there's a lot of functionality there, but just like in terms of easy payments locally, I thought it was pretty sweet. But it's worth playing with anyways. How many guardians are there usually in the Fedman? I think it's up to the mint,

how they're going to delegate it. And much like a regular multi-stick. I think you've got plenty of play. And funny enough with the Madeira one, which makes sense. It's going to be a weird balance because you have the ethos of Bitcoin, don't trust, verify. But the problem with Fetamint in that regard is you want to be kind of secretive as hell as to who the keyholders are, because you're trying to avoid that top-down capture. And so you can't really publicly say who's holding keys.

So it's very much like a time and reputation game, a game when it comes to Fedomints. It's like there's going to be some people who might know who a keyholder is or a couple. But like at the end of the day, you want the plausible deniability of like, I don't know, I just like this mince and I don't know who the keyholders are. And so I think that's kind of the game that's being played here. is like, let's make sure this is resilient to that top down pressure while still allowing for cheap, perfectly private instant transactions. Yeah, we'll see. Well, I think what's so exciting about this is, so when I went to, I went to a couple

conferences last year that were, you know, Bitcoin, like Bitcoin Miami and a couple other smaller ones. And you were selling books or whatever we would, we would sell at the merch booth. It was pretty surprising at a Bitcoin conference how few people wanted to pay in Bitcoin, first of all, and how few people had ever at a Bitcoin conference. So you paid a thousand bucks to get there, you know, plus travel, plus accommodations, all this stuff. And these people, I'd say probably 20% of them had ever used lightning.

Like most of them didn't have a lightning wallet at all. And so you'd say, okay, well, go ahead and set up a lightning wallet. And they'd say, okay, well, what should I do? I say, well, just to make it easy, just do wallet of Satoshi because wallet of Satoshi was still active at the time in the U.S. And they'd say, oh, well, but I heard that that's a custodial one. So it was this weird balance of they hadn't messed around with lightning. And my go-to was always just give them the simplest form to onboard them because a lot of times that does work out. It's, you know, you get them to use their first lightning payment.

But then you had these prints, this balance of I don't want to try it because I'm also a principled Bitcoiner. And I want to keep in line with the ethos of Bitcoin and this idea of self-custody and stuff. So it was a weird balance. So I think that this is a great solution, a really necessary solution. And as frustrating as that is that you're like, wow, the Bitcoiners who I thought are these very forward-thinking tech-driven people were also kind of these rigid principled people where if something's outside of our comfort level, again, it's like these people just broke through their comfort level to get into Bitcoin in the first place and self-custy

and all that kind of stuff. Now you're asking them to do another thing. Well, if you're asking them to do another thing, but it's not in line with the first thing you ask them to do self-custody, cold storage and all that kind of stuff, they're like, wait, isn't this going backwards in my journey? Is it going forwards or backwards? So I think Fetamint is a really cool, bullish solution

because I think the next epoch of Bitcoin is going to be defined by a couple of things, one of those things being spending your Bitcoin. I think that that's going to be huge, what you guys do with the Sats markets up there. is a model for the rest of the world. What they're doing down at Bitcoin Beach is a model for the rest of the world. And I think that that kind of, I mean, what did Satoshi call it? It called it Bitcoin or the white paper, Bitcoin appear-to-peer electronic cash system.

Unfortunately, not a lot of Bitcoiners are using Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash, but I think this next epoch of Bitcoin will be defined as Bitcoin peer-to-peer electronic cash. we desperately need solutions like this to make that happen though yeah yeah i i agree and and furthermore to again and we'll get into uh your your book and everything in a little bit but like it's it's in that same vein like it's it's it's community right it's it's building that that parallel economy um and and finding a way where you can have a community of people that you create relationships with and transact with and build with. And so, yeah, I quite like it.

And I think it's an acceptable tradeoff in the context of making things accessible. And this is also in the context of the tools we have available to us right now. There could be changes where maybe, you know, there's certain things on the base layer or partial ownerships of UTXOs. We don't know what we don't know, and we don't know what Bitcoin looks like in 10 years. So maybe there's better solutions later, but given the options that we have right now,

I think this is a pretty good one. I think it could be something that's very useful to myself in the very near term as it gets built out. One thing I think that it should hopefully help with is this problem that we have a little bit in the Bitcoin community where those ideologies run into the user experience. And so you end up with like a hardcore Bitcoin user talking to someone new. And they're like, okay, step one, you need a raspberry pie in your living room. And it's like, that's not step one.

And what step one is right now, in a lot of cases, looks like owning an ETF or owning a custodial. wallet or something like that. And I think this this creates a potential step one that is a lot more trustless. Yeah. Or closer to trustless than what a lot of people rationally end up using as their first exposure to Bitcoin now. Yeah. It may also be a good option for those in the global south where sometimes the reach is too far. So just an easy way to access at lower denominations without huge fees is maybe an easier way to sort of get access. Yeah, that's that's very true. I hope to see more of this, yeah, Global South,

because right now, like if you guys have seen the stuff that Anita Posh is doing and she was like I like she tries to do like custodial, like full self-custody lightning with with people down there. But like it's it's completely untenable when when feet and like I mean, even just in general, it's tough, even when fees aren't that high. And so, like, some of her takes on, you know, she's been playing around with things like Aqua Wallet as like a go-between. But again, I think Fetamints are pretty solid option.

So anyways, I'll put a bow on this topic for now. But what I'll say is if you haven't played with it yet, then I recommend you, there's a couple different things that you could check out. There's a website, and maybe I'll just quickly share that tab here. One sec. Yeah, so here it is. FETI.Z. Slash builders. And so it'll give you all the links to download the app if you want. So this is the FETI app. And then there, this is the Medira Federation, so the one that was used for that. So, you you can basically just scan and add a federation and you'll just scan this. The other thing that I recommend is go check out Mutiny Wallet because in Mutiny,

if you want, you can go into manage federations and you can scan and join the Madeira one. Or, again, in that section down below, there's a couple different vetted, like there's one that Odell vetted that is another Mint and a few of the like Muti guys have vetted it. there's a few options down there. So you can at least kind of get playing with it and test it out. And it's cool. It's fun to play with. So yeah, either way, give it a gander.

But with that, we'll say, first of all, everybody in the chat, thank you for being here. We have a few people pointing out that there's 10 blocks left. Marra Zen and J.H. are both giving us the flag. Let us know as the blocks tick away, drop them in the chat so we know if we're getting close. Who knows we may still be streaming if we get a few fast blocks going through. On your old miners, let's go. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We were already robbed of getting a 420.

So we may as well just get it done and over with. So let's get happening. But with that, we're going to do a rotation. So everybody that's here, of course, smash that like button. Give this a share. Do what you got to do. Drop those comments and everything. 11, 150 people have been checking up with us thus far via both X and YouTube due to my account.

A lot of it, about 1,000 people through X. Yeah, so we are going to rotate. I'm going to toss it since you just to the right of me here. Dave, I'm going to toss it to you. And a simple question for you. Why are you bullish? I think last time you were bearish. So are you bearish still?

Well, like the last several times I've come on here. I have embarrassed. The first thing that I'm very small thing that I'm bullish on is this new setup that you have here. We're sitting in the Banff High Country in here and Ben has his brand new live streaming setup. And it's very small on the screen from what I can see, but we look fantastic. And that must be great for everyone. Yeah. I mean, look at that.

Look, everybody, look how good we look. So that's a small reason to be bullish. You know, usually when we're talking about being bullish, we're talking about the price. And I think that the big thing, obviously, as we're sitting here that everyone has been talking about for a long time, price-wise is the halving. And I am definitely inclined to think that that is going to be kind of a non-factor. you know, it doesn't actually change much about the total supply at this point. It shouldn't change much about the number of coins that are on the market. So I think that's kind of a non-issue.

Where I'm starting to actually become bullish is more on Bitcorners and all the stuff that's going on. And I'm feeling kind of like a renewed energy over the last like six to nine months from Bitcoiners. And one of the ways that we're seeing that is kind of this new surge of Bitcoin tourism. And so, like, that's where we are. That's what we're doing right now is we're at this amazing hotel here in Banff, a place that everyone in the world should go to, I think. Incredible mountains, incredible hotel. And the high country in here in Banff is owned by an amazing guy named Jeff that is a Bitcoiner,

and he has started to accept Bitcoin at the hotel. and for all the snacks and whatnot that they sell. And very importantly, you get 20% off if you pay in Bitcoin. So this is an area where Bitcoin, you know, just goes right around the Fiat rails, all the Fiat systems for booking and whatnot that cost them more than 20%. And I think we're entering this phase where like there's going to be tremendous value for Bitcoiners supporting each other's businesses. And I hope that one of that's going to be manufacturing.

in tourism and where we're at here in Banff, like this is a no-brainer, which should be a Bitcoin tourist hot spot on, I think. And we've kind of seen like some places, obviously Madera, you know, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras that are kind of taken off as like Bitcoin tourism destinations. And there's obviously a lot of stuff going on, you know, around the big conferences around the world. People are traveling for those. And so I think, I hope that, Alberta centered around, especially Calgary and Banff here, is going to be a new hot spot for Bitcoin and a new hotspot for Bitcoin tourism. So we've got, like I said, the high country in here, we've got more and more businesses

taking Bitcoin locally, especially the small ones, like the ones we're dealing with the stats markets. And then we got the Bitcoin rodeo coming up in July that we're getting people from all over the world out too. So, yeah, Bitcoin tourism is my, the thing that I'm most excited about that Bitcoiners are are doing right now, I think. I love that. I again, and we kind of, I guess I've just not heard it referred to as Bitcoin tourism before, but that's very much what it was. You know, like, you were in Madeira, and I was surprised to see how many people made it out to this island that I had never heard of just a year prior in the middle of the Atlantic for an event.

And so, like, they had just like, they were inundated by Bitcoiners making it out for this, this event. And so I think that, and I hope that you're right in that jurisdictions will begin to kind of build these local ecosystems and see the value in people traveling to these scenic locations, but also are passionate about literally spending their currency locally and supporting the local. businesses that are doing the same. I think there's a huge opportunity there. And again, seeing it in Madeira firsthand was really awesome. You know, seeing it in, you know, I just got back from El Salvador. And obviously, you can, you know, in the city and, you know, around the country, you can, if you're aware, you do have to plan a little bit. You have to know, because it's not ubiquitous yet, right?

Like you can't you just don't force seven million people to jump on a Bitcoin standard overnight. But if Bitcoin Beach itself, I didn't I didn't use anything other than Bitcoin the entire time. And so like right there in the epicenter of where it started, yeah, like everything that I did, I didn't touch a credit card or cash or anything the entire time. And so I look forward to that happening. I think, you know, I think we should maybe be. on a mission here. You're right. In particular, like Banff, it's so scenic and to turn it into

like a bit of a Bitcoin mecca would be awesome. And for anybody that doesn't know where that is roughly, so we live in Calgary, which is like an hour to an hour and a half drive away. And Calgary is a city of what, 1.3 million, I think, which is just a few hours drive of the north of the Montana border. But a big city. And, you know, we've got. got a good start to a local sap market there. I think it's going to be growing, especially with the upcoming Bitcoin rodeo. We're plugged into a pretty good set of, you know, a pretty good market south of the city. That's going to be the day before the Bitcoin rodeo.

And I think we're plugging into a set of merchants that are uniquely positioned to understand the value of Bitcoin. They're very freedom oriented. There, a lot of them are like precious metals. people so like they just haven't been exposed really to bitcoin yet and so i think if we can put that in front of their faces you know not everybody but i think a good chunk of them will start to get it so i think we got a unique going going here and i don't know i'm i'm excited to champion the idea of bitcoin tourism for sure yeah and i think one thing to pull out of what you said there that's cool is like bitcoiners supporting each other's businesses i think it's going to become increasingly important in the

future. And, you know, we've seen sort of the woke mob weaponize their purchasing power in a lot of ways and cancel people and businesses for their beliefs. And, you know, I think we're starting to see some of the opposite. We've seen that with like with Bud Light and whatnot. And I think we're going to start to see that with Bitcoin values where, you know, as a group, Bitcoiners are gaining more and more purchasing power and becoming more and more valuable as customers. And And so once it gets to a point where, you know, if you're a pro-Bitcoin business, that gets you a whole bunch of extra business from the Bikwiners, that's a huge incentive to bring other businesses into the fold.

Yeah, yeah. Everybody recognizes that Bitcoin is the, all the Bitcoiners recognize that Bitcoin is the better money. And everybody would be more than willing to accept it for something that they already do or produce. and there's going to be a subset of those people that recognize that it's such better money, that they're just going to stop using fiat as much as possible. And so, you know, we were having a chat the other night and somebody was like, well, I don't want to spend my Bitcoin.

And I'm like, that's a rational thing when you still have fiat. But you get to a point where you just stop accepting as much fiat. And all of a sudden you're like Bitcoin heavy and then almost fully Bitcoin. And then at that point, you must spend your Bitcoin. And so then it becomes very attractive to you, the idea of having local markets where you can just buy things directly instead of jumping through those hoops of converting to dollars to then buy the thing you need. So I think that's the direction we're headed. People wanting to accept Bitcoin but not wanting to spend it, incentivizing people to spend people to spend Bitcoin. or disincentivizing people from spending fiat with them.

I mean, I charge a 20% premium if somebody wants to pay me in dollars. Like, I think that should be a thing. And again, I'll trumpet the idea that charging a premium on fiat says a lot more than giving a discount for Bitcoin. Because you fully communicate the idea that accepting dollars for you is a pain in the ass. And that's what I want people to know. It's not that it would be nice if you give me Bitcoin. It's that it's a pain when you give me dollars. And I really don't want them.

I'd much prefer Bitcoin. So yeah, I think that's where we're headed. I don't know. Mike, what are your thoughts here? Well, I think I'm guilty of not spending my Bitcoin enough. And perhaps because I'm short Bitcoin and still have Fiat to spend. But I'm bullish on the idea of starting to spend for, facilitating travel. My wife and I do like to travel and there's a big checklist of places that

we want to go to that are also, you know, Bitcoin destinations. Like, you know, I'm dying to get to Costa Rica to spend some El Salvador, Madeira now, and obviously Banff just right in her backyard and high country end. So super bullish on starting to spend more Bitcoin, put it that way. Brian, I'll toss it to you as well. What are your thoughts here? Yeah, no, I was stoked to you guys, gave your hotel a shout out. It was one of our first merchants on Orange Pill app. We just a couple months ago launched merchants, the merchant section of Orange Pill app. And yeah, like that's physical brick and mortar businesses can list on Orange Pill app now. And I think that kind of as Dave talked about, it's like part of why I'm bullish is because

tools exist today in Bitcoin, whether we're talking about Fetiment or decentralized communication like Noster for social media, Orange Pill app, which is not social media, it's a social network with the core competency of Orange Bell app is just to facilitate in real life connections. Like all of this stuff didn't exist in the last bull run of Bitcoin. It's going to be really exciting when the daily issuance of Bitcoin is never going to have been lower simultaneously while more tools for Bitcoin exist than ever before. Like this could you couldn't be more bullish in this time because yes, more. more businesses today except Bitcoin than there were yesterday.

There's more people who own Bitcoin today than own Bitcoin yesterday. It's a one-way street. You don't go out of Bitcoin. Nobody goes into Bitcoin and then back to Fiat. You might go into crypto and back to Fiat. I mean, crypto and fiat are synonymous, right? Like you're trying to get more of one with the other. But with Bitcoin, it's a one-way street.

Bitcoin merchants, a one-way street. And it's just a matter of time. I think that as Bitcoiners, we're low time preference people. But at the same time, we're like, we're building as much as we can to onboard as many merchants as we can. Mark Moss has this great quote that hyper-bitcoinization is not an event. It's a process. We're going to see it play out over time at different paces in different regions. Calgary, it's happening a bit faster than where I'm at in Southern California.

but yet we're trying to make this work. And again, like, there's more tools to find those merchants than we ever had before. There's more merchants that want to accept it. And that's what it takes. It takes an investment. Like, it's no different than an entrepreneur going out and getting a loan or saving up $10,000 to start a business. Somebody could look at that from the outside. Somebody that has a regular 9 to 5, they could say, why on earth you have $10,000 right now?

the reason why you get money is so you can spend money. But an entrepreneur looks at that money and says, no, I look at money to see what I can build with what I have. And it's that same thing with Bitcoiners. It's I have this Bitcoin right now. What can I build? Now, the cool thing is you get to participate in building the parallel economy just by spending it. You don't have to do anything particularly sophisticated other than either spending it somewhere or, as Ben said, just start. to accept Bitcoin. If you want to stimulate the Bitcoin economy, don't, don't worry about spending

your Bitcoin. Just find what what skills you have from the Fiat system that translate over. If somebody's willing to pay you Fiat for something, there's darn sure going to pay you Bitcoin for that same good or service. If you're a plumber, if you're electrician, if you're a lawyer, an accountant, any of those things, you can have a side hustle in Bitcoin. And as Dave said, which is a much more lucrative customer. 12 months from now, inflation's only going to have been worse. Bitcoin's only going to have gone up in price.

The Fiat world is going to look at Fiat customers and Bitcoin customers as two distinctly different people. Bitcoiners will be high signal, high value customers. Fiat customers are going to be your discount bargain shoppers. They're going to be trying to find that race to the bottom for the lowest common price they don't care about quality as much. Your Bitcoiners are going to want quality and they're going to be loyal customers to your business

because they have sustainable buying power. This is a one-way street that doesn't have any signs of reversal. It's just can we be patient enough and build along the way? That's really the variable at play here. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. It's, it seems like we have hit a bit of an early, inflection point. It's very different from the last time that this sentiment was, or this type of

initiative was pushed forward. I would argue that the push of like 2014, 2015, let's onboard all the merchants. It was a totally different environment. Number one, the amount of Bitcoiners that actually held a meaningful amount of Bitcoin at the time was far fewer. But now there's there and on top of that the types of merchants that were being onboarded. It's like let's get Microsoft which like

that makes a good headline. But like Microsoft doesn't give a shit. They don't care. They're using bit pay and then they dump it for Fiat and they thought it was a marketing stick to get more customers. But like that doesn't pan out because there weren't that many bit miners that wanted to like

bother and do anything about it. So I think now you're getting people accepting Bitcoin because they want Bitcoin. You have a good number of Bitcoiners that are kind of keen on the idea of using their Bitcoin and seeing the value of transacting in a way that's outside of the legacy financial system. And you're getting some people that are kind of living on a quasi Bitcoin standard. And I think there's enough to support those local communities right now that are kind of grassroots growing. Whereas before it was like, again, it was a marketing schick with companies that didn't give a shit about Bitcoin whatsoever.

And now it's the opposite. It's like the mom and pop shop that's like our money sucks and we need to accept something better. And we want to incentivize people to pay us in that thing. Totally, totally different sentiment. And I think the time could be right right now. And you also think about unit bias too. So when before when you were, say if you had, if you were a whole coiner, so you have 100 million sats to your name.

If you were going to buy something, you were going to be spending 100,000 sats, 200,000 sets. You're going to be spending a meaningful portion of sats. But now like there's, there's all sorts of goods and services, cups of coffee, whatever you want to call it. There's lots of merchants where you can go in and spend a few thousand sats. If you have 100 million sats, spending 10,000 sats, 15,000 sats is a little bit more palatable because it doesn't feel like it's draining your stack by doing that.

So there's these psychological factors that I think are changing because every time we have a generation of Bitcoiners who have been in for four years and now their buying power's gone up by 10x, that threshold at which they're willing to spend sats perhaps becomes a little bit more bearable. I think a whole coiner or somebody with five coins doesn't isn't bothered by spending 12,000 sats. But 120,000 sats, spending a million sats on something a few years ago, that's always a tough build of squallow just because of that unit bias. That feels like a big chunk. Yeah, 100%. It's nice that sats are becoming the standard.

I do like that. On the other side of the spectrum, it's easier for people to see. stack using whole numbers. It was a little disheartening when people would, you know, buy a hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin and they'd see some some horrible decimal with like three zeros, four zeros in front of it. That was always a sad moment. So, so yeah, it is nice.

I think stats as a whole are just going to do wonders for, for Bitcoin as well. So I have to cut in with a couple things here. One is that I would like a sponsorship from Woodford Reserve. I'm literally drinking this on the air here and we're getting nothing for it. The next, there we go. So one thing that you guys touched on there is I think there's something very different about the way that businesses are looking at Bitcoin compared to 2014. And a lot of that comes from where the narrative was back then where a lot of people were

really looking at it as just a payment tool. And when you looked at like Microsoft, for example, getting in there, you know, that, that's pretty much all that was, was a payment tool for them. And it wasn't like a particularly good payment tool, didn't really have any significant advantages over like your MasterCard. And now when businesses are looking at it, a lot more of them are looking at it as a better form of money, not just a better payment network. And that comes with an appreciation of what the customers are like. And so even though, like I was saying, Bitcoiners have an increasing amount of spending power, the effect that Bitcoin has on people actually makes them more demanding customers in some ways.

And so to your point, like they want high quality goods. They will not put up with the cheap Fiat games. And I think and hope that in the long term, that's going to lead to a lot less, garbage products in the world. A lot less disposable stuff. And businesses are starting to shift in that direction just a little bit.

So we keep talking about like this place, the high country in here in Banff. And I forgot to mention the amazing chairs that have been for sure in porn. But side no. I set up the whole setup and it was facing the other way towards this couch. And Dave came in.

He's like, why didn't you face the camera towards the porn seats? So I literally shifted the entire setup to get like the wall and like these, he's like definitely what like 80s style. Yeah. So this place, you know, like most of the hotels in Banff is older. This place is built in, I think I said 1982. Yeah. which is the year that I was born. And so it's an older hotel.

It's been renovated, but not like extensively. And they're just starting to do that. And so, for example, they're redoing the pool area. And one of the things that they're putting in there is a cold plunge pool. And this is definitely like, this is definitely related to Jeff, the owner of the hotel, getting into the Bitcoin culture and starting to like to like all the same things that we all like. and I'm bullish on that. I'm bullish on the effect that Bitcoins having an increasing amount of purchasing power

will have on like what kind of products and services we get everywhere and way more broadly like what the world is like. Hey, Dave, is he heating the pools with A6? You know what? We talked to them about that. I don't think they're going to do that because it's probably like we probably needed to get here like a year ago when they were. buying the scope of the whole thing. But yeah, I mean, like we've got a company in Calgary called Cryptotherm that, you know, builds exactly that kind of stuff.

And they've built, I know that the owner has a Bitcoin powered hot tub out and is his acreage. Not far from where you're at, actually, Mike. I got to get myself one of those too. Real quick. I mean, just, yeah, what Dave said about the Fiat business model being a race to the bottom. I don't know if you guys heard this, but in the United States, 99 cent only stores just closed all 700 locations in the United States that I remember thinking like five or six years ago.

I wonder how 99 cent only is a sustainable model. Obviously they can change the amount of product and shrinkflation and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, that model is is completely unsustainable. The field world is going to is starting to slowly the market is telling it that that higher quality products, better services, better, you know, like all of that is going to, the market is going to, reveal that truth to everybody. I think that most people unfortunately aren't pointing to Bitcoin as the solution, but that as a fact will be the case. And on the point of the coal plunge, I'm about 12 feet away from the new cold plunge we just ordered for our store. So we have one

already. They're so popular. We just ordered another one. It's in my hallway right here waiting to be installed. So I don't know what the correlation between Bitcoiners and cold plunges is. But it's pretty high. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. I did just in Elsa. I did do my first cold plunge. I failed miserably also. I was not, it was really hot out. So there was no initial shock to it, really. Like it was kind of refreshing getting in.

But then like I didn't, it was my first time doing it. And I did not last a minute. Like I was, it was a poor showing on my behalf. You got to breathe. The secret is 10 deep breaths and then allow yourself to get out. If you can control your 10 deep breaths, that puts you about a minute, 30, two minutes, and that's a good first showing. Yeah, I got a, I need another round just to, to, maybe my next round will be here once they

install the cold plunge. So, yeah. All right. So gentlemen, what we're going to do is we're going to do another rotation. Before we do that, I'm going to do a quick shout out to our sponsors here. And then we will be right back. Everybody in the chat, thank you for being here. I see yellow, of course, wishing everybody a happy having.

So good to see everybody in the chat. And also shout out to C-Funk, absolute legend. Glad that she's joining us as well. But we will be back in just a moment for our continued reasons for being bullish. See you guys in this. Here to peer trading and lending, instant self-custody and no KYC, hoddle-hottle is the place to be. You can sign up with just an email.

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You don't need to give up your personal information to have it set up and working for you. You can check them out today over at nunchuck.io. Yo, we're back. Thanks for sticking around. We're going to dive into our next reason for being bullish. And we're going to do a rotation here. So, Mike, I'm going to toss it your way. And I'll key you up with the same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? Well, I've been thinking about this for quite a while. And I mean, I'm bullish about so many things. But what I'm really bullish about is the availability of opportunity in the Bitcoin space. And let me share with you a little bit of a story.

And that may sort of bring the light why I'm bullish on that. So about a year ago, I was just an average retired entrepreneur, relatively old in the Bitcoin space anyway, who was orange-pilling friends and family and business associates and getting them onboarded with hardware wallets and, you know, telling the Bitcoin story. And I kind of found a little bit lonely. So I decided to branch out and attend the local meetup to get acquainted with a few more like-minded bitcoins and share some stories, et cetera. And I was fortunate enough to sit beside Ben. And we started up a great conversation, which led to a friendship, which also led to other nice friendships in the Calgary Bitcoin community, including Dave and Maidex.

Shout out to Madex. And, you know, what has happened as a result is opportunity abounds. And five months ago, Ben and I decided to launch a new business together, which we call Bitcoin Mentor. The goal that I had at the time was I wanted to launch the business at the having or prior to the having. And I think I don't want to speak for Ben, but I think when we had nothing on the table, at that time. I think he thought I was crazy to have expected to be able to do that in such a

short period of time. I think that's probably true. But nonetheless, it looks like with the official launch of Bitcoin Mentor today and effectively on the show, it looks like we're coming in maybe eight blocks ahead of schedule. So it's pretty exciting for that opportunity. And I'm bullish because there are 17 mentors that have joined the team from all walks of life with one great trade in common and that is to help onboard the next wave of bitcoins and they are also pursuing an opportunity to work in the bitcoin space and for those that are willing to put themselves out there and and provide value for individuals there is great opportunity in the bitcoin space space and for that I am extremely bullish so that's my reason I mean I particularly like this reason

I did think you were crazy when what's doing by the having I was like oh there's no way no way but I guess and Ben I do want to thank you for all the work you put into this so it's been it's been a real treat to get to know you even better and to work closely with you on this and I want I thank you for that. Well, dude, I mean, I thank you for involving me in this. I remember you kind of saying you wanted to do something along these lines and you're like, so what do you think? And my response was, well, I would like to be a part of it.

And so then it became a collaboration and a partnership. So my. Cheers. Yeah, well, cheers. Yeah. Thanks, man. Yeah. So, so I again, I guess to speak to your reason for being bullish in and around, I suppose, again, opportunities as Bitcoiners to be a part of bringing Bitcoin to the masses, but also for new Bitcoiners coming into the space.

I mean, stuff like this didn't exist prior. It was like you got in and then some dude was like, well, go check out this message board. Scroll down. Some dude commented and said how to do this thing. I think he kind of basically outlined it. There's some bullet points there. That was in up a note. Yeah.

And that was my Bitcoin education, just tearing out my hair trying to figure. I'm such a visual learner that. And that was the whole impetus for the channel. And so then I started doing, you know, I started making all this videos and everything. But some people are more, they need more interactivity out of it. They need to actively be like kind of affirmed with what they're doing, ask questions along the way. And I get it. Like you're watching a tutorial.

And one thing doesn't go as is shown in the video and you hit a brick wall. And you're like, shit, well, what do I do? Because it's not in the video. And maybe the app updated is slightly different. And it's just, and so I get the reason for people wanting that, that one-on-one. And so I started doing that as well. But it's, it's to the point where I don't have the time and the day, as much as I love doing it, there's only so many hours in the day. And, you know, you're running the show and I'm going to events and all these different things.

last week I had nine one-on-one sessions, which is like, like, what the shit? Like, that's, that's busy. And like, and, and just to put in context, in December of last year, I, I, I, um, I had, I took a week off in and around Christmas, like, basically I did the Christmas show, I think on the 22nd. And then I took basically until the New Year's off. And even with the shortened month, I had 29 sessions with people. And so, like, the demand for this type of education is there and it's prevalent. And my worry was that there there needs to be consistency amongst,

people that are teaching. There needs to be some type of quality control. There needs to be, you know, I mean, we all know that bitcoiner where you're like, how do I do this? And like Dave would say, like, well, first you're going to set up a node and you're like, holy Jesus, I guess I'm too dumb for Bitcoin. But like the whole point is it doesn't matter where if somebody's going on a journey, nobody gives a shit what their first step was everybody cares about where they ended up and so it's it's like whatever that first step is it's is completely irrelevant as long as the pathway eventually leads to them getting more self-sovereign than they were prior and so um i you know this was when when we started talking started building this this was my my mission was like we're not just

going to take anybody and maybe Mike I'll let I'll let you drop the numbers of the number of people that applied and the number you already kind of said but maybe reiterate how many yeah yeah well we had uh 350 inbound inquiries of folks wanting to explore the opportunity of being a bitcoin mentor of those I met personally in video video interviews if you will with uh over a hundred and then uh as a result of the, you know, roughly 200 meetings I had overall, we've got an amazing team of, you know, I believe best in class educators to help people along the way. And there's 17 mentors in our, on our team right now and from all over the world, from, you know, the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, and India. So we've got a pretty good cross-section. And we will continue to grow. So the

opportunity is there for people that are interested. And, you know, if you're an amazing educator, can get through the gauntlet of teaching Ben how to do something. There's maybe room for you too. That's part of the process. Like they get to check the mic a couple of times and then they come to me and then they have to teach me something. They basically have to educate the educators. So there was a few people extremely nervous, I think, about teaching Ben.

Yeah. It was cool though. It was cool doing the role reversal of like basically sitting and I, I, I was trying to emulate the questions that I get from newcomers all the time. Like what the hell I have? Hold on. My device is online. I know for a fact I've never plugged it into anything connected to the internet. How am I able to send and receive Bitcoin with this thing that's not connected to the internet?

It makes no sense. And then I say, explain that to me. And I wait for the response. And I know kind of what I'm looking for. and there were certain people that were very well versed in being able to explain that in a way that a regular person would go, oh, okay. And it lights that spark and people begin to think about it completely differently than they would prior.

And so that's kind of those moments, like, there were parts in those one-on-ones where if I queued up a question and somebody answered it a certain way, I just, yeah, it just gave me that little smirk and like in the back of my mind, I go, oh, yeah, that's a yes. Like without saying it in the session at the time. But I will say anybody like, and I'm sure there's probably a few of the mentors that might be watching this right now. but if if you got through and and uh maybe we're part of the meeting that we had the other night or or if you do get through uh in the coming week and you get that uh that yes then um don't take it lightly like you should be fucking proud that you made it through a gauntlet of 350 people um because you know something was seen between me and mike that that kind of led us to believe that you've got some unique ability there.

So anyways, the point is I think there's, I think there's some solid talent out there. And I think that Bitcoiners affinity for wanting the best of the best, as was alluded to earlier, with your topic, Dave, comes through in the products and services that they offer. And so I think we're going to see more and more of that, of like this attention to detail, this attention to high quality products and services coming forth from Bitcoiners. And I think that's kind of what me and Mike were aiming to do. So yeah, I don't know. Mike, do you have anything else that you wanted to add there?

No, that's pretty good, pretty good. So just excited. So thank you. Yeah. That's that's rad. I mean, that's, that's really exciting. I think that Bitcoiners that are coming in right now are so fortunate, right? New, new Bitcoiners because think about it like the guys that, you know, this mark,

this month marks my 10 years in Bitcoin. There's a lot of us that went through an alt-coin phase, right? ICOs of 2016, we got into the alts and that sort of thing. I've talked a lot of Bitcoiners that have come in in the last 18 months that will probably hopefully will never have gone through an all coin phase. There'll be much more high signal. Guys that come in, they get onboarded through a mentorship program where you have 17 highly vetted individuals.

is an incredible and an incredible tool that Bitcoin did not have. So you have clubs being onboarded, but not just guys that have a little bit of Bitcoin in their wallet and don't know anything about it. The signal amongst Bitcoiners, I mean, at Orange Blop, we talk about it all the time, the Bitcoin social layer. The stronger the social layer is, the stronger Bitcoin is. Because at the end of the day, Bitcoin is the people. So if we're reinforcing Bitcoin with stronger individuals, more well-rounded individuals,

that's huge. And as opposed to coming in with like Bitcoin bro science, right? I mean, that's what we had every generation before this. And then, you know, Ben comes along and that was like a huge boost for the Bitcoin signal. And now what you guys are doing on an official like kind of systemic program. I mean, that's incredible for people. I think back to bro science in the gym.

I remember when I was 19 years old. I had, there was just a guy that was a few years older than me. He was way stronger than me, way bigger. than me. And he goes, oh, you should take this supplement. So I go down to the store and I went down to just GNC. I didn't know GNC basically sold like steroids and hormones and stuff. I thought if it was on the shelves of GNC, it was good. I should have, I should have recognized that when the guy at the checkout counter said, hey, do you want the estrogen blocker with this thing? That I should have recognized what it was, but I'm a stupid 19 year old and the buff guy at the gym, the bro told me that

this is what he does. So I take this stuff for two weeks. And one day I'm in there bench pressing. when the bar comes down and I touch my my chest area and apparently I developed two giant masses under my nipples like gyno chlamasty or whatever you get from these products. That's what bros. That's the equivalent of to how people were coming into Bitcoin before. It was like get into Bitcoin. It's kind of crypto. It's kind of like we, you know, like it's just dabble in this, dabble in that.

I'm not going to really tell you what it's about. We're in a completely different phase of Bitcoin right now. And I think that's incredible. I mean, as a marketing guy, you saying your vetting process is probably one of the strongest foot forward you could put. I mean, I would put that. I'd blaze that all over my website. We had hundreds of people sign up and you're getting the cream of the crop, the 17, that

are worthy to be on our team. I actually thought you were going to say after all that, we had 350 and Ben was the only one that made it. I thought you were going to say that. So I'm glad it's 17. I'm glad it's not all on Ben. but kudos to what you guys are doing, man. I think that every Bitcoiner on every corner of the globe is going to be better off

for having a more anti-fragile generation of Bitcoiners coming online because of what you guys are doing. Yeah, yeah, thank you. What I mostly took from that is having bags full of Ethan Salana is the equivalent of your drug-induced mantis. It's painful. don't want to show it off. Yeah. So all of that makes me think back to right around the time that I met Ben, like 2013, 2014.

And we were running a store, like a physical store where we sold Bitcoin and we did very similar work in that we were like sitting down with people in person teaching them how to view this stuff. But there was like, there was a lot less stuff to teach back there. You know, it was like there was literally like maybe four wallets in the world and like, You know, you teach somebody one, and then you were kind of done. There wasn't like a whole lot left to teach. And the next phase after that was filled with the shit coin education, you know,

and people trying to teach people about token economics and all kinds of garbage that actually made no sense. And it's pretty cool to see it coming in a way like full circle because, you know, the breadth of the topic is much greater at this point. but also there's like a million times more options for education right now. And even a few years ago, at Bitcoin Well, for example, we were running in-person consultation, like pre-COVID. And it kind of got to a point where, you know, the in-person stuff wasn't quite as viable. And we started doing it remotely.

And yeah, I think it's just getting back to a point to like I was talking about earlier. We've got this energy going in the space right now. where there are a lot more people who want that that kind of help. And it's cool that like in some ways, Ben, you're the, you're the guy that like took that, um,

that education process out of the store and out of the coffee shops where we were talking to people and put it on to YouTube because it was like nothing else back then. And then now you're like bringing it back to the in person service. Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. It's,

yeah, it's interesting how that kind of that, yeah, that full circle played out. And the other thing that I'm very happy about is to see, you know, like, you know, myself and Mike are, you know, we're doing our thing and we're going to do it to like the absolute best of our ability and like try to do the, like, have bar none like the best possible thing out there. Like that's our goal.

But I will say that I fully value and I'm excited about the fact there's a lot of, Bitcoin educators on the rise. And there's people on YouTube. There's people, I mean, this one example, I love, I love Wicked. Like Wicked, the is, he puts out awesome, awesome Bitcoin educational content. Also, I really like Cole, Southern Bitcoiner, do it out of South Africa. There's, there's some people putting out really solid content around educating people world around Bitcoin. And this just kind of

arkens back to one of these comments here. Also, I love the name, archiving clown world. Somebody said, he said, how do you teach someone not to shit coin better than them touching the stove and getting burnt? And that's a fair point.

Like, pain is one of the best teachers. However, what I have witnessed, particularly this last cycle, like never before, is many, many people that I've had one of ones with saying, yeah, I got into the space. And then, you know, usually it's like after about a year, I figured out like everything was a shit coin and like I just started focusing Bitcoin only.

But quite often I'll hear like, yeah, it took about six months or it took like three months. And to me, that's astounding because that that awareness just didn't exist when I gone into Bitcoin because it was so early. But it makes sense that it's happening because of the quality of concise Bitcoin-only content explaining the difference between Bitcoin and everything else and then laying out the resources and the breadcrumbs of where to go next. We just didn't have that before. And now we do.

And whether it's in the form of a YouTube video or whether it's in the form of a one-on-one session or whether it's in the form of just like going to your local meetup and having the few dudes that are like, that's a fucking chick coin man. There's like it's all of that combined and then saying like you okay, you got to read this or you got to listen to this pod or like just the resources that are available. It's making that learning curve absolutely expedited to the point where like people are minimizing their exposure to this bullshit as long as at some point along the road, they're exposed to a bit of that content and then start following the breadcrumbs.

If they're not exposed to it, yeah, they're going to go. They're straight into Poundown, right? Like, they're going to get absolutely wrecked. So I think there's also a big difference in terms of the kind of people that are getting into Bitcoin because you go back like in years and a huge percentage of the people we're getting in there. We're kind of like high risk investors, almost like gamblers, the kind of people who are looking for the next big thing, who want to take a flyer on something. And the tendency of people that are approaching Bitcoin that way is to say, I've already missed the gains on

Bitcoin and I'm going to find the next Bitcoin. And so like there was a battle for a long time of like trying to convince people that we were selling Bitcoin to say like, please don't put all this into ripple, you know what I mean? Like that kind of shit. Now we're at a point where I've seen a lot of people get into Bitcoin and not shitcoin at all. There are enough reasonable voices out there telling people not to do that and explaining why to do that. That it's probably saving a lot of people a lot of money. And then on the flip side of that, like I said, it's a different set of people that are getting in. And we're getting people getting in for safety now.

You know, they're, they're starting to feel the erosion of their savings. And as soon as they start to feel that, you know, and then they see the solution. If you see Bitcoin is the solution to the erosion of your purchasing power of your savings, you know, you're not going to see like Solana as a competitor to that. Yeah. Yeah. I would absolutely echo that. I mean, again, I'm super stoked about what's going on here. Mike, I'm super happy to have number one met you, but number two have built this with you and

aggregated like all these super talented people and I hope some of them see this or are watching, but you guys kick ass and I can't wait to educate the next round of Bitcoiners with you. I'll all say that for people watching like in terms of who this is for, I mean, I suppose it can be for anyone, But in particular, like if you've got, if you got a relative that is like, oh, you know what, I'm just going to buy the ETF. We're basically the answer to that. Like, send them, send them our way instead because what we're going to do is we're going to make them self-solvement.

We're going to teach them how to self-custody and be immune to that 6102 attack and actually hold their own wealth in their old hands. And if they recognize the problem with the system where, like, top down, their wealth is being extracted through money printing and as an arm of the government basically trying to fund their hidden taxes and their exorbitant expenditures, you know, that knows no end. and it's very possible that owning an ETF down the line could mean, you know, you get paid out in dollars. And you get the equivalent and then you just hold the dollars. So, yeah, if you don't want that happening, then, you know, we are, and I won't even say we're the only option because we're not. And there's a lot of people doing really great work out there. And I don't want to discount what they're doing because there's some.

There's some solid, solid people that have been putting in the work. But we're throwing our hat in the ring. And we hope to add a little bit to that to the incredible people that are already fighting the good fight. So if you got somebody in danger of owning an ETF, then maybe send them our way and we can teach them out to do it right. But that's Bitcoin Mentor.io. So we do have a Twitter handle as well, which is the BTC mentor at the BTC mentor. And we will have a Noster handle pretty quick here. We're getting that set up as we as we go.

But yeah, Mike, thanks for bringing that up and coming on the show and sharing the having with us here too. It's my pleasure. Absolutely. Well, awesome. We're going to do with that, we're going to do another rotation here. Again, everybody in the chat. Thank you for being here. Smash that like button.

Give us a share. Over 2,000 people now have tuned into the show. Awesome to see. And with that, Brian, I'm looking at you, man. I'm tossing it your way. You've already had a ton of awesome things to say, but I'm going to queue you up with the official question. Why are you bullish?

Well, honestly, I'm bullish because of, I mean, some of the standard that you and other Bitcoiners have set through blazing the trail for the, the parallel economy and just we hear the term circular economy parallel economy you can use them interchangeably if you want um i i tend to think of a circular economy is a more like localized economy where the parallel economy is like the entire the entirety almost like a federation of the circular economies but however you want to define that the parallel economy is a system it's a way to opt out of fiat slavery the fiatum that we that we've been born into um and Every time that empire collapses, you can go back to Bitcoiners, we love to talk about the collapse of the Roman Empire, but you can look at the Persian Empire, the Babylonian Empire.

You can look at more medieval empires, the Holy Roman Empire, which is more recent history. You could look at the fall of the Soviet Union, more modern, contemporary superpowers that fell. What happened in response every single time a superpower falls? a parallel system develops. There's always for a period of time, it's usually about a half of a generation, a parallel economy develops because the centralization, the organization of the Fiat money or whatever monetary standard, the old regime had completely collapses.

It goes away. And so people need to subsist. They need to buy goods. They need to buy products. They need to buy whatever they needed for their life. They need a plumber to come to their house or their apartment. They needed to find ways to ask. access those. When the old money dies, what do you do? Well, a parallel system pops up and

people would sometimes resort to barter, sometimes things like cigarettes or gasoline in the fall of of the Soviet Union, things like more practical things like gasoline or toilet paper or whatever were things that were almost used like currency. What happens is once the Soviet Union collapses and then the Russian oligarchs, recentralized power, which again takes about a half of a generation. You're talking about 10 to 15 years. They re-centralized power and then they absorb the parallel economy back into the system. So the parallel economies always emerge, 100% of the time they emerge, but they always get reabsorbed by the central power. I think Bitcoiners have a pretty good sense that we're on the brink of that next collapse, right?

But the next collapse that we're going to see is one like we've never seen before. We're on a global world standard, right? The U.S. dollar is a worldwide standard. Fiat money is everywhere in the world right now. The Great British Pound, the U.S. dollar, the Japanese yen, all three of those became fiat currencies in 1971 at the exact same time. We obviously know that. Most fiat currencies, the longest they ever live, is 48 years.

Well, all of those three, the biggest three currencies in the world right now, in the West at least, are at like 52, 50s. 53 years. They're living on life support. So we're at the end of this cycle. And so we are going to witness at some point in our lifetime the fall of the established world order, the way that things work, which right now is fiat money. What's going to happen is, of course that parallel system is going to develop in light of the collapse of empire. But what's unique about the Bitcoin parallel economy, it's the first time in human history that the parallel system will have been developed before the collapse. It won't be in response to the collapse of empire. We have a 15 year plus

head start on developing this parallel system before the empire, before the established world order collapses. And it's not going to be in response. It's going to be pre-planned. And what makes it additionally interesting is that this parallel system, it's not local. It's not a circular economy. I think that would be a better way to describe those economies that evolved in the past or that came after the fall of the Roman Empire. They were more circular local economies. Now when the system collapses, it is going to be a truly global parallel system because Bitcoiners in Southern California can transact with Bitcoins in Calgary. We can transact with Bitcoiners in Tanzania. We can transact with Bitcoiners all over the world.

We have a huge opportunity before us to build this, this parallel economy before it's actually needed. And if we do this right, the world might not actually feel that feel like feel the sense of that total collapse of empire. If the Bitcoin parallel economy becomes robust enough before Fiat dies, we might just see a migration from Fiat to Bitcoin. almost like a seamless transition into the future. And so tomorrow my new book, parallel comes out.

And it's the case for the parallel Bitcoin economy. That's what this entire book is about. We break down like the philosophy between hoddle culture like we talked about today and spend culture. What is the responsibility of a bitconer? Well, as a Bitcoin, you get to do whatever the heck you want. Like there is no responsibility that you have to do by entering Bitcoin. That's a beautiful thing about Bitcoin.

But if you do want the full benefit and the full fruition of Bitcoin, I would suggest getting involved in the development of the parallel economy in some form another. That doesn't mean spending Bitcoin. That doesn't even in fact mean accepting Bitcoin. I would suggest both of those things. But what it certainly does mean is finding as many ways to opt out of the existing system as you possibly can. And now that means when you have a cold as opposed to when I was a kid, we had a cold. We went to the doctor, paid a co-pay. They wrote us a prescription, even though the prescription wasn't going to help with my cold.

And we voted with our dollars for the existing Fiat medical system. Well, the best way to undo the existing Fiat system is to opt out of those things. Like, you don't have to start doing this complicated Bitcoin thing. I hope that you do. But just gravitating towards healthier food, making sure that you're more anti-fragileged as an individual is going to make, it's going to take the power away from the existing fiat superstructure that exist because of the power of the existence of central banks. So I think that it's a really exciting time to be a bitcoiner.

And I think that if somebody's only looked at Bitcoin through the lens of I'm going to create generational wealth for my family, I would make this one point. And then I mean, I'm kind of waxed in here for a bit. I'd love to get your guys's input. But think about this. Look back to the internet economy. There was two types of people in the internet economy. Both of them got rich.

One of them, one type of person got exceptionally wealthy. The first type of person was the person who bought domain names or they bought internet stocks. They bought and hold assets. They bought and held assets of the internet economy. Those people bought things like pets.com and then held it for long enough, turned around and sold it for $10, $15 million. Those guys created incredible riches for themselves and their family. That's fantastic, good for them. They were able to see around corners and take advantage of a situation, buy and hold

something that appreciated in value. The other type of people were those who actually built the internet economy. Now, I don't care what you think about Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk's individuals, but Elon Musk helped develop the payment rails for the internet economy through PayPal. Jeff Bezos helped develop commerce on the internet through Amazon. What's the difference between people that bought and held domain names and internet stocks and then sold them later? And the guys that actually helped build the internet economy, the difference is hundreds

of billions of dollars, right? Like those guys created substantial wealth to the point where just for fun, they launched rockets into outer space. Like they're on a completely different level than the guy that sold pets.com. So yes, both are going to make you rich. Buying and holding Bitcoin is going to be an incredible move for your family going forward in the future. But you know what is going to benefit your family even more is if you have 40 different

connections with real bitcoinsers in real life so that if CBDCs come out and they're the most atrocious form of tyranny we've ever seen and the government says you need to force feed your children bug protein. Well, every rancher's hand I ever shook, every computer repairman that will accept. up Bitcoin to repair my computer or homeschool curriculum I can buy for my kids to opt out a Fiat education, every single one of those connections will never had more value than it would in that moment. So that takes two things. It takes the fact that I have and hold Bitcoin and it takes the fact that I know other Bitcoiners who also have and hold Bitcoin. If I'm just in a vacuum and

I hold Bitcoin by myself, what like, I think we're missing part of the equation. Like, that's great, good for you. But there's this whole other ecosystem that you're missing out on. It's like when you see your kid making a decision, it's like, it's like they're kind of making a good decision, but they don't see the whole picture. That's how I view the parallel economy. There's just such a deep well that Bitcoiners can participate in by participating in the bigger picture. I love what you said. And there's a few things I want to hone in on. Number one, that last thing. You can't live in a vacuum. You can't simply hold Bitcoin and then piss off. I mean, there's scenarios where you'll be okay.

But in this scenario where there's like that top down, like, hey, we're going to stop the on and off ramps. Like typically people live in a vacuum holding Bitcoin and keep low key because they're worried that the government's going to come after them, which maybe valid. But at the same time, if you live in a vacuum and then the government says, all right, off and on. ramps gone. Guess what? You know no other bitcoiners. What are you going to do with your Bitcoin? You are fucked.

You have no outlet to utilize the Bitcoin that you saved. And so like now what are you going to do? What do you do next? Like if there's no mechanism for you to go on and all, you got to figure out those things. And yes, you can find like peer to peer ways of doing it. But peer to peer, there's a connection there. You do need in some way to connect with other people. And so I think that resilience is super important.

The other thing I wanted to hone in on about what you said is, is I love just in general the, again, like the idea of the transition, maybe not being so bad if we can make this thing robust enough before that type of a collapse. I think it may vary depending on the expediency with which people move over to a Bitcoin standard. The people that have done it before a collapse is upon us will do quite well, for themselves. The people that do it as a collapse is happening will save themselves. The people that do it after the collapse has taken place will be the ones that benefit the least, but still continue to benefit immediately after they make the shift. The last person on earth

to shift to a Bitcoin standard will still be better off than before they were on a Bitcoin standard. It doesn't matter. It's, yeah, should they have done it earlier? probably, but they'll still be better off than staying on Fiat. So, yeah, I think you make a great point that if the thing is already there and you can just hop over, yeah, it makes it a lot simpler than having to actively build it in the midst of total disarray. Yeah, I think something that's cool about that, talking about the parallel economy is what we're really talking about is the emergent properties of money. and what we've seen when money has failed in the past is like you're saying like something else becomes the money, whether it's cigarettes or whatnot. And in a case like that, cigarettes would become money because they accurately perform the functions of money. Where we're at now, there isn't really a reason for any large-scale economy to adopt cigarettes because Bitcoin has already competed cigarettes as money.

And we're seeing right now kind of with with more and more currencies sort of on the brink of failure or in the midst of failure. You know, we're seeing places like Lebanon and Venezuela and whatnot where the currency is all but useless and has lost, you know, 90 plus percent of its value in a pretty short period of time. And in a lot of those cases, what they're actually adopting now is the U.S. dollar. And so in those cases, the U.S. dollar is out competing Bitcoin as the best money that they can use there. And in a lot of ways, that's a short-sighted view. But I think we're going to get to a point in the not too distant future where Bitcoin starts to compete with the U.S. dollar in a very meaningful way at scale for money in places where the existing Fiat currency has collapsed. And the interesting thing as well is that, you know, when you're talking about the re-centralization, the reorganization of the economy, and suddenly cigarettes get out competed by a new fiat, it's very easy for. that fiat to out-compete the cigarettes because they're not actually a very good form of money.

And when you get a properly centralized fiat system, it is going to be pretty good at transacting. It's going to be efficient. It's going to be fungible. It's going to do a terrible job of storing your value, but it's going to perform all the other functions of money quite well. And I think we'll be in a spot where, you know, coming out of that sort of decentralized failure zone of a currency, Bitcoin is already there and then is still there. And so In order to bring in a new form of fiat, you're going to have to either use tremendous violence or out-compete Bitcoin, which is going to be a harder and harder thing to do. Dave, you're giving me a bit of a nicotine craving with all you're talking about cigarettes. But, Brian, I'm, first of all, congratulations on your new book.

I'm a voracious reader of all Bitcoin books, and I will definitely pick it up as soon as possible. And your energy is infectious. So thank you for your overview of the parallel economy and all things applicable to it. And I mean, what more can I say than what you said and what Ben and Dave had said? But definitely, as I mentioned before, I'm not as active in that economy as I should be. But I think, you know, by associating with Dave and Ben in the future with the sat market and stuff, I'm trying to get more access to more peer-to-peer transactions. And I think it will evolve and gain momentum in the future.

And I think, you know, it's something we all need to do. So thanks for that. Well, on top of that, Mike, you're about to have a business that actively primarily accept Bitcoin. Exactly. Exactly. No, for sure. And I think that relates to what Brian was saying, too, about, you know, hoddling versus building. And I think we decided to build in this space as well to provide value for that next wave of Bitcoiners.

And I know in that case, case, you know, we modeled the business a little bit after me. I could have used that help for the last six years. And, you know, people my age aren't inclined to spend the 10,000 hours that I have. So that's part of the program. And, you know, I would have gladly spent Sats on having someone help me along the way and would in the future. Brian, we need to get you out to a sat market at some point in the future. You would be an ideal guest. to, especially for all the newcomers in the room to preach about like this, this type of thing. So maybe next time around on the rodeo, that should be something that we, July 1st is the next sat market. Yeah. See if we're making work. That's awesome, man.

I would be honored to be out there. Definitely, yeah, the book references what you guys are doing. And I know in the past you've mentioned even some of your tactics and how you guys accept cash and things like that to help, you know, kind of wean people off and pull them into the economy. I think that Bitcoiners not thinking rigidly about, you have to use Bitcoin right here and now, but how do we kind of work towards the bigger picture? I think the creative minds in Bitcoin, it's really compelling.

And just one last point. I didn't say in my rant, but I just think it's interesting is I'm looking up a chart from my, from my Instagram that I posted a few months back. But Bitcoiners are familiar with, well, sorry, let me back up for a second. when I kind of give my spiel on parallel and how important I think it is, people ask all the time. It's like, well, what's that timeframe? And so it's hard to give timeframes, just like hard to give a Bitcoin price prediction. But I think it's starting to become a little bit more clear.

I heard two different accounting firms report on the growing debt within the United States and how much tax revenue. So basically it's projected and 10 years, 100% one out of every dollar will go towards paying and servicing the U.S. is debt in 10 years. That's not far. We're talking about 2034, like the blink of an eye and 100% of our revenue will be going towards servicing our debt. So you're talking about like the upper limit.

The system basically has to crash by then, right? And then anything else before then? I mean, does it really take 100% of your income to go to debt towards crash? Like obviously at some point before that, the system probably crashes. And we understand, we understand that they're going to make up for that other portion by printing money. That's going to create hyperinflation or at least really, really significant inflation. But as Bitcoiners, we understand. We always reference Yimar Germany.

But I think a lot of times we fail to recognize how it must have felt leading up to that. So this chart I have, sorry, I don't want to just so many reads off numbers, it can be tough. But I'm going to try and keep it simple. In 1914, you could get four German. marks for $1. Five years later, 1919, you could get eight German marks for $1. So four marks, five years later, you could get eight marks for $1. That was a conversion rate.

Four years after that, so it went from $4 to $8 to, guess what, 4.2 trillion marks for $1. So that's how it happens. Think about it in 1914 to 1919. You're like, man, inflation's really bad. This really sucks. we just lost half of our buying power in the last five years. And then in the next four years, you're talking about this is the last denomination that they had.

The smallest denomination that they had for German marks was a one trillion mark note. So you couldn't have anything less than $1 trillion for each mark. Think about that process. Here we are. We're in this environment where we're constantly talking about inflation and everybody is, not just Bitcoiners, but everybody's talking about it. If you look back at a lot of the newspaper headlines from 1914, 1915, before hyperinflation set in, they were talking about inflation in the same way that we're talking about it now.

So, yeah, I think we're getting close. So, Brian, you're saying that those 99 cents stores are going to reopen as the $99 million dollar store. Yeah. I mean, it's like that actually makes a heck of a lot of sense. $99 million, $99 million. It might actually seem like a good deal at that point. Pretty bearish, Mike.

I think he says. Yeah. We need a Tee in there. Yeah. I mean, this is, Brian, it's, there's a, there's a good book that that basically documents this period of time called When Money Dies. And basically about the, the crazy thing was that in the midst of it, I again, I guess, Dave, this goes back to your earlier point then that all of these people in positions of power are just really bad at everything. But the government was like that as hyperinflation was happening, they were their brains and they were publicly saying,

there's so much demand for German marks, we need to create enough for all of the demand. And so they'd be like, well, this is where we need to make more. There's not enough for everybody. as everything was hyper inflating. And it was just like, I look at that and I think like, how is it fuck, like, how was that, these were the people in charge of the country. It made sense from their view somehow.

I don't know. Like they were in their school of thought, that's what they were taught. It's very hard to understand something if your income or your position of power depends on you not understanding it. And so like that, that's where they were at. Like we're basically, especially in Canada, we're in. we're in that first five-year period. We're like year four of those five years where everything doubled, right?

And it's already more than doubled, realistically. And I think there's an interesting detail there wherein, you know, I was talking before about the need for Bitcoin to outcompete the future feats of the world, right? And I don't know if you guys have ever talked to somebody who grew up in Yugoslavia, for example, or Romania, or like, former communist nations where they've experienced a modern day debasement of the currency. They've experienced runs on the banks. And they have reason to believe that they cannot trust their fiat currency.

And they've got that built in. They've already seen it fail and they've seen it betray them. And you never get over that. Like you thought you had money and then you don't. Like that's a very jarring thing. And so I think as we go through that period where a lot more of these fee of currencies are going to collapse. you know, hopefully we can have a fairly smooth transition to Bitcoin. But in order for a future Fiat currency to outcompete Bitcoin and regain its dominance as the main currency in a given area, it's going to have to overcome the trauma that everyone has had from the last time Fiat failed.

And that's not a small thing. Well, and to your point, there's always this competition for the next currency. Well, to your point, Ben, in dying, is it was dying of money? Was it what you guys? Money dies. When money dies. Yeah, how many dies? So in that, he documents the fix.

Well, how did the economist fix? Why Mar Germany? What they did was they had the hyperinflating German mark and then they ran a parallel, there's that word again. They ran a parallel currency next to it called the Renton mark, which for a period of time was actually a fixed supply. I think they fixed it at like 100 billion, 100 billion units. And they said, you can use either one of these currencies.

There's the hyperinflating one and then there's the fixed supply one. We've seen this. Every time that economists want to fix the hyperinflating currency, they have to run a parallel currency next to it that is fixed supply. Now, because it's based on trust four years later, they always start to inflate the supply of that one as well. But what is remarkable about this period of time that we're in right now is that that fixed supply currency that's running parallel already exist.

And it's not in the hands of those same economists that screwing. up the first one. So we don't have to worry about in four years that there's going to be an increase in the supply. What are we seeing today in about four blocks? We're seeing actually a decrease in the daily issuance of that. Satoshi was brilliant in what he did. It was the fix to all of these problems before, but they never had this technological innovation that we have right now. It's a beautiful time to be alive. It's incredibly bullish because all of the pieces are in place. The dinner table is set for a truly robust parallel system that is not organized by mankind or a central body.

It's organized by mathematics and aligned incentives. It's the fix that we've been looking for, that humanity's been looking for millennia, literally millennia. We get to be in this time to participate in that. And so I hope that people, whether they go out and buy parallel, that's one thing. or with hopefully more so than buying this book, you just feel compelled to go out and start building or participating in this economy. If you do want to buy the book, it's on Amazon tomorrow.

You can pre-order it. There's a million sat wallet hidden in the book. You can find the seed phrase throughout the book. So we have fun stuff like that. But at the end of the day, be bullish on Bitcoin, but be bullish on Bitcoin because it's the solution to so many of the things that you see wrong in the world. Oh. Yeah. Damn.

You need to come to Calgary. Let's go, brother. I love it. If you make it to the rodeo, I will make you a steak. Oh, yeah, let's do it. He makes the best steak, and by the best steak, I mean, like, that you will ever have in your entire life. Jeez, okay. He consistently tells me that eating steak at restaurants is stupid.

You can always make a better steak at home. And he's not incorrect when it's his home. Yeah, I mean, go to a restaurant, you get like a beautiful piece of fish that took a lot of practice to cook exactly right. They've got some sauce made out of, I don't even know what all the ingredients are. And like, yeah, I'm going to go out for that and I'm going to pay a restaurant to do something that I would not do at home. But like, the best steaks in the world take five minutes to cook. Like, and they're, they're perfect every time. There's no reason to go to a steakhouse.

If they're going to charge you like $200 to make something. 30% is good. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be there. You just bought me. Yep. There we go.

Awesome. All right. Well, gentlemen, so we're going to start to round it out. I'm just going to be a quick round of any final thoughts and recommendations that you might have from people. So final thoughts, just anything that you want to kind of get off your chest to round out everything. And when it comes to recommendation, something maybe you want to point people towards, you know,

whether it be a resource, something that you wish you would have had in your Bitcoin journey or something new that you think is pretty cool, then feel free to go ahead and do that. And so I'll round out mine. So again, my general feel for this whole episode is Bitcoin builders making a better future for everybody, whether that be through education, whether that be through circular economy, whether that be through a parallel system that people can easily transition to as everything else goes to shit. That's kind of the general feel. And so I think my main takeaway is something that Brian said is you can't live in a vacuum as a Bitcoiner. Because if you do and everything

you're worried about takes place, then what do you do? You have no relationships, no connections to rely on to utilize the hard money that you have collected. And you're going to have to go and build that trust. It's going to be a hard time for you to go and do that when you've had no connections with anybody. So I would say if you're hesitant, then at the very least strategically build those connections over time. Find the people that you can trust and build those associations. And it doesn't have to be all at once that you don't have to like be parading yourself on the internet like I so often too. But yeah, I mean, I think that's a good takeaway. And in terms of shoutouts, I want to, or rather recommendations, my recommendation here that I'm going to give

one that Dave gave earlier and that I previously had up on the screen but I'm going to once again shill the Banff High Country Inn as the first again hotel in Banff

which is Banff is absolutely beautiful if you haven't been to the Rocky Mountains in Canada you've got to come visit and while you're here you may as well drop some sat for a hotel room they accept lightning and you can pay for your room. They've got a POS terminal ready to go

to accept your lightning transactions. So yeah, come out to Banff, spend some time. Probably come in the summer. Unless you enjoy being very, very cold, unless you're like an avid skier. But I like it in the summer. Either way, yeah, come out, drop some sats on somebody that is part of the sat market here in Calgary.

and dude does an awesome job and he's super keen and he's like all over everything and he he wants what we want he wants a circular bitcoin economy so yeah come come give him some support and uh yeah do a little trip by the way if you're coming for the bitcoin rodeo in calgary on uh we're doing the sat market on july first we're doing the rodeo on the second and third if you're in and around town before or after that you may as well see the sat market on july first we're doing the rodeo on the second and third if you're in and around town before or after that you may as well see the mountains. They're an hour drive away. So come up and stay in the mountains and pay sats. So yeah, there's my shell. Again, you got to support your local bitcoinsers, especially those that are trying to help build those circular connections and build out that local economy. So Dave, I'll toss it to you. Final thoughts, recommendations. You go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I have to endorse this hotel again. It's a great place to stay. It's right on a trip. But anybody who's not familiar with BAMP, you should just Google BAMF. Like, it's truly ridiculous looking here.

It's like a tiny little town in the middle of the biggest mountains in the world. It's crazy. And there are incredible lakes here with amazing green water. And it's a must-see place, one of the few places in the world that I think everyone should see. So I would heavily endorse both Banff and the high country in here. But I also want everyone to come out to the Bitcoin Rodeo. That's the conference we're putting on July 2nd and 3rd. Early bird tickets to the Bitcoin Rodeo actually end like at any moment here.

Like I set them up to end hopefully with the halving. And that is, you know, it's happening at any moment here. So prices go up pretty soon. but if you want to come out, check out our incredible lineup. Some of the highlights, we've got J.P. Sears headlining, who, you know, he's a guy that, you know, you can see him on the screen there. Not that many people know his name, but everybody knows him from his videos, right? So he's a bitcoiner.

He's going to be doing some amazing Bitcoin content. And then the other one there that you can see on the side there is the roast of BTC sessions. So we're going to be doing a roast. JP will be involved myself, T. Funk, that was mentioned earlier, and a bunch of awesome Bitcoiners are going to basically be roasting Ben. I somehow agreed to this. Yeah. It's honestly going to be just like incredible content.

There's no way that it's not going to be awesome. And then, yeah, you can see some of our speakers. We got a great list of speakers. The conference in general is focusing very heavily on what makes Bitcoin useful and valuable to the real world. It's not a technical conference, and we're not going super far down the rabbit hole of hard money. We're talking more about like, you know, how does Bitcoin actually choose the world? How does it change people? Why is it useful? And what, why should you get involved? And we're trying to reach out to this big group of people that exists all over the world now,

but especially here in Western Canada, we've got a huge group of them that I would call like the freedom community. They're the people who have, they've identified. the problems that we're talking about. They've identified that they no longer want the government to steal a huge portion of their wealth. And now they're open to the solution. And so we're trying to present this in a way that is not scary and overly technical feeling,

but shows them that like, you know, this is a real thing. This is a real solution. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's going to be a good time. I'm very excited for it. And side note,

the original Bitcoin Rodeo in 2018 was Safedine's first public speaking Bitcoin-related gig after he had just released to the Bitcoin standard, which was pretty cool. So I got the signed copy of the Bitcoin Standard from Sabadin's first speaking gig, and I got the version of the Bitcoin Standard where the forward was written by Nassim to lab before broken. Yeah. I feel like that's probably worth some sats. It must be.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, pretty, pretty awesome. Well, we'll toss down the line. Mike, final thoughts, recommendations. Well, first of all, I'm jealous that I'm not in Banff tonight to celebrate the having with you guys. And my wife and I are heading to a party where it will be like the meme of the guy standing

in the corner thinking. nobody here knows what just happened tonight. The most important thing in 2024, and they're all just carrying on with their normal lives. And so I'm going to have to gut it out through that party with Normies and kind of try and get through it. But a somewhat self-serving resource is, I highly encourage anyone who has any interest

to check out Bitcoin Mentor.io. and scroll through the profiles of all our mentors and try and get a sense of the diverse group of highly skilled educators that we've assembled. And perhaps there's an opportunity to work with some of them to answer any questions or any of your Bitcoin related needs. So and thank you for that. And although I know Dave and Ben well already, Brian, a real pleasure to meet you today. Man, nice to meet you, Mike.

Awesome. And Brian, I'll tell us to you again. And final thoughts, recommendations. Perfect. If you didn't hear that, go to Bitcoin mentor.io, all right? They had, check this out. They had 350 people applied to be mentors. And they kicked them all to the curve except for 17 people.

You're getting high signal mentors that actually know what they're talking about. I'm looking forward to finding out some of this stuff. Like Ben was asking about how do these devices communicate and send Bitcoin without using the internet? I don't freaking know how to answer that question. So I'm going to have to get one of these mentors to explain to me how this stuff works. That's incredible. Okay, Bitcoin Mentor.io.

I have to shill Orange Pill app. Guess what? I'm only a part of this company just like Ben and just like Natalie Brunnell and Knutz Vanholm and Daniel Prince and Nico from Simply Bitcoin. All these people are part of building this thing because we believe in it. We're trying to build a social network. We just passed 10,000 active users on Orange Pillap. There's plebs all over the world.

So whether you want to find people in your neighborhood who are into Bitcoin, if you just need actual real life Bitcoin friends, which we all do, most of us when we start in Bitcoin, that's one of the weaknesses is that we have a few friends on Twitter that talk about Bitcoin. But if we want to go and grab a cup of coffee or something like that, you're just, it's so hard to find that until Bitcoin or until Orange Pill app was invented or created, founded at Pacific Bitcoin a year and a half ago. this tool didn't exist to find local Bitcoiners.

So not only can you now find local Bitcoiners, but you can find local Bitcoin merchants. We're onboarding Bitcoin merchants like crazy right now. If you're a Bitcoin merchant, a brick and mortar Bitcoin merchant, go to orange pill app.com slash merchants and put yourself out there. Peter McCormick calls this the cheat code. If you're a Bitcoin taco shop and now, or excuse me, if you're a taco shop and then you put out there to the world, we're the Bitcoin taco shop. you're going to have the entire Bitcoin social layer at least 10,000 plebs around the world

who will be championing your cause. And if they're in your area, they're going to come and they're going to spend their Bitcoin with you to help participate and stimulate that parallel economy. That's why I wrote this book too, because I'm so passionate about this. I think that this is the next epoch of Bitcoin. I think that parallel and the books that are coming out right now in Bitcoin, it's very exciting because this represents the third wave of Bitcoin books. The first wave were the pre-Bitcoin books.

It was the Rothbarz, the Von Mises, the sovereign individual, those types of books, the books that predated and influenced Bitcoin. And then you had the Bitcoin standard, broken money, Bitcoin evangelism, everything divided by $21 million, those books that help you understand Bitcoin. And those are going to be relevant for a long time because we have so many people that need to be onboarded. Those are going to be that feeder system for things like Bitcoin mentor. But then now we're talking about the third wave of Bitcoin books. And how I would define the third wave is the, hey, I've been in Bitcoin for 18 months. I've been in it for three years, five years, 10 years. What next?

What now? I have cold storage self-custody. I have multi-sig set up. My family's going to get my Bitcoin if something happens to me. I figured that out. But what now? There's something more to this, right? Absolutely there's something more to this.

The Bitcoin books that are coming out now are defining. what the next era of Bitcoin and actually wider what humanity will look like going forward. Humanity as a whole will be changed because of sound money at its core. It's really, really exciting. And so, yes, if you want to participate in any layer of the Bitcoin parallel economy, please get on Orange Pill app. That's one of the easiest ways to get plugged in and start participating in that. And again, the book coming out tomorrow, Parallel, please give it a shot.

give it a read. If you're somebody that says, I only want to hoddle my Bitcoin and I don't, I fundamentally don't believe in that. Please give the book a shot and see if there's a compelling reason for participating in the circular or the parallel Bitcoin economy. Because I think that it makes a pretty good case for that. And if we all get behind this, guys, we're going to change the face of humanity. And that's not hyperbole. We're literally going to change the course of human history if we can execute this. damn man i get so hyped every time you start ranting it's you know what else i heard is that we're going to all uh get girlfriends after the having that's well that's the other

reason orange pill app exists okay with that don't tell my wife then it is a dating app so yeah i will i will vouch also again in in the vein of orange pill app if you're a bickoner and especially i found it particularly useful in in just general travel. It's crazy. You can walt into basically any city on earth and be like, where are the Bitcoiners at? And the answer is, you know, check out OPA, like go on Orange Bill app and see who's around. And you can like inside of 15 minutes being inside of a new city, be like, hey, you're,

you're around and have, let's go grab a coffee or a drink or whatever. And all of a sudden, you, you now have created connection and a friend. friend in any corner of the globe. It's pretty wild that this is like a pretty unique space to begin where you can just say like, I'm a bitcoiner and just walk into any city and somebody's like, cool, want to hang out? I had a flight coming back after we did the orange pill in Congress, we took 535 copies of the Bitcoin standard and passed them out to every senator and congressman.

On my way back from that, my flight got held though or late. It was delayed for nine hours in Dallas. So I got on the app and I started finding there was three local Bitcoiners that were willing to let me sleep at their house and take a six hour nap. Now, I ended up just staying at the airport because we had all this back and forth whether I was going to get on the next flight or not. But just being able to have this resource of there's actually like people you're connected to that will help you when you need this. Now, this is like benign. This is trivial. but think to the future, man.

When I actually need help from Bitcoiners, they're there and there's a place to find them. Holy cow. Party like it's 839-999-99-9-9. Wow. Jens, do we, I mean, Mike, I know you got dinner, but... No, no, it's a cocktail party, so I might go fill up my glass and wait.

All right, we got one block. Just start like this will be the block that takes like 60 minutes to hit. Well, why do we give it at least 15? Yeah, okay. We'll do it. We'll do it. So we're going to pour a little bit more whiskey here.

Yeah, I'm going to do this now. I'm not even using this. I mean, like, your hands are clean from the last time you do this. Yeah. Hey, Lisa, do you want to join us for a, my wife is here too. She's been our, she's been our ice lady. Do you want to say hi for the having? It's.

Yeah. You said ice lady. I said ice lady. I did call her ice bitch before this. That's nothing about the personality. She's just like she was getting us ice. But do you want to say hi for the having? I don't know if I'm in it even.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we're one block away from the having. So that could come through at any moment. So I may not even get a drink for it before I get to celebrate this. But we should. I hope it's a solo miner.

How fucking hilarious would it be if ocean mining mined the people? Oh, God. Like miracles can happen. So there's a bunch of interesting discussion that's gone on about the halving. And like there's a bunch of weird game theory that goes into like when you mine a block. Right. Like so a miner who mines a block can actually start mining the next block if they don't publish it. But they run the risk of another miner.

mining and propagating a valid block that wipes out not only the block that they've already mined, but the work that they've done trying to mine the next one. And there are, you know, another great Calgary Bitcoin or Steve Barber for upstream data was posting a little bit about Antpool. And I don't really follow well enough to know the ins and outs, but he was saying that like Antpool essentially through a bunch of proxies may control somewhere in the area of 50% of the hash rate. and in a scenario where a company controls a significant amount of the hash rate,

the economics of this one block actually change in an interesting way because there's all these like, there's like prediction markets, you can bet on who will mine this. And like, you know, a miner who is able to bet against themselves, for example, and bet on someone else to mine this might have an incentive that is not the same as every other every other block. So we're in an interesting spot. And the fact that we didn't get two blocks in a row

tells us that we, you know, we didn't get 98 and 90 and and and, sorry, we didn't get 99 and and the, the having block immediately won out. Oh, there we go. Happy having. Cheers. Happy having.

Who got the block? Wow. Does it say who mind it? Oh, shit. We got to figure it out. Someone in the chat will tell us. Also, yeah, the SATs per byte, which just went crazy. It was like up at 200 sets, 200 plus sat for bite.

Who mind it? Do we have it? Via BTC. Yeah, so like a bit main proxy. Yeah, shit. Not ocean. Yeah, that's too bad. Well, cheers, guys.

Pretty exciting. And thank you, Ben, for hosting. And Dave and Brian, great. to spend the having with you and wish you all the best tonight. This is my class. Gentlemen, thank you. I,

I, you know, it's, the having is a pretty unique time. We only get to, I mean, it's literally New Year's times four. It's that much more scarce.

So, nice to celebrate it with you, gents. Have a wonderful evening. I guess we'll start to round out here, but, it was so convenient of the global mining. ecosystem.

It was courteous of them, eh, Dave, to put in this show? Yeah, right at the extreme. It's perfect. Yeah, it's a perfect way to end. I mean, I'm very courteous again of all like all the hash to really, you know what?

Why are we bullish as rounding out? We should probably get this show on the road, get a few blocks out the door. Not going to lie. It was not looking good. We had four blocks to go with like 20 minutes. Yeah. And now the next block is,

first in the new epoch. Next block. Damn. Well, that's the most disappointing block of all times. By brains. By brains, fool. For the miners, that is. They literally got half a half of them.

Yeah. Minutes ago. Oh, wow. 38 Bitcoin and fees. Is that real? What? Wow. That's what Jamie said in the chat.

There's no way. 37.62 Bitcoin and fees. are these all the people that got bumped they were trying to get paid for 8401 you know what happened actually uh is um there might have been like a bunch of ordnals people trying to overpay to be in that block yeah yeah yeah yeah for and they got bumped oh that's so fucking awesome fuck those guys those guys indeed you imagine total fees is three point I'm on man pool that space says yeah five oh man fucking huge that's hilarious think

of all the idiots that just paid a stupid first of all this a stupid amount of money to like be in that block for no reason whatsoever yeah yeah to to not even to like have made it into the block because you paid less of an exorbitant amount of money well actually uh the fees in the having block were 37. Okay, yeah. I'm looking at the, the next one was 4.48 total fees. And yeah, so anyway, it is pretty crazy. So the reward for mine that block was actually huge.

And then the next blocks are huge. So it's not a disappointing block yet. Yeah, there may- Miners will survive if it stays like this. Yeah, yeah, wild. Well, gentlemen. Again, thank you for sharing the having here with me. Much appreciated.

Again, just thinking back, the amount of stuff that has changed from one epoch to the next is a lot, not just in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but even just like personally. I think Bitcoin epochs are a good way to measure your life because in a single year, it can be hit or miss. But if you kind of extend your time horizon and you look out to the next Bitcoin epoch, you can accomplish a lot inside of a four-year period. And when I think back to 2020, my goals in and around the halving were I don't want to work for anybody anymore. I want to do the channel full time.

And I want to be able to travel and work for myself. and four years later, that is, has, like, that's my life. Congratulations. That's awesome. Yeah. So what do you want to do next time? Well, since all those panned out, I don't know, like, let's fly an island and full-time ice lady.

Yeah, full-time ice lady. There we go. Well, I mean, I feel like I've already, this epoch had already happened. I'm living in the dream. My Ice Lady is here. You're talking about the good old days already. Yeah. I want to stop flying commercial.

I'm really done. That's a good goal. Yeah, that sounds amazing. That might be possible for many Bitcoiners in the next epoch. But we'll round it out here. Gents, again, thank you for being here. Dave, thank you for joining me live. Ice Lady, thanks for the drinks.

And everybody in the stream, thank you for being here. Everybody in the chat. Love it. All the 3,200 plus people that tuned in over the show. Super awesome. And Mike, again, also thank you for building out Bitcoin Mentor.io and being a partner in that. And also, thanks to the Banff High Country Inn for having us and letting us stream live from it.

So everybody that was here for the show, thank you so much. We're going to log off now. Have a wonderful day or evening and having, wherever you may. maybe happy having everyone thank you next time for your daily session cheers jents have a good thanks ben oh the bit