BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Christmas Special 2022

Episode Date: December 24, 2022

Join a ridiculous number of Bitcoiners for a marathon Christmas Special - with rotating 30 minute panels on various topics of interest.   Guests include: Rodolfo Novak, Stephan Livera, Max Keidun (HodlHodl), Matt Hill (Start9), John Stefanopoulos (Futurebit), Seedsigner, Adam O, Nico Moran (Simply Bitcoin), Steve Barbour, Alex Gladstein, Robert Breedlove, Lyn Alden, Tip, John Vallis, Michael Saylor, Samson Mow, Bernard Parah (Bitnob), Jack Mallers, Joe Hall, Jeff Booth, Obi (Fedi), Adam Back, Alyse Killeen, Mark Moss, Saifedean Ammous, Greg Zaj, Yellow, Sean Harris, Bitcoin Bekka, American Hodl and more!   💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW:   Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab an Embassy today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/    Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions    HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, you can check out their Lend platform for p2p loans that are never rehypothecated. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/QUEM   Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $10 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS    BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel and protect your hardware with faraday bags! https://privacypros.io/btcsessions    Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/   BITCOIN tips: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Have ETC sessions. Bitcoin is a few money. You can't stop it. Get yourself some Bitcoin and hold it yourself. Pure to pure exchange. You know, people are going to organically come to it and gravitate towards it, especially in the world we're living in now. It's incredible.

It's a great tool, and I can't wait to see it proliferate everywhere. Oh my. My heart is a pound in for this one. I don't get nervous for these shows, but I am today, mostly, because I don't want shit to go wrong. I don't want it to go offline or something, to one of those nightmare scenarios where everybody's hyped up and, oh, the feed dropped. That crap.

Well, welcome, everybody. Merry Christmas. Very excited to have you all. I started a few minutes early because I want to get a few things in before we get things rolling. First off, I have to say a huge thank you to all of the incredible people that have said yes to join me this evening because this is going to be an epic marathon. of biblical proportions. So many awesome bitcoins are joining in for this. We have 30 minute panels on various topics throughout the night.

And people that, again, I'm just thankful that they're even giving me the time of day, let alone taking time out to join me for this show. So it's going to be absolutely epic. So a few things I just want to say at the gate. Yeah, there's going to be 30 minute rotating panels, incredible guests. I encourage you to follow them all as you see them through the show. Keep that chat buzzing. Lots of comments.

Give this a share out. It's going to be going on through the night. I hope you've got your eggnog, and I hope you've got maybe a Santa Hat, fireplace roaring because it's going to get festive here. Very excited for everything. Of course, this is live so anything can happen. So I defer to my festive friend Bill here.

We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. A fucking thing sucks. Shout out to the Pleb that added the Santa Hat for that one. That's epic.

So thank you. Thank you for that. Also, I wanted to let you guys know that throughout the show, we will be doing a ton of giveaways. So there's going to be, if you're on Twitter, and that's the place to be to be entering these, the details will drop basically once every hour. So you'll see a little clips that are pre-recorded telling you what to do in order to enter each one of these things to get the giveaways. It will also let you know where you have to be from to enter because it depends based on the particular

giveaway. So yeah, stick around one of the bigger ones. As the show goes on, the giveaways get bigger and bigger. So make sure that you check that out. And I guess that's it. Like, subscribe, share, keep those comments coming. Let's get this bad boy running. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your Christmas session.

Shout out to sponsors of the show. Start9.com. This is your sovereign computing solution. If you've been watching the show, you'll know that I recently dropped a full tutorial on how to set up and use your Start 9 embassy to build your Bitcoin software stack. So this would include things like running a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain or Bitcoin Core so that you can connect external wallets and verify your transactions via your own copy of the Bitcoin blockchain instead of somebody else's, which helps preserve some of your privacy. You can also build things like your own Lightning Note on top of this and establish your channels with other peers in the next. network. You can run things like mempool. Space in order to monitor the network for fees and other interesting tidbits of information and pretty much any other Bitcoin peripheral that you may

need to make your Bitcoin experience more self-sovereign. Now this is the only thing that your embassy does. You can host your entire life on this thing. You can host things like your passwords, your photos, your files, anything you can think of, you can get more sovereign and get it out of the hands of corporations and keep it yourself on your own hosted. Yeah, again, sovereigns computing solution. So start nine is going to be doing a merch giveaway this evening. There will be three winners and the three winners will get to choose their favorite start nine shirt and their favorite start nine hat and pair them up nicely. So what do you need to do to enter this competition while you're going to need to jump on Twitter and you're going to need to tweet out, what are you most excited

about in the age of sovereign computing. What do you think it unlocks? What are the possibilities? You're going to need to tag myself at BTC Sessions. You're going to need to tag at Start9 Labs. And you're going to need to use the hashtag Start 9 XMIS. Now, this is only open to people in North America. Again, apologies for anybody outside of North America.

But again, shipping, you know. So get out there, get tweeting. Give an answer. I will be announcing winners within 24 hours. and we'll get you sorted via Twitter. So we'll see you there. Hello, and welcome to ASIC Lifehacks. I'm your host, Tatum Turnup.

Also host of Between Two ASICs, hosted by Tatum Turnup. It's not a podcast. Today I want to be showing you how to use your ASICs to help with little inconveniences that really just irk you on an everyday basis. Our first one that we're going to be doing is cooking. This was supposed to be a full meal. That was really expensive,

and so we're going to scale it down, and we're going to do an egg. I don't really have an excuse on why I don't have a cast iron skillet with me. Safety, this is for you. All right, so I'm just going to reach back here and plug it in. Now we just got to let it warm up a little bit, all right? And we're going to keep our skillet right here. We're just going to let this baby preheat for just a second.

6 and a half hours later Alright, so I have broken the yolk Which is really upsetting and also None of the proteins have started to denature yet Which is also fairly concerning And I have egg all over me What do I do now? This is going terribly All right, we're still where we were

Not sure if you can see that Oh god We're just gonna let it sit for a little while and see how it goes One eternity later Alright, so this is not going as fast as I thought it would be, but I'm still reusing the heat. So we're just going to... Oh my God. Later that same evening.

So that took way longer than expected. If you're in a crunch and you were waiting on this tutorial to cook your Christmas dinner, just go to the nearest restaurant that's still open and get carry out. Really sorry about that. but stay tuned. We have more applications coming soon that are a little more practical. So really sorry about that.

Awesome. I love it. Very excited to learn more about those ASIC life hacks. But let's get the show rolling. This panel coming in right now, we're going to be chatting about the self-custody renaissance that we're witnessing right now. So I'm going to bring in these gentlemen. Right now, we've got NVK, we've got Stefan Lavera,

we've got Max from Hoddle, Hoddle. Gentlemen, welcome. How are you guys? Good. Doing well. Awesome. I am glad to have you all. I'm going to give us a little preamble, and we're just going to dive right into this.

So, I mean, I wanted to chat about the self-custody Renaissance because we've seen a lot of stuff happen this year, right? We had Tara Luna, we had 3AC, we had Celsius, we saw, how saw FDX, BlockFi, just all of these implosions. But these types of implosions, while not entirely similar to previous ones, it's the same old story, fake Bitcoin, right? We saw, you know, Mount Gawks, Quadriga, Bitcoin that wasn't there that people thought they had. You also see things even after these implosions like CZ from Binance saying that

99% of people are safer on an exchange. But some are not taking his advice. and we know that because we see historic exchange outflows, historic highs of that. And so I want to chat about self-custody, kind of where we're at, where we're going, where you think we'll be in the future. So I'm going to start with just a basic question open to whoever wants to jump in. Is the self-custody narrative winning? I mean, after the FTX debacle, you know, like you had mainstream media saying not your keys, not your coin. So, you know, you could say that we definitely had an upgrading narrative.

I wouldn't say it's winning per se, but I think the people who are prepared to win, like, are definitely more likely to get that going. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'll add in here that, of course, many of us who are a long-time Bitcoiners, we have been saying this for a very, very long time. But sometimes it just falls on blind, you know, it just falls on deaf ears, right? Like you say it, you say it, you say it, and really what happens is people have to kind of learn the hard way. And in some cases, they have to learn the hard way multiple times. And I think what I notice is that a lot of people are scared because they think they're going to make a mistake

when really the way you have to really look at this is to understand, you're just going to make mistakes when you learn this thing. Like that's just how everyone gets started. That's just how you do this thing. So, you know, like on one hand, you could say, look, look how many people think they hold some Bitcoin. It could literally be 100 million or 200 million people when actually the number of non-custodu users, there are estimates from Glass Node and things like this who may have estimated

that number around 31 million. So if you look at it from that point of view, we're behind and we're trying to win this thing. Of course, now's the time to learn. Now's the time to actually, for a lot of people who are going to learn that less than the hard way, unfortunately. But, you know, the technology is getting better. And it's personal responsibility, you know, people just have to learn to learn to take that. It's getting a lot easier. A lot easier. Oh, yeah. And I think the confusion is also going away because I think, you know, if you go back just like, you know, even sort of like a year or two ago, you still had, you know, like even Bitcoiners making life too difficult for people coming in,

sort of like saying that, you know, you need 50 CDs and laptops from Walmart and, you know, like you need to do this, you need to do that and you need to wear, you know, fair day cage underwear to do it. And, you know, that is true. I mean, if you want to, you know, if you're going to hold, you know, 100 million dollars worth of Bitcoin, but like, you know, most people are sort of just trying to get, you know, a little bit off the exchanges, tested out. So there is plenty of ways of doing that.

They're like sane, reasonable. There's good education. I mean, you run like some good courses and you have all this videos that you make. So I think I think this care of self-custody is kind of going away. And that's a, that was a huge barrier. So, so like, you know, it's a thing at a time. It's very early. still very early.

I don't think we have more than a million Bitcoiners in the world still. So, you know, we're going to get there. I want to tag on something you said, and I'm going to toss it over to Max here. I'm going to ask, so you said that the fear of self-custody is going away. And to a degree, I would agree because it is getting easier. But I think more so, and I'm going to see if Max agrees with me, is that the fear of losing it on an exchange that implodes is becoming greater than the fear of learning self-custody. So I'm wondering if Max wants to tag in here.

What do you think is the driving factor for people's decisions on self-custody or not? Well, hi guys. Sorry, I dropped off. But anyway, yeah, I changed my setup to mobile phone. So, yeah. Anyway, I think that, well, the fear of self-custody, I would start with the fear of self-custody because as Rudolfo mentioned, many people previously, they was afraid to do the self-custody. They thought, like, well, I'm going to keep my coins on exchange, on the landing platform, whatever, and everything will be fine.

Easier, they're professionals, I would trust them. So now it's getting shifted. And another thing is that people are actually afraid of, of, of, of leaving the coins on exchange. And one thing, an important thing I think, which helps them to acknowledge that it's, there's no reason for you actually to keep your Bitcoin on exchange, even if you trade or land or borrow,

is that there are plenty of non-custodial solutions that will allow you to do self-custody, plus you will be able to trade, you will be able to borrow, you will be able to land, you will be able to do whatever you want. So it's getting easier to self-custody, not only because the solutions are there,

but it's also because you can now hold your own keys and you can trade with that and you can borrow and you can land and you can do whatever you want. But the shift is happening, that people are moving coins from centralized exchanges and they're actually starting to explore more and more different trading trading platforms that actually doesn't hold

their coins like BISC or if I might mention huddle hoddle. So we see that there's a growing numbers of trades, volumes and non-custodial solutions are actually getting on track across the board. So yeah, something is happening and definitely there's a positive shift specifically for people who understand the importance of self-custody. Yeah, I want to, so, I mean, just in my experience, even over the past, like, since

early November, when shit really, really hit the fan for the umpteenth time this year, but like, it was much more public this time. I've had calls left, right and center of people saying it's time. Like, I want to, I want to self-custody for the first time. And they sit down with me for an hour and they say, you know, I've watched videos, but I just, all I need is just that that hand holding the first time through just that that nod of yes you're doing you know you're doing the right thing like I Rodolfo will smile at this but earlier earlier this week I had a session with a dude who's probably I don't know like 30 or so and his mom who's like 60 something and I set them both up on a cold card and by the end of it she was air gaping transactions like a badass and she and she got it. Like the only explanation that was necessary as I was showing them how to actually air gap

transactions, she's like, so what are we doing here with this back and forth? And all I said was, oh, you're just, you're just getting your cold card to sign the transaction, almost like when you sign a transaction for your credit card. So you're basically just saying, sign this, and then you're giving it back to the computer and saying, there, yeah, it's okay to move. I find that The biggest hurdle really is for people to experiment and try. I think that's like a huge part that got lost in Bitcoin in the last few years because, you know, people are interested in the price, you know, people are interested in whatever sort of like shiny new technology there is. But a lot of people don't don't take a little bit of Bitcoin that they bought off the exchange and just experiment with it.

You know, just just the hacker mentality, right? Like send it to the device, play around, lose a little bit of maybe of claim like doing something stupid, right? But through experimentation and through play, you lose a lot of the fear, right? I mean, you know, and as that fear sort of like diminishes, you see yourself making some pretty big transactions without really batting an eye. It's like, ah, just send it. So, yeah, it's just nice to see that sort of coming back. And I think that people were already forgetting Mold Gocks, right? Like a lot of people were not around for it.

So it was a very foreign to people. Oh, what do you mean, exchanges collapse. I mean, if you've been around for long enough, you've seen like Plinty have to disappear. Every cycle, every cycle. Remember big for? you know like there's been a lot of a lot of exchange collapses yeah yeah yeah Stefan have you seen like I mean you've been doing like uh you know self-custody kind of workshops and stuff like that like have you seen an influx of people in those so yeah so for

example with ministry of nodes I'm not as close to that but I have been doing nowadays because Katan's handling a lot of that stuff um but yeah even with swan we've been seeing this kind of thing we've seen a lot of interest in that. So for example, I've been running some webinars for Swan to teach total, like we're talking total newbies, right? They've literally never done an on-chain transaction before in their lives. And so we were doing webinars there. We were getting big, we were getting record numbers that sign up in terms of registration for this, just a free webinar, right, teaching people just the basics, right? How do you set up a phone wallet? And then, you know, next, next, in the month or so, then we'll do it at the 201 version where you learn how to do a hardware device, right,

like a cold card. I think the point you guys were making earlier is very right. There's a cycle. There's a life cycle to this. So a lot of people come in. And because they weren't around in the days of Mount Gox or in that, let's say, the Quadriga cycle, right? Like the time Quadriga went down,

that was, I think, the 2017-18 cycle, right? Or maybe it was like 18-19 in that sort of bear cycle. So isn't it interesting as well? Like Kate Lung was pointing this out earlier, that every cycle has its little story, right? Mount Cox in 2013-14, Quadriga in the bear cycle of 18-19, and now we're in this cycle with FTCX going down and all these other people going down, you know, it's sad in a way, but it's also an opportunity, right?

Like this is a reminder for people, the people who were previously chasing yield. Now they sort of wake up and take that wake up call and, okay, now I need to learn. How do I get a phone wallet? How do I get a hardware? How do I think about, you know, in the future, if I, as I get more advanced, personally, is it time for multi-signature, right? These are conversations people have. People have to have that exploration.

So, you know, it's a life cycle. But yeah, to answer your question, yes, we are seeing more interest in terms of self-classity. I mean, it's the price of tuition, right? Like, everybody has their own price of tuition that they hit and, you know, how conscientious they are about, you know, what they're doing based on the amount of money that they're dealing with. And so, yeah, we see it. And these tuition checks keep getting larger every cycle because there's more people, right? There's more people and maybe some again some individuals just get cocky with and as the the size of institutions that are involved grows. Yeah, we're going to see we're going to give plenty plenty of money is going to go to the university degree of holding your own Bitcoin.

So we'll see more of it for sure. I wanted to pause a question to everybody. Where are we lacking right now? What is there to improve upon to help more people kind of, you know, beat down this path and make it more accessible for others? One pathway I find interesting is maybe some of this miniscript stuff, right? Like this idea that you could start like in the future, we don't know exactly. It's early days, right? But you could imagine in a taproot world, people have special kinds of multisig, right?

Like maybe they have a standard multi-seek is there two of three with the right backup and maybe it's got somebody else who has another key as like a and it degrades down. Like as an example, maybe it starts with three or five and over a few years it degrades down to two of three or one of five, one of three, that kind of thing. So there's a few ideas. I think I'm excited to see what's coming with stuff like, you know, things like Nunchak and Keeper and things like this where, you know, we're kind of doing more of an NFC style and maybe that's going to help people, like if they get their tap signer, you know, the tap signer card, and they do that first, they get started with that, and then maybe that's an easy way to go. Maybe that's a possible future direction that you can start with a tap signer and then move up to, you know, the cold card or other kinds of devices.

Yeah. I feel like it's, you go ahead. Yeah, it's just, it's nice to have a lot of options, right, that are not all pretty much the same, just a different vendor. it's nice to have like different sets of tradeoffs like different kinds of devices offering like you know very very different experience different kinds of security because you know like people have a lot of different needs you know and and people live in different places and and people have like even different setups right so you know you want your pocket money in lightning you want maybe a little bit more money you know for

to travel, but you don't want the keys on the phone, so you use the tap signer. But you don't want to carry like a, you know, a cold card with you to your trip, right? Like, so, you know, it's nice to have all these things. And, you know, maybe, maybe you need to mix, right? Like you want your tap signer of a code card on Nunchuk or something like that. Maybe you're using, you know, you're co-signing of other people and they want to use Sparrow to their part of the cosigning, right? So I think just like expanding the options with like true difference. It's sort of like it's going to help a lot in the coming in the coming years ahead.

I think especially like even starting like you know next year. I think a lot of a lot of this different solutions will sort of start to make sense to people that the older solutions didn't make sense to them. Yeah, Max, I want to ask your opinion, like what types of demographics in terms of, I guess, types of hodlers versus solutions? Like, do you, would you assign, like, you know, how would you break it down in terms of like, well, this person might use a solution like this? You know, how do you see the separation between some of those use cases and individuals and what they might use? the problem with demographics that as we offer like if you if you ask me from my my point of view in my experience we offer anonymous trades and anonymous lending and borrowing we don't know who our customers are so i'm not sure we'll be able to answer you the question about demographics i don't know maybe there's

like 18 years old 80 years old grandma you know trading on hoddle hoddle at the moment or or like 18 years old boy trading on hoddle hodel who knows like that's the beauty of of of of Bitcoin allows us to do that but I if if I might answer your previous question or add some comments I'm not going to be original but I think that the case the huge like huge thing that we need to improve is definitely in terms of you are ux like simpler new type of of things, that's what we are trying to improve, even building non-custodial solutions, which is really hard to build, and technically these things are sophisticated. And another thing is that not only getting the variety of different wallets there,

like mobile wallets, hardware wallets, of course, the more wallets, the better, you know, multisig wallets, one-seq wallets, whatever, but also getting the variety of different non-custodial platforms, products, so that you can always understand that there's no reason for you to store your bitcoins on any certain exchange to trade or to borrow or to earn yield, although I'm not a fan of the last one. But anyway, you know, we get the variety of wallets. We get the variety of non-custodial solutions that will allow you to hold your keys

or they will trade with you directly. They will send Bitcoins directly to your wallet, not keeping them if you buy from them, for example. And we will get more and more people, because now, like, if you will check the breakdown of exchange customers, like 70 or 80% people use exchange wallets because they need to trade and they want to buy and they want to sell, they want to earn yield, they want to, you know,

there's only like 20, 30% of, of people who are just using the exchange to store their bitcoins. And actually the amount of these people are decreasing. So we need to offer alternative solutions, how to trade with Bitcoin in non-custodial fashion, how to, how to do many financial operations. And then we will see that the amount of people will start to grow. Yeah. Yeah.

I think you're spot on, especially with UX, UI. my hope is that through the bull market, you know, a number of companies and people that are designing, you know, various products and wallets and everything, they'll, that designers have been hired with some of the influx of the money that we've seen and that those products are going to start to roll out throughout the cycle. And I think, I mean, I've definitely seen it in my interactions with various wallets. and you know just in general the ease of getting a newcomer to try something out and understand what they're doing is is much smoother than it used to be but yeah I mean there's always room for improvement and like easy easy UI UX in the eyes of a Bitcoins are it's entirely different from your Normie friends because they're used to the easy you you XUI of like their day-to-day applications that they have on their phone that are you know you know tap here to do this one thing and like you know not having to copy and paste information write things down you know there's a lot of steps that yes are kind of necessary in self-sovereignty but i think we can definitely streamline things make it seem friendlier more accessible while still being secure in it and i i think that's happening um but it's it's it's a longer road than

then we want it to be, I will say. Yeah, true. You know, when you look at like wallets, some of the lightning wallets, like Breeze, Phoenix, Moon, I mean, we're pretty much there. You know, like you open the thing. It just works. I mean, there's nothing to do. It doesn't even ask you to do the backup until you actually put money in it.

Right. So, you know, is it great for real money? Of course not. But, you know, like for you to start. or for somebody that doesn't have more than a hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin anyways? Like, who cares, right? I mean, that person would have lost the Bitcoin or that dollar bill regardless. So I think we're there.

Like, it's just, you know, they even, all of them now back up to the ICloud and, you know, is there a lot of privacy tradeoffs that could happen in all this? Yes, right? But you can't have it all, right? And I think what's really cool is that like you talk to the people. I just had a panel with a breeze Phoenix guys. And, you know, this guys care about people's privacy, about people's security. So, you know, even though they will make some tradeoffs and some compromises, like, you know, the heart is in the right place.

And they'll keep on improving to try to make that with less compromises. right? This is what's so nice, at least like about stuff now. So, so yeah, I think, I think it's pretty cool. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up those wallets in particular because, I mean, obviously kind of different models in each one, but you're right. Like out the box, you can download any of those pretty much boot it up and it's, and you're good to go. And when it is time to back it up in some way, the, the options are quite simple.

and it varies from like again cloud backup or email backup to you actually can write down a seed phrase in some instances. So it is it is getting easy. And of course there's going to be tradeoffs, right? Like for those people that are like, I don't want any cloud anything and I'm not going to do that. Well, that's fine. But you just know that that entails additional, you know, steps in order to properly secure things. And that's kind of, you know, Bitcoiners are used to dealing with. compromised. We spent years and years compromising making, you know, well, we can't do the following

things yet because we don't want to sacrifice the integrity of the base chain. And, and then we finally, you know, are able to now build on top because we were uncompromising in that. So I think solutions will come forth. And even, even the ones that do come forth that are super easy, I think you'll, you'll gradually have less and less to compromise with in using them. So, um, Yeah, I don't know if anybody wants to add further to what I've just said there, but Maybe one point. I'd just comment. It seems interesting to me that, you know, obviously we have our world where we're kind of constantly pushing self-custody and all that. I think there's a whole world out there of people who are, let's say, peer-to-peer traders or things like this where some of them just, you know, to them, it's almost foreign, right? If you talk, like they might be a peer-to-peer trader person who's using finance, like it's like it's the banking app, you know? And so they'll say, oh, pay me into, you know, into the bind. And like, in a way, that's actually what we're trying to fix, right?

We're trying to get more people to actually understand how they have, why they need to like, like, okay, even if you're using a custodial exchange just for the actual trades part, of course, it'll be great if they could use, you know, hoddle, hoddle and not, you know, non-custodial exchanges. But they, they, they, I think it's getting them to make that jump, like to even start to understand why to not, you know, to actually start using the. non-custodial technology instead. And I think that's maybe the big hurdle that we have to sort of, part of that is technology and innovation and education, like, and some of that's education. And part of that is just people learning their lesson the hard way. So it's kind of a mix of all of those things, isn't it?

Yeah. So I'm going to leave a final question. We've got about five minutes for this panel wrap. So my final question here, and we can kind of take this where we see fit, but do we get to a point where self-custive? is is normal or like at least pretty you know pretty widespread or do you think that inherently just the the fact that people always want the easiest possible option is it always going to be like a lot you know more than 50% of people have their funds with a custodian at all times or do or are

there enough implosions are there enough tuition bills where it is. it becomes ubiquitous that, you know, more or less, if you're a Bitcoin, you're probably going to be holding keys or like at least, you know, the majority of people. Yeah, I don't know. Like, I think, you know, Bitcoin is available to everyone. It's not for everyone. Like, you know, everybody, you know, it's a personal responsibility thing. And we know that humans, personal responsibility is not evenly distributed.

So I think, I think. the majority of people will not self-custody. But I think we're going to have enough scares that anybody who is willing to or was on the fence will. And that's a really huge win. That's not possible with Fiat, right? You can't take a bag with your $100,000 in savings off the bank and just keep it at home, but you can with Bitcoin.

So I think the win is the fact that whoever wants to can. and all the people that we can help or drag them kicking screaming will and I think in this process we also make custodians better right like we're going to force them to to be better and do better because Bitcoin is going to keep them a bit more honest

too so yeah it's not maybe what some people want to hear but I think it's a it's a it's the truth reality check hey yeah yeah I mean I mean, it is what it is, but you're right.

Like, I think, you know, we do we get many more people self-custing, which you want. You get actual consequences for anybody who decides to play fiat games with people's Bitcoin if they are custodial. And then I think we also get more options where, again, like hottle, hoddle, another peer-to-peer exchange options, we get more of those kind of proliferating for those that have seen history. and that becomes a more normal thing of, oh, I'm going to purchase a Bitcoin peer-to-peer through somebody that, you know, that, you know, I'm not ever leaving custody anywhere.

So I think all in all, it's a positive, but, you know, we got got a little ways to go. Max, do you have any final thoughts here? And then I'll ask Stefan for any final thoughts as well. Yeah, I agree with Rodolfo that, I honestly, I do believe that majority of people will still use custodians. The question is, what will be the amount of majority? If there will be one billion people using Bitcoin in, let's say, five years from now, and majority, let's say, 60% will use exchanges and

we will have 400 million people doing the self-custody thing. For me, that's more than enough, you know and again agree with rodolfo our our main goal here is to provide solutions you know show the path if the person is dumb nothing will change him nothing will help him you know you will get burned with Celsius with ftex you will get burned with another mumbo jumbo that will pop up in three years whatever like it's just a vicious circle that will never end with stupid people you know unfortunately that's how it goes i'm not a dreamer in that sense i'm more realistic person so yeah these are my final thoughts awesome sophon i'm going to toss it to you and with your final thoughts maybe give people a call to action if they haven't taken uh self-custody yeah sure yeah

so look i think i agree with nvk and max probably the best we can hope for really realistically is a, let's say, a large minority, right? We may be able to get something like 40% who really know and understand self-custody or at least know how to take the first steps, just the nature of the way the businesses in the space work. It's kind of like that. But at least if you can be onboarding people and responsibly trying to encourage them to self-custody, and I think if there are enough of a, let's call it, a large minority who hold them honest, right, and start doing bankruns, basically. Community bankgrounds is, is the way in Bitcoin, not your keys, not your coins.

And so I think the lesson, I think the parable or the moral of the story for people is to just take the lesson, if you can, learn from other people's mistakes. Learn from Mount Gok's, learn from Quadriga, learn from FTX, learn not to sort of chase irresponsible yield products and just do an on-chain transaction, right? Start that process. I think most people get scared or they do what I call analysis paralysis, right? They're sort of assessing the options and then they just, because they're so worried, they just never start.

I think the main thing is to just kind of put that to the side, just take a start, get started and slowly advance your way up. I understand that for a lot of people, it just never enters their mind, right? Because they're stuck in this kind of Fiat banking mindset where it's all in the app and I never have to think about it. But over time, if you haven't been canceled yet, you will be. So give it time. People will get canceled.

then you will have to learn. You'll get forced to learn. So, you know, pain will be the teacher, sadly. But at the same time, there's an opportunity out there for a new, for something new and better with a Bitcoin financial system. So let's look forward to that at least. I love it. Well, gentlemen, I'm going to say a big thank you to all of you. NVK, Max, Stefan. Appreciate all you guys. Thank you for taking the time out to chat this evening. Anybody watching, if you're not following, what are you doing? Follow all of them. But yeah, I appreciate all your time. Have a great Christmas, guys. Thank you.

Thank you. Merry Christmas. Take care. Merry Christmas. See you guys later. Cheers. All right. Everybody.

How was that? First one out of the park. Max from Hodel Hodel, MVP with Coin Kite, Stefan Levera working over at Swan. Yeah, self-custody. It's important. If you have not already taken self-custody, this is your call to action, go do it. If you haven't tried it at a wallet, you know, download, moon wallet, download blue wallet, something on your phone, really simple.

Try it out. Take your first 50 bucks off the exchange. Just learn how to do it. Do a single transaction. Try sending it back and forth. That's all you need to do. There's your first step. Your first step towards self-sovereignty.

And that's our next panel. I'm going to bring in the gentleman right now. We've got three of them. We've got Matt. We've got Seed Siner. And we've got John. Oh, damn, John, you are so festive. Look at your backgrounds.

It's like log cabins and Christmas trees and Christmas. Santa hats and everything. Damn, you guys have up the ante. Every panel from now on, you've got a challenge. So gentlemen, thank you for being here. I appreciate all your time. I'm going to give a quick intro and we'll just dive right into it. Matt Hill is over at Start9 Labs.

Chatted about them at the top of the show. But if you haven't checked out, Start 9, check them out. John, welcome from Future Bit Home Mining, made accessible. Stoke to have you. And of course, Seed Siner, dude. what you and the team are building is fantastic. And again, great resources for all Bitcoiners.

So if you guys are unfamiliar that are watching, then go give them all a follow. But I'm going to give a little preamble and we'll dive right into it. I'm going to throw questions at you guys. So this panel is on building your own self-sovereignty stack. And so the idea of sovereignty, it's the authority to self-govern. And, you know, a short AKA,

don't tell me what to do. So any Bitcoinser has already taken the first step to choosing their money. You know, don't tell me which money to use. Now, this panel consists of people dealing with things like key management, node infrastructure, mining, even general data hosting. And so I'm going to open it up to you guys in terms of, I guess we'll focus first on kind of the Bitcoinser. where does the road to self-sovereignty start? What are those first steps down the road of self-sovereignty when it comes to Bitcoin? Anybody who wants to jump in?

I'll jump in on that one. I think how you arrange the panels is great because I think the first step is the first panel, right? It's taking your money and Bitcoin off exchanges. And obviously, the events in the last couple months have taught a lot of people of painful lessons. of that. So now I think it's a good place where we're at where people are starting to understand the full ecosystem, Bitcoin, and what it is. You know, that's just the first step, right?

And it's, you know, there's a big rabbit hole that we go down after that. So people are starting to understand that Bitcoin is more than just the Bitcoin itself and exchanges. It's a whole protocol ecosystem. And I think people shouldn't understand that program. recall in that whole ecosystem and people are starting to see that there's solutions out there where you can run this whole ecosystem in your house, which most people never realized. So obviously that's what almost everybody here is doing.

That's what future bits doing. We're building devices where you can take it out of the box and you have Bitcoin and not just Bitcoin, but the whole ecosystem in the box ready to go and easier on. So I think that's that's the next step in this journey. That's awesome. I want to toss to the C Center here because you kind of heard John say, you know, that first step is, you know, self-custody. And you've been kind of focusing on taking that to the extreme of not just self-custody,

but like secure, you know, key creation offline through your own, your own heart source. So maybe you want to speak to this a little bit. We're taking self-sovereignty to the pathological level. So I've heard. I would say as far as self-sovereignty goes, even before you take that first step, I'd also add that it starts like in your heart. And it starts with, as a lot of us have heard people say, Bitcoin changes you. And so as you start to learn more about Bitcoin, because you have to,

You have to do that homework. You have to do that research. You have to put in the time if you're really going to invest your hard-earned time and money into Bitcoin. Like you don't get there unless you do the work. And as you do that work, I think it changes you on the inside. And it makes you question a lot of the dependencies that you have on the fiat world. And, yeah. And again, as you alluded, the first step is just getting those coins out of an exchange, out of custodial.

custodial custody. It's a little repetitive. But yeah, I don't know where I'm going with this. I think the ethos of Bitcoin begins in your heart. You have to hold your own keys. But then I love what these guys are doing in terms of taking other parts of your online persona into your own hands, like your data hosting, your interaction with the Bitcoin network, your ability to earn KYC3 SATs.

Like there's so many different directions you can go in terms of taking ownership of how you interact with the financial world around you. And I love what these other guys are doing too. Yeah. That's a perfect lob over to Matt then. Matt, I'm going to queue you up with a question. And I'm sure you can speak to this because this is kind of like your mission.

But why? Why do this? Why worry about all of these steps that we're discussing of taking self-sovereignty over, yes, your Bitcoin stack and everything, but your data. Why is this important? What are the consequences if you do not? Sure. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because we ended up where we are today because people couldn't answer that. Society at large could not answer that. And so we would continually choose, you know, conveniences and security over, you know, freedom. And then one day you wake up and find yourself without any of them because without freedom, the rest are gone.

And so, you know, ultimately, everyone has to make that decision for themselves at a time when it becomes clear to them what the tradeoffs are. And unfortunately, we have very short memories as individuals and as societies. And so it sort of is bound to deteriorate. And one by one, people will become affected by these, you know, gradually. worsening circumstances until they wake up one day and say, okay, what can I do about it? Or even what is it? That's usually the first question is what is the problem? And then once somebody understands the problem, they start looking for solutions.

And it's our job to be ready for them with the solutions. Also, to be ready for them with the education around the nature of the problem and the existence of the solutions. But at start nine, mostly we focus on building the tools. that individuals and families will need when they personally have decided enough is enough and they're ready to at least take a stance and at most fight back. Yeah. I like that.

And again, the kind of road we're going down right now in terms of personal freedom and kind of protecting your wealth, but also your data, I'd encourage anybody watching right now to take a moment, think to yourself, you know, what, what digital things am I relying on other people for? And this could be anything, right? It could just be, it could be your passwords. It could be, you know, all of your photos and things like that. It could be, again, the keys to your money. Or it could be, you know, I'm still sitting large amounts of my wealth and Fiat bank accounts on the regular. and then think to yourself, all of those things can can rug you at any time, basically say, well, not yours.

It never was. How difficult would that make your life? Because I, you know, I had this moment earlier in the year, right? We had Canada basically say, hey, if you're supportive of this thing, you know, goodbye bank account. And I mean, I'm lucky in that I was living on Bitcoin at the point, not that I didn't have bank accounts, but I still have that moment of being like, how much of a pain in the ass is this going to be? And the answer was still significant. But I at least had the thought process of, okay, but I can, I can make it work. It's this will be a pain. This will be a pain. But I will still have access to my money. I will be able to use it. I will be able to make ends meet. And in the long. run, it doesn't affect me if they shut down my bank accounts fully, right? But again, apply this to your data as a whole and apply this again to your money. And you see how quickly things can change. And we've talked a lot about how quickly kind of the geopolitical landscape is changing and

how easy it is in kind of G7 nation here for them to just say, bank accounts? Not for you, not for you. If I could jump in there, like, it's not just what can they take from you, it's, but what of yours can they use against you? So a lot of people know about my background, having been a law enforcement officer for 15 years as someone who had access to privilege information, subpoena power, and information that was obtained by a search warrants and government inquiries and such. and after I had completed my law enforcement career and stepped away, I read Glenn Greenwald's book on the Snowden Disclosures. And even for me as someone who had access to privileged government information, it was eye-popping the amount of data that these huge government data centers have access to. And that is a function of us, you know, storing our messages in the cloud, storing our documents in the cloud. all of those kinds of things that we have come to rely on day to day.

Like the cloud really is just someone else's computer. And so, yeah, I just want to throw that out there. Like it's a function of you come back to Enrand and, you know, innocent men are difficult to rules. So you have to create enough rules such that there are no innocent men. And, you know, with what you're discussing about what would happen in Canada and how, you know, people's bank accounts for being frozen and seized and such. I have real concerns based on, you know, the Snowden disclosures and the overall trend

that is kind of our, well, we see it with Twitter and Twitter's collaboration historically with intelligence agencies and the FBI and law enforcement agencies. I'll let these other guys jump in, but it's a problematic trend. Yeah, that's actually a good segue into what we're doing and my thoughts. especially in the mining space. It's definitely interesting to see how many people really put trust in centralized entities, especially to run the Bitcoin ecosystem. So, you know, mining right now is centralized in these huge corporate, centrally controlled,

publicly traded companies. And, you know, you see this whole other segments of people trusting in the government and wanting the government militarily involved in mining Bitcoin, let's say. And, you know, I don't want to be a downer on the Christmas special, but, you know, I think the next discussion, the first issue was, you know, self-custody. I think the next problem in the next bull market is going to be this issue around censorship of transactions. And that's going to involve around the mining space.

And why that's going to happen is because there's so many. centralized entities controlling and being able to censor your transactions. Not many people know, but over 80% of the Bitcoin hash rate is controlled by a couple dozen entities. The governments could easily go to these guys and be like, listen, you're either censoring these transactions or we're shutting down your mind and guess what they're going to take being a public traded company. So that's why my mission and why I founded FutureBit was to make sure we can combat this.

we need to make sure there are a big, there needs to be a majority hash rate controlled by the people. 51% of the hash rate has been controlled by individuals that are not sensible. And that can only happen if people understand the importance of mining and making sure that they're mining at home, where the government can't go after a million or multimillion people. they can easily go after a couple dozen centralized entities, but they're not going to go after 10 million people. And I think that's an important narrative for people to understand. You know, it's important that you're taking Bitcoin off exchanges

and you're holding it, but that Bitcoin is run by these miners. And if you're not participating in the whole ecosystem, and then that's what we build that future bit, you're not participating enough. You really have to go all the way in. Okay, let's be adversarial here and walk through a scenario. I want to go down the road of like nightmare scenarios where Bitcoin is attacked on every front. And so you were just disgusting mining.

Let's kind of tug on that thread a little bit. Let's say that governments go to these. And, you know, there's some are like obviously geographically dispersed. But let's say there's a nightmare scenario where somehow like a number of, governments where the majority of this hash are located, managed to actually agree on something for once and crack down and say, okay, you've got to be censoring transactions, the following transactions,

you've got to always look for this, and then you push those out. You don't mine blocks with these types of transactions in them. What is the dynamic that plays out if we at least have a good chunk of the hash, you know, which is your stated goal, is home miners that can point to to perhaps pools that won't enforce this. Like, do we then have basically fees for transactions

that are not given the green checkmark by governments, those fees go up in thus incentivizing people to mine on pools that will accept those transactions? How do you see that playing out? Yeah, I mean, and it's not really, it's more of, you know, who is putting these blocks together. That's what matters at the end of the day for Bitcoin mining. So if there's enough people involved where, you know,

especially through Stral and B2, this new protocol coming out where people are able to choose their own transactions and push to the pool itself. So the pools won't be the entities doing the transaction processing. That's what once there's at least a few pools and a few blocks, that's a win, right? Because people can just point their nodes to those pools, and they'll know 100% their terms of will be included,

no matter what a government is saying, right? So that's the minimum solution. And then, you know, past that, there's, you know, the 51% attack vector in mining where, you know, those miners could collude and change the protocol. If you have 51%, that's almost impossible to do. But obviously there's many defense vectors from the node side.

You know, there's plenty of ways to defend against this. But the number one thing is definitely being able to process transactions and pools that won't be participating in this. Awesome. All right. Well, okay. So we kind of chat about the mining then. I'm going to lob this to Seed signer maybe. Again, you've been focusing on kind of like the individual being able to secure their coins.

and transact and build out hardware, without anybody even knowing you have hardware, maybe lay out the nightmare scenario that what you're building is hopefully hedging against. There are a few different ways I think that nightmare scenario could go. One thing I worry about just by virtue of my background is someone like, hypothetically, let's say Vladimir Putin has a backdoor on a popular hardware wallet that a lot of people own, but it's a zero-day attack that, say it's against ledger. And this is an unknown vulnerability

in their tech stack, and it will allow somebody who has their hardware in hand, basically to be able to extract a private key and obtain the funds that the wallet is supposed to be protecting. Now, historically with ledger, I mean, there is a historic list of customers, but hypothetically, I don't think somebody like Mr. Putin is going to hesitate to go knocking on doors throughout Russia, wherever he has a hunch that somebody is holding a ledger that if they can get their hands on that device, they can extract keys and get money out of it. That's one kind of potential nightmare scenario. Another potential nightmare scenario was just hardware wallets not being available. It's not even an issue of them not being compromised, but it's just like in some parts of the world, if you want to buy a hardware wallet,

like you're either going to order it through the mail and risk alerting the authorities to your interest in owning Bitcoin or owning a hardware wallet, or you're going to have to purchase it through a black market source and who wants to buy a critical security device through kind of an unknown sourcing, option. So those are a couple of the options. What I hate to think about is Bitcoin being still legal, but somewhat neutered in such a way that it can only be held on centralized platforms

or government-approved platforms or custodial platforms that are regulated and strip out a lot of the core benefits of Bitcoin, like the permissionless of being able to send the money whenever, wherever you want, to whoever you want, and how much. There are no transaction limits on Bitcoin. There's no $600 limit that you have to be under to have a little more privacy. So it's a difficult question because there are so many different ways that this could go wrong. And we're just kind of trying to keep an option out there in case a lot of different governments around the world. So for people who may have been born, you know, in a,

place where things go south, we try to keep an option in play for them. Yeah. I like that. I'm going to flip it on its head. I'm going to toss it to Matt and Matt. I'm going to, I'm going to ask you to, in an ideal world, outline what, what, you know, again, this is, this is like us. If we could paint a picture of what we'd like the world to be, paint a picture of your average self-sovereign individual for me.

What does their stack look like? You know, like in general, what are they doing? This is like what I dream about. And don't talk about very often because it's too delicate and fragile. But all right. So what I would like to see and what we're trying to build is a future such that

individuals and their computers, and by computers, I mean any piece of hardware that is, you know, performing computation and connecting on a network with other computers, this would include robots, devices that are internet connected. So our endgame vision of the future is a world where individuals and families are utilizing their computers and their robots in such a way that there are no trusted third parties involved in the transaction. So, you know, as a vision, I should be able to

go anywhere in the world, pull out a device that is mine and all mine and doesn't plug into any, you know, mothership clouds or anything like that, and remotely control an entire fleet of servers and robots. I should be able to watch live video footage of my home from the other side of the world. I should be able to have, you know, a drone circling my property and a little vacuum cleaner that runs around and makes jokes. And I should be able to control all of these. fully myself with no subscriptions, no data porting back to the mothership, such that we have a future of, you know, you will own everything and be sovereign, rather than a you will own nothing and be happy.

You know, and that's possible. We know that this is possible. It is possible to connect computers on a network and remotely control them. Unfortunately, what has happened over the past couple decades, is the infrastructure that makes that possible is entirely hierarchical and centralized. But it can be done in a decentralized manner. And we know how to do that. And we're one of the few teams working on that.

I love that. So what I want to ask then, and I'm going to put it to each panel member before we wrap here. We got about five minutes. So what I'm going to say is what is your. first step for people watching that maybe they haven't really gone the self-sovereignty route. So I'm going to get each of you to maybe say just give an actionable, like an action item for somebody to take that first step of whether it be with their data, whether it be with their Bitcoin, whether it be learning something new. What one thing do you think somebody should do as soon as they get off watching this stream tonight? So I'm going to I'm going to go around all Matt, you just had the mic.

So I'll give it to you first and then we'll go John and then see it's signers. So Matt, I'll give it to you. Oh, and I think you're muted. Okay. Hey, sorry. I lost audio there for a minute. Oh, sorry. The essence of the question.

I heard the beginning and I heard the very end and then I missed the middle. All good. So I'm going to give, I'm just giving you a quick challenge before we wrap. Give the people watching. an action item, their first step towards self-sovereignty, something that they can do after they finish the stream. Sure. Well, the first panel is the first step.

I think this was mentioned earlier, which is take control of your private keys, especially if those private keys are encumbering money, Bitcoin. So that's step one. But if you've already done that, which most people have, well, I shouldn't say that. A lot of people, I'm sure have. and you're ready to sort of take the next step into a broader sense of, you know, independence and digital sovereignty. We recommend to everyone who comes to us two things.

Run a Bitcoin node and Lightning Node. I sort of group those together. Like run your own node and connects to it from your client wallets. Don't just run a node and walk away and think that you're helping the network. And there's that misconception that that's sort of why you should run a node. You need to run a node and you need to use it for yourself. to verify your own transactions. That's number one. Number two is self-host a password manager.

It's this really low-hanging fruit. Using a password manager to navigate the internet is like number one on the list of things that you can do to improve your digital security. But using a third-party password manager has its own risks, as we saw earlier today, with last pass getting hacked again. So use a password manager, but you should use your own password manager running on your own server in your own home. It's really, really easy to do. It's a very low-hanging fruit. It takes a couple hours to set up, and then you can literally forget about it and browse the internet like you always would before, except this time securely and without counterparty risks. So we're on a password manager. We make it very easy on our device. I love it. Awesome. John, I'm going to give it to you.

I'm going to give you 30 seconds to a minute to get out your actionable advice for somebody to do after this stream. I mean, obviously what Matt said is I think the next step is just run a node. You don't have to buy a start 9 or a future bit device to do it either. Go buy a $50 Raspberry Pi and hook up a $50 one-tabyte drive and then you're ready to go. There's plenty of one-click solutions out there. And then once you make that step, you know, start mining. You know, you need to defend your own Bitcoin.

So running a node and mining is how you do that. That's the whole ecosystem. Wallet, node, miner. That's what I got for you guys. That's fantastic. I love it. Seed Center. You're up last.

Actionable advice. I'm going to touch on what he said, wallet node miner. So I totally agree with these guys that node's super important in hosting some of your own information, your own data is super important getting into a little bit of mining to safeguard the network. And I would also throw in just from a seat center specific angle, double check your backups. Just get into your backups.

And if you can do it in a safe way with a safe way with a, device like a seed signer or some other secure hardware wallet. Make sure you have your seed words, but try to recover your own wallet. You know, deleted from your coordinator software, make sure you have your words before that. But a lot of people get locked into that device and think that somehow their Bitcoin live on that device. And if the device gets broken or lost or something that their Bitcoin has gone. But the whole point of the 39 seed phrase system is your bitcoins don't live on that

wallet, they are secured by this super complex private key that is represented in a human-friendly way by your seed words. So you will sleep much better at night if you just verify those words are truly controlling your Bitcoin and safeguarding them. So yeah, give yourself the gift of a good night's rest on Christmas Eve and verify your seed words. Thank you. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, I will say thank you so much for being here. I appreciate all of your time. People watching, if you're not following Matt Hill, John Stephanopoulos and Seed Signer, go check him out again with Start 9 and Future Bit as well. Give them all a follow.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time and have a very Merry Christmas. Thank you as well. Merry Christmas. Richard's doing a giveaway, so go to our. Oh, yeah. Yeah, go check it out for sure. And awesome. Well, gentlemen, thank you. Have a good night. Later. All right. How is that?

There we go. Two out of the park. We're an hour in, an hour into the stream. And we've got more coming up momentarily. Up next, we're going to be talking Bitcoin and energy. But we do have a little five-minute break here. But in the break, you will get instructions on how to enter the next contest on Twitter. So we will be back.

momentarily. I'll put up the banner for anybody that that anybody pops in. But we'll see you in just a few short moments with another panel on Bitcoin and Energy. Big shout out to sponsors of the show, shakepay.com. Again, the easiest way in Canada to be stacking sats. You can sign up and with the link down below, your first $100 purchase, they'll give you $10 for free. Now, some of the bonuses of doing that

and using shake pay is after you get your first referral, you can then shake your phone every single day for free SATs. They also have a SATs bag visa card. They have their shake paid program where they'll randomly buy somebody's purchase that you've done with your SATs bag visa. All kinds of awesome stuff coming out of shake pay. And these guys are huge advocates of self-custody. And so that's going to factor into the giveaway this evening. They're going to be giving away, and I, you know, on my Canadian vernacular here, this is, this is not a beanie. This is a toque.

This is a toque. This is a shake pay toque. So they're going to be giving away five shake pay toks. And this is open to anybody here in North America. And so what do you need to do to enter? You're going to be tweeting out, I want you to give me your best. self-custody pitch for noobes. Again, shake-pay, huge advocates are self-custody. So give me your best, uh, you know, short contained within a tweet, self-custody pitch for nobs. You're going to need

to tag myself at BTC sessions, tag at shake pay and use the hashtag shake pay Xmas. And there will be five winners announced within 24 hours to get themselves a shake pay tuk. Anywhere in North America would be just four. fine. So get out there, get tweeting, and we'll see you. And best of luck to all of you. Welcome back to ASIC Life Hacks. I'm your host, Tatum, Turnup, also the host of Between Two ASICs, not a podcast. So this next application is one that we can all get behind. We all have wet clothes when we wash them, but the dryers, am I right? There's so many problems with dryers. One, they don't mind Bitcoin.

Two, dryers don't mind Bitcoin. So today I want to show you how you can dry a article of clothing with an ASIC. So here's a wet shirt, and then we're going to reach back here and power up. Things are okay. Everything's fine. On our next edition, we're going to go over cable management for when you're doing this stuff to really surprise nothing. like stopped working there. Let's come back after a little while and check on our shirt.

Alright, now we're going to do a little progress check. It's still wet. Wider than I would think even if it was just air drying. The good thing is we've been mining Bitcoin. Um, it's weird. The Ethernet port's not lit up. Hold on. Bad news. I wasn't even mining any Bitcoin the entire time. Don't trust verify. I guess. Oh my God. We'll be back with more application soon. Fantastic. If you're not watching Tatum, you need to be.

And he will be joining us later for the after party. He is backstage now, managing things like a boss, I've got to say, helping out a ton in the chat, getting people all set up. So, yeah, thank you, Tatum for everything that you're doing here. And it's at Tatum Turnup on. on Twitter and on YouTube, whatever he said. I got to give a shout out also to Mateo over at Orange Pill app. He gave me this sweater and I like it. It's not a dating app.

Nonetheless, let's bring in our panel. We're going to be chatting Bitcoin and energy. So I've got a buddy here. Nico, good to see you. How you doing that? We've got some friends this time. Normally it's just the two of us. us doing some news but I'm gonna bring them up we got Adam Steve and Ben another

band so there's and there's hello and there's Adam gents welcome Merry Christmas how you guys doing that get up is just fantastic uh I feel like I feel like I'm out Ben right now I'm Mount Ben's I'm my background with five of us is a little obnoxious I'm just It is a little bit of talk about. I'm just going to do this just for this panel because the constant snowfall is a little much. It might detract from the conversation. But gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. I'm just going to do again a quick round.

Nico, obviously, from Simply Bitcoin. He joins me every Thursday to do the news. We've got Steve and Adam from upstream data. And we've got Ben Gagnon, a member of the High Council of Bitcoin Ben's in an airport, in an airport and you're with bit farms right man yeah i'm with bit farms awesome well gentlemen we're here to talk bitcoin and energy and uh what what better people to do that with and people that have their their thumb on the pulse of of the mining space and understand kind of how those things uh intermingle so again just to kind of lob you guys a softball to get this conversation started

I mean, globally, the narrative on energy in terms of what we see through the media has never been more confusing and muddled, where it comes from quality of energy, density of energy, green versus quote unquote dirty energy. And we've seen a lot of the ire in and around energy focused on Bitcoin because it it dares to use energy. So I guess to get us started, and anybody can jump in on this, what do you think the average person is majorly misunderstanding about energy itself? And I know that's a broad question, but we'll start there and see where it goes. Yeah, I mean, look, the reality is that, you know, half the world has been convinced that using energy is a bad thing. when there's a direct correlation with the amount of energy, the human civilization has been, like, has been able to basically grasp. And you could see the prosperity and the amount of energy that they've been able to use,

it goes hand in hand. So this idea that using less energy is somehow a good thing is absolutely ridiculous. And I think it's going to lead to catastrophic consequences. And that's not a theory anymore as, you know, you're looking at what's happening in Europe, right? Just the catastrophic energy policy just led to skyrocketing energy prices. People aren't able to, you know, afford keeping their businesses open. So I think the problem lies with this. Half the world's population somehow has been convinced that using energy is a bad thing when in reality, using energy leads to more prosperity. I think that's what I love about Bitcoin,

right? It's because Bitcoin, it always comes down to like an education. problem. And unless somebody is incentivized to go learn about something, unless they're interested to learn about something, it's not very likely that they dive very deep into a topic. And Bitcoin incentivizes people to dive into a lot of different topics, right? Finance being a big one of them economics, right? Why is it that we can just, you know, the U.S. Fed can just print money out of nowhere? But energy is one of them, right? I spoke with Mark Moss and he mentioned to me how Kevin O'Reary, right, who started off coming into Bitcoin, how he came in and he literally was going to fix Bitcoin, right? who's going to talk about mining only green blocks or green Bitcoin using green energy and things.

And within a year, he had flipped his entire perspective. And he was like, oh, no, Bitcoin consuming energy is, you know, a feature not a bug. So I think I'm hopeful at least that Bitcoin will get more people to think critically about what is energy, right? How does it really relate to everyday life, modern life? Is it, you know, is it a moral conversation, right? is one watt of energy, you know, equivalent to like one unit of destruction of the planet or something of that nature. Hopefully, there will be more critical thinking regarding it because like Nico said,

I think the majority of people have a pretty poor understanding. And they've been told that energy consumption is something we should minimize, energy production is something we should minimize. And, you know, I think a lot of us wholeheartedly disagree. Do you guys think, and maybe I'll toss us to Ben, do you think that Bitcoin, do you think that Bitcoin is that that learning tool, like that through proxy teaches people a bit more about energy, like just the very nature of how it works and the types of energy that it consumes in that you need the most efficient sources of energy to be the most profitable.

So do you think Bitcoin helps change that narrative and that education that people have or lack of education around energy? Yeah, I think it definitely does. I mean, I know it happened to me. After I became a Bitcoin miner, probably 18 months later, every single substation I see, you know, just gets me excited. I'm following substations on Google Maps and drawing the lines out and everything else. Something I never even looked at before suddenly became like a source of pure beauty to me. I think probably the most key thing is that people just don't even know what the definition, like the definition, like the definition.

differences between energy and electricity, which is a really shocking thing. I mean, they just think that this energy, which is everywhere all around us and all these different magical forms, can just be flipped on with a light switch or something like that. They don't realize all the work and all the ingenuity that needs to happen into harnessing energy and converting into a form that's easy and useful for humans to use and be productive doing things. right and the ability to be able to do that whenever you want you know in like kind of any scale that you want especially on a really small kind of home level or small business levels is incredible something that we've never really had before in the in the past you would have to go out

chop your own wood you'd have to burn that wood you know you'd have to do all this different stuff you'd have to build your own water mill or windmill or something to grind the flour Like, if the wind's not blowing, your whole business is shut down. Like, people have no idea, you know, the difference between energy and electricity. I think when you start getting into Bitcoin, you start really going down that rabbit hole. I'm like, what is energy? What is electricity? What are the sources for it?

You know, how can it be efficiently captured? What are the cost-effective ways to get that electricity? What are the not-cost-effective ways to get electricity? Why is it super expensive in this part of the world and really cheap in this part of the world? And you start doing a deep dive onto the, you know, the engineering behind it, the distribution, the transmission, the economics behind it, and it becomes a fascinating world. And it's really easy, I think, to just say, hey, we should use less of it. It's kind of a scapegoat to just learning about the actual technology and the

actual engineering that's taking place. So I think that's, you know, when I speak with people who are experts in energy, they love Bitcoin, they love mining, they see its applications. When I hear people who don't like Bitcoin mining, I guarantee you they cannot tell me the difference between energy and electricity. Yeah, I'd agree. Steve, I'm wondering, do you think this is fixable? Do you think the average person can get to a place where they at least vaguely understand these principles? Or do you think that reality just has to assert itself over time, as it is in Europe right now? no uh the average person is stupid and we'll never understand well first of all guys where's the christmas spirit like i i'm dressed up i've got what do you guys you guys are at home except for ben he's traveling

where's christmas over oh that is uh you do have a christmas shirt on okay i see out of way and you know i am santa claus to you ben i got your asic in my garage man yeah man we got a hook up hello for you as well i got his i got his m30 for you for for his black box in my garage. That's going to be a video coming. Just on ice right now. Yeah, yeah. I would say, you know,

one thing that, you know, is the average person ever going to understand energy? I don't think so. I really, like, not in this sense that maybe everyone here does because we have a keen interest in it, people have keen interests in different things. And I don't think the average person is going to ever care that much about how the energy is produced.

and how they consume it. I think the education can get better. What needs to happen is the average person and the average politician, more importantly, needs to get out of the way of energy system policy. The average person should not be voting on energy system policy. The politician should not be involved, at least the way they are today, in energy system policy.

If we got rid of that and let the engineers and scientists and experts, plan, build, and operate energy systems for the grid and society as needed. We wouldn't have a lot of the silly problems that we currently have, especially if we kick

the carbon accountants to the curb. Things would be a lot better. Is that possible, though? Because, like, you know, people, people, the fact is, people vote for the politicians that are enacting some of these policies. So do you think that, and I guess,

that's kind of like why I ask the question. Do you think we get to a, I mean, it seems like you don't think we get to a place for the average person understands this type of stuff. So what do you think is the end game? Because some places will get it and others won't. So do you think it's just, again, shit hitting the fan and people realizing the harsh realities of how this stuff works? Yeah, I think cost of living goes up, continued malinvestment.

into bad power generation, into bad infrastructure, which results inevitably, you can't hide it. It results into increased costs. So, increased manufacturing costs, manufacturing fleas your country, jobs, job losses. That's exactly what we're seeing. In North America is all of our cheap energy is being suppressed. You know, our reliable energy has been demonized. And we, as a result, our manufacturing costs are basically the cost of a man hour, gone up because that is what underlies the cost of a man hours your energy cost is one of the

big factors so uh you know i'm i'm sort of like pessimistic in the sense i'm optimistic i'm pessimistic in one sense like i just don't have a lot of faith uh in general people uh because they're so easily swayed by nonsense and uh just like persuasive politicians and uh you know the carbon the whole carbon focus is a clear sign of that like carbon is only one factor in the equation And yet it seems to be the only factor for a lot of people. And that shouldn't be the case. But I am optimistic in a sense that I think we're going to, I think Bitcoiners, I think it'll take maybe a long time.

But I think we're going to defund their deficit spending. We're going to eliminate their deficit spending. So that will end up resulting in them having to make better choices. That's all that will happen. And through, through reality, they'll have to make the best choices, which is the best energy systems, the ones that people. people need. So that's like that's my optimistic take if I sounded pessimistic. I don't think it was that bad. But it is it is going to be like that that that dose of reality right. They're going to have

to take their medicine kind of thing. Nico, I want you to kind of tag in here maybe. But I mean, obviously Bitcoin has a huge part in this in that it can it can gobble up that that excess energy and and help, again, be a source of revenue for people when you're not operating a grid at 100% capacity, when that max demand is not there. How do you see this playing out globally, like the people who get it versus not? Yeah, look, I always say, right, the I think incentives are going to win over coercion. And on a global level, over the last two years, you've seen TEPCO, which is Japan's largest energy company. You've seen ConocoPhillips. You've seen ExxonMobil. You've seen Gas Prom. And you also

saw Shell recently announced that they're getting into the industry. Right. So that that just, you know, goes to show that as much as the energy haters, to put it nicely, are trying to attack this thing on the social front. The incentives of Bitcoin are irresistible. And all that, that's on an international scale, right? TEPCO is in Japan. Those are American companies. Conoco Phillips, ExxonMobil and Gas Prom is in Russia, right? So, and, you know, Shell, also American company. And then recently Jack Dorsey announced when he went to the Africa Bitcoin conference that he's going to invest in this company called Grid. And it's basically trying to use excess energy in Africa, trying to monetize that because Ben, Ben, the Ben down there said it, right? The difference

between energy and electricity. The reality is that when electricity is produced, right, it's not very efficient to transport over a long, long distance, and you can't store it very effectively. So what tends to happen a lot of the time is this is overproduction of electricity. And if you don't use it, it basically goes to waste. And now Bitcoin, for the first time in human history, we found a way to monetize that excess energy. Yeah, this is very interesting. interesting. And I'd like that you brought up Africa, but I think, I mean, nations in general that have kind of been, and some of these topics, they, they, they co-mingle. But up next, we're going to be having a panel on, on human rights and freedoms and, and kind of how some, I imagine we'll get into some of the stuff that has been done throughout Africa in, in regards to their, in regards to. of their currency and how some of the value that they create in those countries is effectively

siphoned off. But you're now seeing an opportunity for some of these countries that do have sources of energy to be able to actually extract that value, that excess value, and actually keep it in a currency that can't be debased at the same time. I mean, does this down the line, again, for those that get it, does this help some of those countries that have been kind of screwed thus far, step out from under that boot, do you think? Like just, again, the realities of those that maybe have access to energy

but have not been able to utilize it in a way that is productive or had it siphoned away if they were able to utilize it. Like, I don't know. I'll open that up. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I really want to get Ben and Steve and Adam's input into this, right? So Brandon, Whittam, wrote this excellent, you know, article called, you know, basically said that Bitcoin is this pioneer species. So if you have these isolated energy pockets in the middle of Africa that were way too far away from any cities, now you could potentially build societies around that. So it's a total game changer, right? And it's really interesting because Steve, Steve's company, you know, is figuring out how to turn, you know, natural gas into Bitcoin, basically. And then I know I know Ben is a big fan of hydro, as he's told me many, many times. So this is two different cases of two energy sources that are being made into Bitcoin, right?

So Max Kaiser said it really, I love the way he put it, right, that Bitcoin is going to 51% the world's energy supply. And I really believe that I think every energy company is eventually going to become a Bitcoin mining company. And I don't think that's a theory anymore. I think it's being shown when you have news about Conoco Phillips, ExxonMobil, Gas Prom, TEPCO, et cetera, et cetera. So it's all about waste, right? I mean, you go ahead, Steve. No, go ahead, man. There's a delay.

You're your first giver. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I mean, to what you say, Nico, I mean, I think every. energy producer and power generation company will, you know, implement Bitcoin to some degree, right, at some scale and some capacity, because every energy producer and power generation company has waste, right? There's not a 100% efficiency from energy production, harvesting, or power generation to a downstream market. There's always loss somewhere in between. And what we're seeing is Bitcoin gravitate to where there's the most waste, right? And

waste is either readily available in the first. form that, you know, Bitcoin miners can use. I've always said it before where, you know, it sucks that these A6 can't take natural gas because it would make mining in the oil field just that much simpler. You do need on-site power generation, right? You've got to generate electricity. So, you know, maybe a lower hanging fruit than, you know, the immense amount of natural gas in the oil field is, you know, places on grid hydroelectric, right? Ben is right over the target in the sense that tons of hydroelectric facilities have plenty of waste. And if they don't have it all the time, they certainly have, you know, seasonal or cyclical waste where there's no demand local for

them to push to. So yeah, anywhere there's waste, Bitcoin makes sense, right? Bitcoin mining makes sense. I think what we're going to find is, you know, those who try to go after mining Bitcoin where it's not a very, not a source of waste, they're going to have a lot harder. time unless there's some other secondary use, right, unless they're reusing the heat. But I think that's the next step then, right, is where if you can, if you can take that byproduct of the heat creation from mining Bitcoin and, you know, supplement that into some type of a system like a greenhouse or, you know, boat storage, lumber storage, salt production, I think people have done, and offset other costs. Well, then you can, you know, theoretically mine Bitcoin at a loss, but you're,

you have a net gain, right? Where on the margin, you may be. It may not look very attractive, but overall, because it's, it's, you know, supplementing or taking the place of another capital intensive process, it's, you know, it makes sense to keep doing it. And so it's, it's going to be pervasive, right? And Bitcoin mining's not going anywhere. No matter, no matter what regulators in what country try to try to choke it and shut it down, it's too pragmatic for too many core industries and core processes. you know as a as a third world country here in canada speaking of speaking of energy you know like what it does for energy you know you're talking about jack in africa well up here in canada you know we can't sell our energy to anyone other than the u.s you know like we can't ship our oil we can't ship our gas it's all going down to you guys and you know i've always sort of tease like you know when i'm talking to people usually not in like board meetings or

something like if I'm at a like pitching an engineer or somebody at an oil company but if I'm shooting the ship with someone I'm saying like you know it's pretty cool you can export your gas to the internet you literally are completely bypassing the political blockades on our pipelines and on our gas and on our energy and that's amazing like it you know it's its own market right like what bitcoin will pay you for your gas what a bitcoin network will pay you for your gas is it completely different and semi-independent price. Everything's tied together in a way, but it's generally independent of the market rate for pipeline gas, right? And sometimes it's higher like it was through this bull market. Sometimes like now and most of the time, it will trend to be lower because

it's less useful energy. The stuff you put in someone's home is going to be more valued. But that's just still pretty awesome. And so that arbitrage is there. And any time, you know, any nation, you know, all these Fiat Maxis, what they do is they, they bottleneck the financial rails, but they also part of that, and actually the crux of that is also the energy rails, like the whole petro dollar thing, which your other guests know a lot more about than I do. But all this stuff they do to censor energy and to like monopolize energy and, you know, wage war on energy, Bitcoin sort of screws that up a little bit. You could literally export your oil to the Bitcoin network if you,

turned your oil into electricity, which you can do. Not saying that's like that feasible, but you could do it if you really needed to, right, if you had no other choice. So I think it's pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, again, it's not feasible until the roadblocks that are put up for regular energy are, again, so it's all relative.

And Adam is talking about I'm, I'm mining for heat right now. You see my little S-9. I love it. I love it. So I'm in my basement. It's friggin in Calgary. As am I. And I get no heat in this basement because I don't know who built this house, but there's no heat that gets down here.

So I turn that on when I'm working down here. It's my office. And it's just solo mining. Like I'll probably never hit a block, but I value that heat. So if I hit a block, I'll be happy. I mean, that's the greatest, that's better than any lottery ticket you could ever buy, right? Like you're heating your home. And then maybe you might get like,

you know you might get a bunch of bitcoin out of it maybe you know so fingers are crossed i like those odds better than my lottery tickets right so um you know and i wanted to touch you you touched on again Canadian energy we had Germany come to us and ask if we could uh ship them uh liquefied natural gas we basically we basically and when we've got oh you know we've got a lot of natural gas here and uh and we basically said nah well i mean Trudeau basically said Nah, right? Like that was the- No, we'll build,

we'll buy your wind turbines and make hydrogen and to make that into, uh, what is it meth, why was it hydrogen into then methane? No, methanol. And then we'll ship you methanol. And we'll do that in Newfoundland.

My home province. Yes. It's great idea. Really great idea. Yeah. Terrible. Again, yeah. It's, it's,

but again, a perfect example of, of, you know, Canada will, will be one of those places where, you know, at least nationally, we'll kind of find out, well, you've chosen poor policies.

Well, hopefully things turn around at some point. Well, that's the thing, right? The more idiotic the policies become, the more deadweight loss there is, the greater the opportunity to instead of do whatever the regulators demand with the energy is to export it to the Bitcoin network, right? The opportunity grows to mine Bitcoin as the policies do more and more damage and cause more and more laws. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm going to jump in here with kind of my grand unifying theory because all of you guys are talking about all these different things, which internalize with how I kind of view of the world. Looking at why things are screwed up, my general view is politicians don't want to solve problems. They want to make your problem worse so that you are more relying on politicians. And it's an endless spiral that centralizes their power and gives them more and more power.

And when you look at, you know, what is the. argument. They say, oh, we don't like fossil fuels because of the carbon. No, I think that's bullshit. They don't care about the carbon. The carbon's a complete smoke screen. Because if you say, well, what about nuclear or what about hydro or what about geothermal? They say, no, we want the fishes or we don't like nuclear. It's not safe. Or, you know, they don't even say anything about the volcanoes. They just ignore it entirely, right? It's not about the carbon. It's not about the reliability. What they want is irreliability. They're literally trying to end up. engineer scarcity in our system to make it unpredictable, to make it unreliable so that they can get

more power because the problem is there and only they can fix it. Only these grand politicians have the ability to fix everything. And so I think this is where it all comes together. It's like they're choosing the most unreliable sources of power, solar and wind. I mean, wind is a 1,200-year-old technology that they're trying to promote as the future. It is, it is archaic. we've got England who is using biomass and dropping down native forests in Canada, putting it on a boat, burning crude to bring over wood pellets to burn in a reactor in the UK. It's insane.

If you wanted to scale that biomass plant upwards, you would run out of world's trees. But coal is biomass. Coal is biomass. Why don't they label coal is biomass? Yes. It comes in here as this ultimate like freebie. tool because that didn't help the the you get to their you know 50% bio mass by 2022 or whatever

their goal was and this show's going to all about it's all politics this is going to be labeled an extremist show i'm talking i can i agree you have at least four out of five i don't know about sessions but i yeah i know these other guys so yeah i mean even in even in quebec the the province of quebec is spilling 40 terawatt hours 40 terawatt hours 40 terawatt hours 40 tarot hours 40 tarot hours hours of water over the edges of the dams every year. That's in their own publications. And they say, we don't have enough power. You don't have that power.

And the Bitcoin miners. You don't have enough power. 40 terawatt hours a year is 4.5 gigawatts continuous every second of the day. That's what it equates out to. And they say that they don't have enough power. And their solution is get it, get it. Hydro Quebec wants to build windmills. That's their solution.

They don't have enough power. They've got too much water spilling over the dams. And so their solution is, let's build some of my mouse. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, it's insane. I mean, so I guess to wrap it up, we've got like three minutes here. I'll just toss out the question.

What fixes this? Does Bitcoin fix this? Does just reality fix this eventually? What gets us to a place where we're much better off in terms of energy? Separate money from state, man. Like they're using the money printer to basically fund themselves, fund this crazy, crazy stuff. you know the 1.7 trillion with the T trillion dollar spending bill at 65 million dollars is going to Salman and there's a three point five there's three point five million dollars in that in that

spending bill going to be highways okay it's absolutely become so ridiculous the the theft is so blatant it's in your face they don't care anymore separate money from state fix the money fix the world I love it I mean I think that's a I think that's a fantastic spot to maybe to wrap it. But gentlemen, I'm going to say, first off, Steve was the best dressed. Sorry to your other guy. Thank you. But I will say Steve was by far the best dressed here.

I know Adams had, you know, he's been in and out with the connection. But, you know, hats off to Adam for being here as well. Nico, Ben, fellow Ben. Thank you for being here as well. Great conversation. I wish we had another hour. I've got many more hours ahead of me of many more guests to come. So gentlemen, I'll just say thank you so much for your time.

And Adam, Adam, Adam, I'm just saying, bidden ado, Nigo had a good rant at the end here. But I do want to say very Merry Christmas to all of you. Thank you for being here. And we'll have you back anytime. Thanks for having us. Merry Christmas. All right. Christmas, be passionate.

Merry Christmas. I'll see you guys. Cheers. Awesome. And everybody, thank you for being here for that panel. We've got, we've got another panel coming up right now. We're going to be chatting human rights. And I see everybody backstage right now.

I'll bring them up in a second. But I will just say, if you aren't following Denver Bitcoin, that was Adam, Steve Barber, both of them from upstream data. Also, Nico over at Simply Bitcoin, legendary. He does the news with me every Thursday. And of course, Ben Gagnon over. at BitFarms, give them all follow. They are awesome dudes.

They have a lot of great stuff to say, and definitely worth checking out what they're up to. But I digress. It's time to start our panel on human rights and freedom. And I'm very excited for this panel. I'm eternally grateful for everybody that's going to join me. So let's bring them up here. We've got the man, the myth, the legend, Alex Gladstein.

Buddy, good to see you. We've got Lynn Alden. Good to see you as well. We've got Robert Brie Love. Everybody, welcome. Thank you for being here. I hope you're having a good beginning to your holidays. Happy to be here. Nice to see you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Well, let's let's get rolling on this. I'm going to give a little preamble and we'll just, we'll just dive right into it. First off, Alex, I want to say thank you for having me out to a couple events in the past year and a half here. I came down to Miami when you did the Oslo Freedom Forum there. And then I came up to Norway. just this year for the Alsle Freedom Forum there. And there's been just incredible discussions discussing and educating people on, you know,

human rights in general, but you've, you've kind of integrated this Bitcoin track that introduces Bitcoin's utility in this respect as a tool for human rights and freedom. And, you know, I can speak to utilizing. it my and and it always feels silly bringing it up in comparison to what other people have dealt with. But, you know, there's some stuff happening here in Canada earlier in the year and Bitcoin was a tool used for that, you know, just for basic fundraising when it was deemed that you, you're not allowed to do that anymore. And Bitcoin still functioned under those circumstances.

So Alex, I'm going to toss you the first question. Why is why is Bitcoin useful? as a tool for human rights and freedom. Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for joining us, actually, at those events. You have a great way of explaining to the layperson how to use Bitcoin. So we find that very useful. And we'll continue to rely on your considerable talents for that. I mean, why is it useful is because Bitcoin gives people money that can be emailed that isn't controlled by governments or corporations.

And unfortunately, not all guys. governments and corporations can be trusted. In fact, most of them abuse their power considerably. I know we have a lot of people in the West who believe in the ultimate ability of the state to manage money, to sort of process money, to tweak the issuance of money, and to set rules for banking systems. And I know we have a lot of people here who really believe in that possibility, that the state can be a benevolent actor there. And even if we are to extend them the benefit of the doubt and say, fine, despite everything we've seen, you know, maybe that's true.

That's only possible really for like a vanishingly small percentage of humans, right? So you have basically what is called the golden billion, which is, you know, the people who live in Canada, the United States, the EU, Britain, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, you know, basically a small group of what are known as market democracies that have property rights and free speech. Even in these countries, you're seeing huge transgressions on payments and on banking, whether it be in the United States with Operation Chokepoint or what you saw with the truckers in Canada or what people have been seeing for years in Britain where you can actually go to jail for a tweet. So there's massive erosion of human rights even in what are known as democracies. But even if the golden billion can fix its issues, I mean, you've got seven billion other people who live under considerably less trustworthy regimes who are, you know, either victims of dictatorship or, you know, victims of some sort of interference by our own governments. And for them, the ability to tap into money that can't be controlled by corrupt governments who, in their experience,

always abuse their power and also can't be manipulated by corporations who tend to be quite exploitative. I know that we like to celebrate the power of free markets and entrepreneurship, but sadly, some corporations, especially on the global stage, end up wreaking havoc in poor countries and multinational corporations have a really messy history in a lot of countries and not least in the banking and financial sector. I think what I learned, a big lesson I learned from being in Africa earlier this month was that Africa has not only 41 central banks that are not interoperable with each other. So basically, like, using money is a nightmare there. But also, like, 80% of all the flows that flow between Africans paying other Africans, let's say Kenya, the Ghana, are processed

by American or by European intermediaries. So this is what they call the colonial framework that still exists there. So you essentially have people trying to do business or send money their family and values being siphoned off and rent is being sought and and and seeked, you know, by by people in the West. So that's kind of a system there. So, you know, Bitcoin matters because it provides an alternative to this whole thing. And I just would say as a final thought, I know there's a lot of skeptics out there, probably not, probably not listening to today's show. I know we have some, some people who get it. But I think increasingly just people have to own up to the and admit to the fact that it's not great when a company can just kind of turn off your banking

services for some sort of unknown reason. I think you're seeing a lot of people get pissed off at Twitter kicking off journalists for like, you know, it's not really clear what they did, right? Well, that happens all the time for millions of people with financial services just because of their nationality. So, you know, they had a transfer wise account all of a sudden, like, they got, you know, they can't log in anymore and they don't really know why. And that's the reality. for so many people today. So I think Bitcoin is useful because it provides an alternative. Yeah.

Well said. I want to toss this to Robert here. I've noticed a kind of disturbing mindset of a lot of people. I mean, there's obviously going to be for a considerable amount of time moving forward. there's going to be a general deep-seated skepticism of Bitcoin. But further than that, I mean, I'm sure all of us have noticed it in some way, shape, or form. But even the term freedom almost nowadays I find carries this stigma where people associate it with,

oh, if you're using the term freedom, you get grouped in as a certain political ideology. It's no longer like a, you know, when somebody brings up the term freedom, I see it in my, my social circles at home, they label you an extremist, almost. I've seen this from a number of friends. And so, Robert, I'm wondering, what do you think contributes to what I would say is this, the word freedom in some circles being considered almost like a dirty word nowadays? You know, it's a really great question. I think we typically see these breakdowns in language.

right, when the state starts to try and swell beyond its natural bounds. And I think it's actually pretty interesting. If you look at the rise of totalitarians historically, they typically want to attack journalism or media, you know, have some control over the flow of information. And then the second real key point of attack is the money itself to actually monopolize and control the money. And I guess if you added the third, you would get the, which would be energy, right?

That's the old Kissinger quote that I don't know perfectly, but if you control basically food, money, energy, you control the world. So, you know, I guess you would have to ask the question of what's driving all the political polarization in the country that would answer the question why freedom has become such a dirty word. I think there's arguments to be made that the printing of money is actually driving that gap between rich and poor. And I think the political polarity would mirror the economic divisiveness that's being created through the printing of money.

So admittedly, that's kind of looking at it through one lens. But it is a strange world we're living in indeed when a word is as essential as freedom that really the entirety of Western civilization is premised on, right? the idea of life, liberty, property, all aspects of freedom are being attacked. It's very, very concerning to say the least. And just to echo something that Alex said, you know, like this whole idea of why Bitcoin is useful in that context, I mean, quite simply, Bitcoin just lets people keep their earnings in something that other people can't take, other people being the state or government or anyone else.

I guess up until this point in history, we have operated under the illusion that we needed some governing body to organize society into a manageable, well-orchestrated whole. But I think that digital technologies, Bitcoin specifically, are actually going to prove in the long run that humans are as capable of self-organization as a flock of starlings or any other. instance of self-organization that we observe in nature. So, you know, the key to all that really is freedom. You just let nature do its thing, and that includes human nature. So, you know, hopefully Bitcoin is useful in that way that we're just getting back to or getting closer to this ideal of just pure human self-organization without coercion and violence, which is a maximization of freedom. obviously. I want to toss this down to Lynn. How do you think we make some inroads with the existing skepticism, both maybe what we're just chatting about in regards to

destigmatizing things like human freedom as they've kind of been stigmatized. I think in more kind of privileged Western countries. But then also in and around Bitcoin as a tool for these things. You've been at a number of these events and seen firsthand. What are some of the tactics that you've seen that have really opened eyeballs? I mean, I think there's just various types of education. I mean, I think Alex's entire organization does great work, right? It's the whole theme there about basically human rights. And, you know, I think one of the ways to phrase it is, like something I've been kind of hammering home lately when it comes to financial freedom and money is that there are 180 different fiat currencies in the world, right?

Each one, you know, something like 130 of them or like free floating, another bunch of them are pegged, but pegs can be broken all the time. They can always be pegged and reset, right? So really, you still have 180 different fee of currencies. They all have these, like, little local monopolies where they're enforced to be used. Very few of them are saleable outside of their jurisdiction, right? So a handful, like the dollar are, a few others. vast majority, let's say, you know, put the top dozen aside. The other ones are just like

completely unsaleable anywhere else pretty much. And so you're basically relying on these little 180 different fiefdoms to manage their ledger. So they can manage your life savings. They can manage your ability to make payments. They can freeze your account. They can take your money, all these types of things. And so, you know, I see in the West people say, you know, Bitcoin's like a solution in search for a problem. I've seen kind of some privileged people say that. I'd say, well, okay, put yourself in the shoes of someone that's not in a top 10 currency or top 10, you know, like, uh, fiefdom. They're in, you know, one that's either highly inflationary or authoritarian or both. And what are their options, right? I mean, the other day on

Twitter, I asked, like, if you were going to sell, if you were going to sell a home in a country with a severe currency problem and you wanted to store that, that wealth in liquid, stable form for two years and then redeploy that money into some other property. How would you do it? And some people were like, I'd get dollars. I'm like, well, where are you going to hold the dollars? Right? It's like, you know, like some people are like, why I'd hold it in physical cash? I'm like, okay, you're going to hold a house worth of physical cash in like your apartment. You know, every time you leave, you're going to hope you don't get robbed or the thing doesn't burn down. You can hold it in a foreign bank account. But, you know, in a lot of countries,

you know, like half the population doesn't have a domestic bank account, let alone a foreign bank account. You get some, some countries that you obviously hold dollars in the local banking account, but they can be confiscated. And they're forced to be converted back. Some people said stable coins, but then you're, you know, you're relying on a foreign custodian. That works, you know, for many of them. But it's, you know, it's not a perfect solution. There's physical gold. There's Bitcoin. I mean, obviously, Bitcoin's still new and volatile. So, you know, basically it's kind of a sad problem that so many people just, you know, they can't answer that question easily. How would I store value for two years? And actually, the reason I ask that question is because I have family in Egypt that are kind of in that situation. That's actually what triggered like my, you know, it's like it's funny that this is like a problem. And so I think basically just bringing up specific use cases, like specific anecdotes, specific things that are happening. I think

Alex is great on that. He always has like, you know, every one of his stories has like this lists of like specific people, names of people, specific countries, here's their problem and what their, you know, what their solution was, right? I think when you put a face on it, when you put an example, and that combined with just say, you know, kind of first principle analysis. Like, so what makes good money, you know, talk about like what is freedom? What, what circumstances would you restrict someone else's freedom? Like when you kind of put it on them, you know, what, you know, it. It's, you know, it. It. it becomes much harder for them to answer, I think. And so I think there's multiple tactics. Everyone kind of has their own gifts or own experiences or own backgrounds or own expertise that lets them educate people in the way that, you know, resonates with people like them. That's awesome. Alex, actually, Lynn, I'm glad that you started bringing up specific examples because

I kind of wanted to go down that road. Now, Alex, you were just, if I'm not mistaken, you were down at the African Bitcoin conference, were you not? Were there some, I'm wondering if maybe you could hone in. on some of the signal there. Like, what were some of the examples of what people were using Bitcoin for, the problems that was being solved there? Yeah.

Well, I think it's not that different in some regards to, let's say, Canada and the United States where you have a small group of people who are, you know, have learned a lot about Bitcoin, spent a lot of time thinking about it, reading about it, and who are kind of, let's say, investing in it for the long term because they think it's going to be really valuable in five, 10, 20 years. So there's like a small hardcore group of those folks. But overwhelmingly, the way that Bitcoin is used in Africa is to defeat or overcome the cross-border payment issues that I was discussing earlier, where, again, you can't send money within Africa or from without Africa, without considerable trauma fees, delays.

Sometimes it's like actually impossible to get money from one place to where you want it to get to. So I met a lot of entrepreneurs and communities and businesses that basically act as the off the fiat off ramp. So you have whether it be in Congo or Somalia or even more developed countries like Morocco or Egypt, you have people whose job it is is to receive, they make a platform basically and they receive Bitcoin. or stable coins from abroad, and then they convert it to local fiat for you. This is a huge business in Africa right now. Like we're talking monster business, and it's going to grow big time.

You know, until people figure out kind of, and are comfortable with using Bitcoin on their own in a P-to-P way, like this is really a huge area that I'm seeing, astonishing growth. I met a guy who is from Mogadishu. That's like where he was flying back to. I was going back to the United States. The dude was going back to Mogadish.

show where the government had been like abducted a week before like this is like you know i mean smalia right um and he's got 30 000 clients who's who were who use his business and the average payment that he handles is like 50 to 100 and 6,000 of his clients are refugees who live in Kenya who brought their like Somali k yc with them when they went there when they escaped and they can use his platform still. And, you know, whether, whether their business is doing, you know, doing services and getting paid or whether the receiving remittances or gifts from family, those, those amounts of money are coming in. And then his company, like, you know, swaps them for whether it be like the local currency, which in Somalia is actually dollarized

or, or the Kenyan and Pesa mobile money or whatever. So that's just an example. And there's like tons and tons of businesses doing that. One is called Yellow Card is a big, big East African Exchange and OffRamp, like tons of their businesses involved in this. So I got to spend a lot of time with the Yellow Card guys and learn more about that. So I would say that the main area right now is like Fiat OffRamp, but I think mining is going to be really big as well. I mean, I don't know if you saw this, but you know that Shell is announced like a pilot with Crusoe to do Nat Gas, flaring, right? You know where they're doing. it in Nigeria, right? So in the Delta, apparently there's more flared gas there than like anywhere

else. Like people who were Nigerian were telling me that when they grew up, they remember seeing just fire in the sky like every night. And there's like such an enormous amount of flared gas there. And I met a kid who learned about how to mine on Bitcoin on YouTube. It's like 19 years old from northern Nigeria. He's got a he's got a mining business now. And he's building like a container based product to harvest Bitcoin off of flare gas in the Delta in Nigeria. I'm just like, this is insane. Like people are so persistent and hardworking and creative that really just blew me away. But I think that mining something to keep on the radar, but I think the big thing right now is kind of cross-border, cross-border payments. Yeah. It's, it's pretty stark when you see,

again, what the status quo was prior to some of these things being available and how much of a pain it was and how much easier it can be made. But even to your point in and around mining, you've got a number of countries where, again, they don't control their own money. So that's a mechanism to kind of siphon away any value that they produce. And now they have a way to use, you know, local energy. and be paid in a money that is outside of the state that used to control their money. And the freedom of transaction that enables as well. So it's really kind of like hitting all of these different, you know,

check marks on the list of things that make these countries more self-sufficient and, again, sovereign from the powers that be that they used to have to answer to. Well, why shouldn't African America pay a European or an American to get their money to their family in Somalia, right? So in this case, yes, it's a business. Yes, he's taking a fee, but he's Somali, right? And it's a local business. And I know we want to be like suspicious of KYC, of course, et cetera, et cetera. But like, hey, like, there's a lot of legitimate businesses popping up in this area.

And it's just, it should outrage anybody that 80% of the flows that connect Africans together on this. planet are essentially still imperial or colonial like they get they they get managed and they get profited off of by people in some other country it's crazy um i'm gonna i'm gonna toss this to both lynn and robert to to tag on we got about five minutes here uh between the two of you but i'm gonna say in a world where all the sudden you have nations that have basically been you know shat upon by the rest of the world for lack of a better term all of a sudden become independent and all the senses that we've just spoken about and kind of gotten these freedoms that they previously didn't have.

What does the world look like 50, 100 years out? I know that's a very long line, but like, you know, what I'm getting is a generation or two down the line, how does the dynamic of power globally begin to shift? What does that begin to look like, either one of you? I'll go quick, so I'll leave you a lot of time, Glenn. I think one of the key things Bitcoin does is just inhibit centralization, right? It's almost like the only enemy of Bitcoin in a way. Obviously, no individual is an enemy to Bitcoin, but the phenomena of centralization itself,

political centralization, financial, is inhibited by Bitcoin. And so that means a lot less power getting vested into so few hands in the future, right? This is the power of decentralization. And so if Lord Acton was correct, then we should have a lot less corruption in the world because there would just be less opportunity for bending and twisting rules or exploiting honeypots or otherwise leveraging political hierarchies against individuals. I also think the obviously prosperity should boom, right? The more theft you get out of the system, the more productivity should increase.

I also think the freedom of location is interesting, kind of, like the situation you guys are just describing that a small community could just find an unused waterfall or other energy source, right, and start to self-organize a community around an energy asset in that way and could monetize it themselves, obviously, et cetera, et cetera. So I think we're a much richer world, much more distributed geographically, much more innovative overall, given all the additional freedom that Bitcoin affords us. and I think Bitcoin is basically the truth of money as kind of the key point we're all saying here. It's the ultimate money.

And if the truth sets you free, then no wonder Bitcoin is setting us free. How on that? All yours, Lynn. Yeah, Lynn, take it away. So I'll tie the long term into the present. So we kind of just in the past couple of years got to a point where more people in the world have smartphones than bank accounts. So basically banks had like a multi-century head start and then given a couple decades, depending on exactly where you want to measure it from.

Smartphones just came up exponential and eclipsed the number of people that have bank accounts. And that's partially just the, you know, just technology Moore's Law, you know, gets, you know, exponential cheaper over time up to a point. But it's also because every jurisdiction has to essentially recreate the technology of banking, right? And so individual jurisdictions can mess it. up, either through corruption and other reasons like that, right? Or just colonialism. Like they're pressured from outside sources that messes it up. They're not able to kind of bootstrap. There's all sorts of reasons. Whereas with technology, if you solve something once, you can

then spread it to the world. Right. And so it's like once people get past the current education problem, the Fiaton boarding problem, right, there's these different types of bottlenecks. If you get to a point going back to your question about the future, if more and more people are on like a shared protocol, a shared standard, and if that whole vision is successful, basically they're not having to recreate the wheel every time in 180 different jurisdictions. You basically have this global form of communication of value. And then, you know, going back to what Breedlove said, basically you have, you know, people can organize around energy, people are more mobile, people are harder to censor,

people are, you know, all sorts of things like that. And you can also redeploy these technologies into, you know, we're seeing peer-to-peer speech, right? So different types of encrypted peer-to-peer applications that make it hard to clamp down on spreading information, as long as they have some sort of access to the internet. So I think that's one way to think about it, is just that it's essentially using technology

to solve a problem that banks just, you know, given centuries have only been able to solve, really for the developed world. And even then, I mean, as you know, even in developed world, there's still censorship, there's still inflation, there's still all sorts of problems like that. Music to my ears. I like the picture you painted.

I, again, I look forward to that, hopefully playing out, you know, maybe sooner rather than later, but, you know,

there's a lot of work to be done. And Alex, I will say that, yeah, you're putting in the work and trying to make that a reality. And I'm glad to have, you know,

in any capacity, been a part of it. But I'm going to, I guess, wrap us now. I'm going to say, thank you so much Alex Robert Lynn you guys are legendary

I was again more than ecstatic that you guys could make the time to be here so have a very Merry Christmas and we'll be chatting with you guys again soon Merry Christmas Thank you onwards. See you soon Merry Christmas All right

So we are wrapping that panel In about five minutes here We've got another killer panel coming up Make sure you do follow Gladstein, Breedlove, and Lynn Alden. Again, tons of interesting information coming out from all of them. And in just a moment here, we're going to have Michael Saylor, Tip, and John Valis. We're going to be talking about incentives. So we will be back momentarily.

Enjoy. Again, we've got another competition going here. So be sure to check that out. And yeah. We'll see in a few minutes. After these messages, we'll be right back. Shout out to sponsors of the show, PrivacyPros.com. The bill funnel.

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We'll see you out there. Hey guys, welcome back to ASIC Life Hacks. I'm your host, Tatum Turnup, also host of Between Two ASICs, not a podcast. I hate in the winter whenever it's really snowy outside. All right, so I live in Louisiana, so it never really is snowy. But there's occasional cold spells that, you know, make us have some patchy ice. I'm just walking and I just slip. This is what it kind of is like. God. Wouldn't you really like if that wasn't what happened? I'm going to show you how you can use the heat from an ASIC to make sure that doesn't happen. All you got to do is put your ASIC or ASICs outside. Thinking about it now, there's probably going to need to be some more steps you take before you get to that point. However, I'm just going to show you essentially what happens. Yeah, there's got to be a lot that goes into this, but I want to show you the end result of what

happens, okay? This is what happens when you have ASICs helping with that evil, evil ice. So as you can see, the amount of ice is significantly less than what it was before without the ASIC. now this doesn't mean that it's still so the ice experiment was probably the most effective that we've seen so far oh my gosh this is exhausting we still got one more catch you on a little bit

fantastic Tatum with the hot tips if you miss the first couple go back and watch them because they're excellent solid advice for Mr. Chernop We've got a hell of a panel right now. Very excited for this. We're going to be talking about societal incentives,

kind of how Bitcoin impacts those. So I'm going to welcome my panel in now. We have Mr. John Valas. We've got Timi. And we've got Michael Saylor. Welcome, everybody. How's everybody's holidays going? Amazing.

Nice and warm. Well, I'm super glad to have you all. This is going to be a good time. I mean, much shorter than I would have preferred. But yeah, I'm glad to have you all back. You've all been on the show before. So thanks for taking the time, especially this close to Christmas. But let's dive into it.

I'm going to give a little preamble. I'm just going to open it up to comments and get the conversation going. So, I mean, you can kind of look at the idea of societal incentives pretty broadly, right? You can go from institutional incentives all the way down to the individual level. And these are, you know, pretty. intertwine, they can influence each other. I've on a personal level, experience kind of a journey of self-improvement

spurred on by the values of low time preference that I've come to understand through Bitcoin and people talking about Bitcoin. But conversely, Michael, you probably look at this a lot through a lens of company policy, being on a Bitcoin standard, all of the considerations that entails. And even higher up than that,

we have world governments now. that are starting to navigate these waters as well. So I guess my first question here will be, how do the incentives of Bixd differ from the status quo today? What's different about Bitcoin and how does it change our current incentives? Whoever wants to dive in first. Tip. Yeah, sure. I'll go first.

So to me, I think Bitcoin specifically, what I'm bullish of is that it creates the incentive for people to be more engaged in society. And Ben, to your point, it does at so many levels. At a societal level, at an individual level, at a societal level, like Bitcoin aligns our incentives by giving us all skin in the game, because anyone can hold in excess a piece of Bitcoin. Like the minimum amount is less than a cent for you to hold. So when the ecosystem grows in value, so does your piece of Bitcoin and your purchasing power,

And the way the ecosystem grows in value is driven by the individual level incentives because Bitcoin makes it easier for individuals to be rewarded for their contributions. So now that we can move like any amount of value over the internet without any friction or anyone's permission, like all sorts of interactions can have value attached to them, like even as small as a like on social media. And so, like, it's through these micropayments that's never happened before in traditional worlds. You can actually, like, bootstrap your, like, ideas, and you can receive value instantly and directly from users, which encourages you to keep, like, building and iterating and sharing your creations. And also, from the user's point of view, like, you want to support the things that you wish to to exist in the world.

So you allocate your funds towards shaping the direction of that project, so tip, tip, you're tipping and streaming and donating. So now on both sides, there are like incentives to engage and contribute ideas, which hasn't really been possible in a world where everything kind of centralizes. But then also these actions kind of create pure price signals to show the rest of the market what's working. And as a result, you know, all sorts of ideas can now be funded and shaped at a grassroots level where we're all aligned in wanting to do what's best for Bitcoin because that's how we

grow our wealth. It comes full circle. And I think that's kind of like the magical thing about Bitcoin that you don't really see in a traditional world where everything goes through kind of like a central entity and ideas get shaped top down. It kind of gives that, like you were saying, like a monetary feedback, the speed of that, the speed of the price signal is expedited, right? So you get, it's not always instant, right? We've seen price signal, you know, in some instances go slower than we'd like. You know, some of these implosions, reality takes a little bit of time to hit. But like compared to the status quo of how things would previously be strung along and be lifted up with our traditional financial rails or lifted up with, you know, central banks.

correcting mistakes that people have made, we get that reality check and that price signal a little bit quicker. So I don't know, I'll jump to John and then I'll jump to Michael, but what do you think in regards to this price signal being expedited? Well, yeah, I mean, I certainly think that's what happens when the price signal can effectively move at the speed of light and capital is priced without, is priced naturally, let's say, without perversion or intervention or distortion. And so I think, you know, this whole idea of the value-enabled web and our actions online having a cost. And I think broadly speaking, what that will do is just help us separate the signal from the noise. And that those signals are what become the incentives. And then I think, you know,

two points, broadly speaking again, I think one, and this will take time to play out as everything does when we talk about Bitcoin. But currently, when you have a moment, you have a moment, you know, money like the one we have, where it's, you know, it's controlled by, let's say, government slash the, you know, the people at the top of the banking system or the institutions, when you're competing in a market, the top prize is not just the accumulation of capital or wealth, as it, as it might be. You know, you're a competitive monopoly of some kind, or you've dominated your industry. The top prize actually becomes regulatory capture, because if you can, if you can capture, you know, the regulator, then you can build a, build a motor.

around your business, you can, you know, you can make it prohibitively expensive for competitors to enter into your industry. You can do all sorts of things to gain more power and control that's kind of like super market that's not determined by your ability to compete. And that is largely by virtue of the fact that government slash, you know, banking institutions create and control the creation of money and the allocation of capital and all that kind of stuff. And so when that is limited and potentially eliminated in the future, then I think we have a market that is far more merit-based, far more competition-based. And so people will be competing basically to accumulate the most wealth and capital in the market.

And that will be the highest incentive. So there won't be this additional incentive that's power and control that allows you to manipulate markets outside of your ability to compete and provide value. And I guess the last point I'll make in this intro part is I think one of the things that is really interesting about how Bitcoin acts on psychology and culture. And Ben, you mentioned it, you know, that being involved in Bitcoin has changed you in a variety of ways that you would deem positive. And I think all of us on this panel would say the same. And I think everyone listening would say the same to some degree. And, you know,

there's definitely a lot of reasons for that. And time preferences is definitely one and delaying gratification and undertaking large, you know, thinking about the future more, let's say, and thinking that you have a future. But I think it's also that Bitcoin has certain characteristics or attributes by virtue of how it functions. You know, so one might be, Bitcoin can't lie. Bitcoin propagates truth. And so this, if you translate that attribute into the human domain, you might call that an ethic of honesty, be honest. Bitcoin can't be violated. You translate that into human domain. You might say, don't steal. Bitcoin treats everyone the same. Everyone is subject to the same rules. You transmute that to the human domain. You might say the ethic of fairness. Bitcoin is based on

proof of work. You translate that in a human domain, you might say the ethic of humility. Bitcoin allows you to be more self-owned. You know, again, in the future, when we're not so surreptitiously and overtly stolen from, you know that you are the only one who allocates your capital. And therefore, if you have, you know, the ethic or the attitude of generosity, of charity, of compassion, you know that you can't rely on that being outsourced to the government or whomever, you know, the social welfare system, whatever, you have to, you're in control of those ethics and you have to find them within you and decide how important they are to you. And so, you know, we could probably keep going with that, but you get the point that these attributes of Bitcoin are transmuted into

the human domain and they emerge as ethics. And I think we see that, broadly speaking, in the culture that's emerging around Bitcoin, that people value things like honesty and humility and hard work. And, you know, another big one is nobody can own Bitcoin for you, right? You have to own it for yourself. That's a profound sense of responsibility. So that's the ethic of responsibility. And that is being propagated in the culture. And so what happens is those ethics become elevated and propagated in the culture. And as a result, they become the incentives. And so you are rewarded when you express those ethics in your behavior. And that is a big way in which I see Bitcoin, altering the incentives, the societal incentives that we engage with. And it's great because

wouldn't you like to live in a culture where, you know, those ethics or those moral behaviors that we'd all probably more or less agree on were the ones that were most rewarded, that were most incentivized, that even if you didn't really understand them internally, you haven't done all that work, whatever, the signal that you're receiving is to act in accord with a certain ethic. And so, you know, it's still early days, but I see that happening in spades in the so-called Bitcoin culture. Yeah, so I guess I'm third. You can dive right in if you want to tag in. Thinking about, you know, thinking about the social incentives, I think tips pointed out that

Bitcoin can allow virtuous cooperation across a host of applications at all frequencies. and this is unique and revolutionary. And, you know, create a lot of beautiful things in the world. And John's pointed out that Bitcoin is virtuous and it gives us an alternative to a corrupt system. And when I was thinking about it, I said, so how does it improve social incentives? And I had the, you know, I remember something I'd read.

Someone said, you know, Fiat, you know, Fiat creates, it creates poverty and chaos as the energy flows into goods and esoteric assets and it dissipates thereby making everything in society more expensive. And the Bitcoin system creates order and prosperity as the energy flows into the money and persist, therefore making goods less expensive. And I think you could just say my point of view is Bitcoin improves the social and incentives because it completely aligns eight billion individuals, you know, four billion families, 400 million corporations, 195 countries, you know, everybody in the

world, the working class, the poor, the middle class, the elite, they all are aligned around this idea of virtuous, honest, ethical, technically sound, economically sound money. And the alternative, the Fiat system is, in essence, since all the currencies are collapsing, people that want to take a long view and they want to plan for the future, they have to store their energy across 10,000 property markets, 40,000 listed companies, 100 to 300 private companies, 195 countries, thousands of collectibles, thousands of bonds, thousands of ETFs, and I just mentioned a few things. And all of us are going to fight over which of those things are virtuous.

And then we're going to have an incredible bureaucracy in every single nation state, attempting to properly regulate all those things and control who actually. is all of them. So in the absence of perfected money, you just have a chaotic, expensive, inefficient economic order. And that puts everybody at each other's throats. And in the presence of Bitcoin, which is perfected money, I think, well, my time horizon stretches out because I can see a thousand years from now. And I certainly can't plan for a thousand years on gold or or pesos or dollars or yen or bonds or stocks or collectibles or beanie babies or baseball cards or diamonds or ETFs or anything right so I can see a

thousand years in the future my space horizon stretches out I can see forever or at least I can see all around the earth I can you know imagine seeing not not 13 miles to the horizon but I can see all the way around 25,000 mile circumference of the earth I can see it all my domains all merge. Now I can see everyone trading with everyone across every jurisdiction. And as Tip pointed out, you can do it across unique applications at frequencies, you know, every second that you could never imagine. So that just seems like it definitely improves our social incentives.

I want to tag onto something that you mentioned there. So you were saying, oh, now I can see out a thousand years. we've we've definitely as a society gotten away from the idea of of multi-generational projects you know you used to build a build a cathedral that would you would never see to completion through your lifetime so it would be one of the best examples yeah yeah and and do you think that we get we with a switch to bickland we get back to that where we see projects that are started that people know full well they will never see the end of in their lifetime, but they, I guess, have, again, a common purpose, a common goal. They can see into the future. They can see where society is going and they're more likely to contribute to that. You can bridge across nation states. You know, you can bridge Africa to Asia, to South America, to North America, two companies, four companies and four countries. You can bridge that. You can bridge across time, across generations, right? You,

you have a material to actually construct both of those economic plans. And in the absence of Bitcoin, you can do neither. Damn. Ben, I think the answer is definitely yes. And what's interesting about it is it's not just the capacity, you know, to see into the future and that degree of stability and security that you can kind of project out into the future. But as a result of that, and I think we all, again, have this in a microcontract,

cause them in our own cases is when you have that degree of security and stability, other considerations emerge in your mind, right? The anxiety about the future gets dialed down and the deprivation gets dialed down. You have more abundance and you start thinking about the future. And you also start thinking like, what do I want to do now that I'm not forced to do things? And I think this necessitates a consideration of meaning. Like what is most meaningful to you and what is most valuable to you? And I think that, you know, the cathedral example is great because, you know, I'm sure there's nuances in every case where cathedrals were built, of course. But punchline being not only was there the capacity, but all that capacity, all that mathematics, all that architecture, all that capital went into building something that was imbued with an incredible amount of meaning that was a representation of something extremely meaningful. Now, I'm not saying we're going to build cathedrals around Bitcoin, but I think it's going to, there's going to be a lot of discussion and thinking about the question like, what?

what is worthy of our devotion of our capital and our time, even so far as that we won't be around to see it to its fruition, as you mentioned. And, you know, whether that be building things that express the degree to which we value or find meaning in innovation or exploration or discovery, you know, like spaceships and starships and all that kind of stuff, or whether it is something more earthbound of a manner that we haven't yet, you know, come across, or maybe it is a revivocation of some of the religious ideas, if not the institutions that's carried them. But punchline being, I think we'll both have the capacity and the interest in these questions of what is of the highest meaning and value to us. And I do think we will devote ourselves to them

even beyond our material existence, let's say. I like that you brought it back a little bit to the individual level there too, where you said, well, now you have the capacity to kind of, you know, be more thoughtful with your time. I wonder if, because right now, the average person doesn't have a, even a cursory understanding of, of kind of how our money works or the implications of how it works. And right now, you know, your average wage earner, they enter into a contract with an employer with the understanding of, oh, I'm getting X amount of units per hour of my time. but their understanding of what that accomplishes for them at that point in time, that that contract is effectively broken immediately, right?

There are expectations of what I can afford with this number of monetary units for this hour of my time. It dissipates very, very quickly. And so inherently, you're put in a position of having to argue that you deserve to keep pace with the debasement. but with Bitcoin, that kind of gets flipped on its head. And from a societal level, it switches that dynamic where the company is now put in the position of if you're doing an hourly wage for an individual. Well, the purchasing power of that hourly wage continues to appreciate over time. And so hopefully the productivity of that employee also appreciates over time. But if it doesn't, then you're in a position of as the employer, you are now beholden to the blue-collar worker who you then have to go to and say, well, your productivity has not kept up.

You know, because of this, we think that your wage should now be this instead. And then risk losing that employee having to retrain somebody new. So like the entire way society is structured right now where the blue-collar worker, it's on their shoulders to argue. and claw back the purchasing power that they've been basically stolen from their wages, it completely changes that. And you're right, it gives people that ability to more carefully think about their time. It changes that power structure. And I want tips thoughts on this.

What does that do to the average person? when now they have, they're in the position of power instead of this top down that we've seen. Yeah. I think like when our money is just an effective tool for savings, we don't have to stress about that rat race of fiat when you're constantly like chasing the quantity of money to mitigate that decreasing quality of money. And so Bitcoin helps the individual to just achieve that financial independence sooner. In the meantime, while we're working to build our stack, we don't have to devote so much time and effort and brain space into, like Michael said before, financial planning and all these different types of assets.

And we have to all be magically fund managers with expert skills and asset allocation. And, you know, we're risking these massive setbacks where we can lose it all through speculation because we're trying to keep up with the pace of our loss in purchasing power. And as John said before, when the money is taken care of, when the wealth is taken care of, it frees up so much of our time and energy and brain space to experiment, to have leisure, to have the ability to create and unleash this like dormant potential. Everyone has that something inside of them that they're kind of just like suppressing because we have to work today. It's a nine to five.

And so like all of that comes out with. with the freedom to explore to do what you love to do. And I'm just most excited to see the plebs show the world what they have. Like, show us what you got and you will be rewarded with cold, hard sets. Like, I'm so excited for that. Imagine the beautiful world that is going to get built from this. What is? Michael, I'm going to ask you, what does that transition look like?

Like, how do we get from where we are to the picture that Tip just painted? And is it a difficult transition? Like, is there collateral damage in the meantime? Like, where are we going? I think that we just all have to set a good example and live by the words of Matt O'Dell. Stay humble. StackSats. I think the Bitcoin ethos has been highlighted this year.

And the importance of it is highlighted this year. because the ethos is you have to work hard, but, you know, doing whatever you do and generating income and whatever the local currency is that you get paid in. But if you work hard and then you stay humble, you don't, you don't, no crypto scamming, right? No, no shit coining. And then stack stats. And then the objective public will be inspired by that example. I think that 99% of the world is just watching what's going on. And they see the example of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried and all the crypto scammers.

And they're horrified by that behavior. And then they see the example of the bitcoiners that stay humble and stack sats. And we build better apps on lightning and we keep accumulating. and we keep educating and we keep inspiring. And I think they will join our calls. And next year, there will be many, many people that will look at the entire crypto thing and they will say there is one good thing out of this, the Bitcoin ethos, the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoin community.

And then we'll just get a bit more support. And then each year thereafter, right, this is why laser eyes matter. think about not that I'm going to name names but think about all the people that have suffered reputational damage and economic damage and physical damage because they took the laser eyes off and they and they and they and they uh you know they ambled into the FTX zone or the crypto zone or they started you know started uh you know doing this and that and the other thing and everybody was just too cute right too cute a factor of 10 juggling razor blades and you just keep coming back to the observation that

the objective majority that has all the money and all the power in the world right now they're just watching how we behave and if you believe in humanity then you believe the people are basically honest and well-intentioned and they want to do the right thing and so they're going to look at the future and if they see an honest ethical money that's technically superior, that's economically superior, well, then they're probably going to adopt that money. And sometimes it's painful. You've got to grit your teeth to get through years like 2022, you know, where you have to live through the Terra Luna, three arrows and all the attendant meltdowns.

But that's the path forward, right? Keep the laser eyes on. Stay humble. Stack sats, move forward, upgrade the ecosystem. And don't get arrogant and presumptuous. I've said before, all the things I regret in my life are my good ideas. That I felt, I felt as though I was successful. And since I had already succeeded, I could now move on and do 10 more things.

And you can see a lot of people in this industry do that. And if you came back to the one good idea, Bitcoin, educate people on Bitcoin, work hard to buy more Bitcoin, stack your Bitcoin, don't lose your Bitcoin. It's interesting. I feel like, again, the people that are learning the lessons first tend to be the plebs. They're the ones that on a smaller scale learn the lessons. And then we're seeing it work its way up the ladder where larger and, larger entities are learning these hard lessons having to pay that tuition. And, you know, this year is a fantastic example of, of, you know, that fiat shit doesn't fly,

even if you're a large institution. You can't, you, you, you can't have that paper Bitcoin for very long before you implode. And again, it's a reality check on everyone. I'm wondering if you guys think that, again, in the grand scheme of societal incentives on a larger scale. Do you think that we see the same lesson that's been learned on the individual level and then with larger and larger exchanges and entities? Do we see that at a bank level and maybe a nation state level where there's paper pipeline that ends up in implosions? Does literally every level of this hierarchy have to learn that lesson? I mean, there's nothing like touching the stove, right, to know that it's hot and it'll burn you. And I think that's pretty much an

evergreen sort of, that's an age-old wisdom for a reason. And so I don't think it matters what scale you're operating at. There's going to be people on every scale that do that. And it's great if you can learn the right way without getting burned first, but very few people are humble and wise enough to do that. So I'm sure that the same thing will continue to happen as this reaches, you know, every scale it goes through. I prefer to take a cheerful, a cheerful constructive view toward this, which is I think Bitcoin offers individuals, hope, families, hope, corporations, hope, policymakers, and governments, hope, academics, hope.

And we're educating them. And I think they're going to adopt. They are adopting it. And if we educate them well, and they're wise, they'll adopt it in a responsible fashion. And there's going to be some. They're going to move too fast. They're going to move in a very irresponsible way and they're going to drop the ball and yeah, there'll be some that will fail. But at the end of the day, it's everybody's responsibility to do the right thing, to act like an adult.

And the same is true at the nation state level as it is at the individual level. I think Bitcoin offers everybody the chance to do the right thing. And, you know, we'll see colorful examples of people that may be, you know, spectacularly wiped out along the way. But I wouldn't get down on that. I think that the optimistic thing to say is corporations can adopt Bitcoin to solve their problem, right? And banks can solve their problem by adopting Bitcoin, right? It's a solution to them in the same way that electricity is a solution to them. And, you know, every kid, you know, the word getting shocked, right?

The word shocked means you underestimated the power running through the wire and you shocked yourself. But there's not a single person, government institution on this earth that doesn't want electricity and doesn't need it. So Bitcoin is like electricity and some people are going to get shocked and some people are going to burn themselves playing with fire. You know, it happens. I was a Boy Scout once. I said to my dad, I want a knife. My dad said, okay, you be careful with this knife. I said, I'll be careful with the knife.

You know, I said, I want to go like carve up things with, I want a bigger knife. He said, be careful. I said, I'll be fine. And of course I cut myself with the knife because everybody always does. And that's how you learn. Yeah. But I whatever is technology. You know, Ben, just on both of those points, and we're talking about incentives, right?

And why is it? We talk about orange peeling people a lot in Bitcoin, right? Like we want to share the good word. But, you know, why do celebrities get paid to endorse certain products, right? Because their allure, their example, creates an incentive. that inspires behavior for people to follow. And I don't know if it's just me, but I think some of the wisdom that Michael just shared

and what you were saying, like, I think the, you know, shoving Bitcoin down people's throats sort of approach to orange-pilling, people are realizing that that's not very persuasive. The most persuasive thing to do is to, you know, to, you know, imbue your life with the benefits and the principles and the ethics of Bitcoin And let that show, right?

And broadly speaking, as cliche as it might sound, that means like be the best you can be with Bitcoin. And that is what, you know, people love to buy, they hate to be sold, right? And so people will observe you and, you know, whoever's in your life. And they'll say like, why are they so optimistic about the future? Why are they engaging in work that they find meaningful?

Why are they so happy to be hanging out with all these people they met, you know, on podcasts and online? Why are they so, you know, fill in the blood? fill in the blank fill the blank and that's what everyone wants everyone wants a happy meaningful you know peaceful stable secure life and family and i think bitcoin is a tremendous tool for for you know creating those things in your life and so i think it's upon all of us to just maximize its potential and everything else will fall into place and that will be a very strong incentive in itself i love that uh i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna round this out here i'm going to give tip the last

word and I'm going to ask you a quick question. On a personal level, how has Bitcoin changed your demeanor, how you live your life, and kind of your outlook into the future? It's a positive effect. And I think for me personally, I love that I'm more myself on the internet because the internet doesn't care who I am. Neither does internet money. There are no restrictions. there's no discrimination, there's no rulers. And so seeing that all the incentives are now aligned towards building society where it's like, you know, if you add value, you'll be rewarded. I love that.

I live for that. And I mean, to all the plebs out there, like go to Stackernus, go to Guys, go to Fountain, create something. Again, show the world what you've got and you will be rewarded for it. That's how I'm trying to live my life and I'm having so much fun doing it. So I just want everyone to join me and have fun living your life with Bitcoin. So yeah. I love it.

I love it. Great message. Create value and store the fruits of your labor and something that can be debased. Pretty, pretty simple. John, Michael, Tip, I am so grateful that all of you could join me. I know it was brief, but I want to, again, thank you for being here and wish you a very Merry Christmas. So have a good holidays, guys. Thanks for having us, Ben. Merry Christmas, guys. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. All right. Everybody,

awesome. What a good chat. That was fun. We've got a panel coming in. We're going to be chatting a little bit about world adoption. So we're going to get that going in just a moment here. I'm very excited for this. Again, a big thank you to Michael for coming out to John for coming out for to tip for coming out and and everybody else that's been involved in the show thus far but yeah we're going to be we're going to be chatting a little bit about world adoption I'm just changing up my background here so it's not super obnoxious because we may have we may have a larger panel we'll see here but I'm going to start bringing them in now we have Samson

now. We've got Joe Hall and we've maybe got Jack Mallors in there somewhere. It's kind of dark. Maybe he's needs to turn on the lights in the closet. We'll see. But gentlemen, welcome to the show. And Jack, if you can hear me, we'll get them rolling in a minute here. Yeah. How are you guys doing? How's your holidays so far? Good, Ben. Good to be on your show. Thanks for the invite. Yeah, thanks for being here. And Joe, you look very fast. What's on your head? You came prepared. It doesn't be on the frame. I appreciate it.

I've got a selection. I've also got this. And if not, I have some hats behind me as well. Amazing. And there he is. There he is. Mr. Malice.

How you doing, man? Gentlemen. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. How are you? Very Merry Christmas. I'm great. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

I appreciate it. Are you kidding me? Thank you. You're going on what? Hour what with hours left? We started about, we're going on three, our three pretty quick here. I'll be here for, I've got another three in me, I think. Yeah, at least I could do.

Good to see you. Nice. Do you need a bathroom break, Ben? Oh, don't worry. I've scheduled, this thing is down to a T. I've got pre-recorded stuff on the hour for five minutes where I can run out. It's great. Yeah, so I learned from last year where I just about exploded by the end.

So we're set. Well, gentlemen, thank you for being here. I'm going to just dive into it because we only got like half an hour for these panels. They're jam-packed. So we're just going to get into it. We're chatting about world adoption. And we've got people on the panel that are dealing with that in various capacities, whether it be Jack and everything you're doing with Strike,

Samson, you're doing nation state-related stuff. Joe, you're traveling around like a madman. I think you're in a new place every week when I see you. And so the last panel that was. we had was relating to societal incentives ranging from nations all the way down to individuals. This panel is focusing more so kind of what is actually happening at this early stage as the world is onboarded. So I kind of want to, if we can, focus on lived experiences, actual solved problems for real people in populations thus far. So I'm going to start with a kind of broad question.

But what are you seeing that excites you in terms of Bitcoin adoption in what you're working on, whoever wants to jump in first? But what's exciting you right now? Who's the most excited? Let's let you go first. Yeah, I'll go. So many things. But in particular, the, I mean, this comes from experience in Senegal at the start of this month.

It was the second time going to Senegal and there's, I mean, you've got a massive unbanked population, right? But they've got smartphones. And there's this Bitcoin thing, which obviously circumvents that whole need to have a bank account, preview proof of address and, you know, present various documents to show all those documents you need in order to open a bank account. And we were there, I mean, I was there with Paco and a load of other Bitcoin at the start of the month. and I was giving out sats like a madman and everyone was desperate to get hold of Bitcoin. And I was like, why is it that people don't have Bitcoin here? Like we take it for granted in the Western world that you can just, you know, go on an exchange and buy it or there's a peer-to-peer system set up or whatever.

But in so many countries around the world, it's actually very hard to get hold of Bitcoin. So we don't even realize that there's this, you know, sort of unmet need to provide Bitcoin there. And so we can, whereas we've messed up in the Western world with these centralized exchanges, which are all, basically, you know, as we've seen this year, a lot of them have gone up in flames. With the developing world, there might be a way in which we could create these Bitcoin economies or these Bitcoin countries without even a need for an exchange. You know, circular economies being like the classic example. But I'm excited to see what other sorts of ways we can get Bitcoin adoption without using sort of a

centralized exchange. Yeah, that's probably one of them. I can go on with others, but I'm going to throw that one out there first. Yeah, let's get some thoughts on. the rest of the panel like like so jack were you you were just in in africa correct yes sir and and and what was your experience down there what are what are you seeing on the ground how people are using this stuff how things are going oh my goodness um gana for me was this first time in the continent for me and uh it was a mind-blowing experience to be totally honest with you um

firstly had none do with bitcoin why uh it was mind-blowing There's an energy in that continent. I think people in the West, I'll speak specific to the United States since I'm an American, very insecure, very privileged. There is a deep fear of looking in the mirror and admitting that we have problems. There's a lot of passive aggressive infighting. There's a lot of projection, neglecting issues and inferring that it's always someone else's fault. When I got off the plane in the continent of Africa, Africa, it's the exact opposite. These are people that feel generally mistreated, feel like there is a lot of hope and opportunity compared to how the last few hundred years have gone for them. And you can feel it. Where I'm from, someone may whisper behind your back and say, I heard that guy voted for Donald Trump or I heard that guy's not vaccinated. No, seriously, that guy doesn't like the vaccine. That guy doesn't like the right politician. It's a lot of passive aggressive nonsense. And in Africa, it was crazy. They don't have time to not like each other. It's a brotherhood. It's a sisterhood. It's a banded

together. Or if you don't like the same food, you don't like the same politicians. There's a lot more important things to worry about. And it was the coolest thing in the world. They're active builders. They're very optimistic and passionate. And it comes through violently. And so first and foremost, that is nothing to do with Bitcoin. I just think it was a cool. reminder of how big the world is and how different lives can be. And then I think that there's a very natural overlap for Bitcoin in that attitude is it is I've lately described Bitcoin as the world's new house on the hill. I think the United States of America was at one point the greatest startup of all time, right? It was this idea that you looked at the United States of America for hope. You

look, you immigrated and migrated there for freedom, for equality, for a better future to achieve your dreams. And I think the world is actually starting to turn to Bitcoin in that way. America is not the house on the hill anymore. I don't think people aspire to be what we're becoming. And you can start to get a sense within Africa that it was their house on the hill. It was that it is where you got equality, freedom of speech, is where you seeked hope, job opportunities, and general aspirations to live a life. that you dream of. And so I don't know if that was an answer you were looking for, but it was a very inspiring trip. I love that. I mean, again, like America was an idea, right? And in the absence of

that idea being pushed forth within America in some instances, well, that idea is now kind of found a home that is native to anywhere, right? Anybody can be the quote unquote American, at least as an ideal, anywhere now. And it opens. up that freedom, that ability to transact and save your money as you see fit and provide value for people. It's, it's now become, you know, global. It's incredible. Yeah, Bitcoin has this really innate property of absorbing and capturing energy. It's really difficult to make massive progress when energy is dispersed in different directions, even if unintentionally. If you have 8 billion people that need to be marching together because above all nation states is humanity. At the end of the

day, despite our disagreements, we're all on the same team. Bitcoin has this really cool ability naturally that it's able to channel energy from all walks of life and all parts of the planet and march us in the same direction. It is super cool in that way. So it acts as this newfound modern day house on the hill that can lead humanity to a more prosperous place. And the last thing I'll say on my experience now more practically, that was a little bit. That's okay. It was great. Talking about any use cases, but a word that the other Jack uses all the time that inspires me greatly is necessity. He talks about this all the time. Is there a necessity to do commerce in the Western world? That's a debate, right? And it depends on who you're talking to. There is necessity

for cross-border payments in Africa. And there's a lot of things. data and history there. And so it was also really, really, really cool to see the natural necessities versus what we speculate on Twitter to be cool. But in practicality, maybe there's not much of a necessity. So for me, there was a necessity in getting out of local currency. And there's the debate of stable coins versus Bitcoin. It's not up for debate that they don't want to hold their own currency. It's up for debate of what to them is perceived to be safe haven, whether that's tether or whether that's Bitcoin. And then the other is the difference between the necessity and pure desire and need to go shopping with Bitcoin versus the pure desire and need for cross-border payments

and being able to ask for a physical value to other continents. And the cross-border payments, it's painfully obvious whether you like it or not, that that's far more a necessity. And natural adoption curve is way more explosive there than in commerce. It's just the reality of it. Interesting. I want to toss it to Samson because Samson, you've been also gallivanting the globe in a variety of jurisdictions. And I'm curious about your lived experience and what you've been seeing. And maybe you can pull some examples of kind of what you've encountered as Bitcoin is looked at on a global stage. Sure. So unfortunately, I didn't get to go to Ghana and I have yet to go to Africa. My focus is still on Latin America. And for me, and I guess the rest of the Jan 3 team, we think Latin America is the most interesting place for adoption, not discounting Africa, but there is a sea change happening there in terms of politics. And a lot of it has a do with anchoring of El Salvador and then setting the example. So for us, we want to really devote our energy to that region. But on one of my last we were in Argentina and I got to see firsthand how people living under double-digit inflation or basically hyperinflation live their lives day to day. You know, you're converting, you're converting money to pay for things,

like maybe dollars to pesos, and you're basically operating on a just-in-time model. For us, we were converting dollars basically every few days so we could pay for dinner because we didn't want to, you know, convert all at once in one back. And we actually were losing money through the entire time, actually gaining money the entire time. So if we did convert all in one batch when we first arrived, we would have lost by the time we left. But it's just an eye-opening experience going to see that. And I believe it's important for Bitcoiners to go into the world and actually visit other places, much like Jack is saying, you know, until you go there, you don't have that full perspective. And a lot of people in the West living in Europe, Canada, and the US,

We're kind of very comfortable. We have access to all the tools and financial infrastructure that people just don't have. And it kind of blindsides us to being able to understand the necessity of Bitcoin and other tools, such as stablecoins or other ways to get dollar denominated value. But if you want an example of the practicality of Bitcoin adoption, I can give you one. So we were in El Salvador. We were out at Campo Bello. Basically, it's away from the city about an hour. hours drive and we're just having a relaxing getaway or team retreat.

And we needed to book a videographer. And there was no way for us to pay his deposit, which he required, aside from using Chivo. So because there was already an install base, so you can think of this as their local version of PayPal or Venmo or Wise, we could send him the deposit that he requested before he would commit to doing the work for us. But it just goes to show, like having these tools at the disposal of the people in Latin America is a net benefit because it enables opportunities and commerce activity that otherwise would not have been possible. So I think it's a gradual rollout and it's going to be slow at first, but it is happening and it's happening very rapidly. Joe, I want to jump to you because I saw you doing this thread while you were down there. Your experience as you were using lightning and playing around and interacting with merchants.

And as Samson said, it's going to be a gradual thing as this stuff rolls out and the smoothed out. But you had some very interesting experiences down there. Maybe you could give a little recap of kind of like what your lived experience was where you think you'd like to see this go down the line. How were things for you? Sure. Yeah, I took a lot of flack for that as well. But I was just trying to tell the truth of, you know, I live on a Bitcoin standard and I have done for 18 months now.

And I wanted to continue living on a Bitcoin standard in El Salvador. And unfortunately, I failed. And there's a couple of funny instances. Like, you know, you'd be in a restaurant and they'd be wearing, of all things, Jack, they'd be wearing a strike t-shirt and, you know, you'd go to pay and they'd be like, oh, no, we don't accept Bitcoin anymore. and be like, you're wearing a strike t-shirt. Like, come on.

Of course you do. And, you know, you'd eventually talk him through it and they'd reluctantly accept Bitcoin. I mean, for the most part, yes, you can use Bitcoin. But it's, yeah, it's slow. And it's slower than, you know, those giddy and enthusiastic Bitcoins around the world. Look at El Salvador. I think, brilliant. You know, I can't wait to go there and spend my stats there.

And, I mean, I've since had lots of time to think about it and speak with other Bitcoiners about sort of the adoption process there. And I think it was Obi that put it, like, really. succinctly, he basically said, you know, El Salvador has adopted a new language. And the president has, you know, apart from Bitcoin Beach, where everyone was already fluent in, say, Chinese, the president has said the whole country needs to start speaking Chinese, you know, in the next week or so. And inevitably, maybe a few places will start to learn a few words, string a few sentences together, but no one is going to be speaking like bilingual Chinese within a year's time. And, you know, Bitcoin, for many of us, you know, we spend hundreds or

thousands of hours studying this thing before we even think about, you know, going all in or, you know, living on a Bitcoin standard or whatever it may be. So of course there's going to be these sort of niggling processes at the start. But I also think there's a lot of value that we can get from telling the truth and showing certain things, such as, you know, cracked phone screens don't work very well with QR codes or dark mode for apps. Works terribly, works terribly in brightly sunlit countries where, you know, farmers are in fields all day. might have bad eyesight because they sleep in a in a house that has, you know, an open fire in it. So naturally they can have bad eyesight.

So, you know, dark mode they're going to struggle with. I mean, this is the experience with Osmo wallets. You know, they've learned this through Guatemala's Bitcoin adoption there. And they've realized, okay, how can we make it the most user-friendly experience for people on the ground using it? And yeah, there's a lot still to be done and a lot still that gives me hope and makes you want to work even harder. but of course, you know, Bitcoin adoption doesn't happen overnight. And we're going to be at this for 5, 10, 15, 20 years.

I don't know. And, yeah, as Samson says, across the whole Latin America and as Jack points out, across Africa too. I mean, I'm the most bullish and the most excited about Africa, of course. And, yeah, I can't wait to go back there and, you know, let the stats flow there even more. You should come out as well, Ben. I would really love to.

Yeah, I was very jealous. us watching a lot of the stuff that was going on down there. I would have loved to have been a part of it. I will, it's on the bucket list. So we'll see. Jack, I do want to go to you really quick. In regards to kind of what Joe was saying, like, obviously, this is a gradual process. And you're going to get people that, you know, they use app X, Y, and Z.

Or maybe they, you know, they get on the Chivo and like the experiences. and you know, what we've come to understand from other options out there. And there's confusion and there's people that are just navigating this new world that we're in. What are,

what's some of the feedback that you have gotten in terms of areas to improve? What are, what are some of the top things on your priority list of like, shit? People either don't understand this or it's difficult to navigate. We need to fix this and we need to work on this. What's top of mind?

Oh, Jesus Christ. The whole at strike as a company or specific to Joe's experience in El Salvador? I mean, in general, like what are average people having trouble grappling with as they try to accept or use Bitcoin? Except or use so in a commerce setting. Yeah, yeah, we'll say that. Or even cross-border could apply here too. I think, oh my goodness. There's a huge history to Visa and the card networks that I said as much as I was allowed to say from lawyers on stage in Miami.

It was quite the whole story behind. That was very interesting. But there's a story to how we got to where we are. And so there's a huge difference in the incentives that go behind these things, how these things came about Visa in 2006. was a nonprofit. We'll just give that a second to marinate. In 2008, it went public. So there's a lot to break down in how we got here. Here's another one. Apple Pay is non-existent in Latin America. That's a blanket statement.

In some places, it may have just launched. So how do you go for a user experience where Apple Pay hasn't been successful? To Joe's point, the amount of user experience glitches And it's very difficult. I think it could take as long as it needs to take. You're talking about, in my opinion, some of the more grant sweeping change in payments in the history of digital commerce. And then the things that we're learning are, my goodness, how to incent a bank like Capital One

to want to use lightning instead of Visa all the way to merchants and giving us direct feedback on the QR codes. they don't love the issues with NFC. I think at the end of the day, though, what we all should aspire to is delivering experience that hones in on necessity and provides really clear value to whoever's using it. Sometimes I think as Bitcoiners, we lose that a little bit.

It's this kind of notion that we're going to take the world and convince them to meet us over here. And I love the idea of we're over here and have spent a lot of time understanding Bitcoin and just finding ways to make it valuable over here where everybody else is. And just a reminder that that's probably the most mutually beneficial approach to planet Earth. And probably if your end goal is to hyper-bitcoins and convince humanity that this is the best money and that fixing the money can fix the world, it's probably the best tangible steps forward.

And so I think strikes victim of getting too ahead of ourselves in certain ways. We've learned a ton. So that's my blanketed answer. I don't know if there's anything in particular you want to dig into there. But learning a lot running this company. Yeah. Well, I can imagine, right? Like it's no easy task.

But, I mean, it is providing utility for a lot of people. And I mean, you're going at things from a totally different perspective of what somebody like Samson is kind of working on. right? Like you're kind of like, you know, more or less, the end goal is, is, is freedom of transacting on an individual level, right? Like empowering people to be able to pay anyone anywhere in countries that have been, you know, up until now, very disenfranchised in that. I imagine that's entirely different from, you know, Samson. You're, you're dealing with, you know, convincing nation states that this is this is something that well maybe maybe you can chat a little bit about like what your goals are and how they differ from from what not not the goals in general like I think

we all have a good similar end goal but like what is your trajectory looking like as opposed to what you know jack is working on right so we we actually do have a wallet in development it's a rebuild of aqua which was started at block stream so we're all also trying to figure out the best way to onboard people into Bitcoin. And I think one of the strategies we're employing is that we don't want to, say, just go into Bitcoin and we want to give them the tools that they need for what they're trying to accomplish. So we do want to support stablecoins. We do want to support conversions of different, you know, cryptocurrencies into Bitcoin,

but we don't want to fight them and just only support Bitcoin because I think that is not the best way to reach the most people. You have to meet them on their own turf, which is sort of what Jack is saying there. But at the same time, we're also very much focused on Bitcoin adoption. We brought on Prince Philip of Serbia. So I guess there's a mix between developing and launching this Bitcoin wallet and also working on nation state level adoption. It's kind of what we've been assigned with and we're rolling with it.

So we have a lot of people around the world making introductions to us and a lot of people reaching out to us to get feedback and information about how Bitcoin laws could work or potentially legislation around digital assets too. So it's a bit of everything right now that we're doing. So it's a mixed bag, I would say. What are some of the biggest hurdles? Like if you're, if you're, come on. Yeah, what you see what these countries, something?

What's the push, but like you walk into a room and you say, you know, Bitcoin makes sense for you guys. What's the, what's the first most obvious like you're full of shit kind of reaction that you typically get? Well, it's probably worse now after the crypto collapse and all the FTX stuff, right? But I would say earlier Sailor and John and Tip were talking, they were talking about making people understand why they need Bitcoin. And I think it's the same at the nation state level.

It's really a lot of fundamental education. In fact, you don't really need to talk about Bitcoin. You can just talk about money, the economy, and just general ways to prosperity. And those types of discussions eventually will lead you to the Bitcoin rabbit hole. But you don't need to hit them on the head and say, you know, you guys should adopt Bitcoin. It's the best thing for you. Because you have to, it's basic sales, right? If you want to help somebody, you have to ask them what their problems are.

Maybe it is connecting their diaspora and allowing them to do remittances with less friction and lower cost. Maybe it is generating economic activity. Maybe it's generating tourism. Maybe it's fighting hyperinflation, but you don't need to come out with a gate right away and say, you know, use Bitcoin. You can talk them about their issues and provide insights and maybe a general direction on the path to fixing that. And, of course, you can bring up Bitcoin gradually in that discussion. So I would say the reaction that we get is generally inquisitive. People want to know, and we're not overly, you know, overbearing and slapping them with a,

the Bitcoin bat and say, you know, adopt this thing. But it's generally a pretty bidirectional conversation about what's wrong with the world, what's wrong with your country. And if we could provide any help or assistance, then we're happy to do so. I think your tactic would echo the orange-pilling tactics of your average Bitcoin or two. I think a lot of us have learned that bashing people over the head with it repeatedly is not your quickest path to getting individuals informed. It's it's discussions around why Bitcoin exists in the first place that eventually lead you to Bitcoin. So gentlemen, we've got a few minutes left here.

What I want to throw to you guys is if you can accomplish, I'm going to give you maybe a like a few years out. Let's say if you could accomplish one major goal in helping the world adopt Bitcoin or helping people with the problems using Bitcoin as a tool, one major goal in the next five years, what would that goal look like if you were successful? I'm going to toss it. Maybe I'm going to toss it to Joe first because you're the man on the street

who is out there talking to people and all these places you travel to. You know, what goals do you have for yourself as a bit-corner the next five years? You throw me under the bus. I am. I am. I'm happy, happy to do it. So it's funny you asked this question because I immediately thought to a work appraisal I had maybe six months ago where they were like, oh, what are your goals?

And I was like, I want an orange pill 10 million people. And they're like, no, your goals at work. I was like, that is my goal at work. And so yeah, I really want to orange fill 10 million people in whatever way I can. I mean, I'm currently a bit of a one-man band doing this, but I think that my work is to some extent helping towards that, that mission, that cause. And yeah, I mean, I mean, even tonight, it's 1 o'clock in the morning here, a Christmas party at my girlfriend's family's house.

And my girlfriend walked over and did that thing of being like, please, just don't try and orange fill everyone tonight. And I was like, oh, come on. I'm just having a nice chat. And then before we know it, she comes over and there's like, I've given some sats to her family friend of his. But he was like, oh, like, aren't you the person that was into Bitcoin? I was like, well, I've been told not to talk about it.

So I can't really speak overtly about it. And he was like, oh, I knew this guy once that was mining in like 2012. And I was like, oh, yeah, it's advanced a bit from then. And, you know, we got talking before we know it, you know, and obviously my girlfriend walks over the moment that he's downloaded Wallet of Satoshi and I've sent him some sats. So, you know, he wins and you lose some, right? But I mean, I don't know.

Like, that's my goal. That's what I'd like to work towards. And I think that it's also a lot of fun doing this. Maybe I'm in the obsession, say, it's fascination state. I mean, perhaps Samson's out of this now and has, you know, a strategy and a way of approaching these things. But, yeah, I get a lot of joy out of what I do. And that's probably why I'm still doing it. And, yeah, I just want to do it more and more.

So if I could ask any of the viewers watching this, then also try it. You know, why not just send a few sats to someone? It's not going to hurt. I love that. Yeah. Your goal for 2023 is to get your rejection rate on the street down to under 50%. Thank you, Simpson. These are good KPIs.

I like that. Basic sales. I've got it written here. Jack, I'm going to go to you really quick. It's Christmas, 27. what is the thing you're most proud of in that moment if everything pans out as you as you hope it will oh my goodness what an impossible question um you asshole um i think um the reason i started strike i mean i've been in bitcoin for almost 10 years dude and i could not be more bullish on

what i've described as bitcoin the asset um and the reason i started strike is i think lightning in a lot of the layers that could be built on top of Bitcoin, give Bitcoin enough properties as a utility in modern day society to be helpful and really change a lot of how we conduct payments for me in particular, but even more broadstroke. So in five years, this answer might suck. I hope that I've been able to be helpful towards making Bitcoin's utility in everyday life better. I hope that we could, I think Bitcoin harness is a great amount of power, and I hope that I could play a small role in realizing that, whether it's in challenging card networks, reinventing cross-border payments, or to be totally honest with you, dude, like something that I haven't

thought of yet, that I'm going to hopefully be a really good listener and continue to learn and travel and learn of that lightning and Bitcoin could be helpful with. So I have no five-year KPI. I think sometimes Bitcoiners are super excited about hyper-bitcoinization and stuff and the amount of work that can be tackled tomorrow is so immense. And I try and live within the moment and listen more than I talk. And hopefully I can embed Bitcoin in all of our lives in a way that it is helpful in five years. I love that. Perfect.

Samson, I'm going to give you 30 seconds to rattle off something that you would love to accomplish in the next five years. What would you like to get in the bag? So I guess first, let's say, what is hyper-pictonization? And I think for me, it's just the restoration of money. So I would hope that within a five-year time span, I can work to, you know, get a significant. amount of nation states and cities onto some path to Bitcoin adoption and the restoration of money. So it's taking steps like the Bitcoin law that Jack helped with or similar

things where they can recognize Bitcoin as a currency or just elimination of capital gains to go back to what money is, which is just a medium by which people can transact instead of a tool for the state. So if I can get maybe 10, 20 countries on track, that would be a great thing, an accomplishment for myself and the team here, I think. Damn, lofty goals, man. All right. Well, let's finish on that. Gentlemen, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate that any of you were even able to make it out and have a good chat here and have a very happy holiday and a Merry Christmas to all of you. Much love. Thank you, Ben.

Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Ben. Merry Christmas. All right, Merry Christmas. All right, everybody, what do you think about that? That was great. We've got another panel coming up in just a moment here. Again, some more awesome voices to lend to a conversation in and around building Bitcoin in layers.

So we will be back after a short break. And yeah, see you guys in a couple minutes with our next panel. See you soon. After these messages, we'll be right back. Yeah. It is time to give a shout out to sponsors of the show, coincite.com. Now, if you're unfamiliar, then you better get yourself privy to what they're up to. They've got the best damn hardware in the game.

I love my cold card mark four, and I've taken to doing workshops on them everywhere that I go now. So if you see me at an event, good chance that there's... going to be some sort of a satellite event in around how to learn how to use your cold card to the best of your abilities because these things are packed with features. But nonetheless, CoinCite has a ton of different stuff on their website beside the Mark 4. They've got their open dimes. They've got their SATs cards. They've got their tap signers. They've got all kinds of awesome merch. They've also got the block clock. This is an awesome item for any Bitcoin or shelf. and tonight we're going to be giving away a block clock micro.

So anybody that's interested in getting one of these that can read out all your favorite Bitcoin stats, it's time to pay attention. I do, this is the micro, so it's the baby brother to the mini that I have on my shelf there. It's super, super awesome. So what do you need to do in order to enter this competition? Well, you're going to need to tweet out what Bitcoin stat do you most? want to track on your new block clock and why you're going to need to tag myself at

VTC sessions tag them at coin kite and you're going to need to use the hashtag coin kite Xmas let us know via Twitter there will be a single winner and this is only open to residents of Canada and the US so apologies if you're outside of those places but you know shipping costs nonetheless I look forward to seeing the entries and we will announce a winner within 24 hours so get out there and get tweeting and also check out coin kite.com you can use code btc sessions for 5% off everything in the store hello welcome back to asic life hacks i'm your host tatum turn up also host of between two asics it's not a podcast this last asic life hack that we're going to discuss is one that i think

we can all get behind white noise sometimes it's just hard to go to sleep and just the silence of our own thoughts. Maybe there's a party next door. Maybe we need just some relaxing wave noises. Well, this seems like a perfect idea, doesn't it? All you got to do is put your ASIC right next to your bed. I think that it's a perfect amount away from the wall, the exhaust. We'll see what happens.

Well, good night. Look, this doesn't work either. It's like 90 degrees in my room right now, and it... Look, I'm sorry. I can't do this for you guys. I need some more practice. I feel like I failed you. This thing's not even plugged up to the network.

This has been Tatum Turnup with ASIC Life Hacks. Be sure to subscribe to Between 2 A's... It's Tatum Turnup on YouTube. but the shows between two. Tatum Turnup on YouTube. It's not a podcast. Follow me on Twitter at Tatum Turnup. I'm really sorry, guys.

Merry Christmas. Fantastic. Best tip of the night. Thank you for that, Tatum. Expert advice from a clearly experienced Bitcoin miner. Very excited to have this next panel on. We're going to get it rolling right away. We're going to be chatting about building Bitcoin in layers.

So I'm going to welcome a handful of gentlemen here. So I'm going to say very Merry Christmas to Obey, Adam, and Jeff. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. How are your holidays going, everybody? Awesome. It's just going very well. Obey, you are a trooper.

It's like 1.30 a.m. for you. So thank you for doing this. I'm only a mile away from. Joan Macamoto, so it's one for both of us. And I finished being a true geek. I finished a marathon board gaming

and werewolf night session. Well, that's fantastic. Gentlemen, again, thank you so much for being here. We're just going to get it rolling right away. I'm going to give a little preamble and we can just start diving in and have a discussion. I wanted to chat about the layers being built atop

Bitcoin. So one of the more notable things about Bitcoin is the certainty that we have around the baseler infrastructure and the rule set in comparison to other systems. And a lot of work has been put into optimizing that basleather without compromising on those promises that we're used to. We've begun to kind of see the fruits of that approach through continued reliability and accessibility of running the protocol in an individual level, but at the same time, we're seeing the beginnings of innovation happening in subsequent layers on top of Bitcoin through scaling, privacy, smart contracts, all these different areas. And so some of the most exciting developments are on the horizon. I'll posit this to anybody who wants to answer, but how do some of the

things that are being built at top Bitcoin, how do they propel Bitcoin forward from here? What changes do we see on an individual level of how we interact with Bitcoin? So maybe I'll throw it to – I'm kind of curious to hear what Adam has to say on this. And also, Adam, thank you for being here. This is the first time you've ever been on the show. So very humbled that you would come on. Well, thanks for inviting me. So what do we get from layer two?

I think it's, you know, the layers can make different trade-offs, basically. So I mean, I think layers are natural, like most networks are layered. And it's, on the main chain, everything is towards security, dependability, robustness, decentralization. And people want it that way because they're storing savings on it. They're making sensor-resistant transactions. So the main chain is most censorship-resistant and the best security layer for cold storage. But that has costs and trade-off, right? So on other layers, Bitcoin can make different trade-offs.

So the layer that people are most familiar with being lightning, it can make trade-offs where you've got more of a... hot wallet exposure right because the funds are necessarily online but in exchange for that and and some convenience factor of needing to set up channels and so on which hopefully software can automate over time you get instant transactions so much faster that's cheaper and much more scalable so so we get something for it so but I think it's interesting to say that you know that you can't just put that in the main in the base layer because it

would erode some of the other features, some of the features conflict. So you don't get things for free. There's some trade-off involved, right? And so I think what you've seen over time is layers evolved for different specializations. So lightning for micropayments, liquid for trading things, smart contracts, stable coins, securities, other assets, and topically, a Fetiment for privacy, basically, and another approach to scalability. And they're all making trade-offs,

and maybe there will be some more layers. I mean, there are some other ones as well. I'd love to kind of dive into, again, right now, these experiences that you're discussing, whether you're using lightning or you're using liquid or you're diving into things like Fetamint. Right now, and base layer, it's kind of a segregate,

experience. We've seen the beginnings of blurring some of those lines, right? We've seen things like I love wallets like Moon Wallet or Breeze or Phoenix Wallet where kind of the differentiation between on-chain and lightning is being blurred a little bit and just kind of done in the most efficient way. Do we see a blurring of those lines across these different ways of interacting with Bitcoin. Does it become more cohesive? I see OV nodding, so I'm going to toss it to you. Yeah, no, that's definitely the case. I think, as Adam said, we have this opportunity to have a base layer that has a level of trust that we haven't seen before in money. And that's Bitcoin. But we then build in a layered approach. Others have felt that we could build

with one, have one layer and have everything on that layer. No other complex system built by man has ever taken that approach and succeeded. So we're following the approach that's worked for Ian's. Each one has different trade-offs. But once these basic perinitives are there, so we have this core money, we have a mechanism to send that value around quickly and inexpensively. We have mechanisms to add on privacy and extensibility. Once we have these base elements, you can then start seeing the emergence of applications that use all those elements

but provide this cohesive simplified experience without the news having to be aware of what is being used at which type. So for example, we are producing an app called Feddy, but we expect them to be many more like this over the coming years where when you put perform a transaction, you will not need to know that it's a lightning transaction or it's happening within a FedDEMT or otherwise. You won't need to know that you're getting near perfect privacy. And if there are additional features and functional functionalities that you gain from lightning or from RGB or TARO or liquid, or you're gaining from within the Fediment ecosystem itself because it can be extended as well, you will just use them and it will be transparent to you.

That's the future, that's true decentralized application future that we've been looking and being promised, but it's actually going to come in the right way based on correct foundations. Jeff, I'm going to ask you this one. As these second and third layer protocols are built out, you know most bitcoiners that around now i mean many haven't even uh experimented with using a secondary layer yet but it's it seems to me that we will move in a direction where base layer interaction is few and far between and eventually not not part taken in by many individuals do you do you think that's the trajectory we're going down and what what does that the interaction with bitcoin

look like for the average individual years down the road do we transition there um over time yeah let me start that in kind of the base layer similar to what adam and obi was we're talking about so if if you actually could trust that we're living in a system that's 10,000 times bigger or fours or magnitude bigger than Bitcoin. And most people, besides hardcore Bitcoiners, are measuring their life in that system. And that system has essentially unlimited money printing to be able to kill this system.

So if that base layer wasn't secure and decentralized, in every attack factor, you'd have to expect everything in the world that would be thrown at this to try to kill this, because there's so much power in the control. of money and state control of money. So you just have to expect that. So now, layer one is that.

But it's also because it was that in those tradeoffs, there was actually you couldn't build on top of it. So you could talk about it. You could train it. You could educate on it. But there wasn't a thriving ecosystem that you could build on top of because of those same tradeoffs.

And so that obviously, in an entrepreneurial world in a free market would create a whole bunch of other alternatives where people would build on and try to conflate the differences between those things. And I think that's still happening today. So layer one, which is the percine bearer asset, and we're very early in layer two and layer three with lightning, infatement, and a bunch of other layers. The truth is you can't actually see all of the innovation that's going to come and work. And what we don't even know, what I can't even guess yet,

what entrepreneurs take this and create different businesses, it create immense value, that then create another network effect on top of Bitcoin and start to explode that growth because it's providing more and more value to people. If you just looked at Lightning as an example of that, all over the world now, people can reduce their visa fees by two and a half, three percent,

be outside a system. So every single business that goes and does that brings more people on to be able to transact in that. And that network effect becomes super powerful. And as more people are transacting on top of that through lightning, and then they say, what else do I need? And again, you know, we're funding, we're investing into this quite aggressively, and Obey and,

and teams just recently announced Breeze. But now, even on Breeze, what they're doing now with all of the knowledge that they've built, kind of in how to, because it was hard to build the first interactions, their first iterations. And there's not enough developer, there's not as many developers in this community as many others.

But now with Breezes, SDK that they're building, they're building, now you can have a non-custodial wallet. Everybody can have a non-custodial wallet, and it's not in a walled garden that everybody that won't talk to others so so those start to bring on way more users really powerful network effects way more users because of the simplicity of what's what's offered in layer two and three layer two and three can't hear you can't hear you my bad um i was

going to toss it back to adam here for a second um to tag onto you know what the the future you're alluding to. You know, these subsequent layers allow for for more people to come and interact with Bitcoin. Do you think that these these newcomers of Bitcoin, are they going to have on-chain experiences at all at some point? Or do you think that they'll more or less be relegated to second, third, and subsequent layers? And if so, is that okay?

Yeah, I think at least with the layers we have so far, it's difficult to operate solely at layer 2s because the cold storage guarantees are best at layer 1. Now, maybe there's scope for layer 2s that can provide sort of scalability for cold storage. I mean, there's some early discussion about UTX. so sharing in a way that doesn't create additional space. So, but ultimately, I think that is just to say that innovation hasn't necessarily stopped at layer one scaling. So there are, you know, layer one has been evolving incrementally. There have been significant optimizations in parts of it over the years, but there is scope for more sort of scalability.

in sort of achieving the same effect with less data over time. So I guess the schnolla signature is a little smaller, the multi-signitioner signature is a little smaller. So things are getting smaller over time incrementally, but there's also a longer-term scope for, you know, perhaps a more proof-based system. So, you know, the snarks or proofs of execution, some of the day could be compressed a bit with that. I think Ruben Sumson made a reasonable argument that it's not as large an advantage as has been painted

in other chains that maybe Bitcoin transactions are already extremely compressed. The signatures are about half of the space and that kind of technology at best can shrink the signatures towards zero. So if you do that, That means the best you can hope for is 2x from that, which is maybe not worth a whole lot of complexity rate. So we'll see how it evolves, but I think the interesting thing is, so there's this quote from, it's one of the laws, you know, that's not really a law, just an observation, but this thing called Gauls law, which is about complexity.

So I think the thing that's nice about Thickland layer one is it's not super simple, but it's, It's sort of stable. It does one thing, does it well, and it doesn't add a lot of risky extra things, you know, like states and race conditions and sort of, you know, sort of program, like complicated programs that depend on a lot of states, and you just get yourself tied to not with that kind of thing. So anyway, Gull's Law says a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.

The inverse proposition also appears to be true. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start at beginning with a simple system. So on that basis, I think Bitcoin is on the right track, and we won't necessarily know the limits of what it can evolve to, but it's evolving in the right way that any kind of robust system that we rely on the world has started from. like complex systems sense to fail and have to get rewritten as what that's saying.

It's a kind of complex software systems observation. I, that sounds very familiar to me. Sounds an awful lot like something that's in the back of my mind now, but I digress. Well, I want to, I want to jump to Obey here, and I'm sorry I'm jumping around because we have, you know, limited time here. But I'm interested, Obe, in what you're working on with FETI. And I had a couple questions. And more so, I want people to kind of be privy to what is happening in some of these layers and the improvements that come from a user perspective or some of the features that come from a user perspective

of using something like Fedomitz. And so maybe if you could just take like a couple minutes and explain why, why Fetamance might appeal to somebody and how the tool can be used to perhaps help people with privacy or help people that may not want to self-custody themselves, but how this is kind of blurring that line and helping people along. So I'll leave it to you. Can you explain a little bit about what? being worked upon and how it helps?

I mean, there's a few things that we want to leave till we actually launch, because it leads to the ability to roll out a number of interesting features. But fundamentally, what you're doing is you have two extremes right now. You have first party custody, which is the Bitcoin standard. That's the ideal. If you can do it, you should do it. but after years of talking to a number of customers, I used to run in exchange for a number of years,

it became clear that a number of people, probably the majority of people, wouldn't be comfortable with self-custody. And there are three reasons. One, it's too complex for many, another was too expensive for many when you think globally. And others are just too afraid. Like, what am I going to do with my keys?

What if I forget my keys? What happens if I die? How do I deal with these situations? Now, the other solution, the only other solution, the default, was to custody on exchange, which, you know, there are a few, like strike or a custodial service, which follow good principles and so on. But ultimately, you're going to have to trust someone, a company who could be a stranger with curly hair based in the Bahamas.

and that may not end well. Or it could be someone, you know, who's got an exchange of a name that people think is named after a mountain, you know, from several years ago or anything in between. And so we looked at this and we realized that there's something in the middle and that is to take your existing community and use your community to come together to custody on the behalf of members of that community.

That would allow you to have a service which has functionality on a par with that of an exchange, but you're not trusting effectively a stranger. You're trusting people that you've spent your life and use your own sort of wisdom of your community to determine who you can trust. So you're still having to trust, and this is an important thing,

but you're trusting people who have social capital to lose by breaking your trust, they're part of a community, they could be ostracized. There's still proof of punishability because they can be, as my head of products, there's proof of being able to walk up to the house and punch them in a nose, you know, you know, we can't do with someone the other side of the world. So there is still a mechanism to punish in the event of an issue being caused. So now, one thing is very important is that you have to be very open and clear and transparent

about the risks and trade-offs. And I think when you do that, you can rely more on humans to make sound decisions on the level they can trust a given option by. The challenges happen when we try to give the illusion that there are no risks with whatever option we take

because all issues and all approaches have trade-offs. So in the case of community custody, what does that give you? Well, one classic challenge is how do I back up my keys? Now, if you self-custody. Now, one general approach

is multi-sig, but then who do I give my key shards to is actually the very human challenge, and it's not necessary an easy problem for people to solve. Well, in the event of a fediment,

you've got this system built by the open source community, run by trusted members of your community and run on behalf of the community. So you've already got that system in place so you can instantly identify who are the trusted people that you can use to hold your backup with. Therefore, that bit that can take you weeks of angst to figure out can be instantly done so we can automatically shard and provide people as a default option that are good default option to backup to, simplifying the backup experience for users. So you can take that

process and perform a best practice backup of your keys in seconds. Another thing that you can do is, for example, lightning payments. If I want to receive a lightning payment, I need to be online to receive it. Well, you've now got these guardians who are running 24-7, so you can actually give an invoice to receive a payment, but then be offline, lose your internet connection and still receive that payment because they are receiving it on your behalf. So that gives you the ability to receive lightning payments without being online. There are other cool features. I said we'll wait for launch to reveal some of those. It is also anything that you can see on an exchange, any functionality exchange has been able to deliver or add. There is no reason why in theory

it cannot be added to a fediment community. So we've got an announcement coming out early next year. You can guess probably the day of, you'll do an announcement very, very early in January. But you will be able to see that this system is easily extensible, and we're looking forward to demonstrate how extensible it is. And then finally, it offers a, well, There's too many other features, but two more things, privacy and scaling.

So in terms of privacy, it can be extended in any way, but by default, all federiments provide an implementation of Chalmi and eCash, which is this cryptographically near perfectly private protocol, invented in 1983 by David Chowm. and it implements that a standard. So if you're just using a wallet without having to think about change control or anything like that, you just make payments in and out. You're automatically benefiting from an incredible level of privacy.

And any transactions that happen within your community, and you have to remember, if you analyze most people's expenditure, the vast majority are local to their community for their accommodation, their food, and so on. All those transactions that happen within your community will not only not hit the base chain, but they also won't hit the Lightning Network as well. So it forms a level free of scaling. So those are just like five off the top of your head. Now you do have to make that compromise or you have to recognize that you're trusting your community. But

But it's just very exciting once you decide that you're willing to make that trade off. Yeah. Scalability, privacy, a kind of mishmash of, you know, custody. Extensibility. Yeah. Yeah. We're running out of time, gentlemen, but I'm going to toss something to Jeff, I think, here. There's one thing.

I'm going to say 10 years from now, somebody, begins interacting with Bitcoin for the first time they get a wallet. What's their experience like in an ideal world? Like if you could have an ideal first experience with Bitcoin, we've rolled out a lot of the things that were discussed here. We've helped with a lot of the pain points that we currently have with Bitcoin. What's it like for the average person? It's going to be a lot easier, number one.

The technology that we talk about today will move. into the plumbing will move into the background and people will just be getting value. They'll be using it because it provides them way more value and it'll be simple. And as Adams said, building in these layers with a secure base layer and then in other layers. It's that we're early in that stage right now but that's what's what's coming. Along that axis, another thing is happening and that's what I talk about often is measured in in Bitcoin prices will fall forever. So if you knew that there was only two ways to pay back the unrepayable debt,

essentially insolvent debt, one way through inflation and one way through credit collapse, and Bitcoin protected you from that and you moved over, it means the entire operating system of everything in the world is changing. companies change. The value that they create it means prices keep falling and they keep on falling. That's a huge change for humanity.

And as we accelerate into this into Bitcoin, with network effects that make it easier and easier and more people starting to understand that, that accelerates. These two systems cannot stay. They can't operate forever. So you can imagine if the system outside the system that's based on truth,

and it keeps on moving and prices fall against that, that means the other system has to get worse and worse and worse. And so that acceleration across this whole thing, along with the innovation that's happening on top of it, changes things in ways we can't quite describe right now. If you ask the simple question, you ask, it's going to get way easier. People won't know that people won't have to understand. People won't have to learn as much as we've had to learn to get here.

Interesting. I'm going to wrap it up, I'm going to go to Adam one last time. And we've discussed a lot. There's a lot of stuff obviously being built in subsequent layers on Bitcoin. But Adam, I'm wondering if you would have for the average person that's, that's, you know, they're diving into this stuff. they're curious about where Bitcoin's going. What is what is happening?

Maybe they're, you know, they've interacted on chain. They haven't really done too much else. Where does an individual start if they're new to what's happening in subsequent layers and they're hungry for knowledge? They're hungry to try things out. Adam, where would they start? I mean, I think lightning has got a lot of energy. There's a different wallets with different tradeoffs.

That would be an interesting thing to try out. It's very convenient for retail payments. Pretty reliable these days, getting easier to set up newer, lighter, faster wallets. Awesome. I mean, I think like, you know, it's not just that technology gets easier, but that people kind of get used to it. So if you look around on YouTube, you'll find some sort of 2011 or so very early videos on general news shows or financial news shows with like Trace Mayer or some other people that I actually recognize, but were evidently around early on.

And they are trying to explain what is Bitcoin. And, you know, the vibe is that, you know, they're apologetic that they're into. this kind of crazy implausible thing. And it seems to me that's like pretty much inverted now so that, you know, the newscast is sort of like apologising for their incomplete lack of knowledge or something. And so I think it's just like social reinforcement. People are assuming, well, it must be real.

Lots of people rely on it. Lots of big institutions are adopting it, providing it to their wealth management clients. When can I get on it? So the assumption is it works on it. It does it spurning. I think you're right. I think that, again, the narrative has shifted.

And I mean, other than the ups and downs that come with, you know, implosions like FTCs and things like that where there's confusion as to what it is and does that encapsulate Bitcoin or is Bitcoin separate from it. Those things are learned over time. And more and more people are learning them. And I'm happy to see it. So gentlemen, I'm going to wrap us here.

I'm going to say thank you so much for taking the time. I know it was a short discussion. We had to jump around a bunch, but I'm very, very grateful for all of your time. And I'm just going to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Right back out you. Great seeing you guys. All right.

Thanks, Red, Smith. All right, everybody. Thank you for watching that one. We've got one more topical panel, and then a little bit of a pleb party coming up. I'm going to bring in our next panel right now. We're going to be chatting about some of the lessons learned through a 2022. There were many.

I mean, some people already knew the lessons from prior years, but they can be relearned. So I'm going to welcome in Mark Moss. Safe. Good to see you, man. And Elise, good to see you as well. Welcome. Merry Christmas, guys. How are you doing? Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas. Thank you for having us. Yeah, good to see you all. I think I saw all. Did I see all of you in L.A.? Maybe you weren't in L.A. No, I couldn't make it, unfortunately. Too bad, but I'm sure I'll be seeing you at some events in the future here.

Well, I mean, again, thank you guys for taking the time. I know time zones can be a pain in the ass, but I appreciate you guys all making it out. And we're here to chat a little bit about some of the lessons learned in 2022. So I'll give us a little preamble and then I'll just toss it up for anybody to jump in. But it was a heavy news year. Multiple institutions imploded. Bitcoin has become further ingrained in the energy markets while also facing opposition, you know, from people that don't like energy being used.

We've had narratives ranging from its dead to its national security threat. I think those things may be mutually exclusive. We've had previously widely touted price models destroyed to the downside, but we've seen also things like Bitcoin uses a fundraising method when banks are frozen by the state. And all the while through all of this, people continue to be building on Bitcoin, as we've just seen evidence by the previous panel. So again, we're going to touch on this over the next 30 minutes here, but I'll throw it out there to anybody who wants to dive in.

What do you think was one of the biggest lessons in your mind that was learned throughout 2022, whoever wants it first? I'll jump in. One thing I was thinking of when you talked about that earlier is that there's a saying that I think about a lot, which is that some lessons in life, can't be taught, they can only be learned. And so unfortunately, a lot of people had to learn some very difficult lessons this year.

And even though they heard about it, but you just can't teach those things and they have to learn the hard way. I would say, you know, as you said, so many news stories and so many lessons this year, I think maybe the big realization for the world, I think myself included, but definitely for the world, would be really, you mentioned the Canadian trucker situation, but really what escalated in Russia, right? And so you have three global superpowers with nuclear weapons. And one of them got their bank account seized. And so I think it was like a high alert to everybody. I mean, you know, we see in the United States, bank accounts gets frozen or seized and

happens in third world countries, of course, happened in Canada. But when a global superpower with nukes got their bank account frozen, I mean, that's just like, okay, that's like the last straw. And so I think it really brought to the forefront that, you know, money isn't ours. We don't own it. We don't control it. And really highlighted the use case for Bitcoin. from a personal level, but even I think it's left governments of the world scrambling going,

what are we going to do? And so obviously they're turning to gold. But, you know, I think it's another catalyst that propels Bitcoin forward. So basically not your Fiat rails, not your purchasing power. Is that what we're going? Yeah. I was safe. Would you echo, do you think that's one of the, one of the big lessons? I mean, it's kind of gone, you know, from the nation state level all the way down to the individual level, same lesson. Would you agree? Absolutely. And also across crypto markets, we saw the same lesson being driven home at a time when you saw a lot over the last couple of years of people saying things along the lines of, you know, self custody is ridiculous. People aren't going to try self custody. And I think what was really fascinating is the emergence of this kind of people who think that they're offering something profound by telling you that, you know, actually you can just keep your coins on an exchange.

and then you don't have to worry about running a cold card because, you know, running a cold card is so risky and difficult. Whereas, you know, just as Pierre Rochard likes to put it, you know, just become part of an international bankruptcy court case is the alternative. So there was a lot of faith in the fiat system and a lot of faith in the crypto system being presented as if these things are just there and working and will continue to work. and that Bitcoin's value proposition is, you know, maybe you speculate, maybe the price goes up and that's it. But like people were beginning to forget about the fact that it is just money that you own and nobody controls and nobody can take away from you. And then 2022, I think, was an open-air experiment in illustrating this lesson to people. So we saw, first of all, as you said, you know, Russia. and we saw hundreds of millions of people now can't access global fiat rails which was i you know

it's horrific to see but it was a very good advertisement from my book the fiat standard because it was basically arguing that this is the idea like you're you the the fiat system is like a very bad cryptocurrency where there's only one central node and anybody can be kicked off and balances are completely arbitrary that node can decide what uh anybody can keep or do with their money. And that might have sounded a little bit over the top in November 2021 when this book came out. Like, you know, all right, maybe you've heard about a case of some Iranians getting their money confiscated or something like that or North Koreans. But in your mind, it was just, you know, obviously they did something very bad. But then Russia just, you know,

100 billion people just completely debanked over the day, overnight. was a great advertisement for what I was discussing in the Fiat standard. And so I think overall the year has been one of these painful lessons that Bitcoin likes to give about why it is different from everybody else. And it's really exposed to just how, you know, all throughout this year, we've seen people in Fiat and in crypto just lose everything and get rugged and cry about it and expect sympathy and bailouts. and the

bit winners just continue to stack so I think you know the biggest winner in this year is probably Matt O'Dell stay humble, stack sets. It turns out to be the ultimate winning recipe and formula for the future. I think so. Alis, do you

want to tag into what Safe's been the threat he's been pulling? Sure, so maybe I'll start with the biggest winner of the year. I like what you just threw out Safe. I'll throw out another one. It felt like emerging markets developing economies impact on Bitcoin had a big year. So a couple examples of that were Tara being announced in launching in TestNet and what Tara is we know.

And I've talked about the safe before actually this year on his podcast is the ability for stable coins to transact peer-to-peer on Lightning Network. That was something influenced by lightning adoption in emerging markets. We also saw very recently Bitcoin mining's ability to bring energy to emerging markets where folks are living off the grid that was our last investment still mark's last investment of the year was in the company called gridless which is bringing electricity to households off the grid by allowing mining proof of work to act as an anchor tenant for new energy generation to get those projects funded so that's a bit about the positive safe and mark the The bold already mentioned that some of Bitcoin's long-term lessons like self-custody,

also the value of proof of reserve, and even the match of proof of reserve with self-custody, how that can allow people to be their own bank, but also to sort of test their custodians. We had some negative lessons this year, too, and so I'll extend upon that from what Safe said and sort of like add a sharp point to it. we learned that the smartest guys in the room were not the smartest guys in the room this year, right? So we were told Bitcoiners were told and people in crypto were told these three AC guys, they're super sharp, they know what's up. Sam Pinkman-Fried was the smartest guy in the room.

The lead investor at Sequoia was on, you know, multiple podcasts claiming that his clock speed was just faster than everyone else's. And I suppose faster than founders in Bitcoin because Sequoia is not backing those founders. But what we learned this year that in fact it was more about maybe rhetoric on the crypto side and sort of like slick words rather than really sharp, sharp, thoughtful, well-researched ideas. And so I think that's our minder. It's always good to get is that it's not just sort of the surface level of rhetoric that's important. but doing your own research and finding what's behind it digging deeper and Bitcoiners are good at that and benefited this year from that.

It's interesting again, some of the institutions and kind of these VC-backed firms that you're mentioning here. It's almost like as they dove into the crypto space, I mean, it's it's Fiat incentives on steroids, right? because it's instead of one entity, one kind of top down, you know, can print money. It's everybody can print money. And damn, that screws up incentives and results in kind of what we've seen this year. And so I know, I know, Mark, you've kind of been in and around, not that crypto space, but like you're familiar with kind of the VC space as well. And I imagine for a lot of people, you know, it's, it's, it can be difficult when, when all this money is being thrown around and it looks, it looks so enticing to everybody to say, to stick by your morals and say, no, we're going to back things that are long term that makes sense that aren't built on, on, on bullshit.

We're going to say no to this quick paycheck and we're going to build for the long term. What do you think encourages some people to go one way versus another? Values and integrity. I'm not embarrassed to admit. I talk about it often. I did get deep into Bitcoin and then I fell down the crypto rabbit hole. I spent a couple of years telling people it's blockchain, not Bitcoin. I'm guilty of that.

And after doing my research for years, I was like, wait a minute, this is all smoking mirrors. And about 2019, I signed out of that. and I did have like this crypto research business I was in with my partner and he kept going. And he made a lot more U.S. dollars than I did a lot more. And I had to kind of sit back and watch him go on to make a lot of money. And it was it was integrity, right? It was like I realized that that was a smoking mirrors. I didn't want to spend my life.

It's more than just U.S. dollars for I think almost everybody here on this panel as well as most of the people in Bitcoin. Right. We're really trying to build something. And we don't want anything to distract or take away from that. And so, yeah, sometimes I look back and he's still one of my good friends. And I watched how much money he made last year doing some stuff with Alameda and some really big checks. And I was like, dang, man, I could have done good. But at the end of the day, right, it's about integrity.

So I would say that's what it comes down to. And I think also, you know, obviously something the safety talks about all the time is just that long term perspective. And again, right, if we're really trying to build something big, if we're really trying to change the world, I have kids, so that's really changed my life, especially, you know, through the pandemic and seeing what happened one night at dinner at the dinner table. My daughter said, we're in California, extreme lockdown. And she said, well, at least we can go outside now. I was like, what? Wait, did she just say we can go outside?

Like, I'm an American, right? We're free. And so it was like, I've just kind of come to this point. We're like, man, you know, we need to stand up. We need to build the world that we want. I believe that's built on Bitcoin. It hinges off of that. And so, yeah, integrity.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And it's it's hard to fake that, right? It becomes apparent very quickly if you lack it. You know, and it's it's hard also, you know, Bitcoiners are, we're an abrasive bunch from time to time. We'll let you know. But I mean, I'd like to think from time to time that's for the better. I think it holds people's feet to the fire, make sure that they're not, you know, not. being deceptive. It keeps people honest. And again, we like say if you were alluding to it earlier, people saying, oh, you can actually just leave it on the exchange. You're actually safer on the exchange and how many times time and time again does that get proven wrong. But I worry that, you know,

this panel is called Lessons Learned in 2022. I worry that all these lessons we're talking about actually aren't learned, they will be relearned, and that for the foreseeable future, people will continue to touch the stove. I don't know, say, do you think we have much more stove touching in our future? I mean, I think so. I think the optimistic scenario is, I mean, there's definitely going to be more shitcoins rising, but I think the optimistic scenario is that the new crop of shit coins next time is going to be different from the crop of shit coins this time, which I think is happening.

every time and this is really the key thing and this is why i think you know mark's story about integrity um like a lot of uh a lot of maxis like to say this and i like to present the kind of pragmatic self-interested case for being a maxi regardless of uh regardless of appealing to people's better than nature is just survivor by survivorship bias so yeah you look at your friend okay he made a lot of money but he's not the only person in crypto and a lot more people got completely wrecked in crypto. So yeah, some people got in and got out at the right time. A lot more people-

It was musical chairs, right? Exactly. So it's not just integrity. It's when you leave and if you're the last holding the bag or not. So good for your friend for getting out in time, but there was billions of dollars that didn't to say, this point. In particular, I think what the collapse of FTX showed is just that how much of that money

was just simply people making up a bunch of buzzwords and then taking your money and putting it in FDX earn and then just giving you back some of it. And then, you know, the funny thing is even after a week of it becoming clear that this thing was very shady, these people didn't pull their money out. Many of them didn't pull their money out. They kept their money in FDX and they got wrecked. So, you know, 100 times you got lucky with shit coins and then you were. out on FDX earning yield or doing whatever Metaverse Web 3 new high-tech stuff that we a boomer

Maxis don't understand turns out all of all of that was just putting money in FDX earn and you know it only takes being wrong ones to undo all of the previous ones and so if you have the kind of mentality where you're going to gamble on things that are clearly nonsensical like all these shit coins and you know get it to shady exchanges where the CEO goes on on Bloomberg and explains how his pawns scheme works and he says it's basically a Ponzi scheme i mean if you're going to be putting your money in those things you're going to get wrecked and so i don't care about how many shit-coiners tell me stories about how much money they made you know the ones that got wrecked aren't able to tell you their stories that out there maybe washing dishes or driving cabs or trying to

make money back and they don't have time to go online and advertise to people about their experience and they're ashamed of it and they don't like to talk about it. But this is a zero-sum game. There is no production taking place for people to be wanting, for this to be worth taking a risk. You know, you take a risk on a business that's productive because the expected value, the return expected value is positive. Maybe you'll lose, but there is a possibility that you'll gain. But this is a game of, it's a zero-sum game, musical chairs. And so I think my lesson to take from it is to just take shitcoin people and crypto people a lot less seriously than even I was taking them because I was I was astonished at how everything, you know, all of these toxic shitcoiners who kept talking about, you know, the limitations of Bitcoin maximalism and how all these smart contract platforms are going to do.

All of them got wrecked on FTX or a lot of them got wrecked on SDX as far as we can tell. And they haven't learned the lesson. And they're still repeating the same mistakes. So yeah. It is getting through to some, right? Like there's a, there's a stream of newly minted maxis. Every time shit like this happens.

I had a, one of the beautiful things coming out of FTX was the influx of people that I've had contact me and say, hey, I'm self-custodying for the first time. I need some handholding a little bit just to get set up, but like, I've been, I don't have enough time in the day to like book appointments with all these people. And that's a beautiful thing. But I was speaking with somebody earlier this week. And earlier I was talking about a son and mother that I onboarded and got to custody their

coins for the first time. But there's another individual I was talking to. And not only was he self-custying for the first time, getting on a cold card, he was like very excited about it. And, you worked like a charm. He was doing a great job. But then he also told me that, you know, I've kind of over the past couple of years here, I've learned two lessons. One is that I want to self-custy everything.

But two is I've migrated from all the, and he was, say if you're right, he was embarrassed about the fact that he was in all the shit coins before. And he's like, you know, I've migrated away from that. I'm now, I'm Bitcoin only. I don't have anything else. And I asked him, why? What was what was what helped you towards that conclusion? And one of the things that I kind of honed in on that he said was, um, consistency of message. And he said that there's, there's so many people out there now that are, are explaining how and why Bitcoin is different from everything else. And that while there's, there's varying metaphors for that and different ways of explaining it,

When you get down to the crux of it, it's more or less the same message told in a variety of ways. And he said that consistency contrasted to the plethora of bullshit that's just like a revolving door of why you need something other than Bitcoin that eventually get shuffled right back out of the door. He said it became abundantly clear as Bitcoin's narrative basically stayed consistent and everything else just it was a. It was a bit of a cluster fuck. And he said that's kind of what sent to the deal. And he, you know, named a number of people that have been on the show throughout the course of the night saying that person's message resonated with me, that person, that person.

So maybe I'll toss it to Elise. Do you agree that kind of the messaging, the quality, the consistency has been improving? And how do we improve from here to help more people? I kind of understand what's afoot. Well, that's a great question. So we're, that's a great question. So I don't think there's one answer to that. But maybe to sort of add to the discussion of consistent messaging, I think one of the things I'm hopeful for in 20203 is that we can talk more about Bitcoin and less about Bitcoin versus X altcoin.

So I think it's really interesting that Bitcoiners, people are focused on Bitcoin are called Bitcoin maximalist because we're, because we're, There's so many other things that we don't focus on, right? So just as an example, in the tech space, there's e-commerce, there's cybersecurity, there's autonomous vehicles, all of this, right? And the folks working on autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars, are not calling us out as Bitcoin maximalists and toxic for not talking about self-driving cars. And so it's been, you know, I think one of the things that we learned, again, in every cycle is really sort of the ways the alt-coin folks take advantage of Bitcoin's

uniqueness, ambition, and integrity to try to ride the coattails while at the same time aligning Bitcoin to promise that the bigger opportunity is in that. You don't see that in other spaces because there's not an opportunity to participate in the self-driving car market and exit quickly by selling your bag to someone that has less knowledge than you do. And so, you know, You know, I'm hoping that in 20, 23 in the years forward, we can see more space. I don't think we will. I'm not optimistic. But I'm hopeful if there was one wish that I could be granted tonight, it would be to see more

space between the communities so that we could really be heads down on the plethora of things happening in Bitcoin. It's such a dynamic space, even if you're 24-7 on it, impossible to keep up. And just to talk about that, I think, you know, would be enough. So that would be my Christmas wish. My prediction is that Christmas wish comes true. I think for two reasons, right? I think the increased regulations is going to keep, as Safe said,

I mean, SBF went on interview and explained this box and how they create this box token. It's all a big Ponzi. And I think the regulations crack down on that, and that stuff goes away. Maybe it goes offshore, but the American venture capital doesn't go with it. I think on top of it as well,

I was in Austin for the consensus conference. this I didn't actually go to the event, but I was around. And I talked to some people there and like, oh, what's so, what's so tech, what's the most technology, you know, uh, driven thing that you're seeing? And it was like, oh, deeds on the blockchain or video games or supply chain. And it's like, well, then you should go to a video game conference and you should go to a real estate conference. And you should go to a supply conference.

And I think as a category, it's falling apart. It doesn't make sense. We wouldn't have an internet convention today. And so I think it's breaking apart. The regulation is going to break it apart. I think we're going to get that space. That's my prediction. Not that like that.

I agree, right? You're seeing, you're starting to see, yes, there's a ton of Bitcoin specific conferences, but I think you're going to see conferences where Bitcoin is merely a track. I mean more as like a cryptocurrency conference, like consensus is. Yeah, yes. It's just a mismatch of what? Like they should just go their separate ways. Like, what is a cryptocurrency conference?

Bitcoin is obviously different. Yeah. And I think I think that's what you're going to see. You're going to see Bitcoin actually. actually solving problems and becoming a track on things that aren't Bitcoin conferences, right? You're already seeing it with things like the Human Rights Foundation will have a Bitcoin track as related to that. You're seeing video games that, you know, baked in sets and wallets and stuff like that where there's a bit of a Bitcoin track. I think you're going to see more of that where shit that actually works for particularly particular use cases for individuals,

just become kind of like, oh, this is how you use this in the context of something you're interested in. without needing tokens, which will be beautiful. But I'm conscious of time. I've got to start wrapping. So I'm going to give you guys a challenge here to wrap up. Since this is lessons learned in 2022, I want each one of you, if possible, I can't put you on the spot here, but I want each one of you to give a call to action of the viewers at this moment of leveling up.

if you're a bitcoiner, how do you, how do you level up? And this could be, this could pertain to people at different levels of their bitcoining. But, you know, you speak to the demographic that you think could use a nudge. So, you know, what can people do to level up their, you know, them as a bitcoiner? So I'm going to maybe toss it to Mark first. Then we'll go, Elise and then safe. Sure. I think leveling up is just, I would say probably the number one thing.

I think everyone listening is probably already doing self-custody, but if not, there's step one. But I think education. And so, you know, the most important investment you can make in your life is into yourself. And everybody needs to be continuing to educate themselves. There's so much education coming around this space right now. It's evolving so fast that it's hard to keep track of. None of us are experts. Like, we're all learning more and more and more.

And so people need to continue that drive. Continue going down these rabbit holes. Continue learning all the different disciplines that is affecting. And that way, you have a better understanding. And if you stand for something, you don't fall for everything else. And so you have something to stand on as well as you can continue to share that with the people. As Sam Adams said, lighting brush fires in the minds of men. So you'll have the right education.

You can spread the information properly. And so I would say level up, continue to educate yourself. Awesome. Awesome. Elise, how about you? How do people level up? I'm going to tag on to that. I'm just going to offer something that people can educate themselves on.

So there's all these really sort of like more in the weeds capability that Bitcoin has, Probably last year that I was with you, I talked about stable coins on Lightning without calling that Tara. And this year, I'll say something that I think is really interesting that you can do with Lightning, that people aren't paying attention to yet, is what LATLSTP, Lightning LAMS ELSAT protocol or a new company called C-13, make capable, which effectively allows you to charge per API call. So for developers, especially developers working with OpenAI capabilities, this can be really interesting. What can you build that just adds this sort of like really incremental value or is interesting or sort of a toy that you would monetize and be able to profit from if you could

charge people in in pennies. So LSAT does that. It's a fun new toy that I hope we're playing with next year. Interesting. All right. Check it out. Safe. You're up next. How do people level up? So I mean, you gave me more time to think, but they also took all the best answers. So that makes it even harder for me. So yeah, obviously I agree with Mark and Elise, education, self-custody, tell people more about why these things matter. And I think lightning, of course, is enormously important things. So play around with lightning and start using it more and more. But I'm going to keep it old school here and go back to my bread and butter, which is at the end of the day, you know, this is a game and the scoreboard is really ultimately just how much money is held in Bitcoin.

versus how much money is held in fiat and everything else. That's the scoreboard, really. Ultimately, we win when more people hold more economic value in Bitcoin than other things, and then Bitcoin becomes the dominant money. And so my recommendation and my suggestion is to work hard, spend less, and stack as hard as you can. I think that's really what it comes down to. These are the bullets that win us the war.

Every Satoshi you stack is a shot at the goal. Eliath of Fiat. It's a bullet in the corpse of Fiat. And so work as hard as you can, spend as little as you can, sell all of your chairs and stack all the Satoshis that you can. And I think if anything this year showed that Bitcoins, Bitcoins really are not toxic enough. I think a lot of people have made a very good point by saying, you know, a lot of, a lot of people get us mixed up with shitcoiners. We're not done a good enough job differentiating. ourselves so i'd say i'd urge more toxicity and more explicit um differentiation from uh shitcoins and the crypto industry and i'll end with a quote from uh my man ludwig von mezes do not give in to evil

but proceed ever more boldly against it i love it i think this is the perfect place to wrap the panel uh thank you all for being a part of this uh again i am so super humbled that so many fantastic people yourselves included took the time to be here this evening. So thank you all and have a very Merry Christmas. Thanks, guys. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Bye, bye, bye.

Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. All right. Everybody, what do you think? That was a good time. Excellent quote to wrap up by Safe as well. Seif's for first time on the show. So glad to have them.

I've met him many times in person now. But yeah, first time, first time digitally, oddly enough. Nonetheless, what a show. This has been fantastic. And it's not over because now we get the Pleb Party slash Prophecy Celebration. It's coming your way. We've got one more little break before we get into that. I see the DGens piling into the chat right now.

They're all back there. They're all. They're just, I see them all waiting, ready to go. partying backstage. We will be back in a moment. We've got actually two contests coming your way, the two final ones. This one of them, there's like 600 bucks up for grabs in one of them, in three little pieces. So yeah, that's coming your way. And then we've got a special message that I'm going to play before we bring in everybody for this little party here. But we will be seeing you momentarily. Keep

tuning in because this is where the party starts. I'm going to get myself some whiskey right now. So I'll see you guys in a moment. Huge shout out to sponsors of the show, hoddlehottle.com. If you're buying Bitcoin and some of the following are important to you, things like

peer-to-peer, things like privacy, non-K-Y-C, self-custody, Well, the place to go to be stacking stats then is hoddlehottle.com. You can get signed up in a few minutes with nothing more than an email address and be peer-to-peer trading in no time flat. They also, of course, do have their lending program in which nothing is re-hypothicated

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Bitcoin peer to peer. You're going to need to tag myself at VTC sessions. You're going to need to tag at Hoddle-Hoddle, and you're going to need to use the hashtag Hoddle-Hoddle X-MIS. Now, this is only open to people in Europe this time. So if you're a European, congratulations.

You're now open and eligible for one of these giveaways. There will be a single winner announced within 24 hours and we'll hit you up on Twitter and get you sorted once that is announced. But get out there, enter. We'll see you guys on Twitter.

Shout out to sponsors of the show, bitrefill.com. And these guys are invaluable to somebody like me who lives on Bitcoin because what you can do there is you can get any gift card you can imagine with Bitcoin, both on-chain and via the Lightning Network. So that's a huge help for me. You can, again, the list goes on and on, but just a few examples. Amazon, Uber, Wayfair, Instacart, Uber Eats, Starbucks, Delta, Macy's, Footlocker, Netflix, Steam,

Spotify, Hulu, Home Depot. I mean, again, everything that you can imagine. You can also do things like top up your phone. You can get inbound lightning channels. So it's an absolute, wonderful tool to have your disposal as a Bitcoiner, especially if you're making that shift to being on a Bitcoin standard. Now, Bit refill is not messing around with the giveaway this time. They are, they really kicked open the door when they,

they said what they wanted to do for a giveaway. They're going to be giving away three, three vouchers for $200. Pretty solid. So three vouchers for $200, which you can then use to top up your bit refill balance and make purchases and really get whatever the hell you want here. So what are you going to need to do to enter?

So I want you to tweet out, how does the ability to get gift cards, with Bitcoin make your life easier. So you're going to tweet that out. You're going to tag myself at BTC sessions. You're going to tag them at BitRefil at BitRefil. And you're also going to use the hashtag BitRefil XMIS. Now, this is open globally.

So I imagine we'll have some pretty interesting answers in around how using BitRefil has helped and made your life easier with all these different answers from around the globe. But yeah, this is open globally, and we will have three winners announced within 24 hours, and each one of those winners will grab themselves a $200 voucher to be used on bit refill. So get out there, get tweeting, and best of luck to everyone.

We'll see you on Twitter. Absolute. Hope, I tell you. Isn't hope absolute? Isn't it an absolute? Do I have to be hopeful in percentage and probabilities in order to be more likable to you and more logical? I say no, Sha. No!

Be an absolutist. I choose to hope that in this Friday, the 23rd of December, the new cycle will begin. A new cycle of prosperity. a new cycle of miminess and silliness a new cycle of green dildos and 58k gang go for laser eyes again

and 100K fucking space one and for all a new cycle that is Bitcoin an absolute discern I'm hopeful inspiring

inspiring we're going to get everybody in here. I poured myself, my whiskey. I feel like I deserve it at this point. Let's start getting everybody in. Hey, fuck you, Greg. Fuck you, man.

Welcome. We've got a bunch of D-Gens in the back here. Let's start getting them in here. Bring on in. Sean, how you doing? Doing great. I am loving this. I love yellow's meme.

Let's go. Greg. Made me excited. I see, I see. I see somebody's looking very wonderful back here. Becca, it's good to see you as well. Hello, welcome. Thank you for being here. You look so festive. It's so wonderful. Oh, yeah. It's the day of the prophecy. We have to celebrate.

Like, we've got to be a game here, people. Sean, buddy. We do, we do. I got to give another. I'm going to bring in another here. dude did the most epic job on the beautiful image that is the backdrop to everything that we've been doing world of rusty dude whoo thank you dude you you knocked it out of the park with that i don't know like you're like oh i'm just i'm doing something really quick we'll see how it turns out and this epic piece of art is dropped at my doorstep thank you for doing that man uh very It's my pleasure. I failed you last year. So I had to double my efforts this year. Yeah, well, you know, you're you're making ground. So thanks. But no, I really do appreciate it.

Turned it amazing. We've got to get a few more in here as well here. Of course, I want to bring in the man that's been behind the scenes the whole time, basically wrangling bitconners. I don't know how he did it. But Tatum, dude. Thank you. Thank you. for being backstage this entire the entire time the show's been running he's been sitting there just like you know wrangling bit corners in the chat making sure people show up all

that shit um and and and a question for tatum because we've heard through the grapevine that he's actually related to Andrew Tate it's what we've been no all day no can't talk about that right now sorry is there an NDA

yeah in NBA may or may not have broken it but for how long I will neither confirm nor deny, but he's definitely Andrew Tate's younger brother. And we're going to bring in a friend of mine here, Mr. Dave Bradley. Good to see you, man. Oh, you're muted. Hold on. Hey, Dave.

There we go. Is that a mule of some sort you're sipping upon? That's a mule, yeah. It's kind of an improvised mule with a variety of. booze in it. Awesome. I love it. I love to see it.

And we got to welcome one more, the man who just gave us so much inspiration. Yellow, how are you? Is this like because I'm having an issue, guys. I don't know. I'm stuck a little bit. It's not what it looks like. Okay, so I guess we're going to look like this now. Hold on.

I got to make you a little bit bigger because I want people to see how how wonderful you're, you look good. You look good, man. This is my new room. This is my new room. I have a vase. I have a vase and like my cats and everything. You've spent some time on that, yellow. Yeah.

That's magnificent. It looks great. I've got to say, I love what you've done them with the place. Thanks for having me, Ben. Thanks for being here and providing all the inspiration. And I know it's late slash early for you. It's like 5 a.m. I don't know why you agreed to this.

But thank you. I took a nap. I took a nap. Okay, good, good. You took a poop nap, a poop break. I mean, it was pretty tight time there. It was like I had five minutes in between. Thank God for keto, huh?

Bam, bomb. Well, I mean, Merry Christmas, everybody. How's everybody's year been? I don't know. Like, Greg, how many, how much abuse have you endured over the course of the year? It's not abuse. It's love, man. Yeah.

People tell me fuck you because they love. It's been a lot of love. It's been a lot of love. Yeah. This is the denial when you're an abusive relationship, I think. Exactly. Well, I love it. Thanks for being here.

Again, Tatum, I want to again give you a shout out because I found that your advice was excellent in around the ASIC life hacks. Every point that you made, every video, it really worked out quite perfectly. And I think a lot of people can take

some valuable lessons from all of your videos that we dropped during the show. Yeah, I don't know what kind of lessons it might be, but take something from those videos a lot the fall was real it was accidental my my ass hurt for like three days after that

I love it I honestly I'll say that when you sent those videos over to me the one that I think the moment that had me rolling the most was the new in the bed when you turn off the lights and the Aizig just like ramps up and it's just like a fucking jet neck like on your side table for white noise.

I cried a little on that one. It was solid. Yeah, I was actually visiting my parents. And I was like, I was like, oh, shit. I got to make these videos. Hey, mom, dad, some loud noises. Don't worry about it. And they were like, what was that?

And I was like, don't worry about it. Why are in the room, mom? My mom was like, why are you soaking wet? And I was like, I said, don't worry about it. You just like bring an ASIC with you when you visit your parents? Yeah, always got to have one. Where's the ball of proof vesta at, Tatum? It was, I don't even know at this point.

It's a lot of Velcro to deal with. Tatum's a LARP, no, no, no, no Vest. Oh, shit, I knew I was going to get called a LARP. Yeah, yeah. Pretty sad. My favorite was when the first one played, the first video played, the first comment that came through was, is this supposed to be awkward?

Oh, also a little bit of context. I filmed all of those while writing like 104 fever, so it just made it all the more better. But I had a joy making them. It was amazing and fun. Glad you let me interrupt your show with them. Probably helped feel the sweat that you were generating. I got an effect.

Tell them the thing about how, isn't that shit broken? So you had to like, you had to artificially sweat yourself up. Yeah. Like I was sitting there and I was like, man, this is not like, it's sitting working for some reason. I think because I wasn't ever hooked up. I don't know if it was actually hashing. So it just wasn't getting hot. And so I was like, okay, I got to find a spray bottle.

I'm just like, but, yeah, I mean, it's still got. really hot though with the bulletproof vest i got hotter from from the vest than the actual asic it does look toasty for sure is it an actual bulletproof vest maybe take that's a note uh you're um Dave I uh I uh I I know that uh I know that you want it to mention something which I'm actually very excited about uh can I can I bring it up here do you want to you can yeah bring it up here do you can yeah bring it up uh so you sent me sent me the first little poster for it uh but uh calgary based folks or people in and around alberta or just Canada in general or like Montana for the hell of it because that's close enough um uh bitcoin rodeo in calgary july 4th and 5th in my city excited a big an actual

bitcoin event in calgary uh i'm stoked for this Thanks for involving me in it, man. Yeah. So Ben and I, a couple other friends are hosting this conference. We did one with this name in, like, 2018. And that was a pretty big hit, but I think it was before its time. And Canada is ready for, like, a full gas Bitcoin-only conference. So here we go.

It's going to be a lot similar to, you know, any of the other Bitcoin-only conferences that you've been to, but much better. that's an excellent endorsement funny story actually because safe was just on the original bitcoin rodeo that we did in 2018 was his first ever speaking engagement after he wrote his book so like it was the first safedine like bitcoin rant conference and he knocked it out of the fucking park but like like i don't know if i should tell the story or not but i'm going to so fuck it uh but i remember like reaching out to him saying hey man would you come would you come speak here and he's like yeah absolutely and so um we're kind of doing the book and process like figuring out get them getting them here and flights

and all that stuff and then he reaches out and he's like he's like hey man is there any chance that i could get like a like an honorarium like and like just to kind of like help with expenses and stuff and like i think of that now and i'm like god how far safe has like blown up since then and like how laughable the idea of like safe having you know safe mentioning asking if there there might be like an honorarium program in place versus like the wonderful success he's had since then um it i'm just and to be clear we did then give him an honorary to be there we didn't shut him down uh so yeah i'm i'm super happy with kind of oddly being able to watch that journey from the get-go. It's been incredible. I'm curious, will there be any actual rodeoing at the Bitcoin rodeo?

Well, the Calgary Stampede happens within a week of this. So the Calgary Stampede is it? Is it a hockey team? It's like the running of the Bulls, but it's the running of the moves. Dead ass? I want to come. It's badass though. It is fun.

Dave, do you know stats on how many people show up for this kind of? It's pretty big. Yeah, I think it's 200, 300 million. Thousand. No, I have no idea, actually. But it's the entire population is the United States shows. Yes. It's the greatest store on earth.

And it is like, it might be the biggest rodeo in the world. It's one of the biggest rodeos in the world. It's like an absolutely amazing massive rodeo. People are saying that everywhere. It's everybody I listen to is saying it's the biggest rodeo Just seconds ago Highly regarded In all my circles

Everybody tells me Everybody saying it's the best rodeo All the best ropers will be there All the best rodeo clowns That's true Is it Keith McCullough one of the clowns this year? I want to ride a bull Yeah

Yeah I think that would be a good idea. Maybe not out of the question. Last time we had a miniature pony, didn't we? Yeah, we had a miniature pony and a miniature donkey and those were really, well, that's a stupid question, Greg. Fuck you. I think we're just going to move past that. It's obvious why we had a pony and a donkey. They were a lot of fun. They had cowboy hats, and they really, they really set the mood for the room. It was a good time, I've got to say. It was, I'm looking forward to, again, having some, having a bunch of Bick corners

descend upon Calgary because it is a good time. And I recall, again, Rodolfo was here. He was, dare I say, high as a kite at some point. And there was, there was. As a coin kite? Yes, high as a coin kite. could be um yeah it was it was a it was a good time um but yeah i don't know uh i'll i'll my last uh little pitch here is i'll say did we just did we just spin up a twitter handle

for it at the bitcoin we did yeah yeah at the bitcoin rodeo brand new i think i think i got it there we go all right go follow that if uh if you're in western canada or if you'd like to come to the calgary sampeat and then also hang out with bitcoin so yeah there you go add the bitcoin you. So I'll stop shilling now. But I come to Calgary anyways because I want Bitcoin just coming out. So yellow, I've got a question for you. Could you maybe fill us in on the latest with the prophecy? Because, I mean, I played that clip, but like I need more information. So do you mind if I give you the stage for a second? Yeah, sure. I can do a recap. All right. All right. Okay. Hey, hey, everyone. This is yellow, as you can see, obviously.

And I'm the only puppet, I guess. Thanks for the inclusion. Anyway, the thing is, like, I got bored. And I go to board of all the experts saying that Fibonacci retracement is going to bounce over the, I don't know what they're talking about, like 12K, then they were talking about 8K, then they were talking about like cascading depth analysis and stuff like that. I don't know the terminology, man. Like it's weird to me.

So I got bored and, you know, like I said like I had enough. I had enough. I don't care what the price is going to do from the 23rd of December. The new bull cycle starts. For me, it's the bull cycle. Congrats everybody. We did it. We have bumped today.

To market, baby. 0.34% We did it, guys. He's worth of green. Yeah, I had enough. I had enough. This is the bull market now, so we can start stopping depressed again and have fun a little bit.

And enough is enough. So you're welcome, I guess. I think we're more handedly made that 0.3 or 4% pump today with those three stack chain. Yeah. My favorite part is I was looking back at the clip from, I think the first time that you were on talking about the prophecy. And you were, you were talking about, you know, so we pumped the price. And, you know, back then that was a, that was a different type of pump.

It was significant. But I, you know, in the environment we've had, what was the percentage that we just pumped? 0.34. I mean that makes me feel much better than I have recently so thank you. Yeah, I'm working for I'm working on this for months now. So Beck so Beck's call on 12 K is out of the question now. No, no 12k is still in play. Heretic. This is my office.

We've got lots of people. The plebs are thankful. Look, Mike says, thank you, Yellow. There you go. You know, Nick Marvin, 0.34 LFG. We don't need much to stop, you know. He just needs a sparkle. I'm pretty sure it just means least financial games.

Yeah, everybody's excited. Yeah, you just need a sparkle. Well, I don't stop. Russi's raising his hand. Yes, Russi, we'll call on you. Thank you. I was just wondering if we can stop building now. Oh, man.

Oh, gosh. Let me just check my microphone settings. Fixed, fixed. Okay, I'm back. Sorry about that. So now that we're in a bull market, can we stop fighting and building? No, we have to continue this. I'm still building.

I'm still building. I'm going to keep building. I've been building. I'm going to keep building. Any of you guys want to start a multi-billion dollar crypto Ponzi this bull run? Whoa. I've heard. I'm sick of flying commercial.

I've heard those are profitable. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, last time you were on, you were telling me about some other great life hacks on how to make a lot of money. You want to make a lot of money? Yeah. reiterate that. Yeah, well, there was a guy, we met this really awesome guy in a cigar bar in

LA when we were there for Pacific Bitcoin. And he was like a one hit wonder from the 80s. The band was called Sly Fox. I don't know if anyone knows that, but his friend had some really great advice that we transitioned into the advice at the end of Ben's show. And he was like, he's asking us all these questions like, hey, you guys sell Bitcoin and all this stuff. And we're like, yeah, he's like, why don't you guys just fucking sell cocaine? You guys, you guys, you guys, possees or something? And it was like, well, yeah, like, obviously, you already sell cocaine. I mean, did he have a connect?

Well, he didn't offer. But, you know, and then that was the life advice that I gave to everyone at the end of Ben's show is that it's probably a good idea to sell cocaine and then put all the money into Bitcoin. But I didn't realize there's a flaw in that plan is that. it's if everyone sells cocaine, then there'll be no one to buy the cocaine. Yeah. Ooh. Huff.

Shouldn't have. I mean, you can. Fission market hypothesis. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. I don't know why you can't re-hypocket that cocaine. Just keep selling it over and over again. That's a good point.

We can all sell to each other. Yeah. We have bothered it through my nose. Right. You're telling me I can steak with you and earn a you. We're talking about Red Bull, right? The only paper cocaine is going to be the old one. You can't snort cocaine with the Bitcoin.

No, actually, you can. I made like a round coin, a coin thing, coin type thing. Yeah, I made it. Open dime. If you have a baby, you can roll it up, right? I made like a straw open dime one thing. I don't know the technical details here, but would it be possible to put wrapped cocaine on Ethereum?

I'm curious where you have the funding for this rodeo now. You know, our funding is really very poor. If you look at the quality of our graphics, our graphic design budget for this is precisely zero. You know who did the graphics for this show, and my background here is, Rusty? Wait, mirro. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, I can probably help you out with some graphics to that.

We definitely need a lot of free work from anybody who wants to do a lot. Oh. It's the work for cocaine. I love that. Yeah. Again, Rusty, I got your, I got your, the second. print by the way. So Rusty did the artwork for the 2021 show I did with like Sailor and Mallors and all of them, which was

a lot of fun, but holy shit. The image, it's like all it's on my wall right now and now. But it's a bunch of us riding the Cyber Hornets because it was like just after Sailor said that for the first time. So obviously everybody jumped on that. But it's, it looks freaking epic. I've got both the posters on my, the walls in my office now. they will never come down unless there's maybe next year you'll do the

next year's Christmas special I'll have to swap it out so maybe yeah well I mean he failed me last year should we discuss the elephant in the room you guys I would enjoy that I would enjoy that

yeah should we discuss the elephant in the room though when it comes to the backgrounds here is kind of lame oh wait my bet yeah talk to me it's kind of lame that none of you guys have a made X in the background. Oh, well? Yeah.

I mean, that's what we, so those art pieces behind. Those are like etched, right? In wood? I thought that, I thought that looked like his work. I met him in L.A.

One of the coolest dudes I have ever met my entire life. He's pretty awesome. I thoroughly, he's got a very fuck you attitude. And I know this because he says, fuck you to many, many people all time. You must.

He must get on well with Greg. You're very. Match made in heaven. Yeah. Yeah, no, he does awesome shit. What's his, what's his, what's his website? Space Bowl, yeah. Space Bowl on Twitter.

So that might be a bit more. Yes. He's amazing. Yeah. I don't even have, I don't have one of his pieces. I should probably fix that. I'm not mad. I'm just.

disappointed. Yeah, it's, it's, it is a bear market. I don't have any fucking, I don't have any purchasing power right now. So, yeah. What kind of shows this? Nobody's asked me what my sandwich order is. I don't get it. I'm hungry. I, you still got, you still got American huddle options behind you there. Yeah, I thought about Hottle options. Oh, what? Wait, wasn't American Hottle supposed to join us? Yeah, I thought it was supposed to be on here today. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's my, I should have I made one for the stream, my bad, but it's our sandwich order every show. So I had the thirsty bitch yesterday. It's a grilled chihuahua.

Talked with Peter's special to cook sauce. And here we got a shout out to Peter Bob's abortion clinic. And then because it was model, I had to use corolla on there. And then I don't know. Did you fix the spelling? And you fixed the spelling because it said use Carrilla before. You changed the eye to an O. Okay.

Now we got it up a little larger there. Okay. Go through those one more time. I need a breakdown of those. Hold on, hold on. So you fixed it after the stream? Yes. Yeah, because I took a picture of it this morning.

And I was like, Dan, there's a spelling mistake on there. We sent that last night. Wait, whoa, whoa, is that an interesting? It was Christmas tree, entirely decorated with my god. That's amazing. Becca. Jesus Christ. Wait, what is that?

It's a huge sailor. She's to your boyfriend. Oh, my God. I asked Becca if she put together a clip for Sailor, but then in the end, she told me it was far too cringe for her comfort level. It was too cringe because I know how the memers go after all less maybe in the Bitcoin.

So I stayed away. But my sandwich menu here, the thirsty bitch, the grilled chihuahua topped with Peter's scoop sauce, the used cart and yellows don't stop a leaving steak sandwich. Grilled in Red Bull for 400. Well, this is 410 days now. Oh, quick correct. It's how many days he's been he's been doing spaces. Yep.

And a watermelon salad because we all know how much yellow loves watermelons. Yeah. Yeah. I'm familiar. Come on. That's fantastic. So every Mean Factory live stream now going forward into 2023. So this is why Greg was confused that no one was.

like feeding him. Right. Yeah. Yeah. He looks a little upset. He's got those crazy eyes right now. You say ones that Rusty put in me out in the window, bastard. Yeah.

Yeah. Hang on. Let me see if I can. It's right. It's just me. You're so familiar. At least your face made it. Yeah.

In there. Yeah. No, you're in there. So I could. I spent like, I reckon I spent maybe 12 hours on this. on this thing, like in total, probably like 12 hours. So it got to the point where I just, like,

started putting everyone on the TV screen in the background. I was like, I can't do that. I can't do more. Yeah. He's like, everybody's in there somehow. I was like, yeah. There's a seed signer, actually. There's a seed signer.

Yeah. I have the coolest shit. You want. And I didn't mean shit like seed, but like seed. He's on the top. Oh, yeah. He's just like peeking up over the back. Oh, yeah.

I'm like a back man. You know, I should have put like Sean in the, standing up in the window with like his head popping over the top of the wall and stuff like that. I don't say he wouldn't fit me with it. Tall, motherfucker. I did. Again, I've got to say it looks.

There are still posters available, by the way, everyone. Yeah. It's a word of rusty.com. I'm going to get yourself a post. Yeah. Amazing. Okay, so I'm going to ask you guys,

I kind of asked it at the last panel, but what have we learned this year? What are some of the lessons? Nothing. What? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

I mean, I guess we, many of the lessons taught we already knew, but what, What have the nubes learned this year, if anything? If you have to go, go big. You still talking about it? If you have to swing, swing high. Something like that.

I don't know, man. If they learn anything, that's the point. I don't think they learn anything. Every cycle we have a version of the same. thing happening over and over again. And we have our own narrative saying, dude, so many of them are going to become Maxis.

But, like, not really. They're fucking regarded. They're fucking regarded, man. They're doing the same mistake over and over. What are you going to do, you know? Make fun of me. Yeah, too. I think we've learned that the people

who have the centralized control are going to hold on to that control as long as they can and try to do everything they can. That's what we've really learned over the last year or two. That's what's going to happen. And Bitcoin frees us from that. So as long as we can have Bitcoin and try to teach other people when they recognize that, then it takes away the power from the people who are in control.

I think a big lesson of the year also is that if you're able to steal tens of billions of dollars, you should run away. You should donate to the political parties. You got to make sure you put $250 million away. We know that's like somewhere secret. Yeah, that's the secret. That is. Yeah, but true.

Go on Twitter spaces every other day. If you're going to scam like everybody with billions of dollars, do it as the one coin lady did it she they haven't found here yet right that was guardian chick somewhere yeah 10 years later it can be helpful to fake your own death too yes yeah well sweet yeah because uh those coins so he's referring to quadriga in canada's a big canadian exchange i went down those coins just started moving that were seemingly inaccessible. Hmm.

What's going on? Yeah. Dave, do you legit think that he's not dead? Those are not actually the coins that he stole. Okay. Those are the ones that, like, the auditors actually went somewhere so they couldn't belong to, like, his old business partner or something like that.

Oh, fuck. So the auditors had coins. Oh, yeah, right. I remember this story because they, they, they, fucked up and they sent them somewhere that's inaccessible, but now suddenly those inaccessible coin. So like, possibly the auditors, it's like, it's like the Mount Gox coins with the feds that stole them all over again kind of scenario. And the main of going to jail. Well, probably what happened. So like the, I think it's EY that sent the coins to this random address. And probably what

happened, I think, is that those coins went to like either Omar Donani, who was like the, like, shady back room guy that was running the exchange or like some ex-employee or something like that and then my my next level of calculation is that it's well right Dave you're you're cutting out a little bit hold on it changed mics or something Dave what happened fell into a tin can I don't know oh you're good you're good now maybe it's going to close yeah anyway so I think I think whoever stole those coins probably just like lost all the rest of their money on FTCX in a hilarious poetic justice

moment and had to go jump into the stolen cold storage. Well that's I'm making me sad that they had access to if that's the case. Of course, I mean, scammers are always going to

yeah, I mean it's shitty. I don't even know what to say to that. That fucking sucks. You know, a lot of people got screwed on quad, on FDX, on all of this stuff. But yellow's right. I think nobody's learning lessons. I think we need like 15 more times, no more than that. And then everyone will learn.

Yeah. Yeah, I will say there's been a lot of people that have been, you know, learning self-custody since FDX. At least like in my experience of people reaching out saying they want to learn, Okay, how do I actually do this for the first time? So it's slowly going in the right direction. But like, yeah, there'll be a peppering of people that get it. And they're like, oh, shit. And then the other one, there'll be other ones that are like, whoof, just missed it.

And then they dive into the next shit coin exchange and chase more yields. Well, there's been that new narrative going around where everyone would say, oh, it's not the time about Fox anymore. We have these regulated exchanges in the United States. and even like those twins, right, they would come out, the Wheelbox twins would come out and they'd be like, oh, a lot of people, they would rather, they'd rather custody with us at Gemini, you know. The majority of coins that are lost is because people lose them themselves.

And people just make up all these statistics. And I don't think that's the truth anymore. I don't think people, maybe when he had paperwallets back in the day, people were losing coins. But today, like the way self-custy is, I don't think many people are losing coins. through self-custody. You could basically throw Satoshi's coins in coins lost, right?

And that metric will always stay. Yes. Exactly. It's a dumb metric because, because, yeah, if you look at, okay, back in the day, of course, a ton of coins were lost. But not, like, I don't really think self-custody, I don't think many people are losing coins when they're self-custoding with the way, with how far it's come since those days when it was a lot harder.

Yeah, it's definitely easier. I think there's also, there's going to be tools that that kind of help with that so that, you know, you can get, you know, Uncle Jims that are kind of like a last line of defense, right? So I don't know if you've taken a look at like what you can do with a cold card, like the BIP 85 thing where you can have like your cold card, but then you have like you can derive all these like child seeds from them. And then you can have those be like your family member's wallet. So if you don't trust your mom to like, you know, keep a device and to backup safe and not to lose both of those things, while you can say,

all right, here's your seed phrase. And then if she loses both of those things, you can just regenerate her wallet as like a last line of defense. But I would say don't, if you're doing something like that, don't even tell them you've done it so that they're, you know,

as responsible as possible. And then, you know, if you need to step in and you can say you're lucky i did this but i'm glad you you know you don't want them relying on you entirely come on great great bring desi back bring desi back all right you're being uh you're being called dear get over you're being ducks what's what's her advice for what anything anything all right doesy they want to hear your advice tell them your Bitcoin advice?

You're live. Hi. What's your Bitcoin advice for Sean? It does he. He's saying to do that. It's good advice. I agree. That's advice that all show.

Okay. One more bite. One more bite. Get out of it. I've never seen you're so shy, Greg. One more butt. There's a meaning in there some way. Yeah.

For whoever one missed it, she was eating a potato chip. Boom, boom, boom. I'm bullish on Bitcoin or children. There seems to be many of those happening. And all the Normies are busy not having children. Dude, American Hoddle made a good point on our show last night. Our show being The Meme Factory podcast and Bitcoin has died. You can check it out two shows a week.

Anyway, like and subscribe. Last night we had American hoddle on, and he was talking about how he felt like he was super rich. He was like, oh, we can have as many kids. You want him to have seven kids. Like, kids are fucking expensive. And then the bear market hack, and he was like, he's good. He's good. That's kind of how I feel.

We're going to get bursts of, burst of Bitcoin or children based on the market. On four-year cycles. Yeah. Yeah. I have noticed a number of posts of children being born this year, which seems to line up nicely with some of the peaks. You're feeling real good about your students. Oh, my goodness, you idiot. In what amount of children, though, like, you can recycle the clothes and everything?

That's like self-sustain the whole market? Is Bitcoiners banging and having children during a bull market the new leveraging your house for more Bitcoin? You know what it was? It was that everybody could afford nice restaurants in Miami last year. That's true. Oh, man. You could afford those $500 steak dinners or $500. appetizer meals.

Every having cycle, Bitcoin reward goes down. Bitcoin Babies goes up. Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start doing some research. I'll get back with y'all on that. I'll post like a 24th.

Yeah. I'll post like a like a match and sweet thread that chat DBT me. No. You got to do some heavy research. Yeah. She keeps, I told her,

I told her. I just wait for the next cycle and then we might be able to, you know, get going. But not right now. Sorry. Is she on Twitter? Is she on Twitter? Can we, uh, can we? No.

No. Please don't. All right. Is she on LinkedIn? Greg, we'll find her on LinkedIn. I actually don't know if you're on Twitter. Tidding, if you're on Twitter, find the meme factory at the meme factory TM. I, I need to get, we will push him.

I need to get my wife on Twitter, I think. I think it's time. I think it's time. She's getting orange pill. She does enjoy Bitcoiners quite a bit. And so I think the next logical step is to get her on Twitter so she can like bear full witness to the degeneracy. Did she come to, she wasn't at Pacific Bitcoin, was she? No.

The first event she went to with me was to Charlotte for Pottle, Yeah, which is good. It was small, but she's coming to Miami, which is going to be like such a slap in the face comparatively. Like Halloween was like 150 people, maybe. Miami will be, I mean, it is like we've endured a year of bear market, but it's still going to be. I can't wait for Miami.

They said that I can host a keynote speech. Is it going to have some of those sweet AICL? One way or the other, I'm going to get on stage. I'm probably not going to be invited back, but I'm going to get on stage. I think you'll be like the equivalent of the doge coin guy that jumped up on stage in 2021. Fuck you, Ben. I mean, just in your entrance to the stage is jumping up there unannounced. I mean, the quality, and you could say anything and add more value.

honestly yeah also Miami's gonna have a lot less shit coiners this year it looks like I'm excited about that yeah I remember the whole ape that like the board ape costume guy that was walking around last year I wonder there was a guy the whole ass like board ape costume like a whole mask

and everything I don't about punched him in the face that was just a fairy good video oh I was at the wrong convention I was at the furry convention David. There was a guy there who was signing potatoes. That guy was crazy.

I can believe what I was seeing. He was literally there was a key on him and he was signing people. I'm not doing that again. I think I got a picture of that guy in a restaurant while I was there. You tweeted. You tweeted in the back of this potato. I was sitting. Craig, I was sitting with Dave when I did it.

Yeah, that was a sushi shot. Yeah. restaurant. I look across. I was like, I'd recognize that potato anywhere. So I zoomed in super close on the back of Greg's head as flattering as it is. I forget what I did do to stir the pot because I got you mad at me first. I got you with something. I just can't remember what it was, but you won the day with that tweet. I just

with no context, literally just tweeted a picture of the back of Greg's head with him tagged in the photo. And then I sent the tweet to most of the people here who then started retweeting it. It was awesome. It's fantastic. Yeah. That's too easy.

Yeah, it was great. I didn't need to offer any context or anything. It was, uh, look at this. Tom. Tatum. Go to be shot. That's, that's such a great, you know.

It looks like, spend some time on that one. Did you ever watch home movies? It was like a cartoon. That was quick. That was quick. Did you use AI for that, Tatum? Was there AI in that?

No, it was respect. Yeah. Damn it. Ruiting my fucking luck. I think Rusty designed it, actually. That was a work of... Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. I commissioned this from you.

Not one of my best pieces, all right? It took 15 hours, not just the 12. You can still buy it as a poster, though. You can still buy it in a poster. Ben, weren't we supposed to get some TA from yellow tonight? TA? That's what I thought. Yellow, would you care to?

How? I don't know. Do you have anything? I asked him for some last night, and he said, no, we're doing it tomorrow. Yeah. I'm not prepared, man. How do I do it? I don't know.

I mean, I think that's the same question, anybody who does TA. Yeah. Have you ever seen TA? Can you share your screen? Why the view is dropping? I'm going down on dark stuff. No, no, no, I'm not doing it. I mean, to be fair, I mean, we should really just consult the astrologer charts.

Up and to the right. Up and to the right. Over time. Accurate. It's like Richard, Richard Hardiff in this bitch. Oh, God. I got to plug one thing, which is the having party. Yeah.

Do it. Hey, do you have a link that you can send in the chat and then I'll bring it up? It's, uh, can you just, you can just go to the, to the Twitter at having party MF, H-A-L-V-I-N-G, party MF, and you can show that. Give that a follow. Oh, there we go. It'll be in El Salvador, Bitcoin country. Everyone will show up. All the best Bitcoiners are going to be out there. And it's going to be a blast. We're going to, we got the whole resort in El Salvador, and it's going to be. be all-inclusive, all you can eat, all you can drink, alcohol, non-alcohol.

And we're going to celebrate the having, celebrate the bear market and the bowl that's going to happen. So get ready to the having parties. It's going to be blast. I love it. Maybe I'll give, should I give this, this main one here, a replay to that everybody Yeah, yeah, give it a retweet. Check it out. There's a lot of videos of showing walking. We did a lot of walking. I'm how this channel started. All of my intros to every video were mean walking. So, you know, you're welcome, Sean, for the inspiration.

Dude, we did a lot of walking. We walked all, we went all up and down on all of Salvador, looking for the best place out there. So you got, everyone has to come to Salvador and check out the country at least once. I mean, it's the first country that adopted the Bitcoin. You got to make the pilgrimage down. So why not do it during the having parties? People are, people are asking, uh, which days?

like have we booked already or no we don't have an exact date yet it's looking like it's going to be the third weekend and march of 24 so go whoever is asking go follow the Twitter account ben just are paid and more info will be announced there yes yep I have a question from Tatum is that the heart of gold spaceship that you're speaking into is that you're What? Is your microphone the heart of gold? Is that one of those one world orbs? He's been trying to scan his iris for the last like three months.

I thought it was the next big thing. I bought it. I bought it at the top. What were they going for? Those were, what were they selling the orbs for? Greg would know. Greg bought one. I bought three.

Yeah. To like scan their eyes or something. When was that? When did the orb thing come out? Was that 2021? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

It was like late. Greg doesn't know. That was like I don't know. No, no. It came out right around the time that Miami Tompards happened. So like what that April? 2021.

What was? What was that? Let's chat the most shit-coigney things you saw at conferences this year. Like if you were in person with people, what was the biggest bullshit you came across, and the most aggravating stuff you've come across at? I have a story. So it was,

we were in Miami this last year, and Greg was with his wife, and so he couldn't hang out as late. It really was Mary Kelly that one of his wife wanted to hang out longer, but not him. So we were hanging out, and I went up with, with Marty's owl and we went to some other random bar just in Miami Beach.

It was just him and me that went to some random bar. And we walk in and it's kind of like empty and some random shick-corner comes up to us. And he sits down and starts buying us drinks, right? And he is like, he starts talking to us about all these different random shitpoints. And he's like, here's the way to do it. And me and Marty were like, stop, dude. We're like, why would we buy in any of these points? It's Bitcoin only.

We're just giving them like the regular stuff that we always say. And he is like, yeah, I get that. I get that. But what you got to do is you start your own company and then you get the VC to invest in your and your alt-coin. And then that's how you make the money in the chick coins. Then you dump on everyone. And we're like, exactly.

That's not that. Right. That's what you. We know. Did you ask them where you can scan your anus to get 69 WorldQuins? Yeah, I did that and it didn't work. It didn't work. No, have y'all seen that video of the guy that went up to Dave Portnoy and talked about Hex?

And he was like, are you a chart guy? He's like, no. He goes, see neither am I. And he's just like trying to like chill it. Same exact thing happened to me in Miami. This guy like sought me out for some reason. and was like trying to get me to buy hex and i was like i am this close to murdering you in cold blood right here like i need you to stop like this is kind of scary like you need to be studied

in a lab they're there the hex guys i don't know what it is hexicans that yeah is what they call themselves yeah uh hexicans safe moon army and bsv maxis need to be studied like it's kind of scary XRP army Yeah XRP army They've just died As a slow Horrible death

Right Because like they didn't even They're essentially getting Defunded right If you hold XRP you're getting D so it's just like the Boy Scouts Yeah like most Shitcoiners don't realize

They're getting fucked because after the initial Like launch and pump They never reattained Bitcoin all time highs Yeah But like XRP people They know they're getting fucked because like the shit corners that in the other ones like at least they might attain like a new fiat all time high and not realize that they've lost sats but like the the the ripple idiots they're like they've just lost consistently this entire time like they didn't even get close to their previous fiat all time high let alone their bitcoin all time high which is super like of anybody from the 2017 era that i could have wished that upon it was the xx.

RP morons. For a while, wasn't there like a scheduled dumping for them to? Didn't they have like the time that they were selling their coins scheduled and public? How could you buy in this thing if they're telling you they're going to drop a billion coins

on you? Well, they found the founder, one of the co-founders was he parted and then he was scheduling his cells. He was selling a ton of coins. So what's made all of these shit coin so successful is

like their ability to write headlines you know what I mean and you run into one of these XRP people or whatever the one of the month is and they've always got like a two sentence narrative about why their coin is going to be the next

awesome thing. The next Bitcoin the better Bitcoin or the bank friendly version or the government friendly version or the faster one or the slower one or the more programmatic one or whatever the next thing is. You know what's...

Okay, go ahead, Rusty. Rusty, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. You were talking about Shikorn of stories. Can you even hear? I can't hear right now. I can't hear, right? I think Ruttee might be on you.

This is every episode of... This is how the podcast go. Yeah, yeah. So, so I, like, I... I'm going to hear the shit corner story, Rusty. So every time, so I can't go, I can't go to Bitcoin conferences at the moment. Like the next time we go to a Bitcoin conference, we're going to have to be at like all-time highs to convince my family to go to like Miami or some shit.

But I do like wear shirts like this to like my son's like parties that he goes to, which is probably not appropriate now that I think about it. Nice, man. Yeah. You make that one? Yeah. It's just, yeah, it's a collaboration. It's a collaboration, right?

But someone saw it and he was like, oh man, you're into like Bitcoin. And I was like, far, finally I found like another bitcoiner in like real life. Like a, and anyway, get chatting to him and he starts talking about this company who's starting. And it's going to be, and it's going to be real life NFTs and shit on show. it's written with your scan and I was like oh fuck me I was like okay so you're a shit coin I was like okay so does your company your company doesn't have a shit coin right and he was just like yeah yeah yeah no no we have like our own coin and I was like oh fuck's sake and then he said but he said he couldn't get funding as a excuse he couldn't get funding from any VCs unless he had a shit coin they

literally said do you have a shit coin and he was like not and they were like well then we're not you know we're not interested as soon as he had a shit coin fucking pile on in. So, yeah, I think there's like a, I think there's, I mean, it's also lazy. Like, there's other ways to fundraise, like make a product that's actually good and then, you know, and then earn money to it. But a lot of these people just want to make money quick. So much work.

Yeah. Yeah. Just to show people how easy it was, and actually just to see how easy it was to launch a coin, I watched a 10-minute YouTube video and I launched Pogcoin on Rinkby TestNet and there were people who told me to launch it on the main net and they would buy it and I was like, no, y'all need help. Y'all need to go to therapy.

But there's 69 million Pog coins sitting somewhere in a lost contract on the Ethereum test note. Are you saying Pog, like P-O-G? Like the Pogs? No, P-A-W. G fat-ass white girl. Oh, wow. Talking about...

Did I just age myself so much? No, I thought the same thing. I was looking at the game when you flip the things. Talking about sequence and how they work and their inner workings and et cetera, like Coffizilla did an excellent expose on Crypto Zoo. Oh, yeah, third episode came out. Yeah, the third episode, the conclusion is out. today was out today. I just

watched it before this. It's fucking awesome. It's like in three episodes. It's the project of Logan Paul and Crypto King and a bunch of other scammers and how they basically fought each other, lost interest,

dumped on their followers, so many people lost money and it was an NFT project. And the good thing about it is because there was a leak for somewhere in the team and all their inner dialogue were like was exposed and seen the mini documentary the three episodes documentary and how they talked basically they're basically

saying yeah we're going to copy crypto kidneys and then we're going to dump and then like like they're an ABC like we're going to scam everybody yeah it literally just said like yes we're going to dump yeah yeah the bit the conversation when they're like They're like, well, if we, if we do a pre-mine, then we'll attract VC attention. So they like, they tailored it. So they're like, they did a stealth launch. So like nobody was supposed to know that it launched. And then they would purchase on the quote unquote open market all of the tokens.

And then announce it through Logan Paul later that this thing had launched after they owned a fuck ton of it. And then they'd like strategically dump. But then somebody in the team leaked. that it was like that it was launching like stealth launch and then like instead of five people that were supposed to own it like all of a sudden there were like 30 people that owned it somehow and they like bit up the price and then dumped it like like prior to the public founders that they get wrecked the amount of greed the amount of greed like in those guys like fuck 40 million dude it was like a hundred

120 million we had yesterday. Yeah. Basically they printed 40 million out of nothing. And they were like, no, we have the leak in the team. Like it was supposed to be 120 million. You didn't scam people for enough money. Now we don't have nearly as much exit liquidity as the other guy who scammed us. Like we were going to scam those other people.

I have a story of what I think is the dumbest shit coin I've heard of. and it's a that's a pretty low bar um so this coin was launched like in maybe 2015 2016 by somebody that ben and i both know that i will not name um this coin was called like crowns or something like that and the premise to the coin was you you buy the coin and if you buy one then you get a trucker hat and the guy who launched it his his friend was going to like

graffiti using a Sharpie on the trucker hat, like whatever word you wanted. And then they would send you the trucker hat. And it was like $15 for a token. And you could buy one or you could buy as many as you want. But you only got one trucker hat, even if you bought a whole bunch of tokens. And then I was kind of like, okay, so like, I'm not really clear on this. Like, why would I just, why wouldn't I just buy a trucker hat, like if I wanted a trucker hat? And he's like, well, you could buy a whole bunch of the tokens and then you could resell them.

Like, okay, but like, do I have to give up my trucker hat if I resell the tokens? He's like, no, no, no. The trucker hats are just for the people who buy their first token. And then I was like, I don't get it, man. And then he sent me the, he's like, okay, he's like, okay, this will clear it right up. Sends me a video. The video was 14 minutes long, and it was just pictures. There was no video.

It was just a video of a bunch of pictures. And all the pictures were pictures of this guy's trucker hat around Ottawa. Nice. It was a 14-minute video of that, and I was like, well, yeah. It clears it up. And then you bought so many hats. I actually, you bought one hat, but many tokens, right? I really regret not buying at least one because, like.

I mean, that hat was everywhere. Yeah. Like, did you see that fucking hat, dude? Like, that was sick. So did this, like, I mean, it obviously went fucking nowhere, but like, did it go nowhere very quickly?

Or? I never heard of anyone buying any of those hats. He just got a stockpile of these trucker hats. I don't know. But I know that he went on to like a number of different shit coin

projects after that and seem to abandon the hats. I mean, if at first you don't succeed, I suppose. Sell some more hats. Yeah. Yeah. I mean.

Yeah. A lot of people getting protected from the sun. I like it. Wow. Well, that's, that's exciting. So I'm going to, I'm going to gradually start rounding this out in the next like five to ten minutes here. because I am I'm just about toast but maybe maybe we could give go around and give some festive wishes to everybody maybe maybe little tidbits of Bitcoin advice that you've

gleaned from 2022 something like that I'm just I will I will say I don't know learn like if you're not self-custening at this point you're not taking those steps Fuck, man. Like, just do the most basic step, download a wallet on your phone and just like try a transaction. Like it doesn't really matter what it is. Download moon wallet. Download blue wallet. Download Blockstream green.

Whatever. Just download one and just learn how to do a transaction. Like if you have not done that this year, don't let the year end with you having not done that is what I'll say. So I'm going to, I'll toss it to Tatum. Do you have any, I don't know, what would you say to the people that are for some reason still watching this lessons or any lesson that you've gleaned from this year? Piece of advice, buy my shit coin. Second piece of advice, get your hands on some hardware, whether it be a wallet or a minor. Because once you get your hands on something like that, you kind of get geared towards.

wanting to learn more and go further down the rabbit hole. I started with the treasurer. Now I have four wallets just laying around because I just want to try different ones. I started with an S7 and now I have like eight minors here. And as you can hear, none of them are on because power. But seriously, you learn more every time you get to,

you get your hands on something and it opens up different areas of the rabbit hole so I guess that wasn't really like some wasn't directly answering but I mean I get the gist you're saying widen the hole yeah okay it makes your it makes your orb and you just can that's that's my main takeaway that we'll make a rustle that we'll make a rust Can you do up a poster, a picture of Patoam with the quote, widen the hole? I'm on it. It's the main. I like it.

It's a good segue into Greg. Yeah, I think so. So Greg, with the widened hole, what should one do? If you want to widen the hole, the first thing you want to do is stay humble. Because if you're not humble, it's going to hurt. But it's Bitcoin. So it's going to hurt no matter what. We all know where it's going.

It's going up. It's going down. It's hitting the hole. It's coming out. But the first and last thing you want to go, stay humble. I've got to stack those sets. And remember, it's not a sprint. It's a long-distance race, which is my preferred method of travel.

I'm a big runner. Big. Inference is on big. Yeah, emphasis on big. And I just want to use this opportunity to say thank you, Ben, and Tatum, for having us, having me on tonight. And you fucking everybody else. I didn't have you on.

It was all been. Get away from his widened hole, Greg. I'm going to take my widened hole to the rest of my family. And thank you again. Have a good night. I love it. I love it. Well, thank you, Greg.

Greg's off for family time. And I'm going to toss it over to Sean now. Sean, lessons learned. Hopefully not too many widen holes. What do you got to say for yourself? No, lessons. learned, listen to the redheads in the space, number one. Beka, you don't talk about. Number two, watch more BTC sessions because he's got the best tutorials on anything you want to figure out.

And then number three, when you're orange-filling your friends, don't tell them to not buy Bitcoin. Tell them to read up and study and listen to podcast first. And then maybe they will buy Bitcoin. And they'll get that conviction to not panic so. So you tell people about education. I think the education is the biggest thing when it comes to buying Bitcoin. I've got to say, well, excellent advice, first of all, but even better advice in the chat from Narwhal tacos, he said, you don't need to wrap your Bitcoin when you widen the hole.

That is, I think, the soundest advice I may have heard yet. Always a wealth of knowledge, always happy to hear from Narwhal. So thank you. Dave, I'm going to toss it to you. I have so much good advice. Okay, let's hear it. The first thing is the best thing that you can do possibly is to buy a ticket to our conference. Anybody who buys an early bird ticket will get a lock up Ben's hair.

Ooh. The side part or the natural part? Which side? It's all natural, baby. We didn't say top or bottom. bottom. So, yeah, that's a great value, two for one. Beyond that, the previous advice about selling cocaine stands, as long as you watch out

for that pitfall where everyone starts selling cocaine and there are no buyers left. And then I think the last piece of advice is like everyone should probably consider that 2023 could be the year that they start a multi-billion dollar crypto Ponzi scheme. And like, honestly, next time you're in line at the airport, just think about that. Like, that's all I think about when I'm standing in line at the airport is how bullshit it is that San Bankman Friede's got a private plane. That's, I mean, yeah, yeah, it's upsetting. I, okay, to tag on to the couple things there.

One, what was it at the Bitcoin Rodeo is the Twitter handle? Awesome. We'll follow there because then all the details will be dropped there. And yes, I agree that the most, the scariest thing about selling cocaine to attain more Bitcoin is the likelihood that so many people will sell cocaine that you'll be put out of business. That is probably the most direct threat that you'll get from selling cocaine for Bitcoin. So consider that. And with that, I'll toss it to Rusty. What do you have to say?

Yeah. Earn and save in Bitcoin. That's probably my, that's where I'm coming from. There's something that Tip actually talked about earlier that probably struck me the most, which was, you know, do something, do something that you love. And that's hopefully what Bitcoin will allow everyone to do. do. So yeah, earn and saving a money that doesn't steal from you. I love that. I mean, that's the most basic advice you can, you can take, right?

Like the end of the most pertinent, uh, provide value earning a money that doesn't get to base. There you know, spend less than you're. Uh, Becca. What. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Lots of fun. And I'm just going to build on what rescue said actually. So not just first. and save in Bitcoin, but spend and replace your stats too. Like one of the things this year that I kind of like been more focused on is like we all talk, oh, this Bitcoin economy, this circular economy, like it's just going to be there. But I feel like we have a responsibility to build it as well.

Like we need to opt in and spend the sats. They're cheap right now so you can replace them. What I've been doing like in my own personal life is using big refill one year sponsors and grabbing like my Sephora gift cards off there. So I'm using my sets. I'm supporting these companies. So I just want to, yeah, you know, burn and save in Bitcoin, spend and replace. And somewhere where everyone could do that is plebeian market. So I'm in the background.

I'm building too. I'm plebeian market is like a eBay of Bitcoin so anyone can like buy and sell on there and it's all on Bitcoin. So I encourage everyone to sort of check it out. It's on Twitter, Plubby and Market. And you know, it's just another way that we can all opt in building this Bitcoin economy. So that's what I got. I love it. And I'll echo that because again, like,

Throwing back to the beginning of the year, a lot of people saw that if they support the wrong thing in Canada, well, you might not have a fucking bank account. And I remember sitting being like, well, how fucked am I going to be if that happens? And the answer was it would be, it would have been an inconvenience. It would have pissed me off. But at the end of the day, I would have been okay because of Bitcoin. and so I'll say I'm going to echo the circular economy thing. I've been trying to separate myself as much as possible from traditional fiat rails. And one of the most exciting parts of my year was finding a rancher south of Calgary that I was able to buy a quarter of a cow off of with Bitcoin.

Me and my friend and my friend who is like, he's not like fully orange peeled or anything, but I was like, yo, there's a guy. he's selling a quarter you know we can buy a quarter of a cow together and he takes bitcoin and my friend's like sure so he sent me the bitcoin and then i made the purchase and then we split up all the meat and everything but like i've got a freezer stocked with beef from a local source that i purchased with bitcoin and that is bullish as fuck i'm super excited about that um and i'm and i'm trying to find more ways where i love that i love these mechanisms where you can kind of like um you know bridge those gaps with various services. That's great.

So you can live off Bitcoin. I've been doing it for a while. But the things that get me really excited is where I find a connection like that, where there's a, you know, a mutual appreciation of the money that we're using and providing value for that money. And I think that's fantastic. So I'm super glad you brought that up.

And I think here it's very, I don't know I think it's perfect that I think yellow will get the last word here I'm wondering could you maybe round us out with like some inspiration to kind of finish off

the team I'm going to do it hold on hold on wait I'm going to do it off character this is me now this is not yellow so much I'm going to advice everybody to take a chick pill, calm down. Like, this is a game.

Without not, without pointing out it's trivial, it is a game. It's not trivial. Like everything around us is serious. Everything is happening in the craziness. It's a serious subject. But it is a game. So have a viewpoint, a more relaxed viewpoint. and I will also echo the ancient Greek thing that we say here a lot,

like Pan metronarison, which means basically everything in moderation. Like in the bear market, we have a leaning us bitcoins that we over sacrifices for the bull. and in the boom market we we over live like the now and we don't do nothing in the end like have moderation and everything even if even if like

it is talking to your inner cipher like the cipher guy from the matrix like have a talk with the guy and yeah take a chick pill come down that's it I love it. It's a joke a little bit

it. Well, thank you, Yellow. Very inspiring. I want to thank all you guys for coming out. This was a hell of a marathon. I mean, Tatum's been here since the very beginning. Holy shit, dude. Are you excited to get out of your fucking chair or what?

Ready to widen the hole. Yeah. Wait, hold on. Hold on. I don't get it. No, mute it. I'm on it. That's it.

That's the last thing you get. Wait, look, look down. there. Do you see that? Oh, it's a bad time, Huddl. Did I miss the whole show? Yeah, more about. We're wrapping up. I'm going to shut it down, but I'm going to give you fucking five minutes here. I'm going to pour whiskey.

Hoddle. You get a rant right now as somebody that I sent a, I sent an invite to any he like fucking DMs me as the show is on. Yo man, shit's not going to work. Can I show up like an hour late? I hope it's still running. So here he is.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna fucking pass it to you. I fucked up because I read 915. I was like, I can do 915. Then I didn't realize it was Eastern time. And I was like, oh, yeah, fuck.

Are you in Miami? No. You moved. No, no, I'm West Coast. Yeah. unfortunately. Can I just say quickly that he's he's like lined up

exactly where his picture was in the background. Oh yeah. Did you, Hottle, did you see the image of the actual like that Rusty did for this show? Yeah, no, it's fucking amazing. Yeah, it turned up pretty good. Not quite as good as

Tatum's background that he had before but nonetheless. We were just giving some final tidbits of advice for the year, lessons learned of all the horse shit that we've seen over the course of the year. Do you have any words of wisdom for the plebs for those that are for some reason still here? Yeah, this year sucked, ass. We can just say it like it is. Every like fucking four years, there's one of these years where it just shoves a dildo right up your ass and you just have to take it.

We're just talking about widening the hole. So I think that it's like, this is just the fall. You know, this is the crypto fall, you know, Bitcoin fall. Like winter is next year, right? So like it's a whole fucking year of nothing next year. And then you get like a little little springtime blossom popping up through the snow. And that'll be 24. I mean, this is like, you know, the four year cycle.

So yeah, if you survive this year, you are one of us. You know what I mean? You did well. I think so. I think so. You should give yourself a round of them. Everybody needs,

everybody needs one of these years, right? Like to fully appreciate it. It humbles you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to stay humble because Bitcoin will humble your ass. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, you experience a couple of these. And again, like, you, you, the first time around, it's shocking. The second time around,

you think you'll be feeling better than you actually end up feeling. And then the third time around, you're just kind of numb to it. It still sucks balls, but it's like, it's like at least, you know, you're not actively in pain. You're just kind of like, okay. Is this your third one or your second one, Ben? This would, I mean, I was, I'll consider it my third because I basically, like, early 2014.

So I knew downside for like my entire first. year of Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. So I see I'm late 2014. So like I don't really count it because like it was just all ascension from the time I got in. You know, so it really wasn't too bad. You know what I mean?

Yeah. But yeah, I feel like a, you have to count your cycle as like top trough top top. Top trough top. Yeah, that's right. So if you go like from the top to the trough back to the top, that's one cycle right there. So however many times you've done that, that's your cycle count. Yeah, yeah. And it's, I don't know, like, I feel like this one is a little bit more muted thus far.

Like the top wasn't as euphoric and the bottom, I mean, in a way it has been as rough because everybody assumed like, oh, never go below previous all time high. That's been shattered along with a lot of other assumptions. and trends over the past year. If you had to guess, I don't know why the fuck I'm asking this question. If you had to guess, do we see another kind of muting of that in the next cycle? Or do you think that maybe because everybody's now assuming,

you know, a diminishing returns kind of trajectory that this is when everybody's like, oh, yeah, we'll get to like 100. it. Yeah. Dude, all I know is that Bitcoin

always does the shit we're least expecting it to do. It's always in your blind spot and like none of us can guess it.

And like anybody who was like, bro, I knew what was going to happen. Shut the fuck up. No, you didn't. Nobody knew.

Like, everybody, like the emotions are so heightened. It's really hard to like, you know, not get super bullish,

not get super bearish. So yeah, you just got to, you know, hoddle for the long term. I don't know what's going to happen, man. I'm just here. I'm just hoddling. We'll see what fucking happens, you know. The only thing you can be sure of

is that as soon as everyone on Twitter agrees on something, it's not happening. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I will say this. I've been-Rise to 100K. I've been talking to a lot of different bitcoins from all over the world up over this last year, going to different

conferences, and then just being able to travel around and doing different podcasts and things. It's been amazing. for me to see the idea of Bitcoin, like in this bare market, whatever you want to call it, like we've gone from 70K to 15K. But the idea of Bitcoin is everywhere in the world right now. Everywhere in the world, there's legitimate Bitcoiners that understand what Bitcoin is and what it does for freedom, for all of humanity.

And it's crazy to me to see how, like, yeah, it might be small numbers, but it's everywhere. And that idea is unstoppable. In my opinion, the idea of Bitcoin is out there and no one can stop it at this point. Yeah. It's kind of cool this time around. Like this is the first bear market where I haven't felt bear market sentiment is like a prevailing thing on Twitter in terms of like. Is it going to die around Bitcoin? Like everybody's still pretty fucking stoked about Bitcoin in general.

They're just like, oh, this is going to suck for a while. Which is right. It is going to suck for a while. while. Even our biggest haters, like our biggest haters used to say shit, like it's going to fucking zero, it's worthless, and now they've been putting check and they say things like,

it's going under 10K. It's like, I've been here so long, I remember you told me it would never reach 10K. And now you're saying the same person is like, it's going under 10K, you know, that's their it's a dis now. Yeah, exactly. I've got this framed tweet here.

I'm very excited for when I can gloat over it again, but it's Peter Schiff and this was tweeted in January of 2020 but it reads, those Bitcoin bugs excited about Bitcoin's 4% rally in 2020. Think about this and think about where we're sitting in 2020.

Gold is also up by about the same percentage this year only with significantly less downside risk. Is this the best rally Bitcoin can muster? How will it ever hit 50K, let alone one million? I can't wait till we're back above 50K because that means we're that much closer to 1 million, fully validating this framed tweet, which I paid money for. Dude, I was actually talking to Peter's brother, Andrew, on Clubhouse the other day. And he goes, so what do you guys think?

Do you guys think Bitcoin's going, you know, 12K, 11K, 10, whatever? And I was like, you know, Andrew, I don't know what the price is going to do. I'm to be honest with you, okay? And I only know one man, one man who's gotten it right. all these years every single time. And it's your brother. Every time your brother gloats, that's the bottom.

He's been a perfect, he's been a perfect inverse indicator for all these years. We have to thank him for that, truly. He'll never. I mean, it's just, do you ever,

do you ever just take his tweets and then, like, make a calendar note to yourself to come back to? I made a bad Peter Schiff's tweet, uh, Twitter account at one point. and then it got like locked out or something

but it was just like taking all the all the tweets that had Bitcoin and and then I put it in Trading View with the little like where we are where he tweeted this and they were all significant fuck you's amazing I want somebody created a bot

on my on my request which was you know how you you like invert like the the caps lock so it's like you know the SpongeBob like I was like, I wish there was a bot that literally just tweeted the exact same tweets that Peter Schiff drops, but in this writing style that somebody made that bot that exists to this day, this day. And it's just, I can't remember what the, what the handle is, but it's basically just all Peter Schiff tweets,

but in the style of, as, as, as, as, right. Didn't Amber had a function that were? whenever he tweeted like you would automatically buy. By the ship. Yeah. So good. What a great marketing boy. I love it.

I love it. Well, guys, I got a fucking run. Sorry, Hoddle. No, it's all good. I was late as fuck. You were. You were. You should have apologize.

He was late to a show as well. Like, what the hell? You don't say. It's a reoccurring thing. He's got something. I'm sure I'll see you in passing for like 30 seconds in Miami or something. I know. I know.

We barely get to hang out in L.A. It was a bummer. Well, I'll be, I'm bringing the wife to Miami and she's going to come party with some Bitcoiners. So it should be a good time. But, yeah, I'm going to say a big thank you to everybody here. I appreciate all you taking the time, however brief it may have been. And, yeah, thank you guys. have a very, very Merry Christmas.

And actually, before you guys go, I got to, I got to give a shout out to, I don't know if I can even bring it up here. Narwhal Tacos, what a, what a fucking nice guy. He just, he just dropped 100 bucks as a super chat here. And said, long day, great memories. Have a holiday. Take the fam to dinner.

Thanks, man. I appreciate that. Narwhal's here like every show. So really appreciate it. So thank you, much. much appreciated um but yeah everybody thank you so much for being here have a very happy holidays merry christmas and uh i'm sure i'll see you guys soon so have a good one later cheers thanks man merry christmas all right everybody watching thank you for being here uh and thank you

for watching um damn what a marathon we made like six hours on that shit i've been here for six hours It was a hell of a time. Dare I say that this Christmas show trumped even last years. I felt much more comfortable flowing from panel to panel. It was nice to let a load off at the end and in the widened hole and have a good chat with everybody that joined me for the after party. So I really do appreciate it. And I'm so humbled with the people that were a part of this show.

I'm going to rattle them off right now because I think it's important to thank everybody. Obviously, everybody that was just on the panel here. Thank you. But the people that came before, again, Rodolfo at Coin Kite, Stefan Lavera, Max Kydden from Hoddle, Hoddle, Matt Hill over at Start 9, John Stephanopoulos from Future Bit, Seed signer, Adam O and Steve Barber from Upstream Data, Ben Gagnon, from BitFarms Nico Moran from

Simply Bitcoin Alex Gladstein Robert Breedlove Lynn Alden Tip John Valis Michael Saylor Samson Mao Jack Mallors Joe Hall Jeff Booth Obie working at Fettiment

or Fetty Adam Back Adam back Holy shit I'm like come on Elise Colleen Mark Moss Safedine making his first digital appearance on the show

and then again everybody that joined me in this last panel thank you guys for hanging out thank you everybody for being here a hell of a year so thank you the channel is grown everything is grown

I'm feeling the love so much there's been I can't even begin to express like the shit I see on Twitter like I get tagged in so much shit every day just people being like yo check out this video this tutorial and everything and it's yeah it's

me here, especially with like the start to the year. The beginning of the year fucking sucked. I've got to say it was a rough go. But I had awesome people in my ear, awesome people kind of like helping me through a pretty rough start to the beginning of the year. And I am eternally grateful for that. So thank you, everybody. And let's fucking kill it in 2023.

again, I can't express enough gratitude. Thank you guys very much. Very Merry Christmas. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Huddled by Bitcoin.