BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Cory Klippsten, Lyn Alden, Rodolfo Novak ep271

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

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What is going on, everybody. Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish and very excited for this panel today. We will dive into it momentarily. I'm currently en route to Vancouver halfway there. I'm in Colonna right now, but I'm going to be doing a meetup there. I'm going to be seeing Jeff Booth for a little bit and also going to be doing a workshop on Saturday the 16th. So I'll probably be seeing a few of you there. But nonetheless, Very excited for today's show. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Fuck it.

Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you haven't already like, subscribe, share. All those things really do help the show. Without further ado, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Total the Bitcoin.

Before we add in our guests, let's take a look at where we are on the market right now. We are sitting at $21,730 some on dollars per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 4,605 sats. 90.9% of all Bitcoin have in mind. And in terms of fees, you are looking at a little spike, 24 sats per byte for the next block. But if you're waiting anything beyond that, one sat per bite. So temporary spike, but just be conscious of it. RBF, all those kind of good things.

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You can get your seed phrase in solid steel. Paper doesn't cut it, fire damage, water damage, all that stuff. You guys know the drill. With that, I'm going to stop my rambling. here and we're going to start bringing in our guests we have the legendary lynn alden cori and we've got nvk here uh welcome team ridolfo you made it i was worried that you were stuck with the canadian internet outages but it looks like there you go woodland citadel held up all right did it i uh i scam myself into a rv uh starlink dish and i got a couple other dishes here

from different companies just in case, but we'll see. I should have known that you would be okay, given that you're the man who broadcasts a Bitcoin transaction with a ham radio through a snowstorm. So I figured you'd somehow make it here. But panel, welcome to the show. Thank you, everybody that's already watching. Let's do a quick round of intros before we get into it.

So just who you are and what you do. Let's go with Lynn first. Can you give yourself a little intro? Sure. So I'm formerly an engineer, currently an analyst. I cover broad markets. And I've been pretty involved in Bitcoin analysis over the past few years. Awesome. Well, I'm very excited to have you. I got to meet you for the very first time in Oslo about a month and a half ago. So glad to see you again. Let's give it over to Rodolfo. I'm sure many people are no stranger as well. But who are you? What do you do? I started Quain kite, I don't know, God knows, like 12, 13, 14 years ago. And we make hardware wallets and a bunch of other Bitcoin products like the Block Clock and stuff. And, you know, just Bitcoin is our life.

And our life is Bitcoin. And yeah, that's us. I love it. I pre-ordered my Block Clock Micro. And I realized I didn't do a tutorial on the actual Block Clock. mini that I have. So maybe that's something I should think about doing. Help the boomers.

Yeah, yeah. You know what? I remember talking to you before and Max Pizer had been messaging me being like, how the hell do I get this thing to work? It became a meme. I offer to fly one of our support guys to New York to help us, Stacey. But they refused. So now they just have a dead block clock meeting.

They just travels with them. It's absolutely ridiculous. But hey, you know what? love them. I feel like a dick because I totally ghosted them on that. Stacey like re-d-empted me and was like, can you help us with this? I was like, yeah, sure. And then just totally forgot to respond. So anyways, sorry guys. And let's jump to Corey. Cori, can you give yourself a little intro? Sure. Hey, everyone. I'm bullish. I'm glad to be here. And I'm the founder and CEO of Swan Bitcoin. and as importantly now, getting ready to host along with the Swan Squad and a bunch of other folks,

the Pacific Bitcoin Conference this fall, November 10th and 11th in Los Angeles at Santa Monica Airport. So that should be super fun. I feel like that's like half my job right now. I'm kidding, ready for the conference. I would really love to make it down. I'm going to be in L.A. as of this 17th, but maybe it's worth coming a little early to... 17th of November you're coming here? Yeah.

Oh, yeah, you need to come earlier, even if you have to like round trip down to a little bit conf or whatever. I know Latin American conference is like two or three days after ours. Give yourself a week to go through Pearson Airport. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, in suing years, the plan is for it to be the last week of September instead of November. So hopefully we'll get that locked down. We just couldn't get the venue that we wanted for this year. But in future years, we want to be that last week of September.

I'll see if I can make it happen. I'm sure my wife is listening from the other room being like, where are we going now? She wants to come. She wants to come. Yeah. So, awesome.

Well, thank you all for being here. Everybody watching, of course, uh, this is why are we bullish? If you're unfamiliar, really,

really simple premise to the show. We all come with a reason for being bullish. Uh, and we're going to go by the three hours. Basically, somebody's going to drop their reason, give a little explanation. Then all together,

we're going to riff on that reason. And then third, we're just going to rotate to the next person until we all get a turn. Really, really simple. And we'll just let the conversation take us where it takes us. So I'm going to get us started today. And I wanted to share something that I found to be kind of funny, at least somewhat amusing to me. And that was the St. Louis Fed, they draw a blog.

And the blog was graphs on inflation and deflation while considering the U.S. dollar Bitcoin and the gold standard and he fixed money supply. So I just wanted to read a couple things from it. Here's the first graph, first of all. And so this graph, the way it measures is it's basically based on the unit a year prior. So obviously when we had massive deflation in terms of price. And they're not talking about this in terms of money supply. They're obviously referring to it as, I suppose, purchasing power.

But we had our spike in 2017, and then they considered the massive come down from that spike into late 2018 as inflation. And so they obviously juxtapose that to the steady but positive inflation with the U.S. based on CPI, which I think many would consider to be underreported over the long term. So like, you know, there's basically this graph where it's two flat lines together and just eking up a little bit in the corner as we get to our like 8.6% inflation in May. And then they have this wildly fluctuating chart with Bitcoin. So the part I wanted to read, they said in the United States, we typically pay for for goods with US dollars, hence the consumer price index looks at a basket of goods priced

in US dollars, but what of the CPI were priced in Bitcoin? And it shows those rates in the above chart. It says, even our currently high inflation rate in US dollars is dwarfed by the towering peaks of the inflation right in Bitcoin, not to mention Bitcoin's wild gyrations. Never in the history of the US dollar has the inflation rate reached the the heights that Bitcoin has on several occasions in a few years. Bitcoin also exhibits severe deflations. That's problematic for a currency used for transactions. With deflation, consumers expect goods to become less expensive and thus wait to buy,

which can lead to a collapse of the economy. Given the dollar has been available and not deflating, there was no economic collapse. To be clear, Bitcoin is used very little for traction transactions anyway, maybe because of these repeated deflations. So, I mean, a couple things here. Number one, the reason that I, this is my reason for being bullish, is that this blog even exists. Because if had you gone back even five years, you know, even, maybe even less than that.

But, you know, if you were to see this 2014, 2015, people would have, their minds would have been blown that it granted enough brain power of the Fed to even consider it. And it always reminds me of that saying, and I'm sure plenty of people bring it up in context of this, but first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win kind of thing. And it seems like with things like this, we're getting, we're seeing inklings of that, then they fight you kind of phase. You know, when you see something like this, this isn't an ignore.

and this is maybe a little mix of laughing and fighting because Bitcoin continues to persist. And they've created the charts in such a way that the general message seems to be they're not properly showing the purchasing power of Bitcoin over time. They're manipulating graphs in such a way that people would assume, oh, look at that massive inflation. and that spike up to whatever, how many hundreds of percent based on the previous all-time high in late 2017. So it just seems like a, I'm not sure if this is a malicious thing or if there's some genuine sentiment of somebody at the Fed is thinking like, oh, we have to protect people and, and inform them of how crazy this acid is.

I don't know. But nonetheless, it oddly enough makes me bullish that this chart even exists and that the St. Louis Fed is creating blogs like this. Because over time, the fact that you can easily pull this data on the Fed's website and you can make it reflect things the way that you want them to be reflected. Over time, I believe that these charts will look increasingly bad on the Fed's behalf. So I don't know. I'm going to open it up there. I found this very amusing this week and I wanted to get your thoughts on it. So maybe I'll go to Lynn.

Have you seen this before? Did you see this? I think it dropped yesterday. I didn't see it until you mentioned it. They actually, I think they did something about eggs, price, and Bitcoin the other month. Yes. Yeah. So they've been planning around with their chart.

They've actually had that Bitcoin data for, I think, a couple of years now. I'm not sure when they initially added it. I know it goes back, you know, recently far, maybe half of Bitcoin's lifetime. I'm not sure when they added that. But it is funny that they're kind of, you know, doing those sorts of experiments. I think you're, you asked the right question. Is it malicious or is it just genuine, you know, that's, that's their actual analysis? I think it probably depends on who the Fed did that.

I mean, I think that there are a lot of people with their models. And they do think that it'd be terrible. for a currency to get stronger over time. And there's a lot of academic models that look at that. And that's their genuine opinion on how the world works. But this also could have been written by someone who's like, let me just purposely make it so that it looks like Bitcoin's not really growing over time that it has these random spikes of inflation and deflation.

And of course, it's somewhat disingenuous because it's this tiny little asset that's in the process of monetizing and trying to find its total addressable market. and so it's going to be extremely volatile in other direction. Yeah, yeah. It's again, I think over time, it will, it will age poorly for them. But we will see. You're right. It's so early to be comparing the length of a reserve currency to an asset that's been around for 13 years

and is just slowly being adopted by a small number of people in relation to, all people on the planet, right? So I don't know. Corey or Rodolfo, do you guys have thoughts on this? What did you think when you saw it? I mean, you know, CPI has nothing to do with consumers, right? It's just indexation for pensions. So, you know, what the fuck happened in 1971 really sort of gets down to the bottom of this,

which is they keep on having to adjust CPI to, so that it does not track consumer goods so that they don't have to adjust liabilities, pensions, you know. And I mean, you know, the World Fact Book had, you know, M1's there for a while, too, where Bitcoin started making too much noise there and they took it out, which is kind of fun too.

Bitcoin has this weird thing where since the very beginning, it had an outsized amount of impact on mainstream since the very, very, very beginning, right? Even when it was just like a few people sort of like

meeting over IRC because that's how you found your rate for Bitcoin to meet at Starbucks to exchange cash for. It had this weird outsize just because there really is nothing like it. And it has grown

to an amount of computation power in terms of defense. that, you know, what is it now? Like a hundred times all the world's computation combined kind of thing, like some stupid, stupid number. How can you not address the big Bitcoin elephant in the room, right? On anything you talk about economics. You have this thing that refuses to die

and is overprotected by all the computation in the world. It just keeps on like, you know, refusing to comply. Like, it is government in central planet's worst nightmare. Yeah, absolutely. Corey, what about you? Our thoughts? It's bullish. I love when people start a data series or time series

and trying to dunk on Bitcoin over some, you know, zoomed in time frame. And then, like, very soon, it just comes to bite them in the ass as Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does. And then all of a sudden they have to either pull the time series and look like an idiot or all of a sudden they're selling bitcoin well it's it's the it's the this is like the the rubini of of fed blogs right this is this this is this is going to be the

the uh i rest my case kind of look back moment i i i hope everybody has screenshoted that uh to look back on but um yeah i i mean i i don't think this is the last we're going to see a bit. Even here in Canada, everybody's looking at this from such a high time preference way of thinking. And so, you know, you have here in Canada, Pierre Poliev running for office. He's probably going to be the head of the conservative party here and then run in the election for prime minister. Well, I mean, he's spoken about Bitcoin.

And, you know, unfortunately, the time. timing for him in the market has not been the best part because now everybody's coming and yeah currently right everybody's trying to come and and and dunk on him for mentioning and being favorable to bitcoin throughout the past year saying oh you would have lost X number of percent now on the bright side of this is he's probably going to clinch that nomination for for the conservative party and all the people that have dunked on him like there's not going to be a Canadian election assuming that Trudeau remains aligned with the NDP, there won't be another election in Canada until 2025.

At least six months we're safe. They're not going to break government for at least another six months. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I'm almost glad to see people making those short, those low, those high time preference dunks on him because I think it comes back to bite the man in the ass sooner rather than later. and he's going to look like a very smart man in a, you know, maybe like a year or two. In a few years, if it's 2025 when we had that election, he's going to look like a genius.

Remember when Draper bought the Silk Road coins and everybody was like, are you stupid? You're spending it was a $600 per coin? Yeah. You know, who would do that? Why are you buying all this drug dealer's coins, right? Yeah, and for a while he looked to people on the outside. He looked like an absolute moron for an extended period of time. For, you know, like a year, a year and a half, people could consistently say he's lost money,

he's lost money until he really didn't lose money. So, yeah, well, we will see. But if anybody wants to check that out, you can just go to at St. Louis Fed on Twitter. and you can find the link to that article there. It's worth a read. It goes on a little bit further beyond that, but that was kind of the meat that I wanted to touch on. I'm going to give us a rotation here,

but I got to give a shout out to somebody in the chat that I haven't chatted with for quite a bit. But shout out to Vortex, a legendary bitconer, a large part of my education back in the day to get me thinking critically and lean me towards the heading that I'm on now. So massive respect to vortex, he was over at World Crypto Network,

and then CryptoCast Network. He went off on his own for a while, but he was putting out just incredible content, and then he gradually and slowly bowed out and is now pursuing his other passions. But love the guy, did a solid to many early Bitcoiners out there. So glad to see him in here. So cheers.

with that, let's do a rotation. So I'm going to pop it over to Lynn here. And I'm going to let you have your rant. I try to keep my my topics a little condensed here. But I'm going to let you have your little rant here. I'm wondering what is on your mind? What have you been excited, interested about in and around Bitcoin the last little bit here? So I'll say what I'm bullish on is the Oslo Freedom Forum.

That makes me bullish on Bitcoin. And so, Ben, you were there. I was there. Like you said, it's about a month and a half ago, I think, or a little less. And what struck me about that is you basically have a human rights forum foundation, that they throw this annual conference, and it's been going on for over a decade. And it's just about human rights around the world. It's not a Bitcoin conference.

But they will, you know, their chief strategy officers, Alex Klavstein, and they'll use whatever tools make sense for their mission, which is to spread human rights, you know, basically. basically freedom of speech, freedom of expression, basically having, you know, say in how people live their lives. And so, for example, the way I've described it recently is that, you know, they'll use VPNs as a tool for, you know, moving around hostile networks and, you know, getting data in and out where it needs to be. And they'll use Bitcoin now when you're operating in hostile financial networks. And so there's really two sides of Bitcoin. One is the long-term

inflation protection that you're buying into something with a finite, amount of units rather than an unknowable increasing amount of units. And so considering how much of the world lives in persistent double-digit inflation, sometimes triple-digit inflation or higher, you know, basically a lot of people think of them in developed market terms, but if you actually look globally, you know, most currencies are worse than the dollar. And so it gets more bullish, kind of the further out of the proof of you go from the global reserve currency. So there's the inflation protection. And then number two is the censorship-resistant. transactions. And so, you know, prior to lightning, I mean, Bitcoin was not really meant for a billion

people paying with coffee with it. The whole point is it's like a tank of payment methods. It goes through hostile terrain. And that's basically what it's designed to do. And so the Human Rights Foundation will use it for that type of purpose. That basically, you know, I got to meet people from Nigeria that, you know, they're protesting the government on police violence. The bank accounts were frozen. you don't have strong rule of law. And so what do they do? They turn to Bitcoin. And they start using peer-to-peer money and self-custodial money and basically going, you know, routing around the problem.

And that that was basically true for just activists around the world. And so there was kind of, one, it was hearing people share their stories about various sorts of financial infringements on their lives that are often don't involve rule of law or that involve authoritarian types of situations. And then number two is they also would have privacy experts there, teach human rights activists how to use Bitcoin more privately and how, well, first of all, just how to use Bitcoin. And then number two, how to use it more privately if possible, how to use it for, you know, when you need a little bit more sensitivity with it. And also hearing back from human rights activists, what do you need? Like what are the frictions that you've encountered? How, you know, what types of products and services would make this work for you better? Because obviously we found, I mean, Bitcoin still has limitations.

in the current form of privacy. And there's always ways to make it better, especially on various layers and things like that. There are ways to, you know, around the whole ecosystem, ways that can improve over time. And so for me, that gets down to fundamental. That's kind of what Bitcoin's here for. It's not just for speculating and for moving the price around and for people in developed markets, you know, adding it as a five-per-slice in their portfolio. It's actually on the ground.

You know, it has real-world implications. and people have been using it for at least a decade for some of those purposes. I mean, Roya Mobub of Afghanistan was using it in 2013 because women didn't have the greatest banking access there. So there's all sorts of reasons in the world where people use Bitcoin and something like 50% of the world is classified to live in authoritarian or authoritarian regimes. And so there's a gigantic market out there for peer-to-peer money. and Bitcoin is the best by far, you know, the decentralized, the one we have, the one that's huge, the one that's been here, the one that's got through all these tests.

And so I'm super bullish on what it can do for all these people around the world as they get more and more familiar with what it can do for them. Yeah, it was a hell of an event to be at. It was super interesting to see the different ways that people were utilizing it. I know you and I had a chat while we were there about some of the, the privacy implications and kind of what happened. You're in Canada even as a fundraising mechanism. And, you know, the clear mistakes that were made early on in terms of privacy. But the interesting thing about how all of this has kind of come to light,

especially for me through the freedom forum there, was I met a girl. who I ended up having on the show with Jeff Booth recently named Luda, and she was from Poland. And she works with a group that's basically working in, like, post-Soviet states trying to ensure, like, rule of law and, you know, help protesters whenever there's breaches of human rights and so and so forth. And so she wanted to get protective equipment into Ukraine early on. in the conflict.

So helmets, vests, stuff like, just so people could protect themselves, basically. And also a lot of people that wanted to just leave were basically forced to stay and fight.

So those people she wanted to be able to, to not just to immediately be killed kind of thing. So she wanted to get all this equipment in. And she went through Fiat rails to try and do that or was attempting to look at how that would happen. And it was going to take weeks just to get the- If you get it. Yeah, if you get it.

Yeah. And she had bank account shut down in the process of doing things like this many times. She saw the Canadian trucker protest. And she looked and saw that Bitcoin was raised. And even though some of it was confiscated in the end, just a poor planning and timing, a number of factors added to that. but 70% of it still got directly into the hands of individual people that it was intended for. And it wasn't unable to be frozen as long as it was given to those people.

Had certain privacy measures been insured, then all of it would have gotten there and there would have been no even attempting to track it. She saw the protests and the fundraising and approached me and Jeff at, the event and said, hey, I used that and took notes from that and used it as a blueprint so that I could use Bitcoin to get that protective equipment. She got it into Ukraine on day two of the conflict because of that, which was pretty astounding to hear. And it's funny because, you know, you jump on Twitter and you see, I would say there's some political divide in those two particular issues, you know.

But nonetheless, it doesn't matter because Bitcoin isn't a political tool that anybody can use. And so she saw an opportunity, she used it, and it worked. And we see that from a lot of people. And you touched on two different points there, the protecting your purchasing power and the censorship-resistant nature of it. I was speaking with a woman from Nicaragua, and she was trying to, raise money down there. She came to a 101 class that I did in Oslo on getting your first wallet, learning how to transact, learning how to use lightning even. And so she came up and asked some questions

afterwards. And we were getting on the topic and she was asking about, oh, what about, you know, somebody told me to use this coin or this coin. And, you know, I kind of gave her the, gave her the, the TLDR of why Bitcoin and why not other things potentially. But then I got to the point about, well, also there's, it's a cap supply. So there's, you know, there's only going to be this many. And her, she stopped me and she said, wait, what? There's no, there's no like unlimited supply. Like it's, there's never going to be more than this number.

She had no idea. She was using it just from the censorship resistant angle. But being from Central America, she heard cap supply and her eyes lit up. She was like, this is useful in an entirely different way than I was initially drawn to it for. And it's amazing to see people in places where, yeah, they need the censorship resistance, but then they recognize the value and power behind not being able to inflate a currency for political gain and for other reasons. You know, in Brazil, we had like what, like three, four currency fails. and they did bail in through every one of them.

So it hits both points home right away. It's like, you're hyperinflating my money and you're taking a huge cut from my savings immediately, right? It's just Bitcoin is so obvious for people outside of North America. It's not even funny. The volatility is harder, right, if you don't have a huge float. But the other aspects of Bitcoin do become very, very obvious, very fast.

Do you have, have you had a number of people from, like, Brazil, from different parts of the world? Like, obviously, you do a lot of different bitcoins, right? In Brazil, more people own crypto. Unfortunately, that's the research. So I'm going to quote it as is. Then they own stocks. So, like, because, you know, Brazil has capital controls on dollars still to this day. Most of America does.

you can't just buy stocks because most stocks are dollar denominated dollar traded right dollar everything you know those are u.s certificates the majority of them so you know people like the average person like what do you mean you own stocks like you know like where do you go to buy stocks like it's a lot more complicated than bitcoin is when you think about it right like who's the broker who owns the certificates, right? Like all this stuff that is fairly trusted just because you have rule of law in North America disappears immediately outside of North America.

Like you can't own stocks because you can't own those tiny little small amount certificates. So, you know, when he came to Bitcoin and the rest of the crap, you know, people can just go and buy it by themselves and have it. So it did become like a much, much bigger market immediately for it. Yeah.

And I mean, like this thing's exploded in Brazil. They really do. It is, I see your wife going like very slow. She's not sneaky at all. That was great. That was great.

She was almost doing the stairs. She's like low key messaging me. I think he's crying, but I got to come. I'm like, just go. Yeah, you got to do it. I got little ones too. Yeah. Yeah, that's, it's, I mean, it's unfortunate.

that it's crypto but I mean is it what do you think the reason for the crypto quote unquote adoption is it is it just like a general symptom of most

people don't understand that I mean stocks equities in general make absolutely no fucking sense right why are you going to buy 32x revenue like something like they're not going to make 32X revenue in the next five years.

Like the math on equities, unless you're a trader or you know what you're doing and you're just essentially like, you know, swapping certificates for a profit. Like it makes absolute no economical sense to buy stocks, right? Especially when you're coming from the sense where like there's a much higher friction on that stock purchase, right? Or the equities purchase in general. So when you have something that's like literally like zero friction, like Bitcoin and the shit coins are.

Now you have something that people can go and buy a fraction off with just like, you know, their floats, their floats much smaller, right? We're talking about people that may have like an extra, you know, 100 bucks worth of dollars per month in their discretionary sort of like investment or like gambling portfolio. So they'll go and buy this. Right. And the average person is not an idiot. I love the, it's like the bell curve meme.

You know, you have the deemwitz and you have the sulfites. And then you have everybody, you know, have all the professional class in the middle. You know, the majority of the people totally get it. That's a fucking scam out there. And, you know, they want to get into the scam. but they can't afford to get into the scam because, you know, they want their cut, right? People want to be able to buy a nice TV and have a nice barbecue on Sunday and save some money, right? So with Bitcoin and the gambling versions of Bitcoin, they can get in, right?

They can get a piece of what the first world people have access to. That's, like, incredible for them. It totally is like mind melting that you can buy five bucks of a stock to a person outside of here. Because they literally had nothing. Like buying dollars is already hard enough. So if you go to official dollar, you have to pay. South American countries have an official dollar rate. That is not the dollar rate.

And it's so stupid. They have the official parallel dollar rate. They have the official non-official on the newspaper every day. mainstream newspaper and then you have the delittals right like the guys who sell dollar for cash or whatever and it's a completely different rate so so explain the explain the official and the unofficial because isn't that just like the lie and the truth is no no no you have you have the official lie and then you have the sanction sorry you have and then you have the sanction very very massage truth Right? And then you have the street price, which is not reported by the newspapers, of course, right?

So I'm not going to be going into the streets of Brazil with the newspapers pointing at the raid saying, I want this one. It's not going to work out for me. Yeah, not going to happen. Yeah. And it's just so fascinating to me that, like, you know, the volatility is very hard. And that that is essentially the biggest hurdle for developing world. and let's call it sort of like what PayPal calls it R-O-W rest of the world it's unattainable

to deal with this kind of volatility so like they can buy a little bits and sort of hold but that's why they're so star for the stable coins right because then they get the censorship resistant mostly because that market is irrelevant to regulators

because it's too tiny but they get to have dollars that they can buy, which is the best shit coin is the dollar. And then they can at least hold that without permission in their like harder wallet kind of. But it's it's an inch forward, right? I mean, it's a huge, it's a huge, huge deal for them to be able to do that. Yeah. Corey, what are your thoughts on Bitcoin outside of the first world and how it's being used?

instances of tyrannical governments or to evade wealth like canada. Man yeah I mean obviously I look at this most of the day through the lens of sort of timing of adoption of different aspects of Bitcoin as we understand them today and kind of looking at ways that it may be used in the future and so I'm following very closely just that the rest of world seems very likely to charge up the S curve on medium of exchange use cases for Bitcoin faster than the Western world. I think that seems pretty obvious, whereas, you know, the store of value use case was kind of led by the Western world in the U.S.

and, you know, people treating it as an investment and number go up and all of that. So I just find that super fascinating. It's the reason that I started Alzonte Capital with Max and Stacey. it's the reason that it seems like the majority of my own personal investments and investments of Bitcoin or ventures seem to be kind of in early lightning startups and medium of exchange startups because that's where I'm super bullish on placing bets now. I think broadly if you look at sort of the globe, including all of developed world and developing world, I think your minimum four or five years. away from sort of kind of some kind of inflection point for Bitcoin as medium of exchange. But that's like a broad measure. It doesn't mean that certain localities like, you know, Bitcoin Beach and obviously the

things going on in Nigeria and you're hearing just little stories pop up all over the place and all these people just copying what the crew did down in Alzante and trying to do that in their own little areas. I just talk to somebody that's trying to get all of the merchants in Goa to light up. You know, obviously there's some stuff going on with Costa Rica. You've got dread traveling around the world, doing stuff in Jamaica and trying to spark things. You got Mark Moss doing things all over the place. So I think that's really exciting to see kind of what's going on there.

I love what Galois in particular is doing is among my portfolio companies. I think they're doing some really interesting things. And then obviously, you know, Breeze is out there innovating and kind of going more of the platform route and letting a lot of other people build on top of their lightning infrastructure and kind of making sea lightning more useful, which I think will be instrumental for companies like Swan that aren't 100% focused on lightning, but want to have awesome lightning functionality in our app soon. Well, now we can build on top of Breeze on top of Blockstream and have something dope and market with a self-custody lightning wallet with no KYC that everyone around the world can use

in the damn Swan app. And then if you want to buy from us, yeah, sure, obviously you got a KYC. So like those types of things that let a thousand flowers bloom because you've got that like that infrastructure layer of the different implementations of lightning. And then now you've got that second layer of the people that then make that easier to use and can actually make it very easy for all kinds of fintech apps to get those out in market. Like we're so close to this inflection point of just lightning being fricking everywhere. And, you know, we're doing a lot of integrations for a lot of the lightning apps. because we can take dollars straight from a bank account and have it show up in a lightning wallet through just our system and submarine swaps and what we do with prime trust on the back end and everything.

And so it's going to be an easy on-ramp for so many of these companies where they don't also have to build an on-ramp. We can do that. And then, yeah, I'm just excited for kind of the explosion of services. And whereas this will be when it really, really takes off because my original framework for like medium of exchange taking. off is, okay, a lot of people have to have been in Bitcoin with conviction buying for like eight to 10 years. And when that cohort is large enough that, you know, they've been around and now 90 to 95 percent or more of their net worth is in Bitcoin and that's all they have

to spend. That consumer demand is what pulls innovation out of the entrepreneurs because they can make money doing that. The reason that we may accelerate a lot faster than that, because that would put sort of medium of exchange inflection points somewhere between like 2025 and 2030, it could happen a lot faster if new use cases come faster. And Bitcoin is actually used in novel new ways, just like we couldn't imagine doing what we're doing right now back in 1993 or something like that. So if there are just things that build on top of these layers of infrastructure, the way I'm talking about so that a thousand companies can have a lightning wallet and can use lightning in novel ways and then just be creative about, you know, L and URLs and, you know, stable coins on

lightning or whatever the different things are, things we won't even think of today that will literally exist in like 24 months because you're going to be able to raise money from one of these 15 heading toward 30 Bitcoin VCs that all want to do layer two, layer three stuff. And you're going to be able to launch with something in like three to six months after company formation with a guy and a girl. like a CTO and a CEO, like just getting started on something. And you'll be in market with something in 2023, building on top of these two layers of like the foundational sort of lightning

implementations and then these kind of middleware guys, like the voltages and the breezes and these guys. And so I just think that's going to be super exciting. I wish that I had more time to spend on it. I'd probably if I came into Bitcoin right now and not five years ago, I think that's what I would be spending all my time on. And I'm excited to play a small part in it with some of the stuff we can do at Swan and at least funding some of these companies. But yeah, I'm really excited about lightning and Bitcoin being spent and then used in other ways.

Yeah. You know. Yeah. So it's pretty cool that you mentioned that because that's happening in the hardware space now with Denham. F.C. stuff as well, right? So, you know, realistically speaking, you know, most wallet makers can't, can't do the hardcore, you know, security of the funds on the actual, like, app wallet, right? And, you know, rest of the world, majority of the world is going to be phone first. So what we're trying to do now is you have this tap signer cards like the Nunchuk demo did, right? Like, it's a change. cheap NFC card that has a Bitcoin private key in it. So you can blind sign.

So you can open and close channels. You can authenticate your app without the private key being the app. So if you're in a country where you have a shitty government, right, like your keys are not on the phone either. So now they have to go after your phone keys in a different card as well. And then you have like BDK for the wallet stuff. you have Quankites NFC tap stuff, you start pulling all these things together.

And any company with a more interesting business idea and sort of like business plan can build with better building blocks of technology, right? Because building the very little sort of like hard parts of this is just it's not realistic. for most startups, right? Most startups cannot build secure apps, cannot build the hardware, cannot do this stuff,

and cannot have the integrations with some of the liquidity providers or the other stuff. So you start putting these things together and the magic and the value is added by that entrepreneur in that specific locality with a specific pain.

That to me is sort of like what's really cool that's coming in this next cycle. Let's put it this way. There's so much happening right now. And I love in the bear markets because that's when everything gets done. Yeah, it's when shit gets done, right? And everybody's so surprised when the next bull market comes along because there's so much, oh, wow, all this stuff is here.

Well, that's because when you weren't around, everybody was busy. Everybody was doing shit. People were counting their money, right? Like, it's like the price of the Bitcoin goes up. Everybody's just counting their money. Yeah. I have a problem here because I've been collecting. And like, you know, I did my, I did my cold card video the other day.

But holy shit, like the number of, and I'm not just, you know, placating you because you're on the show. But like the amount of shit that is packed into a cold card, the amount of features is, is kind of mind blowing. Like the BIP 85 stuff that is capable in there. Like you can have, and I'm not sure if Lynn or Corey is familiar with kind of the ends and outs of what's possible there. But basically you can have a parent seed that you, you know, you create in your cold card. But then you can create like child seeds from that up to 10,000 of them for a single device. And so effectively those are all their own wallets. They all have their own seed phrases.

And you can't work backwards to find the original parent seed, but this is all the backup you need for 10,000 different wallets in a single place. And you can always recover as long as you know, like the numbered account of which, you know, one through 10,000 or sorry, rather zero through 9,999, which one it was. So, I mean, it's just the amount of versatility, like the trick pin stuff that you've got in here, here where it's like, oh, rather than here's a duress pin, it's like, if you type this pin, then this happens. Like, if then, then all of those instances, the versatility with stuff like that is, is pretty amazing. And so it just, you know, we were just trying to, like, this

already exists. Like, you know, we have banks with vaults, with people in them. And, and there is this thing called the delta pin. So if you do a delta of the. last two digits and you add that extra number, you know, in a bank situation, he rings the alarm, right? Like a silent alarm, the police comes. So like, we're like, wait, why don't we have delta pins on a harder wallet, right? Like, all this stuff, lock down timers and things. And they're just trying to get people to like do this stuff in a way that that's like

reasonable, but also has sort of like infinite possibilities, right? Because you don't want the attackers to know. I know that you have a, how do you call it, like a duress spin. So I'm going to beat you a little further, right? Yeah. Now, if you have infinite possibilities, well, now the guy is, you know, he's going to have to spend too much time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I mean, there's, there's so much going on through, through these bear markets. There's so much being built and it's being used in so many unique ways. And as we're talking about, you know, Bitcoin with Lin's topic in the, in the context of people in other parts of the world where they need these various tools for different reasons.

And there's so much great stuff being built and so many tools that are available. I'm so confident that, you know, if you, if you go back to 2017 for scaling, when we We started the year with nothing. There was literally no on-chain or off-chain scaling, apart from custodial. And then we got on-chain scaling, and now we have Lightning Network five years later. I literally use Lightning Network every single day right now. I know that's not the case for everybody, but I do and I can, which is amazing to me. And On-Chane has also incorporated a number of different things that help a lot of people

have started batching transactions. Thank Christ, you know, Coinbase, blockchain. Info, I'm looking at you. Or rather, bit pay, I think. I don't know. Exchanges. Who has bit pay. Bit pay. Yeah. You know, people finally, blockchain. Info, finally get in segment like five years after the fact, like I guess, you know, hooray. But, you know, things have happened and progressed. And it kind of happened in the quiet of a bear market. And so, these tools are going to continue to be built and be better. And in the context of human rights, they're going to be more and more useful,

not just for people like us that get to collect hardware wallets, but for people that actually need this stuff, and as a matter of life and death, I think it's going to be important. So with that, I'd like to kind of wrap this topic and segue into the next. Before I do, I just want to give a quick shout out,

because my favorite person is here. He is a longtime fan of the show for quite some time. He was here literally every Friday, sometimes hours in advance. He hates Bitcoin, but he's here every Friday. And his name is David Wong. He always comes in just to let us know how wrong we are about Bitcoin. So David, thank you for being here. He wants you guys to know that he uses his master card and visa every day, and it's super fast.

So, David, I appreciate you. Thank you for your comments. Never change. Please come back every Friday. But with that, I'm going to segue to Corey. Corey, I have an oakling of what your topic of bullishness might be. There was a comment in here regarding it. But I'll let you take it first, and then I'll try and find that comment, bring it up.

So what has you interested right now? Hold on. That was my NVK. impression from Canadian Wi-Fi. Listen, this has been, you know, kind of a nasty downturn that really started with just things going on outside of Bitcoin. And then that basically got some crappy crypto companies wrecked, which dragged Bitcoin down. And I'm just extremely bullish on the silver lining there, which is that a, a big.

business model that was always faulty, which is this idea of what they call C-Fi lenders. So this is block-fi, NXO, Abre, Celsius, Voyager, and a bunch of smaller ones, but those are kind of the big five. You know, gathering retail deposits, but them actually not being deposits by falsely marketing them as like high-interest savings accounts. and then going out the back door and doing risky things with them to varying degrees, right? So crypto.com is in there as well. So crypto.com and Nexo and Aubur didn't blow up, but Voyager and Celsius involved. And, you know, and then BlockFi didn't blow up but had to shut down and took a 96% markdown on their equity.

Whereas Voyager filed Chapter 11. And I would say, you know, if Celsius makes it through next week without filing for Chapter 11, it'll be likely a huge upset. this is extremely bullish for Bitcoin. It sucks so bad for the people that got misled by these shy-de-marketers and promised them this magic treehouse of yield that was supposed to be like low risk or risk-free. And I feel awful for them. I especially feel bad for the ones that like truly were misled and didn't actually kind of understand what they were doing and kind of understood the risk. And we're kind of, you know, the greed is a powerful drug.

and a lot of people were just chasing that yield of, you know, double digits on stable coins. It's like, what do you think they're doing with that to generate that yield? Obviously, they're lending it out to somebody that wants to pay for that. And those are people, if they're borrowing from one of these middlemen, by definition, it's the best rate that they can get. And you know that anyone of quality can get a much lower rate if they want to borrow from somebody. So obviously, it's low quality. Like, that's just obvious. Now, that's not something that everybody understands.

and that's where people like Alex Mishinsky, you know, basically should go to jail for the rest of their lives. Probably won't be the rest of their lives, but wouldn't be bad if it were, because they deliberately fooled these people into thinking that the stuff was risk-free and then went and gambled them. And now, according to the allegations that came out in a lawsuit yesterday, it appears that they were an actual Ponzi scheme because, again, alleged to have been taking deposits from new users and using that to pay interest to old depositors. that's literally a Ponzi scheme. So I mean, just really, really awful arcane research, which does a lot of good, you know, blockchain analysis and the crypto space, whatever. They

went and traced Mishensky's wallets and it looks like he dumped, I think it was 80 million or maybe it was $44 million worth of Celsius tokens on Dex's to enrich himself while telling everyone else all these poor little sycophant hoddlers of cell token that was 88% closely held by Celsius management and had no liquidity other than their wash trading. Just absolute abhorrent behavior everywhere. And none of this stuff is legal in traditional markets, obviously. You don't have Citadel Ken Griffin out there saying like, hey everybody, high yield savings account, you know, retail depositors, I'll give you 4%. I'll give you 5%. And we'll just go use this to like fund. No, there's there's guide rails around the stuff. You can't do that kind of thing. You can't go solicit

from retail and have them, you know, give you their money and call it a savings account. So I don't know. It's just, it's good it blew up now. It's fantastic for bitquiners to have, you know, a lot, another boost of credibility to everybody that got siphoned off from the Bitcoin movement over the last few years where so many people, even if you don't, even if you heavily discount their user numbers, which I do. But let's say that Celsius didn't have 1.7 million users and had 600,000 or whatever. Like that's literally 600,000 people that learned how to buy Bitcoin the wrong way into. the wrong setup where their coins were re-hypothicated, earning yield on like their risky trading activities, you know, losing things in defy hacks and stuff, putting over $500 million worth of users' coins on freaking anchor, which was an obvious Ponzi scheme, even more obvious than Celsius itself was the Luna Terra anchor UST Ponzi. So, you know, this is great, right? Because all these people are up for grabs and all the bitcoinsers can educate them and can be helpful. And, and I don't think that industry gets large again because I think people will educate about the risks and point

out not your keys, not your coins, and look what happened when you guys went that way. And so for companies that are Bitcoin only and providing on ramp surfaces like around the world, whether it's us or Bitcoin Reserve or Unchained or whoever all around the world, coin corners and bull Bitcoin up in Canada, like this is just, it's a great moment because I think we can take share in the bear, right? It's a bear market and we can get noisy and we can put out great educational content and we can go and evangelize with all these people that just got wrecked, just like the class of people who got wrecked on ICOs in 2018, 2019, and that made up a great cohort of amazing bitcoins, you know, the ones that got recruited in the bear. It's like basically

my entire team at Swan. Like this is me, this is Jan, this is Quidum, this is Brady. Like we were all doing blockchain crypto, crypto, and 17 and found Bitcoin in 18, you know. And so I'm just excited to get if this is, if that was getting people off of shit coins and into Bitcoin, this is getting people off of, you know, defy yield, CFi yield, all of this risky stuff with your coins and understanding, you know, it's just not the way. You just be, be more focused on making more money and adding more value and stacking stats and like Bitcoin's purchasing power appreciation, I guarantee you will be enough over time. Just zoom out.

Don't be greedy in the short term. There's no free lunch. I like that. I think I'm going to toss it to Lynn and get some of your thoughts on Corey's sentiment. And maybe I'm going to throw in one more thing here. But I saw something and now it's escaping me who had put it on Twitter. but it appeared that a lot of the lending was just like a big circle jerk that eventually ended up in anchor. Is that the case? Is that what it was?

So there is a lot of that. That was a joke that it was a joke tweet that I put out. And I put it in question form so that it wasn't an assertion of any sort. But yeah, I mean, the joke was basically like what really just happened here was it just because there was a lot of this. And I did actually hear a lot of whispers about this in the last couple of months. and now you're starting to see it as their balance sheets come out in the bankruptcy filings. But you're seeing that a lot of times they would just get something off of their books and then like lend it back for somewhere over here. Anyway, my joke was like maybe it was just, you know,

Alameda lends something at 4% to Voyager, who lends it to Block 5% who lends it to Celsius at 6%. And then Celsius just puts it on anchor. It's the literal circle jerk. Basically. Lynn, I don't know. What are your thoughts in around? on how things have begun to crumble the past little bit.

So one thing I've been covering in my research for clients is that if you look at, you know, VC between say Bitcoin only or Bitcoin focus companies and then VC in the broad crypto space, it's like apples and oranges, right? So, you know, I, like the traditional media still just completely doesn't separate any of this, right? There's like all Bitcoin and crypto. It's all it. They're putting their brands on stadiums and stuff. And it's like really just the crypto one.

were getting so much capital and doing these huge things. Whereas the Bitcoin-only stuff is super focused, and it's pretty utilitarian. And so it's something I've been covering for a while, and it's funny because as more and more stuff comes out, it's even worse than I thought. Basically, the fact that they were all lending to three areas capital, it's like it's smaller and more degenerate than even I expected. And it's something I watched the Luna thing. I anticipated that. But for example, some of the opaque implosions we've seen in some of these more opaque markets, that's even worse than I thought it would have been.

So I knew sales is bad, but the fact there's so many different lenders were all kind of doing similar practices. There's obviously a spectrum of quality there that some were degenerate, where some were merely a different level, right? So there's a spectrum there. But the fact that the whole industry was engaged in basically the same kind of thing was even worse than I thought. And I think that in the long run, this is decent marketing for Bitcoin. And I think one thing we briefly touched on, but, you know, before he came on is that, you know, on chain, if you look at the number of people, like, bringing their coins on chain is good, right? I mean, to the extent that that date is accurate, we're basically seeing, you know, despite the fact they have a huge downturn and price, you have a lot of, you know, smallish bitcoinsers jumping on chain with their stash. And from what I've been hearing, maybe NVK can talk about. I mean, I think we have decent numbers in, like, the hardware industry because, you know,

I think people are learning important lessons from all this. We had a huge uptick in sales for harder wallets in a bare market, like at the bottom, which is like I've heard of, right? Like it never happens like that. We're already expecting, right? Hey, no, screw sales. We're just going to go do our own thing now, build products. But then it's like, oh, why is the warehouse behind on shipping?

And we go look and it's like, holy shit. Like, there was like normal bull market sales at this month. And so do you owe Corey a check or what? That's right. And there is this, I was actually going to touch on that. This is a beautiful thing now where back in the day when there were no ways to buy shit coin like a bit instant. The notoriously infamous original place to buy Bitcoin pre post-IRC. there were no Bitcoin

brokerages, right? Coinbase kind of started like that. You could just buy Bitcoin from them. They'll send you Bitcoin. That's it. But what I think it was really cool that Swan does and Bull does is that like you have this place.

It's a one way place. And they don't custody the sale. So like post sale, it's like you take your fucking Bitcoin out of here, please. Like it's like there is no, they don't hold it. They don't have a wall. wallet, right? So it forces the users on good behavior to start. I absolutely love this idea

of having Bitcoin brokerages, not exchanges, right? I think that provides a much better behavior in the market. And, you know, and as Lynn was pointing, I mean, we can see that coming to Roos now. It's like, I've never seen this before, where like you have users actually new bitcoiners or or C-5 burnt Bitcoiners, now Bitcoiners, you know, buying the Bitcoin, buying the harder wallet, taking custody immediately and moving on to their lives. I find that that's like refreshing. It's, it's incredible to see. And it's, you've seen so much of it.

And it's almost, it's exciting, but at the same time, a little disheartening when you see so many tweets and stuff. How do I self-custody? Like people just coming into the space totally unaware, even the steps to begin doing that when that was effectively the default from the get-go. And then it kind of shifted to you get your Coinbase account and then that's your wallet, you know, or whatever exchange you happen to be using. But like it got perverted for a while, but it seems like this kind of cleansing.

is making people kind of go back to the roots of why this thing exists in the first place. You know, that's something I don't like about my two big competitors, and I talk to them with friends with them, Leisure and Thraser. They have their UI, right? And their UI is literally a feed to buy shit coins straight into the Carter wallet, right? And I'm like, come on, guys. Can you just like, you know, let's just be friendly. Can you just like shave off the scrap and just come up with a solution that,

you know if people are not buying my product they just go and i can send them to you and they just buy just the bitcoin and the rest of the crap is not there because like people don't know and they get tempted right oh look this one is cheaper than bitcoin and they press the button this one went up 200% today it says so it's green it's great press button right like it's just removing that temptation from the screen it's it's really like a huge game for people yeah well and i mean you don't even offer up a screen at all it's like go go find a third party you know piece of software to interact with the device like that's i i kind of like that idea where somebody is a bit of thought of like what do i what do i want to use this device with and yeah

i like that that separation of nonetheless um to make people think yeah yeah yeah thinking is not a bad thing. You know, it's not, it's not, I recognize, I'm always torn with stuff like this because I recognize the, the, a, a single win is better than nothing at all. And like, if it's the difference between getting off zero and never having exposure to Bitcoin, then sure. But like, you want to get them, you want to get them as far down that rabbit hole as possible. And so, you know, I, I try to take the approach in when I'm teaching anybody of, you know, how, how tentative is the person in terms of learning? Are they super worried? And then based on that, I'll say, okay, well, step one, just do this.

Do this one step, you know, get some Bitcoin. You know, and then we'll go from there. And then, okay, get a wallet on your phone, take 20 bucks off and put it into that wallet, delete it, and then try and recover it. If you can do that, awesome, good for you. That's all you need. That's a winner. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's already way better than most people, right?

Because if you gift them Bitcoin, they will lose. A hundred percent. Everybody gave Bitcoin 10 years ago, they lost it. Oh, for sure. Me too. 100 percent of them. I had some guy, like, finally figure out, he found his wallet and I'd give him like 20. I don't know why I'd give him 20 bucks, but I give him 20 bucks like forever ago. And they opened it up. It was like a few hundred dollars. Yeah. He's dancing around like an idiot.

But, you know, like you have those moments where you're like, how much did I give you? Oh, God. Just like pissing money away. I don't do that anymore. Like I let people ask me questions. You know, if they want to test, you know, I'll send like a lightning transaction back and forth or something just to, but I find if you place value on something, somebody will place value on it.

If you place no value on it and you're just giving it away, they don't ascribe any value to that. And so then it becomes like a, oh, I got this for free. If I lose it, it's no big deal. So yeah, yeah. Anyways, with that, I'm going to do, I'm going to round it out. I'm going to finish up that topic and we'll, we'll do one more rotation. Rodolfo, I'm going to, I'm going to pass it to you. I'm not sure if we touched a little bit on, on why you're bullish already, but I'm going to let you run with it anyways. So, man, have Adder. Mike's yours. Why am I bullish? Why have been always bullish about Bitcoin?

Because there is no alternative. I mean, there really isn't. And it's weird to exist in a world where there is no alternative. I mean, like, when you really look around you and you see the things that you required for your life, right? like your internet, your food, that you really need. You know, they all require money. And, you know, I was fortunate to have Brazil issues in my early days in life. But, you know, most people in North America never had to deal with banking haircuts or bank freezes or things like that.

And we live in weird times. And, you know, the boomers have screwed the pooch. they will leave a dumpster fire to the next generation. And they're very selfish generation. They'll take everything they can with them. And I just don't see how everybody else survives long term economically and in freedom terms, right? And Bitcoin is this beacon of hope, but just also. like fuck you and I have all the firepower right like I have all the computation and I make I make

your greed be my defense it's just it's this absolutely perfect imperfect system that that enables us to sort of still exist as as free humans on the next sort of whatever the fuck happens I mean like you know, we're looking at dollar euro parity, like coming. Like, you know, like we're looking at everything sort of like going to be in this weird state of like no collapse, semi-collapse. And how to transverse that without losing your mind and still enjoying your everyday life. Right. And Bitcoin allows for that. Like it gives you this sort of like,

this this like actionable non-bossit hope right like it's like there is this thing that if i can survive its volatility i'm out on the other end right and and you know it's like in the beginning we're all in it because it's a technology is a joke but it's actually true because if you thought the bitcoin was going to work out in the early days you're either crazy uh or you're crazy like you know It was an experiment. It was still an experiment up until a few years ago, right? And now we have this thing that's like half a trillion dollars and everybody has to pay attention to,

even though it's only half a trillion dollars, which is absolutely nothing for a financial universe. So I don't know. It's just, it's kind of like the Internet. When that happened, like, you know, in Brazil, I could access a library in a different country. So like now I can access economically anything I want. and it's a special thing.

And, you know, it's a special thing that leverages humans to exist without admin keys. It's just never existed before. It's Bitcoin is Bitcoin. It's this new thing that just solves the problem. I want to touch on you were talking about how this, the existence of Bitcoin, It's like a tool that leverages all the greed that was exerted by previous generations and further empowers that tool. It makes me think of, and I would have trouble like naming a character,

but like in comic books or something when you know, you have the heroes and they're throwing everything at the guy and he's just absorbing all of the energy to like throw it right back at them. It's a black hole. Yeah, exact same thing. Like it's, it's the more that that the systems of old are utilized, the more the money printer go burr as like a way of of trying to channel power, the more Bitcoin itself is empowered because it, the, the mere act of money printer go burr in the long run. It actually hurts that system when there's an alternative present and it empowers Bitcoin over time. And I love that dichotomy of, in the absence of Bitcoin, absolutely, you know, that that money printer gober.

That's a powerful thing because you're literally reallocating value as you see fit because there's no other way to store it if everybody's on that particular standard. But as more people shift over to this alternative way, the tools that were mechanisms of power, those in charge previously become tools of their own demise in the long run. Yeah. Yeah. So you have the correct human or animal behavior is to acquire more stuff and grow its pile and reproduce more, right? So that's just a natural human state. And then humans through collaboration,

improved over animals and sort of like figure out how you can find a way of sort of like doing this a little better so we don't all kill each other and we progress as a species instead of just like a single thing so that's a standard right you have the the human standard in a way right how do we survive this all together you know kind of so what bitcoin does is it it sort of brings that without a human without having the back door for a human to sort of take advantage of the other humans, right? So we have a standard in which we don't have to like each other, but if you screw my standard, you screw your standard. And that never existed before. Even with gold, that was not true. Because you'd find a way, either through your armies or through your clipping of the coins, or, you know, you'd find a way to lower, to devalue.

or debase your currency somehow to get an upper hand on that and that trade, which is the natural behavior. And I think people forget that that is the normal human state. And Bitcoin prevents the human state from taking over the network. I don't know. It's beautiful. I'll open this up to Lynn or Corey,

but is Bitcoin one of those inventions that recognizes and fixes default human tendencies. Is that what we're dealing with here? Do you want to take it, Len? I could jump in, but you look like you're going to say something. Go ahead.

I feel like the people want to hear from Len, so I'll keep it super short. But, no, I was just going to say, like, this just gets back to money being sort of such a fundamental good that we have. You know, I think it's probably the second most important thing behind energy that we can, that we can sort of use energy means that you have. agriculture and some other things. So it's not quite as important as having this way of communicating value person to person. Being able to do that at a global scale, you know, near for free and near instantly is just a totally massive paradigm shift, maybe the biggest thing since we harness energy,

you know. So I'm just, we're all going to change because this exists now. We've never actually had good money before. We've only had poor analogies for money previously, poor copies of money, poor imitations, I should say. So yeah, by definition, we will all change. We will change because the supply doesn't go up. We will change because we can cooperate with people around the world. Kids in countries that have inflationary currencies will learn math much faster because they don't have to deal with like $10 trillion bills.

And, you know, my wife's confusion in Turkey when like one day all of a sudden they chopped six zeros off the lira. And she was like, how do I buy candy now? Anyway, sorry, I had to finish with some comedy. Lynn, I'll pass it to you. Yeah, so I see it similarly. I mean, I think that, you know, human nature, obviously that's a very slow changing thing. I mean, we, but obviously there's technology. around us dictates what kind of things we do and who we become, right?

So, for example, the fact that we all, like, walk around with, like, supercomputers in our pocket now. We're in global encyclopedias. That changes how we interact with each other and interact with the world, right? So, and I think that changing the nature of money does something similar, right? I mean, if you're in a country where, you know, you have high inflation or authoritarian issues, the more widespread Bitcoin is there, that makes a difference, right? And so, for example, I view it as asymmetric, kind of anti-authoritarian anti-inflation technology. And I think that's something that is good that the world has that.

And it's, you know, kind of going back to the thing of like, is it a discovery and invention? I think that something like it was inevitable. Once you have a certain number of pieces of technology, it was inevitable that someone was going to put the pieces together. But it's amazing that the first person who put it together wasn't like a scammer. Imagine if someone was like the smarter Satoshi, but it was like a scammer. and just was like made bitcoin but like did a pre-mine and like was like a weird personality and like didn't leave right that'd be that would have like kind of tainted the whole thing and the fact that the person who actually kind of put the pieces together just kind of put it out there and updated a little bit and then left and it had just like a really down-to-earth personality did no pre-mine you know it's it's just amazing that it worked out like that i think that's you know it's kind of i think it's you know it's hard to go back and determine the probability of that but the fact that the fact that the first one was this well designed, I think it's pretty remarkable. And go ahead.

Sorry, go ahead. And just to finish my point, I mean, so, you know, for thousands of years, money and people moved at the same speed, you know, speed of foot, horses, and boats. Then, you know, we invented the telegraph and the telephone. We laid undersea cables. And then from there, we could update ledges around the world instantly, but our money still had to move slowly, gold, silver, things like that. And so we had to abstract it more than it already was.

We already had to abstract it for divisibility and portability, but now we absolutely had it abstracted just to keep up with our commerce. And then, you know, ever since 2009, for the first time we have a bare asset that moves at the same speed of commerce. And that's just slowly kind of rippling out to the world as we figure what that means. Yeah. Just drawing on that, like the Bitcoin design, it's so beautiful and weird. Very weird.

It's full of magical numbers. And everybody know that when you program and when you design a system, you don't add magical numbers because that never ends well. And Bitcoin is weird that way because it's essentially like a collection of magical numbers. You know, you have the, you know, how the distribution works. All these things are just magical numbers. Somebody picked them. And you're just economically absolutely perfect in relation to the technology, right? Like in all the trade-offs, just this magical trade-off system, they're like, you.

Even if Satoshi was a scammer, which, who knows, maybe he probably was. Maybe he's in jail right now for other reasons. And it doesn't matter. The system was designed in a way in a time where there were no other scammers. And if he was a scammer who did too much free mine, Bitcoin probably would not have taken off. You know, Satoshi could have mined a bunch of other blocks under different pseudonyms post the post the first block

right like for years after he could still be mining now I mean and and we would not know and you would not make any difference because the economics of it keeps the checks and balances right because if you was dumping it the system would have disappeared too

so we have this extremely special and interesting thing that has this magical properties right economical projects. And that's why it's been so hard for anything else to come after that and take Bitcoin's lunch. Because there is a lot better technology out there.

I mean, if you're being very honest, right? There is stuff that has way better privacy. One of the reasons why a lot of academics don't like Bitcoin is because the privacy is atrocious. The cryptography is weird. The choice of curve is not the best. Like there's all these peculiarities, right? that just would write set of trade-offs that actually pushed off a lot of people that maybe would have ruined the problem, the project of the beginning too. It's a very weird, interesting

system. Well, it's like, yeah, it's accidental immutability. Because if you look at the initial forum post, right, so Satoshi, you know, at the beginning he would just make updates and just kind of pushed, you know, just send the updates out. It was assumed that people would just update them. And, you know, he even, when he was asked about block size, he's like, yeah, we can phase that in and, you know, we'll just have to make sure people know to update. It's just like casually assuming that, that, you know, that we're going to accept the updates. And by leaving so early on in the process, that's kind of what made this thing that was sort of this kind of normal piece of software,

suddenly become this kind of truly innovative thing where you can't know what there's no one there to push updates to you. Here's a fun one that a lot of people don't know. There was poker in the original client. There was like the building blocks to make a poker casino in the original client. I mean, Satoshi was like definitely thinking of this as a means of exchange for a world that is adversarial, right? I've got a question. Oh, sorry, Lynn, you go ahead. Yeah, I got a question.

I mean, it's so hard for every other founder to step away, right? So, for example, Ethereum, they've had difficulty bombs on the code, and it's like seven years now. They won't let go of power, right? And so it's just remarkable that so early on in this one, they let go of power. And that's what allowed it to kind of become, you know, some credibly immutable system. You know, Satoshi kind of had a little bit of a user revolt on the beginning. Like people were not sort of like taking the updates as much. Like it did get weird around that time when he was like, it's pre-departure still.

And because the dynamics were already sort of like correct, right? dynamics were designed so that he expels any sort of admin person from the project. That's why there's always this Mexican standoff in Bitcoin, which is its security, right? It's like the miners, the devs, and the economic nodes all pointing guns at each other, right? Like, it's absolutely perfect. I had a question for you guys. So to Lynn's point, I believe, it's amazing that the first person to do this wasn't just, some scammer that was going to pre-mine and do all this shady stuff.

If that had been the case, would Bitcoin have even been possible? Because at that point, I mean, part of part of the reason why Bitcoin became as resilient as it is, is it had that time to grow unabated because nobody realized there was any value there. Right. And so it had this kind of germination period where it was just left alone, was able to grow. And then everything that came thereafter in some way, shape, or form could and oftentimes was tainted because, you know, obviously identifiable founders, pre-mines, ways of issuing it that, that, you know, were not, quote, unquote, fair. or just massive tradeoffs in decentralization in order to achieve some feature that Bitcoin didn't have yet.

In a world where Satoshi launched Bitcoin did some massive pre-mine, tainted it in some way, made it scammie, you know, tried to personally benefit in some clearly nefarious way. would would the creation of a better system even have been possible given the framework that was set forth and the recognition that value could be had there would would we have bitcoin what do you guys think just i guess like just two points on that one is i highly recommend people reading a little bit of bitcoin prehistory the the nakamoto institute has some great tax on that and understand what was happening at the time too. Liberty Reserve guys had just gone to jail. And an e-gold guy was having, like, essentially, like there were many attempts by cypherpunks and other people, too,

completely unrelated to the movement, to try to create a digital means of exchange that was outside of the bullshit captured financial system, right? And, and, and, and, and, and, and, And every single attempt was miserable failure, right? It was either capture by like bad guys or by the bad guys of the state. There was always something. And, you know, Satoshi's true genius there was really solving a computer science problem, which is the two generals problem. I mean, the Byzantine general problem does resolve the issue.

And that's, that's, that's, like, so it wouldn't matter, like, if Satuishes nefarious or not, or anything like that, the invention, it's like, it's like, you know, do we care that Tesla had a drug problem? No. Like, I mean, he resolved, you know, a lot of, like, electric issues, right? Like, uh, it's one of those things. Like, he solved, like, a real scientific breakthrough. Um, and, and, and, and, like, the personality. and all these things don't matter because it could have essentially just delayed, but you can only delay electricity so far. I'm going to, I know we're tight on time here for a couple of you guys. So I'm going to start rounding this out here. But I just want to go around really quick. And I want to get any final thoughts. And I'm also going to challenge you guys just one quick question is to recommend a piece of content,

whatever it may be, podcast, video, audio, book, website, anything that you have found useful in your Bitcoin journey or something tangential to Bitcoin. So I'm going to start here with, I see I'm grabbing something right now. I'm going to start you with Corey. Final thoughts on anything that was said today, anything that you want to wrap up, and then a recommendation. if you can. This was fun. I love Bitcoin. Never been more bullish on Bitcoin than now,

which is crazy because it seems like you'd be all psyched at Bitcoin 69K. But I understand now what the OGs were saying. Like the bare markets are actually happy times for Bitcoiners because you can just you can think more, you can build more, and you can kind of make these connections that are going to carry you through the next time shit gets nuts again. So since I was here in studio, in Canada with all you find Canucks. I have to recommend Tomer Strolites, amazing coffee table quality, beautiful book,

Y Bitcoin. And he'll be signing these at Pacific Bitcoin in November in the Swan Dome. I already got mine signed and it's a beautiful note that you guys don't get to look at. But, you know, Tomer like just smacked me across the face a little over a year ago.

It was probably like 15, 16 months ago right at the beginning of 2021 that he started posting a lot of these medium articles and people started picking up that there was just this incredibly insightful and eloquent new writer that was putting out an incredible volume of work. He was just doing a new essay like every three or four days. Anyway, we got to be friends. We weren't just like immediately sympathico like I am with a lot of the swans and I really loved that. You know, it took us a second. to catch our vibe, but we just had such a great mutual appreciation for Bitcoin. And I certainly appreciated his just immense talent.

And we were lucky enough to snag him as editor-in-chief for all the Swan stuff last summer. So I've been working together full-time for over a year. And I just think this book is a tour to force. And it just really, if you haven't read much of Tomor Strolite stuff, you should definitely follow him on Twitter. And I highly recommend picking up why Bitcoin. And it's one of those books that you don't just want on a Kendall. Like you want to grab that physical book of it.

It's one of those ones you want to hold and touch and feel. That's my RECO. I love it. And Tomer was just on the show last week and he's super awesome. So yeah, definitely check it out. I've ordered my copy. So it's on the way. I didn't get to pick it up at Bitcoin 2021.

I missed him, but I will have my copy soon. So awesome. Lynn, I'll toss to you. Any final thoughts? Any recommendations? Take it away. So I'll echo something that Corey said earlier, which is that basically that there's so much interesting things happening on lightning. And that it's just, you know, big pools of capital institutions, they're just completely not looking at lightning at all.

It's completely off the radar of so many things. But basically it's over the past couple of years, they've really hit critical mass in terms of feasibility, liquidity. And, you know, to the extent that I see all these startups starting to build it out throughout the development world and throughout the, you know, the whole world. I think that's one of the bullish things to keep an eye on. And that even outside of lighting, just development that's happening throughout the ecosystem to make Bitcoin better, more usable for people is huge. And it's, I forget who said it, but basically this won't be seen until there's another bull market. And people like, where did all this stuff come from? It's because so many people are building it right now and that there are

people that are raising capital, deploying capital over the middle of a bare market. And it's super valuable. For recommendations, I guess I have two. One would be swan.com slash canon, which is basically like a big learning resource that that's user created that people can go to. I did one, but a lot of like tons of other people put together canons. And the whole point there is that everybody's kind of an expert in something. And so kind of it made a platform for a number of people to kind of put a lot of content in something that they love and that they're passionate about their knowledge of about, to kind of teach the world about that niche, that niche about Bitcoin and, you know, Bitcoin Gaming, Bitcoin privacy, whatever the subject might be, there's like a whole rabbit hole you can go

down, which I like. And to kind of tie back to the Oslo Freedom Form thing, I would also recommend Alex Gladstein's book, Check Your Financial Privilege. I think that's, it's kind of looking at the whole thing from a different angle than many other Bitcoin books. I can kind of speak to a different audience, I think. It's basically about the human rights angle of financial freedom basically. So I would see check that out. Awesome. I love both those recommendations. Book

is great. Canon's awesome. So yeah, awesome. Thank you, Lynn. And Rodolfo, you are up last. Final thoughts and recommendations. Take it away. So I've been having I was having a huge, hard time

sort of trying to keep track of apps and like projects. updates and new things and technical stuff happening because there's just so much happening in Bitcoin that I started upon completely unorganized and Matt sort of was kind enough to be my guest and essentially it's Bitcoin.com. I bought a domain and just trying to gather project releases new projects, no twervy stuff. In a boring way, it's not the price.

There's no macro. There is no, like, it's just like, okay, this is cool stuff. People are working on, some notes on it, project release notes. And the first one was a blast. It was a tweet in the morning and up recording in the afternoon kind of thing. That's how the whole thing happened. and we're recording the next one next week. So if people do have projects that are like amazing

and nobody knows about or new software releases, especially if they're boring, please do let us know. Go to the website. There is a submit story there on the top, right? You know, there's no sponsors. It's just we're just doing for the fun. because I need a way of reviewing what's going on in the space every few weeks. So, you know, we're trying that and maybe they'll get us some interesting highlights on new stuff.

So, yeah, I just wanted to sort of bring that up there. Awesome. I love it, man. I love it. I'm going to be checking it out. Everybody, I'm going to round it out here. I'm going to say thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate all your time.

This is a lot of fun. Fridays are always the best. I get to hang out with the coolest people. So I appreciate you all. And of course, you are all welcome back anytime. Thanks. This was fun.

All right. Thanks, guys. I'll see you soon. All right. And everybody watching, thank you so much for being here. Fridays are always the best part of my week. I get to chill out with awesome bitcoins.

And just chat. So there were a ton of people here. today watching commenting i really do appreciate all of you of course uh as always do like subscribe share all those things are super important they really do help the show leave a comment down below if you're watching this via uh streaming sats on something like fountain or breeze smash that boost button um of course you can help the show in another way you can always hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below you can hit up uh shake page I am now all of my shake pay lead and bit refill keystone Bill Fottle.

They're all in front of me now. And if you really like the show, you can always hit me up with a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. That is strike. That is strike.combe slash BTC sessions. You head there. You hit the tip button. You'll see a lightning invoice. Or if you tap to the right, you see a regular Bitcoin QR code.

With that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be. I'll see you guys next time for. your daily session.