BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Dan Gould, Lawrence Lepard, Dom Bei Bitcoin - Uncovering Their Bullish Insights ep354

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/bitgould https://twitter.com/LawrenceLepard https://twitter.com/Beiwatch1 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted mutisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ 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 Server Lite,One or Pro 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. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION 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/ Been watching the show for a while? Like what you see? Help me cover my video costs by sending some sats over on my Geyser Fund page! https://geyser.fund/project/btcsessions

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. It's another Friday. It's another episode of Why Are We Bullish? Very excited to get things going. I'm pumped this week. I just finished. I did four tutorials this week.

It was a lot. But I'm prepping because I'm flying out. I'm going to be in Italy for most of the summer. I'm very excited about it. Taking the whole family. If you're in Italy, mostly southern Italy or Malta or perhaps London, because I'm stopping there on the way home. let me know.

Maybe I can come hang out, meet you for a little bit. But either way, this is going to be a lot of fun. Very excited for the show. We've got all first time guess. This is going to be a good one. And we'll bring them in momentarily. Of course, as always, this is live. Anything can happen.

So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Fuck it. Do it live. I can. I'll write it.

and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you haven't already, like, subscribe, share, all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. Shout out to everybody watching live from YouTube, Twitter, Rumble, and Noster.

We're streaming live to Nosterer. So shout out to my Nostrges, drop a zap. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our guest list, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. This is

Timechain Calendar.com. We're sitting at $30,283 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 3,302 sats. In terms of fees, next block, 18 sats per byte. If you're willing to wait a little bit, nine sats per bite should do you.

Mempool is currently purging anything sub around two and a half sats. Call it three sats per bite. And in terms of mined Bitcoin, 19.4.4 million Bitcoin have been mine. that's 92.52% of the entire supply. Shout to sponsor the show, hoddlehottle.com. If you're stacking sats and you've got some priorities in mind like peer to peer trading, instant self-custy, no KYC.

Sign up here. Super easy. Sign up with nothing more than an email address. Get in there. Head down. Choose a currency, a payment method, an amount. And you can start viewing offers right away and be stacking those non-KYC sats or vice versa if you really need to. They also have a peer-to-peer lending platform in which nothing is ever.

re-hypublicated. Check them out. Links are in the show notes. When you do stack those non-Kyccats, get it in some of the best hardware on the market. Coin Kite is always killing it. The cold card mark four is my go-to hardware device. I also love all the other stuff they're doing the tap signer, the block clock, open dime, stats cards, and coming soon. The cold card Q1, can't wait for that one. If you want to reserve it or if you want to pick up any of the things that I mentioned, head over to coin kite.com. Use code BTC sessions for 5% off. If you're looking to go beyond, single sig and check out multi-sig, check out Nunchuk.io for their assisted multi-sig. You can set it up super easy to do on your mobile phone.

It works with things like the TAPSigner and the cold card and a bunch of other hardware options. It also has baked in inheritance planning, so your sats will get to your next of kin, if anything should happen to you. And one of my favorite things about it, also no K-YC. So it doesn't require personal information to be set up and work for you. So head over to Nunchuk. And finally, shout it to Start 9, your sovereign computing solution. I love these guys and what they're doing. They've got devices for every level, wherever you're at.

They've got kind of entry level all the way up to what I'm now running, which is the Start 9 server pure. It is robust as hell. You can run your Bitcoin stack like Bitcoin Core, Lightning, mempool. That space. You can also host your data, files, passwords, photos, Noster relays, nostriles, nostril clients, a whole bunch of other stuff. Check them out, start9.com.

and I've got a full tutorial on what they're doing too. Anyways, enough of my rambling. Let's get our guests in here. I want to welcome to the stage. Dan, Larry, and Dom. Welcome, guys. I'm so happy to have you. I think, given your all first-time guests,

if the audience is unfamiliar, let's do a quick round of, who are you, and what do you do? I'll toss it to Dan first. Welcome, man. Let people know who you are, what you do. Thanks, Ben. I'm Dan.

I've been working on Bitcoin Privacy for about, six years. So I started with privacy applications, stuff that does coin join, some other lesser known protocol called Tumblebit, making sure everything works with TOR. And over the years, I've come to see privacy as more of a systems problem than an applications problem. So I'm working on getting pay join into all the apps across the Bitcoin ecosystem. There's a lot of adoption happening. There's a lot of incentive to use pay join because we have fee savings with it. And yeah, I'm stoked to talk about it. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you, man. Again, I've, I've kind of been watching what you're up to on

Twitter and seen you around. And I think it's only fitting that we finally get you on the show. So thanks for being here, man. I appreciate it. Larry, it's good to see you. I saw you in Toronto. You were on stage with Foss. You guys knocked it out of the park. And it was the live. far, by far the most entertaining talk I watched the entire time. So I'm super glad to have you. I need to say that. Nice to join you finally for one of these. I know we've been talking about for a while.

Foss is a tough act to follow. So I'm Larry Lippert. I run a fund that focuses on sound money and I'm a big advocate for sound money. I've been for a bunch of years, really 30 or 40 years. So that means I came from the gold space. But once I found Bitcoin, I've come to realize it's a better choice. But I still have some legacy gold positions. and so I guess I bring the macro to this party.

These guys are techy. I'm not. But I do follow the macro picture pretty well. We'll talk about that. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you, man. And let's toss down the line to Dom. Dude, it's good to see you.

I think I last saw you. Did I see you in Miami or did I see you also in L.A. last year for Pacific? I can't remember which. I'm going to go with both for the win on that one. I saw you both briefly in Miami at the Swan House, saw you in Pacific. And before, Larry, I appreciate the technical label on there. But for someone that didn't have his mic plugged in and was trying to troubleshoot that,

I'm going to say, I'm with you. I'm going to roll with you on this on the non-technical. I'm a firefighter. And I've been a firefighter for 14 years. Used to be on a union board. I was the president of the Santa Monica firefighters. and I work now to Orange Bill workers, unions, pension funds, and try to bring like education-based sustainable adoption to unions and workers in the

workforce. So that's my background. Love that. So do you sometimes confer with the blue collar podcast boys? You know, I have the, you know, from Pacific, I got the great opportunity to get connected with them and we haven't looked back since. those guys tremendously. So it's, you know, looking forward to seeing them at Pacific.

I told them, look a one-way flight to Pacific. You don't need a return flight because it's going to be an insane week. I love it. I love it. All right. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Very excited. Shout it to everybody that's currently in the chat.

We now have the live chat up on the side of the screen. So everything that you post, good or bad, will be live for better or worse. So do with that what you will. but this if you're unfamiliar is why are we bullish? If you're unfamiliar with the show, very simple concept. We're all coming to the show

with a reason for being bullish, something that's top of mind that we're excited about. It doesn't have to be price. It can be a personal experience. It can be an item of news. It could be an application or a device or whatever it may be.

We're just coming with something we're excited about. So the flow of the show is very simple. Somebody is going to drop a reason why they're bullish. then altogether we're going to riff on that reason questions comments whatever it may be and then third we're going to rotate until everybody has had a turn so somebody's going to get to rant on the reason we're all going to chat about it and then we're going to rotate until we're all done reason riff rotate simple um and today i'm going to get us started and uh this week i'm

i'm super bullish because and it's funny because we were chatting just before the show you know Larry is saying that he's, you know, not super technical. Dom's messing with his with his mic and everything. But I'm actually super bullish because people are much smarter when they need to be than they give themselves credit for. And the reason I say this is I've been, you know, I do these one-on-ones with people where people can book me out and get me to help them with hardware wallets or, you know, whatever aspect of Bitcoin they may be investigating. And I got to tell you, I am nothing but impressed with some of the people that that call me up. And I'm talking like, yes, of course, I get some people that are a bit younger and everything, but I'm mostly impressed with some of the people that call me up and they're maybe a little bit older.

I had a guy that I was chatting to 79. And he was working on getting, he was asking about non-KY. YC Sats. He was asking about different types of hardware. He was starting to dabble in multi-sig. 79. The other guy I was just chatting with earlier this week, and he's knocking it out of the park, getting his cold card going with Sparrow wallet for the first time. And those of you that have used Sparrow wallet, you know, like, it's, when you first look at it, it's scary as fuck. There's a lot of information in front of you. And you're like, I don't know. This is too much.

All it took for this guy to feel comfortable was just simply kind of pointing out the areas to focus on. Hey, you only really need to be focusing on this right now. You're receiving here. You're sending here. This is what you're doing with the cold card. It's kind of like giving a signature on a credit card transaction. That's what you're doing. You're just getting that information to and from proving that you're allowed to spend the money.

And with a few simple explanations, the comfort level is just completely different from the beginning of the hour to the end of the hour. And so my reason for being bullish is I honestly believe, I honest to God believe that anybody that thinks that the average person will not be able to self custody in the future from a technical perspective from it being, oh, this is too difficult for me. I don't understand it. I think they're fucking delusional. And the reason I think that is because, one, I already see people that I wouldn't expect be able to do it that are doing it. But two, things are going to change and become much easier. Looking at Sparrow wallet and looking at Cold Card and everything, yes, it can be very daunting.

But people can still get it if they have the will. The thing that I think is going to happen is all of these interferes. are going to get far simpler. They'll still have advanced features for those that want to use them, but that'll be kind of pushed the background for those if you choose to use them. But like if you think about it today, you know, I have an 80-something-year-old grandmother-in-law. And like she's never been on the Internet until like last year.

And now she's like using messenger. and understands her way around an iPad. The fact that you can today that the average retiree has no qualms just picking up an iPad and getting on a video call is had you said that, you know, 20 years ago, everybody would say you're insane. It was completely inaccessible. We're going to go through. And this isn't even a generational thing.

It was just a let's get the interface simpler so that somebody. can tap and go. And I think we're going to see that with Bitcoin. I think we're going to see that with all of the interface and all the things we're using. And again, I'm seeing it today. I'm seeing some of the most complex shit done by people that you would not expect to do it. And for that reason, I'm beyond bullish that people that care to and want to will be able to self-custody, not just with difficulty.

with ease, with ease in the future. And so that's why I'm bullish. That's why I'm excited. And I'm going to open it up to the panel, guys. I want to know if you agree, disagree, quasi, agree with me, and what you've been seeing. So whoever wants to dive in, go ahead. For the first time in giving some more technical talks about Bitcoin, I've seen people grasp it more and more recently, too. You don't need to talk about some fundamental things because people have seen it in the news.

People have been familiar. And yeah, I think self-custody is a lot more palatable. I like the comparison to video chat being just part of reality now. That's really an element of virtual reality that, like, yeah, you just pick up an iPad and you enter the metaverse. You enter cyberspace. It's great to see that. And it's bullish for Bitcoin. It's coming.

Yeah, it's happening. I'm going to also go bullish on this, Ben. If there was a little pop-up thing, I'm pressing the bullish button on this. I think the, you know, it's interesting. You mentioned your grandma, and I looked at, you know, what ended up when my grandma started using an iPhone. And the connection with people was key. and we know that Bitcoin offers a tremendous,

tremendous amount of connections to be made between, like, people in the space. But sending sats is something that comes to mind immediately, right? And once people start sending sats and they see it, you know, wherever they're at with their friends and things like that, they're going to be like, hey, what are you doing? And sending sats and they'll take the time to learn and figure that out. And I think that it's an important generation to learn Bitcoin because they're also most susceptible to inflation because they can't earn wages anymore.

A lot of, you know, a lot of older folks can't work. Not all, but some, you know, can't really get out there and do manual labor as easily anymore. And so, you know, their money is fragile. So I'm going to say bullish. And I think it's just a matter of time and they'll be able to figure out self-custody. I'm totally with you. And I feel strongly the same way.

I think that it's been, it's been inaccurately. reported how hard it is to do because I've had a lot of older clients that I've taught. I've literally gone through, you know, this is a treasurer. Let's plug it in together. Let's set up your 12 words, you know, the whole thing. And it reminds me very much, you know, I was around in the internet in 93 and 4 and, you know, you were dialing up on modems. And before the browser, before Netscape introduced the browser, I mean, it was literally green screens, you know, and, you know, there was no point and click, none of that shit. And yet, you know, look at what happened. And so I think the combination of two things. One, anybody who wants to

learn it can learn it. Obviously, if you say I hate technology and I'm not going to, you know, take the time to learn it, I'm not even going to let you teach me it. Well, then you're not going to figure it out. But having said that, you know, you look at Fetament, which, you know, Obie gave me a demo of it the last time I saw him. And you look at how, you know, how easy it's going to be to create a federation and to have that federation, you know, verify you and so on and so forth. I mean, this is going to get dead ass simple. So, that really anybody can do it. And it has to, honestly, to get 8 billion people using it.

But it will, in my opinion. The technology will solve the problems. As you say, the people who want to go deep dive can go deep dive. But, you know, there'll be an idiot-proof interface, you know, available within a few years. And, you know, that's going to completely change the game as I see it. So I'm massively bullish like you. Yeah. It's interesting because, again, you make reference to,

again, early 90s of internet and, and, you know, how, how rudimentary some of the interfaces were and, and just general use. And, you know, we see, we, I've previously seen some of that with Bitcoin. And you can still see some of that with Bitcoin, depending on what you're trying to do. But like, you also see things where just so many of the difficult aspects of it are, are already being obfuscated in the background. I mean, lightning's kind of a, a perfect example where, you know, we, when I first started playing around with it myself in 2018, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know what a channel was and everything. And then it got to a point where, okay, I can kind of, I can kind of start using lightning

a little bit. And it was, it was difficult, but I kind of started figuring it out. And then it was like, oh, I can do this easily, but it's custodial. So like, have I gained anything? here. And now it's starting to get at the point where non-custodial lightning is download an app, hit get started, and then hit receive. And it's non-custodial. Like I'm not relying on somebody else to manage channels. It's all automated in the background, but I'm interacting with lightning and it's self-custody. So I've seen this with a lot of different things. You know, you see, you know, running a node and connecting your wallets to it used to be a hell of a task. Now you're starting to see these plug and play options where you get like you get your own bitcoin note for

those that want to run one you can connect your wallets relatively simply it will get simpler but like the point is you're you're seeing that trajectory in the run your own software stack option and you're starting to see it with other things like multi-said you're starting to see it with even just general bitcoin wallets have gotten a lot better from when I first started using them and I think that's amazing. So I'm super excited. Larry, do you, is there something that you do regularly today that you think back of, you know, 20 years ago and you're like, holy crap, I can't believe it's actually easy? Was there something that you were assuming was not going to be easy in the future that you wouldn't touch? And then now you're like, oh, actually, it's,

it's fine. Oh, gosh, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, you know, using my computer, I mean, I've never been very technically oriented. And, you know, I was always a little bit intimidated by a computer. And, you know, I mean, you look at email browsing the web, you know, all the things we do just so naturally and so intuitively. I, you know, I could never have imagined them. I never imagined the way the whole thing would evolve. And I was involved with the, you know, with the internet very early on. And I just got hooked because somebody said, hey, back then there was something called Novell. The older guys on the call will remember it. But it was email, but within an office. So you just hooked up. all your computers together. Somebody gave me a card that had an internet address. I sent it to my internet address. What's that? Well, imagine if you had Novell worldwide. That's pretty powerful.

And so, yeah, I mean, everything we do today is kind of amazing. I mean, you know, I recall, I was around, I'm sure you how old I was, I was around with the first IBM PC came out in 1981 and it replaced the Wang word processor. And that was really the basic use of the PC for the first version. I'll never forget my boss. I was at a venture capital for my, never get my boss saying, well, this is like a really nice IBM Selectic, but I can't see what else we're going to use this thing for.

And how is it kind of like, hey, dude, you know, we really ought to be investing in this shit because I think it's going to get really useful as time goes by, right? You know, so, so yeah, things change, right? A lot. And, and of course, and we don't know how they're going to change. I mean, you couldn't, you know, who could foresee eBay or who could foresee, you know, just all the things, all the things that will pop up as time goes by. We can't even imagine them today.

But there will be major, major changes in killer apps that are coming that we're not even aware of today. It's so exciting, right? Yeah, I agree. Along those lines of doing things I never thought I would do. And Dan will appreciate this. I never, I never, ever thought I would explore trying to reuse code on a computer. But instead in up my own node and exploring lightning, like I took that step, not, you know, if you guys would have seen me set, try to set up, I hit you up, Ben, about trying to set up a Lightning Node on a Mac operating

system without a third-party platform and without changing the operating system. My joke is that I'm not on speaking terms with chat GPT because of this interaction. We're in a fight right now. But that being said, I would have never started to like play around with code. Not that I have any talent or ability to do that if it weren't for Bitcoin. Never. So, you know, it's just one. area that some I never thought I'd do. Bitcoin gets you curious on a lot of things, like it sends you down a lot of different rabbit holes that you may not have explored otherwise, which is fantastic.

I want to address, there's one question in the, because we're talking lightning really quick, there's one question in the chat that I'm going to bring up. Somebody said, Jura said, what is the best lightning non-custodio wallet? And they asked if it was Phoenix. In my opinion, and maybe I don't know if anybody has a different opinion here.

In my opinion, I really enjoy Phoenix for a mobile non-custodial lightning wallet. I really like it because when I was saying that you can now download a wallet and get started and then receive and just go, that's the one I was referring to. And I did a video on it recently. And it's pretty easy to use. They still don't have a lightning wallet where you can do that and then also have like a lightning address. the little things that look like an email address that people can can send sats to but i think that's just around the corner it sounded like zeus is working on that with evan colludis um

so that would be awesome if we if we saw that as well but anyways i don't know if anybody has anything i'll wait in on that i've had great experience with the moon wallet m uun yeah and i've also had great experience with wallet of satoshi yeah i have not tried phoenix but based on your recommendation i'm going to give it a try yeah give it a try So the main difference between the three. So Phoenix is like a true lightning wallet. It's like it has a chat in the unit. You have lightning channels,

but it's all automated in the background. You have no idea. If you were to like delete the app, it's the same kind of backup, which is 12 words. And so yeah. So if you screw up and you're like, oh crap,

you download it again and you plug in the 12 words and you're set. Moon does some some odd things in the background that is it's it's like lightning and you can interact with lightning invoices it's not exactly lightning and because of that when the fees on the Bitcoin blockchain go up then there can be some some tricker sometimes it's very very cheap and sometimes I'm like what the hell happened yeah yeah it's because of the way it's operates in the background I won't get into the technicals but like that's why they're going to have to do a bit of an overhaul to make it kind of work correctly in those situations. And then wallet of Satoshi obviously works very easily.

It's good for small amounts, but like it is a custodial option. So that's why like you sign up, it works out the gate. And so with that, you know, keep minimal amounts on it. I don't mind using like a buck or two or like zaping people with it here and there. Or like if I've got like 30 seconds to show somebody a lightning transaction. Then it's like, all right, download this, hit receive, there you go. And I don't even have to explain like, oh, there was a fee to set up a channel. It just goes.

And then I can work on that later because that's, you know, I'm never going to send somebody to custodial solution. And then that's their end point. It's like, no, that's step one if I don't have enough time to do something a little bit better. But I mean, that's my valet. That's my valet line like tip go to is. is, you know, one of those custodials where you're just like literally in the valet, like, hey, do you accept Bitcoin? No. Do you want it? Yeah. Okay. I've done that in a valet spot with cars behind quickly and they're like, cool, dude. And then you leave a quick disclaimer. Hey, look into

custodial versus non-custodial and don't go and buy a bunch of Bitcoin until you learn stuff. Later, have a good day. And then, you know, that's it. Yeah. It's nice because, again, It's it's a quick initial step. And then, you know, you can always be like, hey, if you're curious, just, you know, here's, here's an email or, you know, hit me up here. And I'll help you with when you have questions because they're going to have questions, right? Somebody's going to be like, oh, I go, what do I do with this? And then, and then you can be like, oh, you know, this is step one. And, you know, you can move somewhere else.

Again, education is is a spectrum. It doesn't matter where step one is for you. it kind of more so matters the end point. You don't make fun of somebody for learning the alphabet when they haven't yet read human action, right? Like it matters about where they get to, not where they start. So I think that's kind of an important thing

in and around education. And we see it. And again, to reiterate my point, I think a lot of people are getting educated a lot more faster in and around Bitcoin than they used to. There's a lot more content to help them get there. And I think that's great. And I'm super excited to see it.

I think on that note, there's this app called Lightsats, which you may have talked about on the show before, that lets you sign someone up for a wallet, a custodial wallet. And you can monitor whether they move it off of the custodial wallet or if they don't do anything, you can even claw it back after it expires. It's awesome. You can, yeah, you can literally create a little tip. You load it with a certain amount and you send it to somebody. They can redeem it. And it'll literally walk them through, hey, download a wallet, scan this code and then, you know, redeem some money back to your wallet. It's, again, an awesome kind of orange pill mechanism.

And then you can lead them down the next steps after that. But as you said, you don't also, you're not just by. by default, giving away all your Bitcoin to the deflation gods, you can climb back if the person doesn't redeem it, which is also super nice. So yeah, yeah, I love that. Great recommendation. One other point on Phoenix. I think they deserve a congrats this week for launching splicing. So they massively reduce the amount of fees that they charge by how the wallet works. Without you even noticing a difference, it's incredible. I think it's, It's the first production app that uses splicing and it's out on beta on Android.

So yeah, congrats to that team. Dude, it's awesome. I upgraded the other day. And again, if you're using the previous kind of version of Phoenix, it'll say, hey, you can upgrade so that things are cheaper for you. You hit a button. It kind of basically normally to have a whole bunch of lightning channels in Phoenix and basically like does a single transaction to turn them into one. beefy channel and then and then anytime that you need additional capacity, it'll just like adjust on chain the size of the channel in the most efficient way possible. It's great. So they're,

they're killing it. I can't wait for more wallets to do it too. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, gentlemen, I'm going to wrap this topic because I want to get to more here. So everybody in the chat, thank you for continuing to drop your comments. But we're going to do a rotation. here. And I'm going to, actually, Dan, I'm going to toss it right back to you. And I'm going to queue you up for your reason. So I'll ask you this simple question. Why are you bullish? So pay join adoption is growing. There's a piece of news this morning where Galoy launched a bounty to integrate pay join into their backend batching service. So pay join for those who don't know it is a way to spend Bitcoin where both the sender and the receiver contribute

inputs. And by doing that, the transaction looks like a consolidation or a spend. It's very difficult to tell the amount that's spent. It's very difficult to tell who's paying who. And because of this, it breaks the foundation of a lot of the chain surveillance and chain analysis. So it's missing receipts, a lot of senders that can do pay join, but now that we've got the pay join dev kit out since last week that lets people integrate pay join anywhere, teams like Brea, who have awesome batching complex backend servers can integrate pay join and receive in custodial apps or non-custodial apps

and get efficiency, much like splicing. It could even be combined with splicing. So I'm stoked that not only were we able to get the pay joint dev kit out across the line and into a few sending wallets, but now there's some incentives from businesses who don't even mention privacy in their release. It's strictly a financial win for them to use something like pay join so they can make their spending more efficient. I love this because by default, there's not a lot of incentive other than the people. people that want privacy for, again, for receivers, for various businesses to implement this. But if it affects their bottom line and they're actually incentivized to implement something because it's going to be cheaper for them to do transactions, then that's a win all the way

around. Because before, if there's no incentive, it's like, why do I, why do I risk implementing this? Like, what happens down the line? Like, is there worry? but if it becomes, especially in an environment where I think it will end up heading where on-chain fees end up being expensive, you're going to want to be as efficient as possible. And if being efficient means also being private, then that's huge. Pay join is pretty cool. I've seen a few implementing it.

I know obviously like Samurai has cahoots. I think Blue Wallet implemented pay join, if I'm not mistaken. I think BTC pay as well. Is that right, Dan? Are they some of the ones that have been working on it as well? That's all right. Yep. Wasabi and Sparrow and Join Market also support it.

There is an app that runs on L&D called No Looking that allows you to open channels with pay joins. And yeah, PDK lets it. There's a bunch of adoption issues open on the Bitcoin Wiki. If you look up pay joint adoption, there's an enormous table. There's a bunch of discussion happening. And PDK really brings it over the line to make it possible for projects like Nunchuk or Star 9 to support it in the default experience. And I think you can't require someone to use a certain app to have the fix.

If you can get the privacy as a consequence of some action that saves money or just the default way the wallet works, then it can actually be ubiquitous. You don't need to take the time out to learn how to use this separate thing. You don't need to spend the extra money to go and coin join. It just happens and it's not even overt. It's covert in the background. No one really knows it's happening. Yeah. Yeah.

That's amazing. Is Nunchuk looking at I thought maybe I saw something about that? Maybe not. Either way, if Hugo is watching, Hugo. We've talked about it a little bit. We've talked about it. There's a thread on Stacker News

where he did an AMA where we talked about it. I don't know if there's a issue open yet, but yeah, their coin selection updates awesome. Like they should support pay join. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think more privacy, the better. I'm curious, either Larry or Dom, in terms of just general privacy on Bitcoin, where are you at? Do you have concerns?

Is it kind of like a big question mark for you? Where are you guys at? For me, it's something that, you know, I talk about this a lot when Wicked brings this up on Cafe Bitcoin about UTXO management. it's one of those things that it's easy or when you're talking about privacy or learning pay join, it's easy to kind of get discouraged because your first look is a little bit overwhelming if you're not understanding. You almost take a first look and you go, it's too much.

I'll get to it later. But what I'm really trying to do is start, you know, adding a little bit each day, each week. Because a lot of these things, if things moving quick, we're not going to have the time maybe to catch up or in this case, you're, you're. privacy may already be exposed and kind of compromise somewhere. So I think now is a good time. I'm bullish on tools like pay join. I think privacy is important,

especially as, you know, people's stacks become larger and as people become more savvy on how to take advantage of the transparency of Bitcoin, right? Right now, we don't have to worry about it because most people are like, I don't even know, how would I even, where would I start finding that? but your average lay person will become familiar with that and will be able to, you know, see how you're transacted. Yeah. Yeah, my view on privacy is I'm all for it.

You know, sadly, at the base layer, it's not that prevalent. I'm trying to get up the curve on OPSEC. I wish I knew everything Dan knows about how to be perfectly secure. One thing I hold out, and I'd be curious to hear your guys' comments on this. One thing I hold out as kind of a fair amount of promise for helping us all with regard to OPSEC is that as the Lightning Network becomes, as my understanding is that it's extremely hard to track transactions to the Lightning Network, that you can't easily, you know, backward integrate what went where, when, because the channels are so many hops and so forth. And to me, I get excited by that, and I've been convinced by Jeff Booth and others that, that, you know, that the Fetamint type solutions, the Lightning type solutions are going to. to provide us with a lot more privacy than we currently have with our, you know, blatantly obvious

on-chain transactions. I hope that's the case because using coin join and getting non-KYC coins are, you know, it's tricky for those of us who aren't technical. And I don't want, I don't want anyone to know what I've got and where I have it. I think, I think Dan is good to maybe touch on this. I don't know. I think the biggest hole is always when you touch KYC or touch the banking system because that's electronic records all the way down.

I guess in some ways Bitcoin could be said to be worse because in the banking system, the information is siloed in individual institutions. But lightning is definitely an improvement, especially if you're a sender and you're using your own node. When you send that payment, it's very difficult to figure out where that came from. But if you're a receiver, the Bolt 11 invoices that we're most comfortable using encode the public key of the node. So someone watching packets on the network can figure out payments that are correlated to that one node.

And there are more sophisticated attacks that can do that too. And the other thing that I don't know about is when you use Phoenix, you're not making a channel to all of the people you're paying. You're making a channel to Phoenix, I think, and then it's being routed however it is. I know they use like trampoline routing and they're working on blinded paths, but without those things, even sending isn't private. So I know it's coming. Private lightning is coming, but I would be very careful if, you know, if you were haunted by someone and if you made a certain transaction, it would cause danger to your family. you know it's not perfect cash might be a better option yeah dan dan and ben i mean um and larry where do you guys you know for someone like maybe that i'm i'm working with in a union or at the

firehouse that's getting into bitcoin where do you think is a good starting place and maybe the second step for just adding tools um you know focused on privacy to their repertoire of like how they can you know hold move and transact in bitcoin Like when I tell people or when somebody comes to me and they're interested in diving down the privacy rabbit hole, I tend to tell them that perhaps they should basically have, you know, take their KYC stack and just leave that B and then begin stacking separately for a time and start learning the ropes. and yet mistakes may be made, but at least then, you know, you can kind of catch those as you go and start to level up from there.

It's, I think the biggest problem is that people let, let perfect be the enemy of good. And you can be, you can begin to get more private over time as you learn. But if you never take action, then you're never going to improve

and you're always going to be stuck where you are. So yes, you know, mistakes will always be made, but you can take steps to get more private. And I think a lot of people, you know, they're sitting on a big stack KYC Bitcoin. And, you know, that's that's kind of the reality of the world we live in right now. But that doesn't mean you can also not have a non-KYC stack that you begin to build. And so like the KYC stack becomes the if something happens to me and the government is still quasi sane, how do my relatives still easily access my Bitcoin? And then the other stack becomes if the government goes bat shit crazy, how do I have another stack that nobody knows exists? And so you can kind of start building those two positions.

and then you can kind of hedge against both potential things. More than likely, most people will encounter the former where something happens to them and their family is like, what the hell did you do? How do I get my hands on this? You want to make sure that they're okay then. And sure, they're going to have to then deal with, you know, the state in all of that.

But, you know, it's important to also, you know, start exploring. like what if what if she goes gets a little crazy i wouldn't mind having like a small stack that i gradually build where you know the only only myself and my closest family members know it's even there yeah or even a stack like hey this is a stack i might finance purchase a house with and here's a stack that like if my neighbor's selling their lawnmower that's the stack i might roll with you know um i always think about the peer to peer stuff because i think that's coming year, you know, as time goes, it's going to be exciting to see. Yeah, 100%. Larry, don't worry, you've got your work cut out for you right now, but it will get easier,

I promise. I hope so. I think you can maintain for a few different reasons, too. Like, if you're trying, the biggest problem that's obvious with refusing privacy is that you're going to get hit over the head with a crowbar. If you're being surveilled, you become the target of theft potentially. So even if you have KYC coins, if you're able to fence them off some way, remove the number of people who know about them, I think that can have some significant benefits to you. And as far as people just getting started, Ben Carmen gave a great talk at consensus of all places that went over. You know, self-custody, first of all, if it's in someone else's wallet, they know about it.

Don't reuse addresses, which you talk about ad nauseum. Like people here, I think, know that. Sink using your own node or in a private way, like use a decent wallet that we might recommend on the show. And broadcast your transactions with Tor. So people don't associate the transactions altogether. There's some basic stuff you can do. And then if you want to get into advanced, okay, what's the implicit?

of lightning, what's the implications of using coin join, you were already in a pretty safe place. Yeah. Yeah. Consensus. Yeah. Tell people not to use the same address. You lost like 99% of the audience at that point. Oh, no. Anyways. Okay. So awesome. Long and the short of it is privacy is getting better without compromising on the base layer promises of Bitcoin itself. I think that's the important takeaway. Like we can achieve a lot of these things without having to drastically change Bitcoin itself, which is kind of like the whole point of Bitcoin is you want to be pretty sure that the way Bitcoin works is the way Bitcoin continues to work because that includes the scarcity.

But if we can work with what we have with backwards compatible changes maybe or even just with what exists already, then that's a win for everybody. So yeah. Yeah. And not only in the actual chain rules, but also in our user experience. So that's the coolest thing about pay join to me is that you can have the same experience of scanning a QR code or tapping for NFC and just sending your payment at the same time. you're not taking a separate mixing step. It's all happening in the background. So preserving that backwards compatible experience,

not requiring a fork, they're all good reasons that I think Pay Join is the right fit. Awesome. Awesome. I love it. Dan, if people want to dive a little bit more into Pay Join, is there anywhere that you would send them to either learn a bit or tinker?

Like, what would you recommend? Yeah, payjoin. dot org gives a nice overview step by step of what pay join is, the problem that Satoshi left open in the white paper, it directly addresses, like, how it works, and it points you in a few different directions as far as the community goes and the roadmap. And then there's also payjoineddevkit.org for those that want to tinker. There's an inaugural blog post that gives the whole history of the dev kit and you might figure it out by the name, but it was definitely inspired by BDK, Bitcoin DevKit and LDK Lightning Dev Kit, which are roughly the same architecture.

And the idea is you create one core systems library that's well tested, well documented, and bindings to that library. So projects can use it from all these different languages. And then we can have a way of looking at it that's similar across all the projects. So all the updates go there. And yeah, I think those two resources are good places to start. If you want to chat or learn more, all the links are right there. Awesome. Awesome. Love it.

All right. We're going to do another rotation. I'm stoked about the privacy bit. And we're going to, well, I feel we're going to completely change gears here. And that's okay. That's what the show is all about. It's a bouquet of bullishness, we'll say. So we're going to do a rotation.

But I'm going to give a shout to again, everybody in the chat. Thank you guys for those chat messages. Yellow is here. He says, what? What? Yellow. Good to see you. What chain has been enacted.

But, yeah, keep those messages coming. Also, if you're watching, if you're enjoying it, maybe you're watching on Noster, then be sure to drop his zap. You can zap the show, BTC Sessions at VLT. go ahead. It's ready for you. But we're going to do a rotation here. I'm going to toss it to Larry. Larry, I'm going to cue you up again with the same question.

Take it away. Why are you bullish? Yeah, so now we go to the non-technical part of the show. Everything that's been discussed so far is over my head. So at a macro level, I just jotted down four or five things that have happened in the last few weeks. I mean, I wasn't with you two weeks ago, but I figured I'd hit the most recent highlights and we can talk about them. So the BlackRock ETF application is a big deal. I mean, they're evil and they'll probably use it to manipulate the underlying price.

But the fact that just as they've done with a GLD ETF, but the fact of the matter is that, you know, this is one of the largest, if not the largest asset managing in the United States, run by a guy who three years ago was talking about how Bitcoin was a network for money laundering. and they're now embracing it. And not necessarily for all the reasons we see it as being something that's going to make the world a better place. They're doing because they think they can make money on it. But that's okay.

It does add credibility. And there are a lot of assets out there, trillions literally of assets out there that will be coming to Bitcoin but haven't because of a lack of regulation or a lack of endorsement or a lack of belief that it's a safe. space for a professional money manager to operate in. And when BlackRock is opening up an ETF in the area, it becomes more of a safe space. So it makes me very, very bullish. Related to that, the kind of the macro, you know, dials that I look at that show me what's going on. I mean,

so the U.S. fiscal condition continues to get worse. We've seen a 20% decline in tax revenues in the last quarter. And in turn, we've seen expenses, fiscal expenses, increased by about 11%. So we're going to run a deficit this year of somewhere between $2.2 and $2.8 trillion, depending on what fiscal year you use or when you end the year. The dollar has been extremely weak in the last two weeks. It's just broken through 100. It was at 114, six months ago, a year ago. And the U.S. one-year treasury yield has just made a one year all-time high. And what these all are to me is there continued signs of rivets popping. And the biggest rivet that popped was the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in March.

And my firm and those of us who are kind of macro investment gurus, we all kind of recognize that what's going on here is the government's in a position where they must inflate in order to get out from underneath this debt burden. and yet, you know, inflation is running so hot and they've had so many complaints about inflation that they're trying to tighten. And they're kind of in an inflate or die choice. And this is what happens in sovereign debt crises. It just generally is a third world country, not the world's reserve currency.

And as a result, it's becoming more and more obvious that the Fed is going to have to pivot. And they're going to have to resume printing money. And they're going to have to resume, you know, growing the credit markets. or else we're going to have the Great Depression, which I think they fear that even more than they fear inflation. And the inflation numbers have given them a little bit of cover. The headline rate came down to 3%, which was lower than expected. So I can easily see how the narrative is going to move to, well, look, inflation was 9%. We've got it down to 3.

It's on its way to 2. We're good. We can start cutting rates. Maybe we can get rid of this QT, maybe we can go back to QE, et cetera. So in my view, things are going to start turning. in our direction monetarily. And related to this, I'll just add one more point. You know, we just went through one of the tightest rate hiking cycles ever in the history

of the world. You know, the only person who did it similar to this was Volkorn. That was in the 80s. It was 40 years ago. And in that environment, you know, Bitcoin obviously took a big hit from 68 down to 15, partly driven by FTX, but year to date, 2023, Bitcoin is the best performing asset in the world up 100%. And by the way, gold is up 8% this year, not nearly as much as Bitcoin, but the point is, in this kind of a rate hiking cycle in the past, gold would have been down significantly.

And so the point I'm trying to make is that these two sound money assets are looking through the bullshit that the Fed is spewing and realizing that they are without, you know, no matter what they say they want to do, they are going to have to print. they just have absolutely no choice because ultimately they will not let the system fall apart and so I think everyone will be shocked when someday the narrative changed and just like he said inflation was transitory and then it wasn't all right now he's fighting inflation he's got it all under control he's going to bring it down to 2%

he's going to land this airplane well wait until the airplane crashes into the runway and you know everything is is going tits up quickly including the bond market which is what I'm watching most carefully and, you know, they're going to reverse course. And when that happens, we're going to see Bitcoin go through 100,000 very quickly. We're going to see gold go through 3,000 very quickly, and the Fed's credibility is going to be further damaged. And so, you know, whether it happens in, you know, I don't know, three months or nine months, it's somewhere in that window in my estimation.

we're about to catch one hell of a ride, you know, as what started, because what really started in 2008 and continued in 2018 and then 19 and 2020, you know, it's not over yet. And this is at a bigger level than 08. This sovereign debt crisis is a bigger deal than the 08 housing bubble. So when it really breaks, you know, it's going to be something to behold. It could lead to hyper-bitrobinization right then and there. I don't know.

But it's certainly going to lead to much. higher asset prices for all of our stuff. That's the good news for us. The bad news for us, the world's going to be an uglier place. And gasoline might be $10 a gallon. But that's a different problem. I see all these things. And I'm very, very encouraged, very, very bullish on how the next year, year and a half

look for us. Interesting. So I've got some questions for you. Sure. So in Canada, we just got another rate hike. do you think that the Fed stubbornly remains like do they do another hike or do you think that they're like they're they're they're they're done with that again you've got three three percent on the CPI it seems to be like if if you had to take a wild guess do you think that they they stay a

little stubborn until ship breaks or do you think yeah yeah I do that's that's what they always do Do they always kind of misplay their hand and go too far in one direction? I mean, you know, the CME numbers show you that there's absolutely no doubt that on this one coming up in July, I think it's like 25th or something, there's absolutely no doubt that at that meeting, they're going to bump it again. The interesting question is, you know, they don't have one in August because they've got Jackson Hole. The interesting question is in September will they bump it? And I think that's right now the consensus is they won't. And I think that's about right. I mean, it's interesting they skipped a meeting where they said, well, we're doing a, you know, a tight.

skip. We're not easing, but we're going to see it. And by the way, I think that occurred because I think the Silicon Valley Bank thing scared the living shit out of them. You know, and they had to, they had to, they really did have to resort to QE. I mean, the bank term funding program was, was just QE. But they've unwound most of that now. Or they've unwonted a lot of it, I should say, on their balance sheet, although the term funding program is still $100 billion. But yeah, they'll probably push it too far and wait for something to break. but, you know, I don't think they're going to have to wait too long because things are breaking. I mean, you know, beneath the surface, it's not good.

Look at the credit card numbers. Look at the chart I like the most to look at. It just tells me this cannot go on is you can just Google it. And anyone can find it on Google is look at the U.S. federal government interest expense chart. And it, you know, it goes, it's just, it's an increasingly steep sloped line. And the second derivative is almost straight up right now. And we're at $900 billion headed to $1, $1, $1, $1, $1, $1, $1,000, $1,3 trillion. And, you know, that, and every time that goes up, that increase the deficit,

which means they've got to sell more bonds and they're fewer and fewer buyers of the bonds because foreigners aren't buying them anymore. On related thing, I mean, the, yeah, there it is, right? Look at how steep that gets. Good Lord. Right? Yeah. I mean, you know, that's a serious issue.

The funny thing is, is at the time, well, no, it's not even close. I was thinking in Bitcoin log terms, but I was looking at this little bump here. I was like, well, that would have looked. No, no, this is far worse. Right. It's a real serious issue. So, you know, the macro, I mean, to me, this is a little bit of a common forest storm. I was around in 08, and in March of 2008, Bear Stearns failed.

And JP Morgan, as always, was brought in to buy it. and they gave them a sweetheart deal and they bought it. The government back stopped it. And at that point in time, I thought, okay, here we go. This is it. We're going to have the housing market's going to collapse. This is the GFC right here, right now, March. Well, no, they managed to put it back together and paper it over and everything seemed okay.

But as we all know, in September, October of 08, we really did have the GFC. So there was about a six-month lag. And to me, you know, Silicon Valley Bank was bare strength. You know, there's a lot of stress in the business. bond market is a lot of stress in the financial system. Financial system, after 15 years of ZERP and free money and incredible malinvestment, the financial system is so out of balance that to think that the 22 bare market brought it back into balance is just a joke. And we're just setting up for a much bigger catastrophe sometime in the next 18 months, in my opinion. And when that occurs,

I think people are going to be shocked. I mean, Bitcoin could easily go into the $2,000, $400,000 of coin range and gold could easily go into the three four five thousand dollar an ounce range. I want to show you something that was a headline yesterday. Again, Canadian-centric, but I'm curious your take on. I'm sure Foss is looking at this, just having an aneurysm somewhere. Anyways. So in Canada here, with mortgages and everything, so in 2020, the governor of the Bank of Canada

went on national news and said, you know what? If you have a large expense coming up, if you're looking to buy a home, if you're looking to take out a bunch of debt, you should do that now because interest rates will continue to be low for a very long time.

And then, fast forward literally a year to a year and a half later, they were dropped, well, maybe two years maximum. The same governor of, of the Bank of Canada was effectively saying anybody who got a mortgage in this time frame, and I'm paraphrasing here, is effectively fucked. They were saying that your mortgage rates are going to go up by just these insane rates.

And now we're seeing headlines like these where it says, as interest rates continue to rise, keep in mind they just rose them again, some variable rate mortgage borrowers are seeing their amortization periods extend to six. 60, 70, even 90 years, Canada's federal regulator is now acting to reduce the risk posed by such forever mortgages. And so I guess my question is, is there any resolution to this that is not bad? because when I'm looking at it, I'm thinking, okay, so one is they do nothing, nothing changes, and then all of a sudden you buy a home and then your mortgage is 90 years, you die before you pay it off and then what, they just repossess your house and sell it again,

so you never own your home. Two is federal regulators say you're not allowed to do that. And then we have another housing crisis and everybody, again gets their foreclosures. Or three is they say, we're going to drop rates and we're going to inflate the shit out of everything. Like I don't see another thing that can happen here. Yeah, I agree with you.

It's got to be three. And it's funny that your finance minister made that statement about, you know, taking out mortgage because back in the, I remember very clearly back in 06, 07,08, I remember Greenspan and Bernacki saying similar things because they were trying to get the economy going and they knew that people were taking out helix against their homes they would spend. And so, you know, these people are really bad. I mean, they just mislead people left and right. It's bad stuff.

I just, I just went to the bank, by the way. I had some U.S. dollars and I was exchanging it to get into a bank account to actually to buy stats, but besides the point, I walked into the bank and they were like, hey, and I won't say specific numbers there, but they. They were like, hey, would you like your line of credit to this number? I was like, you know, I don't think I need that right now. I think I'm okay. And then I paused.

I was like, wait, is that my current line of credit bumped to that? Or is that on top of my existing line of credit? And they were like, oh, no, this is on top of your existing line of credit. I'm on. And I was like, are you? I was like, I absolutely do not currently want that. because I like what anyway so yeah it's it's it's this is that a normal thing like is this what do we just see craziness like this happening right now I don't know I haven't I haven't seen that in the

United States I mean I but you know the the debt vendors obviously they make a lot of money on this I mean the average US credit card rate has gotten up into the low 20s 22 24% down you've probably seen this right and climbing out of that hole No, I haven't seen it personally because, I mean, this is some, again, we've seen the variable rates. I mean, I remember as early as recent as like a year or two years ago, I was telling people, do not get into a variable rate, HELOC. Don't do it. Whatever you do, don't do it.

You might as well go to a loan shark off of, you know, off the street and let them charge the points, you know. I know. I know, people who took out helox and, you know, they were at one or two percent, which, you know, you can take a lot of money out and you're paying one or two percent on it's not very much and they've reset up to six seven eight percent and that's that's a big change right so yeah yeah it's it's you know larry that the your your bullish points um i get the image of like when you're talking about the system and the rates of the looney tunes cartoon where they're trying to plug the holes and stuff just keeps it keeps breaking and there's water coming through and and the way it comes into

alignment a little bit with this Black Rock ETF is, you know, it's no small kind of pivot of bonds and things like commercial real estate no longer being safe havens in that. Like if that image is true plugging all these holes, anything

that the Fed can break, will break. And if you cannot rely on that as a safe haven asset. And so simultaneously you have an institution like Black Rock opening the door for an ETF spotty for Bitcoin as you have institutions that are looking around like, wait, bonds aren't going to help

our pension keep up with the payments. We have to make to retirees. Commercial real estate might get cut in half. Where are we going right now? Where are we going to go? And you're seeing them take leverage, which is terrible. You're seeing them get into venture capital, which to be honest, is just a little bit too crazy of a field, I think, for a pension fund to be nimble enough to move. And you have, you know, Ben, you mentioned, how does this have a happy ending? And I think we know the answer, right? It's what we're talking about here. And it's to see the light, to listen to what Larry says is the monetary fire alarm that's doing his job right now.

Yeah, I mean, I just suggest to everybody, you want to have assets that the government can't print. Because the way the government's constructed and the way the system is presently set up, they're going to print. It's what Foss says. You know, they just, it's programmed to debates. They can't help it. Now, where I could be wrong, just for full disclosure, and people will laugh at this. When I tell new investors in my fund, I say, they laugh at me.

I said, look, we could be wrong. If the government suddenly got incredibly responsible, cut expenses, balance the budget, trimmed entitlements, got out of all these wars, you know, and straightened up and flew right. You know, this wouldn't work so well. But, you know, I ask everybody listening, what do we all think the odds of that occurring up? I'm telling you, Larry, the Fed will print. Sorry.

We could get AGI too if the AI becomes productive enough. Well, that's right. No, there's no doubt. Look, if we had a productivity miracle, you know, we could conceivably get out from underneath this debt burden. You know, I mean, look, we got out from a similar debt burden after World War II because we had just enormous growth in the economy. We had the GIs coming home and everybody needed a washing machine and a car and a house and the economy grew like a house of fire. There's a lot of inflation. The bondholders got killed.

But, you know, we got out from underneath 130% debt to GDP load, which is kind of where we are right now. The problem is now the demographics are the exact opposite. We've got this huge boomer generation that's retiring isn't going to work anymore. And, you know, we've got this young generation that's getting screwed because they're not getting paid fairly. well and on top of that the young generation has been incentivized to not have children because they're inherently yeah well yeah exactly as a as a blue-collar worker in an inflationary environment you're placed in the position where the company you're working for obviously recognizes that dollars don't go as far they then say like you're already at a set salary or an hourly wage or whatever

it is. And so the company is going to do everything it can to like be as efficient as possible with its capital. And that includes keeping you at the same rate until you come forth and argue with them to try and just keep up with inflation. And so you're at a total disadvantage as a blue collar worker in a fixed a cap supply money. It's total inverse. It flips. It gives the advantage to the blue collar worker where you go, you negotiate. negotiate your wage at a certain point in time. Obviously, as time goes on, technology allows us to be more efficient and create more things with less resources. And so you kind of, you know, hopefully stay in lockstep with the company making more money. But it's up to the company to come to you. If you're not, if you're, even with technology increases, if you're not keeping pace with the deflation of the currency, then the company, somebody has to then weigh, well, is it worth firing this person and then hiring new and training? Yeah.

Yeah. And so, like, I think it levels things out much better. Oh, yeah. No, no question. Yeah. No question. I think immigration is huge and key, too. In Boston, there's so many foreign students who are incredibly skilled.

But I have a bunch of friends who are like, I have three months to find a job. and there's all these tech layoffs. If I can't find a job, I have to go back home. And these people are the definition of productive. Like they're productive people, but I don't know how we get them to stay. I don't know how it seems to be bureaucracy, really, but I don't know what does it.

I don't know. I feel like a lot of people have a wake-up call coming too because there's going to be a lot of in the coming years. Sure, you might be productive in a certain sense, but like what actually has value? Like everything is super skewed. Like what do we actually place value in? Fiat has screwed us.

That's the thing. That's the thing. I mean, we should all be working 20-hour work weeks and be, you know, have much better lives than we have because, you know, we've totally misallocated capital since 1971.

And, you know, and we've had so many technological that all our lives have gotten better as a result of those technological innovations. But they should have, it's hard to believe. They should have gotten even better still.

If we hadn't done all this stupid shit, we did. We did the stupid shit because, you know, the money was broken and nobody knew what the right price was for anything. All these prices today that are just fictitious prices. Think of all these big. I mean, who needed all the large houses we built in this country? I mean, it's insane. Who needs to live in an 8,000 square foot house?

I mean, look at Europe. You don't see that. It's nuts. But, you know, capital's free. People are making a lot of money. what the heck, you know, I've got a big ego, I'm going to build an enormous house.

It happens. It happens, yeah, right. Awesome. All right, well, gentlemen, I'm going to give this another rotation here. Love that topic. Larry, I'm super glad that we got. We got to mix in some macro with the technical here.

Dom, I'm not sure which way you're going to split it. So that's good for me. Maybe you'll throw me. a curveball, but I'm going to toss it to you, man. Again, before I do, again, shout it to everybody in the chat. Also, Dom, before you dive into your

reason, there was a request earlier from C-Funk. And I got to bring it up. Anyways, C-Funk said, Dom, you got to tell us a joke. I don't know how she specifically worded. I'm trying to find it right now. Anyways. I saw that one. Yeah,

anyways, I'm not going to let it go. you owe C-Fung a joke. So Dom, I hope you've been preparing because I'm putting you on the spot right now. The pressure isn't, wasn't my little brief false impersonation enough? That counts as a joke. I let's see, I kind of saw that and I tried to just come up with something on the spot. Let's see, of the dad joke variety. How come Bitcoin can't keep a relationship?

How come? Because no one can live up to its standards. How about this one? How about, how about, um, why? You have to recover that quickly.

No, no, nobody. Okay, here's another one. Why, why did the judge get upset in a courtroom full of Bitcoiners when they, when they,

when they enter the room? How come? Because everyone sat. Oh, come on, y'all. All right, that's all I got. Tell them.

See, dad jokes for the win. That's it. Like, There. C-Funk approves. You've got the seal approval. Celia says... Yeah.

All right. And that happens to be what I'm bullish about is these jokes. I really think it's going to take my career to the next level. That's the end of the show, everybody. We're going to wrap it up here. No more reasons for being bullish present. Yes. No, we are going to rotate.

I do want to say, hey, to everybody in the chat. Thanks, guys, for being here. Keep those messages coming. And also, again, If you're watching, if you're enjoying this on any platform, really. But if you're enjoying this on Noster, if you're enjoying this on Twitter, on YouTube, wherever, and you've got a lightning wallet, feel free to zap some sats to this show. Always appreciated.

But with that, I'm going to toss it over to Dom. Dom, other than being fully capable of bestowing us with hilarious dad jokes, why are you bullish? Yeah. Gosh, the list is so tremendous. And so I could go on forever, but to start, and I'm going to avoid actually, let me just start by saying this. I'm really bullish on this, the things that I'm working on, of course, with unions.

I'm seeing a ton of great response from unions based off like our firefighter union becoming the first union to self-custody Bitcoin. I'm seeing tremendous response people reaching out. I'm working with multiple unions across the country who are looking to replicate models. So that's extremely bullish that response. But I'm actually going to go with my bullish item along the lines, Ben, of what you said about the older boomer. And I'm going to take it back down to Gen Z.

And this is just something that it made me think of when you were talking. I saw that Gen Z BTC and a lot of us met this young man at the Bitcoin Mag conference in Miami. He just built this new program called Set Aside Satz. And I haven't looked incredibly into it, but what I saw on the tweet was he's looking to build this program, not only in educating Gen Z kids, but setting aside sats for future generations. because he's smart enough to know that Bitcoin revolves around scarcity. And it is running out and it will continue to run out. And I don't know about y'all, but I'm incredibly bullish on this because I remember being young.

And I know that young people most that I've talked to do not care really about money or their long-term kind of future plans. I was one of those people very late. I started learning about building wealth. So I do think it's as important as older folks getting on the mission, the younger generation has to get on the mission for Bitcoin. And the earlier they can do it, the better to build that education. It's just one of those things that's really tough because, again, young people, they're living their life and they don't care about any money, not to mention the most sound, hard money of all times. So I'm really bullish to see like folks of the Gen Z generation, like building and Bitcoin, trying to do something like save Bitcoin for future people that maybe in 10 years,

I start going like, damn, I wish I got some of this back in the day. I think that that is like unbelievable and it's really inspiring. So that's my bullish item right there. I like we kind of ran the spectrum here. I started at one side of the learning curve and we're starting at the other side here. Inception. It's interesting though because like we kind of have like in the middle ground, I'd say like my, I'm kind of millennial. I'm not quite.

I miss the Gen X thing. But like that, that range, I think we've got a lot of people that have that are kind of dismayed, upset, angry, but they, they, a lot of them haven't figured out where to place that anger. They haven't figured out, hey, like, I, it's the money. The money's broken. And that's the cause of a lot of these things. But I think there's a unique opportunity to get Gen Z and the generations thereafter to recognize like, hey, money's broken. And that actually really affects your life in the long run over the decades. And it's really cool to see people in that demographic begin to recognize that

and build resources and level up newcomers into the space. I've not been so bullish as when I see, again, like people on the far ends of kind of that spectrum of like, hey, I'm, you know, I'm a retiree. I get it because I saw us depeg from gold. I'm into precious metals. I understood scarcity. And here I am. And then you get this whole group of people that was never exposed to that.

Literally never in their lives have they witnessed a sound money. And they're still able to hone in on and realize the money's broken. And so if somebody who's never had that exposure can step back and go, Oh, that's why shit's broken. Yeah. And that gives a lot of hope. If somebody with no prior knowledge of this stuff and no personal experience can hone in on that, that's massive. And with no.

Go ahead, Larry. Go ahead. No, no. It's good. I was just going to say, and with youth on their side, right? Like, like, I mean, and what we all being young don't realize, and we have this saying kind of in the fire service is that your most vulnerable member is your youngest member. member. You sometimes think it's the oldest member because they're a little more fragile, but actually they're not. They've benefited. Any of the older members have benefited from the system working or a

system working over years. Your youngest members are your most vulnerable because they're going to be the ones to not be able to get a house. They're going to have major problems saving money, not going to know where to look in legacy finance, AI, come in maybe take jobs and change the the way production looks. Who knows? I mean, enhance some, change some. But they're the most vulnerable. And so to have members of that generation be like, look, I see this next level.

This is where I sincerely believe that SAFE's book, the Bitcoin standard, is going to go down as being one of the most important economic books ever written in the history of mankind. And I say that, I mean, which sounds kind of hyperbolic, but I really do believe that. I say that because those of us who are, older who did see 71 and who knew that the money was broken in the 70s and 80s and the whole nine yards. And we're Austrian economic economists before, you know, a lot of you guys were born.

You know, we, I mean, here we are fighting this fight with this gold weapon, which is, you know, they've managed to manipulate and it didn't really work, blah, blah, blah. And along comes Bitcoin. It's a sharper spear. And suddenly I've got 20 and 30-year-olds, you know, quoting von Mises to me, right? and the reason that occurred is that Safe wrote that book. And because I think that book has educated more young people and changed more minds than any other one thing I can point to in terms of bringing the youth into this thing. And it's the youth that have to fight the war.

I mean, I may not be here for the end of the war. I'm certainly here for the start of it. And I'll be here as long as I can. it's you guys and the Jack Mahler's of the world that are going to carry it over the finish line, you know, hyper-bitconization, fiat currencies are dead, maybe big nation states are dead, you know, the whole world is decentralized. I mean, we're seeing that now, you know, all these large, and we hit peak centralization of World War II, figured out how to slaughter 50 million people in 10 years, you know, and now we're

heading towards, you know, decentralization. And decentralization is going to make the world and mankind, it's just going to make it a much better place for all of us. You know, because without broken money, we won't be able to do Vietnam. We won't be able to, you know, all the stuff that we did that was so wrong. It just won't happen. And so it's, it's a beautiful thing, really. Yeah, I agree.

Dan, do you have any thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I'm Gen Z, so I see it in my friends. I think the biggest thing is people not being able to own homes in the cities they live in. Like, I know doctors who can't afford homes in the cities they live in. And a lot of the, I'd say the wealthiest Gen Z people all hold significant portions of Bitcoin. I mean, I have a bias, of course, because I know Bitcoiners. But that's like across places I go. I think that's a big difference between people with some money in older generations

and people with some money in my generation. So people just see that and they start to ask questions. They're like, okay, why is that the case? Yeah What is there anything that you view as Like a disconnect for like you said like oh the the wealthiest people I know And in Gen Z are tend to be Bitcoiners by and large Is there a disconnect like I wouldn't say they're Bitcoiners

I'd say they have Bitcoin and they probably got it with crypto that's the yeah Yeah, yeah is like everyone sees and I think that's changing after the events of the past year or there's at least an opportunity for that change and people are more receptive to that idea. But I think that's where the disconnect is, is everyone saw, oh, we got to get into crypto and everyone that's marketing that is stealing money from people. But they're seeing that change. That's, that's an interesting trajectory because it's, it's literally Fiat's fault that

people get into Bitcoin in that trajectory because like it becomes. an environment where nobody knows how to value anything. And so then your only outlet is straight speculation and gambling. And what's the prime example of that is like the insanity of everyone can print money and everything's a casino, crypto. So you dive into that. But as you dive into that, somehow, some way you find your way to the signal and you realize Bitcoin's different.

And you didn't come to it initially because of that. In fact, you may have avoided it initially because of that. Oh, it's boomer coin. It's blah, blah. And then you realize that Bitcoin is the thing that actually fixes the reason you're gambling in the first place. And that's a pretty cool trajectory. I think that's an interesting learning curve. Yeah, people are very interested, I think, to see Bitcoin sustain some momentum after everything else died.

And it's a thing that you can hold real wealth by creating something. something of value. Like that's the whole point. It's not Fiat. There are of course some people who have some money from like management consulting or big corporate stuff, but even the layers of that are falling away. The tech layoffs really affected lots of people who had had large incomes. And they're asking questions like, why doesn't this make sense? I thought we were doing the productive thing that makes all the money. Yeah. Larry, I see a question for you if you don't mind me pulling it. Yeah, I saw that too. I'm happy to try and answer it as best they can. I'll read it out because afterwards this goes to audio.

So this is from Jeremy Garcia. He says, Hey, Sessions, can you ask Larry if he thinks an ETF can manipulate the price of Bitcoin like the Comex is used to manipulate gold and silver? Thanks. Absolutely. I mean, the quick answer is yes, but it's not going to be quite as easy. Paper Bitcoin does exist. There's not nearly as much paper Bitcoin as there is paper gold. They've had 30 or 40 years to perfect paper gold since 1971.

Bitcoin's only 14 years old. And it was probably only two years ago that all the alarm bells went off in the central banks. And they said, holy shit, this thing's a working fire alarm. We've got to figure out what to do here. And so they created a futures market. And there are derivatives on Bitcoin, and there is paper Bitcoin out there. and I do believe that the Black Rock guys are not good guys and that they will probably end up selling some paper Bitcoin.

They'll take cash in, say you own a Bitcoin, and they won't actually go buy it. So that's fraud. And it means that they're going to try and manipulate the price. Let me say this, though. The price of Bitcoin will be much harder to manipulate than the price of gold. And the reason is the price of gold never goes up 5X in a year or 18 months.

And so if you need, manipulate the price of Bitcoin and you're on the wrong side of it, you can get carried out. Now, they own the printer and the printer might just fill that hole for them, as it has, I know in the past with the gold manipulation. But the point is, I think Bitcoin is a sharper spear and I think it's going to be harder to manipulate. But as long as, I mean, when we reform this, when Bitcoiners run the world and someday we will, when Bitcoiners run the world and we reform the government and we reform the financial system, one of the things we need to do is, we need to ban and outlaw all financial derivatives. They're weapons of mass destruction. And the reason is that they become a balance sheet game.

And whoever has the biggest balance sheet can manipulate the price of anything. And so if you have financial derivatives and you have the control of the printing press, the government, guess what? You can set the prices, full stop. So that's something that has to be addressed. But I'm hoping for hyper-bitcoinsization before they figure out how to totally manipulate it. And at that point in time, Bitcoiners will be the people who are running the government. and the governments will outline that outlaw that kind of behavior.

So that's that's my optimistic view of how it will play. Do you think that because of the speed at which Bitcoin can settle, that expedites the, oh, shit moments like where shit actually hits the fan and people realize that even large institutions, banks, central banks, nation states that the realization of, oh, this person's insolvent just comes quicker. Absolutely. No, absolutely, no doubt. And, and, you know, okay, you say you have the coins, fine, show me the address and move

one to prove it. You know, I mean, we've got, we've theoretically got, you know, 8,300 tons of gold in Fort Knox hasn't been audited since the 50s. And I'm guessing somebody gave it away or rated it or used it, you know. So, so, yeah, I mean, Bitcoin's a much better tool for a number. enforcing monetary discipline. Larry, it's also super interesting where the supply sits at this time. Right.

And leading into institutional stuff and the ability of, you know, the smart, the devs, the coders to audit the system in real time. I mean, like, you know, they're very good at catching foul player or things that seem awry, like, you know, unbelievably talented and always on it. That's right. it's a much better tool than gold. It just is. Yeah, I agree.

It'll be, again, it seems like a bit of a Trojan horse. Everybody, it sneaks its way into the system. Everybody thinks they can continue to play their Fiat games. Turns out, you might be able to play them for a little bit, but, you know, given enough time, everybody's to Mount Gawks. Everybody's an FTCS. Third parties will disappoint. All right. Third parties, they will disappoint at some point. And I think the skepticism, Larry

mentions about the BlackRock ETF is on point. There'll be another opportunity with the institutional wave to educate, grab people. Because look, if a pension fund gets on BlackRock ETF, we may know that somehow they're going to drop the ball and it's inevitable. But that window of saying like, hey, now I'm going to grab you. You're a member of this pension fund. Forget what they're doing. let me show you the real deal on how to use this and to get them ready for when a third party messes it up, which they always do. They're like, you know what? I got my education. I've been, you know, going on with sessions, getting myself custody set up, and I was ready for this. Hey, Ben, Dom, Dan, I told my wife we were going until 730 and I've got dinner on the table and

I'm going to get the hook here. Oh, my God. I'm going to, let's wrap it. I don't want to be in trouble. Are you okay with me signing off? Yeah, absolutely. Larry, before you go, do you have any parting words, any recommendations for somebody to check out, anything that you want to point? No, no, no. I mean, I make a lot of noise on Twitter. It should post a ton, so you can always follow me there. I write a quarterly macro letter, which is free, and it's worth what you pay for it.

But it's at my website, emma2.com. You can get on the mailing list. We won't spam you. Awesome. So, you know, I would just say to everybody, hang on, we're right, and we're going to win, and just give it some time. You know, don't sell your sound money assets. This is what's going to save us. You know, there's no doubt in my mind.

Awesome. It's been an honor being out with one with you, Ben. And also, Dan and Dom, I'm really impressed with your knowledge. So it's really great being with all you guys. I'm sorry I've got to run. All good. Have a great dinner and tell Ms. Lepard. He gets out of trouble with the wife.

Give her our regards and ask her why she's bullish. Yeah, okay. We'll do. Thanks, guys. I'll see you. Bye-bye. See later. All right.

gentlemen, as Larry signs off here, I always like to finish the show with a quick round of any final thoughts they may have. And then also, any recommendations if you want to point somebody towards something, a resource, really anything that you think that somebody watching this could benefit from. And it could be anything. It could be a book, a podcast, a video. you saw an app, a website, a device, or just a life experience and a bit of advice that you'd like to impart on people. So, yeah, I'll start us off. So you have a moment to kind of think of something that you might want to throw out there. My final thoughts here are people are leveling up so fast.

People are learning so fast. You know, we've talked about a mixture of people, you know, surprising myself and others in terms of their learning ability, but also on the other side of things, important tools being baked into how we utilize Bitcoin day to day so that it's simpler for people to level up and learn. And I think that's not slowing down. For everything I've seen, the place where people are at compared to when I got it. I mean, it took me years to kind of get where I'm at. And I see people getting basically to where I'm at in a couple of years in like a year in some instances, which I don't know how to parse that through my, like

it, to me it seems impossible, but that's because it took how many years to get here. And the resources weren't there. So I think you're going to see the education of your average Bitcoin or just expedite in the coming years. It'll be impressive. So in terms of recommendations, I'm going to recommend, and I'm going to pull it up here. I've been trying to pump up other Bitcoin educators because obviously I spend time making practical tutorials for people. But I think there can never be too much of that stuff. And so I saw a dude that I've mentioned on the show before, drop a tutorial just recently. His name is Darren Honeyset.

And I tweeted out his new tutorial the other day. I'm going to put it up on the screen just so people can see it. Anyways, his name is Darren Honeyset. He tweeted a tutorial on Start 9, running a Bitcoin node, setting it up, linking your wallets to it. And basically being able to verify your Bitcoin transaction to your, yourself with your own copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. And this guy's been doing stuff for a while. I think he took a little hiatus for some time.

And then I started commenting on some stuff as he started releasing new videos and trying to encourage him. And I think more people have been watching. And I think he appears to be back at it with this video that he just dropped yesterday. So please go follow at D. Honeyset, H-O-N-E-Set, H-O-N-E. E-Y-S-E-T-T-T on Twitter. He's also on Noster and he's on YouTube, most importantly, for those video tutorials.

Go check out that recent Start 9-1. Leave a comment, like it, share it, subscribe, all that good stuff. Because honestly, the more educators we have in the space, the faster people level up and become better Bitcoiners. And I think that's so incredibly valuable. And shout out to Darren for making stuff like this. because I know the gamut of making tutorials. It's not easy, man.

It takes some time. It takes some blood, sweat, and tears. But it's worth it, though, because you go out and you get to see firsthand the people that are like, I learned how to set up a node because of you. And I think that's going to happen for Darren, too. People are going to come up to him in person in the future and say, hey, man, I actually really learned a lot from you. And I'm a better bittern because of you.

And I hope to see it. So, yeah, go check out Darren. He's awesome. with that I'm going to do a rotation I'm going to toss it to Dan first and I'm just going to say do you have any final thoughts or recommendations for people watching

yeah of course it's been awesome to be here it really has been an honor like Larry said my recommendation is going to be to go to your local bit devs or if one doesn't exist to start one so if you don't know about it bit devs is a common

Socratic seminar format to talk about Bitcoin developments. And there are over 20 listed cities on bitdeves.org. So there's probably an organization near you. You'll have developers come. You'll have investors come, people from industry, plebs that are curious. It's a great place to meet people and meet the educators too and participate, figure out how to get Bitcoin directly involved with the vendors in your community or even the government in your community. So because it's a local event, every city is oriented to what it can most effectively do in the city. And that's where you meet Bitcoiners.

It's pretty regular. It's a lot of fun. And yeah, I wouldn't hesitate to start one either. If you only know a few people, if you start doing it consistently, lots of people will show and it'll become a Bitcoin nexus for you. So yeah, check out bit devs. Awesome. I love to see it.

Rand in the comments says he's working on face to face now. It's a priority. So again, yeah, meeting your local bitcoins is very important. You build that local community. It's important to have people that you can talk to face to face that share common goals and values with you. And if you haven't experienced that yet, holy hell, the first time you sit down with another bitconer that actually wants to heal you rant about Bitcoin, man, that's a freeing experience for sure. Dom, I'm going to pass it to you.

Again, any final thoughts you may have, any recommendations. Go ahead. I'm going to direct people to three places. You know, first, probably for the listeners of this show, I don't have to direct them to you, Ben, but obviously, you know from our conversations, you've been key in my education on self-custody. And so like that's, you know, it's a no-brainer. but I've never seen a space like Bitcoin where there are people that are just willing to teach.

Sometimes you have critics say, oh, well, they're furthering their own asset. I disagree with that. There's a difference between promoting and teaching. And I've never seen any space that has more teachers than this space. And I keep finding more good ones. Dan, great to meet you. I'm going to look into pay join a lot more. I'm very curious about the privacy aspect.

I think everyone should not wait until, privacy becomes, you know, in the fire service, we train on stuff so that when it happens, we're ready. Don't wait until you see privacy stuff in the headlines. Check out what Dan's working on with Pay Join. Learn it now. So you have the comfort and the time. Second, if anyone's, you know, bring Bitcoin to your workplace. If you're interested to bring it to your workplace, I'm eager to build models right now. I'm working on stuff with unions. So check out my Twitter. I'll have more stuff with the proof of workforce thing coming soon. I'm building a kind of a nonprofit mission for anyone that wants to bring Bitcoin to their workplace,

unions, organizations with like small, easy to do models. And then the last thing, read your history. I've been like reading all the old books again. I just finished for like the second time, the block size wars. And like the history is unbelievably great at teaching on Bitcoin. And so looking up old articles, reading old articles to see what was happening at the time. Unreal.

And it's been incredible here with you all. So I'm really appreciative. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for being a part of the show. This is a good rip. I thoroughly enjoyed it. You helped me cap up my week in the perfect way.

And of course, both of you and hats off to Larry for being here too. All of you are welcome back anytime. So have a great weekend, guys. have a good one y'all later all right everybody thank you so much for being a part of the show again hats off to dan to dom to larry really enjoyed chatting with them this evening and everybody in the chat too thank you so much for being a part of it i love when you guys show up every week and you've got comments coming through it's it's awesome to see you all um

in terms of things that you can do of course if you want to help with the show you can like, subscribe, share. All those things are super helpful in getting all of this stuff in front of more eyeballs. You can also hit up the previously mentioned sponsors, hoddle, hoddle, coin kite, and Unchuk, and Star 9. They're all down below. Just go ahead and click. If you're looking for a little bit of additional help, if you're looking for, hey, I don't know how to set up a cold card. I don't know how to do multi-sig or lightning or set up a node, all that kind of stuff. You can always reach out to me. You can head to BTCsessions.a and book me there.

There's a QR code on the screen right now that'll take you to one-on-one private bookings. Also, heads up, I'm going to be in Europe through the summer. So that means if you've wanted to do that, but the time zones have been pretty scruy for you. They may not be for the next five weeks. There's limited days that I'm going to be doing it because

Italy seems kind of cool and I want to spend some time with the family there. But I will be doing a little bit of of one-on-ones as well. So feel free to scan away and book yourself a session if you're in those time zones or for when I get back. And then finally, if you really liked what you saw, you can also head over to my Geyser page. And that is where you can just simply tip Sats.

The QR code on the screen right now, you can scan. It'll take you there on your phone. And that's a page where you can leave comments and send Sats. if you thought it was a good rip. All these guys were absolute legends. Thoroughly enjoyed having them on. But yeah, I'm going to stop ranting there and we're going to wrap it up. Thank you guys so much for being here.

I appreciate all of you being a part of the show. And have a great day or evening, wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your daily session.