BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Dennis Porter, Jaime Garcia, Rich Swisher BTC CHAT ep390

Episode Date: January 13, 2024

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/JaimeWGarcia https://twitter.com/Dennis_Porter_ https://twitter.com/MotivPM BOOK ME for private one-on-one sessions on my website! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more. https://www.btcsessions.ca/ 💪 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/ SEEDOR is one of the most robust metal backups on the market today. Get your SEEDOR starter set today! Use this link for 5% off. https://www.seedor.io/discount/BTCSESSIONS?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fprodukte For US based customers: https://www.seedor.io/btcsessions Canadian customers: https://link.thecryptoboutique.ca/BTCSessionsSeedor 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

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. Awesome panel, a couple of return guests and somebody brand new as well. And yeah, we're just going to get bullish with each other on a Friday. I hope you guys are having a decent January. It is so cold where I am. It's unbelievable.

But stay warm, I hope. And if you're somewhere warm that I'm going to be in the next few months here, then I'm already jealous. but if you're in Madeira experiencing nicer weather or El Salvador, I'll see you guys soon. Now I really can't wait. But nonetheless, we're going to dive in. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen.

So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share.

All those things help a ton. Hit that little like button just below the screen. Share this on whatever socials you're on. And of course, subscribe. I'm on the warpath to 100K by the end of 2024. Help me out. And with that, I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

Before we bring in our guests, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. This is Timechain Calendar.com. And simultaneously, I'm also bringing up the live chat over on the right-hand side. everything that you say will now be online for everyone to see for better or worse. Over on time chain calendar, we're sitting at $42,812 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will grab you 2,336 sats in terms of fees. Next block, 37 sats per byte, still nice in those lower double digits.

And the Mempool is purging anything south of around 21 sats per byte. In terms of Bitcoin mined, 19.6 million of them, that is 93.32% of the total supply. Why? Quick shout out to sponsor the show, starting with me. If you guys need some additional help in terms of your setup, maybe all of the free tutorials aren't cutting it and you need some one-on-one handholding. You can head over to my website, BTCSessions.ca and book me for private one-on-one sessions there. Shout out to Hoddle-Hoddle if you are stacking stats and you have some priorities that include peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custody, and no KYC. This is a great place to go. Just an email address to sign up.

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They have full starter sets for one or two seeds, and you can always grab more if you need. check out the links down below for the best shipping option for you. Nunchuk has you covered with assisted multi-sig, and what that is basically they handhold you through on your mobile device with things like tap signers, cold cards, and plenty of other options. When you're all set, you have three keys. They have one. It has baked an inheritance planning so that your Bitcoin gets to your next-of-kin,

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Noster relays and clients, and even some AI tools as well. You can check them out at Start9.com. They've got everything from entry level up to what I'm running, which is the Start9 server pure. And with that, enough my rambling, let's get in our guests here. So I want to give a warm welcome to Jaime, to Dennis, and to a rich gentleman. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you guys joining me on a Friday.

I hope you're all doing well. What are you guys up to? You doing all right today? Thanks, Ben. Doing great. Awesome. It's going out. It's freezing.

Yeah. That it is. That it is. I'm glad that we could be here to get bullish and warm up together at least. But gentlemen, let's do a quick round of intros before we dive in and then we'll just get right into the show. So we'll do a quick round of who are you and what do you do? And I'll toss it over to Jaime first.

Can you give yourself a little intro, man? Sure. Thanks, Ben. Jaime Garcia, a Salvadorian Canadian bitcoiner. I've delved into the world of Bitcoin back in 2021. inspired by Jack Mallor's announcement of El Salvador's adopting Bitcoin. And I marrised myself in learning and your videos played a pivotal role in my early Bitcoin education. And then, you know, you'll hear a little bit more about that today from me.

And so just recognizing the lack of Salvadoran perspective in the Bitcoin space, I became a regular contributor to Bitcoin magazine focusing on, Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador. So yeah, today I'm excited to share why I'm bullish on Bitcoin education. But yeah, other than that, I'm a dad, a husband. I do my thing for my Fiat job. And that's about it for me. Awesome. Well, glad to have you back, man. And it's funny to see you on here after having seen you in person not too long ago when you came up from the sat markets in in Calgary just weeks back. So yeah, it's good to see you again, man. Let's toss it down to Dennis next. Welcome back. Can you give yourself an intro for anybody unfamiliar?

Hey, Ben. Great to be back. Glad to be on the show. I've been a long time fan. And yeah, for those that don't know anything about me, my name is Dennis Porter. I'm the CEO, co-founder of Satoshi Action. To keep it short and simple, we pass laws to make sure that you don't have to move to El Salvador or when the United States decides to cramp down on your Bitcoin rights. So we'll be in about 15 states this year, up from 13, passing laws to protect your right to self-custody and a number of other things, which I'll probably talk about here in a little bit when we talk about why are we bullish. But glad to be back on and happy to be here with Jamie and Rich as well. Awesome.

Awesome. Well, dude, good to have you. And yeah, we're curious to hear what's been going on. Also, apparently the chat's already asking about the aliens you've been seeing. also also not an alien hunter yeah that's definitely not my my role in this space but some people certainly uh can't seem to forget that one infamous tweet awesome awesome all right and rich first time on the show thank you for being here can you give yourself a little introduction yeah my name's rich swisher um i am an alien so if anybody's hunting for him uh i i i'm the co-founder and president of

motive. We're an NGO. We're the U.S.-based 501c3, but for the last four years, we've been operating in the various cultural regions and geographic regions of Peru, where we are using Bitcoin to tackle the problem of people being so dependent on aid, they don't have the ability to make some of the most basic of fair decisions. Like, um, uh, what? what they have to do to survive and what they have have to do to help their kids survive. It would, and a lot of times it'd be things that are unconscionable up here, but they're really trapped within without a choice. And they're trapped out of a banking system.

They're trapped out of an economy. And many of them don't even have identities. We created a portfolio of programs that allows them to learn how to and then to actually lift themselves up into, self-sufficiency and interdependency within a community. Bitcoin is their bank. It's a, I believe it's a God-given right that we have to be able to freely transact. It gives them that ability. And then with vocational skills, they can dig themselves up.

They're not the hopeless scabs in society that quite often they're treated like. They just need a fair system. And that's what we brought down there. We have 15 operating circular economies in various regions, up on the Amazon, out in the mountainous region, the Amazonian basin mountain region, the Andes up around Cusco and Machu Picchu, and then down, most of them down in the coastal areas, the kind of the slums around Lima. Damn, that's awesome. And I'm sure we'll maybe get, we'll get granular with it, perhaps, depending on your bullish reason. But I'm very curious about kind of how that came to fruition and all that. But we'll dive into that shortly.

But thank you for being here, of course, and thanks to all the panelists. We're going to dive into the show. But if anybody's watching for the first time and you're unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish? Very simple premise of the show. Each one of us comes with a reason for being bullish, something that. that we're currently excited about in and around the world of Bitcoin. And that can take many forms. It could be a personal experience.

It could be like an app or device that we just tried. It could be some item of news. Really anything is fair game. But the flow of the show will be, number one, somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish, is their chance to rant and talk about whatever has them all riled up. Number two, everybody altogether is going to riff on that reason. We're going to all ask questions, give comments, go

down whatever rabbit holes we feel like. And then finally, number three, we're going to rotate to the next person until we've all had a turn. So basically reason, riff, rotate. Number one tip of the show is don't drop your reason too early so that you still have something to talk about when we get around to it. So we're going to dive right in.

I'm going to start with mine. I was kind of split on a couple different things, but maybe I'll just, I'll pepper in my second half as like a little bonus. here. But so obviously, like, this has been a, a little bit of a wild week just in terms of like the, the mess of the past couple days and all of that and, and all of the ETFs launch and the, it's been, it's been noisy. But there's one thing that kind of came out of these past, this past week that I was actually quite happy to see. And that's that a couple of these funds are, actually donating portions of their profits. And I think that's kind of a big deal. So Vanek,

their ETF profits, 5% of those profits are going to go to support Bitcoin core developers. So it said, you know, this was announced a little earlier on, but they said, we're not Bitcoin tourists at Vanek. We're in it for the long haul. That's why we made an initial $10,000 donation and signed a pledge to donate 5% of our Bitcoin ETF profits. to support core devs at Bitcoin Brink for at least 10 years. Yeah. So anyways, I think that's great. Our developers, you know, they're very much relying on grants in many, in many situations.

And so having a source of funding like that, hopefully with no strings attached, I recognize that there's some, you know, potential hazard there. But, you know, I do think it's a positive thing that our developers have income. And then the other one that I really like is Bitwise is donating 10% of their ETF profits to brink OpenSats and the Human Rights Foundation. And so from what I've been hearing, like Odell talking about and everything, my understanding is that though that 10% that is split evenly amongst those groups is more or less just like no strings attached,

hey, we're going to just drop these sats. And then OpenSats as an organization then says, okay, we're going to allocate these to either evenly across the board or wherever needs help. And OpenSats is a fantastic organization. If you haven't used it, then highly recommend dropping some sats to either just the general fund, which is just distributed equally,

to a specific project that you like. But, yeah, 10% of profits to these three organizations. I also have a soft spot for the Human Rights Foundation. I've done some side-by-side work with them, working with political dissidents in various parts of the world that are utilizing Bitcoin as a mechanism to freely transact in spite of the best efforts of, you know, some tyrannical dictators that may say,

you're not allowed to do this here. And so it's an excellent tool for human rights and to see funding from, you know, something like an ETF flowing into a human rights organization that's utilizing Bitcoin. I think that's a great thing. So I guess not too much else to add there. I think it's important that our debts have funding in some way, shape, or form. I think that this is a wonderful thing to see. And we'll see how it plays out over the years.

but it looks like that there's going to be less of a struggle for devs to get by on some very important projects. So I'm curious your guys' thoughts in and around this. You know, like I think it seems pretty positive, but, you know, people have brought up the, you know, the potential of some of these funds to also try and influence development as well. So, yeah, I just, I'll toss it out there. I'll let you guys chime in on what you think. I would, yeah, that's where my concern on that would come in. I think it's great that their intent, their apparent intent and stated intent is great. I'm not knowledgeable of the governance of the core devs.

And that would be something that I would really like to see them step up and have some way to be governed on what they do, how they do it, who is brought into that group that is separate from any funding. So it is an absolute set amount. It can't be touched. Maybe that it is supported by, I don't know, maybe it's any corporation operating on Bitcoin pays a license of goodness into that. And it is a set amount and that is that. And if they do pay their dues, they are marked as a business that is on the up and up. If they do not pay their dues, they're marked as a business. It's not supporting the core very evenly. That would be one of the things I'd like to see. That would be, I mean, I'd be in, I wonder if that website, I feel like this is something that

Rodolfo Noback would have put together, NVK. Like, see, he has every website under the sun. But I, that would be a great website just like companies that support Bitcoiners and just like listing the companies that are giving back, like the profitable companies that are giving back to the ecosystem. I think that'd be a great website to have. And, and even like track, you know, like what percentage of profits are going to and where they're going to and stuff like I think that'd be a pretty small. And lock in the amount. If it's anything that can be influenced, if there's anything that can turn. garnish what is so amazing about Bitcoin, lock it in, set amount. You can't go above it. It'd be

kind of along the lines of take money out of politics and see who we end up with in office. It ain't going to be any of the ones that we have in there now sort of thing. Fair enough. Dennis, what are your thoughts on this new source of funding for devs? I love it. I'm a big fan. I think it really goes to show how big we are growing, a group and how important it is to align yourself with some of the values of the group. I mean, this is something that groups have done for decades is like try to force corporations and large powerful players to align their values with them. You know, we see it with like even just things like the LGBT movement.

Like they have rating systems on like how DEI you are, right? So it's like the same exact thing that we're doing and we're replicating. And that just means that we're growing as a as a block, as an economic block, right? for money, but eventually this will also translate into voting power as well. And it's something that I've been very, very, very supportive of now, like, listen, like if these guys start using their support of core devs to push through things that we don't agree with, then, you know, we fight those battles when we come to it. But in the meantime, I think we should be celebrating any sort of money going to the historically

underpaid and underappreciated core developers in this community. And I think it will draw more core developers in. So for me, all good things, but also keep an eye on, you know, the future and future impacts as well. Yeah. I may, how about yourself? You don't, yeah, I, I kind of have a little bit of reservations around it. I mean, yes, I think it's, like Dennis said, you know, this is a group of, you know,

essential people to the protocol that has been underpaid, underfunded, you know, but is this the funding that we want? Having said that nobody else is putting their money where their mouth is, and they are. And so what does that mean? What's a stipulation? What's the kickback, right? So I think we just need to see how that plays out. And exactly, you know, if new bips and new proposals start coming in. And all you have to do is follow the money because now we have a bit of a money trail on this, right?

The one thing that I'm kind of curious about is like of the profits it generates. how doesn't like and forgive me maybe i'm i'm i'm the the left side of the curber here but how does an a bitcoin etf generate profit they've got fees on on everything okay that's what i was going to say is it like the the fees generated and what you know that's where they're going to get that from okay yeah so they've basically got if you're holding the etif if you're holding those ios uh then um you will you will you will pay for the privilege of doing so right uh and right now i think that it's like some of them are in and around like a quarter of a percent um some somewhere in that range like all of them are are relatively

what we'll say relatively speaking they're they're low and there's been a lot of competition because there's so many of them um but i mean even a quarter of a percent on on substantial amounts of money um can can add up and especially like you know there's with the number of debbs that that would be supported through that i feel like it makes a meaningful impact but my my last sort of point or question or sort of question mark i don't know if any any of us know the answer is like how how are they paying these you know um is it fiat or is it bitcoin is it a more spot btcccs right so what it so i don't know if there's any details around that statement on how it gets paid out?

I think it is being paid in Bitcoin. Cash. Are you talking about the ETF? Like what if you try to like redeem? No, no, no. I'm talking about like paying. Yeah, the donations to the foundations. Like if they give open sats, the profits.

I'm sure it's Fiat. You think? I mean, I mean, open sats accepts Bitcoin. So I'm, yeah, I don't know. Probably. I guess actually. To be honest, like even though like as a, you know, nonprofit leader, two different nonprofits I run like generally like I like to take small amounts of Bitcoin over time,

kind of like treat it like my savings account. But for the most part, like nonprofits sort of prefer fiat because the vast majority of our expenses are paid in fiat. Like it's just the nature of being in a nonprofit where you're trying to, as you get more funding, you like grow your organization and it's money in and money out with a nonprofit. Like you don't tend to hold on to like you don't. you don't want a lot of Bitcoin coming in because then you're constantly converting it all the time.

Well, it's nice to have some coming here. It's like they open stats for sure. They obviously accept Bitcoin. Same with the, well, actually, all of these organizations, of course, accept Bitcoin. There was a comment in the chat here that I thought was worth bringing up.

Brad said, ETF's funding good foundations, which independently fund devs. You said this is a nice barrier between the donor and the developer as far as I understand. I'd agree, like going through those foundations as opposed to direct grants to individual devs to do specific things. Yeah, I think that buffer is absolutely needed. Yeah. I'd love to play devil's advocate on that.

The more we talk about, the more I go like, yeah, that's corruptible. Yes, definitely. Okay. Yeah, corruptible. like to to play against what rad wrote down in there like okay well then you have a then you have a donor that's able to corrupt on two layers how much can they go in because money corrupts absolutely and but it's absolutely needed and so if if there was kind of a smart contract sort of automated pool where devs get X amount period and it comes out of the pool, one pool. And it goes to all devs evenly. They're set. They know exactly what they're getting

out of it and pay them well. But anytime you can influence by, okay, well, here, I'm going to make you a little bit happier than you are. Well, then you're going to influence. And the small people are not going to influence. I have our organization. We're lucky. And the way we operate, everything comes in. We pay a very small portion out into fiat and have to convert it into fiat and have to convert it into fiat up here in the u.s because mainly everything's in peru and everything we do down there is on bitcoin because we're making the circular economies um but i have um i have one donor that really is he's he without him none of it would have started and none of it would keep going i i'm i'm donor level number two um and what i've given pales in comparison and uh even though he's he's super

super hey you know do your own thing if he doesn't like it that goes away so he is in control even if he doesn't want to say he's in control um and and it shuts it down and we would have to really think about and we've been in those positions where we have to really think about okay do we pull out the the rug from under you know 10,000 people like that because no no we disagree with that one source or do we say okay well we'll we'll compromise because we're you know you're don't want to pull the rug out from these single moms that are going to go back into a terrible situation so okay we'll go with what that one big powerful person says whereas if it was out of a pool and and you know core devs that's a smaller group and easier to be controlled it was out of a pool

and it was just a dead set amount and bitcoinsers and people involved in the in the bitcoin space and economy could see how much each company is putting into the pool, that's great. Then that company gets that pump. We get to see, okay, who's giving how much. But then devs, they're always getting the exact same amount. It's not going to go up. It's not going to go down. They wouldn't be as influenceable.

With, I don't know specifics around HRF and, and Brink, but I know the open sats, as a donor, you have the choice. to either pick an organization that you like a specific project that you want to fund or you can donate to the general fund which then oh either way i'll keep going um there's the general fund and that just splits everything kind of equally um equally amongst uh every project that's listed so there's basically the option of like hey i really want to donate a btc pay server and it just goes directly there. Or you can just say, I'm going to donate to OpenSats.

And when it goes there, it just evenly distributes across everything. So yeah, yeah. So I don't know if you guys have anything to add. Rich is here. I think it's just the camera got cut. Ben, I would say that in concept. I like the idea of funding the devs. I think that I would say that, you know, the challenge here is for all of us plebs.

and some of the OJs who like to call the PLEB's names and whatnot, they should actually donate to some of these funds for the developers so that we don't rely solely on these mechanisms to develop Bitcoin development. Yeah, yeah. there's the other thing brought up by Rusty he said one thing about you know if we're rating companies or you know trying to step in regulating money to the debbs there there is a you know a potential in and around even just the the rating system that we start to give people to so i mean i guess like no matter how you slice it there's going to be people that

want to raise money and and give back. In some instances, that's going to be fully altruistic. And in some instances, people are going to try and utilize that to have a degree of influence. And so at the end of the day, it's up to individual people utilizing Bitcoin to utilize it the best way that they can. And it becomes very difficult to say you're not allowed to give this person money to do work. And I feel like the lines will be blurred there because it's like if there's, for instance, a feature that I really want in a particular wallet or that somebody really needs for their business and they say, hey, I'm going to take some of my profits and I'm going to help fund this tool being made. And it's maybe a tool that people weren't utilizing

previous to this. And all of a sudden it's like this new suite of tools comes out and it's great for this business, that also kind of, in a way, impacts how people use Bitcoin because that tool wouldn't have existed without that funding. And so, yeah, I mean, again, this whole thing is a double-edged sword. And as long as people are cognizant of, you know, as we're saying, follow the money, depending on if you start to see behaviors and things come about that maybe are in myth alignment with some of the core values that a lot of us hold near and dear, then all we can really do is call attention to it and say like, do we want this? And even at the end of the day, we can't really say no, right? Like if somebody wants to build something, you can't really say no to it. But what

you can do as an individual is if it does anything to screw with the protocol, you can run a node, you can link your wallace to your node, and you can say, you know, don't change the protocol. This is, this is what I want to use. Ben, have you ever heard this saying, he, he who pays the piper gets to call the tunes? It's a very popular one up here in the prairies. So, and they're Canadian prairies. Yeah. Well, and that's, we have for Cho Sawyer typed in.

Having large money inflows will start to corrupt the ethos of Satoshi who did it for free. And I saw a lot of other people are saying the cordevs should have a, have a volunteer attitude. They should do it because they're capable of doing it. And in all those situations, all that we're talking about, we're relying on, we're relying on, relying on human nature. and for it to be good. And overwhelmingly it would go to the good.

And even when we're talking about, hey, if we see things we don't like, we'll blow the whistle. Well, Canada, me and Dennis are down here in the U.S. There's a lot of things that we don't like going on in the government that we can see. And we're not really, we don't have a whistle to. Yeah.

We're supposed to. But in truth, we can't blow the whistle. It is what it is. It's going to run that way until it's a, a big massive major stop that I wouldn't want to see Bitcoin have to go through. Yeah, fair enough. Well, gentlemen, I think I'll put a bow on that topic for now. I'm going to be cautiously optimistic in and around this development.

And hopefully as stated, it'll just be like no strings attached, like, hey, we want to look good to the Bitcoin community. And we're going to, you know, peel off a small portion and help fun things. And who knows, maybe this brings forth a whole new suite of tools that otherwise would not have been funded at all. So I'll cross my fingers there. But if things start smelling funny, then I'm sure I'm certain that Bitcoiners will call it out. But either way, we're going to do a rotation here. Again, everybody in the chat, thank you for being here.

Of course, hit that like button just below the screen. If you get the chance and give this a share. But we're going to rotate over. I'm going to toss it to Jaime first, and I'll cue you up with the same question everybody's going to get. Why are you bullish? Sure. Well, I'm going to show some love to the people in the chat to, you know, because I always

see them typing, hello from Germany. So insane 89M hello from Germany. And then there was somebody think it was a bit dug or something from Edmonton. Nice. Hello, Edmonton. But why am I bullish? Well, I want to highlight the incredible impact of Bitcoin education, mainly through an initiative. And I'm going to assume that many of you know what this initiative is, but I'm going to also assume that some of you probably don't know.

But they're called My Primera Bitcoin. And in Spanish or in English, that means my first Bitcoin. And a year ago, this program that this organization in El Salvador created became open source and it became kind of like one of my eureka moments in my Bitcoin journey. And this organization, my first Bitcoin emerged as a result of El Salvador making Bitcoin legal tender. but there was an educational gap. And the founder, John Dennehy, along with many local bitcoiners in El Salvador, began to put together a curriculum in a student workbook where they could teach local high school students to understand, first of all, what money is,

but then how Bitcoin works, why Bitcoin emerged, how Bitcoin mining works, some of the more technical stuff, and essentially create a wallet, back up their wallet, destroy their wallet and restore it so that they could have some sort of financial sovereignty. And I mean, if the country itself is going to have this technology, this innovation, as their currency, it only makes sense for people to know it. But it became apparent that students, like young high school students, were the most, I guess, ripe for this type of education and began to be targeted towards them.

And so this program, this organization and their educational program has become so successful. And they made their program. open source and has been translated into English and other languages now are being translated. Korean, I know, is one of them in German and with more to come. Once I took a look at this program, it really kind of drove home why it's so valuable. And it's really the fact that it simplifies complex concepts of Bitcoin, and it makes it accessible and digestible for students globally. In Canada, in particular, we've made some significant strides with this program.

We have been honored to receive a full node status from my first Bitcoin, which means that we can fully use the branding here in Canada to promote. that program. And this is really significant because, you know, we, you know, my, my main goal is to expand the list of educators, train them, onboard them, and equip them with the resources and the funding needed so that they can teach this program to anybody who wants it across Canada. And so in 2024, I'm aiming to have more educators across Canada, delivering the courses and hopefully maybe I'm aiming for 21 classes of at least 10 students for the end of 2024. I know it's ambitious because we just sort of started. I graduated one class in

in 2023 and I'm about to start my first class in about a week from now in 2024. So that's why I'm bullish. I think that my first Bitcoin is doing something amazing. their courses are being taught throughout many circular economies and equipping educators like the ones in Peru with the tools that they need in order to support their efforts and educating people about Bitcoin education. Awesome. I love it, man. I'm so glad that you're doing this too. I'm so glad. And education is one of the number one places where I think people need to focus their firepower because it is it's not easy going from something you've known your entire life to as something entirely different, let alone for somebody that's well out of high school. but if you can hone in on people that are younger,

that are newer to this as well. I love that they've been doing this in schools and everything. And the thing that stands out to me is, imagine getting this type of education on our own fiat currencies growing up. Oh, absolutely. Curiously devoid of that type of education in the school system. I wonder why that might be omitted

to explain how fiaturricular, fiat works to people at an early age. It's almost as if they'd catch on to the, to the whole ploy and realize how broken our money is. But it's really cool that in these programs, that they start with how money works, how the current system works, and then move on to,

well, and so this is what you're living in right now, and then this is what we think will replace it, or this is just how this system works. And people can then contrast and compare. And that kind of, I guess, transparency of like, well, here's the two options, which one seems to be maybe a little bit better and which one seems to be a little bit worse, whereas, like, we don't even learn about how our money works, let alone an alternative to it. So, I mean, I feel like a lot of kids in El Salvador that are learning these things,

I mean, they've already got more education in and around how currency works than most people on the planet. But I think it's setting them up for the ability to kind of move themselves forward quite a bit in life, you know, in comparison to a lot of other places. So anyways, those are my initial thoughts there, but I'm curious everybody else's as well. Yeah. There's a great quote. I'll read it so I write off the internet so I don't mess it up, but it's right to the notion of why we don't learn about the financial system. And it's a quote by Henry Ford. And it says, it is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system. For if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. I mean, it's like people really understood this stuff. They would be pissed. And there's an incentive to not teach people. I mean, we've really gotten away from teaching anybody, anything about economics, true economics and true to finance. in schools because if we did, people would be riding in the streets. And to Jaime and apologize, I mispronounced your name earlier.

Oh, it's all good, man. It's all good. To Jaime's comments about what's going on with Meade Premier, a big fan of what John has done with that organization and very, very happy with what's happening in El Salvador. For those of you that don't know, my parents have lived in El Salvador for well over 12 years, 13 years now. Some Bitcoiners have met my parents down in El Salvador now. They call my dad Papa Porter.

So it's a shout out to Papa Porter. But yes, love what they're doing. Very, very ambitious to be able to train the people up early and often on Bitcoin. And if our schools aren't going to teach us about finance, then we need organizations like Me Premier to step in and teach all of us, especially the young folks that really don't have an opportunity in this fiat system, teach them about Bitcoin and set them on a good path and give them an opportunity to make progress and to be successful for generations to come. Rich, I'm curious to hear you chime in as well because you've been, you know, you've been kind of in and around this, this education curve, you know, with what you guys are doing, teaching people about how to do all this.

And I'm sure we'll get into your story, but I'm curious about your thoughts and around me premier Bitcoin and just general education and around money at a young age. Oh, do I still have you? I don't know if it froze. I think he froze, yeah. He froze, right? Just right when you were doing that, I think it froze. Okay, all right. Well, quick.

Yeah. Oh, I was just going to, you know, sort of to jump in there. You jogged my memory on education and the importance of it. I mean, it's critical. We face an era of a complete lack of education. It's not just on Bitcoin. It's on a lot of different things. I mean, this became apparent to us at Satoshi Action when we started trying to talk to folks

at every level of government. that means everything from city council all the way up to the federal system. And we would run into people and we would start talking about, you know, energy because energy is really important for Bitcoin mining. And we would talk to them about, you know, the dynamics of energy and how we see Bitcoin mining playing into that. And the comments we would get back on just how energy works, even from like top staffers. Now, there's some great staffers.

And I shout out to you guys out there. A big shout out to Tim Haidt, working on the financial committee there in D.C. But there are some staffers, though, that really. just don't know these topics and yet they're put in these positions of power. So we got to educate, but not just on Bitcoin. We got to educate on all the things that Bitcoin is connected to energy, money, finance, banking, you name it. And there needs to be more education on it.

Yeah, I just want to give out a shout out to Mark, BTC on the chat. He said that, you know, he would teach it in French in Montreal. And so that's great. DM me because we also need translators for French. Yeah, absolutely. And the more

the more communities you can get this type of education too, it's so important. And Dennis, I love what you're saying about you know, the fact that yeah, the average person knows is taught nothing about the monetary system, but like

again, energy, I knew nothing about even just like the, the, fact that when when you're producing energy, you need to produce enough energy for your peak demand at all times just to make sure that you don't have blackouts or you don't risk blackouts and brownouts. And that most of that energy is like it's not like it's it's saved and kept for later. It's just kind of wasted more or less if it's not all used up.

I mean, I didn't know any of that about energy before Bitcoin. And then, of course, like, as naturally when you have a money that's intrinsically tied to energy and quasi-backed by energy, I suppose, or secured by energy, yeah, of course, people that are using that and seeing it as important are going to start to understand energy better and see the value there. So yeah, I think it's great that we're adding that. Oh, we got, we got Rich. There we go.

It cut off right as you said like, all right, well, let's go to Rich because he's had connection with this. Sorry, I missed. I definitely wanted to chime in on this. I am a little frustrated. I want to be doing me put a matter of Bitcoin down in our centers, but I don't run on the ground. and they have a lot going on and I've not got my co-founder. I mean, we are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to keep up with what all we have going on.

And I think it's really important. I know he feels the same. And so I've been talking to John in DMs and working with one of his staff and trying to convince my ground team to get going on that. Because, yeah, I think it is really important. important for every i agree with all the reasons you said but let me add a little perspective on for the uneducated um and many times illiterate um who we are teaching and so they get their information um from word of mouth um maybe a bit from tv they get a lot of it from local government

and politicians and their belief system in those kind of environments or belief systems very different like if you say hey we're going to bring you independence the ability to stand on your own um they'll tell you get out of here we want nothing to do with that you know that's why that's why there are governments governments create money and they just need to give us more of it and then we'll be okay but we need somebody to take care of us we need somebody to put houses up for us we need somebody to feed us need somebody to educate our kids give us these programs. I mean, geez, that's how it works. And that's what the politicians that want the votes come along and tell them, bring me in and I'm going to bring you this and bring you that.

And man, when you are stuck in, when you're in survival mode, and not only are you in survival mode right now, you were born into it, five generations in your family before we're born into it. Survival mode is just life. And somebody comes along and says, hey, we're going to give you a bunch of that sounds great when there is no other opportunity for you to go and earn your way out you are just looking for somebody to give you stuff and if you really want to enslave those people it's great just go and give them about 30% on what they need and they will be hungry and starving and back tomorrow never give them 100% just give them 30% and just say come again tomorrow we'll give you a little bit more um so in teaching them in teaching the the participants in our programs

about Bitcoin, we do not roll in early and go, hey, here's what's so great about this. They do not understand the foundations of what they would need to understand to realize that our current financial system is bad. And a lot of our people come to recognize the great value that Bitcoin monetary system has after they have a successful business operating, they realize they can earn a little bit more by working a little smarter, a little harder, going to a better location, this and that. And they start experiencing financial self-sufficiency. And they realize, hey, I can build this up a little bit more.

That's when you can go in, in our experience, that's when you can go into those individuals and say, hey, I want to teach you something about the financial system and about banking that you've never done. And I know you don't trust the banks and whatnot, but here you go. And so they start out from a completely different plane in understanding that. And I just wanted to throw that perspective on not everybody is sitting where we're at and our ability to go, hey, wait a minute. I think I'm probably I'm probably less educated than all of you are. And especially when it comes to finances.

I heard about Bitcoin in 2011. I was interested in the cryptology. I come from a military and intelligence background. and the cryptology was great. I didn't care about the money. Whatever, it's internet money, and I didn't pay attention. And I also didn't pay attention to our monetary system until I had this opportunity to do something for so many people,

and I had to be orange-pilled. And then I learned both our financial system and Bitcoin. And, yeah, what Miprimeta Bitcoin has come up with, I don't think, I think it is a second-to-nun curriculum on on taking people up there but some of the people like the ones we have they need some steps to get up to where they can hit that rich agree just one comment on that i you know one of the beauties about this is you can fork it to like um suit your needs and meet people where you're where where they're at and the biggest irony is that you know the inca empire builds so many

amazing and wonderful things and the descendants of them have become so dependent on the state that, you know, it's kind of sad. But at the same time, I think, you know, the programs there to help you and take what you need from it. Because even like on the ones that I taught, there, I could see that there's a few. students that their their eyes were wondering and I'm like you do you are you following me and then I just sort of like okay you know this is what you need to get out of this one so like I had to like take a different approach but like when when you have like an entire population where you know like yeah culturally like they're they are different their their views of life in society

and values are different it it may have to require like a different in treatment, a different fork. And this is by no means a universal course. But definitely, given everything that's out there, I think it's one of the better ones. I think it's for everything I've seen, it's absolutely the best. And rolling it out, it not hitting all of our people isn't why we don't roll it out. We have thousands of people. We have people that would fit right in there.

And the ones that don't, we might be able to identify gaps. and then identify trends and gaps and what kind of maybe maybe be able to come with some hey here's some preparatory courses if you're going to go way out in the sticks in middle of nowhere but yeah and when you talk about the the ketchua people that are up around where the incas were it's one of the biggest tragedies and i think it's easier for people to or they pay more attention to it when we put pictures from that region up um But they not only are they dependent and having to, they have to leave their land. They have to leave their language and go and, you know, just beg on the streets and try to find something to do down in Lima, which is a different world for them. And they're even losing their culture and all.

And we were really blown away. It's where we started. We started by trying to save kids' lives by giving them shoes. And it was these little basic things. And what it all boiled down to was their ability to freely. and securely and fairly transact and once given that system man they the ketchua take off like wildfire and making things great things happen for themselves so it's really exciting seeing that culture be able to regain some of its artisan crafts regain uh be able to stay in their

ancestral lands rather than vacating because they're starving so it's cool yeah it's a big it's a big thing to meet people where they're at you know it's like people all the time try to dump just mass information on folks and our education at work that we've done, whether it be the public or folks in position of power, it's like it's always best to meet them where they're at. And another big thing is to ask them questions before you dive into the education process. Like learning about their perspective on the world or on finance is really helpful. So I always tell people, if you know, if you're just a pleb on the street trying to educate someone, like before you start educating, ask some questions,

and it'll probably lead you in a really good direction. Yeah, I think you're totally right there. And actually, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to segue. Jaime is just, I believe you're just going to swap, go off screen for a minute and swap rooms. But nonetheless, I want to do a rotation. We'll put a ball on this topic. And I mean, maybe not entirely because, Rich,

I kind of want to segue. way into you because it likely relates in and around what you guys have been doing. But I'll leave it open-ended and I'll just cue you up by, again, simply asking, why are you bullish? Yeah, I, you know, bullish in general, because I learned, because I learned the basics. And as far as I understand, the technical side of it, it seems, it's at least more bulletproof than anything we've had before and hopefully the bulletproof nests last a really long time but here recently um we motive motive is like a project to be able to turn our donor he wanted to apply his funding to somebody doing good for people and we were we were saving kids lives that were um dying at a

at a crazy rate just from exposure to cold through their feet and he's like yeah we'll help with that But what I really like is, and I'll help you more if you can make these transactions that you do, keep it in Bitcoin and try to make them circular. And I'm like, wait, we just want to buy some shoes and you want us to create circular economies. Neither one of us are economists or finance people at all. But as we really started diving, you know, we were super motivated to save as many lives as we could. And then the pandemic kicked off and it kind of shifted into a much broader scope program. And then we realized we have to, in order to do this in Bitcoin and keep it out of Fiat, no caching out, we need to create these circular economies.

Through that, that really ended up being the product, motive created a product. And it is how to take people from dependency to self-sufficiency and maybe community. community interdependency through these programs, this financial system. And that's what the design team and development team here in the U.S., that's what we did. The team in Peru, they executed. They rolled it out. They were the field testers, get information back. We'd come up a better design, and then we roll out another iteration.

And we got that quite mature to the point where the U.S. team, there was no need for us to be taking any funding or whatnot. It was time for us to disband. We have this product and that was that. And we did that. It was so it was first of this year where I stepped away completely from the day to day. And Motif Peru is doing Motif Peru and we're just a product. And I was excited to go off and work other jobs. Go get a job and work for somebody else for a while.

I don't like being the owner or be in the CEO. but doors just started opening and now it looks like there's a platform that I'm going to probably gather people together and create and launch this platform that really helps will be a really valuable tool for any organization worldwide that is looking to create Bitcoin circular economies really make it all function that way and the doors are opening in so many different different areas from so many different people. And I mean, it's what, January 12th. And I was trying not to do more. And now it's just bubbling itself back up. And I think when things happen organically like that, I'm a man of faith, so I believe there's a little bit of supernatural or a lot of

supernatural help in this. But just within the Bitcoin community, the organic growth of people caring about how this gets deployed, that it gets deployed, the betterment of its deployment. They're constantly looking for connection and kind of creating these self-organized teams. So now I'm looking at, all right, well, 2024, I don't know if I'm, I don't know if I'm going to go back to earning a great paycheck and doing my own thing at a company and maybe looking at now doing like a platform development project based on the needs of organizations that want to replicate what motive's doing. So that has me pretty bullish and excited. Damn. That's awesome. I kind of want to leave it up to the other gentleman to dive in first.

I always jump in first. So if you guys want to take it down a rabbit hole, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, just with regards to, you know, creating circular economies, you know, the work that that you're doing, Rich, and then others in El Salvador are doing like Mike Peterson. It's just critical work as we prepare for a transition to new financial systems. So thank you for the work that you're doing on the ground there and for the additional mission work that you do as well. Like, you know, your additional, you know, nonprofit mission work, however you describe it, also gives you a really great gateway to talk about Bitcoin.

And, you know, I think that's something that should be not undervalued or underappreciated. and we should be talking about other ways as a community that we can be doing outreach to be able to build bridges and talk more about Bitcoin. One example is we tell miners all the time, you know, reach out to the local community, you know, figure out what are some of the needs of these small communities. Oftentimes they go to very rule parts of the country, parts of the world. And, you know, they just, you know, a miner is a business, right? They just want to set up shop and get to work mining Bitcoin. But oftentimes it can be very beneficial to engage with the local community and get them incorporated into what you're doing. because the long-term effect of that is that they view Bitcoin as something positive,

and then they become curious. And when they become curious, it opens a door for you to be able to educate a more accelerated rate. So thank you again for the work that you're doing. It's just very, very critical work as we move towards a world where Bitcoin is the Premier. Hopefully, we can be using me Premier down there as well with what you're doing. But just, yeah, wanted to make sure and thank you for that. I'm sure you don't get thanked enough for it. No, I get thanked way too much.

I mean, I'm good. I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that. I've had some super fulfilling jobs, but, you know, this is just right up there. If not the most fulfilling thing I've ever been able to be a part of. Rich, you know, I think that a lot of Latin American countries share, you know, very similar histories. You know, Peru, much like El Salvador, had, you know, bloody, bloody, bloody civil wars, with both a very oppressive series of dictatorships and governments fighting very oppressive and you know, villainous guerrilla movements like Shining Path and then the Tupacamaru. And what that does to a population, it robs them and not only impoverish them in a financial level,

but at a cultural, psychological, and an emotional level. And I think that this is where the challenge of education becomes even more exponential because you're having to teach people that there is a better future when they've never known any hope or positivity around or even some of the, you know, concepts around what a better world could be. And so like just like to echo what Dennis has said is like, thanks for doing some of this work. And hopefully, you know, what comes and what emerges out of it are some local leaders because that's what I find is that, you know, we could come in and say, this is great for you. but Rich you yourself said it earlier that the, you know, when you take that approach,

they say, okay, you can get out of here now. We've been sort of told this forever, right? But if you can get a couple of great on the ground, local leaders to sort of like teach and get people on board, I think that makes a huge, huge difference. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, keep at it. and I'm looking forward to see how this developed. I saw Julian and Isabella go down there, and they were onboarding people onto a few different lightning wallets,

and people were really excited. Mind you, they probably weren't up in the Andes, although in some footage they were. A lot of the times they were in Lima or more, you know, densely populated places. But definitely people seem excited about Bitcoin when Julian and Isabella were down there. Well, they were with us the whole time.

And they're going to be putting a documentary out, and I can't wait to see if that's like. Yeah, no, they did. They did get up to the Andes. I think they started in Kusko and the Waialapata and Hawaii and the villages outside of there. So it should have a bit of that. I really, I was down there when Joe Nakamoto and Paco de, India went around and so I was with them and saw a lot of that so I'm really excited because I wasn't down there to see what Julian and Isabella did but one of the

things let me jump on a couple of things you said there the local leaders and then the education piece education without leaders is it's hard to make it stick and one of the the keys to our program so we created our field guides So another organization can come along and say, hey, we want to do that. And we can walk them through. And one of the very first things is you're not going to plant anything or get anything done until you first find a really quality leader. And the success is going to be based on how quality of a leader you have there.

And we have, we've had, we've experienced good and the bad. We've lost locations over now. This leader is not, not in it for the good. We haven't had any that are, that are, you know, trying to thief or anything like that. but quality leadership is really important in educating because it's not simply in education. It really requires a mentorship. And we wanted to do something really simple and found that, no, you have to do something really holistic to make it actually function and launch. We wanted to do like what Mike was doing in El Salvador.

I went soon after we started, I went down there, spent a week with him. And that's where we saw like, okay, we got to, we got to throw education in this as a piece. But we wanted to do something simple like that. He is getting kids to stay away from gangs, bringing them to good things, getting them back into education and they're learning about Bitcoin. We were in a we're in austere crazy terrible places. It was also easy. You know, Mike was able to say, hey, come to a beautiful surf spot.

So where we couldn't do that, we had to, we had to develop it a little deeper. and which I think is really, really important. And that leadership element of it is critical. You're right on the money. Like iniquitos, I said we're up in on the Amazon. And we fail up there over and over and over. We've still not had great success there because it's really tough to find a quality leader in that area.

It's very easy to find them up in the Andes. It's kind of tough around Lima. So culturally, and as well, we look at how this might go around the world, that's going to be, it's going to be a huge piece of it is how that, how that rolls out. I'm sorry, had my mute there. I'm curious, you know, you've been talking about meeting people where they're at and, and, you know, you need those initial steps to kind of, you know, even begin to, to lead people down that path. What, what, when you know, when you're, you know,

you when you were first kind of helping, I guess, get these communities rolling, like, out the gate, were there common stumbling blocks that you encountered every single time that you're like, okay, well, this is a definite pain point? What were some of the big challenges on an individual level as people were trying to understand the things that you were, you know, handing to them? well one trust and trust and then finding value in it so if we go down and i just um me and mike peterson were involved in a uh thank god for bitcoin human centric design organization find how utilize bitcoin um in the missions field um and talking to different missionaries and the

difficulty you know you're wanting to go and spread i'll just use this as an example you're wanting to spread to Christian faith. So you go out in the community and you're going, hey, hey, hey, look at this. And that community, if they've got things pretty, pretty situated and they're doing okay, there's going to be a percentage of them that go, okay, let me look at that. If you go there and they're starving, they're going to tell you, no thanks, going to keep looking for food, but cool that you're here. When their kids are dying at crazy rates or they're, you know, dealing with parasite problems and and shortened lifespans they're not going to want to hear that message they're like hey i've got to deal with this and that was the way we went in um with we luckily we stumbled um into that

issue with the feet and there's an easy sounding solution athletic hiking boots a couple of foot medical lessons and sessions per year, seven pairs of socks, and help them out. But what we were doing is we're meeting a real dire need. And the people, the Ketua people, give you the Hizsman right off the bat. Like, they don't want to talk to outsiders. They don't want your help. They realize help is damaging. And they're like, get out of here. But when you're going there saying, hey, you're losing 5% of your kids, we can help with that. They're all ears. And that life saving steps program, that's like a door opener for a lot of the places we go. And we have a few of our programs that are door openers.

And we want to deliver value up front and show that, hey, we're here for you. We're not here for Bitcoin. We're here for you. But we have this great tool that's Bitcoin. And it helps. And the rest of it is really the Bitcoin part comes later because we're dealing with people that truly are in survival mode. We're dealing with people that make the digital. decisions to, you know, that my kids aren't going to be able to eat, but this, this cartel,

this narco trafficker, this neighborhood terrible person says if I send my daughter over to his house, you know, for a week, then, well, then I'll be able to make the other kids survive. That's an impossible choice. And I, I condemn anyone that tries to judge those people without living a lifetime in their shoes. So that's, that's how we got. rolling is we went in and solved those things with this other with this bitcoin thing as a tool and like i said earlier they're not really looking into the the nature of bitcoin and the the virtue of it until they're at a place where they're like hey you know what kind of thinking about starting a second um uh location for my business here i have everything dialed in and squared away then then they have the

time to be able to think about the bigger things that we all have the luxury of time to think about a lot of comments about people saying you're not you know you're they're not off they're not on chain they're on the lightning network they don't even hold their keys and we're like if they have 20 bucks in their wallet they didn't pay anything last week and they got and they just got paid again if they have extra they're going to be actually putting a roof on their house instead of the plastic tarp they're going to be maybe buying a couple extra guinea pigs so they have more protein to feed their kids. So deliver the value up front and the stumbling blocks have been more along the lines of like getting locations getting robbed. We're in very poor, gnarly places, locations getting robbed,

are individual people getting robbed. Dealing with the lockdowns and the pandemic, we had to make the decision when all the churches were closing shop and NGOs were closing shop and going away. That's when we ramped up and we went ahead and violated. did the lockdowns and we're holding big groups we're doing six feet apart and double masks and all this kind of stuff but that was that was when i was really nervous for and we did we did lose a number of teammates that that didn't survive those gnarly times there in peru um but what my fear was was like all right i'm going to get these great leaders that we've developed they're going to go to prison. They're going to get stuck in this. We had a communist president get elected. That spun

things out and has kept things in a spin out. We've dealt with that. Bitcoin hasn't been a challenge at all. Everywhere has signal. It's easy to get phones. All the problems of the illiterate. We use the blink wallet a lot, formerly Bitcoin Beach wallet. We use that a lot. And the illiterate can read what they need to read. They can learn how to read the buttons they need to learn how to read. When it's there, they're being able to transact and keep their kids fed, they'll learn to read 40 years old ladies never had a smartphone. She'll learn how to read and use that app because it keeps your kids alive. So those kind of stumbling blocks, man, they've never really appeared for us. Yeah. So it's, I mean, like you're saying, when when the choice is one

or the other people, people rise to the occasion when it's, when it's the, the, you know, those dire needs. Yeah, wow, that's wild. I don't know if I have anything more to add, like, unless any, unless Dennis or Jaime want to add anything further to, um, Rich, can you tell people where they can find more info about what motive is doing? Yeah, um, you can go to our website that we don't monitor really well. Again, we're skeleton. We're actually no organizational staff anymore. It's just the field operations in Peru.

And my Twitter is at Motiv PM. My co-founder's Twitter is at Motiv Peru. And Motiv has no E on the end of it. We did the Latin American spelling, MOTIV.m. And yeah, that's our website. MOTIV. I believe it would also work as ONG, but it definitely works as motive. NGO.

And you can see a lot about what we're up to. And then Julian Figueroa and Isabella, they are putting out a documentary on us coming up soon. When DirtyCoin comes out, I think they're going to have some pieces on us as well. and when Joe Nakamoto just left Coin Telegraph. And he's putting together, last I talked to him, he was thinking it would probably be three installments of documentaries on his time with us down there. So there will be some good information coming out soon, you know, into the public eye. But other than that, we suck at marketing.

We hate social media. We're doing our best on it. So website and Twitter. that's the best. Awesome, awesome. Well, yeah, go check him out. Again, your Twitter handles in the show notes and website, mottiv. com.

Awesome. Awesome to hear what's going on there. And I'm very much looking forward to what Julian and Isabella put together and what Joe is going. And dirty coin looks pretty awesome too. So, yeah, awesome. Well, gentlemen, with that, we're going to do a final rotation. One last shout out to everybody in the chat. Thank you for joining in and being here.

hit that like button if you can give this a share and we're going to rotate over to Dennis who's been a busy man uh I mean for quite some time now but I'll open it up for you why are you bullish I am very bullish on the states and when I say the states I mean the United States currently as we said today we have members of Congress Liz Warren Elizabeth Warren for those of you that aren't are wondering which one I'm pointing my finger at, who are trying to backdoor ban your access to Bitcoin through banning self-custody, through banning your access to mine. And we fundamentally believe that we have to do everything possible to stop this. Self-custody is not only, should not only be a right.

It's something that needs to be venomately defended because if you can't self-custody Bitcoin, then you always are only owning an IOU to Bitcoin. So Satoshi Action Fund has been dialing in its efforts to be able to protect. fundamental Bitcoin rights, and we've been doing this through the states. Fortunately, we have this little thing called the 10th Amendment where the federal government cannot force states to enforce their laws, which means, you know, good example, cannabis industry. Take a look at what's happened to the cannabis industry over the last decade or more, and you've seen this play out in real time. And we want to pursue that exact same strategy here in America. We want to protect your fundamental

right to self-custody, to mine Bitcoin, to run a node, to run a lightning node, to run a lightning node, operate on Lightning and we're going to be doing this by passing laws at the state level. Last year in 2023, Satoshi Action was able to pass into law our rights to mine bill. This was really a very just simplified version. It was one part of the new bill we'll be passing here in 2024, but it really just said you can't discriminate against Bitcoin miners. These guys are allowed to legally operate in your state, in your jurisdiction. We passed that law into effect in Montana and Arkansas.

And since then, we've just been building on the momentum. In 2023, we were facing FTX collapses, $17,000 Bitcoin, and a variety of other scammers getting exposed. And people really started to question, you know, is Bitcoin going to survive? Obviously, the people in this room, the people in this chat know better. We know it was going to survive. But imagine trying to convince a lawmaker to pass a law when, you know, FTX is in the middle of a collapse. That was a very difficult time, but we were able to do it. And now in 2024, it's a totally different story.

Not only do we have our bill passed in two states now, so we have the momentum of wins behind our back. We've got 40,000 plus Bitcoin. We've got ETFs being approved. And we also have peer-reviewed research to back up a lot of the claims that we have been making as an organization. In 2023, we realized we needed more research. So we launched a research arm called Satoshi Action Education. We brought on an academic with 20 years of academic experience. And we just started writing papers. We wrote a paper on how Bitcoin mining is good for the grid. We wrote a paper on how Bitcoin mining is, well, we helped on a paper. I shouldn't say we wrote it. We helped on a paper about how Bitcoin mining is good for renewables. We're also working on a paper that proves that

Bitcoin mining is very good for mitigating methane emissions. And all of these papers, really, the ultimate point of them is to go to lawmakers and say, listen, we're not crazy. These amazing, incredible features of Bitcoin are real and they are possible. And we've proved it through credible evidence-backed research. But now we're going into, let's see, I'm losing track, losing count. I said 13 states in my recent announcements, but we could be active in up to 15 states now in the USA in 2024. We're not just going to lawmakers and saying, hey, will you help us get this bill pass? We think it's a pretty easy ask to say, don't, you know, try to ban self-custody, right? It's not a big ask. So they agree with us. But other states are reaching out.

Folks are just saying, hey, you know, we love what you're doing. We want to introduce this in Idaho. We want to introduce this in New Hampshire. And that's happening without us even needing to do anything. So again, super bullish on the states. Our goal is to pass these protections in about 13 states. That's going to be a difficult task. I think we'll at least hopefully get it in 10.

But yeah, bullish on the states, bullish on what they're accomplishing and pushing back on the federal government with protections for Bitcoiners so that we can at least keep some Bitcoiners here and we don't lose them all to El Salvador. Love it, love it. I see Jaime has a question for you. I'll go ahead, man. Yeah, I know. I'm actually just wondering, like, does the Satoshi Action Fund have like a, like a legislator's Bitcoin playbook? You know, something like, you know, here's the list of best practices and laws that you should be looking to pass in your state, right? And it almost becomes like a like a templated solution that like legislators across all 50 states.

and territories, if you will, can basically enact and pass in order to, you know, protect some of these fundamental rights around Bitcoin and self-custody and mining and so on. Well, the short answer is yes, we do have a what would be somewhat like a playbook for lawmakers and policymakers. It needs to be updated with our most recent 2024 initiatives, but it does describe, and I'm in the middle of doing that right now. But if you go to Satoshiaction.io and you go to our work, you can scroll down and you can see this. In fact, then if you wanted to kind of show people, that's pretty easy to find.

But yeah, if you go to Satoshiaction.com, you click on our work and then you can scroll down. It's up at the top bar. Yeah. You can scroll down. Just click on that. Yeah. And then you can scroll down and you can go and you'll see there are some laws we passed in the past.

Some legislators guide. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Down here at the bottom, there's a legislator guide that you can, that's a one-pageer. you can download that straight from the website on the benefits of Bitcoin mining. And that's the legislators guide. But check, you know, go ahead and go download it right now if you want to, if you need to.

But in probably about a week or so, that will be freshly updated with new policy initiatives. And I also cleaned it up. There's some like, you know, we were just launching in 2023, barely getting our feet under ourselves in 2020, I should say. And, you know, there's probably some typos in there that I need to be fixed. But generally, it'll give you what you want out of trying to get in front of lawmakers and give them something that's helpful. Have you worked with Bitcoin Coalition at all? No, not really worked with Bitcoin Coalition a whole lot. You know, we're sort of one-stop shop when it comes to policy and when it comes to research.

And we generally work with, you know, a lot of different groups effectively that are in the state chain. So there's a lot of like state councils, you know, TBC, a lot of these other state councils. Alabama is a good one. South Carolina has a great one. Dennis F over there. Andrew Birchwell in Ohio. Lee Bratcher and Texas is. great. So there's a lot of really, really good councils. Greg Lafell, I'd be remiss not to mention

my great friend, Greg Lafell and Virginia. But we work with these councils, you know, ones that are willing to work with us. We work well hand in hand and they're very effective because they're on the ground and they have relationships and connections that make it make sense to work with them. So yeah, we haven't had, unfortunately, haven't had an opportunity to work with this other group. Let me know. They, Amanda Cavalry is the founder or a key piece of it. She ended up finding me on LinkedIn when she was in Peru and said, hey, I heard there's a place I can spend Bitcoin and we linked up. And I went up to the, I went up with her group and spoke to members of Congress. And I don't know if it's if they're just focused on federal.

But I'm happy to make that connection because, yeah, I think that what you're doing is is so critically important. I think property rights, you know, should be very clear and it's crazy that they're not. But yeah, we need somebody to take an initiative like you and do that. So that's great. And if you'd ever, if you'd ever like our help, one of the things we were, I think, helpful in those meetings for where there were minors, there were financial services. And then there was a nonprofit that was doing humanitarian thing. And it helped any kind of pushback going like, hey, wait a minute, hold on. yeah, you're concerned about this and that, but they're saving children.

And it was a great way to kind of quiet some of the noise. If you ever want to utilize us, our story, anything like that, I'm happy to do whatever we can to best arm you with any way we can or go along and help physically. Yeah, thank you, Rich. In fact, it might be very fortuitous for us to connect. Satoshi Action is going to be developing a key question exercise. around financial inclusion. We find that the questions around mining,

we've made quite significant gains in being able to improve the dialogue around the environmental and energy fud on Bitcoin mining. But one of these really unexplored and underutilized areas of conversation for talking about the features of Bitcoin is talking about financial inclusion. And there's a whole sect of lawmakers and groups

that's really important to them. And so we want to highlight financial inclusion and we would love to make you a part of some of the research work that we are going to be doing on financial inclusion. And certainly we would love to utilize you as a resource. And the same goes for us if you need us as a resource. But we would love to utilize you as a resource for when we get in front of state lawmakers

and federal lawmakers to share the stories. At bare minimum, it's good to have folks like submit commentary. So if you write a letter and you say, hey, this is why I support Bitcoin, that can be really, really helpful for us. In fact, it might be makes sense to go to all of the really, you know, humanitarian, focus groups because we might be a nonprofit, but it's very political. It's very research focused. And I would, you know, in a long term effect of promoting Bitcoin is clearly humanitarian, but yours is very, your effort is very humanitarian at its core. And so being able to have you vouch for

Bitcoin, you know, a letter that we can share with lawmakers. That's very powerful. You know, a lot of lawmakers today still see crypto, which they include Bitcoin in that. It's an unfortunate trajectory of where we are. They haven't been able to separate the two. but they see this whole area as kind of just like as a way to make money and for rich people to get richer. Not all lawmakers, but a lot of them do.

And so having humanitarian groups come in and be a part of the conversation is certainly a valuable resource. Yeah. And I mean, we have four years of it going on already. So we have four years of back data research to put forward to you. And then the continuing.

And it seemed to me like that was the most the most useful piece of ours. I mean, the people in the meetings, I was going around with like Fred Thiel from Marathon and Amanda herself and they're all way brighter than me and had such a great message. But I was a great backstop for when there was any kind of push or a well, yes, we're going to help rich people get richer. And they'd point to me and be like, no, no, no, no, no, you're going to close that. You're going to close that gap and bring the bottom up. We, you know, a big part of what we did, build our economies from the bottom up was just easiest. way to do it. It's just the way that made more sense. And so, yeah, if you can utilize us to your

benefit, man, we're behind you. Thank you. I very much appreciate that. I look forward to working with you. Awesome, too. Love, love the connections. Awesome. Dennis, I do have a quick question. Like, what is the biggest headwind that you guys are facing right now in the work that you're doing? To be honest, it's fine. It's a money thing at this point, right? We have we have so much demand for our legislation and so many states want to pass our laws that we're running out of money to be able to support these efforts. That's why for those of you that get my repetitive email blasts when I say, you know, we need to raise this money. It's not like just like, oh, trying to pretend that there is some artificial need for more money. Like, no, we actually need more money. Anybody that's in a

nonprofit can tell you they need more money. But that's really the limiting factor for us right now and being able to pass law across the country to protect fundamental Bitcoin rights. But from like a political headwinds, maybe like something that is on the horizon, I would certainly say that the concerns around national security, the funding of terrorism and illicit finance has become somewhat highlighted in Washington, D.C. And so that's the area that we're most concerned with, educating lawmakers on. But ultimately, we still stand in a position to have the upper hand because we're working in the states and the federal government via the 10th Amendment cannot force the states to enforce federal law. So we feel very confident that what we're doing will be the ultimate

backstop to protect U.S. citizens and those that live within the United States from Elizabeth Warren and her efforts to ban self-custody, to ban Bitcoin mining, and probably would be happy to ban Bitcoin just outright if she possibly could. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, she for sure. She for sure would love to do that. And she's got the backing of Jamie Diamond to try and get that done, I suppose. You know what was... One thing real quick on the Liz Warren thing that was interesting, and again, to point out the importance of your work,

she's so far out there that like even her side of the aisle was kind of like, okay, well, but there's her and these other things. What they were doing is switching to way more reasonable and rational because she's clearly, unless you're just a cheerleader in her thin thread, you recognize that she's just a loon. Some of the others were looking for more reasonable sounding ways to sneak things through. And what you're doing there, you know, going at state law and putting those backstops in there, that's going to stop the ones that are a lot smarter than Elizabeth Warren, more intelligent, more wily,

and not just firebrand, shake her fist, and anything comes out of her mouth. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. This is maybe it's like a fortunate attack. You know, I mean, I'm always kind of one of those people that believes that attacks always strengthen Bitcoin. But they do still require us getting involved and us getting engaged and us raising our hands and participating. So I love when Bitcoin gets attacked. You know, if those of you that don't know Daniel Batten, he became a Bitcoiner because Greenpeace attacked Bitcoin. And he was a former Greenpeace activist.

So he's like, wow, I better look into what's going on with Bitcoin and low, behold, he discovers a lot more and realizes that Greenpeace was wrong, or at least Greenpeace USA, was wrong about Bitcoin. Mark, BTC asked for our lightning donations. I put it in the YouTube chat. I don't know if people can see it, but if you go to our website, it says donate BTC, you click on it, it's open node. Once you, you know, fill out your information, which is required by law, I'm sorry, we have to, we have to ask, we have to ask for the information. Once you go in there, yeah, right here, you put on your information. Automatically, it will go over and you can pick lightning or you can pick on-chain transactors.

I just did a test and I'll actually just so nobody gets my address here. But I just did a way. We almost all got a lot more Bitcoin by knowing where Ben lives. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Except for it's not here, everybody. It's not here. Yeah, yeah.

It's sunk in a boat, right? It's at the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. But just to show people what that screen looks like when you go in. Yeah, pretty much you take it there and there's an on-chain tab and a lightning tab, and then you can just scan and pay. By the way, if anybody, I just did a test $10 donation off screen, but if anybody that's watching wants to scan that and toss $10 to the Satoshi Action Fund, you're more than welcome to. If nobody does in the next couple of minutes, then I'll do it from my lightning wall on screen too,

which is totally cool. But Motive also has, you guys have Bitcoin donations, correct? Correct. Yeah. Awesome. I think we only had one Fiat donation ever. Amazing. Amazing.

That's awesome. So Motive. NGO and then also me premier Bitcoin. I like there's there's donations there as well correct correct um we actually just set up the uh the my first bitcoin canada donations page on on geysers so that's awesome that's super awesome so no shortage of good good organizations to to give your stats too for sure yeah exactly and so again just to kind of demo here but i just copied the invoice just by tapping on it um And I've got an Albi wallet right here.

Send, paste, continue. And then that should go off. There we go. So anyways. Much appreciated. Certainly the Mute Premier and MOTIF folks deserve donations more than we do doing the Lord's work down there in Latam and the global south. So I'll be making sure to make a donation to each of those as well.

Yes, absolutely. So and by the way, if you're on the motive website, I'm just going to bring it up here just so you know. Right from the main screen, there's a donate button up in the top right. So you can go there, scroll down. There's all kinds of stuff that can get you going. So yeah, go and support the causes that are near and dear to your heart. I highly recommend everybody do that.

But gentlemen, I think this is the time in the show where I like to start to round things out. And usually what I like to do at the very end here is, just do a quick round of any final thoughts that you may have, but also any recommendations that you have for people watching. So a recommendation could come in many forms. Maybe it's just a piece of general advice that you wish you had when you kind of started dipping your toes into Bitcoin. Maybe it's, you know, a new app or a device that you tried that you thought is cool and people should check out. Or maybe it is something like a website or a book you read or it can really take any form. So anything you wanted to bestow upon people watching you think might help them

in their Bitcoin journey. That would be great. So my general final thought here is I love, unbeknownst to me that kind of the whole theme of the show is people, again, putting their money where their mouth is and their time and the fruits of their labor where their mouth is and trying to support causes in and around Bitcoin that help people. Obviously, like my example at the beginning is obviously coming from all the Wall Street bros, but hopefully we'll funnel down and help some great tools be built. But me premier Bitcoin, getting people educated. What a fantastic initiative.

Again, what motive is doing is amazing. And again, protecting the rights of people within individual states to be able to self- custody and utilize Bitcoin as they see fit is super important. So I love seeing this. I want to see more of it. So I guess my general recommendation for everybody, I did a market here in Calgary a few weeks back because I love the idea of these circular economies popping up everywhere and this kind of bottom up approach. And one of the people, family there, made me. these tukes, or as Americans would call them beanie's, but they're tukes. But nonetheless, they made these hats and the phrase that they gave to them was, be the change with obviously

the Bitcoin B. And I think that's just such a fantastic slogan overall. But I think we could all, I think we could all go about embodying that even more. And if you see some, if you see some something that's lacking in the space, then you're wondering why it doesn't exist? Well, it's because you haven't done it yet. So go do it. I think that would be my piece of advice for everybody. But with that, I'll rotate over to Jaime and any final thoughts, recommendations you may have. Yeah, yeah.

I got a couple of recommendations, but I also want to maybe answer a question here from the chat, from personal extension. She said, or he, that they like the tiny picks on the background. I just want to say that these ones here, my wife painted those. And it's actually, Dennis, you'll appreciate this. This is around the Pacific Northwest. There are these little rocky islands that you can see. And this is kind of like the sunset.

She kind of like took a mental picture of that. So yeah, I want to show my wife for being a great artist. And the one over here, that's actually a picture from an artist in El Salvador. And he was trying to, this, I went 10 years ago and he was trying to sell it to me for, for $2. And I said, I'll give you 10. And I even, I felt like I was ripping him off. But it's a volcano and a lake. And so, uh, recommendations.

Hey, donate to any of these great causes today. It, you know, chances are that you also have a, my first Bitcoin initiative in whatever country you're watching from. So it doesn't just have to be in Canada. But if you are in Canada, we're looking to grow our educator network. So DM me, my DMs are open. And of course, if you're not in a position to contribute with your time, you know, we'll happily take your stats from our Geyser page as well. Last thing is like I'm also working on writing a book about Bitcoin adoption.

And I still have a little bit to do. go my biggest expenses right now is to go to el salvador and interview people on the dollarization period of al salvador as well as the the uh using how the maya and the pepils uh the indigenous people there use cacao as a currency it's interesting story so i got to go back and do that but i know that there's lots of people wanting money to fund all these things rather than me asking for money what I've done is I've launched this fun novelty t-shirt and a couple other t-shirts. And if you like it, just DM me and you know, you can buy the t-shirt and it's Satoshi's. I'll have a website in the future.

But and then I will use the funds for that to help me write the book. Somebody told me that, hey, dude, you know, by doing all. all this with the t-shirts, you're, you're stepping on a whole coin to pick up some sets. But, you know, maybe I am, but, you know, it is fun too. So it gets my creative side going as well. But thanks, Ben. I appreciate you inviting me. And I really love sharing the stage here with Dennis and Rich.

Awesome. No worries, man. And I'll toss it down to Rich as well. Rich, any final thoughts you may have and any recommendations you may have. I'm going to jump on something you said. and then also Jaime. The reason we came up with the name motive is there's two definitions for it. It's the reason behind why you do something.

The other definition is it's causing mechanical action. And my recommendation is what yours is. What we've always said is go be motive. If you have to only donate to us or whatever, that's great. But what we'd really like to do is inspire you to cause mechanical action go out and and and do something with this whether it's jumping into an organization like me me premier a bitcoin and saying okay i can teach a class man you know most people can do that go do it they should have a they should have a stacked line of people saying i want to do this um or jumping in with like

dennis's organization and just going like okay what what does it take how what little bit can i do what large bit can I do. That's really important. It's kind of tougher to jump in, jump in with us, but there's organizations all over the place. And even if there isn't, learn and speak to people. Be out there, be a voice. Don't let it be something they only hear from the internet.

Let the people in your circle hear from you. And you don't have to be toxic or anything like that. Just share knowledge or just discuss with them. but it takes, you know, big range fires take individual blades of dry grass being lit. And that's, I think, my biggest recommendation. Love it. Awesome. And I'll toss it over to Dennis.

Same question. And any final thoughts, any recommendations? Go ahead, man. Yeah, a couple real quick. One would be if you want to work in the Bitcoin space, you're just discovering Bitcoin. Now is a really good time to start getting active, start working on something. just go and do it. You know, when I first got into Bitcoin in 2017, I tried to mine, almost killed myself

by trying to do my own electrical work twice. So don't do that. Hire an electrician, but do something. Learn to code. Just get engaged because you're never going to find what it is that you're good at or what you have to offer the Bitcoin space until you just get in there and do it. So that would be my big recommendation to people. Now is a good time to when I started.

I started like the very end of the bull market. And it just like, it was like there wasn't. enough time to actually get in and do anything. And so it took a whole other cycle, which was this last previous bull market for me to get in and actually find the thing that I want to do and the thing that I'm good at, the thing that I'm passionate about, which is advancing some political causes and some education and research here in the U.S. Another thing is if you are really interested in helping us, I just tweeted it out. I've tweeted it out before, but this is a big sort of trying to push is to find folks that want to help us.

do you know someone said that's made the comment earlier that that you know how much do you want to get involved i believe it's hymey do how much you want to get involved you want to do a little bit do you want to do a lot you can kind of pick your own poison when it comes to how much engaged you want to be with us at satoshi action we have the ability for you to help write letters you can show up and testify there's a there's a whole variety of ways that we're going to be having people help us to pass these laws and educate lawmakers so that the u.s.a can be a great place to be a bit coiner so if you go to my twitter right now there i just posted about it so people people can see it. It was a draft that I had saved. It wasn't for this moment, but it just happened to be there.

I was like, hey, man, good time to put it out. You can go sign up to be a volunteer, talk a little bit about your skills and things that you can offer. And we love to connect with you. And last but not least, but make sure to donate to my premiere and motive and make sure those guys down there keep doing the Lord's work of onboarding people that are the most disenfranchised and most disadvantaged. We certainly want to make sure that Latin America is a leader on Bitcoin. Yeah. Awesome. And I just retweeted that too for anybody looking. So, awesome. All right.

Well, gentlemen, I want to say a huge thank you for joining me here on a Friday evening and taking your time that is scarcer than Bitcoin to spend it with me. So thank you guys so much. Everybody watching, by the way, all of their Twitter handles are in the show notes down below. And from there, you can find everything else that they're working on. So thank you guys so much. Have a great weekend. And you're all welcome back.

anytime. Thanks, Ben. See you. All right. Thanks, guys. See you later. All right. And everybody,

thank you so much for being here and being part of the show. Everybody in the chat, you're all awesome. I love seeing you guys in there every single week. If you can do me a solid,

of course, hit that like button below the screen. Share this out to anybody who you think will enjoy the show. And of course, subscribe.

I'm on a warpath to 100,000 subscribers by the end of this year. So if you can help me get there, that would be super awesome. Now, if you want to help the show in another way, of course, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Those were hoddle, hoddle, coin kite, Cedar, nunchuck, and start nine. And then also, if you need some additional help, if you've been hitting up all of the tutorials and you just kind of hit some stumbling blocks and you need that kind of one-on-one personal touch to help you get through, something that you're learning about Bitcoin. You can head over to

my website, BTCSessions.C.C.Shanes. There's a QR code on the screen right now that you can scan. It'll take you right there to book 101s, or you can just head to the website again, BTCSessions.ca. Anyways, guys, that is it for me. Have a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. And I will see you guys next time for your daily session. Have a good one, guys.