BTC Sessions - Why Are We Bullish? Devin Rose, Phil (Coinicarus), Cole (Coinos) ep429

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

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What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? We've got an awesome panel joining us today. And we'll get through some intros momentarily. I hope you're all having a good week. Lots of interesting stuff going on this week, which I'm sure we'll discuss a little bit about later on in the stream. I'm sure some people are down in Nashville and maybe missing the show tonight. because they're on their first beverage of the evening. But either way, hopefully you're having a good time. And other than that, I'm very excited to be here. Unfortunately, I couldn't be down there for this, but I will be traveling about for the rest of the years. So either way, we're going to dive into the show. Of course, this is live.

So anything can happen. And I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. And if you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things that help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs.

I am 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. I am pulling up timechain calendar.com and simultaneously, I'm going to pull up the live chat. Everything you say in there from here on in is live for the world to see for better or worse. Over at Time Chain Calendar, we are sitting at $67,958 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will snag you 1,471 sats. In terms of fees, still low. Four sats next block, four sats per byte next block. And in terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.73 million of them, which is 93.95% of the total supply.

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the tap signer, open dimes, the block clock, and much more. If you head over to their website, make sure you use code BTC sessions at checkout to get a nice discount. Links are in the show notes down below. All right, and we are back in, and it's time to bring in all of our guests. So I want to welcome to the stage, Devin, Cole, and Phil, which I will now put you full size. I don't know. It screws me around like that. But welcome, gentlemen.

Thank you so much for being here. And we're going to do a quick round of intros to kick things off. So I'm going to go around. And Devin, I'm going to toss it to you first. Can you give yourself a quick intro? Who are you? And what do you do? Sure.

Yeah. I'm Devin Rose. I live in Northeast, Texas, on a homestead. and I am an author recently of a book that involves Bitcoin, which might come up. We'll talk about it. Yeah, so happy to be here talking with you guys. Awesome. I picked up my copy.

It's over there on the shelf, not within reaching business, but I do indeed. I snagged a copy as soon as I found out about the book. I'm always down to pick up a new Bitcoin book, especially fiction Bitcoin book. I enjoy that. So thank you for coming and we'll toss it down to Cole. Cole, good to see you. It's been a while since I saw you in person, but very glad to have you here virtually on the show.

A lot of people know who you are and what you do. Yeah, thank you for having me, Ben. Last time I saw you, I believe it was the Miami rooftop party, the after party of the Miami Bitcoin Conference. Yes. So yeah, my name's Cole. I work with Coinos, which is a Bitcoin Lightning wallet. We have a focus on setting up merchants

with accepting Bitcoin Lightning and liquid as a payment option, but we're also a good wallet to use as a user, even if you don't own a business. And I'm located in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Very excited to be here. Awesome. And I'll be seeing you soon, actually. I think we may cross paths because I'm going to be out in Vancouver. They're doing a meetup there on the 11th of August. So if you're around, then I'll get to catch up a little bit. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Awesome. And Phil, it's good to see you, man, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I'm glad to have you. For anybody I'm familiar, give yourself a little intro, man. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm Phil. I am the co-host of the Pleb Underground YouTube show. And yeah, just a fellow bitcoiner and, you know, doing my part for spreading the Bitcoin signal. And we make Bitcoin-only content. Hell yeah.

Well, good to have you, man. I'm going to get us diving right in. So anybody watching that's unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish. The premise of the show is simple. Each one of us has come with a reason for being bullish in and around Bitcoin. And the flow of the show is pretty simple as well. Pretty much somebody's going to drop their reason for being bullish. They get to rant about it.

It could be take any form, a personal experience, an app, a device, a current event, whatever it is. They get to rant on it and get it off their chest. So after that, all of us are going to riff on it, comments, questions, whatever rabbit holes, we go down. And then finally, we're going to rotate to the next person until each of our guests has had a turn. So reason, riff, rotate, simple. And I'm going to get us started off today. And my reason for being bullish this week has to do with a couple of things that are here in my office right now. Now, the one that is behind me here can be a little harder to see.

There's a little light back there on my shelf. I'm going to, maybe I'll enlarge this just for a second, just so maybe people might be able to see it. But there's a little thing right there. But I also, for show and tell, I have one that is a little bit easier to focus on right here, too. And these are tiny devices that are home mining. DIY devices. Now, obviously, Bitcoin mining is very competitive. And if you don't have cheap power, you're likely to not really be making a bunch of money. But that's kind of also not the main point of

this. These devices are low cost and require very minimal amounts of electricity to run. they allow you to set them up and kind of learn about how a mining device can jump into a mining pool or can solo mine basically kind of shows you the ropes of how to set that up and tinker and learn a little bit about Bitcoin mining for those that have never done so. And you can kind of approach it in a couple different ways. you can solo mine, which means pooled mining is when a bunch of miners get together. They pool their resources. And then it's basically like being in a lottery pool where if somebody in that group wins the lottery,

then based on how much money you've put into buying tickets, you'll get your percentage out of that. So you can do that with these devices, and you get very, very tiny payments typically via lightning if you're going to do that. Or you can just yolo into solo mining where you just run the device. You expect to not ever get a payout, but if you do, it ends up being a pretty sweet payout for a low-cost device.

So it's kind of like a forever lottery ticket sitting on your shelf. And it's a curiosity and it's a conversation piece. But beyond that, if it were to be normalized Like if every person that normally bought a lottery ticket just had a little device on their shelf, you would begin to see the amount of hash rate for those tiny devices across the globe begin to compete with and in some instances eclipse some of these larger corporate mining pools. And so you could actually have a significant amount of hash rate that is decentralized in the hands of the plebs

instead of these large corporate entities, which is kind of cool. And so I guess there's a number of reasons that you would do this. But I just wanted to kind of, again, call attention to these projects. And so if you go to bidax.org, B-I-T-A-X-E.org, there's a bunch of links there in and around what it is, how it's fully open-source ASIC Bitcoin miners, has hardware design files, firmware updators, also places where you can pick up pre-assembled devices if you want that. And some of the forks of this project, so Bitax being open source, anybody can take the base project, tinker with it, change it, and then create their own version of it.

And so the one that I was dealing with is actually called a nerd axe, which again is a fork of it. But it's just this little, you know, calculator-sized device with a fan on it and a single Bitcoin ASIC chip in it. And, yeah, it just purrs away on your shelf. I think it's really cool. And I actually picked mine up from these guys when I was in at BTC Prague, but they have a whole bunch of cool little devices. There's other places from the Bitax website where they have pre-assembled devices or

kits, assembly kits available from a whole bunch of different websites. But yeah, I think just overall, I think this might be the easiest, cheapest, and most accessible way for your average person who is curious about Bitcoin mining and, you know, maybe isn't going to be doing it in any sort of a professional sense, but is just thinking, I'd love to learn about that. you can get a device for like 70 bucks and it's you know that little one that I held up before you can get something like this super cheap or build it yourself from parts and then you you know you dip your toes into to Bitcoin mining for the first time and learn a little bit more about how Bitcoin works

and I in my mind just the learning is is worth it so that's what I'm excited and bullish about this week and I'm going to open it up to you guys and kind of get your take on Have you seen these things before? Have you ever tried anything around mining? Is it a blind spot for you? So whoever wants to jump in first, have at her. I could go first if nobody else wants to go. So yeah, I definitely, I've seen a lot about the bit acts.

I follow Solo Satoshi. I love his account. Absolutely awesome. Always putting out bullish stuff. So is CK Dev, right, from CK Pool. So as people may know, I also have. a bit axe. I also have a nerd miner and I also got the Avalon device. You know, that other one, dude, it's all so cool. And I get it. I totally get it, right? It's a lottery. It's more of a

learning tool. I think it's a little bit more about that. But look, somebody asked in the, in the questions or in the comments, you know, like what are the odds compared to a lottery? So just to give them an idea, right, I have those three devices running. And I've got about like 2.7 terra-hashes, 2.8 terahashes per second. And I've got a 1 in 3,991 chance out of the year. To put that in perspective, right? So I'm pretty much guaranteed to mine a block every almost 4,000 years. Just to put that in perspective. But you know what? I actually think that that's better odds than winning the lottery. I mean, the crappy country lottery, you know what I mean? So you know what?

If I'm getting to mine and learn about Bitcoin and I get that you're not offering that much hash when you have a device like this. But still, right, it's still not a hasher that's coming from some giant, you know, giant controlled entity in asterix. I think it matters. I think it's worth it. And as the Bitcoin fiat exchange continues to go up, right? And the value of Bitcoin goes up. Well, it becomes in my eyes less. less and less expensive to run one of these devices because as of right now, it's costing me

about $3 a month maybe to run this device. So three bucks a month plus like, what, what does it, what did it cost like $200 or something? I mean, are you kidding me? For the shot at mining a block, that's a piece of history. I don't know. I've worth it. Like, I've done dumber stuff with my money. I'm way dumber stuff. Well, especially in the context of if it's somebody that is replacing the habit of buying a lottery ticket every week or more, then it's absolutely, because you're actually, again, your odds are greater, but also you're doing something positive by, you know, if enough people are doing this, then it decentralizes hash power a little bit more. So, you know, all in all, it's a net benefit to everybody, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And I looked into getting one of those heat bits,

which I'm sure you're familiar with. And I almost pulled the trigger and then realized nine months out of the year here in Texas, it's really hot. And I thought, you know, if there was an air conditioning bit, that would be nice. So, but my friend, one of my friends, he gets all these devices. He's here locally where I'm at. And I've always put it off just because I've been lazy, but the fact that that bid axe guy won, you know, a block and you guys are doing it is going to put, I think he's going to push me over the edge.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess we failed to mention the fact that earlier this week, I don't know if I even said that when I was talking about it, but earlier this week, somebody running a bitax actually, you know, metaphorically won the lottery by mining a block and got the 3.125 Bitcoin plus the fees. I can't remember what it added. Phil. Do you remember what they actually got from the block of the fees? I don't even know, honestly. I saw like two Bitcoin and change. Yeah, yeah. Something like that.

I didn't see the exact number, but I know it was at least two and something. Yeah, they did pretty well. It was amazing. Basically for a $200 device and $3 a month in power, they made $200 grand. Supposedly they had been mining for 19 days only. 19. Supposedly, that's one of the tweets I saw from Solo to this, from Solo Satoshi, 19 days. Oh, my God.

Sam. I was literally, so I'm doing it. I was doing a tutorial on this. I just finished the edit, but I was doing the tutorial and I saw the news break and I'm like, what if it was me? Because I was looking. I was like, oh. I checked the address.

Yeah. I was like, what if it was me? Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty wild. Cole. I'm curious. Have you ever dabbled in anything?

Is this like a mining for me was a blind spot completely, but I'm wondering if you've ever dabbled in anything. Absolutely, that's a really big part of my story. Actually, you know, I got into Bitcoin in late 2014, early 2015, and I got into mining pretty heavy into early 2021. And that was my main source of income for 2021, actually. I bought a bunch of machines. I only ever did A6.

Of course, I was big machines. I got S-19s running. I've had S-17s running. I've never ran anything less than an S-17, but I got a mining operation right now with commercial space where noise isn't an issue. They're really loud. I have an H-Max system that I had to add into it and everything.

I've had stories when I was in Calgary. I rewired my receptacles, my outlet. I used all the electricity pretty much that I possibly could in my apartment at the time. I even had an electrician come over to my place and rewire my oven plug because I don't really cook that. much in general. So I unplug the oven, rewired the receptacle. I got two big Bitcoin mining machines hooked up into that oven plug. Ovens have a lot of power. So if you have an oven at home and you don't cook,

you want to run some Bitcoin miners. I just gave you some alpha there. You heard in the first, cooked meals or shit coins. Rewa. Yeah, yeah. No, I'd rather mine Bitcoin than use an oven, right? and it's just one of those things. My dishwasher, same thing. I unplugged my, I just hand-wash my stuff, right? So I'm on my dishwasher, rewired that receptacle. I got a full dedicated circuit to a machine on that one as well. Hold on.

Clearly, all of your electricity was included in the rent then. No, no, no. I had to pay. I was paying $100,000 in my money. Before I hooked up my machines, my electrical bill was maybe 35 to 40 bucks in one. And then after that, it was like 600 to 700 bucks a lot. I had everything plugged in.

But I was making like, by not selling the Bitcoin, it's worth it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Yeah.

Well, that's all. I have cords everywhere. I bought rugs though to put over top of the cords. So you're probably wondering how would I sleep because the noise was really loud. So I had to buy phone boards. this thick from Amazon and I put them on my bedroom door literally so I could sleep at night. Was that apartment just like boiling hot at all times? Well, actually it wasn't like terrible. I had the doors open a lot of times.

Yeah. I had the doors open. Yeah, I had them facing outside. My balcony door was open at all times with the screen on it. And I had the machines aiming outwards. So it wasn't overly hot but I had to shut them off about two weeks per year at least two weeks because the heat wave yeah that's fantastic yeah so yeah lesson is um you know if you're living with somebody or uh you have a a live-in girlfriend or wife not ideal but if you've got a bad or pad then then perhaps uh but i will say that these things are wife-approved, not too much issue with that. And I do, Devin, I do have actually a space heater behind me,

but I built it out of an S-9. So I tore off the fans. Crypto-Cloaks did a little walk-through of how to do it. So I used their walk-through, tore off the fans and replaced them with quieter ones, and then used Brains OS to, like, ramp down the fans a little bit. And so it does me well. And like where I am in Calgary, it gets really freezing cold in the dead of winter.

It'll be like minus 30, minus 40 Celsius. And so, you know, I could use every bit of heat I get. And, yeah, getting a few sats on the side. We'll doing that is a okay by me. So, yeah. By the way, are all three of you guys Canadians? Two of us, myself. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. So, Phil, you're not a Canadian. I am. I'm Canadian. I just live in the U.S. Yeah. Well, Phil has rejected Trudeau and fire. I didn't realize you didn't consider me Canadian. Ouch. No, no, no. It's that's a compliment at this point. You've effectively escaped.

Well, you could see the difference, right? Like, I'm like, oh, you know, I'm still so proud. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Awesome. All right, well, Jens, I'm going to put a bow on that one. Anybody that is curious about that, keep your eyes peeled. I think tomorrow morning I'm going to drop a tutorial on how to actually set up and use. It's for the nerd acts, but the same lessons will apply for the other devices.

So if you're curious, go dabble. It's fun. But with that, I'm going to do a rotation now. and we're going to dive into the next reason for being bullish. And I'm going to toss it to Devin first. And Devin, I'll cue you up with the same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? Yeah, I had to whittle this down because I was thinking, when am I not bullish?

And what am I not bullish about? I guess, you know, the depths of the bear market have been shy, I'm not bullish. But right now what I've seen with my friends, I got into Bitcoin almost 10 years. ago. And when I talked with people back then, you know, it was a no-go. It was, they never heard of it, or it was a scam. It was a Ponzi. And now I hosted a Bitcoin group for guys around here. A lot of guys came. A lot of guys were interested. And they wanted to know how to buy. Even my boomer dad, who, you know, gets most of his information from mainstream news, you can imagine. Well, now, of course, CNBC and the talking heads at Fox business or wherever are talking about Bitcoin.

Political candidates are talking about Bitcoin. Some of the guys in the chat have been saying how, you know, RFK Jr. just stole Trump's thunder and is talking about Bitcoin. Trump allegedly is going to talk about Bitcoin. Sure, you know, that's cool. So either way, though, the fact that this is now happening and people are discussing it, it's no longer. or the fringe weird thing that it once was. So have you guys seen that with your friends too in the past year or even shorter? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's, I would say that there's a lot of things that have become more common vernacular amongst everybody that denote that they understand there's major problems. And that they're also, you know, maybe not everybody, but there's more of an acceptance of, oh, I've seen Bitcoin around. I've seen it for years and years. So it's a thing and I'm not dismissive of it.

I just haven't ever really actually looked at it. But like the things that stand out to me is people using the term fiat, the fact that the meme money printer go burr was not a Bitcoin or meme. That just came out of nowhere and everybody just now takes for granted that, oh yeah, the Fed just. like prints money like nothing like that's just it's it's in it's it's again uh it's the term is used a lot but the memetic warfare of it all the idea that these memes can actually see change over time and change people's minds about the systems that they're in so i mean again people are beginning

to understand that the money is broken and something's very wrong and they're still piecing it together but the idea that Bitcoin is somehow, or the previous idea that Bitcoin is somehow not legitimate money has been very much called into question by the fact that our money sucks as it is. And so people are more willing to maybe take a look at something different, I think, anyways. Yeah. You other gents, Bill, Cole, how do you feel about it? Have you been seeing that? Unfortunately, on my end, when it comes to people in my personal circles, they still, there, I get a lot of the, oh, you know, I should have bought it when it was at 15K. You know, so it's a lot of remorse.

It's a lot of that. But in terms of, in terms of the overall feeling, what's really interesting is exactly what you guys were alluding to is that you're having these general conversations in places like, you know, like a. you know, just a regular restaurant and and people there, you know, like the waitress knows that the money's broken, right? You know, like the chef knows that the money's broken. Like it's really interesting because when I contrast that with my childhood, I mean, for real, in the mid-90s, if you were talking about broken money, right, and that like there's a money printer, people would look at you like you're completely insane. And now, like, they're not looking at you that way anymore. So to your point, like there is a shift, but I just wish,

that in my personal life that those people that know me would start to actually take it a little more seriously and pay a little more attention to what's real. What do you think is the thing that eventually pushes them over the edge? Because it's obviously not

necessarily somebody that they know preaching to them, but do you think there'd be a trigger moment that could happen? I genuinely do. I think it, I think unfortunately, because human beings, do react the quickest and the most due to misery. So unfortunately,

it has to be something like, you know, like massive hyperinflation of some sort. Like there has to be some type of an event where I believe it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that the money has broken. Like we can see it. For us,

it's beyond the shadow of a doubt. The money is broken. Like it's not a problem for us. But I'm talking about just the kind of that shelling point that captures the majority of people where they can see it and be like, it's broken. And then it's their own idea.

They've conceived of it. And that's it. It's off to the races. Yeah. Yeah, fair. Cool. I know you go and you are an active orange pillar. Have you found it about the same or easier or harder?

Like what's the gauge for you as you go out? Because you onboard merchants and things like that. What's the feel for you right now? Yeah, exactly. Similar things to what Phil was saying. And what we're all talking about is letting people. people know how broken the current system is and how bad inflation really is. We get told what the CPI is and what we're supposed to believe that.

Unfortunately, most people do believe that. If we are told inflation's 5% or 6%, most people believe that. So when one of the breaking points is you were asking that, like what's, what's the breaking point? And that's letting them know how bad inflation really is. And you let people know that when you use the inflation tax, calculator, which is not bad. It shows inflation not being as bad as it really is. But even using that inflation calculator, the Canadian dollar has lost 90% of its value since 1994, and that's being

extremely conservative. It's actually lost more than that. Now, why is it that they're able to tell us the CPI, or why is it that they're able to tell us that the inflation is not as bad as it really is? something that I read in the book called Thank God for Bitcoin. Highly recommend that book. Robert Bred Love was one of the contributors to that book. I finished it maybe a few months ago. And it's called the thing they used for lowering inflation is called the hedonic quality adjustment.

Hedonic quality adjustment. 99.9% of people I know even like in general, they don't know what that is. and that's where the price of something will go up in value, or sorry, a certain good or service will go up in cost, and they mask that as just the quality of it going up. They mask it that way, okay? But really the quality of certain things stays the same year over year. Like, come on, right?

And they do that in a very big scale. So letting people know how broken the current system is. Willie Wu was recently in Vancouver, and we asked him, what do you do, what do you say when you're trying to orange pill somebody? And his first response was, well, you tell people, do you want to make 11% in a year? Or do you want to make way more than that with Bitcoin, for example, right? And I always tell people when in doubt zoom out. People are like, oh, well, Bitcoin goes down in value the negative volatility. So you let them know that when you don't zoom out, Bitcoin's the greatest hedge against inflation that mankind is.

ever seen you tell people stuff like that price is just one thing we know that bitcoin has a lot more value than just price for sure you tell people that you actually own your money your bitcoin money you don't have to worry about a bank collapse there's been how many bank collapses have failed in the past two and a half three years i've lost count like silicon valley bank was a bank that everybody trusted well a lot of people a lot of people trusted credit swiss bank in switzerland which is bigger than silicon valley bank a lot of people trusted all these different banks and they collapsed. So when you tell people those kinds of things,

they're like, oh, wow, things that were trustworthy by the masses ended up failing. Stuff like that. It's interesting because, again, you, stuff has to get really bad for a bank to collapse. And stuff doesn't have to be nearly as bad for an exchange to collapse because you can't create new units out of nothing as easily. as as, you know, the legacy system.

And so, you know, in Bitcoin, when an exchange doesn't have your money, it's quite quick that's, and not as quick as a lot of us would like, but typically within a few years of effing around, people find out, you know, those exchanges. At some point, there's a liquidity crisis because we have these cycles too. You know, all of a sudden people are way less likely to leave all their funds in there. going to take them out or they're going to want to exchange them for dollars they're going to whatever but because of this cyclical nature of bitcoin um you know the if if somebody's running fractional reserve it's much more likely to just get washed out whereas in the fiat system like who holds their cash

who like all of the capital typically stays in the system and if things get bad enough then you just get a bail out right so it's it's much less likely um that people realize how bad it is or it can take a lot longer for shit to hit the fan. We're starting to see shit hit the fan more regularly in the legacy system now because it's such a house of cards at this point. But again, like Bitcoin's very efficient in pointing out the fraud when it happens pretty quickly. And I think that's a positive. Even though in the media it's portrayed as a negative, of, oh, this exchange collapsed, this exchange. No, that's a feature. When an exchange it collapses because they're doing shady things and it happened three years into them running it, that absolutely

is a feature. And I'd love to see more of it because it's, again, as you guys alluded to, touching the stove is what teaches people. Phil, you said, you know, misery actually educates people. And so the more you see of that, the better. But I mean, back to Devin's original topic of people realizing what's going on. We're seeing lessons on both sides of the fence. You're seeing it in Fiat land where people are realizing, like, even though they still may not have complete distrust in their banks yet, which, you know, how many more times do you need to be slapped in the face? But nonetheless, they're still realizing something is wrong. They're getting more dollars for their jobs.

They've moved up in seniority. They've done all these things that they thought were right. They went to school for however many years to get that degree to get what they thought was a good job. And they can't afford to put groceries on the table, let alone have a family. And so people are really in tune with the idea that something is completely broken. And in Bitcoin, people are learning the lessons cycle after cycle. Okay, let's focus on Bitcoin. Okay, I focused on Bitcoin, but then I used a bunch of leverage and I got screwed again.

Okay, so let's not do that again. Let's make sure I have self-custody. So there's always new lessons to be learned. It'll just, you know, gradually funnel people towards better habits over time, I think, anyways. Yeah. Devin, is there anything that you wanted to tag on there before I do a rotation for our next topic or any closing thoughts in and around your experiences? Nope, that was good, good chant.

Awesome, awesome. Okay, I love it. Perfect. Well, we are due for another rotation here, and I'm going to do that in just a moment, but there's one thing I'm going to do, actually a couple of things. We're going to do a quick shout out to our last sponsors, but also I'm going to give away some sats here.

We're going to do a giveaway. So if you've got a lightning wallet, get that, thing ready because we're going to give a Bitcoin well giveaway in a moment. We're going to throw a coin into the well and we'll see how many sats a lucky viewer will get. But we will be back in just a moment after a quick shout out to our sponsors. We'll see you guys in a sec. In lending, instant self-custody and no KYC, hottle-hottle is the place to be. You can sign up with just an email address and once you're there, you can start browsing offers immediately, whether you're looking to buy and sell or whether you're looking to lend or borrow.

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So if you got your lightning wall, it's ready, make sure you are ready to snipe these sats. This is the Bitcoin well, wishing well. The way it works is anybody using Bitcoin in the U.S. or Canada, every time that you purchase Bitcoin or sign up or refer a friend, you accumulate points. And every 500 points gets you a coin that you can toss into the well and win sats. anywhere from 500 sats up to a million sats. So I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to redeem some points right here. And off it goes into the well.

I'm going to expand my screen a little bit so that people can scan. And there we go, 500 sats on the screen for whoever snags it first. If you do get it, let me know in the chat or shoot off a tweet or a note on Noster, wherever you may have seen this. And let me know that you snag the sats. I'll give you a few more seconds, and that is it, and we are gone. All right, awesome. Let me know if you got those sets, and congrats to whoever did.

But with that, we're going to do a rotation, and I'm going to go right down to Cole. Cole, you are up, my friend. So same question as everybody gets. Why are you bullish? I'm bullish with all the merchant adoption happening that I'm seeing. We're seeing a lot of communities that are growing with their Bitcoin merchant adoption. More merchants coming on board. A lot of people are having more fun and they're seeing more value spending their Bitcoin

compared to spending just dollars. And it's opening the mind, using Lightning is opening the minds up of a lot of people that Bitcoin can scale. Lightning helps Bitcoin scale on a very big, on a very big scale, essentially. And a lot of people that I. talked to aren't aware that the lightning network capacity was reaching new all-time highs during 2022 when Bitcoin's price was at all-time lows. And right now, the lightning network capacity, shout out to GlassNode's data, I like their data, and right now it's almost at its all-time high sitting there right now comfortably, the Lightning Network capacity. So what that means to the

the viewers who don't know, it just means the amount of Bitcoin that's put up as liquidity in the lightning channels around the world. So popularity, you could say that's a popularity gauge. And Bitcoin's hash rate, like on chain, normal Bitcoin's hash rate, was also beating new all-time highs, even when Bitcoin's price was at all-time lows in 2022. Those two, those three things make me really bullish on the Bitcoin space. It shows that the popular popularity at Bitcoin, the, you know, people using it, it's not slowing down, even when the prices are at all-time lows. I mean, it's easy to say that Bitcoin's pop in that when prices are all-time highs, but we don't need Bitcoin's price to be at all-time highs to be using it.

I was on bringing on merchants in 2022 with accepting Bitcoin payments, and we were having meetups consistently, small little events at these places, even during 2022. Of course, we have lots of those now. I host eight per month, actually. So that's something I'm bullish on. It's spreading the word having consistent attendees to these meetups and stuff. And I'm really, I'm just bullish on that. How many people are interested to learn more, you know? Yeah. I love that.

I love that, you know, there's people that keep at it and keep working and keep curious during the bear markets. And that's, that to me, you know, I enjoy the bull runs, but it also brings a lot of riffraff. But those bare markets, like those are special times because it's when the world at large is kind of not giving a shit. And the people that have a greater grasp on what this thing truly is, they stick around and they learn and they level up and they build cool stuff. And we get to enjoy the fruits of their labor and our labor when the bull run comes back around. And, you know, it's, it was cool to see that this past bear market, that was actually, it kind of, there was still a lot of activity. Yes, I know obviously not price wise, but, you know, a lot, I felt like a lot less people disappeared.

Or we had enough people where there is always still something new and interesting happening. And that wasn't always the case. Some of those bear markets of the past got pretty quiet. There wasn't much going on. And this time I didn't really feel that. And to your point about merchants, I think there's a different crop of merchants that are coming around this time. I think it was a little premature, the push that happened in like 2015, 2016, 2016. Because, again, like, especially brick and mortar stores, even online at that time,

it was a lot less frequent that somebody would, one, have Bitcoin. Two, happened to be in your brick and mortar store, and three, I actually want to spend their Bitcoin on your goods. For online, it may have been slightly more frequent, but not that frequent, because a lot of these merchants that onboarded back then, it was a marketing schick, right? They were like, oh, we're Microsoft.

We're going to accept Bitcoin because we think, for some reason, it's going to bring in more customers that will take their paycheck, buy Bitcoin with it, pay us with Bitcoin, which will accept through BitPay and then dump back to dollars, which just didn't make sense. And the reason why it's better now is because the merchants that are accepting Bitcoin want the Bitcoin. They actually want it because they're like, this is the better money. Please give me the Bitcoin. And I think it makes sense as a merchant. If you've got any type of a skill or a product that you make or a service that you offer, whatever it is, you already understand

that Bitcoin is better money. You, already take part of your paycheck and purchase Bitcoin in the first place, why would you not also just accept Bitcoin directly and then just save whatever you get for the, you know, for that in exchange for that. And we started doing that here in Calgary where we put together the sat market. And we've got between 30 and 40 local merchants that get together a couple times a year and we have a big market and everybody comes together. And, you know, and it's not just like people making like a hat with a be on it. It's like farmers with eggs and beef and like dairy. There's barbers and there's roofer and there's plumbers and there's personal trainers. There's all this different stuff.

That's like actual day-to-day stuff that you're going to use. And we have bitcoins coming together and letting each other know that, hey, I do this. And like I'm now, my kid shoved something down the toilet the other day. So I got the Bitcoin plumber to come over to my house, clear it up, literally fixing my shit coin problem. I also now have a personal trainer that I'm seeing three times a week and I'm paying him in Bitcoin. I've got a beef guy that's in Southern Alberta that I get all my beef from and I pay him in Bitcoin. I've got all kinds of stuff in the fridge from local farmers and merchants that I pay in Bitcoin.

And it's getting better and easier to do it. So my end goal is like you, Cole, to onboard as many people. that make my life easier that I can then spend Bitcoin directly on. So yeah. Could I add something, Ben, really quick? Yeah, there's someone in the chat, CJ at 1545 there. He said, just wait till the strippers start accepting lightning. You know what's so funny?

Like you're not going to believe you. You know what I'm going to say, right? Yeah, you go ahead. You go ahead. Already do it. Yeah. So I do Bitcoin street interviews sometimes where I just interview people like, would you rather have $20,000 cash for one Bitcoin?

I asked those questions. And I went out front of a strip club in downtown Vancouver and asked one of the strippers in the lineup, waited to get in. And she told me that literally before she met me, she had accepted lightning as a tip when she was on the stripper pool. Not kidding. Yeah. I'm trying to picture.

the upside down spin with the QR code as the guy tries to scan it instead of pulling out dollars. Interesting. Yeah, I think she might know she must to like put her phone on the or whatever, something like that. Yeah, but I was like, whoa. And that video was public, by the way. It's on BitcoinNews.com. That's hilarious. Well, now you can go tell her that she doesn't need to create a new invoice every time.

She can just have a bolt 12 offer on a QR code on a piece of paper there. problem solves. There you go. There you go. Phil, Devin, I'll let you guys jump in in regards to, again, merchant acceptance, kind of where you feel we are, what hurdles we need to go past, what's going well, what's not. I don't know.

Where are you guys at on this? It's kind of, I feel like it's a mixed bag, right? Because I still believe as much as, okay, as much as I love the direction that we're going in, right? Like, I understand that sometimes development doesn't move as quickly or adoption doesn't move as quickly. But it's kind of like it's always shifting, though, and it's always shifting in the right direction. But I think one of the main issues that we have, I feel, are the gatekeepers, right? Like the manoruses of the world and like those payment systems.

Like I love that people want to build their own terminals. Like I was one of those people who built the lightning gumball machines, right? Where you go and you swipe and then the relay fires and then the gumbal. ball comes down after you paid with lightning. Like I love doing all that stuff. And I think it's really cool. But I feel like people just, the average person won't necessarily take us seriously until that is part of that experience.

That experience when they're standing at the grocery store and they don't have this separate other box. It's just this box that they're used to. Because sadly, like, sadly, it's a matter of the lowest common denominator. Yeah. That's, in terms of, in terms of that. But again, all I'm saying here is, it's. It's not that we're not that we're not making progress. It's just that that to me is kind of like that big hurdle in that direction. And also from what I've understood in terms of lightning, and maybe Cole can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've understood that like the routing, right, like routing can be improved. Like a lot of our kind of a lot of our bottlenecks revolve around the routing. And I guess obviously people are working on solutions. But I think that once we smooth that,

out we can then start to imagine like much bigger levels of adoption yeah yeah Cole I don't know I don't know yeah it's I do agree that yeah lightning network's not perfect but it's you know it has helped Bitcoin a lot but we do have routing issues sometimes mainly when we don't have channels open with other Bitcoin lightning wallets so so one of our solutions on how we're trying to work around that is or not try how we are like doing working around it is that we as coin also we open channels with the biggest providers right so that'd be like wallet of Satoshi or yeah like all kinds breeze moon yeah so that's that's one of our trying to

work around yeah it's one of our times yeah but it is it is something that needs to it's a work in progress yeah yeah we we had the thing too sorry ben where like i was using the phoenix wallet and then all that stuff came out and they shut it down they shut down the other one that I think that I had used. Yeah. And then just, Satoshi. Yeah.

And then if I was like, well, there's mutiny wallet. And now, so, so Cole, somehow did y'all get around that, those restrictions or that fear? Regarding like, well, the Satoshi pulling out of the U.S. and Phoenix. Yeah. Was it just, was it just the U.S. that freaked everybody out? Yeah, the regulation. We're still operating in the U.S. If that's what you're wondering.

Yeah. were not, yeah, the fact that, yeah, we're still operating in the U.S., but it's the regulation that they were afraid of. Yeah. Canada, Canada has somehow, despite our government, has somehow escaped the crackdown on, or the seeming crackdown on lightning in terms of, like, in the U.S., yeah, Wald of Satoshi packed up shop, Phoenix Wallet decided to not be in U.S. app stores. You also saw, obviously, you know, the whole Samarrow. thing, which isn't lightning related, but you know, that, that, you also have blink wallet,

which is available basically everywhere on Earth except for the U.S. And all of those things are still in Canada minus samurai, which just is, you know, the servers are all shut down and everything. But we have access to pretty much all of that. So I still use Phoenix on a daily basis because I quite like it. And I've got like a big ass channel on it. So I never have issues with sending and receiving payments. and they've got the bull 12 things.

So that's my, you know, for self-custodity lightning, that's kind of the one that I go to on mobile. I did want to say, Phil, to your point, in and around, you know, that lowest common denominator in people wanting an easy, an easy experience where they can, yeah, they can use their regular Fiat payments, but also have an option for Bitcoin. I think that the pathway that we begin to go down is we start with a Bitcoin-focused merchant terminal or like Gateway where they've integrated Fiat payments as a secondary solution.

And so I feel like there'll be smaller mom-and-pop shops that kind of understand the value of Bitcoin and begin using those types of things. And then it hits kind of a point where maybe a slightly larger or one of the bigger ones goes, you know what, we'll just turn this on and see what we can do there. I like the approach that, and I'm going to bring it up here, but I really like the approach that ZapRite is taking. I use this thing all the time. But they just have plugins for just everything.

So, like, you can have an expub for a Bitcoin wallet. You can plug in your own lightning node if you want. You can do things like Lincoln Strike or, you know, a liquid wallet or Zebedee. But you also have the Fiat like Stripe or ACH network or CEPA payments or in Canada, InteractE Transfer, or, you know, Square or PayPal. Like you have all these things that you can accept payments through and write alongside them. Sure, plug in your mutiny address. Plug in your Albi address. Connect directly to your unchained vault.

You know, you can do all these things and then you can create like a merchant portal where that is like a payment link or you can create invoices or you can do all these different things. The one thing that is currently missing that is coming is like a point of sale terminal that you can just have on a phone. But, you know, once that stuff starts to come together, then why would I ever use something else as a point of sale terminal if me as a Bitcoiner? I sure I want to accept payments and if people are wanting to pay me, but I can also just plug into something like this and just be like, great, I have my Bitcoin payment options. But if somebody needs to pay me, maybe I can go through Square or whatever else is the least cumbersome for me at the moment. It gives you a lot of play. And the other thing that I like about this is that they added an option. A lot of Bitcorners will give a discount if you pay in Bitcoin.

I think that's great, but I like the way that they frame it here is because they've added a premium for Fiat. And that's my favorite thing because it accurately depicts the message you're trying to send, which is U.S. dollars or local fiat currency is cumbersome, and I don't want it. I prefer you to pay me in Bitcoin. So I'm going to charge you extra for the pain in the ass that accepting dollars is. going to go to one institution. I'm going to have to deal with that. They're going to rake away some fees.

I'm going to have to send it to my bank account. That's going to take however many days. So literally, when I use this and I send an invoice to people or I have a payment link that people go to, at first I set it at 10% premium for Fiat and people kept paying me in Fiat and I really don't want them to. It's 20% now. If you're going to pay me in Fiat, I charge a 20% premium. And lo and behold, very few people want to pay me in fiat, which is great.

Nice. Nice. Yeah, I'm hoping that we continued down the path, though, of that interoperability. And Devin, I'm curious your thoughts around merchants and Bitcoin. You've been around for a long time. You know, how do you feel now versus the early days? Yeah, I thought merchant adoption was vital back in 2016 and 2017. And as you said, there was a push for it.

and some places added it and it was too early. One of the smart bitcoinsers, and I bet you guys heard this talk to, who's a financial guy, said there's four stages of adoption of something before it becomes money. Let me say it that way. First, it's a collectible, then it's a store value, then it's medium of exchange, and then it's unit of account. And so we're somewhere between the store of value and the medium of exchange, probably more on the store value. I still think of it like that.

Obviously, Lightning and other things are trying to make that better to bridge over to the medium of exchange. But we're not quite there yet. Also, there's just, I mean, a minority of people even have Bitcoin. I'd love to different if more people got Bitcoin, number go up, and then they realize, oh, this is a store value. And then there's that more critical mass of people who, when we do want to be able to use it,

it is a medium of exchange, great. And then finally, I guess unit of account is now people are pricing stuff in Satoshi's instead of dollars or, you know, yen or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you're right. Like, obviously your average person that has ever had or used Bitcoin, they've done it in a sense of, oh, I'm going to buy some of this and I'm going to hold on to it, either for short-term gambling or, you know, if they get it, then it's long-term savings.

Very few people have reached the heights of psychopath that is somebody living on a Bitcoin standard right now. I'm proud to be one of them, but not a lot of people are quite there yet. But I'm glad that the tools are beginning to show up to allow us to do so. I've been, you know, 90 plus percent of my income has been Bitcoin since 2020, I think. Wow. And so, you know, I've, it's not as easy as, you know, as using your bank account for everything. But also, I was not nearly as concerned when they started shutting down Canadian bank accounts because, congrats, you got a couple hundred bucks and a bunch of debt.

Sure, take my credit card. But yeah, like it's definitely a tradeoff, but I think the rails will be there for when people begin to transition. And so, like, to be one of those early people to live on a Bitcoin standard, I feel uniquely in tune with the options that are there. and I see where they're lacking, but I also see where they're improving. And that makes me excited. Yeah. Well, with that, I don't know, Cole,

do you have any last thoughts in and around your topic before we hop to the next one? Yeah, someone in the comments here, Richard Hewlett, he said, is there a lightning wallet that lets you enter in a cost basis for SATs, for tax reporting purposes? On the Koynos wallet, there's the clock icon which shows you the transaction history.

There's a button that says export and you press that and it exports your CSV file, which puts everything on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and it itemizes everything, the exact price of Bitcoin at the time of purchase, the amount in Canadian dollars that it is, or US dollars, whatever your currency is that you want to set it to. So it makes it pretty easy that, like the topic of tax comes up a lot. It comes up a lot. Yeah. And I let people know it's not nearly as complicated.

as you think it is. That's a big thing. The only reason why merchants that I talk to are people in general, if they're still not wanting to come on board with Bitcoin, it's just because they don't understand it and they don't know. Like, yeah, they kind of people and some people just don't get it. Yeah, that's what it is. It's just ignorance. Anyone that does understand Bitcoin, they will dive into it. They will accept it as a payment option. Anyone that like understands it. There's one thing to there in regards to, you know, some people say, I would never live on a Bitcoin standard because of the capital gains tax, which if that's your reason for not living on a Bitcoin standard,

I think you're misunderstanding exactly what's happening there in that if you're on a full Bitcoin standard, it means that you do not hold dollars. And when you're paying capital gains, like if you do something and then you pay a capital gain on your Bitcoin as you've spent, spent it. You are, whatever the gain that you have on top of the initial buy, so it's not like you pay tax on like all of the Bitcoin that you own, it's that you bought Bitcoin at a certain price. It increased in purchasing power. And whatever an increased in purchasing power, you're paying a

portion of that in taxes. And so what that means is your purchasing power has gone up and you've paid a portion of that gain to the government, which means you're still up. As opposed to when you're holding dollars longer term, you are guaranteed to lose purchasing power. So saying that I wouldn't ever be on a Bitcoin standard because I don't like the capital gains is a little bit like saying, I don't want to win the lottery if I have to give some of it away. You know, like, I don't want extra money if I have to give some of it back. Like, to me, it's a silly excuse. Now, the excuse of it sounds complicated or I don't know how to handle it, absolutely.

But in terms of, in terms of like the reasoning of, oh, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to be taxed on it, that never really jibed with me in terms of, like, And on top of that, if it goes down in a calendar year, you actually can claim a capital loss, right? And you can't really do that with Fiat. So I'm just saying that, you know, sometimes those concerns, I don't know, I find them a little silly. Anyways, with that, we're going to put a bow on this topic. We're going to do our final rotation. And Phil, I am tossing it to you.

Same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? All right. Well, since, believe it or not, one of mine was the Bitax, but you already brought that up. The other one was Cole's awesome comments about the Lightning Network. I wanted to bring that up. But you know what? As I was thinking of that, I realized really what I'm bullish on is this cycles were building on Bitcoin, but here's my shit coin narratives. Okay. I noticed that this cycle, in previous cycles, I've seen it a lot more towards the, you know, you know, like ETH and Solana and all these garbage tokens. And I know the meme coins are really quote unquote hot right now. But hear me out. I'm seeing a lot of people come to Bitcoin. I'm seeing companies get formed come to Bitcoin and they're building fake layer twos,

which essentially it's just a sly roundabout way to introduce to you a vapor token while they separate you from your Bitcoin. So I have to say I am really bullish on that because I have to say that in the, The previous cycle, I actually was concerned that the bad crap was just going to go totally over there to the alt coins. And hear me out. This is something that I ended up learning during this bear cycle. It's that as much as we don't like the garbage on Bitcoin, okay? Like I don't care for ordnals. I don't care about any of that stuff.

I think it's all a grift. The point is, is that these people want to come here and create what they determine as economic activity. Okay. And that means there is some value in this place, right? There's some value in this blockchain. And these people believe that building their chotchkes around it, you know, is going to, you know, is going to somehow enrich them. And although I, you know, I don't fault them for, for wanting to do that. But I do think, I do think that that activity and that attention is good for Bitcoin. So I'm actually bullish that these narratives have come back. Okay. And that. that all these people are thinking that, hey, we love Bitcoin. We're going to pretend to build on Bitcoin, and here's our shit coin. So I'm excited. It's right. It's a kind of, because before the narrative was Bitcoin's old tech, we're going to

new blockchain over here. Come join our new blockchain. Now people are like, well, I mean, Bitcoin's the best. But now we're going to build on top of it to make it better, even though they're not actually building on top. I think the trajectory that we're on is relearning. all of the lessons of what led us from crypto to Bitcoin, on top of Bitcoin. And so, like, there's one thing that stuck with me from five years ago. I think I was in Riga with the Bull Bitcoin team. I was with Francis Puglia.

And we went to some presentation. And some guy was, he was doing some sort of, like, healthcare weird thing. and it was like on top of Bitcoin in some way. And so I sat there and I was like this was, you know, as I was going through my, oh, Bitcoin is the one that makes sense. And I said I was firmly in that place, but I hadn't yet grappled with stuff on top of Bitcoin or tangential to Bitcoin. And I came out of that presentation very confused. And I was like, so I looked over at Francis. I was like, what did you think about that?

And he just looked back at me and he was like, you know, if it was a bad idea outside of Bitcoin, it's probably an equally bad idea on top of Bitcoin. And I think we're all about to, this is this cycle of lesson is bad ideas are still bad ideas if they're on top of Bitcoin. Very well said. I appreciate you. I appreciate you introducing the France as well. wisdom from that because that is that is pure gold right there better than gold it's bitcoin

you go uh devon i'm curious your thoughts and around this you've been around the block what do you think yeah and i've got a confession to make to you guys too you know i started at bitcoin in 2015 but then one of my best friends or a really good friend was a big eth guy yeah and so ethereum was my gateway drug and then it was ripple and then after that you know it was down uh the the alt coin jungle. Yeah. And it's only in the past, the past bull run bear market where I realized, nope, it's Bitcoin. And what's interesting, though, what I've seen now is people have also kind of realized

the alt coin game is up. And you don't have the excitement that you had in 2017. In 2017, I was like, oh, there's chain link and there's Cardano and there's Iota. It's going to be internet of things like robots and cars and everything's going to get disrupted with blockchain. Well, that didn't happen. And 95% of those tokens went zero and didn't come back the next bull run. Now we had another bull bear market and there's even fewer of them that are around. So I think people have started to realize, oh, it's not that there's going to be 10,000 cryptocurrencies.

There's Bitcoin, which is for money, finance, super important. Maybe one of these other things comes up with a use case. Great, right? You know, Ethereum probably has the best chance. Now it has an ETF, whatever. So it seems like though people have gotten a lot smarter than they were back, including myself, you know, six, seven years ago. What do you guys see when you see the all coin landscape as well?

I feel like it's again, I think it's dwindling And yeah, I don't know The alt coins To me and from what I've seen Little booths at different events It's like the altcoins are now Doing the affinity scam of we're building a Bitcoin layer two

With our altcoin, right? Like Tron's layer two solution to Bitcoin That was a thing on a board above a booth that I saw somewhere. And it's like, Tron is now a layer two to Bitcoin. No, no, but yeah, I don't know.

I'm curious, Cole, like, have you, you must have seen some of this because, like, you're dealing with lightning, which, and I mean, I guess we should get our terms here straight, too. Like, layer two, like, it depends what your definition of a layer two is, Like when you're dealing with lightning, it is actually Bitcoin locked in a multi-sig between two parties and that is actual Bitcoin there.

When you're dealing with liquid, even though I use it, I do concede. That is not Bitcoin when I'm doing a liquid transaction. It's liquid Bitcoin. And I only ever use it typically for my day-to-day expenses, like maybe max, like a portion of my monthly cash flow. and just in case we get fee spikes, but I wouldn't necessarily be putting my life savings in it, and I recognize that there's trust involved there. I think it's less likely the way that that federation is set up,

that it would easily be clamped down upon on all corners of the globe, but I do admit it's a possibility that I have to be cognizant of. So, yeah, Cole, I'm curious what you've dealt with in terms of, layer twos, you know, in scaling and what you've seen being around the block with this kind of stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I've seen a lot of stuff come and go. And with liquid, yeah, like it is federated. It's not the same. You know, Bitcoin's the only thing that's actually like trustless still. Even with like whitening and liquid, like I like those, but Bitcoin's still the only one that's actually, actually trustless.

And you know, you take something like stacks STX, like they claim that they're built on Bitcoin, they're not. Like they are not, they are far, yeah, and they go to their website last time I was on their website. Like they still advertise that. I don't really like that. Other misrepresenting themselves.

They're just trying to build more users, right? So yeah. So I, the topic of layer two is on Bitcoin, I've kind of simplified it. And at the meetup, at the event that I was hosting last night a very we got into a very heated discussion actually like not me but a couple of members in a group setting about layer two's bitcoin needs to have layer twos need to have layer two's like for bitcoin to scale we need to have layer twos we have to have stable coins on bitcoin for bitcoin to scale

like stuff like that so when i hear stuff like that i always point out to people that stable coins stable coins can be frozen stable coins are centralized you have a lot of trust needed that that stable coin will be pegged. So there's that. And then also when I say, if you want to have layer twos, it's like what you were saying, Ben, a bad idea is still a bad idea,

or a risky idea is still a risky idea, right? And when you have layer twos on Bitcoin, it's the same centralization risk, in my opinion, as, like, Ethereum. Ethereum is not decentralized. It's completely centralized. Everything on Ethereum is centralized. So layer two is on.

on Bitcoin, in my opinion, I think have the same centralization risk as other alt-coin blockchains and stuff. Right. So when you brought up Tron, Ben, I was about to say, oh, what's wrong? Ben, you don't trust Justin's son? Like, yeah, I just couldn't make a joke like that, right? Because there's so much centralization in Tron and Solana. Solata is an absolute joke.

Like I have read, I got an article or a page this big on Telegram that and forwarding to tons of people about. how many times Salon has been caught for fraud. Like, I know this isn't been awkwardly, but I'm just saying, like, like people think they can trust stuff. L2's on Bitcoin. Yeah, I'm not, I think it's as risky as a theory.

That's my opinion. Yeah. L2's. Yeah. Devin, what do you think about? Like, what's your general take on? Like, do you have a line where you're like,

I won't use it versus I will or like, where are you at with? I'm willing. I'm willing to use stuff. I mean, especially coming from Altcoin World. I at one time had WBT, which as you guys know is rap BTC and Coinbase at a bunch of people or, you know.

And guess what? Did it work okay for me? Sure, it worked fine. I got in. I eventually got out. But I do like the idea of, I'm in, you call it a homesteading community of people out here. I got to keep this in a PC

so I don't trigger certain words. We're all very normal, you know. But I like the idea of the, what is it, fedaments, kind of the federated thing because there's people in our community who they're not going to adopt Bitcoin anytime soon. If some of us got together and said, hey, look, we've set up this thing, and it's now easy for you to do. Great.

Now, yeah, you've got to have trust in me and these. five other guys, but guess what? We already have social trust in each other because we base our lives around each other and one of us betrays the other person. Well, everyone's like well, Devin just betrayed us. Like let's go and, you know, get him. And his

kids aren't going to be invited to the birthday party anymore. You know, I don't want that. So, so I don't mind. I like the idea or I see the idea of, I bet you guys have heard of this, of Bitcoin becoming base money when I say that.

like just like the, you know, the Federal Reserve, you know, has base money. I can see that being the foundation for the totally new financial world. Yes, other stuff will have to be built on it. Yes, some of that stuff will be garbage and will be scammy. And, you know, derivatives of derivatives. It's like we could almost rebuild the bad system we have now on Bitcoin. Not quite, though, because the base layer is sound and solid and can't be defrauded on. And transparent.

Say again. And transparent is. And transparent. Exactly. There's no central bank that can say, hey, yeah, we're going to increase, you know, the base money supply, give it out to all our friends, you know, can't a lot effect. So a little bit of a ramble, but those are just some thoughts. Yeah. Part of me wonders.

Because, you know, it wasn't just Nixon deciding to go off the gold standard that actually was the, the, trigger for that. It was everybody like external countries noticing that the United States was able to stick around in Vietnam much longer than they should have with the amount of dollars based on the amount of gold that they purportedly had. Like there were there were indications that the U.S. was printing more dollars than they held gold in the first place and that that slippery slope began to go a little bit too quick, and then soon you got France pulling up a warship demanding their gold back. And so, you know, when you have that transparent base layer, like the way I look at Bitcoin in terms of how it should work in an ideal world is, you know, I'd like people to be as absolutely

self-sovereign as possible. But I don't want to trade off the transparency of the base layer and the ability of anybody to verify and host a copy of the blockchain or making that accessible to as many people as possible. And so does that result in a difficulty for most people to have a UTXO that they own? With what we have right now in practice, yes, could things come down the pipeline that could change that? Yeah, perhaps. but I'm just talking in a sense of what we have right now.

But what I wonder is, does that transparency, is that enough to allow us to build a system atop it that is easily transactable and people can secure and verify and see the underlying base and call out bullshit the moment it happens? Like can we demand absolute transparency on behalf of, you know, let's say a, and I have I hope it doesn't get back to government money based on like pegged to Bitcoin because I think that would be a poor system that could be easily rug pulled. But maybe these smaller community, you know, things like Fetamints that give users of it default privacy and easy transactability, but also allow you to kind of audit the underlying coins

and can we create mechanisms like that, that give us a degree of certainty of what's going on? You know, in those instances, it's going to be more like the system of free banking, where there were bank runs. But the money, you know, like any effing around resulted again quickly in finding out. And so while you had pockets of untrustworthy,

institutions that would collapse, by and large, all of society was at least better off because the money itself wasn't corrupted yet. And maybe with the transparency of Bitcoin, you'd be able to point that out a lot quicker than we could in the old system. So, I mean, my hope is that maybe we have partial ownership of UTXOs or some way where you can always have unilateral exit if you need it. But barring that, I'm hoping that the transparency is enough. We'll see. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, well said, Ben.

Man, I didn't know you're a philosopher. I do what I can when I'm not. He's on the council of Benz. That's right. Awesome. Well, I mean, is there anything else, Phil, that you want to tag on to that? Any thoughts in around this topic? before we put a bow on it?

No, no, I think we, I think we did pretty well with that. It's good stuff. Awesome. Okay, well, gents, here's what I like to do to round out the show. Every time I like to do just one last round of any general thoughts that you have from the episode, anything else that you want to get off your chest. But more importantly, as a second thing, a recommendation that you may have for anybody watching the show that you think will find useful.

So over the course of the show, we've had just shy of 2,800 people join in and give a gander. So with them in mind, again, any final thoughts, but any recommendations, and those could take the form of just as simple as a piece of life advice, maybe some app or device that you've tried that you would think that would be really cool for them to check out, a book you read, a video you watched, anything that you think you can throw their way that might be useful. So I'll get started so you guys can stew with it for a second. In terms of final thoughts, again, we're at a point in Bitcoin where if you've been in it

for a while, you have this kind of like bipolar feeling about how things are going. On one hand, it feels like, God, when are we going to get there? But on the other hand, you realize how far we've come from your initial foray into Bitcoin. And you can see the tools being built that will eventually result in the applications and the easy access that all the normies eventually will be using. And so if you're a bitcoiner and maybe this is your first cycle and you're like, why isn't there a worldwide? adoption yet. Well, strap in. It's going to be a while. And just know that things are happening.

And you got to kind of keep your eyes and ears open and see those little pockets of innovation that are happening and test things out. And in terms of recommendations, I will, again, encourage people to check out bitax.org,

B-I-T-A-X-E. e.org and that'll have a whole bunch of links where you can check out stuff about the curiosity of home mining on cheap hardware and level up and learn a little bit. So with that, I'll toss it over to Devin. Devin, same thing. Any final thoughts you may have and a recommendation if you got one. Yeah, well, thank you, Ben, because I do recommend a book. It's called Chasing the Seeds and I did write it.

So this is a selfless or a shameless promotion. I love it. So what's funny is the last thing that we talked about there. In the final book in the series, I'm going to do a brief spoiler. In the final book, there's going to be a small little kingdom. It's going to have as its money, Bitcoin, and it's going to be a much better place in happier society. But it doesn't start with that. In this book, it actually, there's bank runs that happen.

The bad guys want to bring in a central bank digital currency. The good guys have to use Bitcoin because all the credit cards stuff's shut down. And the hero character is trying to find his father's legacy. His father died and left him some riddles in an Austrian economics textbook that his father had. So the hero starts on a worldwide scavenger hunt and Bitcoin organically comes into play in this. story. So what's fun about it is, as a bitcoiner, when you read this, you're going to pick up on all the little Easter eggs I put in. But you're no bitcoiner, not no bitcoiner, you're friends who don't have Bitcoin, non-bitcoins. This is a book you can give them. They might not read the Bitcoin

standard, you know, right out of the gate or the creature from Jekyll Island. They might read a fiction book with, you know, fun chasing stuff on the cover. So it's a way then to kind of share with them and they'll see how Bitcoin's useful. So thanks for pulling that up too, Ben. I appreciate it. Yeah, no worries. I'm excited to dive in. I'm just on the cusp of finishing my last book, and this is my next read. But again, I love, I feel like the world needs more integrated Bitcoin fiction. And this sounds right up my alley. I love, you know, every night before I go to bed, I've always got a novel on my side table, and I usually get through a chapter or two each evening. So this will be firmly secured on my side table inside of a few nights here and really looking forward to it.

So yeah, check it out, Chasing the Seeds by Devin Rose. You can grab it on Amazon. I saw some people prodding you asking about perhaps eventually accepting Bitcoin. Did anybody give you some tips on that? They did. I'm such a hypocrite because here we are Bitcoiners. And they're like, I can't use Bitcoin to buy this. And I was like, I wanted to do that and I could do that.

But also, as you guys know, 99% of people are on Amazon. Just the reality right now. And we're trying to get them into Bitcoin. So, yeah, no, they did. And also they made very cogent guesses about things that the book might be about that only Bitcoiners would know. Your normally friends are going to be like chasing the seeds why are you chasing seeds you know how stupid uh so yeah i'll i'll think about how to accept bitcoin

for it that's awesome and if you're in a bench and you're on a bitcoin standard just go to bit refill and grab an amazon gift card there you go then you're all set um awesome awesome i'll uh rotate over to cole call any final thoughts recommendations go ahead man yeah absolutely um final thoughts would be it so you know i'm uh i'm representing a bitcoin and lightning wallet so I mentioned that like layer twos are risky and stuff. That doesn't mean that I don't still use them. You know, I do recommend using lightning as a way to like accept payments because it's instant. And then with COINOS, we have an auto withdraw feature.

Okay. So right now, COINOS is custodial, but our number one priority is making it actually have a non-custodial option. That's our number one priority. We're going to roll that out very soon. Now, the auto withdraw feature, let's say you have a cold storage wallet, which I hope everyone has. I would send Ben, BTC sessions. I'll send him, let's say I send him 20 bucks, and he can set his threshold to 20 bucks or $15. So everything he gets will automatically be withdrawn into his Bitcoin wallet of choice, obviously, as cold storage.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah, you put your auto. Yeah, exactly. So that's that's really good. You can basically use coinOS in a non-custodial type of way right now. You know, lowest fees in the world, the wallet is Satoshi 0.5% or 0.1%. And I want to, I want to say also that Vancouver, if you look at BTCMap.org, that's where you can see a lot of businesses that are currently accepting Bitcoin as a payment option. And on BTCMAP.org, you will see that Vancouver is the most Bitcoin-heized city in North America. When you, like, zoom into each city, there's some places in Mexico that have a lot of merchants as well. Calgary sound, eh, Ben?

Like, Calgary sounds like it's really catching up, man. Like, you said there's 50 merchants that come here? Like, that's really cool, man. Like, I mean, it sounds like Calgary's, like, going to be right there. But when you zoom, yeah, so when you zoom out, it's about 100. When I see Vancouver, I mean the greater Vancouver area. So from like West, West Van to Abbotsford is what I mean. West Van on the mainland, yeah, to Abbotsford.

That, yeah, exactly. There's, I think, 98, 97, 98 businesses. So that makes Vancouver a really Bitcoin-onized place. Yeah. We, Cole, I'm going to need some advice when I, when I get into Vancouver of the best spots to hit because I'm going to be coming through with some stats.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, totally. Yeah, definitely. And I will, and I will say, so regarding coin-offs and everything, especially from a merchant perspective for, you know, quick usability, like when you're trying to get somebody, Obviously, like, as somebody goes along and if they're, you know, an absolute purist, then they're going to be doing all the things, getting lightning channels and getting all that stuff set up for themselves. But from just like a basic perspective of somebody being able to set this up, and the auto-withdraw thing is kind of key because you can say as you're onboarding a merchant, like, listen, let's set your threshold right now and have a, you know, we can have you on like a device for your savings or, you know, a, you know, a, a, a, a, you know, a, a. cold wallet for you, but we can at least set this up and then you won't have to deal with like

lightning channels and everything. But once you hit however much a few hundred bucks or something, it'll auto send into your long term savings. And then at least you minimize exposure to custodians. And it's just, it is quite easy to just come and say like, oh, I want a dollar. And then you automatically have the options for lightning liquid or on chain. Obviously, I'm not going to take an on-chain transaction for Bitcoin for regular, for a dollar worth of Bitcoin. But it gives all of those options. And so then that would just pay into your regular wallet. And once it builds a balance, then yes, you can get it into your own self-custody.

So, you know, I like what you guys have done with that and made it simple, but have also been working towards making sure people have good practices down the line. And I think as long as the ecosystem that somebody is in gives them a pathway to self-custody, then I think that's the most important thing because we're also used to starting with, you know, like here's your on-chain wallet. But transactions will get expensive. And so I kind of feel like our teaching is going to be inverse. Like right now, we're starting from a place of the most self-sovereign that you can be. and then working your way up the stack and being like,

here's your on-chain wallet, which you can secure with hardware. But then there's this thing called Lightning, and that's the thing you're going to transact with. Or maybe that's like the glue in between all these other little systems like Fetamints and liquid and everything. And so, like, you work your way up the stack and you're confusing the hell out of people

when in reality a top-down approach where you start easy and then work your way towards self-sovereignty might be a better pathway that doesn't get people turning around and walking out the door right away. And I'm experimenting with that in my, as I teach people, trying to find the easiest way to get them started, but then leave those breadcrumbs so that they move towards being a responsible bit corner. So I wish I knew the perfect answer, but I like what you make fun.

Yeah, we, we, to set up a merchant, a lot of people ask us, it's just we give them a physical QR code laminated. And then we give them a printer, which is for. inches by two inches by three inches by two inches by two inches is that small right so basically the waitresses that are using us at restaurants the cashiers at convenience stores and liquor stores that are using us none of them understand bitcoin they don't have to understand it we want them to but they don't have to they just got to show the QR code to the customer customer scans it the

printer pops out a receipt as soon as the Bitcoin wallet receives the payment they that's it they don't need to understand Bitcoin at all so that's makes it easy that's awesome that's awesome well that's great Phil I'm going to pop it to you finally. Any final thoughts, recommendations? Go ahead, man. All right, here we go. So I'm going to leave people with three things.

First, the Hopium. Legacy is here. Historically, we've never spent this much time in the all-time high region, right? According to Bitcoin's price history. So this bull run, I really think is going to be epic. So zoom out, self-custody and stack. Next, shameless plug. Check out our YouTube show, Pleb Underground.

We have daily clips and weekly guests. And finally, for a recommendation. Don't forget to check out, I think, the most epic work that everybody should start with. Everyone's a scammer. And you could find that on the, yeah, dude, the Nakamoto Institute.org. I'm sorry, I will never stop recommending that. I have no choice. Everyone's a scammer.

Everyone needs to read it. I feel like not enough people do. And I feel like if they did, they wouldn't have so many problems. And they would have a lot easier time stacking. And I think it's really important that everyone understands, right? even us as bitcoins. We're scammers because we want more Bitcoin too. Okay, so we want more Bitcoin.

The shit coiner's want more Bitcoin. The no-coiners. They really want Bitcoin, but they think they can't afford it. Everyone's a scammer. And there's an audio version of that too that you could check out that Guy Swan does, which is totally awesome. It's totally worth the listen, totally worth the read. I will always recommend this.

And this one goes back. This is turning 10 years old, pretty soon. Yes. Wow. Yeah. This article changed my life. Seriously, I was down bad and shit coins. I had lost tens of thousands of dollars being a fool.

And then, you know, I don't even remember which bitcoiner put this in a link in their in their Twitter. And I was like, it just changed. It just completely changed the way that I looked at everything. And I was like, that's it. It's Bitcoin only. I don't care. This is the best. This is it.

That's fantastic. It is some good reading. Awesome. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, that is our time. That was a great rip. I really enjoyed it. A lot of fun.

Thank you all for joining me and getting bullish on a Friday evening. I really, really do appreciate it. Everybody watching, we've now had it in around 3,200 people over the course of the show between YouTube and X and Noster all tune in. So thank you guys for joining us. These guys' social handles are in these show notes down below. So make sure you go check them out and everything that they're doing. And gentlemen, I'll just say. Thank you again, and you're all welcome back anytime.

Awesome. Thank you. Thanks, thank you so much. Cheers, guys. I'll see you later. Bye, guys. All right. And everybody, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you all as well.

Of course, as I mentioned, I'm going to be dropping that Bitax tutorial or Nerdax tutorial tomorrow morning. So keep your eyes open for that. Again, make sure you follow these gents and everything that they're doing. Make sure you check out Devin Rose's book. over on Amazon, make sure you check out Plev Underground with Phil. Make sure you check out CoinOS. And if you're going to be in Vancouver, come say hi on August 11th. And before we round out here, of course, make sure you like, sub, share, all those good things.

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