BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH: Dom Bei, Seth for Privacy, Graham Wardle ep415

Episode Date: May 11, 2024

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Yo, what's going on everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. Got an awesome panel joining us this week. Very excited to have them all. A couple returning guests and a first timer that is long overdue. So very happy to have them all. We'll bring them in momentarily. Of course, this is live.

Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Fuck it. Do it live. I can. All right. and we'll do it live.

The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things. Super important. They really do help get this content at front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

Before we bring in our guests, we're just going to take a quick look at where we are in the market. Right now, I'm pulling up Timechain Calendar.com. Simultaneously, I'm going to pull up the live chat over on the side. Everything you say from here on end,

we'll be live for the live for the live. the world to see for better or worse. So back to Time Chain Calendar, we're sitting at $60,779 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will snag you 1,645 sats. In terms of fees, next block, 23 sats per byte, anytime 20 sats per byte. And in terms of Bitcoin mined, 19.7 million of them. That is 93.79% of the total supply. We'll get a quick shout out to our sponsors.

And then we're going to bring in our guests and get bullish altogether. See in a second, guys. mission to enable independence by being one of the easiest and quickest ways to purchase Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. The best part about it, every buy goes directly into your own self-custody. They never hold your coins. You can add a Bitcoin address as part of onboarding. There's a transparent 1% spread, no hidden fees, no withdrawal fees, plus they have KYC

free sales and bill payments on their website. They're also a publicly traded company under the ticker BTCW on the TSS. XV. Check them out over at Bitcoinwell.com. Check out my full tutorial on how to use them. And you can check out the links in the show notes down below and sign up today. Kite.com has some of the best hardware on the market today to secure your Bitcoin. The cold card queue is an absolute powerhouse and is my daily driver. And on top of this, they have plenty of other goodies including the Mark 4, 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, let's get our panel in here. Welcome everybody to this show. I'm gonna welcome in Graham, Dom, and Seth. Welcome you guys, thank you. I'm gonna do a little shuffle around here, but welcome to the show.

A couple returning guests, a long overdue first timer, but we'll do a quick round of intros for anybody unfamiliar. Dom, I'll toss it to you, For anybody in familiar, who are you? What do you do? My name is Dom Bay. In addition to guest starring on the Ben Sessions Christmas special,

which I hope I've earned a permanent spot or, you know, we'll see how that goes. I'm also a firefighter. And I founded a nonprofit called Proof of Workforce. We help bring Bitcoin education-based adoption to organizations, institutions, municipalities, workers. We want to bring Bitcoin to workers. And that's what we do.

Awesome. Well, glad to have you back. And yeah, sure. I'll extend the invite now if you want to come get married with me again. Yes. But you're going to have to deal with the blue collar guys again, too. So, I mean, that's Josh and Dan, you heard it here. Buckle up, boys.

I'm coming for you. Awesome. Graham, it's good to see you, man. Welcome to the show. Hope you've been well. Can you give yourself a little intro for anybody unfamiliar? Sure. My name is Graham Wardle.

actor, poet, podcaster guy. I met Ben years ago when you're working in Calgary, helping me with Bitcoin, and I've just been a passion about it ever since. But mainly my area of focus is telling stories. So podcasting, television, movies, such stuff like that. But I'm very passionate about Bitcoin, self-sovereignty, you know, all that kind of stuff, sound money. So I'm happy and stoked to be here, Beth. Awesome. Well, glad to have you back, man. And we'll toss it down the line one more time. Seth, I don't know. know what I was thinking, not having you on the show sooner, but I'm very appreciative of you joining. And it was great to be on a panel with you at Pacific a couple years back. So for anybody

familiar, can you give yourself an intro? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. I mean, it is crazy. We've only crossed paths that one time at Pacific Bitcoin, even though we've been in the space and kind of doing similar things for quite a while. So great to get you to know you a little bit more. But for anyone who doesn't know, I am Seth for privacy. It's in the name. I love privacy because privacy is essential for human freedom. But what I do by day is I'm head of strategy and marketing at Foundation, where we build Bitcoin-centric tech to help you reclaim your freedom. And then I'm also the editor-in-chief at freedom.tech, which is a publication that focuses on really just bringing actionable news and guides, reviews, et cetera, to you around all things,

freedom tech, not just Bitcoin, not usually other cryptocurrency. but other kind of technology like privacy tools to help you accomplish that. So, yeah, that's my background. Awesome, man. Well, very glad to have you. Very glad to have you all. And we're going to dive in here and also shout out to everybody in the chat, joining.

Very happy to have you guys all here as well. Be sure to give that like button a little tap and give this a share out. But we're going to get rolling. If you're here for the first time and you're unfamiliar, this is Why Are We Bullish? So pretty simple premise to the show. each one of us has come with a reason for being bullish, something that we're currently excited or buzzing about in and around the Bitcoin space. So the flow of the show is as false.

Number one, somebody's going to drop their reason for being bullish. This is their chance to rant and get whatever they're excited about off of their chest. Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason. We're going to discuss comments, questions, rabbit holes, wherever we end up going. We'll take it there. And then finally, number three, we're going to rotate until we've all. had a turn. So reason, riff, rotate, nice, and simple. So I'm going to get us started today. And, you know, I'm sure Seth would echo me a little bit. These past couple of weeks have been

a little, a little rough. And that's an understatement in terms of infringements on privacy and kind of massive government overreach, in my opinion. So it's been, you know, You're trying to find a lot of silver linings when it comes to the environment that we're currently in. And so that's going to be a little bit of my reasoning today for being bullish. I've seen, to give this context, obviously we had the samurai wallet team arrested. And in the wake of that, we've seen a number of other big. Bitcoin-related apps or wallets or companies pull out of the U.S. or just shut down operations entirely.

And so it seems to me like we're moving into an environment where at least, at the very least in the U.S., there's going to be, if you're just going through regular app stores, a degraded and diminished experience when looking for Bitcoin-related. applications that you might want to use. But, you know, not that I'm super keen on custodial options, but wallet of Satoshi ducked out, so Americans can't just easily download that. In the wake of Samurai, we saw Async and Phoenix wallet, which I do quite like. They just said, we're not going to offer anything to the U.S. app stores.

You know, even Wasabi Wallet said we're going to prevent Americans from accessing our, our coordinator before they just fully, you know, shut it down entirely. But plenty of examples of companies that are effectively saying, like, we just don't want to be in the U.S. It's too much of a minefield. However, out of that, what I've seen, and even a little bit prior to this, what I've seen is a little bit more discussion and awareness from people that the app stores, number one, are a bit of a choke point, but number two is that there are

alternatives to, you know, the Apple App Store and the Google Play App Store. And so I wanted to highlight a few things. And for some people watching, this may be a first time learning about, oh, you can side-load apps or you can get what are called progressive web apps on your phone. But I just wanted to highlight a couple things. Now, if you're on Apple, you're a little bit of little bit more, yeah, you don't have as many options, but we'll kind of go through it really quick here. So, you know, there's been alternative app stores for quite some time when it comes to Android, FDroid, the Aurora Store, things like that. You can basically get, you know, whatever apps that you want without having to, you know, get the approval of Google for your apps and

be able to download them with maybe a little bit more privacy. Alternatively, an example like Phoenix, you know, you can of course go to their GitHub page and download what's known as the APK file and install it directly on an Android phone. I'm not saying that necessarily if you're in the U.S., I'm advising you to do that, but I'm just saying this is a thing that is technically possible. And then we also see things like in terms of Nostr, Primal. You can, of course, they give the option for APK files there where you could just download

directly and install. But I also saw something interesting pop up this week, again, an alternative app store, zap dot store. And this is, well, I'll read what they have here. It's a permissionless app store. It uses Noster to establish identity linking release artifacts to social profiles. validated by the Web of Trust. This enables secure installs, a new app discoverability layer, and developer monetization via Zaps. And, you know, I've downloaded it and just kind of took a look

really quick. It's very bare bones right now. Like, you can't even really browse, but you can search for specific apps if you know that they're there. But you can see things like Mutiny Wallet, Zeus, mini bits, Phoenix, you know, a number of Bitcoin related things. I'm sure they'll be more added. But what I'm happy about here is, again, just the awareness that you are not beholden to the app store at all times. There are alternatives. And in the face of censorship, you know, you have ways to go about things and still get access to the software that you want to run. And so, yeah, that's kind of where where I'm at. And I see Seth just, drop something into the chat here. I'm going to pull it up as well. And I'll bring it up.

So Seth, maybe you want to you want to talk. What is this that I'm looking at right now? Yeah. So you hit on some of the main options, which have been kind of the go-toes in the more on like the privacy Android OS space, because a lot of people who want to use like a more privacy preserving operating system like Graphene OS also want to get away from the Google Play Store for privacy reasons, sometimes security reasons. And so there's been great. tools like FDroid, like Aurora store, which is kind of a wrapper for the Google Play Store. But one that's really kind of taken the space by Storm is this that you're showing right now, called Obtenium.

And the beautiful thing about Obtenium and the reason I use it for at least probably like three quarters of the apps that I have right now installed is that you can install apps from a plethora of sources. You can install apps directly from like the GitHub release page like you showed with Phoenix Wallet. So you would just grab that URL for their GitHub release. page pasted into Obtenium and it'll automatically check for updates, install the app for you. It handles all of the complexity that usually comes with manually doing those things. You can also do FDroid, both official and unofficial repos directly in Obtanium.

If an app only publishes their APK on their website, there's tools within Obtanium to actually scrape the APK file from the website and automatically check for updates and help you install it and all of that as well. So it's kind of my go-to now. I'm either using the Google Play Store when like absolutely necessary because there's no other source for an app or I'm using Obtanium for everything else. And the beautiful thing about the Bitcoin ecosystem is most good apps and wallets in the space are free and open source and publish APKs on their GitHub or some other method. So you can get pretty much everything in the Bitcoin ecosystem plus the privacy ecosystem, etc. directly through Obtanium, which is a really, really cool app.

It doesn't get highlighted enough. But I think it's a vital one for this kind of use case. Wow. Actually, I had never heard of it. So that's something I'm going to be adding to my phone right after this likely. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's just important for people to, again, to realize, like you're not beholden to the Google Play App Store in a lot of instances. And I feel like we get a little bit of this. this, people will use the most convenient option until it gets so walled garden that it's, the tradeoffs are not enough to keep them there and they go to things that are maybe a little bit more difficult to use initially or take a little bit of know-how or some searching, but they'll then default to that. And I think we're in a bit of a position where I kind of think in the realm of

torrents. And so you saw, you know, like Napster, centralized, easy to shut down. Okay, everybody moved to torrenting files. But then you saw the free market kind of come up with, well, here's Netflix. And everybody said, well, we'll, we'll pitch our 10 or 15 bucks a month and we'll get easy streaming. We're willing to trade off. But now we're in a position where it's like, what I need six or seven services to get all this. fuck it, I'll just torrent again. And so, like, I think we're, we're maybe seeing a little bit of that, but on, on kind of a more serious note in and around Bitcoin and privacy, right?

Like, okay, well, I'll use a centralized service or I'll use a custodian and everything, but then the hammer comes down. It's like, oh, shit, maybe I need to actually use these better tools that will preserve my self-sovereignty and my privacy. And so I think we're going to maybe see a little bit of back and forth between that as as this top-down kind of push to remove privacy comes about. And maybe it's not from the necessarily, because a lot of people maybe worry about the privacy aspect

a little bit less than they should. But when that has real-world consequences, then they start to worry about it again. So I don't know. Either way, I'm just happy to see options like this pop up, and I'm happy to see people explore new ways of obtaining and running software on their mobile devices. I'm curious if Dom or Graham, if you've ever, first of all, are you guys beholden to the iPhone ecosystem? There we go.

But have you ever done a progressive web app or anything like that? Don. I'll tell you something I've done, not a progressive web app, but I tried to build my own Lightning Node through Terminal on on the on a Mac Mini where I run my node, which ended in a violent feud with a chat GPT app and we're not on speaking terms and that's warfare. That's a vendetta right now. But I'm pretty beholden to the iPhone. Haven't downloaded apps outside of the app store.

But I mean, I'm here now. So let's let's explore and see what's out there, you know. I think if anything, both of you guys being on iPhone, in terms of like lightning optionality that's, that might be good for you is, I mean, mutiny, you can go and you can install that as a progressive web app. So basically you just go to, I can't recall the URL, but it's easy enough to find. But you go to the website where it would load as a lightning wallet and then just in the top of your browser, the few little dots. and they'll say add to home screen or install app i can't recall what it says on an iPhone but then it just it loads when you click on the icon that's on your on your home screen it opens as a full app without the browser bar above it and it's just everything is just mobile friendly so

always an option worth trying out just so that you're you're familiar with the flow anyways i'll definitely try that out because uh well i just say i had i thought it was so cool i had my phoenix liquidity channel topped up. I was like walking into work like y'all don't even know how set I am. I can go anywhere. I can go on chain, off chain. I can no look past to the right. I can cross over left. You don't understand how versatile I am and then I wake up the next thing. I'm like, that's gone. So, so I'm all for looking into other options and staying nimble. That's we got to stay nimble in the space. Yeah. Yeah. Graham, what about you? Have you? I've done some native. Yeah, Yeah, like you can save web pages, yeah, as like apps on your on your phone, but it still brings up the browser bar.

I think Android is the only one that gets rid of it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's basically like you just, it's like saving a website to your home screen. And it doesn't work, at least from the videos that I've seen of you where like the, it looks like an app. Like you use the web browser experience. I've done some test flight stuff, like testing of apps, which is kind of not really, but it's different than going through the app store. Have they gotten approval or not kind of thing? Yeah, yeah. But I probably would just go with like getting an Android phone myself and just having it for a lightning

wallet. But Phoenix is still in Canada. Is it not? Like they're still operating in Canada. Yeah. So what I'm what I'm curious is whether Canada is just slow and inefficient or whether they care. I'm, I'm thinking a little bit of both.

Like I'm, I think they care. It's just whether or not they can ever like pool the resources. to actually do a fucking thing about it. Because, yeah, they're not really on top of stuff. They're pretty slow to act on a lot of things. But I think it's important that it would be privy to the fact that, okay, well, in a way, we almost get a little bit of runway ahead of whatever the states do. Yeah, we can see what's coming.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we can kind of gauge that as like a worst case. I suppose. But Canada, we had ETFs for Bitcoin before the States. Like we had the purpose ETFs for Bitcoin, what, a couple of years ago. So we were ahead of them in that, in that sense, in terms of regulatory stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. But they're also, again, I think that's like a, okay, well, the government will permit that because it's like custodied through. Right, right, right, right. So I think, yeah, I don't know what's in store with, for Canadians when it comes to this type of stuff. We did see, and I can't, I'm having trouble remember the name of it,

but there was almost like a payment processor kind of merchant window type thing that had a custodial lightning aspect to it. And that got served up and shut down. And that was based out of, I think somewhere out of BC. Oh, really? Yeah. So they do have a bit of an eye on some of these things. things. Okay.

But I just don't know to what degree and how nimble they are to go out and actually crack down on them. But I worry that the precedent set in the U.S., they'll just kind of take a template of what happened there and then say, okay, well, now that they've done it, we'll just copy pasta. And, yeah, I don't know. Seth, what are your thoughts here? Yeah, I mean, I definitely, I expect Canada to follow the U.S., but maybe they'll sit and wait on whatever precedents. isn't set by these cases. I think it's definitely, it's nice that you'll have a little cushion. I feel like at some point we felt like America was leading the way in freedom. Maybe not in my lifetime, but now it feels like we're like the Western version of China and leading the way in oppression, but doing it in like a nice civil way where people don't really notice until

it's too late. It's the American form of oppression, I guess. Yeah. But yeah, I think that that cushion is nice because it gives people in Canada more time to figure out how they're going to work around when this type of regulatory environment hits Canada. Because it's, it's certainly, if this continues in the U.S., Canada is not going to, not going to push against what the U.S. does when it comes to financial crimes and privacy, all of these things. I don't expect them to go their own way. So it's a great chance for people in Canada to learn how to use.

Like you're talking about alternate app stores being a vital tool to consider switching from iPhone, something that I haven't actually talked about publicly at all, but actually ran an iPhone for eight or nine months recently because I was curious with all the changes they had made on the privacy front, how usable it was while doing things as privately as possible. And just the walled garden gets to you, man, like once you've experienced the freedom of Android and the ability to get apps from anywhere, to also use progressive web apps, but to use something like Obtenium to get whatever you want, whenever you want, it's just, it's too nice. and the user experience difference between something like graphingOS and ios isn't nearly as much as people

really think it is until they use it um yeah so yeah it's tricky but thankfully there's there's still time for most people and like you said like a lot of these things that are pulling out from the u.s thankfully they're free and open source so you can get the apk even if they for some reason stop publishing the apk you can build it from source and there is nothing illegal about doing either of those things just to be totally clear like building and publishing open source code that's not under fire here at all. It could happen at some point, but that's still heavily protected in the U.S. under the Constitution and under previous precedence. So there's a lot of protection there for apps that do choose to be free and open source. It actually enables their users in a unique way

that doesn't get talked about enough in that if their state pushback, users can continue to use their code. And even if they get shut down, like Samurai wallet, if people have copies of the code, the work can continue and a lot of the applications can still persist. Sometimes services go down, that kind of thing. But there's a lot of added flexibility. So it's amazing the options we have. Like I've, the story you talked about with BitTorrent and everyone kind of going Napster, BitTorrent, Netflix, and now everyone's just kind of like I'm not, I'm not running 10 subscriptions to watch the three shows that I enjoy. Like that's the exact same journey I've done with Android inside loading. And like back in the day, you couldn't get, maybe you had like a really crappy phone

or I had like really low quality tablets, didn't have an allowance. I just earned the money I could working and bought a tablet, hacked it, and I had to side load everything because you couldn't actually install the Google Play Store. So those are my only actual access to apps generally. And then obviously things got really easy. I got locked into the Google ecosystem, played around in the Apple ecosystem, kind of loved my gilded cage for a little bit. And then now, like, the wake-up hits and you're just coming full circle and you realize, I'm just back to side-loading all the apps that I love because I don't want to rely on Google or rely on Apple to tell me what I can and cannot use. I want to have that full.

flexibility. It's definitely, it's kind of like a Bitcoin approach to mobile, mobile devices and operating systems is really about individual freedom rather than trust and essentialized entity, just pretty, pretty awesome. Yeah. You know, the reason that I'm even on Android was actually because of Bitcoin, I was iPhone all the way until it was either 2014 or 2015 when, when Apple banned Bitcoin wallets from the app store. And I switched to, I was like, well, I guess I'm I'm no longer using an iPhone and I switched then and I haven't switched back since. So it's been, you know, again, it was this very reason that that brought me, you know, Bitcoin was what brought me over to this side of the fence in the first place.

So yeah, it's interesting to see it kind of playing out continually. I got an interesting, Seth. You'll appreciate this one, a positive twist on some, this net, you know, like unfortunate attack. Originally when my nonprofit applied for a human rights foundation grant, right, I didn't, I was learning more about what they do. And of course, they provide tons of support for folks trying to use Bitcoin under authoritarian regimes. And so that wasn't quite a fit because I do a lot of work in the U.S. and I work with labor groups and unions. But I'm just saying, with recent actions, I may be eligible for a re-app. I mean, we got, we got between samurai, between Phoenix,

leaving it. I want to go, what's the definition here? Because if I look into other countries, are those apps available? I mean, we have to, that has to be an input. I mean, we're, we're, I think you got a case, man. I think I got a case. We're all up for HRF funding now. I'm just saying opening the doors a little bit here, you know, so trying to find some positives. That's great. Awesome. Well, we'll put a bow on that little topic there. Dom, I'm going to keep it with you. We've since you're so, so, you know, you got, uh, you got such a good demeanor. Uh, we'll keep it bullish. We'll head to you. And, uh, I'll cue you up as well. Uh, so Dom, why are you bullish? Well, I'm bullish for a lot of reasons, but I'm going to

summarize it under one. And y'all please, um, Seth, Graham, just hit the buzzer when it's time just to go, dude, enough, right? And just, you know, bend up. those. I think I think I'm most bullish right now for the previous closed off minds and hearts that were once closed to Bitcoin that are now open due to recent organizational and institutional Bitcoin adoption either A voluntarily or B through capitulation. And in my work, I am finding a trip like it is like a member Oregon Trail. It's a bad analogy, but like it's it's on like there is a wide field of people that are now open to learning about Bitcoin and the opportunity to pull them and work on Bitcoin initiatives,

you know, get people to learn about self-custody is, I'm extremely bullish on this. And I think it's it's broader than it ever has been before just on my interactions. Giving giving a couple of examples of some stuff I'm working on. have been having some conversations with pension funds. And I think they're very open to, you know, the positive impact that Bitcoin can have on their portfolio. I just think there's a lot of like red tape they need to get through and process, procedural stuff that they need to sort out.

Still working with a ton of unions and seeing, you know, organizations interested in adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet and doing it through self-custody, learning the right way, starting from a place of self-custody. So really bullish on that. Went to Belize to work with the local government there on some Bitcoin initiative, potential ideas for a community that has very limited access to traditional investment vehicles and are forced to hold Belizean dollars as a savings mechanism, which is pegged two to one to the dollar.

So tons of stuff. And then in my local city, I'm starting to get good traction. And so to bring this all together, I think when I used to get laughed out of the room in certain areas, I'm now finding people open to initiatives. And that to me is this unbelievable opportunity. And there's pressure to do it right. And surely some of these, like when you see stuff with Samurai and you see Phoenix dropping off, that always sucks because how many people have I orange pilled with Phoenix and told them, you know, find ways to add liquidity and be able to transact on lightning. And so you got to go back with those people. And sometimes you lose some of those people forever.

Unfortunately, it's a reality. Like when that happens, they go, hey, thanks too much. I'm not going to go check out the next app. I'm not going to download some stuff. But there are so many people open to Bitcoin right now that the field is ours to do with. And there's so many great people in this space that are doing it the right way and teaching Bitcoin the right way. I am freakishly bullish on this. That's, I like it.

Can you tell me more about the, so you said they're coming from a place of self-custody. So as you're kind of working through that, like what are the hurdles you're running into? What are the challenges? What are you finding is the kind of sequence of steps to at least get them to that place? Yeah, so when this,

I worked with the Santa Monica, firefighters when they became the first union to self-custody Bitcoin, you know, the nonprofits, we've since kind of through working with multiple unions perfected what I call this like natural progression. And so the first measure is a get off zero measure, low risk, low stakes. Why? Because you can't learn from a place of emotion or fear. It just doesn't happen. I use the example at BitBlok boom. I said, if we set the building on fire and I started talking about physics, who's sitting here, Just going like, interesting. That's an interesting point.

No, everyone's running out crazy, freaking out. So you have to keep people calm. So it's a get off zero, like something that's so minimal. Like imagine a dollar a member or $5 a member. Cool, let people laugh at us. That's great. Let people ask, why are we doing so little? This is stupid.

Good. That's great. Let's have fun. Keep it light. Starting from self-custity. Because how do you put a significant amount of capital as an organization into something that you haven't even learned the way that it was meant to be used. So you start with a get-off zero in self-custody because you can afford to make mistakes with that

self-custody. You lose your seed phrase, which, trust me, our organization makes sure that doesn't happen. But God forbid, a dollar per member is at the end of the world of a 100-member organization loses $100 because they made a mistake in self-custody. You want to have that learning process. And so organizations have been open to this and actually eagest, to do this and it's worked out very well. And then from there, through handling, interacting with Bitcoin, utilizing something like Sparrow

to learn about UTXOs, to get comfortable with it and bring things forward, then you can go a lot of different routes. And maybe self-custody isn't the best option for an organization. They may go to like an ETF or some multi-sig with a custodian or something like that, but they learned it. They know what they're doing and why. and they know the risks and the tradeoffs and they can make that decision. So I'm seeing a lot of organizations that find the appeal in learning it the right way.

And from there, their members learn the right way too. And then they become stronger and they become more educated and they approach it as more, you know, grounded, fundamentally strong bitcoiners. I like that because even in an instance, You know, you hope everybody goes the self-custody route. But at least there in an instance where somebody opts out, as you said, they're familiar with the trade-offs. And then if, if, or we'll say when, shit hits the fan, it's like, I should have probably listened to the advice about why those additional steps, well, maybe not as convenient were important. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Or they might do something like take insurance or get added protections because they know, wait a minute, okay, I know what it means to hold Bitcoin. I've held it in self-custody through, you know, a non-custodial wallet. I know what that means. If we are going to take a custodian approach, I'm very well aware that that custodian can fumble the rock and lose our entire holding. So what are the options then about insurance, backup, you know, mitigation, what's the contract look like what happens if the Bitcoin is lost instead of just going we bought the

ATF we own Bitcoin no no not the case so that's that's fine if they get there how they get there that's fine and I even recommend similar steps for pension funds and I've had some of those conversations naturally for a pension fund self-custody does not make sense but if there's a way for them to learn to build an internal division even just get familiar with it then they can make those assessments themselves too. Yeah, I'd imagine for a pension fund, is that even there's not even a is there a legal framework for them to self custody or is that just that's totally off the table? I mean, it would depend on the fund. It depends on the state law. There's a lot of variables. There could be some that are able to do it. It's interesting because, and then there's the bylaws of

the pension. If you think about only a few pensions hold gold, but the ones that do, Right. You know, that was a, that was an asset that if you hold in self-custody, like, is it legal for a pension to have a safe at their office with a bunch of gold sit in there like went the ETF route? Bitcoin provides a new way to hold it in self-custody. That's not as cumbersome. And you can do it by minimalizing the physical challenges of doing that. So I think, I think there's a avenue for pensions to remember, pensions were pillaged in the, 08 financial crisis. They, they, you know, we know that the Fed, that they can, they can tweak through rate adjustments, through who gets liquidity, through all kinds of different mechanisms, the way that assets perform. And so being able to hold something that's their own is a very pro-worker stance in a system that has punished workers when things go wrong.

So I don't know, that's very early what it looks like. And of course, many pensions are just going to get the ETF. But I still think there's an avenue to learn about it internally and get a greater appreciation for what Bitcoin is. Yeah. I'll open it up to anybody else who wants to dive in. Yeah, I just wanted to throw in that I think it's like a natural human evolution to go deeper into something, you know, whether it be our food or Bitcoin. I think organizations and people will eventually realize the benefits of self-custody and say, We're going to choose this.

Just like I'm going to choose organic food. I'm going to choose sustainable farming practices and things like that. I think that's like a natural thing that over time people will want to learn. They'll want to continue down that rabbit hole and become. That's like the theme that I feel in this chapter of the world is like the self-sovereignty and personal responsibility. So I see that being echoed through institutions and individuals as well where they're like, well, wait a second, how does this work?

and how do we continue this journey of learning? Because I think we're at the facing a lot of the system collapse of centralization and like just outputting our trust into other people and like, yeah, sure. So I see that continuing and I agree that there's a massive momentum that I'm feeling that's exciting for Dom and exciting for me as well. Like you can see it happen. You can see this wave coming. And I'm excited for it because ultimately,

it's like more self-empowering, more personal responsibility and self-sovereignty. And I have yet to see anybody learn about all these things go down this rabbit hole and then go, yeah, it's not worth it. I'm going back. I want more so I want more like someone else to do it for me. You know, like once you learn this, like you know, like you said about Android, getting your own apps on your on your phone. And such, you're like, Seth, you're like, well, why would I, you know, go back? Like this is, I now have the understanding and the sort of the muscle to, to be in this arena, why would I want to go back to the bubble route? So I like this. I like this train of thought. Seth, I'll leave it to you too. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. They are actually

orange building these people on self-custody and not just ETFs. Like when you started mentioning this, like I don't know you before meeting you here. So I wasn't sure that was going to go down like the I'm just like shilling ETFs kind of rabbit hole that I feel like is too common in the Bitcoin space. But it was really awesome to hear that you're actually walking these people through self-custody and helping them grasp what Bitcoin actually is, like that it's not just another stock that they can throw in an ETF, but that it actually has immense value beyond that.

And it's something you can actually take custody of as opposed to most other things. So I thought that was really awesome. I really just was curious, what are the biggest hurdles that you've seen when you're helping them learn how to self-custy? Like, what are the sticking points for most people that you're talking through when they're actually taking on this step

of just learning the ropes of self-custody? I think the biggest, hurdle is like the Indiana Jones first step onto the invisible little platform, right, that you have to walk on. And I'll tell them, I'm like, guys, I'm not part of a financial organization. We have no product to sell you. Like, you tell me, take a hike. I say, catch you later. We're not, there's nothing to buy. And so I'll tell them, we've done this. We've walked multiple organizations through this. And even when you tell them, it's like this, Well, someone's in a knock on my door and especially right with some of the stuff we're seeing the negative.

The negative media has gotten better. But with Samurai, there's still this lingering, you know, Jamie Diamond. I'm watching the news. Criminals only use it, right? And it's like, and this is unfortunate because these are the people it punishes. It doesn't punish the Wells Fargo's executives who knows that their banks are buying ETFs right now. It punishes the everyday worker who looks and goes, hey, Do you hear that?

They say criminals use it. Let's stay away. So the biggest hurdle is that first faith of like, look, guys, the reason we're getting off zero with such a small amount is because the stakes are low. If someone knocks on your door and I turn out to be a maniac, then you're talking about a hundred bucks that you have to go, okay, fine. Or what do we get rid of this or what do we do with that? So once they can get past that hurdle of knowing like, okay, a bunch of groups have done

this, there's a pathway. It's all been sorted out. Then it's off to the races. And from there, the most bullish signal is once an organization does something like this and takes Bitcoin into self-custody, the members blossom. And they start getting very interested in what they're doing and why. And so in our organization, for example, there's a ton of people that are now interested in the fundamentals of Bitcoin.

You know, I joke around. I walk in to get coffee and I put the timer on, like how long until someone hits me with the Bitcoin thing and you know you walk in and they go you hear someone who you didn't even know is they go yeah I don't know this having things some miners might be doing some tough readjusting and you're like what have you been watching dude what I was like 10 seconds it's not even seven in the morning yet you know they're like okay all right so but it's encouraging it's fun and it's very you know inspiring yeah that's awesome well I'm I'm glad to hear obviously it's it's it's It's always an uphill battle trying to get people to, myself included, I'm no exception to sometimes going the convenience route rather than the best practices route.

But when shit hits the fan, the good practices that I have I'm always happy about and the bad practices that I have, I'm always just pissed at myself for taking. And so, yeah, I mean, kudos to you for presenting that to people and helping them get down that road. And hopefully a good subset of those people will continue to go down the path that you've laid and the ones that don't hopefully will get there. I always kind of, when I zoom out, I try to think that it's always impossible to get somebody to do best practices, immediately out the gate. But teaching is a very different thing in that it's very easy to criticize somebody's first step when it comes to education. But that's kind of not the point.

It's where they end up. And if somebody's first step is something that is far, far from ideal, but it leads them down the path to being far more self-sovereign and private about things, then then that's the path that they need to go down. But if somebody's first step is to look at what you've presented to them and then turn around and walk back out the door, then you've failed as an instructor. And so you need to give somebody a path that based on the individual will lead them as far down that kind of self-sovereignty and privacy route as possible.

And sometimes that's baby steps. And so, you know, that's a fine thing. as long as you don't leave them hanging, right? 100%. There's so many different tools, mechanisms, whatever gets them to that spot. It's funny when you're talking about self-custy, I don't know why I had a flashback to that first night.

I slept when I moved an amount of Bitcoin back in the day to a hardware wallet and just sleeping, feeling like I was just untouchable. It's mine. You'll never get this. You'll, there's a lot of stuff that can happen, but you will never get this. So I want to watch. Yeah.

I want others to feel that same thing because from that feeling sparks a journey to learning about why do you feel so good about that. So, but yeah, whatever, so many different tools and it's all, it's all good stuff. Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's, let's put a bow on that one as well. Thanks for the topic, Don. That's great. We are going to continue and do a rotation.

here really quick. I am going to do a little, a quick little shout out to our remaining sponsors here and then we'll dive right back in. So Graham, prep yourself because you're about to get bullish, right? Let's see you guys in a sec. Multi-sig and inheritance planning. It's hard to beat Nunchuk.io and their Honeybadger program. On your mobile device, they allow you to set up a full multi-signature vault. And once it's done, baked in inheritance planning so that your Bitcoin gets to your next of kin if anything should happen to you. On top of this, the entire thing can be set up with devices like the tap signer, the cold card, and plenty more options, and the whole thing can be done without KYC.

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or whether you're looking to lend or borrow. You can check them out today at the links down below. All right, gents, let's dive right back in. Graham, I'm tossing it right to you with no delay. I'll cue you up with the same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? I'm bullish and optimistic about Bitcoin. I told you this briefly, this story,

been a little while ago. I was on a plane. And I was sitting, I got upgraded to first class, which was awesome, and I was sitting beside this other gentleman. And yeah, it was great. And we got to talking, as you do normally on flights. And he turns out to be the cybersecurity expert where he goes into these big corporations. And he like basically does like a, you know, like it's almost like a Hollywood movie. Like he breaks in or he exposes the vulnerabilities.

And he presents them with like, hey, here's where your holes are and your security. here's what I can do to help you fix him up and such. And so he's sharing about how much he's traveled and he does this all around the world. He's done very well for himself and he lives the life. And I was like, awesome, dude, good for you. And I said, so what do you think about Bitcoin? And he was, he didn't know that I knew some stuff about it. So he just kind of was like, oh, I'd stay clear, you know, steer clear that.

It's, you know, bad news, pyramid scheme. They're going to shut the servers down at any moment kind of thing. and I was like, I took a beat and I was like, wait a second, this guy doesn't know. And I was like, I don't think they have servers for Bitcoin. He's like, oh, yeah, well, they got to run off something. And, you know, all you got to do is shut down the server. It's over. And so I kind of in that moment, I knew, I understood.

I was like, oh, this guy whose whole life is cybersecurity and, you know, traveling around the world in this business has, bought the narrative or just not done the research into Bitcoin. And this was only a few months ago that I had this conversation. And so, you know, I kind of pressed him on a few things. And then he kind of realized that I knew a bit more than he thought. And then so he kind of deferred the conversation and we went out of ways. But I took a step back from that moment. And I've seen lots of memes and photographs and stuff online of data of like Bitcoin user

adoption and the internet user adoption. It's like we're in the year 1999 or something like that. And I was like, okay, so this is really interesting. And I find it fascinating the power that mainstream media has over people's minds and narratives that have over people's minds. And so I'm bullish because the people that do the work who ask questions, who think differently, who want to understand and learn, are doing that. work and they're going to reap the benefits of being early adopters. And I think that's very exciting and awesome that if you do the work, if you learn how to navigate this space,

that there is great potential for you to preserve your store of value, to have a more self-sovereign life, more independent life, empowered life. And the other thing that I kind of made up a metaphor for myself was we all understand the benefits of like self-defense, right? Understanding how to defend ourselves in a fight. I see learning Bitcoin and Bitcoin in general is like, it's almost like financial Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Like if you know how to have your cold card or your cold storage, it's like self-defense, but in the financial digital world, how to defend yourself against tyranny, against

centralized power and control. And so the same way we understand significance and importance. of learning and going and training with your friends and, you know, jiu-jitsu or whatever martial arts that you want to train. I see Bitcoin in a very similar fashion where your Phoenix goes down. Okay, cool. Well, let's learn something new. Let's learn a new way of doing this.

Let's learn about side-loading apps or whatever. So we're constantly adjusting and moving the same way a fighter or somebody who wants to learn self-defense would be adjusting their techniques based on how other people and how the world is interacting with them. So I like that comparison. I don't know if it fully checks out as a metaphor, but for me it does. And that's the way I see it is like my fitness,

there's no end goal to it. And the same way with my digital self-defense in the financial realm, there's no end to it. I'm always going to be learning. I'm always going to be, you know, progressing and developing new strategies. I just got one of these UB keys. I can see that, you know,

for extra security and stuff. So I'm bullish about the journey and about the learning and then recognizing that we're all in a journey. So I don't fault the guy for not knowing. I was just surprised that he didn't have that being that his area of expertise, cybersecurity and whatnot, that you would think that he would talk to somebody about it and know a bit more about it. But yeah, so I'm bullish because I feel like it's just an affirmation of how early we all are in this journey in terms of the adoption. and which is exciting. As soon as you started talking about this story, Ron reminded me of the other thing that's hit in the cycle

or hitting like Twitter and Nostra and everything right now, which was the commencement speech. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I understand part of the booze because you don't want to be preached to. Yeah. But at the same time, at the same time, the irony of what I imagine was a bunch of people who just pumped 100 to 200 grand into a degree that they may never use and that are going to be in debt for decades to come, booing what might be their one shot at undoing a bit of that mess in terms of just preserving purchasing power into the future and things like that.

you know, that wasn't lost on me. And I think there's a lot more of that. And that's also part of, you know, Bitcoin is a lot of things to a lot of people. And I think that everybody looks at it a little bit differently, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. But at the same time, yeah, there's a lot of people just have, they haven't looked any deeper than the quick blurbs that they've seen in the news. And Bitcoin was my first foray into realizing that sometimes the news anchor may not know what they're talking about.

You know, that was that were the experts or the person in authority. How often have we seen that recently is like the person that we're supposed to trust. Oh, actually they didn't know or they gave us bad information. Yeah. And it's like, ah, you know, like. My first realization was when Mount Gox collapsed in 2014. And I had, you know, I was, I knew, I felt I knew nothing about Bitcoin, right? But I knew enough to know that Mount Gox was just a poorly run business that lost everybody's money.

And it was equivalent to a bank. And then I flip on the news and Bitcoin got hacked. Yeah, right? I barely know anything and I know for a fact that is fully not true. And it was reported as fact. And that was like I had to step back from it. And that really changed a lot of my view of a lot of things. It was it was honestly, it was kind of jarring to have that moment of I've done me.

I've maybe been reading on this thing for a month or two. and like I'm in an not an expert in any way, shape, or form. And that is just patently false and reported everywhere as true. And it makes you think, like, how many stories that I know nothing about are reported as true that may not be accurate.

And so it's, yeah, it's kind of jarring when you see something. And just like your experience, you know, somebody who you would assume would be, you know, very well versed in this realm. But I mean, maybe that. I guess we just learned that that assumption is never a good one of the 10. Yeah, that was my assumption. I would think that someone who's into computers and cybersecurity and hacking systems and whatnot,

you know, it's a cipherfunks that like came up with Bitcoin. You'd think that they would be aware of this type of passion and development. But I was talking with my dad about this and he was like, you know, some people have specializations and they just kind of go down one track and they don't think about other things. I get that. Does that make sense? But I think it would be kind of like, you know, I'm in the acting world and TV and movies. And if someone was to talk to me about, you know, new 3D movies or something that was coming out,

and I'm like, oh, I don't know what you're talking about. You know, like, I guess that's in my brain. If like it's something within my industry, that's a new development or something, I would be curious to learn at least a little bit about it how it works. But maybe not. And, you know, just I think it was more so I was, I was baffled by the narratives that he was sort of regurgitating, similar to what maybe you were saying about Mount Gawks as being like, oh, wow, like these are not original thoughts. I'm talking to an agent Smith right now. These are just regurgitated thoughts right now.

They're not yours. Yeah. And that's always like a sobering experience where you're like, oh, whoa, like this is not, hello. Yeah. Yeah. I think, okay, so I want to, I want to bring a comment world. the rusty in the chat here experts can't admit they don't know and i think i think this is a human thing yeah i agree yeah not just like it's and it's not relegated to i'll say it here it's this

pertains to bit corners too um you know there's there's many times as a bitcorner that you you are humbled um and you know even like the the recent crackdowns is is is an example oh this is a is bulletproof. There's no way any of this can happen. And then, oh, holy shit, not as bulletproof as we thought. And so, yeah, like, you know, when you get super confident in a particular field, sometimes you can overestimate the realm in which you have expertise or like the certainty with which you can assert a certain set of facts. And, Yeah, it's, you know, Bitcoin, if anything, is humbling. And it's sometimes tough to grapple with.

I don't know. I'm curious to hear it because, again, Seth, this is a little bit of your realm. I'm curious to hear your thoughts in and around all this. Yeah, yeah, it's actually, it's really fascinating because I think there is this broad assumption that, like, cybersecurity, you would understand why you would want money that's not centralized and that's more secure, but it's actually the opposite of what you'd expect. So I actually come from a cybersecurity background.

So that's my whole life before finding Bitcoin and starting to work in the Bitcoin space. And a lot of the reason for that is because, A, cybersecurity is a profession that pays well, so people don't have a felt need to escape poverty or to have some other way to store wealth. Most people who are working in cybersecurity will have good 401Ks and stuff like that.

So they kind of have like the American, and dream of setting up your future. Obviously, there's a lot of issues there still, but I think that's one of the reasons. But the primary reason that I saw actually is that most of the interactions that cybersecurity professionals have with Bitcoin is in the ransomware field these days. And so what they're seeing with Bitcoin is they're seeing that when large-scale hacks occur, what happens is the ransomware attackers want Bitcoin as payment to allow the company to get their documents back, allow their company to have their servers unencrypted, that sort of thing.

So there's a, there's very much kind of like a bad taste in the cybersecurity world's mouth about Bitcoin because of that. Even though that's like it's such a tiny, tiny fraction of what Bitcoin is used for, that's a lot of the exposure they get. And when you read things from the most highly respected people in the cybersecurity world, it's overwhelmingly a skepticism of cryptocurrency in general and a dismissal of Bitcoin. There's, as far as, as, far as, I know there's no real expert in the cybersecurity field who writes broadly or is well known that is a huge fan of Bitcoin. And a lot of that I think comes from that first taste of Bitcoin for many people in the field

being dealing with ransomware or something like that where obviously bad people are using Bitcoin for bad things and they dismiss it as this way that bad people get paid even though that's such a tiny tiny percentage of it. So there's a lot of interesting kind of like back and forth in the cyber security world around cryptocurrency, but it is pretty broadly dismissed, unfortunately. But I think a lot of that also just comes back to the first point I made, which is, especially in the West, there's a lot of lack of perceived need for Bitcoin. So, like, I honestly don't need Bitcoin right now, personally. I make enough money. I have a good family. I live in the U.S. I'm generally free right now.

I don't have this, like, immediate perceived, I need Bitcoin now to survive. And that's that's true most people in the West. Thankfully, I mean, it's a good thing that people don't have to have something specific to survive. But what that does is it weakens people's ability to look at these things objectively. And they just look at it through the lens of like, I've got my 401K or like, I don't really have money I want to put into some other random investment. And they don't grasp the consequence of either grabbing what Bitcoin can be for you or not,

not interacting with Bitcoin until it's later on or too late, depending on if something goes really south as far as a government or something like that. So I think that's a lot of it too is just the lack of perceived need. But I have seen really over the last like four or five years, I think that's shifting both in the Bitcoin space and the privacy space, in the self-hosting space, there's a massive wake-up happening where people are starting to understand like, oh, the people who give me my news, the people who are in my government, they aren't generally working for my good.

So I need to figure out how I can take some of this stuff into my own hands. And a lot of people are waking up and coming around with these things. I think this probably the same general idea probably applies to you, Dom, as well, where you're coming in and you're probably seeing a lot of more so in the financial realm people talking about. Like, do you encounter, you know, as you're going through and you're chatting to people about adding, adding Bitcoin as a Treasury Reserve asset or adding it to the balance sheet, do you get that pushback where people are quoting things that are just completely untrue that they've just heard through the news cycles? And, well, it's only used by criminals. It's a Ponzi. It's a, you know, are you hearing a lot of that, too?

Oh, yeah, for sure. And hearing that from people that aren't always, like, naive, some very well-educated, super-intelligent people, I swear, I want to just go after they give me some punchlines. Like, can you show me the 10 iPhone articles that you pulled that from? I just, you know, and then be like, come on, man, be honest. And they go, yeah, you're right. It's just 10 that popped up on my phone and that forms my understanding. We all do that in some sense. There's, a ton of topics you can hit me up on and I'll probably regurgitate some news clip I saw. And it's and like you mentioned, Ben, like with the false media stuff, it doesn't take much to learn when I first saw the Silk Road, if I would have scratched a little past the surface and I was working in emergency medicine and I remember we went on a couple of people that were impacted from something they bought on the Silk Road and I was reading about it simultaneously. if I would have just turned four or five pages more, I would have found Bitcoin, boom, right there, punch me right in the face.

But we're busy. We have our little areas of interest. We pick up only the headlines. And so by not inquiring and looking into things a little more, I missed it. That's why Bitcoin's so powerful. I love the aspect of our community where even though sometimes it gets venomous at times, people call BS on people nonstop. and they say, this is BS, because that's a good approach to help you find other things.

So I do see it a lot in my realm. It is getting better. But yeah, it's. And just to say on what Seth said, and Graham, I loved what you said about the constant learning and things like that. But going to what Seth said, the U.S. is very privileged. And there are a lot of people that don't need it. I encounter that also. And I'm sure you do, Ben, in the getting people to accept payment, you might go to somewhere

in a different country where like credit card fees will destroy a business. They cannot, they cannot handle a three to five percent credit fees. So something like Lightning will change the whole game for them. In the U.S., they go, it's the 3% fee. I don't need to deal with the headache of accepting Bitcoin and figuring this out. So in that sense, you know, the U.S. will be the last to do certain things as far as applications for Bitcoin. But the best part of the story, Graham, is that you got in first class. That's what we should be celebrating here.

This is like we should not overlook that fact. And I'm proud. And it's good to know you. Thanks, bro. Yeah. Yeah, it's, again, I think if we weren't encountering things like this regularly, then it would be an indication that we weren't still relatively early. And that where Bitcoin was currently was closer to where it was going to be in the future. And there wouldn't be as much left.

There wouldn't be as much new ground left to cover. And so I think a lot of these, again, Grimm, your story, the commencement speech, you know, what you're talking about, Seth and Dom, when you encounter these misunderstandings that are so pervasive, again, it just indicates that most of the world is just still very unfamiliar and we still have a long way to go to figure out where Bitcoin fits into the story of the world. And so, hey, we're here for the ride. And let's let's go on it and see where it takes us and be a part of it and hopefully shape it too. And Ben, real quick, just to, you know, some of these people are comfortable, but they don't realize they're comfortable in a lukewarm, headed to boiling pot of water. And so you are seeing some of these people who are more comfortable and have assets and have access to 401Ks go, it's getting a little hot in here, my friend.

what's the Bitcoin thing? What's up with Bitcoin? So you are seeing that. And I think there's the opportunity for a lot of us to get them on board. Yeah. Yeah. I fully agree. Yeah.

Well, we're going to, we'll put a bow on that topic there as well. And we're going to do one final rotation. And Seth, I'm looking right at you. Again, first time on the show, very excited to have had you here. and very excited for the first time, in spite of everything that's been going on the last couple weeks to ask you, why are you bullish? Go ahead, man.

Yeah, yeah, thankful for it. Thankful to jump into it. Thankfully, there are actually some things to be bullish about. So I know I tweeted earlier that it was hard to find topics, but digging in and thinking about it a little bit more, there's kind of one general topic and two subtopics. I don't know if that's illegal to bring out two things that make me bullish on here. I might have to ban you from the app storage.

Yeah, this might be my one and only appearance. So it's his favorite way you can, people. But the overarching theme of why I'm bullish is that entering such an adversarial environment gives us in the Bitcoin space a unique opportunity to reassess what we thought Bitcoin was, what Bitcoin actually is, and what Bitcoin could be. And we've seen some fantastic progress towards what Bitcoin could be over the past couple of weeks in that we've seen amazing things like people think. thinking more deeply about privacy tools on Bitcoin.

We've seen like a new coin join protocol that was written by Super TestNet. That has some really interesting advantages to existing ones today. We've seen things like the BTC Plus Plus Conference that just happened, where the overall focus was essentially how can we make Bitcoin more useful? How can we give users of Bitcoin more tools without making it harder to run a node, without making it harder to validate transactions? And there was a lot of just fantastic work that went into that conference, fantastic conversations that happened.

Sadly, I wasn't there, so I've just been kind of trying to live vicariously through people who were. But there's a really good article by Reardon on Twitter who walked through a lot of this stuff. And it gets technical, but the crux of it is, there are ways that we can improve Bitcoin, make it easier to self-custody, make it easier to have privacy, make it easier to do inheritance on Bitcoin, make it easier to do shared custody. on Bitcoin in ways that still preserve the core of what we want, which is making sure that it's

easy to run a node, making sure that it's easy to validate transactions, and making sure that it stays decentralized. So that's kind of the first topic is that that general approach to improving Bitcoin, and there's a lot of movement behind that in a good, conservative, safe way. Like, I think people get scared when they hear improving or changing Bitcoin, but not changing the fundamentals like 21 million, not changing anything that people kind of hold near and dear, but thinking about how we expand the functionality of Bitcoin in a safe and sane way. And then the second one, which really ties into that is that we just saw this last week,

the BIP, the Bitcoin Improvement proposal for silent payments merged into the Bitcoin Bit Catalog. So basically, you can read more about what silent payments are there, but the significance of this is it kind of signals to developers that it's go time to start implementing this. And to break it down really simply without boring you all to tears, essentially what silent payments are, is you can have a unique type of Bitcoin address where you can share this either with one person or you can post it in your Twitter bio, you can post it in your Noster bio, you can even potentially put it as part of your profile in Noster down the line. And what happens is when someone wants to pay you, they're able to derive

a unique Bitcoin address from that public address that you've posted. But no one can just take that address, paste it into a Block Explorer, and see what payments you've received. You can detach the history, detach the data around what transactions actually happened without requiring someone to ask you for a new address or without requiring someone to run a server if they want to accept donations in a privacy preserving way. So it's a massive step forward in enabling, especially donations for free and open source projects, donations for NGOs, tipping for random people on chain. It's a massive step forward in that space. And it's an improvement for privacy and user experience in a lot of ways, which is a rare thing that those two go hand in hand. But the removal

of the need to DM someone and be like, hey, send me an address so I can send you some Bitcoin, but rather they could just have it in their Twitter bio. You can send to it. And no one will know that you sent them a payment. No one else can understand what's happening there except for you and the person you're paying. And anyone can use that address and you'll all get unique addresses every time you go and use it. So it's a really powerful tool that's just on the cusp of actually making it into wallets. Right now, the only wallet that has it really close to a a beta release is cake wallet, but I know a lot of people in the Bitcoin space are working hard to make that happen. So I know it's a little technical, but that's the stuff that kind of gets me,

it gets me bullish. So I wanted to drop those things. No, I'm glad you did. And so I've got a couple of questions here. So practically speaking, this would be a forward facing type of static payment code. Is that correct? And so this is this similar to like the Paynim thing that was happening with Samurai? Yeah, so it's, Paynems are a little confusing because Paynim, the thing, is actually just a short code that points you to a server that gave you the long form static payment code. Whereas the underlying static payment code had its own Bitcoin improvement proposal, which was called BIP 47. It actually wasn't accepted into the BIP catalog. It's a whole other story to get into.

but it was a very similar approach, but it had some downsides in that when you use a pay name or use that direct long string payment code, you had to make a notification transaction to tell them, hey, I'm going to be sending you funds. This is where you should look for them. And then you could pay them after that. So in order to make, if I just wanted to send, like, I wanted a tip in one time on Twitter, I would have to send them two transactions to do it. Now, if I was going to send you 100 transactions, one notification transaction isn't a big. deal but it also had the downside where the notification transaction everyone could see those notification transactions they couldn't see subsequent ones but if i had a paynum posted you could look

up and see what wallets have notified me that they might pay me in the future and so there was a privacy leak there the big advantage of bit 47 payment codes versus silent payments is that they were a little bit easier to do for a light client so the way that we usually use bitcoin nodes is they connect to someone else's dode, we ask for a balance for the addresses that we have. That was easier to do with Bip 47. You can't do that with silent payments, but in a way that's good because it actually improves the privacy that you get from them. But there's work going on right now to simplify how it will actually look to sync silent payments. Because right now it can be slower. You'll either have to run a full note or use someone else's full node. You don't

have to trust it and you don't have to give over privacy to it. But there could also be a middle ground in the future where you have a separate key with silent payment. It's called a view key that you could give to someone, kind of like an expub, where they can see when you get paid and they can tell you. But there are some differences. I think silent payments are just overall a general upgrade to Bit47 or PayNMs and an improvement over them. This sounds like this would be particularly useful. Again, I've been doing more work in and around the HRF. And so there's like there's an organization that I think,

of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and that's Nevalny, Alexei Navalny, who died in prison, but it was opposition to Putin. And they had a donation portal. And initially they were just using static addresses, and then they realized that that could be a detriment to donors' privacy and everything. So they switched up, started using BTCP pay

and everything like that. But they were mixing. They were using, I think they were using a built-in VTC pay, like there was like the Wasabi coordinator. Well, that shut down now. So in your opinion, is some, is silent payments helpful? Or is there still like, is there still like, there's obviously still going to be the on-chain, you know, trail? And so for like a top down kind of, hey, we want to see who's donating to who. Is this, I suppose that would be protecting them, right? Because they have a payment code unless what the government that is worried about this also makes a donation,

or does that also help? Yeah, yeah, that's the big thing. So the main benefit over running BTC pay server is just that it's a lot easier. They don't have to run a special server. They just generate a silent payment address, post it just like they did a static address, post a QR code, and they move on. And I absolutely love BTC pay server. So it's not to say that like I don't want them running BTC pay server, but it's a lot simpler. Some NGOs aren't going to want to have to run infrastructure to receive Bitcoin privately.

So it absolutely does help that side of things. And it helps the simple privacy in that some government employee of an oppressive regime can't just copy and paste the static receive address, look in memple. Dot space and see who's donating when they're donating how much. But it, like you said, it doesn't fix the kind of forward-looking privacy. So if the oppressive regime wants to burn some sets, they can send constantly send small payments to that silent payment address. And then when the NGO or whoever go to send funds, let's like they just sweep all the funds out of their wallet to go sell it for USD or whatever, the NGO would see, okay, all the payments

that we made all got merged into this one transaction with 100 other inputs. So pretty sure that all of those other inputs were also donations. And so they can still lengthen that way. That's where we still need better privacy tools like Samurai Wallet. We still need Whirlpool, even though it's gone for now. Like you said, they were using Wasabi Wallet. They still need something like that. So we can't stop at silent payments.

They kind of solve the simple receiver address privacy problem in a unique and user-friendly way, but they don't solve the forward-looking privacy. So we still need good tools on that side. So I'm getting a little bit down the rabbit. hole here, but fuck it, we'll do it live. So, so, so my question to you is, where are you at when it comes to something like join market? Because, you know, we had, we had Wasabi, we had samurai, both of those, at least for the time being, are unavailable. And I know that you can have other coordinators and everything. I'm curious your thoughts on a couple of things.

Number one, is join market a viable alternative? And can it be improved to be a viable alternative if you don't think so? And number two, do you think there's going to be replacement coordinators for both services? So, yeah, I'll let you start with that one. Yeah, I'll answer the second one first. There certainly could be alternative coordinators, but obviously it would be extremely illegally and I would not recommend it and it's not a good place to be in necessarily. So it's certainly something that can happen. Thankfully, both are open source, so that could

come back. The other beautiful thing about them being open source is we can work to maintain the projects in the meantime. And let's say a samurai wallet's case goes exceedingly well. We set a strong precedent for freedom and privacy in the U.S. They can just spin whirlpool back up. If there's maintenance that needed to happen in the meantime, the open source community could rally around that and do that. I don't know that there will be alternate coordinators because it's such a risky thing to do right now with the regulatory uncertainty, but there could be outside of the U.S. since there's not the same jurisdiction, it could be a safe thing to do. It's just, it's really hard to say what will happen there. But the main problem with it is unless everyone

coalesces around one coordinator, you're going to have very low liquidity. So it's going to be hard to actually mix large amounts of funds. It's going to be very slow to mix because you're and I have a hard time finding participants. So it gets problematic in the sense of if there's 20 coordinators that spin up and you have to choose between one of them, you're likely going to have a much worse user experience compared to using one central coordinator that could pool all that liquidity together. On the joint market side of things, it's interesting.

I'm kind of in a weird space because it's the only tool that you can use right now, and I think it's better than nothing, but it also has some issues with the model. unless you mix frequently on both the taker and maker side, which means both that you act as the coordinator and you use someone else as a coordinator. Coordinator is not a good term, but I think that's the closest thing

that people can grasp and how join market works. It's decentralized. There's no central coordinator. But essentially, if you're a new person using joint market, instead of putting up an offer to say, I want to coin join funds, you can just take an existing offer. And as that taker,

you sort of act as a coordinator, because you bring together multiple makers into one transaction. The downside is you have to reveal your inputs to those makers. So if you mix with the same makers repeatedly, they can unwind your mixes. So you have to hopefully get new makers and mix multiple times for every output that you want to mix. But not only that, on the taker side, you pay really, really high fees because you have to pay the mining fee for every input and output in that transaction, even if it's not your own. And usually that's seven to nine other outputs,

at least that you're having to pay for. And so it's really costly. And when we're at like one set per V byte, I think it's fine. But I was doing some testing when we were at like 50 sats per V byte, and there were some other issues with their fee calculation because he was using Bitcoin Core instead of something like Mimpole. Space and I lost a few hundred dollars in stats.

But that's a separate issue. But I think the model is a little problematic in how it works. And the beautiful thing about something like Samurai Wallet was the way that they did it. Not only was the actual mixing protocol proven to be more private, but the model of just new entrants paying for on-chain fees and paying a fee to the coordinator and then having free remixes worked really well to gain strong privacy over the long term. So it's tricky. I feel like I'm kind of stuck as a privacy advocate.

of Bitcoin space because there's not a there's not an easy tool to recommend right now. Yeah. Well, it kind of seems to me like you're you know, you've got join market with with the tradeoffs they're in and the expense or you've got something that has great privacy, but you're trading off the self-sovereignty in custody, which at any point could be shut down. And that's kind of where we're at currently until as you as you alluded to somebody balzy enough to be putting themselves into a horrible position

spins up a coordinator for either of those other implementations and says like, hey, I'll just I'm going to hope that I don't end up exactly like the samurai guys. And so,

yeah, it's a tough position to be in. Do you, And sorry, I've got lots of questions in this realm. But do you see, I tend to think that most people in five, maybe 10 years are not going to be doing on-chain transactions, which, you know, barring some with Bitcoin as it is right now, you know, and increased usage, you know, a lot of transactions become, you know, infeasible when it comes to cost.

And so where do you see that leading in terms of, in terms of how people use Bitcoin? Of course, there's the custodial, like, well, I'll just do it for cheap there because they'll just hold all the funds. But what does a more private alternative with what we know now, is it basically just trade custody for privacy and cross your fingers? Is that where we're at right now? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's really two approaches.

I mean, I don't think we can sacrifice custody for privacy because then you're losing a massive amount of the other aspect of freedom money that Bitcoin brings. And I tweeted about this yesterday, but freedom money, to me, has to have two things, privacy and self-custody. If you don't have both, you don't have freedom money. Because even if you have privacy

in a custodial model, e-cash is like the best possible custodial model. You have privacy there, but what happens if the e-cash mint just decides to rug? Or what happens if the government says, tap on the shoulder, you're no longer allowed to run this, mint, all your Bitcoin are belong to us. That could happen overnight. You have no say. So I don't think that that's a viable solution in the short term or in the long term.

So I think you really only have two routes. One is we actually improve Bitcoin. And like I mentioned, at the beginning of this segment, there are really novel, innovative ways happening that we can do this without adding additional burden to running a node. And you allow better tools to be built than lightning for scaling for privacy.

Or you use something like Monaro to gain privacy. And I know that's probably like anathema to be spoken about on a Bitcoin pod. But right now that's kind of where I am right now is I don't have a strong Bitcoin privacy tool. So for most people who just need a simple tool, I'm saying use Monaro like you would use a lightning wallet. You don't need to store your wealth in it, but put a few hundred bucks in it that you can spend out of. And it provides the privacy that people are seeking for the digital cash side of things.

Now, there's a whole other can of worms that we could spend hours and hours going over on the tradeoffs that Manero has because it does have tradeoffs. I think they're worth it, but it does have tradeoffs. But I think that that's a good alternative for now. but the long-term one, I think we have to improve the Bitcoin protocol and expand the scripting that we're able to do to build out better layer two solutions. Because if like you're saying, we can't spend on chain in five to ten years, then we can't use lightning because you're going to have to be able to spend on chain and some way to be able to settle a channel, to be able to claim funds if the other person on the other side of the channel

causes problems. You need that. and there are ways to improve lightning, but all that comes down to improving the way that we can actually build on Bitcoin. And I think that's the next step that really has to happen out of this adversarial environment is people understand that changing Bitcoin in safe, cautious ways has to happen for this to continue to be freedom money. So to play devil's advocate there, I'm curious, is the idea, so you're basically saying, like, right now, again, you're like, I value privacy so much, and this is my only violence.

option right now is swapping it into another currency for the time being in order to obtain that. And with with with the the tradeoffs therein, is that now I know there's self-custody in those situations. I'm assuming you're going from either on-chain to Manero or lightning to Minero or some type of swap mechanism there. But is with the tradeoffs in Minero, and people have different, I guess, takes on this, like you're saying, like, don't store your wealth in it. And I imagine that's alluding to the fact that, like, over the long, a long haul, like, the value of Minero versus Bitcoin has dwindled.

And that seems to be a lot of the case in a lot of different alt coins. And so it's not meant to be a mechanism to store long-term wealth. Or, I mean, maybe for some people it is. But for those that have those doubts, is how do you view the tradeoff of that versus, you know, I'm going to load a few hundred bucks into my mint on like a fetament type thing for spending? and if that mint gets a tap on the shoulder and then goes tits up, well, there's my few hundred bucks,

but then I've got my on-chain savings. How do you view that dynamic and that trade-off? And that, I don't know. I'm just curious your thoughts there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think to me it comes back to what freedom money is. And if you are using Monero as your way to spend, it can be a way to store value.

There are many, many, many people in the Monero community, that do that. But the reason I don't mention that is because it's usually not the first step for people. I think the most approachable initial step in this crazy environment is just using it for spending. But I think it's, to me, far preferable to a custodial solution because even if the value of Monaro can float against Bitcoin could go up, could go down. Historically, unfortunately, it's not been amazing. But even that floating, if you drop 20%, that's a lot better than losing 100% in a rugpole to me.

And you don't have the sacrifices that come with custody alongside that. You're not trusting one central entity. You can run your own node. You can keep your seed phrase secure. You can do all of the things that you love about Bitcoin, but with strong privacy assurances. So to me, that's far preferable to something like

Fedoments, to something like eCash, because I view self-custody as the hard line. I don't think that any solution I can recommend can be custodial, even if eCash is like the best case custodial, which essentially it is. And so I still think that Monaro is well worth the tradeoffs there. And there's been a lot of engineering that's gone into Monero that is planned for these adversarial environments, which helps to protect it against the government trying to do similar things in Monero that they've been doing on Bitcoin right now. I think that's why we've seen in Bitcoin, they've attacked the privacy tools.

Also in Ethereum, they've attacked the privacy tools. But so far they've left generally the rest of the ecosystem intact. but in Monaro, there is no privacy tool to attack. They'd have to shut down the actual node network, which is almost as impossible as the Bitcoin network. So instead, they just try to make it harder to go from Fiat to Monaro. But the beautiful thing is Bitcoin is unstoppable. Monaro is unstoppable.

Swaps between the two are unstoppable. And so you can always go back and forth between the two in a trustless fashion, which is also a vital part of that recommendation. I wouldn't do it if there was no way to go back and forth while trusting a central entity. But atomic swaps are a really powerful, cool thing that's possible between the two. How do you, again, some of the criticisms I've heard are, what about the privacy of, oh, you, it's not like it, you know, you have Bitcoin, it's tracked on chain, a swap takes place. why it's not it's not like well the person magically doesn't have the bitcoin anymore um so like

a common criticism i've heard is like you you always have some sort of of mechanism in which that that swap is is tracked in and out is does that actually hold true or are you not of that belief so it depends on exactly how the swap happens uh there are some ways that can happen where like if you're using an instant exchanger service where you send in your bitcoin they send you a manero there's a short period of trust and um custodianship by the instant exchanger certainly they would have a record of this bitcoin came in and we sent out minaro now they couldn't track the minero after that point so you would have privacy you would have forward-looking privacy you could kind of think of it like you've used whirlpool and samurai wallet in that the the government or law enforcement whatever could see that funds went into

samurai wallet, but they can't see what happens after. You could view it the same way with that swap. But one of the really fascinating things about the taproot upgrade in Bitcoin that is possible now is that you can do atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Monero in a way that doesn't reveal on-chain and Bitcoin that any swap has happened. As long as the atomic swap goes through properly, the script itself is not revealed. So all it looks is like a taproot address paid another tap-rude address. That's the only thing that it looks like on-chain. And on Monero, there's no evidence of that transaction standing out. It looks like any. other Manera transaction, the amounts hidden, the sender hidden, the recipient hidden.

So thanks to Taproot actually and atomic swaps, you can make it so that the swap is totally impossible to see on chain. It would just look like the Bitcoin got sent to a new address, which could be swapping hands, could be you sending to a new wallet. There's a lot of plausible deniability in that. Awesome. All right. So I guess to get back on the Bitcoin privacy front, I am wondering what do you think needs to happen on Bitcoin in order to re-obtain the vision of what you hope it to be in the future? What do you think needs to happen? Oh, wait. I think.

Dude, cliphanger. Yeah, seriously. Can you all still hear me? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It grows at a perfect smart moment. Okay. Well, my cam is down for now, but I'm still here.

I can rejoin real quick if you'd rather I do that or I can just continue like this. I'm sorry. You can go ahead. You're more in private this way. Yeah, my Linux misbehaving. Yeah. Yeah, so on the Bitcoin side, I think the two big things are the short term is improving lightning and that requires consensus changes in Bitcoin.

But making it easier to actually use lightning without having a clear on-chain footprint and making it easier to do in a way that doesn't require as many transactions on chain or where you can share UTXOs and Lightning. There's a lot of really interesting stuff there. Because Lightning does have reasonably good privacy, and when there's improvements in place like Bolt 12 specifically, there's a lot of other smaller ones I won't mention right now, but Bolt 12 specifically, there's a lot better receiver privacy,

which has always been the problem in Lightning. So I think that's the short term, is continuing to improve the lightning. network. But I think long term, there's some really interesting ideas on how we can do things like coin pools using covenants, where you can have a shared pool of coins where each person has complete custody of their own funds. But it just looks like a single UTXO, and outputs can get peeled off as much as they need to without revealing what incoming transaction is tied to the outgoing one. So that's an interesting one with covenants. There are some other

possibilities like Mimble Wimble extension blocks and other things that I feel like needs some more, I need some more time to think and process what they would actually look like on Bitcoin. But I think it is exciting that there's, there feels like there's a little bit of openness right now to improving privacy at the base layer in Bitcoin that I didn't think was there before this adversarial environment. So I think there's some, some hope for what we can expand there. And I need to kind of collect my thoughts a little more on what that could look like. But I think the main two next steps are improve lightning by improving Bitcoin scripting and build out covenants so that we can do things like coin pools.

Very interesting. I am not well-versed enough to continue asking you questions on that. So I'll kind of leave the cliffhanger there. I don't know if Dom or Graham, if you have any other quick questions you want to ask in this realm before I start rounding things out. So I'll defer to you guys if you have anything. Graham, I had a couple quick ones, but I already talked to Seth about talking to him offline. You know, I'm super interested.

Seth, if let's just say there was a group of firefighters that wanted to, here's something that's very interesting to me. There's already a circular economy that exists within unions already. Right? They collect dues from members. They trade money all the time. So they collect membership dues. then they maybe they buy certain things or have events there's always this money like kind of swirling around that stays within each other if they were interested in doing um lightning transactions you know fed him it's something that's been discussed other configurations what do you what do you see as being you know the privacy side is interesting because a lot of people always uh uh you know they think privacy with with trying to hide activity but we know one of the biggest

threats to transactions is being hunted down by large conglomerates that use your data to then basically drive you to buy certain things, right? That's another side of the privacy that people don't necessarily jump to. So long-winded question of what are some configurations for pre-existing circular economies just out of the gate that you see that can still maintain privacy and also maintain low transaction fees for doing that kind of a constant like transactional exchange. Yeah, I mean, I think for that, lightning is still going to be a good fit. Would this be a scenario where you like have a, I hate to use the term Uncle Jim because normally doesn't refer to someone being a custodian, but like perhaps a board who oversees

these things running a multi-sig, would this be a scenario where like them running a mint would fit the need or is this something where you just have individuals who want to be able to transact privately? I think running a mint could be, I'm very, that's something I've been looking into more and more because if you take a larger union and then you take smaller independent unions, the ability to have transactional interaction not only within a union anonymously, but between unions, right? Because if we're all part of an organization, I don't care if anyone knows what we're spending, et cetera. But if we interact with a neighboring organization, it's not like we're rivals, but it's not like we are in the same click. And so that's what that's what Feddy Mint really like is

appealing and why I'm interested in it. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, to me, that's one of the few ideal use cases is when there's kind of like community custody fits the model, because you're already trusting those entities, like perhaps they're the ones custodying the funds that aren't being invested by the group anyway. So you're already trusting them with other Bitcoin. So adding on an additional layer of an e-cashment or something, I don't think that that's crazy.

I think that would be a reasonable thing to do. I think the hard thing is that you get into a scenario where that is legally pretty murky, because in the U.S., unfortunately, that would probably count as money transmission. So you'd have to like register with Finson and do all this craziness. I think it's ridiculous that that's true, but that's pretty much the case in the U.S.

because of the insanity of our financial regulations. So I think that's where it gets weird. But again, this is already a, it's already a regulated entity investing people's funds. So maybe that's not that much of a lift to come together and get Finsent approval to be able to run that thing. It just gets a little weird because when you do take custody, there is additional burden on you under crazy U.S. laws.

We thought that when you didn't take custody, you were safe from that. But obviously, the DOJ wants to change that as well with the Samurai Wallet case. So it's all kind of crazy right now. And that's where my default just continues to be self-custody. But in that specific case, like, that's the kind of idea where I think fetaments are at least interesting to think about and pursue. Yeah. Again, the last, I guess the,

the smaller the group, the less the risk, the bigger the group, the greater the incentive to rugpole, I suppose. It's probably the spectrum we're on, right? Well, that's why I love some of these broader adoption like applications, because what a story that would be, right? You know, FinCEN investigating, you know, the firefighters or Teamsters Union for sending money for a picnic, and we're going to crack this down. And you go, Okay, cool. Let's open it up. Let's take a look at everything. And what did we do wrong? We swapped some Bitcoin because we're having a picnic and someone, Joe had to get the potato salad. So where's this? Is this how we win? Just fetaments for innocuous uses. Like I think so. I think I think so because that's not, you know, well, we'll get into this later. And, you know, like, this is something I'm very interested in. Yeah, that's great. Well, all right, jens, I got to start rounding it out.

I'm conscious of time here. But I like to end every episode with a couple quick things. Just a quick round of any final thoughts that you may have, anything that you just, summary of your takeaways from the episode. And then secondly, a recommendation. And that can take any form. It could be, you know, a video or a blog or something that you saw that you really liked. It could be an app or a tool that you really like.

it could even just be a piece of life advice. Whatever comes to mind at the time, just toss it out there if you think that somebody watching or listening afterwards may benefit from it. So I'll start us off here and then I'll toss it down the line. So in terms of final thoughts here, again, I'm kind of struck by actually from an earlier episode, much earlier. So my wife goes through the Friday shows. And so she'll be going through this one at some point.

And she clips up all the little rants and comments that people have and turns them into shorter clips. And so one of the clips that is kind of in the rotation right now is Daniel Batten. And he's mostly referring to narrative attacks on Bitcoin. but I think this applies more broadly. And the quote, paraphrasing it is, is any attack on Bitcoin in the long run, it doesn't weaken Bitcoin. It weakens the attacker because there's a resourceful bunch and the very nature of what Bitcoin is. is, is, is, in its very nature is meant to kind of subvert that top down control. And I'm not saying that we should be complacent in that of, oh, everything is good for Bitcoin.

But sometimes challenges like this that come up are good because it holds people's feet to the fire and makes them think like, number one, why am I really here, but number two, how do we deal with this? And so, you know, that was kind of part of my reason for being bullish is, hey, app stores can be a problem. What do we do? And, you know, there were a number of answers that I threw out there and sat through one that I had had no idea about. And now I'm better informed about that so that I can start, start tinkering with Obtanium, which is fantastic. And, and, and, you know, some people watching this may not have even been aware of progressive web apps, let alone alternative app stores.

And so I guess my main takeaway is, no matter how shitty things may seem, as the attacks come at Bitcoin and they're sure to intensify over the coming years, just know that it will also involve a hardening and there will be a response to it. and some of those responses, I'm hopeful and will continue to investigate and learn about tools that help when it comes to those types of, in my opinion, infringements on people's freedom and privacy. So that's kind of where I'm at with this episode. And then in terms of recommendations, I'll just, in general, I guess to throw back to my own topic, If you've never installed something that is not from your own app store, try just for the first time. If you're on an iPhone, just learn how to use a progressive web app.

Try Mutiny wallet. There you go. You can try something out for the first time. Add Mutiny, not from the app store, but again, from your browser and just tap those few little dots and add to home screen. And there you go. And just see how that works. and how you might deal with something being inaccessible where you are. And then if you're on Android, then investigate,

adding, just downloading and installing APK files or using alternatives like Aurora, F-Droid, and Obtenium as options. So yeah, with that, I'll toss it over to Dom. Any final thoughts, recommendations? Yeah, final thoughts. As always, really great to connect with, Seth and Graham and I'm always amazed by the quality of folks in Bitcoin. It's a, it's a relevant aspect of today's episode. Bitcoin no longer is just this isolated thing.

There's so many different, I mean, not that it ever was, but there's so many different facets that are being worked on simultaneously, not just by individuals, but entities. And so it's great to hear the things that Seth are working on and Graham. And Seth, you know, I'll connect with you anyways to learn more about how to support that stuff. I believe that it is super important. And even if I'm working in a different aspect, it all is interrelated. So I'm very eager to support those working on privacy as with all technical aspects of the things we love most about Bitcoin.

So yeah, super bullish to hear about all the work as always. As far as recommendation, I'm really loving the Genesis book right now by Aaron Van Werdom. So if you have not read that, it is an awesome book that dips into very brief like history of money overview, but more into cryptography and efforts that led to Bitcoin on. Unbelievable read, loving it. So check it out. Awesome. Love it. I'll toss it down to Graham next. Final thoughts, recommendations. Go ahead, man. Well, thanks, Ben, for having me, man.

Thanks, Dom and Seth as well. Love chat with you guys and learning from you both. I'm constantly inspired, Ben, by the community of people in Bitcoin. And the reasons that they're a part of it, the passion, and I think that is a big part of why I have been attracted to Bitcoin in general, the community. And I think shows like this and conferences and such, it's like it's the people that are behind this movement that is inspiring to me. And there's challenges along the way, there's upsets. But that's what makes an adventure. That's what makes life worth living. And

I'm excited to be on this, on this journey of learning and, you know, self-sovereignty and financial independence and finding ways to have, like Seth said, freedom money. It's a mindset. It's a way of being and living. And I've been constantly inspired by people in the Bitcoin community about why they're on this path and how they want to live their lives. And to me, that's super exciting. So I'm grateful to be a part of this. My recommendation, I would say it's adopting that flexibility mindset, like, you know, this always learning. So that's something that I always like to just, I I like to try in different viewpoints, perspectives, and I go, if I can't prove it or disprove it, how does it impact my life?

And so I don't know a lot about the technical stuff like Seth does or probably Dom or Ben, your guys' technical expertise is way above mine. But the ideas and the spirit behind Bitcoin in the community, I go, I'm never going to be able to check all the code and read all these things, but it's the personalities and the people and their intention and their passions that inspire me to move forward. So I think keeping it open mind and being flexible in your learning and staying on the path, staying committed to your own personal growth and self-sovereignty, and you'll end up in the right place. Awesome.

I love it, man. I see Dom in the chat there. I have to just shout out this one last thing because this is what's so sick about Bitcoin. I was working with a Firefighters Association in San Salvador that we raised some money for through organization and then we donated it to them to do self-custody. As you can imagine, hard enough to get anyone to do self-custody, but also doing it while having a language barrier, whole other animal. So we get to this point where I'm on this conversation, but trying to get a hold of the individual who's handling everything on their organizational side. And he's like, okay, I can do it now,

like, how are we putting this in self-custody? And I'm like, Ben, dude, do you have the Phoenix tutorial in Spanish and I'm like there's no way he's gonna get back dude I like two seconds dot dot dot I got you just translated dude he sends it boom dude get it over to him 30 minutes later he's like we're all set up I'll call you with questions but we're good we're locked and loaded and I'm like sick let's go dude well that's awesome let's hope that their top down government does been Phoenix walling or they don't bail. I feel like in in in El Salvador that that may not be an imminent threat but yeah either way. So got to stay nimble do stay nimble yeah fair enough. Seth I'm going to toss it your way again final thoughts recommendations go ahead yeah I think for for final thoughts the big thing that jumps out

to me is just kind of chatting through all this both things Graham said Dom said things I talked about you talked about Ben is just that like as we enter adversarial environments as we actually get to the then they fight you stage there's unique opportunity to to learn individually to take personal responsibility individually to to grow and learn a new thing every day every week whatever it is whatever pace you can go at but it's a it's a unique place that we can be in where the perceived need drives us to actually become better people and so I think I hope that everyone takes that chance individually and also as a Bitcoin community, we have a unique opportunity to figure out how to solve these problems that are facing Bitcoin as the result of tyrannical

governmental overreach. And we can come together. That's not all technical people needed. We need a lot of people to come together and help in this process. And there's a place for everyone. So I think that's really my final thought out of there. As for recommendations, I think just we kind of touched on Phoenix pulling from the U.S. a few times and just wanted to shout out Zeus wallet. Evans just a fantastic dude. He's been fighting the good fight for a long time in the space. I've been a huge fan of Zeus for a long time and then sponsoring them and just want to recommend it as a good alternative to Phoenix if you're looking to migrate out. If you're looking to have a new solution that doesn't give up custody, it's a fantastic tool. So I think that's

probably it. But last thing I just wanted to say, thank you for having me on. It's been an absolute blast. And sorry, my Jerry-Rigged camera gave out of me there. That's totally all right. And I will second your recommendation of Zeus, Evans, an awesome dude. He's putting in so much work, and there's been so many amazing additions and developments in and around Zeus and what he's doing there that it cannot be overlooked. And, yeah, I can't wait to see what he continues to pump out for the rest of the year and beyond because, again, from me, I know from a user perspective, it can be tough when everybody wants the ease of use of wallet of Satoshi in a self-custodial and private way.

But if anybody's going to get us to a place like that, it's going to be people like Evan that are putting in the work and just fucking crushing it with things like Zeus. And the mutiny team and people that are working on these solutions and trying to navigate this complicated space. you know, from two perspectives of ease of use and like making this thing resilient to the types of pushes that we've just seen these past couple weeks. So I don't envy the work that they are, you know, having to navigate and need to figure out. But I do very much appreciate them. So with that, we're going to round out. I will say a huge thank you to all the gents. everybody in the chat also thank you for being here very glad that you all took part at the 2,500 some odd people that tuned in over the course of this episode thank you for being here

and the many others that will tune in after the fact very much appreciate you all um also be sure to like sub share all that good stuff all these gentlemen uh their handles are in these show notes down below so make sure you also follow them and check out what they're up to wealths of knowledge in various respects. And gentlemen, I'll say to you, thank you so much for being here, contributing, having a fantastic conversation. This was a hell of a rip. I really do appreciate it. And of course, as always, you guys are all welcome back anytime. So have a great weekend, gents. Thanks, Ben. Cheers, guys. Thanks, Ben. All right. Everybody, thank you for sticking around and being part of

the show. Again, please do follow these gentlemen. Again, their handles are down in these show notes below and check out what they're up to because all great contributors to the space in very different respects and they've all got something that I think will speak to you. Everybody, of course, again, like, sub, share, all those things, help a ton. Thank you for being here and being part of the show and commenting and just everything. This is always the best part of my week, getting to hang out, chill with Bitcoiners, and just talk about what we're passionate about. So I really do appreciate it. If you want to help the show in another way, hit up the sponsors. All the aforementioned sponsors are in these show notes down below as well. And then finally,

I'll give one last shout out. If you're relatively new to Bitcoin or if you're, you've been in the Bitcoin space for a while, but you're looking to learn and maybe all the free tutorials on the channel aren't quite cutting it. You need a little bit more one-on-one and hand-holding. We just launched a company just a few weeks back. This is my company. I've got a plethora of awesome, awesome people. We put out the word that we're looking for Bitcoin educators. We had 350 plus people apply and we whittled it down to 16.

So there's a tight-knit group of people that we put together that are ready and waiting in the wings. To educate you on anything Bitcoin, whether it be, One-on-ones for self-custy in general, just how do I use a Bitcoin wallet, whether it be hardware, multi-sig, running a node, maybe home mining for heat. I know it's summertime, but winters get cold in Canada. You know, you name it, we got it. We can help you out. So please do reach out. You can check us out at Bitcoin Mentor.io.

Or if you're perusing my own website, vtccessions.ca, then if you go to the booking page, it'll take you right there. but again the team i'm very excited about them they're awesome and they can help you through anything so with that i'm going to round out thank you guys again so much for being here really appreciate you what an awesome rip and uh with that i will sign off have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be i'll see you guys next time for your daily session