BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Dread, Jason Maier, Urban Hacker ep306

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/PoleVaultDream https://twitter.com/cjasonmaier https://twitter.com/realUrbanHacker 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab an Embassy today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, you can check out their Lend platform for p2p loans that are never rehypothecated. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/QUEM Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $10 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions BITCOIN tips: https://strike.me/btcsessions

What is going on everybody? Welcome to the show. We're back doing Why Are We Bullish. First show back home yesterday. I did the news, Nico. And first, Why Are We Bullish back home? I was in L.A. most of the month for November. I did a couple, did a few while I was down there, but happy to be home in the home studio.

And back where I have everything I need. So, yeah, very excited for this one. We've got an awesome panel. We're excited to have all these gentlemen on. We'll do some intros in a moment. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here.

We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share, all those things. They help a ton getting this. content in front of more eyeballs and without further ado I am ben with the bTC sessions this is your

daily session before we bring in our guests let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now this is the bitbo dot io dashboard uh so we're sitting at 17,048 per coin a single u.s. Picks you up, 5,866 Sats. 91.54% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, a little bit higher right now, 36 Sats per byte next block. If you're willing to wait about an hour, still double digits, 14 sats per biders.

So, you know, use that RVF. Just make sure that you're okay to bump fees if you need to get through anything in a speedy fashion. Let's do quick shoutouts for sponsors of the show. Kite.com. God, these guys just have the best damn merch out there. I love my cold card mark four. It's badass. I just did a workshop on it down in L.A. It was fantastic. And yeah, I don't know. I'm using this thing all the time. They've got all the great stuff here, though. The coin kite, the plethora of things that they provide between the open dime and the block clock and the sats card and the tap signer and all the great stuff they have there. I just so many great toys to play with. And it's, I love. securing my stuff with the Mark 4. So anyways, be sure to check them out. CoinKite.com.

You can use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store. Got to give a shout out to new family member in the show, Start 9. It's purring behind me on the shelf. I'm in the midst of putting together my tutorial on Start 9 Embassy. And what the hell is it? It's your sovereign computing solution. It's your Bitcoin node. It's your lightning.

node. It's so much more than that. All your crap is normally with trusted third parties. All your data is with trusted third parties. Well, you don't need to deal with that anymore. You can be managing your passwords, managing your files, managing your everything at home from your own personal server. This thing is an absolute beast. I'm super impressed in what I've seen so far. I can't wait for you guys to see the tutorial. Again, that's going to be dropping at the beginning of next week. But I'm super glad to have these guys as a sponsor of the show. And beyond that, just what they're providing for everybody. I think it's incredible.

They've got incredible customer support. If you pick up a device from them, which I highly recommend, these guys are just awesome. And they've got the brand new high-end embassy. They've got a couple of them, but they've got the embassy one. And they've got the, now I'm, Dred's going to kill me. me. Embassy, jeez,

I'm not even remembering the name of the fancy one. The Embassy Pro, of course, because I'm an idiot. Anyways, if you're looking for next level,

like badass, hardcore hardware, this is where to go for it, start nine. Anyways, shout out to those guys. Links are down below. Check them out.

Hoddle, hoddle. Hey, if you're looking to get non-K-Y-C-sats, look no further. Non-K-YC, non-custodial, they never hold your coins peer to peer. So it's the trifecta.

It's exactly what you want out of getting Bitcoin, especially if privacy is paramount to you, then this is where you're going to be ending up to stacks. They also have their lend program where nothing gets re-hypublicated and it all stays within your own keys, escrow, all that kind of stuff. So anyways, check them out, hoddlehottle.com. There's a link down below, but I have tutorials on these guys, and you'll be seeing more from them in the future.

So shut out to them. Bitrefell.com helps me live on Bitcoin. You can get all your gift cards with Bitcoin on chain and via the Lightning Network. You can get gift cards. You can get phone refills. You can get inbound lightning channels. You can earn stats back as he shop, more stats back with the referral program. It's all awesome.

Check him out and links down below. Bill Fottle, of course, backup your hardware and software. If it's important enough, get it in solid. steal. You don't want to have to be worried about, you know, fire damage, water damage, all that crap. Privacypros.io. You can check out the Bill Fottle and Faraday bags. If you're that kind of guy, like me, all of that stuff is down below. And one final shout out to shakebay.com if you're in Canada, easy way to be stacking sats. E-transfers in and out, no deposit or withdrawal fees, including withdrawing Bitcoin. And if you sign up down below, after your first $100 purchase,

10 bucks for free. Shake your phone every day for free sats, all kinds of awesome stuff and awesome programs with Shake Bay. So shout out to them. And sorry for all my rambling. We've got to get our gentlemen in here. Let's start chatting. We've got Jason. We've got Urban. We've got Dred. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. I think it's in order to give you guys all a quick intro of who you are and what you do for those that are watching that may be unacquainted. Let's go to Jason first. Let people know who you are, man. Yeah, hi, everyone. My name is Jason Mayer. My fiat job is that I'm a high school math teacher, teach all levels of high school math, been doing that for quite a long time, and I love it. And I'm also in the process of writing a book about Bitcoin called The Progressive's

case for Bitcoin. The goal is to just get people who are absolutely not into Bitcoin, into Bitcoin, zero to one, a lot of people who are on the left side of the political spectrum all over the world. So that's my deal. Dude, I love it. I'm glad to have you. It's always, I think, And maybe we'll, I'm going to save some of my thoughts for it later on because I find, and I'm very much looking forward to reading what you're pumping out. But yeah, very interesting to have all different people from various walks of life come to Bitcoin. So I'm glad to have it here, man. I agree.

That's my goal. Awesome, awesome. Dred, good to have you back, man. How you been? Hey, Ben. Yeah, nice to see you again, man. Thanks for having me on. A quick intro of people who don't know me.

I'm Dred in Jamaican, and I'm a recovering technology consultant. I'm now a bit coiner, educator and lightning pleb, you know, big into lightning. And now I also, as you mentioned earlier, work for Start 9, doing a lot of servicing and super shadowy coder stuff to try and create this new sovereign internet. So glad to be here. Dude, I'm glad to have you. And yeah, I was going to say, you looked like you might be a shodew.

shadowy supercoder when you came on here. I think we all might be a little bit shadowy. So glad to have more shadows. Psychobats, right? Yeah, exactly. And Ervin, first time on the show. Welcome, man. Let people know who you are, what you do.

Yes, so hi, everyone. My name is Harbin. I work in simulation and video games. And, yeah, so my Fiat job is medical simulation to help people become better doctors. And as we are going to see later, I think it's relevant for Bitcoin. But yeah, let's discuss more in detail later on. Awesome.

Yeah. I love it. It's again, your background and some of the stuff you're working on in your fiat mining job are very interesting in the way it'll relate to. conversations later on. So yeah, it should be fun. Well, gentlemen, welcome. Thank you for being here. And everybody watching, welcome. Thank you for being here. If you're unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish. Very simple premise. Everybody comes with a reason for being bullish and the flow of the show is very simple. Somebody's going to drop their reason. Then together, all together, we're going to riff on that

reason. And then number three, we're going to rotate. So the three hours, reason, riff, rotate. Very, very simple. I am going to get us started this week with my reason for being bullish. And yeah, so this is something that I've been noticing more and more. There was a, if I'm not mistaken, I think it might have been Corey Clipsden that wrote a blog when he launched Swan or in and around the time he launched Swan about an intransigent minority of Bitcoin. is the threshold that needs to be hit in order to basically make Bitcoin take off. And some of the reasoning behind that was, was, hey, you know, if you look at at societies, once you get kind of like a three or four percent

ratio of people who will not budge on a particular topic, you can help kind of influence the trajectory of that society. And so some of the examples, like in Canada, and North America, all of the food, or most of the food, the majority of the food, is kosher. And so it's something that in general doesn't really affect a lot of people, but it's easier to say, well, you know, we'll do this one thing. And everybody else that's just kind of, you know, buying their regular food, it doesn't really affect them.

They don't really care. But then the people that are the most passionate about this thing that need kosher food, well, they can easily access it rather than having to provide separate options for everyone. Didn't make a lot of sense. And same thing, I believe in the UK, everything, or there's a lot of stuff that is halal. And so you get to a certain point where there's a certain subset of the population that would really like to have something and won't take something else. And it makes more sense to just kind of say, well, if nobody else cares, we're just going to kind of integrate it. And the idea is that if we get enough Bitcoiners, Bitcoiners with a meaningful, enough of their kind of heart and soul in this thing that want to see it succeed and are willing to go to certain lengths in adjusting the way that they live to partake in the Bitcoin economy and actually maybe opt out of the legacy economy, then you get to a point where.

it becomes easier to integrate Bitcoin into everything to help accommodate those people that refuse to partake in the way things used to be. And then you start to see sweeping changes I would say for the better across most of society. And I think I'm bullish on this this week because I'm starting to notice it's working. I'm starting to note and like part of this is

we get the blowups and we get the people that are kind of doing our job for us a little bit in it in an awful way you know they they pray they're predatory towards towards people that may not have fully understood the difference between bitcoin and other things yet and so they fall prey to some of these scams and some of these Ponzi schemes and they you know that ends up being their cost of tuition and it's that's unfortunate but it it then in the end it makes it easier to point out the differences and say, yeah, that sucks that you got burned. You're welcome here. This is why there's a large opposition or why we feel so strongly about what we do. But just in general, one, this kind of past cycle was the first time that I've

seen people come in to the quote unquote crypto space and very quickly shift Bitcoin only, like sometimes in a matter of months, sometimes in like a year, a year and a half. That was not the case prior, I'd say, to 2020. That just simply wasn't there. So I think the quality of the messaging is getting better. The messaging of Bitcoiners and the breadth of different types of content available out there. And again, the cohesiveness and the conciseness of the message has gotten. so incredible that if you dive into the right um if you if you hone in on the signal and

you get the right material in front of the right person it's very hard to argue with and and they've come very quickly to the same conclusion as as a lot of us have um but also you it's not just bitcoin content it's it's starting to permeate mainstream media as well not fully, but the hints are there. And what I mean is these blowups have given opportunity to some really good bitcoins to get on some large publications and some large media conglomerates and say, there is a difference here. And here is the difference.

We're going to explain it to you in byte form. And some of the people that get up there and do these short interviews, knock it out of the friggin park in like two minutes. And I'm continuously astounded that some people can get up there and concisely convey that message. And not only that, but corral the conversation to be able to get out the necessary information to plant those seats. And I don't see this lessening.

I see it growing. And I think that intransigent minority is close. closer than we expect. I think that it will continue to compound from here. I don't know when we reach escape velocity, but the trajectory is promising in my eyes. So that's why I'm bullish this week. I think that we've made big ground over the past couple of years,

and I think we will continue to make more ground at a faster pace in the years to come. So I'm going to open it up to you guys. What are your feelings on kind of? of where we are in terms of helping people understand Bitcoin versus all else. Anybody can jump in. I'll go. I mean, I think that you make a very good point because, you know, I didn't get into Bitcoin very long ago. It's been a couple of years.

And my journey from sort of like crypto space into Bitcoin only took less than a month. So I'm one of those people where I was just getting. the education that you're talking about, right? I'm getting to read books and I'm getting to see videos and I'm getting to like listen to people who know what they're talking about. And just, you know, to echo your point that the education is out there and people are motivated to sort of spread the message. And, you know, we're getting more and more airtime on bigger and bigger, you know, opportunities to explain that message. And I don't know how, you know, these, like you mentioned the examples of people getting on like a big news program and have a minute and a half

to describe why Bitcoin is different than crypto and why Bitcoin only is the way to go. But they do and they do a great job. So I agree with everything that you said. I think that, you know, I still see hurdles in the way of people just going Bitcoin only, right? Like it's not easy yet, but we can kind of, if you zoom out and look at the space and see what's happening during, even out like a bare market where, you know, people aren't phomowing left and right. It's just sort of like, what are my building? What kind of U.S. am I building? What kind of experience am I using for my users?

And so I think that we're knocking on the door of something great. If we can keep building a better experience for people and making it easier, it's possible to live your whole life, Bitcoin only right now. But it's not easy. You have to be committed to it, as you say, right? So as you get those sort of like people who just won't budge added to the people who are like, oh, well, this actually is easier, then you're going to sort of see that tipping point pretty quickly, I think. So I'm also bullish for in the same way.

Awesome. Dredd, what are your thoughts here? Do you think we're going in the right direction or things that you like or don't like or think we can approve upon? Oh, we're definitely going in the right direction. And I'm excited to see the next level of what it looks like, because to your point, you know, these people are doing amazing things. Like, we're seeing people like Jack Males and Natalie Brunel go on TV

and Orange Pill the Nation in a minute and a half where I could barely orange pill nine people in a telegram group after like talking to them for months and months. Like, they laugh at me. And I struggled to do that. But I could probably orange pill one or two people. And the generation before me of Bitcoiners, they were even smarter. They even got it earlier.

Brilliant people, JunSeth, people like that. But they were really hard to understand and didn't get across as easily to people who would otherwise be orange pills. So I think there's like this progression of people who are not only just as toxic, but more charismatic as well. So they can bring across that message without off-putting people as much. And I feel like the next generation, even after the people that are on mainstream TV now, imagine what they're going to do, right? They could be the politicians of the world and the people who, the superstar, the pop stars of the world that are really orange-building people in stadiums. So it's pretty exciting to see the progression and to see where it goes. I do think that also people, it's not just them, right?

It's also the fact that these cycles are happening quicker. You know, like there are almost every month now, there's a crash or a hack or something huge is happening that tells people, you should have listened to the Bitcoiners. You were calling them crazy before, but they told you not your keys, not your coins. They chose to get your coins off of exchanges. They told you, you know, stop trading shit coins. And you're learning these lessons almost every month now, as opposed to it would take a full cycle of ICOs before they crashed. And I feel like that's also helping people to, you know, people don't have long memories. So I think that repetitive burning of touching the stove is really helping people to learn quicker.

So I think that, you know, we're getting into a cycle of people who are learning quicker, people who are also less tolerant because they're coming in later than the earlier people that were kind of reckless. And the combination of those three things is just making a beautiful, a perfect storm. of adoption and I'm glad to do the rest of it too. Yeah, I'd echo that. Urban, what about you? Where do you think we're at? Where do we need to be?

Yeah, so for me, there are multiple things that makes me really bullish. The first one is I had so many people reaching to me after this complete chaos we had. And they were like, okay, Herman, you seem to not care about the current situation. you seem to have not lost anything. How do you do it? How can I do the same thing? And I got a few people to buy a ledger, to go on a Bitcoin-only exchange,

and to buy a few sets. And that was really, really exciting. And yeah, that's something. Which, again, to bounce back or what you said, Dread, you spend month and month and month trying to explain people why it's important and they completely ignore you. But then when such event happened, then suddenly they get it. And the low price also makes me bullish because everybody who understand Bitcoin. It means they remove even more from the exchange, right?

So the low price actually lock down even more Bitcoin every month that people convert their their income into Bitcoin. But as we have said, we can all go and discuss privately with people, but that doesn't scale. And I'm the first one to know this, like education at scale is something challenging.

And this is why I think we need different ways. Having people to go on TV is one way. And I believe I have another way, which is through video games, which I'm going to talk. and present later on. But yeah, I'm super bullish, actually. Awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'd echo, like, I'm sure all of us have had this, this, with this last implosion, people saying, okay, now, how do I self-custody? Like, that's, have you guys all had this in the past, you know, a month or so? Probably a handful of them, right? Like, I've had people book me through my website a bunch of times this past. month saying, okay, I'm finally ready to do this because I'm freaking out and like, well,

most of the people that reached out to me weren't impacted by all the crap that happened. It was enough of a wake up call for them to say if if this one, if this one that was held up as like the gold standard of like the shining beacon of how a quote unquote crypto exchange should be run was was actually just held together. with like twigs and glue, then then like what am I not knowing about where my Bitcoin is or does my Bitcoin even

exist? And so yeah, the time is now. I will beat this drum again and again and again. Self custody is not harder than legacy banking. The only difference is that at some point you had to learn

how to sign up, provide all the proper credentials to create a bank account, how to go online and do your online banking and connect to the app and do all of these different things. You have to learn that at some point.

It's just that you've already been through that learning curve. That is not more difficult than downloading an app and writing down 12 words. You can do it. I trust. Yeah. And if you look at, for instance,

When you see sometimes people in those religious school, you know, like madrasas and Christian school, they can, you have like children that can redo the Bible, like by heart. And they learn it and they are, if people are able to recitate the Quran or the Bible by heart, they can remember 12 or 24 words, no problem. Everybody can do it. Like there is no excuses. And I think this is, yeah, people make it more complex than it really is. Yeah.

And again, one of the arguments I hear is, oh, well, we can't secure things properly, like physical things. I think that's, I think that's bullshit. If it's important enough, you can do it. Like most people, you have a passport, right? And when you're traveling, you know if you're somewhere, you do not lose that password port while you're abroad. If you do, there's actual consequences. Now, I'm not saying it never happens, but most people assign enough importance to that document to say, like, I need to get home when I have a flight. Or, you know, if you're a parent, and I was talking about this the other week, if you're a parent, you have kids, you don't lose.

them. Being a parent is very complicated and involves a lot of responsibility, but it's important enough that you spend the time to make sure you don't just lose your children. And they run away from you. All you need to do is put something in a secure location and remember where that place is. It won't run away from you. So if you have kids and you're responsible for those kids, you're responsible enough to to hold your own wealth, I would say. And I think it's just sort of a cultural thing too, right? Like, you want to, if you want to gain the benefits of Bitcoin, you need to have some responsibility.

And you're right. It's not hard. People can do it. And to your point, since, you know, FTX imploded, I've had tons of people reach out to me like, okay, like, how, like, can you walk me through this? But I've also had people who should have been reaching out to me and have it, right? So I'm not like, I'm going out. to other people that I know, like, hey, you know what?

Like, you should be asking me how to do this right now. So, you know, it's an ongoing thing. And I think, you know, if we can sort of lead people to where they need to go and understand the importance, and you're right, like, it's not hard to protect 12 words and to put it someplace secure. You, you know, you just prioritize it, right? And this is something that's important and you should take it seriously. And if you do that, then it's absolutely no excuses not to at this point.

And, you know, we'll like with Jason's point, but also add a concept of Sabali, which is kind of African for patients, because to your point, it's not hard. And we don't think it's hard. And sometimes we get frustrated with people who are like, it's impossible. I can't remember 12 words. But we just have to have patience because they're on their journey as well. And I mean, they started off by making the mistake of being on a exchange, but that was just a naive mistake, not a mistake of malice or, you know, misintent. And they're going to make more mistakes. They're going to buy a harder wallet from eBay, you know, third party. They're going to, you know, try to take a screenshot of their secret phrase on their, on their iPhone, or send it to a friend or, you know, things that we can just be patient with them and say, hey, this is the correct way to do it. It's similar to how you would teach a child how to protect their passport, because the child probably doesn't understand how important that passport is yet to get home. And I think that's the way we're going to be able to help our friends and, you know, extended people as well.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I'll sum of this topic and just say, I think we're on the right trajectory. There's incredible bitcoins doing incredible things in and around educating the difference between Bitcoin and everything else and how to properly deal with Bitcoin in a self-salvern manner. And I think that's a fantastic thing. And I think we're going to see incredible things in the coming years. a larger community of more people coming to better understand Bitcoin.

So that's why I am bullish. So what we do at this point, we're going to do a rotation. I think it's time to get some more reasons for being bullish in here. Again, I'll give a quick shout out to everybody in the chat. Thanks for being here. Keep those messages coming. I'll start pulling some of them up on the screen now that my topic is through. but we're going to jump to Jason.

And Jason, I'm going to let you take the mic here, and I'll just ask you a simple question. Why are you bullish? Great. Thank you. First of all, I didn't know that we were actually physically rotating dread. You caught me off guard. I'm sure Irvin did the same thing. We just can't see.

So I'm the one left out. Yeah, there you go, right? All right. I'm not doing it. So why am I bullet? One word to like for today is Africa. I think I'm looking forward to the Africa Bitcoin conference happening in Ghana. It starts on Monday.

It goes from the 5th through the 7th. And anybody paying attention to the space knows that this isn't just about adoption, right? Like Urban mentioned the lower price earlier in the show, which is great because we know eventually, like everybody's going to capitulate and we're going to have big players soaking up all the and like Wall Street banks and all of that stuff in nation states are going to be buying Bitcoin. The longer the price stays low and we get people who are disadvantaged or don't have a lot of money to put into Bitcoin right now, get those people stats and sort of try to get the playing field more level, the better.

So I think it's not just the adoption, but it's also the community that you see happening. And of course, from my vantage, I see it from afar, right? I'm in the States. But you can see just a community of people who want to educate and do the evangelizing of Bitcoin and try to explain everything going on, making sure that there's resources to learn how to do things securely and correctly and avoid scams and all of that thing. So there's huge headliners for this conference and a conference. couple of days, Jack Dorsey and Alice Gladstein and all of that. And of course, people like Anita

Posh who are doing work in Bitcoin in Africa all the time and doing boots on the ground stuff, which just makes me proud and humbled. So seeing that happen is exciting, but it made me think about in sort of preparation of writing my book, I had an opportunity. I called up a colleague of mine, a teacher who works at the same school as me. And he's from Senegal. I said, I would love to buy you lunch and just talk to you about your experience using money in Senegal. And he's like, I don't know if I should. I don't know anything about money. I'm not like an expert at all. I said, this is perfect. This is exactly what I want. I want to just talk to you about like your experience using money in Senegal. We know most Bitcoiners know that they use the CFA Frank.

And France has sort of manipulated the money supply in 14 African countries. Even after leaving politically, they've had this financial control over these countries. That's devastating in lots of ways. And he was aware of this. And, of course, he talked to me about being in America and being in other countries and sending money back home and just the sheer amount of thinking about money and different kinds of money that he has to do, that I don't have to do. do as an American, really, was astounding.

And, you know, he shared with me sort of some exciting developments in Senegal and also some surrounding countries, but, you know, his experience was in Senegal of, like, almost all of the young, up-and-coming politicians in Senegal are completely aware of this sort of neo-imperialistic CFA Frank harming African countries. and it's something they talk about, two people and young people are paying attention. And he said a couple of decades ago, it was only the most educated people who even understood that that money was from France or it was being controlled in Paris and that kind of thing. And he said, today, almost everybody knows.

I said, well, are people into Bitcoin in Senegal? And he said, I have no idea. And of course, you know, I do know that there is a growing amount of people in Senegal and a lot of other African countries are starting to get into Bitcoin as an alternative. We know that the Central African Republic is, you know, another country that uses a CFA Frank that has adopted Bitcoin. And who knows what the next things, you know, down the pike are. So seeing, you know, like I said before,

not just the adoption, but the community that's happening in Africa and this new conference that's happening and the education and the people going and doing really good work to get Bitcoin. known all over the continent, coupled with that conversation that I got to have face to face with somebody who has real life experiences using money and the challenges of that, and knowing that Bitcoin is a solution. And he was very happy to learn as soon as I started mentioning the ways in which Bitcoin is going to make his life easier, his eyes got wide. So knowing that that's the solution to the problem that exists and knowing that people are

really doing that work is why I'm bullish. That's that's my rant. That was great. And so one of the things that stood out to me there is it's it's interesting because it seems like no matter where on the globe you go or who you talk to and where they're from, there does seem to be this increasing awareness of how broken the money is everywhere. Like like so. bringing it back to the West, you see people using terms that they've never used before. Fiat. That's a term that up until the past, you know, a couple of years, you would never hear that in conversation.

If somebody said Fiat, most of the people in the circle would be like, what the hell are you talking about? It's happening a lot more. People are beginning to, like the money go. Money printer go Burr meme was not a Bitcoin or meme. Like it's people are realizing the joke that is the system. And it's very interesting to hear that the same thing is happening, you know, in places like Senegal where where traditionally they wouldn't be, they definitely aren't learning this in schools.

So something is happening where people are are learning to. dig deeper into topics that maybe they are purposely kept in the dark about and they're beginning to ask the right questions. Why am I continuously so screwed with my currency, especially like, I mean, everybody is, but why are we more screwed than most? What is happening here? And now you're getting people going, oh, this system, particularly our system with the CFA Frank is incredibly predatory. It's, it's siphoning off the,

the fruits of our labor to, to an overlord more or less, right? It's, it's, it's, it's siphoning away all, all of our time and, and our assets. And, and it's, again, like, just to see people understand that.

Um, and, and see the root of the problem is, is huge, in my opinion. opinion. But I don't know. What do you guys think? Like urban dread? What do you guys want to add in? Yeah. To bounce back on that, I, it has been a couple of things since 2020, I started to always ask to be the ability to pay in Bitcoin. Right. And I'm like, look, I don't really use the local warlord currency. I would rather use Bitcoin.

And initially, everybody, like the answer was always the same. It's a scam, it's a Ponzi, whatever. But now, like, I don't know. It has been like maybe a year, maybe six months. The answer has changed. More and more people, they tell me, oh, I don't accept it, but I'm pretty sure I will need at some point because I believe it's the future. And this is so interesting because they know nothing about it.

Right. And you can see because they have no clue what it, what it, really is. But they have this sentiment that, you know what, it's probably the future. And it's really interesting to see the shift from, you know, the bakery, the butcher, whatever, the random, the grocery store. They are like, okay, I've met a guy that now proposed to be paid and pay in Bitcoin. And I could definitely see the shift in everyday conversation.

which is really interesting. That's, yeah, absolutely. Dred, what about you? What are your thoughts in here? Yeah, I completely love this bullish topic because, I mean, you probably see people walking behind me back and forth. And that's because I'm in an executive lounge in the airport headed to Apragana right now. Like, I mean, I'm so excited to be going to that conference. I'm going to be speaking there and hosting a panel on the payment rails and the differences between with traditional fiat rails and digital money and the way bitcoin can solve that and it's true i mean

the cfa has completely you know strip mine the country more or less you know as alan farrington said and it's it's it's kind of disgusting that they have all but admitted it and still decided to do nothing about it you know frat being france um specifically i'll call them my name um but you know many of these African countries are young and hungry and the adoption rate is through the roof, as you said before. But even more than that, they're building. They're building amazing things to solve their own problems, and that makes me more bullish than ever. Like there is a company called Mashankura, and they're basically putting Bitcoin send and receive functionality over SMS. You don't even have to have internet access, and not even a smartphone. They can have a regular

phones, dialing numbers, and you can send and receive Bitcoin to people in rural areas with just a cell phone signal. It's amazing the things that they're coming up with to get over their own hurdles, right? And even across countries in Africa, they have mobile money, and mobile money is quite objectively better than the money that we have in many countries in the Western world. Even it's even easier to use sometimes with cash up in Venmo because they accept mobile money in stores and restaurants and almost everywhere. right, but it's within that country. So if you're going across like remittance from one African country to the next,

you have M-Pesa in one country and you have M-Pesa in the other country and you can't send it across. They stop you from doing it. You have to do some kind of other convoluted bank transfer with all kind of K-Y-C-A-M-L-U-R-E-R-S and charge you a bunch of fees. And they're solving that. Like BitNab and other companies are using Lightning to peg out of M-Pesa and peg back in any other country.

instantly. So Bitcoin solves so many problems for Africa that's going to connect the countries together and hopefully connect people together. I mean, there's many, I mean, you can't solve humans, of course. We are going to human. But Bitcoin does fix a lot of this. And it allows us to remove a lot of these barriers and start healing as people and start healing as a continent and hopefully get from under the boot of France and the CFA. So I'm super bullish. about this and I'm super bullish about the conference. I can't wait to speak to all the people there and network because my plan is to go there as well and see what they're doing and hopefully help.

You know, I volunteer everywhere I go. So hopefully volunteer as much as I can and help them to build and then learn some stuff from them as well. Amazing. Great topic. That's fantastic. I'm a little jealous. I've never been to that part of the world.

I would love to maybe I'll make an effort to. get out there next year or something. I imagine this is, is this becoming a yearly thing now or what's the deal? I hope so. It's the annual inaugural one. I'm hoping that they make it an annual thing. Ghana is like

the technological capital. I don't want to speak for Africa. I'm not African. Not from an African country. But from what I've seen, Ghana has a lot of technological advancements that make it a good place to host. A lot of human capital there that is in the technology.

space. So it should be cool. I mean, I'm going to learn it's my first time there. I'm going to learn a lot about the country and the continent and hopefully travel to a few others as well. The thing that's so exciting about stuff like this to me is we're seeing this, we're seeing it play out where the ones, the nations that have the least to lose are the most likely to try new things and thus will be the recipients of the most proportional gain from making this switch. And it's going to be an incredible thing over the next decade or two to see some of these nations that are like, that realizing how exploited they're being, like how much

exploitation is coming from kind of their overseers, and then running a parallel system and realizing the freedom and the ability to actually retain the, fruits of their labor is going to be massive. And the shifts and the change and the quality of life and a lot of these places is going to be undeniable. It's going to be amazing. So I really can't wait to see how the world changes. And also at the same time, the rent seekers and the people that have been siphoning and

and living off of that exploitation, they're going to actually have to work for a fucking change. They're going to have to actually produce things instead of siphon it off from somebody else. And yeah, the world's got a... I mean, the world is going to look a lot different, right? Because I think that there's a lot of people living very comfortably all around the world right now that is just a direct result of,

you know, like wealth and value being, you know, exported away from poor countries. And to your point, Ben, I mean, there's no, there is no coincidence that the two first, the first two countries to adopt Bitcoin have been forced for years to be using some other countries money, right? I mean, that's not a surprise. And so I think that the people who really understand how this game works, it's a, it's a no-brainer. And the dominoes, I mean, the dominoes are falling and we see it, you know, you can, those people who are paying attention are seeing dominoes fall and it's just going to keep happening.

So, and, you know, we people, you know, obviously Bitcoin doesn't fix everything, but it really does, it's, it's necessary to fix a lot of things. It's a necessary first step. So it is, it's an exciting time. It really isn't. And I have a fiat job that keeps me from going to Africa, but next year I'm, I'm going to go because, I mean, it's amazing. And I, you know, I'm looking to move, you know, go all over the world and talk.

people about Bitcoin. So it's going to be amazing if I can do that. So that's fantastic. Well, this was a great topic. I'm very happy that you brought this one up. And I encourage you guys to look deeper into the CFA Frank system. Gladstein wrote an article on this. I can't recall the name of it. But it's, you'd have to take a look. But if you, if you Google out Alex Gladstein, Human Rights Foundation and CFA Frank system, something along those lines. You all, there's an incredible article that basically covers the exploitation that's taking place. And it's, it's disgusting.

But now it's front and center. And it's, I've heard it mentioned in a lot of different circles now and by politicians and by lots of people around the world. And it's no longer kind of like this hidden away secret. it's it's now kind of there's a there's a light on it so yeah hopefully that changes um nonetheless i think friends it's time for another rotation and so uh i'm just going to toss it down to dread here uh dudes it you you've got the mic so again same question to you why are you bullish why am i bullish um well many reasons but the one i'm going to be bullish for tonight is really um start nine

the embassy pro and specifically my hopeful future combination with FETI, like these two projects are super bullish for me and, you know, just looking at how I started, just building nodes and thinking about, you know, being, being a lightning pro, whatever that means from a lightning club, I was just trying to, you know, put together a raspberry pie, a child's toy and figure out how to have a house my money sovereign on my little single board computer and and I saw start nine I think it was back in 2020 and they were just i mean bitcoin the people in bitcoin seem to be some of the smartest people i've met and that's across technology across the world honestly and then the start nine crew are some of the smartest people in bitcoin so you know seeing that team seeing what they were building and

you know i felt like the dumbest person in the room and that's usually a good thing because then you learn a lot, right? So I'd start sticking with them, learning all the different, you know, the different principles that they have. And I realized that running a node, running a lightning node is just the tip of the iceberg. It wasn't even really what I was truly after, right?

Because the money is what I wanted to hold, but what I really wanted to hold is everything. I wanted to hold my own sovereignty. You know, I didn't want Apple to have my picture. They didn't want, you know, NSA to read my text messages. I mean, they probably still are. But, you know, I wanted to have some more control over my life.

And this is the first company I've seen that's actually truly going after that in a way that potentially might even end up making the company redundant or obsolete as they complete their goal. You know, like if they create this sovereign internet where everyone has a node or everyone has their peer or whatever you call it, their router, and it's running on their own, then there is no reason for you to pay. anybody, anything for your services, because you have them there. And therefore, unless you're getting some kind of support from a company like Start 9, what they're building right now will not provide revenue.

And that's, anyway, that was an amazing, you know, pure, almost altruistic, but not because, you know, it's still a company. But that made me super bullish about the company. And then the embassy pro was just this beast of a tool that I finally see that, you know, can replace a maradbury pie. Like my Raspberry Pi failed on me. I had a pretty big note and it failed on me. And I was kind of angry because I lost a lot of good channels, right?

And it was because the Raspberry Pi was just failing. Anybody knows about lightning. When you run a lightning node, it fills up a log. And the log can get up to, you know, over a gigabyte, sometimes more. And if you run in a Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi is sometimes underpowered or it can't handle that much computation and it can just crash. And if it crashes in the middle of a routing session or HDLC getting stuck, you'll have a corrupt database.

You'll lose your channels, trying to restore it. And that costs money because you're closing channels. Every channel closes the transaction fee, and I had like 100 channels open or something. So it was kind of painful, but it made me realize I needed bigger architecture. And the pro is like just this huge, really cool, you know, hardcore PC. I don't want to call it a PC because that's not doing it justice. It's a server that you can put on an uninterruptible power supply and just have it running and you can run a small business on it.

If I'm going to become an uncle Jim for my friends, from my family or even from an island, I really want this Embassy Pro to be the one that I can use to do it. And the cool thing about it is that they're going to have clear net now. I know that everybody's complaining about Tor. Oh, yeah, Embassy Pro is cool, but I can't access. it because Tor sucks. They're DDoSing Tor all day, which is true. Because DDoS is like denial of service, dedicated denial of service.

Well, Embassy Pro is going to have clear net in one of the upcoming OS releases. So you can have your own domain name and run it from your own home, just like you're doing right now, except it would be over SSL VPN instead of Tor. So it's so many cool things that are coming out with. I could go on forever for that. But the main part of the bullishness is that Feddy is this really cool service. that would take all of this supercharged architecture and drop a private federation on top of it

so you can control your own money within any organization you want. If it's your own church organization, your own activist organization, your own small business, your own country. You know, you can control that money within the Bitcoin network, privately. And when I say private,

I mean, Tommy and E-Cash is really private compared to anything else we've seen, you know, except maybe a private lightning channel. So just two of those combined, this makes me super bullish. I'm super excited to talk to the guys in Ghana about Fetty and see how I can build this thing together with them. This is, I love this. And so when you say Fetty, you're talking about like what Obie's working on? What OBB was working on, yep, Fettie Mint.

I think the repo or the project is called Fetty and they're using Fettie Mint. vice versa. I don't remember exactly. Yeah, yeah, that would be right. Yeah, Fediment is the protocol, I guess. And then FETI would be the product that OV is building on it. But it's really interesting because like I didn't quite understand Fedement or like I just was unfamiliar. And I watched a couple of his talks and just kind of understanding like how you can effectively

have like a multi-sig with various. key holders, but then you can have people that actually provably own even like fractions of a UTXO. And even the keyholders of the multi-sig don't actually know what you as an individual hold. And you can then withdraw at any time. And then further, like, so any transaction between you and any other individual within the fetament is private.

it. And then my understanding is that you can link different fetaments together via lightning channels as well, if I'm not mistaken. And they can interact with each other. Is that correct? Yeah, I know they can interact with each other for sure. I'm not sure how they link with each other, but I know that if you're sending your, you know, Ben coin of fediment into my dread coin, And it's the same lightning transaction coming across via Bitcoin. So they interact like that just over the Lightning Network or over the Bitcoin network as if it was a regular transaction. I'm pretty sure there's other ways you can interact as well because Fetiment is a layered

solution where you can build applications on top of FETI. So you could build a layer three application that we could both interact with our federations in many different ways. I mean, the sky is the limit, really. That's why I'm so excited about it. We don't know what it's going to get built on top of it, you know? And you were talking about hosting that as well, and you were talking about relating it to start nine. Like, are you talking in what capacity are you referring to being able to utilize your embassy with Feddy?

Yeah. So to your point, let's say you have a federation that's spinning up for their people. And it's a three or four multi-sig, right? There's three keys out of four to control the movement of funds. So if you're using those, if you're using that multi-sake to move funds from one place to the other, the Federation has to sign that the three of the four keys to move it, but it's a blind movement. I'm not going to explain, Tommy, it doesn't take too long.

But those three or those four keys want to have their own four fully validating nodes. and they can be running on four fully sovereign devices in different geographic locations, you know, under different Internet service providers, maybe even, you know, satellite, who knows, but they can be completely sovereign and completely separate places and still control the same fetament. And that's the way you're going to have to do it anyway. You have to have a device to control the keys and why not have a sovereign device that is bulletproof, that is, you know, instant setup, that is private, that you don't need any coding for, that is fully anonymous, that is easy to use, and that's kind of what Start 9 is building.

So it's like a, if you're trying to build something like this for, let's say, activists that are not technologists that are not type for punks, they don't know how to code. They want something they can just push the button and use, right? And you can push the button and set up Star 9, push the button and install a FedEx, push the button and set up your federation, and all of a sudden you have private money, but going back and forth without any coding. And compared to 2018 or 2017, 9000,000,000. possible to do it. So it's pretty cool that we can do that now.

We've come a long way, hey, in a few short years. It's like I remember in it now it doesn't it seems like not that long ago, but I remember everybody freaking out during the block size wars. And they're like, oh my God, all of these exchanges and these big companies want to change Bitcoin. And that's when it kind of became clear like running a node is his someone important. Like you, you, you, if your, if your wallet is not pointing to your own node, then you're trusting somebody else's. And in that instance, the threat there was, what if that person starts to tell me that

Bitcoin is something different? And my wallet no longer is on Bitcoin as I see it to be. Somebody else defines Bitcoin differently than me. Well, this prevents that from happening. because you're running your own economic transactions through your own node and saying, this is this is Bitcoin. And if you want to change it, my node will ignore you. And that's particularly important when you get to the level that you're talking about

where you might have an adversarial nation state, right? Like if it's the CFA Frank system, you know you've got an adversary that wants, to defend that and may go to lengths of trying to corrupt the data for you know, for you, on the monetary system you're trying to use to opt out. And so when you're fully self-sovereign like this or you have a fetament that is utilizing self-sovereign stacks like this, then that can be prevented. And that's huge. That's massive, actually.

And the nation state attack is real. And that's why running it in different geographic locations matter. So you can have not just one validating node that you know the blockchain, the time chain is correct, but you have four. So if one gets corrupted, you have three more that are validating the time chain and telling people, you know, this is what it really is and you're still safe. And I don't know. I feel like this is kind of military grade, as Jason Pilar would say. this is military grade, you know, technology that we're using here to protect our money. And it's not a weapon, but it's definitely, you know, the best defense I've ever seen against the state.

And I'm bullish that it's going to work. Yeah, absolutely. I want to get thoughts from maybe we'll go Urban and then we'll go Jason. But Urban, do you have any thoughts about kind of what we're talking about having that self-sovereign stack? And the way that this kind of you can build things atop it, you know, things like fediments when necessary or just do the general idea of self-sovereignty through tools like this. What are your thoughts here? Yeah. So I think self-sovereignty is important.

Not just for Bitcoin, but also for the data you have, you know, having your own cloud, your own. server at home is important. And we have seen a big smartphone company willing to nurture some of their phone function when some country asks them to do, as we have seen with the recent protest in China. And it's really exciting to see. And I especially like solutions that are like one box, you plug it in, it works. it's easy to use. You have a web interface.

Because this makes it accessible to everybody, basically. And I think this is the big, compared to the previous cycle, so in the previous cycle, you had people, they were building their own node with like Linux machine, Raspberry Pi, and they were like putting together, you know, like virtual machine and Docker image and all of that. But this is complex, right?

I mean, it's a job. If you work in a company, they will be a sysadmin doing this full time to make sure it's running smoothly. And having more and more of those solutions, it's really great. I'm a big fan of Synology, which is appropriate.

So it's not open source, proprietary small home server that you can plug. And it runs like a Linux distribution with some web UI. And to me, this is a good first step into being sovereign with your data. It's like, okay, now my backup is on my own device. And seeing those devices like a start 9, like umbrella, like orders, that make it so easy to have the exact same experience.

But for Bitcoin, which is targeted with like, you have your own node, you have a lightning node. it's automatically updated. It's easy to use. Yeah, I mean, it's really great. I'm still waiting for like hardware specifically built for that. Because right now we still use, I think we could have a major boost in performance and ease of use

when we start to have like ASIC. And when I mean ASIC, I don't mean ASIC mining machine, but I mean ASIC hardware, designed to run Bitcoin node, just like you have now Synology device, which are designed to have five hard drive, redundant.

If one of them fails, it automatically switch to the other one, et cetera, et cetera. So having this capability for Bitcoin would be amazing. And as for Fed Demint, I mean, it's also incredibly, I

I'm sometimes afraid of the mimpoo, like people being locked out of Bitcoin because one of the things that in the long term makes me not so bullish is high fees, constant high fees that would lock out certain people with UTXO that are too small. This is one of the things that scare me off at night. It's like you have your 200 bucks in a UTXO,

and you cannot move it because the minimum fee on the mean pool is like 300 or whatever, US dollar. And having things like Fed Emint, Lightning, sharing UTXO in a trustless way is definitely things that help partially help this, to have less congestion on the main chain and to keep it for like more important. Because if you are in a Fedemint thing, you don't care if there is high fee on the Mimpool. And then if you can do atomic swap and things like this with other Fedemint network, you also don't care because it's all off-chain. But then if you want to buy a house or like a big thing, yeah, you want the security of the blockchain.

And then you're willing to pay whatever 50. I mean, who knows the price, right? But you're willing to pay for it. And I think it's important that we build this now. when the mimpul is not full, when it's cheap to do transaction, because we have time to experiment, we have time to do mistake, rather than in the future when everything is full, and then it's extremely hard to do anything.

Yeah, I'd agree. And I mean, it's nice to see that, like you say, right now, when things are, you know, fees relative to like the last little bit, are higher, but it's still not bad. And it's still like there's a bit of runway there. But it's nice to see things like this being built out now. And we're starting to get access to them now so that when the time comes, that they're necessary, we can, you know, we can better migrate to using those and not bogging down the mempool with,

with transactions that become un-economical. So yeah, yeah, I think that's important. I want to pass it to Jason and get his thoughts on, again, this kind of like self-sovereignty kick that we're on here. Anything that stuck out to you here? Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we always talk about not your keys and not your coins. And I think that for a lot of people, like the next level is, like,

you know, running your own note. of like I have mine behind my shoulder here that only exists because of BTC sessions, right? Like it's the only way I was able to do it. And it's not hard. You know, I tell people if you know how to connect your Nintendo to your TV, then you can probably set up a node and follow the directions and do it. And then take that like sort of next level of sovereignty. So like any kind of plug and play option, you know, like I'm sitting here listening to the conversation.

I'm going to update my Christmas list now. like embassy pro you know like sounds like an amazing amazing idea so you know i think that's that's great anything to make it easier i think it was circles back to something we talked about before right like using bitcoin at all easier taking you know self-custody of your bitcoin is getting easier like validating transactions and running your own node and all of that stuff is getting it's all getting easier so this is just great for adoption um in terms of fetiment like i'm not certainly not expert but you know i i i distinctly remember the moment in the grocery store when i was listening to obi talk about fetidemint and explaining it i usually listen to podcasts when i'm doing grocery shopping

and i just stopped in the aisle and like yeah i was like oh i need to focus on this is like a big deal you know i usually just sort of do my grocery shopping and and just listen to people talking about bitcoin uh no big deal and just grab the orios but i just stopped in the aisle and was just like thinking, and I distinctly remember it, like, this is such an amazing layered solution that's going to give access, you know, Bitcoin access to people who don't have it. And, you know, as Urban was saying, like, you know, as, you know, as fees go up or as a mempool gets large, you know, just these off-chain solutions that still sort of prioritize, you know, security and privacy and actually, like, maintaining Bitcoin, you know, philosophy is

super important. So you just want to echo all of that. It's it's super bullish that all of this stuff is getting easier. And there's whenever there's a plug and play option that actually maintains the philosophies that we really care about, then that's that's a win for us. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Just to kind of round this topic out, I would just say to anybody that's maybe curious and and feel like oh i don't know if i know enough to to go down this road the the act of of either building and then using a node or just getting a plug-and-play option and then starting with it that is the learning mechanism right the act of doing is how you learn it you don't you don't go through and like learn everything and then you already know how to do it and so then

you run a node it's you learn as you go and so for those that are like I don't I don't know where to start again I'll have a tutorial on the start nine coming out Monday um the one in question will be like a full like build it from a kit um but again you've got options for plug and play and there's so again, I've got tons of tutorials on how to set up a node. You can also just do things like run brick Bitcoin core and connect it to hot wallets on your computer and then connect hardware through there. There's a plethora of options. I would just say, take a look, see what option seems appealing to you, and just go with it.

Just, you know, make a decision and then just start learning because there's a ton of people that will help you the entire way and will be more than happy to offer advice and troubleshoot with you and just again take it as a learning experience it's it's awesome to get a better understanding of bitcoin through using bitcoin um yeah so all over to add one thing to that is you don't have to do all at once either like you know these nodes can do a lot but you can just start with Oh, did he cut? We just lost. What was he going to say?

You can just start with, what do you figure? Connecting it up and connecting a hard wall. Oh, there you are. You cut with, you can just start with. What do you want to start with? You can just start with passwords. You can just start with, you know, downloading or getting your plug and play and get bulletin and protect your passwords.

And that's it. You don't have to do everything at one. Or you can just start with Bitcoin. But the point is, you know, just start to your point. Just do it. There's no class to sign up for it to get it to figure out how to do it. Just do it. But do it slowly.

You know, get used to one thing at a time. And eventually you'll have your entire life in your own hands. Awesome. Yeah. And whatever you do, do something that you can do again and again every day. because if tomorrow you're like, okay, I route everything through five Tor relay and VPN

and all of this and it's super slow. And after two days, I want to shoot myself in the head because it's so complex, right? Then it's not useful because you will just go back to use Google and to use all the convenience. So do an easy one, see how it goes,

and then add progressively more things. And if it's too complex, you can always go back a bit. But it's not like, it's not binary. It's a scale and do things that initially helps you. Like password manager, yeah, as you mentioned, it's a big one. It helps you.

You don't have to remember all the password. And that already helps, right? And then you can move to the next thing, et cetera. Yeah, I agree. So there's your action item, everybody watching. Take that leap. It's not that hard. And again, start it step by step, one foot in front of the other.

So time has come. We're going to do our final rotation here. Everybody in the chat again, thanks for being here. I'm seeing people talking about building their nodes and that they're running them or they're curious about running them. So yeah, guys, dive in. Why not? But we're going to do a rotation here. We've got our final entrance.

And so, Ervin, I'm going to toss it to you. And I will just cue you up by saying, why are you bullish? Okay, so this is a bit of self-promotion, but I think you will all love it. So as we have discussed during the past hour or so, yeah, Bitcoin is not that hard, but there is one critical thing that makes it really different from a lot of other technology, which is it's permanent. sometime when you do a mistake, if you mess up something,

it might lead to you losing money. It might have a bad experience. And it's hard when you're a beginner to know where are the tricks and where are the things that you need to be careful with. And we can compare this to other industry that have similar issues. So if we go to like a surgery or airplane pilots, it's in a way, it's similar, right?

If you fly into the mountain, then it's gone, right? You cannot go back and you will even kill yourself. And if you remove the wrong organ or you cut the wrong vessel, it might lead to serious consequence for your patient. And the experience gathered there and the best way to onboard people is with simulation, because with simulation you can basically play the scenario in a safe environment, allow people to do mistake and allow them to recover and to learn from their mistake. But nobody dreams to be the perfect bitcoiner with like five multibrovers,

the sick thing, whatever, self-sovereign node in a citadel, in the mountains. Like, if we could get away with this, we would. Let's be honest. It's just like, it's not something that made people want to do it. It's more like an inconvenience than anything else. So my idea was knowing what I know from the simulation industry, what if we make a video game in which there is a tiny Bitcoin simulator,

which you can use, which behaves like the real Bitcoin network, with one crucial difference, it's all offline, and you will not lose anything if you mess it up. So starting from there, the next thing was, how do you get people to play with this?

And this is when I got the idea of creating a trading game, which is like one of those MSDOS style, pirate game, you know, like Sidmeyer pirate, where you go in one island, you buy a run, then you move to the Caribbean and you sell it and you make good profit. But the entire word use Bitcoin. This is after hyper-bitconization. So you have to know how to use Bitcoin to play the game. But because it's, there is no real money, there is no micro-transaction, there is no like

bullshit like this. It's also, it allows you to do mistake. And you can always restart the game and start a new, a new session. So this is my project. I've been working for more than a year now. I have a working prototype that I showed to Ben a few weeks ago. I don't remember. I think it was before the FTC thing,

because we didn't discuss about this. you're muted you're muted you're muted ben sorry I think it was probably about a month ago because I've been out of town since November 9th now so I just I just got back so yeah it would have been the beginning of November maybe that we chatted

yeah I think so so yeah so it's the goal of the game it's you have a train it goes from city to city and you need to buy goods in one city and to sell them for profit in the other city and you need to manage your Bitcoin wallet. You have a tiny Bitcoin core node with a server in your train that you need to

you need to hook up. Can I bring up the visuals with this now? Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. So I love the look at this. It's like those old school again like when you do I think back to when I had some of my

older computers and I'd play. something like this and like the visuals are just are just fantastic so maybe i i pulled up all i have like four images here so maybe as i flick through them just kind of like let people know what what we're looking at here okay sure so sorry that's all right man i just try you might not have a voice right now. So that's okay. But I'm going to flip. I'll flick through these as we go too. Yeah. So there you see two of the cities.

So I don't want to entirely spoil the scenario, but the planet heart stops rotating. We don't really know why, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is one side is super hot, which is the desert you see. and then the other side is freezing cold. And this makes like an extreme environment. And the people who have the most like in this new world, the most dangerous thing you can do is basically move with a train, goods, and merchandise from one place to the other, which is what you do.

So you have to constantly battle. So this is the inside of your train. this is your main quarter where you can sleep you see the small terminal yeah that's your Bitcoin node right there there is other thing on it there's like there is other things then there is books you can read

which explain the scenario and you have to like you can buy books and newspaper and understand what happened and you can see your wallet on yeah yeah So yeah, that's the wallet. And then on the next image,

this is one of the examples. You have the meme pool and it has transaction and sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low and it's based on like during the night is usually lower. So you have to be careful. And yeah, so it replicates the Bitcoin network. I recently posted a tweet where I do a transaction

where I show the UTIXOs that you can see then in your wallet. And this is the local market, and all the price are in Satoshi's. So it's already hyper-bitconized, right? And the nice thing about this is, even if you don't like Bitcoin, you can still play the game. Because the only time you use real money is to buy the game, and that's it.

and after this there is no DRM, there is no copy protection, there is no internet account, there is, you can just play it, which is what I want. As you said, Ben,

it's like this old school game where you would buy the floppy, you would put it in your Amiga, and then you could just play as much as you want without limitation. Yeah. I love the look of it. It takes me back to like,

like I was saying, some of the old school games that I used to play, particularly like the look inside, the train as you pull up your terminal and you check like all of the different you know the stats and and looking through the marketplace of like what you're going to buy and sell and everything it's it's it's fantastic i love again like the aesthetic of it is is fantastic so i'm uh yeah and the game is unforgiving like uh everything is permanent and you cannot go back just like the real bitcoin network

So I give you just one example. There are shady companies in games that provide really high interest rate with your Bitcoin, which you can totally send the complete amount. But any money you put in that will be pretty much. I mean, you will get the interest, right? But eventually they will rock pull you, right? But you could, it's like a gamble, right? you might if you get off or you realize the error maybe you just earn money with it but it's

extremely dangerous and there are a lot of those things and i do not let you go back so you there is only one save it always go forward and if you lose then you can just restart the game that's it it's it's it's really like it's unforgiving but i let you play as much like okay sure maybe you lost all your money but you can always burn your furne your furnishing into the steam engine to go to the next city and try to buy things. Right. So it's not all lost. It's always possible to recover. And there are many things. The real question is can you sell your chairs? I mean, I think so another example is your crew produced trashes, right?

And you have to get rid of it somehow. And if you do not get rid of it, it will fill up your entire inventory. And then it will show random trash bag on your screen up until that you cannot click on the menus anymore. So it's your job. I mean, it is your job to make sure this train is running as smoothly as possible. That's awesome. tacos is asking how many sats is ramen noodles in the game? I have to check.

I don't know. Is that an actual menu item? Is it a real thing you can get? I mean, there are instant noodles. That's so realistic already. It's incredible. Yeah, they are instant. And you can do like really nasty things.

So for instance, you can do illegal stuff in it. So remember, right, you crew produce garbage. One of the way you can get rid of it is you can produce gutter oil, which is something. Like you can look on the internet. It's really disgusting. It's basically people doing like really like cooking oil recycling from the sewer. But then it's illegal and you might get caught, right? It might lead to consequence.

And again, it's to teach you that everything you do has consequence. Because in our society, we like, you know, if tomorrow someone will throw a chunk of gold in a volcano, they will blame the volcano that they cannot recover their chunk of gold.

It's like our society, we are collectively, we don't want to be responsible for anything. And in my game, it's no, you can do shady things and you will be responsible and consequence will follow. But it's fun, I think it's mostly like a fun game.

I was inspired by games like Rimward or Minecraft, which allow this type of experience. Yeah. It's like the game of life, but like future dystopia and super unforgiving. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's, yeah, I mean, and there are many things.

like I want to you can 51% attack Bitcoin. You will lose your resource and your soul and your crew will not be happy. So the goal of the game is simple. It's not even to be rich, right? You have a crew of mercenaries and they want beer and money. They want beer and sats. That's all they want. So in order to provide them this, you need to trade.

You need to do things. And if they don't have, if they are not paid, then they don't have beer, they are not happy. So that's the entire goal of the game. But then you have various ways you can achieve. And the game is right now, there is a working alpha. So every screenshot you saw. And I think Ben, you can testify that you saw it running

and you could ask me to click on things. And you actually had a private demo of this. Oh, yeah. So the game is, right now what I'm looking is for funding because I am working every day after my Fiat job. And I wish I could lower the amount of work I do for my Fiat job and I could just focus on that. Because, yeah, I mean, this would help.

This would make onboarding people on Bitcoin scalable. Because when you go to your Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner or whatever, and you annoy all your family about Austrian economics, that just doesn't work. As we said in the beginning, we spent month and months trying to have people moving out of exchange, and then it needs a big Ponzi so that people finally get awakes.

But with this game, you can have the experience of the Ponzi, and you can try it yourself, and you can lose all your money, and then you can learn, okay, maybe I shouldn't do it with this, right? I love it. You have a tally coin, so I'm going to give a shout out to the tally coin. You're raising funds to build the orange pill simulator. But yeah, if anybody likes the look of the game and you want to help get it out the door, then, yeah, there's a tallycoin page.

Just go to tallycoin.com. And then search Orange Pills simulator or at Real Urban Hacker. And there's a whole description and like screenshots and everything of what it's going to look like, but I don't know. I think it looks awesome. I, I, yeah, it, it looks pretty fun.

And, uh, and I think it's, it's a unique way of teaching people about Bitcoin. And like you said, allowing them to screw up without like, really, really screwing up.

Also, somebody really thinks it's a fucking great idea in the comments here. So, uh, but yeah, I don't know. Like, I'm all for stuff like this.

Um, this would be something that I would play around with for sure. And I mean, if you're a whale, you know, you want the word of your Bitcoin to be worth more than the future. What would be the best way is you invest a tiny bit of it to make a cool video game. And maybe this is the video game. Everybody plays before Planet Heart is hyper-bitconized. Yeah. I mean, this makes me really bullish.

But like seriously, this is like super fun, innocent way to learn. and yeah I really I mean obviously I'm the one making the project so I love it but I think it has so much potential yeah yeah at Cortic was like why call it a coin

and tally what the fuck tally coin is just it's a fundraising page where you can connect your own node and receive and receive donations or or people can like fund your project either on-chain or via lightning,

but tally coin isn't directly associated with the game. It's just a page where you can raise funds and stuff. But yes. So I want to get thoughts from maybe Jason first. I don't know. Have you, are you much of a game player or were you as a... Yeah, I mean, you know, my first reaction is nostalgia is a drug, man. Like, seeing the imagery for the game for the first time I've never seen it before is just amazing.

It brings me back to my childhood. And, you know, first of all, so, like, Urban, this is a great job. Like, I think that it's an interesting project. And I think that if you try to educate people by gamifying it, and in particular, this isn't sort of, like, beat you over the head with, like, Bitcoin, right? Like you're not like the game isn't memorizing like Bitcoin memes. It's actually like you're accomplishing something else in Bitcoin. It just happens to be part of it. And, you know, to make it into a game is a great way to learn.

You know, like I have kids and they're, you know, half of their screen time has to be educational because that's how they learn math, right? Like literally playing a game and my kid gets hooked on it because he's into the game thing, but he's learning multiplication, right? So this kind of fits that narrative and I love the style of it because it looks just like the games I was playing when I was a kid. And I think it's a fun thing. It's a fun way to get people involved. So kudos to you.

It looks awesome. And I'm glad I got to see it tonight. Awesome. Yeah. Sorry, Urban. Go ahead first. Yeah. Thank you.

I got a lot of great feedback about the art. Thank you so much. I know I'm paying people to help me, right? So I have two other people working with me and helping me one programmer and one artist. But it's, I think it's a testimony to our craftsmanship and my team that is helping me to pull it off. And this is really, I'm really proud for me and for them to hear this. And it has a bit of Bitcoin culture in it. I would just give you one example.

there is, you can mine in the game, not just Bitcoin, but like steel and stuff like this. And there is an old, one way you can get rid of your trash is there is a trash dump somewhere. And you can just, you know, put it there and basically they just get all the trash. It's the way you get rid of the trash, one of the way. And you can also mine in there. And what you do is if you mine in there, you will get trash. So my expectation is that nobody will do it. But there is a very, very slim chance that you can find an old hard drive with 8,000 Bitcoin.

And I know I cannot give this back to the guy who lost them. And in a way, I want to say thank you to him because he taught like his unfortunate adventure. I want to give him a hug because it's so cruel what happened to him. But the reason why now we care about our keys is because we'll all read the story. And in a way for me to be able to recover his wallet and game was like, I want to give a copy of the game to him and to say, hey, maybe there is a bit of closure in this. Right. So you can actually, one of the way you can cheat the game, but this is really hard to get because it's like very rare.

if you go there, you mine, you find it. And then you learn how to recover the seed phrase from a place. You input it in your wallet and then you can sweep it off and you get $8,000, which in the game is like you are multi-trillionaire because now Bitcoin has worked so much. But yeah, so there are a bit of Bitcoin lore into it. But again, the game is not about Bitcoin because Bitcoin is just the money. use this is just boring in the game it's just yeah whatever everybody use Bitcoin I just have to use it as well what's funny is the story is all the thing

that can happen to you I can't wait to see the first screenshot of the guy in the game who actually finds the 8,000 Bitcoin I think that'll be hilarious yeah that's that's great I'll toss it to Dred man any thoughts comments questions in regards to the game I've been a gamer for most of my Appalachians life kind of grew up our own computers and gaming and this like jason said brought back a lot of nostalgia a lot of good feelings um back when to your point you didn't have to log on to the internet to play a game you know you played it on your computer by loading seven or eight floppy disks you know so that it was really cool to see that um it's brought back to those roots but i've also been waiting for a while now

to see gaming really truly integrate with Bitcoin. And, you know, the games, they've kind of done that with, you know, places like Zebedee and Thunder Games where they kind of take a game that's already there and maybe put some kind of Bitcoin wallet on there or, you know, a Bitcoin component. Like you can get Bitcoin winning when you finish, you know, shooting or, you know, playing a ballgame. But this is much more native.

Like I like the fact that it's the reverse now, you know, It's like building a game around Bitcoin versus plugging Bitcoin into a game. And I love that about it. And I hope that there's more like it. I know that the Jeremy Rubin and the Judica team is working on a similar, not similar, it's different, but it's a mining game where you get resource management. You set up mills and mines and try to use different wind solar panels, et cetera, to mine Bitcoin. And the goal is to mine as much as you can.

But that's still just one aspect of it. I love that this game is a universe. It's everything that you could possibly think of in the world as if it's a simulation. As if it's, you know, we are probably living in a simulation, to be honest, we don't know it. So this is just a simulation of that simulation without losing all your Bitcoin. I love it. And I have one more thing. Have you thought of multiplayer?

Because we could all play this together. together. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I had a VC in Amsterdam who asked me about multiplayer. And yeah, look, I'm an honest guy. And I presented something I know I can do and I know my team can do.

Multiplayer, I've done multiplayer game before. So as I said, my background is in video game. I successfully made an open source video game project before, so I know this business. And then I also work now in simulation. So I think I'm uniquely positioned to pull this off. Multiplayer is not the thing you will do first, because this is like extremely complex.

It's like making the game plus networking, plus cloud, plus this, plus that, plus authentication, plus anti-cheat. It's like it is so much more complex. If I get proper funding, my dream would be that somewhere see the potential in this, gives me the resource to do this, we can do a solo version first, and then we could have like, I could build a team to do a multiplayer, or like a second version that is multiplayer.

But I want now to focus on non-internet game that can be played everywhere regardless of your hardware. The name of the game, right now it's more like a code name because the name of the game might not be even Bitcoin related. I mean, it could be like train pirate simulator or whatever, you know. But the current name is the Orange PIL simulator, which you will. find on my blog and urbanacker.net by the way is my blog if you want to check it out yeah so so yeah multiplayer not not now not now one one day if we if we get enough yeah i mean if if i get funding and stuff sure but but even if i get funding that will not be the first thing i do yeah got to get that you got to get the game ship first first

But it could be an eventual goal maybe at some point if it comes to that. But yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited to play around with it. I think it would be a lot of fun. But all right, gentlemen. Oh, yeah, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, you ask Linux native. I use Linux.

I use Windows. So yeah, it works on Linux. It works on Mac. It works everywhere. I use a game engine behind. the scene, so the game engine, as long as it's one of the platform that the game engine uses, it's fine. By the way, the game is also up, is not open source, but it could easily become open source because all the resource I used are open source.

So for now it's proprietary, but I would have, if, if the game is successful, I will be willing to make it open source. But first, I need to make sure that either I sell it or get funding, right? Which is a road check. Yeah. That's awesome, man. Well, I'm excited. Again, chicken and the egg thing too, right?

Because a lot of the Bitcoiners love open source projects. And like I work with OpenStats. I'm on the board there and we fund open source projects. So, you know, I know you probably want, I don't know, that's a thing you should think about if you want to open source it in order to get funding as opposed to waiting for funding to open source it. Yeah. I have quite some experience.

Yeah, I don't want to go too much in detail, but we could do have a private session because I know a lot about the economics of open source and especially in video game. It's tough because many open source projects, they have like a professional support. But you cannot do this with a game, right? It's not like I can say, well, there is a free version.

And then if you're an enterprise and you use this tool, this cloud service, whatever, you need to pay, No, I cannot do this with a game. So for me, it's a bit tough. But I'm willing to make it open source. I have no issue with that. I would love it. But I need proper funding first.

Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Well, maybe we'll funnel a few more sets towards your tally coin. But urbanhacker.net, you can check out there. And then if you go to tallycoin.com. And search OrangePills simulator, you'll find it there too. All right. So gentlemen, I'm going to start rounding this out.

All I'm going to do just for the tail end of the show here is really quickly. I'm just going to go do a quick round of any final thoughts or if you have like a recommendation that you want somebody to check out, whether it be like a book or a video or a blog or a, you know, anything that you've found useful in your Bitcoin journey, really any final thought that you may want to offer. And then where people can find you. It would be great. So let's do a quick round. Again, my final thoughts here.

I mean, our focus here has pretty much been, again, like the proliferation of Bitcoin through society in various means, whether it be people maliciously targeting individuals forcing them into a position where they need to learn, or whether it be people around the globe being able to actually hone in on the signal and the quality of instruction that people are all. offering, becoming much better. And, you know, and the tools that we, we all use to, to, to help us learn about Bitcoin, the trajectory is, is one that I think is going in a great direction. And I'm very excited to see all of those things happen. So, yeah, that's my final thoughts. I think we're going in the right direction. And people over, overestimate what can happen in a year.

underestimate what can happen in a decade. And I think next decade is looking very bright. But there'll be exciting things in the next few years to come as well. So I'll toss it to Irvin first. Any final thoughts? Anything that you want to get out before we wrap here? Okay. So I would say people should sometimes think more adversarily.

recently I was listening to Matt O'Dell explaining that some guy asked if he could test something on his node, whatever. And he was like, I mean, sure, it's a public node, do whatever. And then he was like, are you fine with the 300 gigabyte of database entry and the log of your lightning channel? And Matt was like, oh, that was what, that's what he wanted to do. And the simple fact that you could do this, right, like remotely. I mean, it was nice, he asked, but we have so many notes that are kind of open. And I think we, for me, there is no state that is against Bitcoin yet. Even China is fine with it.

Like, to me, a state that is against Bitcoin is like huge hard force against people who even remotely looked for Bitcoin on Google once in their life. That's what I mean by adversary. It's not, oh, yeah, sure. we ban mining or we prevent people from not using non-KYC. No, they are still fine. And I just wish people would think a bit more adversarial. Like, think about what happened in our recent history

because people were reading the wrong book. I will not say more because, you know, we keep it, you know, family-friendly and everything. But think about what happened in the 40s, right? just saying. And this was not even a new monetary system. This was a simple book that some people didn't agree with. And I wish people would be more sometimes thinking,

what is the worst case scenario and how do I protect myself against this? But don't get me wrong. I don't want this to happen, right? Nobody wants, but it could. Yeah. I think if again it's hindsight is always 2020 but if you can try and Think out a few steps ahead and and just It's it's always so tough to assume what's going to happen next, but Taking a few extra steps can help insulate you from a variety of different things. So yeah

Be diligent. I guess and Yeah, and one last thing I just I just forget to mention sorry If you want to know more about the video game I just showed, I did a full one hour and a half with the podcast, Ungovernable Misfit. Nice. Where I explain in detail, the project, the reasoning, et cetera, et cetera. So you can also listen to this.

And if you want a private demo and you have some funding, just DM me on Twitter and we can arrange that. Awesome. Awesome. Love it. Jason, I'm going to toss it to you next. Any final thoughts, things that you wanted to get off your chest as we wrap the episode? Yeah, I just, I think, circling back to the topic that I was talking about earlier, I think that if you're looking for a resource, I know we mentioned Alex Gladstein's article about the CFA Frank. He also has a very new article in Bitcoin magazine right now about the IMF and the World Bank.

All of those things are mentioned in my book that I'm working on too. But he also has a book out now. If you can't wait for mine, then you definitely should be reading. If you haven't already, check your financial privilege. I'm going to just throw that out as a recommendation to really understand the power that Bitcoin has to help vulnerable people all over the world. And to try to get out of a bubble if you live in sort of a developed Western nation, get out of that bubble and understand how money is broken. It's broken here. but it's also broken in much worse ways elsewhere.

So those are just a couple of resources. If you're interested in the book that I'm writing, it should be out at the beginning of this coming summer. I'm working on an academic calendar. So we're going to drop that at the beginning of the summer. And you can check it out at Bitcoinprogressive.com. And you can follow me on Twitter, which is on the screen. So thanks for having me.

Awesome. Very much looking forward to that, man. Can't wait for it to drop. That'll be another one to go on my bookshelf here. So awesome. Dredd, you get the final word, man. Any final thoughts, things that you wanted to get out before we wrap? Yeah.

First, Jason, awesome to see another educator in the space, man. I'm really happy to see the proliferation of that. So glad you're here. And my point's going to be very similar to urban, but probably on the other side of things because, yeah, I want people to, you know, think more adversarily and expect the fight because the next phase is then they fight you phase, right?

But at the same time, you know, don't just talk and hope for people to think differently. You know, put your head down and start building too. Like, Cypher Post, write code. And, you know, I've been trying to live by that persona for a while now and just keeping my head down and building as much as I can. Like, this is the fight that we're in. You know, we're not going to wait for the state of attack.

We need to build the tools to protect our, ourselves from now so that we have those tools when everything starts happening. And you know, you can do that in many different ways. You can do that by a running your own node. You can do that by learning to code. You can do that by helping people, educating people. You can do that just by talking to friends and family about this and making awareness. So it's really up to you how you decide to make that happen.

But, you know, I think that it's really up to us to build and not just talk. And the article I would recommend would be an article by Roy Scheinfeld. Breeze, he made a really cool article about the maturation of lightning. It's called Maturation of Lightning growing up by going vertical. Amazing article about the future of where we can go with the technology, similar to how other industries have gone vertical and specialization of things. That's a good article to read. And the last thing I'll say is that, you know,

the humble stack stats like Matt O'Dell always says, but Bitcoin may have a price and knowledge is priceless. So even though you're stacking stats, give away your knowledge as much as you can because, you know, it's where the true value is. I love it. I think that's a great way to, to cap it out.

Gentlemen, I will say, this was a great conversation. I really appreciate all you guys taking the time to come on and talk about the various topics. I thought everything was very, very interesting. And everybody watching, of course, all of their Twitter handles are actually in the show notes down below. So you can all of them follow and find out exactly what they're doing from their Twitter handles and go on from there. But yeah, gentlemen, thank you so much.

I really appreciate it. And you're all welcome back anytime. All right. Cheers, guys. I will see you soon. Everybody watching. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

I hope you guys enjoyed that. Give them all a follow. I'll say it again. These guys are all awesome. They're all working on incredible things. And I think it's worth checking them all out. Everybody, again, thanks. Do like, subscribe, share.

All those things, help a ton. Help get the show in front of more eyeballs. You can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Coin Kite, Start 9, Hoddle, Hottle, Shake Pay, Bill Fottle. They're all down here. You can also do a couple other things if you're so, inclined. If you've been checking out tutorials and stuff, or if you're curious about some of the things that we've been talking about and the free tutorials are not enough, I do one-on-ones.

So if you're ever curious about that, just hit up my website, btccessions.ca. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always hit me up with a strike tip, which, by the way, Edgar, ahead of the curve, you already dropped the strike tip. So thanks, man. I appreciate that. But yes, you can drop a Bitcoin tip on my strike page. Strike.com. slash BTC sessions. You type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button. You'll see a lightning invoice.

Or if you prefer, tap to the right, you'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your daily session.

Tuddle by Bitcoin.