BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Eric Podwojski, Rob Warren, Croesus ep289

Episode Date: September 17, 2022

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/epodrulz https://twitter.com/BikesandBitcoin https://twitter.com/Croesus_BTC 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $30 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $10 free with a savings balance of $75 or more for 15 consecutive days! https://start.ledn.io/btcsessions 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 BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards, earn sats back while you shop. https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 BITCOIN tips: https://strike.me/btcsessions

What is going on, everybody. Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? We got a killer panel today. And every single one of these guests is a first time to the show, I believe. So a bunch of brand newcomers to Why Are We Bullish, very excited to have them all. Now, as always, this is live. Anything can happen.

So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. 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 really, really do help get this content in front of more eyeballs.

I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we bring in our panel, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. This is the Bitbo.io dashboard. We're looking at $19,747 per coin. Single U.S. dollar will pick you up 5,063 sats. 91.2% of all Bitcoin have been mine. And in terms of fees, ooh, a little high, a little bump there.

30 sats per byte next block. I haven't seen enough like that in a while. Maybe I've missed it. But it has been fluctuating a lot. Even if you're waiting 30 minutes an hour, you're still looking at between 15 and 20 sats per byte. So, yeah, it's been a little errat. I was messing around with a RASPie Blitz the other day, setting up lightning channels,

and I thought I was going to be in the clear with a certain fee, and then I just ended up having to bump fees all over the place. So, I don't know, be careful out there. Use RVF. All right. Shout it to sponsor the show, coincite.com. These guys just have the best goddamn hardware out there. I love my cold card mark four.

I love everything about it. I love the air gabbing. It's so badass when you can plug in the little SD card, plug it into a 9-volt battery and execute an air gap transaction. It gives you chills the first time. But they've got a ton of awesome stuff here. The open dimes, the block clocks. By the way, block clock micro just rolled off the assembly lines.

So they should be dropping pretty soon here. Tap signer, Sats card, just all of the great stuff here. So check them out. Coincite.com. You can use the store and code VTC sessions for 5% off, everything there. ShakePay.com, if you're in Canada, easy way to be stacking sats, e-transfers in and out, no deposit or withdrawal fees, thin spread. If you sign up with the link down below, first $100 purchase will get you $30 for free.

You get the same deal every time that you refer friends and family and they do the same thing with your link. You can shake your phone every single day for free sats and get on a streak and build that up. You can also get Satsback Visa cards, tons of stuff happening over at ShakePay. So check them out. Links are down below for that. Lend.com. these guys have been particularly useful for me whenever there's a cash flow crunch. Of course, I'm earning Bitcoin.

I live on Bitcoin. So whenever there's a cash flow crunch and I do need dollars in a bank account, but I don't want to sell some Bitcoin. Well, I can deposit here, get a loan of dollars to my bank account within 24 hours. When I pay back those dollars, I get back the same number of sats. They do have savings accounts for Bitcoin and USDC with quarterly 3,000. third-party audits in which you can cryptographically verify that your holdings were part of the audit so you don't get jerked around Celsius style. They've got their B2X offering, Bitcoin-backed

mortgages, and those are dropping in select U.S. States soon as well as cross-Canada. So be sure to check them out, start.ledon.com.com.com. As I was saying, I live on Bitcoin, bit refill helps a ton with this. You can pick up every gift card your little hard desires with Bitcoin, both on-chain and via Lightning Network. You earn Sats back as you shop. You can get more Sats back with the referral program, top-up phone refills, lightning channels, and in the U.S. now, you can pay your bills.

So you can get on that Bitcoin standard. So bitrefill.com. There's a link down below for them as well. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, get into solid steel friends. I find that paper just doesn't cut the mustard, you know, fire damage, water damage. I don't want to deal with stuff like that.

So this time backing up my important Bitcoin stuff. With that said, links for all that are down below, but I'm going to stop rambling now. I've got to bring in all these guys that I've got on the show. Welcome to Rob, Krizes, and Eric. Very happy to have all you gentlemen. First time on the show for all of you. And as I understand, first time the internet is seeing the face of one of you. So we'll go down the line.

And we'll do a little intro. So I'll go to Rob first. Let the people know, who are you and what do you do? Cool. My name's Rob Warren. So I do currently growth at upstream data. We essentially build everything that you might need to put a mining machine into, whether it's a black box, which is going to be sitting in your backyard,

or something on the oil field all the way up to almost a megawatt worth of capacity. And I am a partner in a privacy-oriented hosting company called Distributed Hash. That's the best way the hash should be. Damn, that's awesome. And I will say, since we've got somebody from upstream in the house, I just, I just locked in my first ever minor. I got a what's minor coming in and I got a black box coming in. So be seeing those in a few weeks and there will subsequently be tutorials springing forth from that. Finally, it's about.

This is how it starts. You're in trouble now. It starts with one. I know. I'm sure my wife will be like, why is our house buzzing? What is happening? But yeah, no, it'll be a good time. Very excited.

Let's rotate down. Eric, welcome to the show. Let people know who you are, what you do. Yo, what's up, guys? Thanks for having me. My name's Eric. I work with Bitcoin Magazine on their business team. So I do a little bit of different things, but mainly account management.

So, you know, Bitcoin Magazine, we're the big media company. But we also throw the Bitcoin conference every year in Miami. So come out this year of Bitcoin 2020 and come say what's up. So besides Bitcoin magazine, I also do some personal things with Bitcoin. I have a little Bitcoin education company. I just try to educate as many new Bitcoiners as I can. Plus, my new thing I'm working on is trying to get Bitcoiners hired by Bitcoin companies. I think right now that the human capital coming into Bitcoin is enormous and it's only going to strengthen the network.

So happy to jam on that soon. I love that. That's fantastic. I love the brain drain of and so many bit corners that I've seen over the over the past number of years where they'll come in. I can't I can't think about anything else. And then I see them again a year later at like there's a bunch of people I met at Bitcoin 2021. And they're like, I just can't stop thinking about this. And then a year later I see them. And they're like, oh yeah, I'm working for insert Bitcoin company here. I'm like, yes. That's awesome. Awesome. Well, let's do one more little rotation. And I'm going to preface this rotation with, I wonder if we will see creepy face. That was the first. And prior to us even going live, the first comment. So, dude, introduce yourself, let people know who you are, what you do. Well, hi, everyone.

I'm creases. My real name is Jesse Myers. And so last week, I decided to finally come out from the shadows and be more public about Bitcoin. see if we can't try to or kill some people on LinkedIn and, you know, the professional sphere more broadly. So I run a small investment fund, which started out as altcoins and ended up just Bitcoin. And most of you know me from writing and making graphics about Bitcoin for, you know, trying to generally push Bitcoin education a little bit more. bit further. And that's what I will try to do more of now. Awesome. Well, dude, I'm very happy to

have you on the show. I've obviously seen and read a bunch of stuff that you put out there. So, so stoked to have you on. And likewise, for Eric and Rob, glad to have you guys here. So we're going to dive into it. Everybody watching, of course, thanks for being here. If you're new and unfamiliar with the show, this is why are we bullish? Very simple premise of the show. We go by the three R's. So number one, somebody's going to have a reason why they are bullish and they're going to get to rant on it. Number two, we're then going to all together riff on that reason until we feel satisfied. We've explored the topic. And then number three, we're going to rotate to the next person. And we'll do that until we've all had to turn. Very, very simple. I'm going to get us started

this week. And my topic is, is one that is kind of closer to home for me, but a lot of Bitcoiners have taken notice of this past week, about six days ago. Last Saturday, this came to a lot of people's attention. But Pierre Polyev has been elected as conservative leader. leader of the conservative party of Canada. So why the hell am I talking about this? If you're unfamiliar,

he is a huge Bitcoin proponent. And so he, the writing was on the wall for quite some time. In fact, I kept on poking and prodding him every time he would tweet something about sound money or how ridiculous things like MMT were and kind of getting down to the crux of why having a, a limited supply money and and would contribute to economic sanity for once.

I would always spoke in prod. Just just say it, Pierre. Say it. We know what you're thinking. And eventually he did come out in the open and start talking about Bitcoin. And I'm happy about this for a couple of reasons. Number one, I will say as a caveat, Pierre obviously is a politician. And to say I've been disillusioned by politicians over the past number of years is really understating it.

However, there are a few positives here that I see as steps in the right direction, promising things. Number one would be there's a number of what I would consider. consider solid bitcoinsers that have Pierre's ear. In particular, in Canada, a couple that jump out to me would be Jeff Booth and Greg Foss. They're both, you know, pretty, they are familiar with and speak with Pierre and have had in-depth conversations about this kind of stuff with him. I noticed that when he first kind of came out, he was using more broad terms like blockchain and so and so forth. And that message got very, very refined to the point where in conversations and videos that he was putting out online, people would begin to ask about crypto and things. And he would then specify Bitcoin.

No, while here I'm talking about specifically Bitcoin. Furthermore, early on when he still wasn't quite out in the open about Bitcoin, his speeches that he was giving on sound money very much like, all the key points that you would expect in like a Bitcoin standard or, or, you know, other other great kind of pieces of literature that have been putting, put out there by other prominent Bitcoiners. Turns out that, um, his 10 minute speech on the history of money in Canadian parliament was largely informed and based around the Bitcoin standard. He also subsequently was on the What is Money show with, uh,

Robert Breedlove. They didn't specifically talk about Bitcoin. I think he's, he's, you know, being cautious because the short, the, the high time preference of basically everyone else, of the legacy media of anybody that may oppose any of his ideas, they're going to be looking at the one-year chart of Bitcoin. They're going to be ignoring the fact that had you been, had you been opting out of inflation since Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015, you would have 70xed your life savings. But nonetheless, he's done a lot of things that I think give it a lot of promise. He went to visit Ali at Tihini's in Toronto.

So Tihini's being the restaurant chain that made Bitcoin their trillions. treasury asset. So they convert all their treasury, all of their savings into Bitcoin on the back end. And he came and did a speech there and bought Schwarma with lightning. So he seems to be on the right track. Now, a lot of people early on when he kind of came out of saying that he was supportive about Bitcoin and he liked the idea, it seemed like a long shot that he would ever get in a position to actually run against Justin Trudeau as as shot to become prime minister. Well, he he won in an absolute landslide in the conservative leadership. He got damn near 70% of the vote. So he is firmly the choice for the people that were able to vote in

the conservative race, myself included. Now it's just a matter of when and the current sentiment when an election does happen. But when it does happen, my take on it right now is it's probably a coin flip. It's still, it's not going to be like an easy win. It's probably like a 50-50 if things were to happen at some point this year. It looks like it could take longer than that. Like if the way that things work in Canada is, You can call an early election.

So Justin Trudeau can call an early election at any point, which he's done. He previously did it. So just to give you an idea, the last time he did it is he locked everything down and sent everybody checks and then called an election. So everybody felt safe and full of money and then said, yes, sir, I will give you my vote. So, you know, you can do those things strategically. And there is a four-year window in which you have to have an election. but calling an early one if you win that resets that time frame.

So he's effectively locked in until 2025 right now. If the party that he's kind of aligned with doesn't break ranks. There still could be an early election. There's a few things that could happen there. But as it stands right now, 2025. We'll see. But I'm just given all the shit that I'm, happened in Canada this year in particular.

At the very least, this is, it's nice to have something happened that seems to be a step in the right direction, a step back towards sanity, something that is favorable for Bitcoin and people that just like as little government as possible. and I think overall, even if Pierre Pahliav were to get in and kind of doing about face, I still think he'll be relatively favorable to Bitcoin. And at the very least, it is a time buying mechanism. That's kind of what I view politics as is because I believe that Bitcoin is inevitable. But in the interim, politicians can make it.

a hell of an uphill battle to get Bitcoin fully entrenched. But at some point, it becomes too widely used and too much of a mainstay of day-to-day people peer-to-peer transacting that you can no longer stop it. And I think if we can have a little bit extra time to establish that, it'll make much less of a headache. And I think Pierre is one of those things that can buy us some time. to get us closer to a Bitcoin standard so we have less headaches in the future. So that's kind of why I'm bullish.

Again, you know, caveat, never trust a politician. But at the same time, I still view this as a big positive. And it's my reason for being bullish this week. So gentlemen, I don't know. I'll open it up to thoughts, questions, whatever you may have. What do you guys think? Yeah. So it's an interesting point about that,

a Bitcoin friendly politician at the top of government might be able to buy time for Bitcoin to just keep developing. But how much does that matter versus just Bitcoin's mechanics playing out, getting more scarce, and the adoption curve progressing naturally, you know, organically through a grassroots bottom-up movement? Yeah, what are your thoughts on that? I think it allows the grassroots element of it to flourish unencumbered a little bit easier, right? Like if you're in a jurisdiction where they come out and they're like, hey, no self-custody. And, you know, people are still going to self-custody. People are still going to do all the things they're not, quote, unquote, allowed to do by the government.

But it's going to be much more under the radar. there's going to be people that are made examples of which will put off adoption by a lot of people and it'll have to get a lot worse before that peer to peer adoption. It would have to be really, really bad for people to take those types of risks. Whereas if it's if it's relatively open and as his messaging is, people are free to choose their money, it can develop a lot quicker. And even if somebody shitty got in after him and enacted a little bit of, bunch of terrible laws. I think it enables enough people to kind of get a good handle on it, that they, they understand that it benefits them and that somebody trying to shut it down has

ulterior motives. That's kind of the question, isn't it? It's, um, is the government going to be the handbrake or is it going to be the accelerant? And if it's going to be the accelerant, do we get things that we may not actually like along with that? Oh, you know, we support. responsible Bitcoin growth.

You can register your Bitcoin with every major bank through any province in Canada. Congratulations, you did it. It's really kind of curious, isn't it? Because in some sense, we're almost asking the state to do something that we know if they're hip enough and intelligent enough to understand what they're doing in the long run will fundamentally remove their monopoly on monetary violence over the people that live within that state. So is there somebody out there who actually believes earnestly that the state should be smaller and will actually go through all of the trouble of transitioning us to hyper-bitquinization?

Because there's really only two reasons why anybody gets into Bitcoin. You get into Bitcoin because you're curious. Like you're a tinkerer. You're looking for sick gains. And then you start learning about the network. You're a programmer. You're a cypherpunk. Or you get into Bitcoin because you have to get into Bitcoin.

And so that's kind of what I'm rattling in my head is. is he just the canary in the coal mine? Like if he is earnest, let's assume he's totally earnest about what he's saying. Is he looking at the financial state of Canada and going, oh, crap, like this is actually really, really bad. We're extremely exposed in terms of where we stand monetarily, in terms of where we stand in terms of our economy as a country, because El Salvador, they're always going to be the first. They're always going to be the first.

but to have a nation like Canada come and go, wait, we're actually kind of in that same situation, guys. I think we'll be second in line. That's a very different conversation. And so that's what's rattling in the back of my head is that is he there because he's curious or is he there because he is actually at that point of, oh, wait, we actually really need this. Yeah, Rob, I really like what you're saying there. And to go on that as well, I see Bitcoin needs, I think, a couple more years. of development before it's ready for mainstream. So I see Canada, a G7 country as it could be a Trojan horse for Bitcoin in a good way or

it could be a bad way. I could see Bitcoin not being ready for it in the short term. And that aspect could be bad. Now, let's say Pierre gets elected in 2025, give us a couple more years to develop, make better tools, better user interfaces. And by that time, having them come in, I think it would be great. But for me personally, I would love to see a couple more developing nations, another El Salvador or two, three, four of them come through. And then let's see a Canada come through.

What do you think we're missing? Sorry to interrupt. I'm curious what you think we're missing. What sets the fire off in everybody's head? I like maybe one more bull cycle because right now, you know, we're kind of in the bear market and really not a lot of people, at least non-Bitcoiners that I'm just friendly with, you know, my neighborhood. aren't really talking about it. Like they were a year or two ago. Like they knew that I was the Bitcoin guy.

They come to me and talk to me about it. But now you don't hear a peep about it. So I wanted to go a little more mainstream, to be honest. I want people to open up to the idea of it. And yeah, just have the apps. So like I heard a stat like one in 10 lightning transactions don't go through. Right. So later developing some more layer two,

layer three technologies, I think over the next couple years it would be really good, set us up in a really good position for that church and horse to come through. I think you're right. A couple more years. And that's as much as I hate having Trudeau as prime minister. I like the idea of that election not coming right away. Because right now I think it's a coin toss.

But we also have a prime minister who just announced that he's going to, he has a new inflation whatever inflation package to help people out in the midst of inflation in which he's basically

creating more money and sending it out to everybody to help them with inflation. So I think all Pierre needs to do is sit there and let Trudeau continue to make mistakes because the economy is

not getting better anytime soon. If it's not, if it's not the Bank of Canada raising interest rates, which we're, you know, we're, we just hiked again, which I'm sure you guys are about to hike again as well, quite a bit. Our interest rates are up a tonne as well. And, and so if it's not the economy tanking because of that, then it's going to be the inflation, right? It's one or the other, more or less.

And we're kind of right now, we've got both. Now inflation, obviously, it can be, they're killing demand in order to kill inflation, right? That's kind of what they're going after. But at the same time, Trudeau isn't even letting that happen. He can't help himself, but print more money and send more checks to undo what the Bank of Canada is doing. So they're basically fighting each other. And so he's going to print a bunch of money, give it to everybody. The Bank of Canada in turn is going to raise interest rates to fight the inflation that's caused by that.

And it's just going to be, it's going to devastate everything. And I don't want that to happen. I think it's awful. I see it actively affecting people that I know. People that, you know, I've got family members that are retired, they're getting wiped out with their investments. and their cost of living on a fixed income is totally screwed right now. But I think it's necessary to have it be bad for a while, like really bad for people to recognize that they have to vote in some other way.

And who they're not going to vote for is the party that has aligned with Trudeau in order to keep him in power so that they can't call an early election. and that would be the only viable party outside of the conservatives that could contend potentially with the liberals. And so I think at the end of it, people will just be so pissed at what shambles our economy is in. If you give them a year, maybe two years, the obvious choice will be the person

that's been screaming at the top of his lungs about how stupid all of these economic decisions have been. On top of that, right now he's getting, being pummeled by people saying, if you would have listened to Pierre when he brought up Bitcoin, you would be down like, again, using the one year time frame.

Give him a couple years, he's going to look like a fucking genius, right? Like, not only will they not be able to say shit about what he was saying about the economy as at large and the Bank of Canada and the deficits that were printing, but he'll also be able to say,

I was also right about this other thing, this option of using a different money and opting out of inflation. So I think a delay and timing on an election like this would be our friend. And then beyond that, it will give us additional time to build on Bitcoin and really insulate ourselves from government capture. Now, Rob, you were saying something earlier too about, oh, well, you know, we encourage everybody to get your own

sanction or you know government sanction Bitcoin. Oh fat compliant Bitcoin. Yeah, compliant Bitcoin in your bank account. I think it open I, you know, I hate the whole custody thing. I think you know, people

should self custody. I think that in the context of this, it at least gets people thinking about it. And then when they get screwed, more people than not will at least understand how to transact peer to peer. I wonder if it might be an AOL situation,

like when AOL and Comcast in the early days, you couldn't even email each other because they were little walled gardens. And so you had people, oh, you're using the open internet. You can just interact with anybody? Why can't I do that? And then the sudden realization, like, oh, I'm not on the internet. I'm in here. I think people will realize, oh, I'm not on Bitcoin.

I'm in here. and they'll opt for the other side of the wall. It's happened a lot this cycle at least, right? You know, the number of folks who were screaming from the top of their lungs, how stupid a lot of us were for just buying and holding, or as Matt O'Dell likes to say, staying humble and just stacking sats and not getting fancy with all of your nonsense, that then blew up. I mean, the whole three arrows debacle was case and point of what you're describing, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, I'll obviously be watching this. I don't think there'll be too much going on in the near term unless there's a sudden election, a snap election. But, you know, I'll be kind of watching. I think it'll be good if he kind of shuts up about Bitcoin for a while until there's an election or until things turn around. because right now everybody's going to, again, they're going to be exercising their high time preference and saying, I told you so, for a limited amount of time.

But yeah, so let's round it this topic. Let's do a little rotation. Everybody in the chat, thank you for being here also. I just wanted to bring in one from a great one from Peter here. I've never heard this before, but he said, keep the Ponzi going and laughed about it. So thanks, Peter. very insightful, very glad that you could join us, never change.

And we'll do a rotation here. So I'm going to jump to Rob. I'm going to let you take it away. And I'm just going to simply ask you, why are you bullish? Holy smokes. This is the perfect week to be bullish out of all the weeks because they did it. They actually did it. They took years in planning.

It took so much government grip. It took so much lobbying, and they did it. They got rid of proof of work on Ethereum. And it's the most insane thing I've ever seen happen in my entire life because it just completes the circle. And I think it has finally revealed to us that the emperor has no clothes. And we all looked ridiculous as Bitcoiners at a certain point to the broader community while they were telling us to be more inclusive about our crypto holdings

and to say that their Algo and their Doge and Shiba were doing just fantastically, and we were just so close-minded. They did it. They actually did it. You found hundreds of billions of dollars worth of an asset, and it jumped off a cliff simultaneously. And it's happening. Nothing could be more bullish for proof of work.

You know, the reason proof of work is so stinking important is because it's what connects you to reality. And there was this video that was going around with Vitalik, talking about how they can do this wonderful stuff in proof of stake that you obviously can't do in proof of work. They can make up their own physics. They can make the birds go underwater and they can let you walk on the ceiling when you go from your office to your bathroom and it'll be fantastic. And that's great. But you get the consequences of that. You get what that incentivizes, which is absolute nonsense. The reason proof of work is so important is because it grounds everything

that we are doing in the real world. There's no escaping it. There's, There's no way to get around it. If you want to contribute to the network as far as mining is concerned, you have to acquire an ASIC of some sort, at least to be competitive, you have to get an ASIC. You have to find a source of electricity. You have to figure out how to cool that thing and keep it running. You have to figure out if you're going to go to a pool, if you're going to self-mine, if you're going to solo mine, what are you going to do? How are you going to set your machines up? These problems only scale as you get bigger and bigger.

You know, setting up a megawatt facility is enough of a pain in the butt. And then you look at what these guys are doing on the tens or hundreds of megawatt scale. And you consider what they're doing is they're not just struggling to run a machine on the cheapest power possible. They're now negotiating with the energy producers and the grid and creating this extremely symbiotic relationship that is not just empowering to the miners themselves, but is empowering to the producers of the energy. because I can tell you, energy producers are producers like anybody else. If I run a hot dog shop, I don't want to stop making hot dogs. The only difference between energy and a hot dog shop is that if nobody comes up to buy my hot dogs, I stop making hot dogs.

That's not really how power generation works, or at least not in that same kind of speed. It takes time to ramp something up. It takes time to ramp something down. And there's this entirely free market symbiotic relationship that has emerged, not even going into all the crazy stuff with using your ASIC to take. heat your hot tub in your pool or your HVAC system or mining on flare invented gas, which somehow triggers both the leftists and the very conservative bitcoins at the same time, which I think is the most beautiful thing on the face of the earth.

But it still works. It has created an incentive where we as Bitcoin miners have to fundamentally be connected to what's happening in the world. We're operating in this free market. We are taking our own risks. And sometimes, as you could see over the last couple of months, you get over leverage. and you do some stupid stuff, hungry for hot dogs.

Yeah, if you can't stop making them, you've got to eat them. That's exactly what the energy is. But that's what I'm turbo bullish on now, because they did it. The mad lads did it. They jumped off the cliff. They had all of their big boy hats on with their NFT avatars,

and they were laughing at us because we were missing out on the revolution. And we were just sitting there building doing exactly what we do, which is focus on education and get a little toxic sometimes. And they just took it off the cliff, and you can see it two days afterwards where guys are posting messages saying, hey, how come the top seven staking entities control a super majority of the network? Wait a second.

Don't you need a super majority of validators to go ahead and execute certain things on the network? Isn't there only like 15 to 25% of all existent EF is actually what's currently staked? So what you're saying is it sub 20% of your entire network is now, essentially controlling the entire monetary policy of this entire experiment that you just Leroy Jenkins off a cliff. It's absolutely beautiful to watch. This couldn't be a better week for Bitcoin mining. So this is what I am just turbo bullish about right now.

Oh, I love that. I'll let you guys dive in first for I comment. Del Roy Jenkins. I love that. Yeah, to add to that, I completely agree with you. They kind of shot themselves in the foot. And I think Ethereum over the next couple years at least is really going to side with these bigger entities that will ultimately be against Bitcoin. Like you're seeing it happen right now.

You're seeing what is it, green piece. You're seeing the WEF. You're seeing the White House favoring proof of state because it's quote unquote green better for the environment and all that kind of stuff. So in a way, it's not we're all going to make it. No, it's you guys chose your side. you chose who you're battling with. We the people are going to be with Bitcoin. You guys are going to be with the big dogs and we'll see who wins.

That's kind of how I see it. Yeah, I wonder if we're going to see a period of a handful of years of Ethereum continuing to be more and more captured behind the scenes. But succeeding in their marketing push, for the broader public, you know, and that people will be onboarded onto Ethereum, not knowing that it's a cage that has been increasingly designed for them.

And I wonder if we might face a protracted battle here of having to try to educate and through increasing censorship on Ethereum, having to use that as leverage, to educate people about actually, well, this is why we Bitcoin. And I wonder if we're going to embark on a five-year period here of fighting an uphill battle against more powerful entities than us. But I still have faith that in the end, that ends up with open networks winning,

with freedom being preferred by people. people once they understand the choice they're making. But yeah, I wonder if this could be a tough slog. I think you're right in that in order to appeal to the state, this is like how you market it, right? This is how you market it. You fall in line with the ESG narrative. But in the background, everybody knows this thing is capital. and has basically in real time becoming an apparatus of the state.

Right. They're vying in line to be the platform in which CBDCs are built upon, right? The World Economic Forum is celebrating the merge on the front page of its website. And there's a reason why. And that's because the legacy system is proof of stake, right? the rich get richer. And that's exactly what what Ethereum on proof of stake enables.

And I think if you guys are familiar with Tip, tip underscore NZ on Twitter, she summed it up perfectly here. That proof of stake, circular logic explained. And yeah, the largest coin holders determine the state of the ledger. And the state of the ledger determines the largest coin holder.

So there's the circular logic illustrated, right? It's those with the most money get to dictate the state of the ledger and how it works. And the state of the ledger dictates who has the most money. So it's basically it reinforces itself and it inherently centralizes over time. I think I will say I think it was a little early and it's a little early for. for us to be laughing and celebrating the validators right now, because I think for a time that will appear to decentralize, right? I think a lot of, there's a lot of Ethereum that is still, like, not,

that is still locked up, right? And so that will be unlocked and people will stake in different ways. So I think for a period of time, you'll likely see like, oh, now there's more people staking over here and here, and it's a bit more dispersed. but inherently it will centralize, right? Like the average person is going to be, I think when you look at Ethereum already, it was plenty centralized.

So like this move of itself hasn't necessarily immediately contributed to even more centralization because that already existed. When you have a network that can change this entire consensus mechanism on a dime or that can implement non-backwards compatible changes to the protocol. Like in 2019, they had some upgrade, and I was working at some exchange that had to basically be sending out emails. Like, if you have Ethereum here, then you got to, you know, we're going to turn off withdrawals for a little bit until this fork goes through.

They fucked up, like Ethereum fucked up and forgot about the difficulty bomb. So they hard forked. And then they're like, whoops, why is the blockchain so slow? Oh shit, we forgot about this thing that's supposed to force us to go to proof of stake. Ah, we'll just hard fork around it. So they did another hard fork two weeks later. So if you can change your decentralized cryptocurrency on a dime, like twice in two weeks,

you either have the most agreeable group of people of all time, or you have a small number of people that actually control everything and a large number of people that are either just completely apathetic or unaware that these changes are even happening. And I think it's the latter. So nobody wants to admit it is that they don't know how it works. No. Like it takes them so long how to figure out an account-based system as opposed to like a UTXO system, which we have in Bitcoin,

that once they figure out how to set up a mega mask and mint an NFT, they then assume that they understand everything else that's going on. And it's kind of, I mean, it's kind of shocking to me. You know, I agree with you that it's, it's definitely not the time to kind of like wave the flag and go rah,

rah, but I do think that the pin has been fully pulled on the grenade. Like it's gone. It's hot now. And this is, this is a space where you don't win. just don't die. There is no winning for Bitcoin.

The way that Bitcoin wins is by not dying. So it is the best thing at not dying. The exact same way in being a provider in the space and being a business in the space, you will do very well until you do something stupid and then you blow up and you will never regain your reputation. And that's how it goes. This is a place to lose, not to win. So you have to be very conservative in the way that you build, which is why a lot of the tech bros

just aren't, aren't so pleased with Bitcoin development because they don't want to do that. They want to push something and see what breaks and go, oh, we can fix it. So I think we're past the event horizon, right? And we're just going to lose people every cycle, whether it's, you know, the initial pre-mine, whether it's the Dow, which lost a ton of development intelligence, or now is the Ethereum merge. Here it is again, another opportunity to just hemorrhage people from your ecosystem. Yeah. On your point about complexity there, I love this little quote from Greg Maxwell that I don't think ever got enough love, but he was describing Ethereum.

The general approach of the Ethereum crowd is they put something out, it gets shot down because it doesn't work. So rather than go back and fix the problems, they make it more complex. And if you keep repeating this, eventually you appear to be secure, not because you've actually created something secure, but rather you've created something. sufficiently complex, it's just too much work to criticize. Sounds like the government. This is why programs eventually. Yeah. This is why Ethereum won't

die. It'll just be assimilated by the Borg. Right? Like at what point does it become like is it dead? Like at what point do you remove enough parts of like any semblance of being decentralized and just merge it with the Fed? Yeah. Exactly. Like when when is it no long Like when is somebody assimilated by the Borg no longer humid when you when you switch out enough parts that they're just fully machine?

Same thing. When is it no longer a decentralized cryptocurrency? Well, you swap out enough things and become enough of an apparatus of the state. You're just the state. Maybe that's what the merge was actually supposed to mean. I was digging around with the like AI generated art and I was trying to get it to create an image of the Ethereum logo. like morphing into Klaus Schwab, but I couldn't quite get it to do what I wanted.

So we'll work on that. Yeah, it's, I love, I like this topic as a bullish topic because, like you said, Bitcoin just needs to not die. It just needs to continue existing. And, and that's enough.

It needs to keep pumping out blocks every 10 minutes. And keeping an option for people to earn, money that they control fully themselves. Right. So like, you know, we don't have to onboard everyone through Fiat gateways. Eventually people, so long as they have Bitcoin to earn for their goods and services that that works too, you know. Yeah. That's exactly right. Any final thoughts on this, Eric?

Yeah, I guess I'm curious how we as Bitcoiners can combat this. this upcoming marketing campaign from the Ethereum, from the quote unquote decentralized alt coin community that's proof of stake based. I see the attack vectors coming. You see it's happening right now with big centralized organizations. What can we do as Bitcoiners to say this is wrong? I mean, obviously we can do what we're doing right now. How do we do this at scale?

Like, how do we get this word out? Rob, I don't know. I have a lot of thoughts about this. Because there was this court case that was up in Adams County, Colorado, where they put a stay on a gentleman who owns an oil and gas company who was essentially running an upstream data product called a hash combo. You run natural gas out of a well. It's waste gas. It goes into the generator, runs through a generator, burns, produces electricity, makes Bitcoin. Kind of the sickest thing you could think of in your entire life. I can literally bring a digital market to any

oil field in the U.S. or Alberta anywhere on Earth. And they put a stay. They told him he can't do And they started to actually sue him for doing this because it was an unapproved use of the land. And we got together with a bunch of folks in the Colorado Front Range. That's the kind of area that I'm in. And we went out to the Adams County Commissioner meeting, not as some paid chills just to say, hey, we think you guys should be a little bit more considerate about what you're doing. Because you seem to be bringing this kind of heavy-handed environmental mindset, but that's not the entire story. And at the end of the day, what struck me during that meeting was that money talks, because we didn't know that the week before this guy that had just been told to shut down his wells

or to stop essentially monetizing his wells, they put him out of business, right? He said, well, listen, I'm just going to orphan the wells. If I can't make money off the wells, they're going to go into the state orphan fund, and they're not going to be useful because I'll just take the L on the balance sheet and I'll walk away from them. Well, it turns out that Adams County has over 200, 190 orphaned wells because it's one of the most productive places to generate gas, oil and gas in Colorado. And you have all these commissioners that are sitting there almost like, wait, come back, get back in the room. Because their only solution to not have to go to the state and go through this incredibly invasive process of dealing with these orphaned wells, which nobody wants to deal with.

But they can't actually say, they can't actually do anything productive because they've all become sort of hardcore environmental shills. They're in this double-edged sword where all of a sudden, wait, they want to negotiate. because it's actually better to keep people in business than it is to just run them out of town because you're actually injuring your county because the resources are just sitting there unused. It's ridiculous. You're leaving minerals in the ground. So at the end of the day, I think, you know, money talks.

There's a lot of really, really, really good marketing campaigns and reasons about how we kill 20,000 babies a year and future generations will be injured by our climate change contributions and A6 are sharp and we'll probably bleed you out. But at the end of the day, you know, good, good business and money talks, the ability for somebody to participate in the network and to mine and to find places to source cheap or waste energy and to make it productive, it's all that matters. That's all we're doing is miners. We're finding waste and cheap resources and we're

making it productive. And the second that we can't do that anymore, those A6 have to go into a box or they have to go pick up that hash hut or they have to go pick up that hash combo and they have to go ship it somewhere else because we're stuck. We're connected to the real world. And so that's, that's really our task as people who are in this face is that we are always going to be on the hunt for all of your trash and all of your waste and all of your extra. And if I'm willing to pay you for it, you are probably not going to run me out of town. You're probably not going to try to ban me and put me out of business and say that I'm the worst person ever when I'm running a business in your county and improving your air quality and increasing your tax base, frankly. So,

If anything, we'll make them more honest in the long run. But education is a long game, as I'm sure Ben knows, as the man with probably the most accrued YouTube videos on the source. But yeah, it'll just take time. But I'm very confident. I'm turbo bowl right now. It's interesting. Of course, you take it to the mining front. And that is one, you know, this major way, how we embed ourselves into society and business plans.

But I guess my mind goes back to onboarding people to understand that Bitcoin is the best saving technology that they can use for their own financial future. And just like as soon as you get anybody to think positively about Bitcoin and because they have $1,000 in it, suddenly they're open to why Bitcoin is good and hearing all the good things, mining and, and, you know, economic freedoms and everything. So, so I guess that's where, so luckily we have multiple fronts that we get to push, right? Like, we can educate people about how they could be using their waste or methane, whatever, to turn that into money and how valuable that is to all sorts of industries that currently have waste. But we also get to just

push, hey, there's a halving coming up. This is your risk-free increasing scarcity asset that you currently don't know about, but you're about to learn about. And 99.9% of the world doesn't understand these very simple supply demand mechanics that you get to front run them on. And just that, like, oh, that's such a valuable front to be able to push on. And that's obviously where my focus is. So it's, of course, your brain goes to mining and my brain goes to personal incentives for, you know, a risk-free savings technology. Yeah, I tend to agree with the how do you say creases? Cresis. Yeah. I didn't know the first time that I went on the podcast. Yeah, apparently it's creases. Okay, good to know. So tying it back to my opinion,

and I stated before how I think Bitcoin's not necessarily ready yet to face the big boss. I would really like to see we meant these new Bitcoiners from giving them Bitcoin through this bear market, right? Let's onboard new people the network. And they're kind of like boots on the ground, just like all over the world fighting for Bitcoin in a way. So when the battle comes, when the big money comes in fighting against Bitcoin, now we have all these little soldiers saying, no, no, no, no, Bitcoin's good. So that's, I would like to see up more years just to see more, more, the smaller guys get more of a share of the pie before the big money really flows in.

As painful as altcoins are, I think they create an amazing amount of cover for Bitcoin. We just get more time to spread this viral marketing campaign and try to reach more people until suddenly we have, you know, the Canadian PM on board. and senators in the U.S. And surprise, it's too late to stop it. It's already, it's been too late to stop it for a number of years, I think. Yeah, I agree. I think it's great distracting regulators who are trying to stamp out a bunch of unregulated, unregistered security.

Or Gary Gensler, you know, he's trying to make his case while this market is moving so fast. And like, they're just hurling themselves. into new scams and whereas he's trying to like figure out okay how do I even attack this massive surface area that is constantly evolving yeah we're guys they should know better though yeah we should know better he he taught a course at MIT on this stuff yeah I mean it's it's nice to keep everybody distracted while we're we're upending the global financial system in the background so I think I think it's an overall positive. But I mean, no matter what gets thrown our way, whatever shit regulations come down the pipe, the economic incentives will continue to be there. And all

it's going to take is from jurisdiction to a jurisdiction, you've got to have some that are favorable and some that are not. And then you've got to see the favorable ones begin to benefit economically. The other ones will change their tune. It may take some time, but it'll become pretty evident, I'd say in the, you know, especially over the next decade or so, it's going to, it's going to become more and more clear over time that, hey, perhaps you should figure out how to integrate this thing into your society and benefit from it rather than, like you said, running out of town. So, yeah.

With that, I'm conscious of time. So I want to keep things rolling here. Fantastic topic, Rob. I really enjoyed that. But we're going to roll over to Eric now. I'm going to bestow upon you the same question. Why are you bullish? Yeah.

So my thesis on my current bullishness, it revolves around human capital. So that comes in two forms. Well, human capital being Bitcoiners. So I'm bullish on Bitcoiners, really. The two forms it comes in is all of the new Bitcoiners that were minted in 2020, and even this past year, right, saw the price run up, gotten a Bitcoin, probably got wrecked. You know, maybe shit coin traded a little bit too.

But now, you know, they're in the weeds. They're reading the Bitcoin standard. They're making transactions. They're doing peer-to-peer transactions and all that kind of stuff that Bitcoiners do. And now they're learning the ropes, right? They're learning what makes it different from the rest of all the other cryptocurrencies. So I think there's a whole new wave, call it the class of 2021, whatever it may be, that are learning a ton right now,

and they're going to be ready to go in the next year or two, once again, gain some more knowledge and confidence, to either, one, join the Bitcoin workforce. So there's a ton of Bitcoin companies, and there's more and more every day. And two, just spreading the word and educating others. So my first part, right, the human capital, we got all these new bitcoinsers.

Now the second part to it is we got all these Bitcoin companies. It's only been the last few years, I would say, companies such as my own Bitcoin Magazine have gone Bitcoin only. So these companies realize, hey, it might be worth it for us just to focus solely on Bitcoin, focus on the signal, ignore all the noise because there is a, I guess, a business case for that. So just digging in some research I did this past week. I know CK from Bitcoin Magazine has this list on Twitter of like over 600 predominantly Bitcoin-focused companies. Some of these are huge. Some of these are smaller. Think about that. And that's just probably in like the U.S. Europe and consider the rest of the world too. I'm sure there's over a thousand now. And they're all hiring Bitcoiners. So as the network is growing in market cap, right? There's new Bitcoin companies coming on board, hiring more and more Bitcoiners that are well educated. And I think Bitcoiners are some of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. So think of all this, this human intelligence, human capital, coming in,

to work on the network. I think it's it's really bullish. My second point here is we do this thing at the bitcoin conference called pitch day and I know as of last year we had over like we hosted over 400 Bitcoin companies at pitch day. So pitch day is essentially just like shark tank but for Bitcoin companies. So we have VCs and then startups come in pitch their products right. So think about that last year, there were over 400 or so Bitcoin companies looking for startup money with really great ideas. I can imagine this year at Bitcoin 2023, there's going to be double that at least. So every year you're seeing this trend go up and up and up, up into the right, all these new Bitcoin companies that are hiring Bitcoiners, Bitcoiners that are studying right now soon to be

Bitcoiners that are learning why Bitcoin. And overall, yeah, I just think the people are going to be strengthening the network like never before that's my case that's fantastic i and i i i won't talk too much here i'll give the other guys a chance to chat but i love the the best thing about the bear markets is you get to see what's being built you get to you know everybody's actually building stuff um like the bull markets nothing gets done right no no no distract just for you yeah yeah everybody's running around trying to get something done, but like real, let's be real here. Like during an actual bull run, like 2021, how much actually got done? No, you got to showcase the shit that got built in 2020 and 2019 and 2018.

Like 21 was like the year of lightning of being like, hey, there's a thing. It's here. Everybody thought Bitcoin couldn't scale. This is now a thing that's available. It's not perfect. There's work to do. But like, holy shit, you can send this instantly. And it's like really, really cheap.

and fast and it's amazing. But right now, all the stuff that's being worked on, all the improvements that are being done, all of the, again, like layered technologies that are being created, the companies that are coming about, the Bitcoin focused companies that are coming about, it's huge. And to the public at large, they hear none of it. So it'll be, and to your point about early on, you were talking about, you were talking about it. talking about like, oh, there's, we need some more time. We need people to, to come and, and, like, learn and be onboarded and to give us time in case there's bad regulations and

everything. I think that in terms of public perception, most of the world has now had its first touch point with Bitcoin. Like, no, no. very few people would you ever say the word Bitcoin to and they wouldn't know of it. And what they would probably know now is that it was a thing and it crashed. Like most people, unless they've been around for a longer time and they know that's happened multiple times. Now everybody, more or less everyone in Earth has heard the term Bitcoin, knows it's digital money or whatever and that it crashed. well they're about to have their second touch point at some point in the next couple of years where they see again like the price ticker and it starts being all over CNBC again

and it's still around and now the whole world will go wait what the fuck I thought it was dead I thought it I thought it crashed I thought it was over why is it still here and and and now it's going to be the real life uh iteration of of that old video the guy made don't buy Bitcoin. This one time? Yeah, this one time, Bitcoin and it crashed. It's that.

I will challenge you though, Ben, because I, my wife, my wife was at a company event yesterday and she, we jumped in the car together to go an appointment afterwards, and she said to me

that she was talking to somebody I think knew with the company, and they said, oh, well, you're married. That's great. like what's your husband doing? She said, oh, he works in Bitcoin. And she looked her dead in her eyes.

And she said, what's that? Oh, man. So my wife then had to explain to this person what Bitcoin was, which may or may not have been one of the finest moments or most exciting moments in our marriage so far. Because the number of times that I've been like, I need you to come over here. Like, we're going to send this transaction.

I need you to understand how it works. Like, okay, check out these seed words. You have to understand these seed words. Like, here's how it goes together. Like, here's how the pieces fit together. So the number of times that I've been, like, very exuberant about this, and she's been incredibly patient, you know, it seems like it paid off. I think that we found the last person in the world who never heard of Bitcoin and explained

it to them. To hit on your bigger point, which is the education point, which I couldn't, I couldn't agree with more because education scales nonlinearly. and, you know, good education is just another force multiplier on that. You know, the better that you can do it, not just extending the reach of your education, but the quality of your education. Like, I still feel like I think what you're kind of alluding to, Eric, is like this idea of work, we're still kind of fumbling around looking for like the killer,

the killer app, the killer understandable use case where everyone just wakes up one morning and goes, Bitcoin. Because for all of us, it's sort of a do-your-own research. ecosystem where you have to just bang your head against the wall for a little while until the parts start to come together. And then you're like the schizo meme with all of the red lines connected. And then that takes you another four years to actually figure out how to explain things properly in a coherent way that makes sense. But I couldn't agree more with you that like something is very characteristically different about this cycle. Because my sort of personal thesis on it is

that I think that we finally hit the elbow curve in not just a, adoption of the asset and understanding of the network, but the elbow curve and the number of people that are growing as participants of Bitcoin overall. So maybe we're growing, you know, 5%, 10%, whatever that sort of annualized Bitcoin maxi conversion rate is per year. I'm sure somebody out there could put an estimate on it. But over that fixed time period of year one, year two, year three, year four, it feels like 2020, 2021, 2022, that little series was us hitting that elbow curve where all of a sudden there were a lot of people bumping into the walls going, hey, I'm new here, what's going on? And all of a sudden education became incredibly

important because you always have, in an exponentially growing system, the new entrance to the ecosystem always outnumber all of the OGs. And so if you don't have people that have been through a couple of runs and can coherently explain things and can say like, sit down, don't touch that, don't buy that. Don't show me those 12 words. Okay, we're going to walk through this together. If you don't have people that can actually do that in a functional and coherent way, then you're just kind of sending them off the rails, right? They're just kind of bumping, their NPC kind of just bumping back into the walls. So I could not agree with you more that this whole, this whole very, very important time to be focused education is now. Like now is the time to have really good

education in the space. I want to plug Ben real quick, too, because think about Ben Sessions here, right? Started making YouTube videos free to the world and he's a Bitcoiner. So he's coming it through the lens of the Bitcoin and trying to teach other Bitcoiners. Right. So the past couple of years, Ben's been making this archive of amazing quality videos. We need a couple more Ben's that are happening right now. Rutz released this entertaining plus really great quality education resources to the world on these platforms that regular people go to, whether it be like, I don't know, YouTube, TikTok, you know, all of them. Let's just get the word out quality education such as what Ben's doing.

I think we're going to see more and more of this come this cycle and that will just breed more and more Bitcoiners. It's going to catch like a match, basically, just a bunch of matches all over the place. I would love to see there's definitely been a lot more. There's definitely been a lot more quality education over the past few years. Like when I first started making stuff, it was, I mean, I started a channel because I couldn't find anything to like, I'm very visual learners. So that's why I started making the tutorials. But there's been so much.

And I think this is why you see the growth of people going Bitcoin only is because I think ideologically and the, like, like the technical nuts and bolts of how Bitcoin works has been distilled in and the goals of what Bitcoin hopes to achieve. All of those ideas have been distilled so well and and told through so many different creative metaphors that the, the message is so consistent and coherent across so many different mediums that it's really hard to ignore versus the cluster fuck of explanations why all this other stuff is necessary, which spoiler alert, it's really not.

And I think that's why we see a lot of Bitcoin only. I would love to see a solid, like somebody to, I don't have the bandwidth to do it. But like if somebody was really solid on like TikTok and could just drop like, hey, here's a Bitcoin only wallet. Here's how you spin it up, back it up. And, you know, or like, hey, here's how you connect a wallet to a node. Just simple shit like that where you can like or just like splice it really, really quick. so somebody can pause, do the step, pause, do the step. I would love to see content like that.

And one thing that's very encouraging is I was just in France for surfing Bitcoin. Actually, this is the shirt that I'm. Yeah, that's an awesome shirt. Yeah. It is a sweet shirt. I really like it. But so I was in France for a surfing Bitcoin. And they've got a YouTuber in France does all like some English content, but a lot of French content.

It's very shit coiny. over in France. But there's this amazing group of plebs that like this core group of plebs that are just pumping out incredible content. And I've got to say that this guy, he's like French me. But he's, I think, how's his hair? I was about to ask that. Well, we'll have to, we'll have a discussion.

Maybe I'll convince him to do the inverse or something. We'll see. But, but, but I've got to say, what he's built is impressive. And I think the only reason that maybe he isn't as well known here is just because it's a lot of French language stuff. But he's built out a team. And not only does he have like the technical practical stuff, he also has like a track on Austrian economics and a track on mining and a track. So it's all like very segmented.

Like I want to learn about this specific aspect of Bitcoin. and there's video series on everything. He has like a full set of free open source courses and everything. It's pretty wild. So I'll pull it up for later in the show. I'll give a shout out before the show ends. But yeah, incredible resource for the French-speaking Bitcoin Republic to check out. And I would love to see even more of that here and around the world in different languages.

So yeah. Kresis, sorry, I interjected before you got to same. anything, but I don't know if you have anything further to add on the topic. No, it's interesting because I guess I was sort of thinking about, for my topic of why I'm bullish, it's this comes into it of I was reflecting today about where I was this time last cycle, like in terms of my journey. And basically, I just got wrecked by alt coins in 2018 and then in and then in 2019 the real the real like uh final nail in the coffin for it was um bitcoin bounced off the bottom in summer 2019 late spring um but altcoins didn't and and that

that's what finally broke my remaining conviction that there was a place for altcoins And so from that point on, I had to go through the hard journey of like, all right, maybe the maximalist were right. Let's see what the hell they were talking about all this time. Oh, this makes a lot of sense. And then, you know, so I was what you were talking about last cycle. And so any contributions that I've made to Bitcoin have all happened since that point in last cycle. So who is coming through that part of their journey right now? There's got to be some huge new cohort of people who got screwed by Doge or, you know, Shiba Inu coin.

Or they're starting to question Ethereum because of all the changes going on. Who knows what are the reasons there? And who knows, you know, what's going to be the catalyst, what's going to be the next? nail in the coffin for this new cohort that is forced to learn about the Bitcoin perspective right now. But yeah, so it is exciting that there's human capital. There's a ton of human capital that's excited already in Bitcoin. And then every cycle, we're going to capture some new incremental slice because, frankly, because people get excited about altcoins and then get wrecked. This is my journey. And then they're

forced to unlearn what they thought they knew and then learn the Bitcoin perspective because it's the thing that, you know, the phoenix that emerges when the, the flavor of the cycle, alt coins don't emerge from the ashes. So yeah, so I guess I was, I was just kind of stuck thinking about how true it is that every cycle there is some, there's some like interplay between the onboarding of new people and then the increased educational content and production and products that come from a larger base of excited people and how Bitcoin's mechanics guarantee that that just keeps happening. Every four years, we're going to capture some new slice of people through their own painful journey. Everyone's going to have a painful journey.

And the product of that is, you know, once you see the orange light, you don't unsee it. And, you know, so we just keep amassing a larger and larger base of people who are focused on Bitcoin. So, yeah, that's a good thing to be bullish on, bullish on the accumulation of human capital. Yeah, absolutely, man. I I well again, I guess we're kind of already segueing into into your your topic. So I mean, we may as well just roll with that's if that's all right then. Sure. So what I was what I talked with with everyone here about was that I'm excited about.

I'm bullish about where we are right now. And so I talked about, you know, thinking about my where I was this time last. cycle and how there's a whole bunch of people in that place right now. But just in terms of the literal price mechanics of Bitcoin, we are in that bottom zone. We are in the refractory period after the crash when we go down below where we probably should be in terms of a natural price equilibrium based on the amount of Bitcoin being mined every day and the amount of humble sat stackers that are trying to gobble those up. So this doesn't last for long.

This last time it was the first four months of 2019, where we were down in the 3,000 range. And then I got caught on the sidelines. You know, this was part of my humbling. And a lot of people right now are going to get caught on the sidelines because it feels so bearish. And so I've learned through my hard lesson not to fall for the bearish sentiment here at the bottom. That's just how it's how it feels at the bottom.

I haven't quite learned the flip side of how to be bearish at the top. It's very difficult to learn that lesson, I think. Especially when, you know, as you guys know, my focus is on like the long-term, potential of Bitcoin and I think it goes to 10 million a coin in today's dollars, you know, in our lifetimes, which is crazy. But that's what I think the numbers point to. So it's hard to get, it's hard to get bearish when we get to 70,000. But anyway, so we right now are at a place, I had to do the math right before this. I like to talk about, you know, how much Bitcoin there is per person in the world. There's 250,000 sats per person.

if you spread it evenly. And right now, I couldn't believe this, but that costs $49 right now. So, you know, in my head it's still 100 or 120, but right now that's $49, which is not going to last because that's, you know, you spread out everyone's savings

or everyone's net worth. And that doesn't add up to $49 a person. And so, yeah, so I, you know, I think about how bearish the, the broader sentiment about Bitcoin is and how it finally feels, and this is really encouraging, it feels like the public views Bitcoin is dead, finally. Like there's something in the last month or two where it's like they've stopped so much celebrating the decline.

And now it has started to transit. into like, oh, that happened and it died. And that's like, it's such a nice turn because that's when, you know, that's when the bottom is actually starting to set in. Yeah. And so, you know, the next having is, is in late April, 2024. So we are, we are well closer to that one than the last one now. and the mechanics are inescapable.

You have new supply. Demand doesn't change on, you know, on net. And we have the next supply shock, the next supply shortage. Price equilibrium has to reestablish itself. The only way is up. And then we go through the whole amplified price spike because everyone piles in and gets too excited and speculators show up. and then we have a whole bubble.

But on the back end of that, we have a higher low. So now is the time to get excited. And, you know, we had a peak of 70,000. We're at 20,000 now. Do we not get back to 70,000? You know, I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're looking at 100, 200. And that would put in that if we do achieve that,

that would happen in the, next three years. So you're talking about one hell of a cager. If you actually zoom out enough to focus on right now is the time where we are in that bottom zone, even though it feels shitty, that's where we're going. So, yeah. I had a quick question. Actually, Rob could probably answer this. So right now, today or this week, we reached an all-time high for overall hash rate, right? in a quote unquote bear market, what was it like in 2019? I wasn't following hash rate back then. Like, was that at all time highs as well?

Oh, man, I was about to ask a question too because Kouris has this like, because you're hitting on something so interesting, which is that like it, it kind of doesn't make sense. Like why is hash continuing to go up when hash price, which is sort of like the stats per terra hash or dollars per terra hash in fiat? Is that an all time low? So like right now is the point where everyone is getting. squeezed. If you do not have

either ideological reasons for stacking no KYC Bitcoin, which you don't mind doing at a premium, or access to extremely favorable energy, you don't mind. But something very odd is happening is that people are continuing to build. I mean, 2019, when you were starting to get into the run-up, the same thing always happens, right? Approaching it, you start to get a pinch.

in the market and then something pops and things go asymmetric on the mining side very quickly because what you have to remember is that mining has fixed input costs in the way that you construct the business. So if I contract with a utility and I'm going to pay you, you know, five, six, seven cents per kilowatt hour and the profitability of my S-19 is sitting at, you know, 11, 12, that's maybe my break even, 11.12 cents per kilowatt, I can get squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze during that bear market. But as soon as stuff pops, I can make everything back. I can make everything back in four months because my costs are the exact same thing, but I have this insane asymmetry in what I'm going to be making for the simple reason that you might in a Clark Moody

dashboard see one exahash going on to the network. But in reality, that's thousands upon thousands of machines that have to be either built in a location, it contracted with a utility, a power purchasing agreement has to be put together. Those guys are maybe going to curtail on certain situations, whether that's seasonal or environmental. The stuff that you're seeing coming online has a very, very asymmetric upside and it can't respond. It literally can't respond. If price triples tomorrow, you're going to have some very happy Bitcoin miners for a good amount of time because you cannot triple hash rate in even six months. Because the hardest thing isn't even getting A6. If you wanted to, if you wanted to come to me and buy

100 A6, I could negotiate a good price and get them to your door within, probably. probably like early October. I could get them to you in like a couple of weeks. If you wanted to set up somewhere to plug those in, if it's not hot right now, try to go find a transformer. You know, a transformer is just a huge spool of wire

that takes electric from one source, like your substation or your primary power, and transforms it down so that you can actually power your miners. Try to find one of those. And try to find one of those. can actually power a couple of megawatts. It's not going to happen. These dudes are going to be laughing at you

because they're selling to machine shops. And even if you can get an allocation for one or refurb one or one that isn't going halfway across the world to go power somebody else's development because now you're competing with civic development, building cities and neighborhoods, you could be looking like eight months out, 12 months out. So that's kind of the dynamic of.

So it sucks and it's your downside to protect, but when it gets hot, it gets hot real quick. The question I had for Koresis is actually hearing you, because it's something that I'm so, I'm more like Ben where I'm more like physical and visual and I got to have my hands on it and mess with it. And I'm always impressed by guys in the more like analytical fun space. When I hear you sports, the think boys. Listen, I'm apt to put my think boy hat on every once in a while. But it strikes me that you're so, you have this just like robust confidence in,

here's where we are right now in the cycle, so to speak. And I'm so impressed about how you get there. Because the way I kind of get there and have to convince myself was like, okay, we're going through another cycle. This is normal. You know, you see, you know, less inquiry to the business side. And then you see, okay, that drops on the intake. And then you go, okay, well, actually stuff.

stabilized for the last couple of months and we're actually starting to get way better people coming in talking to us looking for these kinds of services that's actually a really positive upswing that looks to me like a bottom how do you how are you so confident looking at it from your perspective like what is it that gives you that kind of yep there it is because for me it's seeing like inbound leads or inquiries or or the dynamics of the space I'm curious how you perceive it yeah that's interesting question it all comes back to just a bit of reverence for supply demand and just as a concept really, the math of supply demand. And then the inevitability of 900 Bitcoin a day now, 450 a day in less than two years.

And then that difference, that no longer being mined 450 a day gets, eaten out of the market until the only way is up, you know, until you have a shortage, an acute scarcity event, and then a repricing. And so it all comes back to hard and fast math that, you know, to be fair, like in 2009, 2011, 2012, I would not have been convinced that this should necessarily work that, that, you know, Bitcoin is a savings technology based on increasing scarcity. But now we have a track record of seeing that play out. And then the fundamental part is that there are enough people in Bitcoin who want nothing more than to accumulate more Bitcoin, that there's your base, right? So like, it doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter today

if we get any new believers between now and the next having. All that has to happen is that the believers, you know, don't unsee it between now and the next having, and people keep stacking stats. You could even lose a good chunk of people, but so long as you don't lose half, so long as you don't lose half, like, you know, in April 2024, then you have a scarcity event.

And, you know, so that, That's how, like, I turn it over in my head just thinking about the pure math of it. And, you know, I come from the business side and an MBA. So I think about markets and I think about supply demand more in an abstract kind of way because I spent so much time in classrooms learning that stuff. And when I turn it over in my head, there's just only one outcome. And that's increasing scarcity, which makes, which makes, which makes, this a savings technology? And coming back to your point earlier, I wanted to say earlier that, I think Pierre Rochard has come up with like the killer app for marketing Bitcoin. And

we need to refine it or figure out new ways, new media to broadcast that. But Bitcoin is savings technology. Bitcoin is the 401k or the mortgage that is forced savings that you've build into your financial plan, and it's going to outperform those assets on a risk-adjusted basis, because it has math that 100% guarantee it has increasing scarcity. You know, obviously, in a climate where we've bid asset prices to the moon because we went from 15% interest rates in 1981 to zero. and something's got to give. And that's going to be the world.

The traditional assets are going to give. But here is this new asset that has increasing scarcity that the world has underappreciated to date. So there's your killer app. This thing is how you build wealth in the 21st century in a climate where everything has already been bit out of reach of millennials and zoomers. And we just have to like find the right combination for Bitcoin is your savings plan.

Bitcoin is saving technology. Bitcoin is your your digital mortgage, whatever. We have to find that. And that'll be just iteration and new people. People who aren't in Bitcoin right now, there's going to be some zoomer who comes in next year who's who thinks that Bitcoin's a scam right now. And they're going to come up with some brilliant way to like synthesize that idea and advance it.

make it better and that's how Bitcoin's going to go. So I don't know. That's why I have such confidence in this is it's the combination of, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this math and these mechanics, and there's no way out. The price goes up. That's the only release valve on this asset. So it's the combination of thinking about that a lot and seeing this is the only way

that this can possibly. behave going forward. And then simultaneously talking to people and realizing that 99.9% of the world doesn't understand that. Has no idea that there is a 21 million cap. He doesn't know that there are halvings. So this is like a, this is an economic reality that plays out every four years and is going to keep doing that. And 99.9% of people still have to learn that this is the best asset for them to hold over their lifetime. And so like that's that's just that's exactly where you want to be. You want to be in that place before everyone's figured it out on something that is risk adjusted,

a better investment than anything else. So, you know, when I think, the more I think about it, the more excited I get about Bitcoin every time. I don't have enough Bitcoin, man. So I wanted to touch on something you were saying earlier about, you know, figuring out like the amount of dollars you need to spend to have the, the evenly distributed amount of Bitcoin per person. It was something like 50 bucks right now or whatever. What I would be curious about is I would love to take the equivalent existing amount of fiat in the world today,

like the M2 money supply, divide that up equally for the population of the planet, which I took a look and I think it was somewhere in the realm of like $2,500 or something like that. So technically speaking, like if, of course, this is like evenly divided. So then I would want to then take that number and say, what would be a comfortable lifestyle?

Like what, what do the 1% the 0.1% of the world have in terms of Fiat as a percentage and then figure out the percentage of Bitcoin to live that type of a lifestyle if Bitcoin were the de facto currency for the world. I think that the better measure would be an even spread of global assets because, unfortunately, we live in a time where we have demonetized money and we have monetized everything else. Yes. So I think I've done that calculation before.

And I top of my head, I think it was like 35, $45,000 apiece, even more. spread obviously, you know, the 1% own a massive portion of that. But then, you know, so then M2 would be 5, 10% of that, you know, of your average person's net worth is your average person's cash holdings. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Because it would be, it would be interesting to basically do the math, work it out, and say in order to like, in a a hyper-bitconized world, I would need to have this much Bitcoin in order to have the comfort and standard of living of this particular person. You should call it the Stack to Flex model.

Well, I've tinkered around with this a little bit, and that's where I end up coming out with my like 10 million per Bitcoin numbers. is there's 900, maybe a thousand trillion dollars worth of assets in the world. And what percentage of that can Bitcoin absorb? If you try to break it down to how much of that 900 is store of value, the store of value function, it's probably something like 400. And of those store value assets, it's like mostly bonds that are, you know, losing money in inflation adjusted every year.

And so Bitcoin outperforms them, right? So how long does it take before the world realizes that Bitcoin is a better return on there, you know, a risk-free return that's better than bonds. And then how much of bonds will migrate over to Bitcoin to try to be where the actions at. And then you have to add in, you know, how much of gold is captured, how much of the collectibles market. I think it comes out to something like half of the store value bucket.

So you get like 200, 200 trillion in, and. state relative value for Bitcoin, right? So that still leaves, you can still have a lot of money stored in real estate. You can still have a lot of value stored in equities and cars even and art. But Bitcoin takes a good chunk of the world's asset value and just absorbs it. Like Trace Mayer always used to say the, the blueberry that gets hooked up to the city main, the, the, the water main for the city and can inflate infinitely. It's the black, the black hole on the world's balance sheet. So that's how you come out to like, you know, that's how you come out to 10 million per coin. And in, in that world, you're talking about being 20% of Bitcoin is 20% of the, of the,

the world's assets. So if you are overweight right now, Bitcoin, if you, if you have, if you have, I guess, in theory that would mean all you would need is 5x the average person's Bitcoin to to double your average net worth you know if it just just right there you know if it ends up reaching that end state if you have instead 250,000 sats you have 500,000 stats you have 500,000 Sats, you, or sorry, 5X, 250,000, then you would double your end state net worth versus the average as a person. And anybody who's in Bitcoin right now has well over 5X, the average person's share of Bitcoin. And so you could do the math pretty quickly on what it would take to be the equivalent of a

high net worth individual, which I can't remember. I think ultra high net worth might be 25, 30 million, something like that. And so if you're talking about Bitcoin going to 10 million per coin, that would be a 500x. So you would not need to have all that much in it to end up crossing that. relative threshold of ultra-high network individual.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, I'm sorry you're saying, Eric. I was going to just to sum up what Chris was I'm saying that you just put something so elegantly that I had never heard somebody articulate in the kind of way that you just said, which is this piece about the fundamental distinction between Bitcoin as an asset that accrues value versus what you do with your fiat because you know that it is,

eroding in value, which is you put it into a bond, which is why the bond market is so immense, and which is why you have to get a yield based on your risk threshold to offset the fact that the corpse is rotting. You have to kind of keep this thing alive. That's really fascinating. I just want to emphasize that I don't think I've ever heard anybody articulate it in such a clean way and make so obviously apparent that you will see this crossover point. where it just doesn't make sense to put your money in bonds because the base unit is degrading obviously too quickly. The next best thing is obviously going to be your savings account, your Bitcoin.

And it will not be questioned that your money increases in value over time. Now, of course, that's going to slow down the rate at which it is increasing year over year, but it's still going to increase. And that's like the fundamental distinction. Does it lose or does it gain? So that was beautiful. I really appreciate you putting it like that. Thank you.

It probably got that from Safedine. I think he talks about that in the Bitcoin standard, about how we all have to become investing professionals as our second job. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to add in real quick, your number of, let's say, 5X, 500X, whatever it may be, is that assuming that there's 21 million Bitcoin in supply? because if it's not, then it's really less than that.

I'm sorry, we'll have a higher. Yeah, I guess I just do all my calculations, assuming 21 million, but you're right. Is it three or five million less? I think when we get to that end state, yeah, I think it'll be a lot less. I think it'll be probably below nine, something like that. So, yeah, I would take that number and just think your Bitcoin now is even more worth it. Right. Here's hoping. Here's hoping that's either that or we're all delusional.

Are you telling me this is ultra sound money? Go on. I love how they basically recreated bomb token. Yeah. Oh my god. Oh, I had forgotten. Okay. Which was really compelling when that happened, the bomb token for people who aren't familiar with it. I forget the exact mechanics of it, but every time you, you transacted it, it would destroy 50% of the supply in that transaction, maybe it was 10%. But it was obviously hyper deflationary. And it had its one to three months in the spotlight and then completely died.

That makes sense. Well, I'm conscious of the time here. I got to start wrapping up. But what I want to do is I want to do a quick round of, again, like either if you have questions or final thoughts, anything like that. So we'll go around and do that. But I'm also going to give you guys a bit of a challenge here. And I do this every episode.

But I want to challenge you guys to recommend something that's been helpful in your Bitcoin journey. So this can be something like, an article, a book, a video, an application, some sort of a resource. It could really be a piece of hardware, something that you think is worthy of people watching to check out and either play with or learn from or whatever it may be. So I'm going to give just, I guess, final thoughts for this panel here. we really ran the gamut on just about every aspect here. We had everything from politics to mining to like building an army of PLEBs and education and then just down to the numbers.

So we've really like we've covered a ton of content here. And that's kind of what I love about doing the show. You never know what you're going to get when you go into it. And all these all these topics, again, made me super bullish. But again, for my own topic, I'll just kind of reiterate it was it's a nice change of pace from the cluster fuck that has been Canada earlier this year. And so it's nice to kind of see at least a little bit of tide shifting. And I hope that continues. So I'll leave that there.

And for my recommendation, maybe perhaps not specifically to the English. speaking individuals, but we chatted about it earlier. This is, and I'm going to have bush of the name, the Cove, Bitcoin. And this is the French me. And he just puts together so much Bitcoin-only content. And it's just so thoroughly thought out. And there's just so much here. It's so well organized.

He's got a full. course, this is obviously auto translated, but like first year, second year, Bitcoin 101 and 102, Econ, like they've got just everything here. He's built a team of people around him. So he created the

translation, by the way, Discover Bitcoin. But they've got somebody that is specifically lightning, somebody Austrian economics. And then they've just got so much content that they're putting out. So if you're French speaking, they do have

translations, I believe in English and Spanish as well, at least partially. And yeah, kudos. By the way, the guy who created it, Ruxi, R-O-G-Z-Y, and I got to meet him and a bunch

of the team in Bia Ritz, France, just a few weeks back. So, kudos to them. If you're French speaking or need content to share with French-speaking bitcoins or budding bitcoins, then send them towards Discover Bitcoin, aka De Kouve Bitcoin. And yeah, I'll leave that there.

But I'll rotate over to Rob. I'll get any of your final thoughts, man, and any recommendations you may have. Man, the final thoughts is that, first of all, thank you for doing this and assembling such an awesome group of people and doing it so regularly. and that speaks to the final thought, which is that this is signal time. Fair markets are signal time. And as you look around the room, whether it's YouTube or Twitter or Bitcoin magazine, the writer's chats and telegram, those are the people who are going to be there for the long haul.

And so this is who you're building with. And those are the people to know. So if there's anything that you do at this point in time, it should be reaching out and trying to connect to those people because the room got really, really big and it got really, really small. And this is the perfect time to be participating in the most high signal conversations

that will be happening to and through the next cycle. And then we will all get lost in the rabble and be smiling and giving high fives and handshakes at the next conference. And then everyone will inevitably forget about us again. But know where you are in the pattern, right? As far as resources are concerned, if you even have the slightest curiosity of Bitcoin mining, just get an S9.

Just get one. Go to Kaboomracks. Get an S9. Get a ship to your house and just start hunting. There are some brilliant. Rob, what do you lose? What does it cost you on average if you're like in a big city and you're mining at a loss to run an S9? You're not going to make money.

Yeah, yeah. How much do you lose a month, though? It depends on how you run the machine. So you can run most S-9s about 1,400, just over 1,400 watts. But if you run brains on them, you can underclock them. So what a lot of people will do is they'll underclock them like 800, 900 watts. Because what that does is it drops the fan speed to a point where you can mitigate it really easily. And it effectively becomes a space heater, which that's a whole rabbit hole to go down. because the question isn't how much does it cost to run.

The question is how much is your heating bill? So that's a whole rabbit hole. If you have any curiosity, though, in the mining thing, don't go get a new gen. Don't go a bunch of, buy an S19 XP or a water-cooled M53S plus plus. Don't do that. That's ridiculous. Buy an S-9 for like $230, $250, $250.

Go to KaboMRAX and go plug it in. Go start reading stuff on, formerly slush pool now brains pool on the brains pool site their mining insights handbook the information is there you can learn it you can play with it and if you come with it from the attitude of

I want to understand how this thing connects to the real world you're going to have a blast and maybe you'll find the way to contribute in the mining space and there are so many ways to contribute in the mining space right now yeah so big shout out obviously to those guys And then a big personal shout out, of course, to Joe Rogers and to Rona Minor, because those are the D-Gens that shift me my first S-9s and started this whole debacle of me plugging it in in a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment on a fifth story somewhere in the city of Denver. And my wife looking at me like, are you really about to turn our second bathroom into a sauna, which I did?

you want to talk about like breaking out and sweat every morning when you go pee if you yeah long story short just take the jump those are two awesome resources to ronan minor on twitter joe rogers uh fantastic guys the community is as combative as any other twitter community but if you start asking questions everyone wants to contribute everyone wants to see you succeed and just learn it um and i'm seeing somebody in the in the uh In the comments, even saying they're finding them for like 70 bucks. If you can do that, get those two. Just get it, get it sent to your house, plug it in, learn a little something.

Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited for my mining journey to begin. So amazing. Eric, you're up next. Any final thoughts and recommendations? Yeah. Shout out Joe Rogers.

You know, he's one of my coworkers. He's the man. Shout out Ben for, you know, all the educational content you give free to the world. It's personally for me. It's been amazing to use that as a resource. So thank you for that. Just, yeah, bullish on Bitcoiners overall, the human capital coming into the space,

the newly minted Bitcoiners coming right now into the space, and all the Bitcoin companies that are going to be hiring, they're currently hiring, there's going to be so many open positions, the next bull run when these Bitcoin companies have some more money. I'm telling you, it's going to be crazy. So start doing the proof of work now. if you don't have a Bitcoin job yet and you want one, putting the work right now in the bear market

and then come bull market, you're going to easily get a Bitcoin job and it's going to be the best thing in the world. So come help the network grow, bullish on Bitcoiners. And then lastly, my resource, I actually tweeted this out like a week or two ago. I gathered like the top three news or articles, short articles on who I give, I guess, newbies in the Bitcoin space. information about Bitcoin. And one of the articles is from CREAS, it's the YUPD Elite dismiss Bitcoin. So I do have part of my friend group, unfortunately fits into that. I'm sure some of them are actually going to be watching this. So you guys that are watching this, go read that article. It'll explain why you should not dismiss Bitcoin. So he has great

articles and I would definitely recommend Ben's work as well. Awesome. Thanks, man. And that is a great article. I did love it. Obviously, I had it recited to me through the sultry tones of Guy Swans' voice. Yeah. Cresis, you're up last. Final thoughts and recommendations. It is pretty fun when you hear Guy read your own article. It's a surreal moment. Yeah, my final thoughts. Well, I was thinking about your prompt about like what are cool resources that are valuable right now in the bear market. I think that, well, I gravitate towards history because I like to look at this stuff on a really long time scale

and what it means for humanity. And this zero to one moment of going from analog stores of value to digital store value, and that only happens once. One of the things that was helpful for me, and this is coming from a more, traditional business background and finance. And so for anybody out there who comes from a background like that, reading Ray Dalio's The Changing World Order was something I did right around when I read

the Bitcoin Standard and then also Jeff Booth's book. And that combination was pretty potent because what Ray Dalio was kind of laying out, out is how the history of reserve currencies is transient. You have 100 years at the top. And then just based on the natural mechanics of how debt works, you erode your own position as a reliable balance sheet worth lending to. And his implication in that is that the US,

the U.S.'s time is up on the top. And he sort of suggests that China is the ascendant world power. But what I think that he misses is that the Internet is the ascendant world power. And he doesn't account for that in his framework of only thinking about nation states as being the authorities worth, you know, that have the position to issue currency. low and behold, Bitcoin has bypassed that system. And the internet, the global community is the ascendant world power. That was the takeaway that I got out of reading that book. But when you hear Ray Dalio talking about the transience of reserve currency status,

it starts to create the burning platform for, your own understanding that, okay, actually, the dollar isn't going to be here. It isn't going to be as trustworthy in the future as it has been in the past. And I think that's a valuable piece to help Orange Pill people like me, the yuppies, because it comes from a credible yuppie. Did you see the YouTube video he did? No. He did a, so he took that entire, I think it was a book, right?

and he made it a 45-minute visual YouTube video that's like doing semi-viral. So it's a really good resource for visual learners. That might even be the better way to do it. I just clicked through LinkedIn before it was even a book. Yeah. And read really the first few chapters was where all the takeaways are, as is often the case nowadays. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I agree.

It's excellent read slash the video is fantastic. It's a nice, like, Clist Notes version of kind of the main concepts of the book. but it's, yeah, yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, gentlemen, I will say, once again, this was a great time, always the best part of my Friday. It was fantastic having you all. Again, all of you for the first time, too, which was super great. So I'll just wrap up by saying thank you for reinforcing my bullishness

this week. And yeah, you're all welcome back anytime. Thanks for having us, Ben. Thank you very much. Awesome. Thank you so much, guys. And to everybody still watching, thank you guys so much for being here. I really appreciate everybody that's always here in the chat,

asking questions and commenting and everything. That was an awesome rip. So kudos to these guys. And by the way, all of the Twitter handles are in the show notes down below. So make sure you go and you give them all follow. And you can check out the recommendations and everything that they're up to just from their profiles there. Of course, guys, everybody, like, subscribe, share. All that helps so much.

It helps get this in front of more eyeballs. And thank you to all of you that have been doing the boosts on streaming sats and everything if you're listening to this audio only. If you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors in the show notes. And sorry, my camera is going out, but that's okay. I'll just talk through it. Again, previously mentioned sponsors. coin kite, shake pay, leaden, bit refill, bill foddle. They're all linked down below.

And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. Strike.combe slash BTC sessions. You get there. You type in any amount you like. 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'm out.

Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. And I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.