BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Evan Kaloudis, Q, Bob Burnett ep256

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/evankaloudis https://twitter.com/boomer_btc https://twitter.com/q_liketheletter 💪 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 Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions 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's going on everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? All new guests this week. I'm pretty damn sure. I see these guys or interact with them so frequently on Twitter. I'm never quite sure if it's a returning guest. So very happy to have all these gentlemen today. I hope you guys are having a good week.

I hope you're not freaking out too much about the pretty much norm that is Bitcoin, which is volatility. But we'll get into all our reasons for being bullish this week. week momentarily. 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 can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. And thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share. All those things really, really do help the show. And thank you to those of you that do it religiously. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

All right, before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we're sitting in the market right now. Close your eyes if you get hurt by scary things. $36,000 per coin. A single U.S. dollar, this is the positive. We'll pick you up 2,778 SATs. 90.63% of all Bitcoin have in mind. And in terms of fees, we did see the Mempool getting hammered to the past couple of days here, although it might be lightning up 16 stats per bite for next block, but anything beyond 30 minutes. It looks like one sat per bite will do you. So maybe that's clearing out now. Could be. Might be a good time to open up some lightning channels, run some whirlpool, move anything to cold storage that you need to do. Yeah. Let's keep going. Of course, show to sponsors to the show,

shake pay.com. If you're in Canada, easy way to stack. Sats, e-transfers on both ends in and out, no fees for that, thin spread. And if you sign up down below and buy your first hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin, they'll give you 30, yes, 30 bucks for free. You get the same deal, any referrals that you get from friends and family. And you can shake your phone every single day for free Sats. So check them out. They've got a Satsback Visa card too.

So that's definitely we're checking out. Lennon.I.O. Love these guys. Super easy way to use your Bitcoin for a variety of different things. For myself, it's typically been if I'm ever in a pinch and I need dollars, but they don't want to sell my Bitcoin. I can deposit it here, get a loan of dollars to my bank within a day. And then when I pay back those dollars, I get back the same amount of sets. They, of course, have their savings accounts.

They have their B2X offering. And more importantly, they're getting into Bitcoin backed mortgages. So that may be of interest to a number of people that I know. So be sure to check them out, leaden.io. So, bit refill, again, super easy way. If you're a living on Bitcoin, all the gift cards that your little heart desires paid for with Bitcoin, both on chain and lightning. You get stats back as you shop and you get additional stats back if you want to refer friends and family there as well. Also in the U.S., particularly for you guys in the U.S., they've just started rolling out their bill payments.

So you can now start to pay all of your bills in Bitcoin if you're looking to switch over to a Bitcoin standard. So hats off to them for that new release. Keystone, one of my favorite most used hardware wallets, 100% air-gapped, meaning you don't plug it into anything internet connected. It's all done via QR code, keeps the keys of your money, safe and away from internet connection. Definitely use the Bitcoin-only firmware. Always recommend that and works awesome with Blue Wallet, Sparrow, Specter, all that stuff. Pretty good in a multi-sig, too.

So check them out. And finally, you're backing up your hardware wallets. Get it in Steel, Friends. you don't want slips of paper sitting around, fire damage, water damage, all that stuff. So Bill Fottle over at PrivacyPros.I.O, this is what I'm backing up my stuff with. So check them out.

And with that, I'm going to stop my ranting here. We're going to start bringing in our guests. We've got Evan, we got Q and we got Bob. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. I'm very happy to have you. Let's do a quick round of intros so everybody knows who you guys are. So we'll just get a quick,

who are you and what do you do? and I'm going to toss it to Evan first. Let people know who you are, what you do. Sounds good. What's up, y'all? My name's Evan Kulutis. I'm a lightning app developer. And I'm the creator and co-maintainer of Zeus,

which is a really great lightning wallet for people who want to have full control and connect to their lightning node on the go. I can vouch for that. We'll be talking about that later as well. So glad to have you, man. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, no worries.

Well, toss it down the line. Bob, welcome to the show. First time. Can you let people know who we are and what you do? Yeah, thanks, Ben. Yeah, I am a virgin. Not a stranger to the show, but excited to be here. I'm coming to everybody from El Salvador today,

which I can probably talk about a little bit later in the show. But I'm the CEO of a company called Barefoot Mining. We specialize in what I call horse-sized mining sites, which would be kind of smaller size of half a megawatt to a couple megawatt-sized sites. which we think are absolutely critical to the infrastructure that we're building. We'll talk about more of that later. And as I can guess, if you're watching this, I'm an older member of the community, a proud boomer.

I got my cut my teeth in the personal computer industry. Used to be the chief technology officer for a company called Gateway, for those of you who were old PC guys. But that's where I spent most of my career in in PC development. And eventually that path led me to gear. Awesome. I'm bullish on Bitcoin boomers. There's some solid ones out there.

Yourself, people like Gary, Gary Leland, people like, Greg Foss. There's some solid entries. Larry Lepard. And yeah, those are all buddies of mine. We kind of, when we, like at Bitcoin 2020, we all ended up at one point and another kind of congregating all the old guys in the corner. But, but yeah. Yeah, it's, I think, I think, you know, boomers, to a certain degree rightly get a bad rap, but just like anything, I believe there are some of us that get it and we're trying really hard to bring the rest of the crew along. Yeah, I'd agree.

There's some solid. And the Bitcoin boomers that do get it, they contribute above and beyond to make up for their counterparts that are not on the Bitcoin train. Awesome. And up next, we have Q coming live from his mother's basement, according to the amateur investors in the troll box. This is very accurate. So I'm going to docks you, Chris. Thank you for that. I'm Q. I'm the host of Bitcoin Magazine live and I work over at Bitcoin Magazine. Yeah, coming to you from my mother's basement per usual. Awesome. Well, guys, I'm very happy to have you all. I'm sure we're We're going to get to some interesting conversation here.

For those of you watching for the trolls in the troll box, keep them coming. Love your comments. Of course, do all those good things like sub, share, all that. Those unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish. And so we go by the three R's really simple. Somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. We're all going to riff on that reason together. And then we're going to rotate to the next person.

And we'll just do that until we've all had to turn. and I am going to get us started today with my reason for being bullish. And today I'm just excited because I've got so many awesome things to play with. You know, I do the tutorials every single week. I play with a lot of different things and get to make videos on what's new in Bitcoin and, you know, what little devices and apps and incredible things that you can get your hands on and play with. And it's funny because when I started the channel, I would get a lot of, well, you're going to run out of things to do. You're going to run out of things to talk about and cover and make videos on.

And we're coming up on six years of doing the channel. And I have yet to run out of shit to do videos on. Like just to give you an idea, I've got a plethora of goodies in front of me. I've got, well, you know what, I'm going to bring up my screen for a second here because there's just so many things that I have planned to be covering. So this is like a sneak peek of future tutorials. So I guess we'll start with some of the software stuff I'm doing. I'm going to be checking out the Bitcoin company.

Shout out to the High Council of Bitcoin Benz. Let's go. Yeah. Sorry. I get really excited when Bitcoin company comes up and I hear people. I'm helping advise them. So yeah, great product. Oh, yeah.

I'm super excited to get playing with this and try some of this out. It looks awesome. Again, like just being able to use your Bitcoin for everyday stuff and get stats back and all this kind of, it looks fantastic. So I'm going to be playing a bunch with that. There's another thing that came up in my radar called Albi, which is like a browser install that allows you to get tips across, like whether it be YouTube or Twitter or websites or websites or web,

whatever it may be, basically you can claim it via this via a login and then they'll enable lightning tips for you, which is super awesome. So I'm going to be playing with that. AmBos just released a new kind of lightning channel marketplace called Magma, which I'm really excited to check out. So that's super awesome. Evan, you're here. So we got Zeus.

I previously covered Zeus. And I did the best thing about the tutorial when I did Zeus is I created that video while I was in Greece, like on the opposite side of the planet from my lightning node, which was running at home back in Canada. And I created a whole tutorial on connecting my Zeus wallet to my node with liquidity lines that I had set up myself. and was able to, I basically set up, make payments, receive payments, and watch people stream my podcast and pay me live via lightning and via like the podcaster, podcasting 2.0 app. That's great. And those sats were like streaming minute by minute as people listen. And then I was immediately able to access them from my note in Canada while in Greece

via the app that you're working on, which was, again, mind-blowing. But there's just so many things. Like, in terms of hardware, I just got sent my, I'm not sure how to say it, Palace, I think. It's like a tiny enclosure from crypto cloaks for Bitcoin node. So I managed to pick up, I guess they had them back in stock, but I got another Pi 4. and I got my little solid state drive for it and everything. And on that, I will be tinkering with Start 9. I haven't played with Start 9 yet, but I've heard really good things.

So I'm going to have another Bitcoin notes sitting on my shelf next to my umbral and my Ronan dojo. I've got my cold card Mark 4 sitting here that just arrived. So I'm going to be doing a video on that. I've got a foundation passport batch two coming my way for whenever they ship. I just got a new enclosure for my seed signer. And so I'm going to be doing a new seed signer video because they've just updated so many awesome things since I did the original video. It's just like a nonstop flurry of incredible things that are being made and improved upon

that like I don't think I'll ever run out of things to cover. There's just there's so much being built that I'm I'm busier now after having covered six years worth of Bitcoin stuff than I've ever been. Like there's no way I could possibly cover it all. So like in short, I'm bullish because of all of the the goodies that I get to play with. But really, I'm bullish because of the amount of brain drain. coming to Bitcoin and how much is being built on Bitcoin. So I guess I'll leave it there.

I'm going to open it up to you guys if you have comments, questions, anything about maybe any of the things that I mentioned, but maybe about Bitcoin at large and all the stuff being built. So whoever wants to dive in, feel free. Ben, have you tried selling any channel or purchasing any channels through Magma yet? I have not. So in terms of lightning-related kind of markets and stuff, I've done the voltage one where you can like buy channels through loop, I believe.

So you get like a sidecar ticket and you plug it into loop and then you get a channel open to yourself. I have not tried magma yet. Yeah, magma is pretty cool. I sold one channel or well unsuccessfully. I forgot to you got to paste in your UTXO for the channel open. So still got to get a little used to the system, but it seems to be a pretty cool,

sure, unique little marketplace. Personally, I'm really a big fan of the emboss guys. I'm really stoked to see them building out the product and giving us our first taste of, you know, sort of channel finding, if you will. I'm quite pleased with the experience so far. I'm looking forward to, you know, buying some channels.

I've already got my listing up. That's awesome. I'm a little sad that I couldn't have taken advantage of this maybe like a few months back. Well, I guess I would have had to close channels anyways. But anyways, with all the stuff that happened in Canada, I thought it was perhaps a good idea to start anew with my Bitcoin node in particular in and around lightning transactions and everything. So all of that stuff got closed out.

But I was like my node was like somewhere in the top 100. Yeah, nice. And now I've got a lightning node that is not associated with myself, at least at the moment, you know, super publicly. Anyways, so unfortunately, I'm back building on that. But it's still, it functions as I need. I can still, I still get streamed payments. I still use it all the time. It's still fantastic.

And it still works like a charm with Zeus. So, you know, I can't complain. But, oh, what about Bob or Q? Do you have any thoughts on Bitcoin at large or any of the things I mentioned? Yeah. Well, I'll speak to the, I guess just the overall tone. I appreciate you sharing all that because I think all but one of them were things I wasn't even aware of. But that in itself is a testament to the space.

And you know how a lot of people like to use the analogy of the development of the Internet to Bitcoin. And I absolutely believe there is similarity to that. But I'm a PC guy, right? So I lived through the whole internet evolution, but I was literally there at the beginning of the PC development. I would argue that I was on the design team of the world's first laptop. And what you're talking about is so reminiscent of the way life was for me, like in, let's say, 1991 or 1992, where we didn't have the communication mechanisms that we have today. So we would get publications like PC week, PC magazine, Byte magazine, computer shopper, you know, and those of us that were geeks in that, we would devour those paper-based organizations flipping through.

But it had the same fervor, you know, guys designing in 1991, 1992, cards with MIDI interfaces or, you know, another. guy doing some sort of faster storage solution and then, you know, new pieces of software and like all these other things. And it has that same energy. And it just, it's, it's so exciting. Even last night, I was meeting with a group here in El Salvador, actually a group of lightning developers. And one of the things that my wife said, my wife's here with me. One of the things my wife said, You know, when I started getting involved in this market in 2017, she said, like, it was life-changing for me. She said, like, my aura changed. Like, my vibrance changed.

My youthfulness changed. And she's absolutely right. So I've never felt my age, but I can't change the fact that I'm old. But, you know, I'm sure you guys all have this in your life. You know, there are guys that are 57 and they're next to dead. And there are guys that are 57 that are still ready to try to kill the world. And I don't know if it was in the pre part of the show, but, you know, a guy like myself or Foss or Gary Leland or, you know, all of us. I mean, for us, this is rebirth.

And every time we hear that sort of stuff. and we know that what we're working on is changing the world. And we see it gaining all this momentum. You know, it really, really excites us because it's not about the money. I don't think any of us have any issues with making money. But it really isn't. You know, for me, if I never make another dime, but what I did is I made sure, hey, the world for my grandkids and my great kids kids and all that is better.

I mean, that's good enough. That's enough to get up every day and go after it. And I'm glad there's so many people doing those sort of things. I would bet almost every one of those products you showed is from somebody who believes the same thing that I believe and that I know you guys believe. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that assessment. One thing that you said that struck me, because part of me in the back of my mind, I was like, when will I be obsolete, you know, in the like people don't need explanation around internet nowadays. You wouldn't need tutorials around that. But you said, you know, you said you were

working on like some of the earliest laptops. And some of the biggest channels that exist right now are people just reviewing, you know, the newest MacBook or whatever, whatever new piece of hardware that's out there. So who knows? Maybe I have a longer shelf. life than I imagined and I'll be able to be reviewing the newest node and the newest hardware and all that well into the future. I would be flabbergasted if that wasn't the case. Well, I'll cross my fingers. Maybe I won't have to just fade silently into the background as time goes on, but we'll see. Kew, how about you? What are your feelings? I think my big takeaway from this entire conversation has just been the sheer fact that as we continue to build out

Bitcoin, its network and the products to help us interact with Bitcoin, we're not just like, all right, here's the problem, here's the solution, like let's now move on to the next product. It's let's refine this. Let's make this better. New companies will pop up and like create this competitive advantage to where the best products are being pushed forward and the marketplace is really dictating that because you don't have a lot of oversight. right now for good. And it's leading to the best products really finding their user base. So what I'm really bullish about about this entire conversation is just the sheer fact that

the best products have been proven to be winning over the course in the last 13 years and it'll just iterate out better over the next decades. The interesting thing about what you're saying too is, you know, there'll be incumbents and newcomers and everything. but everything is on a base layer of open source code. And there's this affinity for a lot of products and things that people are building to be open source themselves, which really holds people's feet to the fire to ensure that what they're offering is above and beyond.

It adds an additional element of that kind of frame. market pressure of making sure that that you are constantly iterating and improving. And we just like literally, I think three, three of the things, four of the things I mentioned were I've got to cover this again because it's improved so much since I did the last video, right? So it's like there's so many things, new things popping up, but also so many improvements happening on previously existing products that they need to be covered again because the experience is totally different and and and so much better than previously shown so yeah it's it's it's a whole new world uh with everything that's

's happening and it will continue to be for for years to come so that is an amazing openness of this community too so um obviously i mentioned the pc industry well you know the pc industry was developed in cloaks so like i have several patents uh the companies I worked for guarded our intellectual property to the nth degree. And we would scour our competitors' products to find any evidence that they violated our intellectual property. You know, it was very contrary to the open source, you know, freedom of information sort of attitude. if I went to a conference, like the Bitcoin 2020 conference, then I would, if a similar conference in the PC industry,

I would walk around trying to steal secrets and get somebody else to say something. It actually really was kind of almost, I look back at it and kind of cringe at myself for the behavior, you know. But it's what I was taught and, you know, and they would do the same thing. as a CTO at Gateway. So if I was, if I was on a panel chit-chatting with a peer from, let's say, Dell before going

up on the panel, he'd be trying to steal something for me. I'd be trying to steal something from him, you know, when are you going to release this new product or what are you going to do with this? What are you going to do with that? And try to get somebody to slip up. Now it's completely the opposite. Like when I was at Bitcoin 20, any, you could ask me just about any question about any of my companies, and I'll tell you.

you know and you know about how we operate what our financials are what our projections are you know anybody can ask me that and i've got 99% chance i'm going to answer the question and and i get that with almost everybody here it's interesting there's such a change in ethos right like it's you can kind of see um like this this transition from and i mean whether and there's speculation to be as to how much is impacting this. But like on its base, you know, the the Fiat system kind of bred a mentality of like protecting your intellectual intellectual property and trying to prevent others from from building upon your ideas and trying to basically like it's a rent-seeking mentality.

and we've had this seismic, wow, it's nice out. So the motorcycles are driving up and down literally my sidewalk. But anyways, there was this mentality of protecting your intellectual property and then gatekeeping as much as possible and rent seeking as much as possible to squeeze that for every last drop before other people get their hands on it. Whereas Bitcoin as an idea, the whole idea behind. it at the base layer was to to create a level level playing field for all and through osmosis a lot of the projects being built atop it have that same ethos of okay well you know we're going to create the best things that we possibly can we'll put it out there you know you hopefully we can either we're doing it altruistically just to create things or we're you know maybe we can

turn of profit. But a lot of the mentality is we're going to build the best things we can. We're going to try and keep it as open as we can so that others can build atop what we've just built as well. And it will enrich all of us for being part of this broader ecosystem because it puts us all further ahead. We're now trying to to outpace the previous rent seeking system and take its place with a better system. So, Yeah, I love that juxtaposition there. And the community, I think, polices the behavior. So if it definitely does, right?

So if an individual or a company starts to behave outside the ethos, they get called on it really quickly. And, you know, there's that whole thing about, you know, how toxic is too toxic or whatever. But I really appreciate it. I think it's fantastic. And I think it's a model not just for, you know, Bitcoin, but I think really for all businesses and maybe even kind of all governments

and all lifestyles that, you know, you can count on the community itself a lot more than people have a tendency to believe. Yeah, I'd rather an adversarial environment that betters us all than a non-adversarial environment that stagnates, right? Yep. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I think I'll round that one out there. I know mine was pretty disjointed and all over the place, but I was just really excited about all the cool shit sitting on my desk right now.

So I wanted the chance to rant about it a bit. But we're going to do a little rotation here. Again, everybody in the chat, thank you for being here. Keep the comments coming. I'll pull up more as I see them come in. And yeah, let's toss it over to Evan. I'll let you have your little rant. What are you excited about this week?

What's got you bullish? Oh, man. There's just so much going on, but I think the things that have me the most bullish are just the advancement we're making at protocol levels. So on Lightning, we've got Tarot. That is going to enable assets to be created within Taproot scripts on Bitcoin, and for those inputs to be added to channels on Lightning Network. So that's going to be incredible.

There's some people who are like, okay, like, why would I want to use the US dollar? on lightning. And to be honest, I probably won't use it like that. I mean, I think we're pretty privileged to be in the West and have real easy access to the U.S. dollar. But many people in different countries, in different situations, might not have access to, you know, the dollar, which is, you know, the world's most stable fiat currency at the moment. But I'm really excited about the prospect of what getting this infrastructure into these different institutions will do. You're keeping a TV here. Yeah, yeah.

But basically, I think that lightning, let's say, US dollar on lightning has the ability to provide an experience that's, you know, comparable to what we see in traditional banking apps and payment apps at lower fees than, say, cards, which is something that Morgan Stanley has come out and said that, you know, is the case. And, you know, once this network is embedded into all these institutions and apps, we can go and say, hey, listen, guys, you have this great network that's facilitating your U.S. dollar payments. You guys know it has a native token on it.

You know what that native token can do. So I'm really excited about taro, especially as a, not only just for people in developing countries who need access to dollars and can't just hedge all on Bitcoin. but I'm really bullish on it as a Trojan horse of getting this network into all these different institutions and, you know, it being one click away from putting Bitcoin everywhere. So that's number one for me. I'm also very bullish on splicing on Lightning Network. So when you open up a channel right now, the channel has a fixed size depending on the UTXO that you feed into it, right? and if you want to change the size of that channel, you've got to close it out and then reopen it with your counterparty with the appropriate UTXOs.

So splicing is going to allow you to resize a channel with new UTXOs and dynamically scale your channels up and down depending on how much you're using it or how much you need. How does that work? I'm really confused on the mechanics of that. Well, on a high level, you're adding a UTXO to the collection that's backing the channel. So previously you'd say, okay, here's my channel. It's backed by this UTXO that's right here. Now you'll be able to have multiple UTXOs that are backing a single channel. Dynamically, meaning you can do it as you.

Yeah, dynamically. So as long as you're willing to pay for an on-chain transaction to add to that channel, you can add on to it. Now, the really exciting part is we've just got our first proof of concept on mainnet yesterday by this guy named Dusty Damon. And he's just been focusing on splicing. And yeah, it looks like you can do it on mainnet now. It seems like the spectres needs to be fleshed out a little and put into all the proper implementations. But this major pain point that I felt has been like an issue. on lightning is about to be solved.

Wow. So super excited about that. And then last thing I'll talk about very briefly because it's very convoluted and there's a lot of nuance to it is just been very bullish about all the discussion about covenants about CTV and the small discussions around any prev out, which I'm personally very bullish about because of the tantaments it's going to make for the Lightning Network through the L2 spec. So there's a lot going on.

Anyone who says that Bitcoin development has stagnated does not know what the hell they're talking about is misinformed or is shilling their own bags. So we've got the greatest minds in the world working on this machine and it gets a little bit better every year. Damn.

Okay, so hold on. I've got, I maybe wanted to touch on taro. and because I've seen obviously it can do a lot of incredible things what are some of the just because I'm sure people will be curious what have been some of the criticisms

of it because like obviously it adds functionality that's that's a good thing without screwing with the base layer as well what but I've seen some people be critical of it Are you aware of some criticisms of it? Or is it just like, general like, oh, do we need this? Or I don't know.

Okay. So number one, people are apprehensive towards shik coins, got currencies on Bitcoin. And that's a completely understandable take. I understand that. You know, people argue that we're now using, we're now going to be using precious block space for these shit coin assets, right? And I really don't see that as.

an issue as long as people are paying for that block space, right? You know, if it's your your sats, they're going to the miners. Do with it as you please. And yeah, I mean, just some arguments about the spec, where it's going to be implemented, but I'm fairly confident the vast majority of lightning implementations, if not all, will have some level of support for creating these sort of channels and moving these assets around. Interesting. I feel like everyone's main concern should be dissuaded by two major things that are going to be huge. It's number one, that sort of Trojan horse effect of getting this network in all to these major institutions. This is something that we can end up seeing in stuff like Venmo and your traditional commercial bank.

But also, people are not taking into consideration how the routing schemes are set up and how the channels work. and you don't need to find a full path of, say, U.S. dollar channels to make a transfer. Just the receiver and the sender need to have those asset channels. So people in the middle are just moving around SATs, which means all of us can potentially be making money from routing these transactions and not even knowing that they're for US dollar or euro back tether thing. Well, there's a whole degree of like privacy additionally. to this because nobody knows what the hell asset is being transacted. Yeah, that's definitely a nice perk too, right?

Compared to, you know, a traditional transfer. I mean, listen, there's always counterparty risk for the issuers, right? I'm sure there's going to be some not-so-great people that are going to be issuing assets through this manner. And they're always going to have the ability to freeze those coins if you're going to redeem them. But if it's trivial to exchange these assets for Satoshis and move them out to use, you TXO however you want, then who the hell cares?

I think that I think taro is going to be a huge net benefit, not only for Lightning Network, but for Bitcoin as a whole. Yeah. Yeah. And again, with the criticisms when I was looking at them, you know, the main one that I saw is, is like the shit coin argument of, oh, we're going to have shitcoins on top of lightning. We'll be. Okay.

Yeah. I mean, a bad idea outside of Bitcoin is still going to be a bad idea on Bitcoin. coin, but at least you get rid of the necessities, like people necessitizing, creating an entirely new blockchain with different infrastructure to spin up their, their scammy crap. And I think in the end, if it's a garbage idea, it will fail as it would have if it was its own blockchain. So, and the best ideas will bubble to the top. If something actually is useful, somebody will use it. Great. And, and it does, again, it doesn't affect the base layer. And I really like your point of of Trojan horsing because if, if all of,

if a lot of institutions start to say, well, this is clearly the most efficient way to move around US dollars everywhere. You know, if we get to a point where shit really hits the fan and US dollars are not desirable anymore, they're already plugged into the Bitcoin network. And they can just say, well, just semi-sacetting. because sad is now worth more than a U.S. dollar. So yeah. It's going to be great, you know, because that software is going to have to run underneath it anyway, right?

It's like just create an address and start sending yourself Bitcoin to it. The switch is already going to be flipped on. So super, super excited by all that stuff. You know, I feel like the potential for a lot of shenanigans on there are somewhat limited because you can't just be putting in. these like solidity contracts where all the state is saved that we're still limited in our block space. And furthermore, I really don't think that Tarot is super conducive towards NFTs either because of how the channels are set up. You're not going to want to doing a channel of one of one asset is not going to make any sense on lightning. So yeah, you could still really do them, but you're not going to have any really all these nonsensical things with complex logic on there.

So I think it's all a positive in my eyes. Awesome. Well, I don't know if Bob or Q have anything to add in here, anything that you wanted to comment on or add questions to what Evan had. I'm genuinely curious. Like, I sit on the side of the coin, definitely. That is, like, why do these stable coins add value to the Bitcoin ecosystem at large? Evan, I'm genuinely curious as to, like, what? broader benefits in the intermediate time frame, like in our lifetime, does this benefit?

And then after our lifetime and then like beyond that too, like when the last Bitcoin is mined, what do these stable coins actually add to the Bitcoin ecosystem? I think it's mostly short term. I think we're talking about people, let's say someone in El Salvador who may have some exposure to Bitcoin, but they can't be 100% Bitcoin because they have expense. like their house and, you know, food or potentially other costs, schooling maybe, that's denominated in U.S. dollars. So let's say you're in a down market that we could potentially be going into right now. I'm not super convinced, but sort of seems to be the trend. You might

want to be able to de-risk. And someone who might not be as affluent as someone in the traditional West, you're not going to really have that luxury to take that gamble and potentially not be able to pay off your rent for your family's home every month. So I think that people who are really complaining about those semantics of it and what value it adds for Bitcoin are mostly speaking from a position of privilege. So I think we need to think more sorrow about how it can affect people's lives now to be sort of purist about it and say, oh, you're not doing Bitcoin in the right way because you're using US dollar on lightning is like, you know, so it's sort of dickish and not seeing the larger picture.

But, you know, everything else I said stands true about getting that infrastructure into place and having institutions really embrace it with open arms is one step away from them embracing Bitcoin with open arms. That's awesome. I love it. Bob, any of the thoughts? Yeah. First, I'll follow on that.

I do a lot of speaking, group speaking and evangelism. And usually when I'm talking to a group, especially if it's a newer group, the first thing I'll say to them is they're almost always in the United States, of course, I want you to listen to everything I say and step away from your privileged position in Miami, living in a first world country with a first world government and a banking system and all these sort of things. as effed up as those things are, they're still the best. Go remove yourself and go sit in Lebanon, go sit in Sri Lanka.

I have the benefit of my wife being from the Philippines originally, and so I learned a lot by learning about the world through her eyes. And she was born in 1970 in the Philippines, which was in the middle of what was called the Marcos regime. And the first 16 years of her life, she lived under martial law. So her entire formative years were from that perspective. And go study a little history. You'll find out that the damage the Marcos family did to the Philippines is phenomenal.

And I don't think they could have done the same kind of damage had Bitcoin existed then. And if that was the base layer of the currency there. So I think what you said there is really important, Evan. And I also think that, you know, using lightning or Bitcoin is as, as I don't think we have the right. It's almost like a free speech thing. Like if somebody wants to use it in a stupid way, I think we kind of have to let them. It doesn't mean we can't voice our opinion that we think what they're doing is stupid. But we can't stop them from doing it.

You know, I'm going to talk here in a minute a little about some mining stuff, but one of the things I want the world to stand up to is to make sure that there's never any restriction on your use of electricity that you can plug in a wall and do whatever the hell you want with the electricity that comes out if you pay for it. And I think it's extension of the exact same thing. If you want to do something stupid on lightning or something stupid on chain, go for it. You know, pay for it. You know, suffer the consequences. But we can't try to police that. I guess that's the important thing. I think the moment, I'm not a developer.

I'm a hardware guy. But I think the moment if the software community says, well, we're going to have to try to stop somebody from doing X, Y, or Z, then that's a failure point. you know, that's a restriction of free speech. Absolutely. I agree with you 100%. Someone wants to, you know, use block space for something stupid. You know, as long as they're paying it, it's generally okay. They're entwined in the Bitcoin ecosystem and they're doing some sort of behavior repeatedly, like you may be not batching transactions if you're in exchange and using up all that block space.

Not only are you, you know, paying it for it financially, but you're also making the ecosystem worse as a whole and you're going to suffer for that long term. I think the incentives there are super aligned. Lightning, it's a little bit different and we need to think about some things, you know, mainly the difficulties of maintaining a node moving forward as we're building out and scaling up lightning. But I think generally speaking, that analogy holds up really well. Yeah.

You know, I'll, you said I'm very transparent about my company and what we do. One of the things I'm down here in El Salvador doing outside of trying to get some mining started here is that I have a problem in my company. And so the way one of the things that we do in my company is every site that we develop will bring in outside investors. So just imagine, for instance, the four of us were all partial owners in a site. And, you know, I would manage it and operate it. we'd all have a cut, right? So what I, what I do with my investors is I, I pay daily. So I don't, I don't believe, I want to go down a rattle here, but I believe what the public mining companies are doing, hoddling, Bitcoin is bad. I don't, I don't like it. Again, it's,

it's, it's not for me to say they can't do it, but I believe that that's, that's against the ethos and it is not the right way to do it. So if we're all owners, I'm not going to hold the Bitcoin in the company. I'm going to give it to you guys every day. But as my business has scaled and I've got more investors, what used to be a fairly simple, manual, unchained process that I could do as the money came out of the mining pool has become a fairly difficult task. And so I'm trying to solve that problem.

And we haven't solved it yet, but I think lightning, may actually be able to solve that problem for us at a low cost. And we have to do that not only quickly and inexpensively, but with good record keeping and all those sort of things because we have to track cost basis and all that other stuff. So, you know, I'm learning about a lot more about lightning than I ever did. But the importance of it, what guys like you guys are doing, Evan, is just so important to where.

we're all going as an industry. So I appreciate you very much. I just want to give a shout out to Adam, Bitcoin Meister in the comment. Yeah. Apparently all, every single guest on the show has been on his show. So get to see him on there. And Bob, I guess you might be seeing him in Sioux Falls. Yeah, two weeks.

I'll be in Sioux Falls. Adam's going to be the MC. We're doing a Bitcoin day. I know Foss is going to be there too. so anybody in that region of the country, you know, please come up and see us. Awesome. Awesome. Well, that's, that sounds pretty exciting.

Well, Bob, I want to keep it with you because I'm going to round out Evans topic and I think we'll do another rotation. So I'm just going to let you keep the hot mic here. And I'm going to toss it to you for you to let us in on what has your bullet for week. All right. Well, I'm going to start with what happened in New York, with the legislation, kind of getting stuck in committee, essentially, is what happened was, you know, there was legislation there to try to stop proof of work, and which was an absolutely ludicrous thing. It would never, ever work. But, you know, it got defeated. One of the comments that I've made, I've ever been a little public about it, is that it's too bad for New York because they have some phenomenal resources. But it's too late. They've already, what would you say, tainted the water?

Like, because, you know, a typical mining, I mentioned earlier, you know, my company does smaller mining installations. We'll do half a megawatt, one, two, three kind of sized sites. And but even those sites are typically multi-million dollar ventures. And so who's who in their right mind would go plop a couple million dollars in the state of New York right now in a mining operation when Texas and Oklahoma and Wyoming and North Dakota and South Dakota, El Salvador, all these other places want you? You know, what I what I like to say is, hey, there's a there's a funnel when you're trying to select a site for mining. It starts with jurisdictional and community acceptance. And that's just logical, right? You only go where you want to go.

And then is the energy available. And then what's the cost of the energy? So I feel sad for New York because I, you know, and I hope the people there really, really revolt against the politicians that even started that legislation. And I hope it's a message to the politicians as well that, even introducing the legislation creates a problem. Just because you didn't pass it doesn't mean that it doesn't have the same effect as if you did pass it. Because it kind of does.

They're going to get what they want, but they're going to also have to suffer from the fact that their state's not going to get the capital. It's not going to be a home for this stuff. I'll contrast that because this is the, you know, why we're bullish stuff, is that next week I will be in Michigan. And I don't think this is public, but I am, but I can say it. I'll be testifying before the Michigan Senate next week because the Michigan Senate is going to be, it's in committee right now.

I'll be testifying before the committee to do the exact opposite of New York, which is to bring in a very open, embracing bipartisan law. It's got a little too much, you know, blockchain. cryptocurrency language in it, frankly, for me, but I got to kind of go along with it, just, you know, because it doesn't exclude us, right? It doesn't exclude what we're doing. So, so that's, that's really bullish. And I think what we're seeing is, it's really fascinating, at two of the top 10 states by population and economy in the country, Michigan and New York. And one's going to win and one's going to lose, right? It's very simple.

because what Michigan is doing, and I'm not announcing I'm going to Michigan right now, but I'd say they're absolutely still on the list. And if I find the right site, I'm going to be there, right? I find the right site. I'm going to be there. There is not a price in New York where I would go there. It's too big of a risk. There's no price.

I mean, honestly, it's ridiculous. So a little bit of context. I'm a New Yorker, born and raised. I left about, I don't know, when do we leave, October of 2020? So, yeah, it's just openly hostile to Bitcoin. And you cannot make sound business decisions in an environment that's hostile to the industry that you're trying to help bring to, you know, the city and state. So it's really just a calamity, a real travesty of justice, the things that people like Ben Lonsky have put into place in New York. and it's doing a real disservice both to the city, the state, and all the constituents of the state.

New York is going to be left in the dust as far as Bitcoin innovation goes. And, you know, I don't really have any pity for the politicians that are going to be seeing dwindling tax revenue. I have a lot of, you know, pity for the citizens who don't really have any option and can't really get out. I just said will not be coming back to New York until it's at absolute rock bottom. And that seems like what's going to happen. Because every time a new politician comes in, whether it's the mayor or the governor, it's every time they get worse and worse. And they become increasingly hostile towards Bitcoin.

So you get what you deserve on that. Yeah. And they clearly don't listen. Oh, go ahead, Q. If I may, because there's something that you guys have both brought up that I hope. heartedly agree with. And that's this idea that these politicians actually give a rat's ass about anything other than what's going to get them more votes. Eric Adams did exactly that. He went from, I'm going to take a paycheck in Bitcoin to, I'm going to take a paycheck in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I'm going to be Bitcoin focused. I'm going to be crypto focused. And he slowly but surely rolled it all back until the day came where he said, you know what, actually, not only am I not going to do Bitcoin, I'm going to make it harder for Bitcoin to operate in this city, in this state all of a sudden. So when we watch all of these other politicians, every other race around the country, start to tout a pro-Bitcoin platform, I hope this is a lesson that Bitcoiner, single-issue Bitcoin or voters pay attention to because they're going to promise you the world and then not deliver on it on just like everything else, all politicians always do. That's my mini-rand.

Listen, yeah, these people are rats. They are seeking more power, attention, and money, right? And you cannot give them an inch. We saw the Bit license come out. And if previously was, you know, one step process, right, or multiple steps, but it was a one-time thing. You get your, you go through all the hoops that pay the, all the filing fees, pay the lawyers off, right? And you're good. You got your license.

But that wasn't enough. Now that you have everyone escaping from New York because of, horrible policies, not limited to just a Bitcoin. They've been losing on tax revenue. And what they're doing is they're putting the squeeze on Bitcoin businesses. Not only do you have to apply for the Bit license, go through all the hoops the first time, but you've got to get an annual assessment now. That is no doubt going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars for Bitcoin businesses in New York. And listen, if businesses want to stay there and can comply, well, maybe next year it will be, you know, bi-annually, or maybe you have to do it every

quarter. And if you keep playing these stupid games, you're going to keep winning stupid prizes. I've got to say that Loski is a scourge on the name Ben. It is an attack on the name Ben. And I think that the existence of Ben Loski may have actually been the impetus to the rising in the high council of Bitcoin Ben. I think that's why we see such an influx of Ben's in Bitcoin to undo the damage that Mr. Loski has done to the name Ben. And so it is my mission and the rest of the High Council to ensure that we not only undo all the

damage that Ben Loski has done, but supersede it by creating such positivity in and around Bitcoin in other jurisdictions outside of New York that it will be, you know, we got both we've got our work cut out for us because that guy is a great a piece of shit and uh and the best part is he puts out all of we could curse on the show oh yeah you can say whatever fuck ben loski he's he's saying that he puts out all of this legislation and then he goes didn't he go for work for ripple or something uh yeah yeah through the revolving door and the end yeah he goes out and he's like I know. I mean, it's super complicated, so I'll help you navigate this now.

Like, fuck, you. Come on. Yeah, yeah. I set up the hoops. Let me teach you how to jump through them when they're lit on fire. So, yeah. Yeah, it's just like the perfect team. Like, I can't believe people are this brilliant.

Doesn't it all the while just pretending that you're doing it for the betterment of your community. Because, yeah, New Yorkers are too stupid to have access to lightning on ramps. We can't possibly be able to decide. what's good for us as far as cryptocurrency investment goes. We need these jerks deciding, you know, what the best decisions for us to make are. It's Chris and I'm, I welcome Bitcoin steamrolling all these people and slowly whittling away at all of these institutions. We've got we've up to a PG-13 rating apparently. I'm confident we are going to steamroll these guys.

And, you know, I have this expression I use. They call it the unholy Trinity. And the unholy Trinity is, you know, the central banks and governments. It's the environmentalist extremists. And it's the old coins. And what started, I think, as a three different groups all attacking us, independently, they've started to kind of loosely coalesce. And if you look at, if you look at the the alt-coin shit coin group, it's led by Ripple, you know, so it's, I actually didn't know about the

the Loski Association to Ripple even, but it's not surprising because I think that is, I mean, that's like the lead demon of the cause, right, is, is Ripple. And I, I just cringe every time I see that because what happens is I'll be shocked if I don't hit it when I'm in Michigan next week testifying but but there's always some other crypto expert right there's always another crypto expert and and every time a media source or somebody quotes this crypto expert it's somebody associated with ripple and like the Chris Larson bullshit from um what was that a month ago or so of, you know, we don't need proof of work in in Bitcoin. So that's like that Greenpeace campaign, right, where they say, okay, we need to change the code.

There's a group of 20, 30 people that can make this decision. Hashtag change the code. Let's change Bitcoin from proof of work to proof of state. You've literally got. By ripple, right? Chris Larson, right? Yes, Chris Larson, put $5 million into that. $5 million campaign.

We just got Loskey, Larson's. Greenpeace and Elizabeth Warren sitting in a room giving each other hand jobs. That's basically what you thought. Yeah, some of the worst people, huh? That's hell right there. Yeah. That's the definition of hell.

Yeah. I'm sitting in a room with those groups. Yeah, no, it's been, it's, it's ridiculous. But I mean, it's, it was maybe inevitable that they all found each other like a match made in hell. Like they're all just, They're just like, this thing won't go away. We can't how, like, we can't, you know, sell our garbage tokens and supplant it.

We can't regulate it out of existence. And maybe if we combine forces like some sort of like anti-power ranger force, like we can get large enough to topple it. But it's just it's not going to work. They're just going to spin their wheels. And, you know, it'll take time. It'll be annoying as hell. but in the end, you can't kill it.

It's just going to prolong the inevitable. So, I mean, get on board or die in the meantime. Or die. Yeah. Or die. I feel like it's also like a lazy effort. You know, it's like, oh, we put together this webpage and started a hashtag. It's like, guys, submit a poll request.

What Bitcoin Core is open for anyone on GitHub to submit a poll request. submit it, write the code, get discussion going in the comments. And, you know, maybe just fork Bitcoin, actually. That would be cool. Go for it. I mean, a lot of people who have been in the space for a while remembers the Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV AirDrops. And a lot of people provided pretty heavily on those while at the same time fighting

off some of Bitcoin's most staunch opposition. I feel like we should do that, but like, you know, a little bigger this time. I think we'd have a lot of fun with that. So, you know, hopefully they figure out how to program and see it. And, you know, we see a PR on GitHub one of these days. That would be nice. Amateur investors just bumped us up to an art rating. I was volleying whether I was going to pull up that comment on screen.

For the pawn afterwards, I will not. But, yeah, anyways. again like it's it's annoying because it puts off kind of what the writing on the wall that we all see coming but in the end it's it's it's yet a blip on the road to hyper bitcoinization so it's in the end it's the truth becomes clear given time

and bitcoin is a system based on truth like where is capital most efficiently allocated. And when you have a base layer that allows you to actually see the truth of that matter, then everything else just kind of filters out over time. But it does take time and we're living in a realm where it's been untruthful for a long time for basically all of our lifetimes. And so, yeah, it'll take a while to clear it, take a while to clear it all that garbage. but it is what it is.

I just wanted to, you know, I guess it kind of plays in here, but I saw a comment earlier. Somebody who's asking about another type of legislation that kind of screws around with people just trying to utilize Bitcoin the best way they can. In regards to Argentina, there was a bit of, They basically took, rather than going the route of, you know, something like El Salvador, they made another deal with the devil, aka the IMF,

and basically put into legislation contingent on their accepting of however many billions of dollars loan from the IMF, they agreed to include legislation that would effectively ban banks from dealing with different, Bitcoin related products, which is very telling that the IMF is inserting those types of stipulations on the loans that they're giving out. But the person had asked, hey, like, is there other ways for people to get Bitcoin in Argentina? As far as I know, like this bank legislation does not prohibit people from actually obtaining Bitcoin through regular means or exchanges or something like that. But I did make a thread earlier today, just basically like ways to obtain Bitcoin without any, like without a centralized third party. So Robosats, that's a relatively new one that you can get Bitcoin without needing it. You basically just need a lightning wallet.

Bisk and another decentralized option. Hoddle, hoddle, another option. And basically all of these will link you up with another peer. that will accept a variety of different payment methods in exchange for Bitcoin or vice versa. If you're trying to get fiat, you can get in a variety of different means. And all of these are accessible anywhere on the globe. And you can obtain Bitcoin or get fiat for your Bitcoin if you need to be paying for something locally. And again, it just, it kind of points to the fact that all of this bullshit legislation is just not

even maybe delaying the inevitable a little bit, but more so just making it a bit more of a pain in the ass. But then kind of reinforcing Bitcoin in that we're building the, we're like water, we're building the tools that enable the people to work around all of this bullshit, all of these blockades that have been put in their way. You know, you're not going to stop people from getting and utilizing Bitcoin. You're not going to legislate mining out of of existence, you're going to push it to favorable jurisdictions, and you're going to see in real time flag theory play out, not just with individual like bags of meat, but with entire networks of value, right? So again, it's just a, it's just a temporary blockade that will be routed around. It's

literally that meme of, you know, the government bans Bitcoin and the guy is sitting in front of a fence that's placed literally on like a sidewalk and then there's a path going around it. That's what's happening here. So it is what it is. But I think with that, I'm going to round out this topic. I, Evan, Bob, both of you have had fantastic, we've gone down some fantastic little rabbit holes here. But I'm going to, I'm going to toss it to Q. here. I'm going to let him have his moment in the sun. Q. What are you excited about? What has you bullish? What's on your mind? I'm going to honestly like it's it's all encompassing, but it is exactly what you said. It is the fact that the price is down so much. It's the fact that the fear of the

great inferior index is reaching new lows almost every single week. Like I'm genuinely bullish about that. And I will tell you why. The last time we're going to be. The last time we're we were in a bare market, Bitcoin had four digits in it as far as on the other side of the decimal place. Right now, in a bare market, which technically speaking, we are, Bitcoin is down almost 50%. I think 48% was what I calculated before coming on the show. This is, this is the bare market. We have joked the memes from 2019 or in 2020 of you'll never get 10k Bitcoin again. And like, oh, imagine buying the dip when the dip takes you down to 30K or 50K or whatever it is. Well, this is that moment that we joked about.

And it's really exciting to me to see the fact that something like the IMF goes out of their way to attack Bitcoin in any way they can. It excites me that Joe Rogan is having genuine conversations with Khalil Roundtree, who comes to the Bitcoin conference and is hyping it up on arguably the biggest, news source in the country right now. And then at the same time, we are in the midst of a battle with New York City or whatever in California, Gavin Newsom, Decatur Newsom, as I like to call him, enacted a new executive order saying, oh, we'll explore crypto, just like Biden did the explore Bitcoin crypto executive order. All news is good news at the end of the day. And if this is what the bear market is, which candidly, I take the other side of the corn from Evan, I think there's more downside to come. I think the correlation with the NASDAQ is not ending anytime soon, but that's also

like for someone like me who comes from having traded and invested in traditional markets, and I see this correlation. And to me, I don't see any reason why the correlation would break in the short term. Well, now all of a sudden, we can start to take advantage of the price dip and really change the game for the next bull market and bull run. That said, like nothing I said is genuinely on paper bullish. Like the price is down. We're getting shit on from every single angle. Every single shit coin wants to take an attack at us. But you know what? Bitcoin can absorb all of this. And just it's like a it's like an old anime. I can't even think of it. But it's like you absorb all of the bad energy that comes to you. And then you just release it 10 times harder on the other end.

And that's what I think is ball run whenever it starts will be like. Yeah. I love that. Well, I mean, the bullish part about that is all of the downsize that you just cited, Bitcoin's still going to exist after going through all of that. And it's, I think Guy Swan has said it multiple times, but it's just a game of survival. Bitcoin just needs to continue to exist. And that's it.

All it needs to do is just continue to exist and function as normal, which it has done for 13 years. and it will continue to do well into the future. Like it's despite what anybody does, despite any of these regulations, despite any of these shit coins coming out for whatever reason saying, oh, you know,

we've got this use case or we do this better than Bitcoin or, you know, all of the tradeoffs that they make in order to achieve those individual use cases, you know, they, they, they, they,

they, they, they, they, they, they get gradually less, market share as people and those actual use cases that are important to people get built atop Bitcoin.

And so again, Bitcoin just needs to exist. It just needs to be there and needs to just be an option, even if it's a difficult option to get to, if the situation becomes dire enough for different people in different places, they will gravitate towards Bitcoin and they will utilize it. you're right like bitcoin could continue to dump it could continue to go down okay we've been here before we've been here so many times before you sit around long enough in bitcoin you've seen it all right like it's it's it's my first year in bitcoin was 80% down I I was born into the bear market I was molded by it like that's you you

get you get desensitized and it's and the beautiful thing is i i was listening to um uh john valis had the macro hang the other day yeah like foss and and uh pish and jeff booth on and they're all talking um and and i listened to another one with tomor strolight and and they were kind of reflecting on what happened and down in miami and and they were like you know I don't recall talking about price the entire time. I was there with every Bitcoiner I know and every Bitcoiner that knew who I was and came up and talked. And price didn't come up a single time.

And that's the best part about Bitcoin. Like we're all here saying, you know, price follows eventually, but we're more interested in what Bitcoin is enabling in that it's an off ramp for the perverted monetary and fiscal system we're currently living in. And that's the beautiful part about it. And not only that, but we're, we're conditioned to have that low time preference to just ride it out. Okay, great, bear market.

Fuck it. I don't know. I was already on a 10 or 20 year time horizon anyways. Who gives a shit? Right? It doesn't matter. I don't know. Evan, Bob, do you guys have comments on this?

Q? Do you want to say anything more? I mean, the one thing I do want to add it and I'll give Chris the nod for pointing this out, like truly the best producer, even when I'm not on BM Live. The hash rates at an all-time high. And this is what? Now a year from the China Maining Band. So it's again, this reminder of attack us all you want.

Like Bitcoin and also pet peeve, I fucking hate the world, defy centralized finance, all of it. The only true decentralized finance is Bitcoin. There's no marketing. There's no business behind it. There's no powers that. be that are pushing it forward, it just continues to be and live. And people who are incredible and far more technically advanced and savvy than I am will continue to build off of this

incredible technology to make it more user-friendly for, again, the technically unsavvy people like me who will sit there and watch PTC sessions videos 10 times over just to set up my cold card. But alas, I will finish my rant and I'll pass the mic to Bob. All right. Well, I love everything you guys say except for one thing. And that's that I don't believe we're in a bear. And I think, Q what you just said, hash rates at an all-time high. My 80-year-old father hasn't called me in panic yet.

I've been orange-pilling people for five years. I haven't even got one phone call. I got a phone call three or four days ago from a guy I've been trying to orange pill that didn't get it, who finally called me up and said, I just sold everything. How do I buy the Bitcoin now? It, like, I think you said it had been at the conference, I didn't talk about price with anybody. Like, it's not, it's not relevant. I'm out, I'm out raising money right now for new mining sites. I'm going to, I'm likely going to have to choose which investors to accept as opposed to, you know, begging for investors to come in. So, you know, I really don't feel it. You know, I know on a technical basis and I'm just using semantics about, you know, we're not in a bear.

You know, maybe we're in a bear. I'm not a, I'm not a financial analyst or a trader or anything like that. I don't give a fuck about that stuff. But psychologically, it's not a bear. it's as bullish as ever. I agree. It's early, the early, like the earliest barrel market that I experienced, there was genuine sentiment from a fair number of people that there was a question as, like,

is Bitcoin coming back? That didn't as much exist in 2017. I mean, mainstream media, yes, Bitcoin's dead. They'll do it every cycle from now until the time we die. But, you know, less sentiment because, again, more people come into the ecosystem. They understand what's happening. They're building. They're like, oh, yes, it's doing what it's doing.

It's being Bitcoin. And that's fine. And but like this time around, you know, we, we had some all time highs last year. and then it's it's been like a steady grind down for a while now like everybody i know nobody's shaking nobody's saying is this it like is it never coming like nobody says is bitcoin dead that's not a sentiment that you hear from anybody it's just well it's just time to keep our heads down and work we're just going to build some cool shit or you know i'll let other people build some cool shit and I'll make videos about it.

Like everybody's just kind of getting to work and doing what they do and having conversations and not not anybody that I know is is thinking that this is the end. You know, the bubble is popped. Tulip Mania is over. There's none of that sentiment that I'm seeing. It's just, well, we just keep building. Can I chime something? and Evan, feel free to like use this or just completely ignore me interrupting when you're

sure to talk. Like all of us have been in Bitcoin for at least a couple of years, if not plenty, plenty more than that. I'm definitely the youngest here as far as Bitcoin years go. And I would say only from personal experience when you start or when you're getting into the space, all you care about is price. But as you invest more time, you step away from that. And so while all four of us on here and every single person watching couldn't give a rat's ass of Bitcoin is 35, 45K, or 55K, it's that next class that we're onboarding that is still paying attention to price.

That is still looking at on a technical basis. You're down 48% from your all-time high. That is on a technical basis a bare market. So that's kind of what the angle. I also want you guys to be thinking about when I say we're in a bare market, not just for the way we look. at it. It's the way outsiders are looking in on us. Yeah, absolutely. It's, and I, by the way, I was just playing with you when I said, we're not in a bear. So I hopefully, I didn't defend you with that. Let's go back to that, though, right? Like, short term, right? We've seen this grind down, right?

If we're looking at the cycles, right, we've seen that the cycles have topped off a little bit longer every year. I personally predicted us to top off in like late January or, or February. Maybe it was a little before that. But the ground down is definitely a lot longer this time around. So I feel like the cycles are getting a bit longer. But I think more interesting is just thinking about the macro climate as a whole right now and where things are going. It seems like we're heading into some sort of depression. There's a high possibility of stagflation. And personally, I see a lot of parallels between the early and mid-1970s where, you know, oil prices went through the roof, people had to conserve, only get gas on some days, and what that kind of market looked like,

right? And we had a few things in that time that really did well. And that was mostly hard assets and energy. So like gas prices went up, you know, metals. And I think there's a really strong possibility that we see a lot of that repeat in the next couple of years. And we see Bitcoin being a huge benefactor as, you know, all these central banks are dealing with this crazy infusion of cash into the economy that's been pumped in because of the COVID hysteria. And, you know, just trying to find ways to keep that all afloat, balancing inflation and employment rates. You know, I feel like the central banks of the world have really dug themselves in a bit of a hole now. And things just seem very much different to me.

I truly believe that, you know, we could definitely see a brand new Bitcoin all-time high, you know, far before the next cycle. Yeah. It seems like the havings are definitely having less effect because, I mean, early on, like a drop from 50 Bitcoin to 25 Bitcoin every 10 minutes. is substantial in relation to the existing period of Bitcoin, right? But I mean, 90% plus of all Bitcoin have already been mine. It's all priced in now.

Everything's priced in now. Yeah. Yeah. But it seems now that the largest effect on the price of Bitcoin will be people understanding Bitcoin. And so previously, like supply and demand was just kind of, of doing its thing. But now it's going to be supplied demand and understanding, right? It's knowledge that will do its thing. The more people have a better knowledge of what Bitcoin

is or the more people with enough capital that have an understanding of Bitcoin, the more the price will be affected to the upside. Because as people understand it and they have the capital to actually acquire Bitcoin, then that Bitcoin's not going anywhere. Because they're going to accumulate it and they're going to sit on it for an extended period of time and perhaps use it as a mechanism to borrow against, but they're going to hold on to their Bitcoin because they value it. Whereas previously, again, like that supply and demand of new Bitcoin coming onto the market, it had a stark effect on the market itself because the market was used to X amount of Bitcoin being gobbled up and now that's going to.

cut in half and when it's a large percentage of new Bitcoin coming into the market, then obviously it's going to have a large impact. But when, you know, we're already down to six and a quarter and we go from six and a quarter to six to three point one to five, you know, and it's, it's not going to have as much of it, you know, there'll be a pinch. It'll be felt over the next having and everything. But now it's more a game of who gets it. Who's got the capital to accumulate it and can survive all of the other chaos going on in the markets and still be able to hang on to their Bitcoin in the in the in the in the in the in term because again like if you have Bitcoin and you have shit positions and other stuff and you get margin called and there's no you know I was listening to Greg Foss talking about that if there's no bid on anything else if you're just like trying to sell into nothing. and the price of what you're trying to sell is going to crater. The only thing you have to sell is the thing that actually has value.

And you may not want to sell Bitcoin, but you may be forced to to cover your other positions if you're, you know, doing the Fiat thing and leveraging up. So yeah, there could absolutely be some volatility and some downside and everything. But those that aren't levered up, those that are kind of keeping with that low time preference and earning,

spending less than they earn and trying to be as responsible as possible. Those are the people that are going to come out the other end of this thing and actually have some Bitcoin savings and weather this short-term bullshit that we all have to weather because the Fiat world that we knew before

is unwinding. Yeah, definitely. No, we've always had this I'll say always, but there have been many things written about the correlation and correlation between price and hash. And Q mentioned it earlier.

You know, we're at an all-time high. So I had kind of viewed that correlation as broken right after the China ban for obvious reasons. But I think in my opinion, and I've done studies on this, I think that the majority of the China mining equipment that is ever going to come back has come back. that we're kind of at that point where maybe we're in the last 15% or so of that equipment, still looking for a home. And what we're really seeing now is, you know, true capital investment in new equipment. We also, I believe it was yesterday or the day before I can't remember,

but we passed, you know, blocked 735,000, which is the midpoint of the, you know, of the halving cycle. And so, you know, we're, we're now chasing the roughly two-year cycle. It's actually slightly faster than that. But we're chasing that. You know, I can say as a minor, yeah, I'm not the biggest in the world, but, but we're still accelerating. You know, we're going to add more sites this year. The bigger guys, and maybe say that for another time, they're still accelerating. You know, so I think we're still going to see that.

cash go much, much higher. I think the danger, by the way, for all of us is if price doesn't respond and or fees don't come up a little bit, there can be a squeeze on the mining community come roughly, you know, March, April of 2024. You could see those that are less healthy run into some issues because the reward. Because, you know, we're basically operating on about 40, thousand or 40 million dollars a day in the mining community if you use it in the dollar terms or about nine 10 nine 15 Bitcoin terms that's that's our livelihood so um so anyway I guess

the reason I bring that up is to me it's another reason to be bullish though I believe the price hash correlation will return and I also believe what you said Ben about education that we're still seeing the capital infusion. I still think everybody that learns about Bitcoin and gets talked to by somebody with the right knowledge base, the orange pill percentage is going to be massive. And I think we're going to continue to slowly see this institutional adoption. Amateur investors wants to know if shit hits the fan. in early 2024, is that when you scoop up key basics?

Yeah, yeah. You know, there's been some, a little bit of softening in the ASIC price. And for those you that don't track it. You know, we've seen just a little bit of softening. Still, I think, a little high, frankly. But. Bob, I'm curious on just like the delivery of equipment. Have you felt or been impacted by the ongoing supply chain issues

that every single sector that touches semiconductors seems to be dealing with? the last 90 days or so we've been able to get what we want with really short lead times in the gray market so if we like if we just say hey we want to add 40 40 machines in a given spot we can get those easy if if we're trying to put up a site with you know several megawatts and we need hundreds we have to plan a little bit but it hasn't been that hard You know, what I like to say is in the mining world, whenever you're going to put a site up, there's three variables. There's the energy, there's the mining equipment, and there's the capital. And my theory, the dilemma there is one of them is always hard.

So as soon as one of them goes from hard to easy, a different one goes from easy to hard. So right now the hard one is it's not capital capital is still there The mining equipment I would say is moderate You know that as long as you're doing you're not trying to do some 50 megawatts site you don't have to plan far ahead it's the energy you know can you find the energy in a reliable spot at a good price You know that's that's the game that's interesting I'm I'm this is this is my mission this year is is getting into mining and creating that tutorial video series. You know, how to obtain, how to obtain a miner, how to calculate your,

your power. What hookups do you need? How do you set up the machine? How do you get set up with a mining pool? Basically, all of that stuff is what I need to cover. Luckily, Steve Barber lives 10 minutes from me. Steve's great. He's a good guy.

So we're going to have beers probably in the next couple of weeks here. Yeah, I love to. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I'm going to get myself set up with a black box. And I think originally I was like, maybe I was just got like an S9 and all. Nah, fuck that. I'm going to go S-19 and just kind of like, let's just do this thing. I think I may as well just get right into it.

Yeah, I don't know. Do you mind Ben? I saw somebody in the comments, that's why not just buy more Bitcoin? And that's a long topic. But let me give you the short answer, which is if you take a dollar and you invest it in mining today, and let's say over the course of the next four years,

Bitcoin just goes up and to the right. And it, you know, you probably would have made slightly more money buying the Bitcoin. But if it still ends up at the same point, let's say it's at $250,000, four years from now. But it gets there on a variable path, on a volatile path, which we also know is the way it'll go. The mining will outperform it by a good measure.

because we talked about the correlation between price and hash. So when the hash rate comes down, as long as you keep mining, when the hash rate dips, you own a bigger percentage of the world's output. And then it's also downside perception because let's say you bought it a Bitcoin for $40,000 today in four years, it's still at 40. You've obviously gone nowhere. You'll almost certainly be profitable at a decent level having mine. So I'm not discouraging anybody from buying Bitcoin.

Obviously, I strongly encourage it. But I think what I would recommend to people is as you acquire more Bitcoin, it becomes a bigger percentage of your net worth. Start peeling some off. And if you can get involved in some mining, because it's almost like inside the Bitcoin ecosystem. It almost is kind of a self-hedging thing. In fact, interestingly, if you just look at it from stacking stats

and somebody also said something about non-KYC Bitcoin and all that. So yeah, if you want to go that route, you certainly can. But if it's an extreme case, let's say we really are in a bear, and let's say this bear goes back down to 10,000 or something like that, and you mine through that, you'll have a shitload of Bitcoin, you know, and just huddle. I mean, it's the same thing. You just huddle.

Adam Back has talked about that on some of his streams. So the best times, were mining through the bears, when the company did the very best is mining through the bears, especially if you're willing to measure your business in Bitcoin. Yeah.

So I was looking out my, what I'm paying per kilowatt hour the other day. And, and if I'm not reading it wrong, I'm paying like seven cents. Oh, that's really good residential. Really, really good. Yeah.

Yeah. So, uh, which is seven cent and, and U.S. dollars or Canadian? No, it's like Canadian.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Even better. Jeez. So I mean, unless I'm, unless I'm reading that wrong,

but I had my, my bill pulled up in front of me and it showed me they killed one hours and everything. I've got to look a little bit closer, maybe just to double check. But, um, like even if I'm wrong and

it's seven cents American. You're still going to crush it, especially with some of the 19s. Yeah. You just got to make sure you're a breaker in your house can handle it all, you know what I mean? Yeah. It's, it's a newer home. It also, and I know that Steve Barber will cringe when he hears this, but because it's a newer build, it's got, it's got solar panels on the roof.

Steve, Steve will be like, mother flatly. but regardless, I mean, it does cut on the cut down on the bill like 30 bucks a month or something. And it just came with the build anyway, so whatever. But yeah, I mean, it could be not so bad getting an S9 in a black box and just. And eventually, like, you know, I don't have a garage yet, but we will eventually build a garage out. And that it'll just heat the garage, right? So those harsh Canadian winners. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Those minus, you know, we had a few stints of like minus 30 minus 40 this winter. It's kind of sucked. Sweet. So it sounds like you got a lot of the formula down. It's really, well, I was going to say the sound, but the black box seems to handle pretty much all that. So it's just like figuring out the heating. But yeah, that's awesome.

So yeah, the only other thing I would say you should check out is sometimes at least providers down here, They have variable rates throughout the day where their pricing varies. That might mess up your. I think we're locked into a rate. Oh, yeah? It's a flat rate. Yeah, it's a flat rate. And we locked into it like two years ago.

Oh, sweet. Okay. So everything is coming up big now. That's great. Yeah. So we got it for, I think, at a couple, at least a few more years. So, yeah. Yeah.

We'll see. But anyways. I guess, yeah, I'm going to start to round this out. What I will do of you guys, I've got a, I'm going to get some final thoughts, but I'm also going to give you guys a challenge. And the challenge is to recommend, and I'll do mine first so you have some time to think, but to recommend a piece of content that you have found helpful at any point in relation to Bitcoin or topics that relate to Bitcoin in some way, shape, or form.

So that could be a book, a video, podcast, a magazine, an article, whatever it may be, something that you have found helpful along your Bitcoin journey. So I guess my final thoughts from today is just if you're new in Bitcoin, let's say like the past year or so, you've started to kind of come in and you're sitting around. looking at this and you're looking at the price and you're feeling kind of grim about things you know i mean if you're sitting here you probably got a relatively level head but nonetheless look to what's currently being built look to all of the things that continue to happen regardless of current price action and that will give you an idea of of the value they're in um because i'm a firm believer that

when we get our bull runs, those bull runs, a large portion of them are predicated on what's been built in the previous number of years leading up to them. You know, sometimes it can get a little heated and they can go above and beyond the price we quote unquote deserve. But, I mean, the past year, yeah, it was exciting, but comparatively it was pretty muted. And if you see all of the incredible stuff that's being built, I think Bitcoin is worth above and beyond where we're currently at and where we, even where we were at any point last year, just in the sheer utility value that it offers the world in contrast to the legacy system. So that's kind of where I sit. And in terms of content to check out, I'm, I'm, I'm. kind of on this one. I'm,

I'm, it kind of falls in line with the whole flag theory thing. Uh, but I'm, I'm reading the nomad capitalists. Go where you're treated best. Uh, and so I'm,

I'm a big fan of, um, free market competition. And I think it applies to countries as well now, whether that be where you domicile or whether that be where your company is or your, your money is. And I mean, I guess Bitcoin technically doesn't have a place that it resides.

It's in the cloud. But regardless, I think it's worth looking at those things and us seeing that sovereign individual thesis continue to play out as it, I believe, is already kind of currently playing that. Paring Nomad Capitalist with a read of the sovereign individual might be a pretty solid. a little bit of reading for yourself. So I'll leave that there. I'm going to toss it down the line to Evan.

Do you have any final thoughts for today? And do you have a recommendation of any piece of content for people to check out? Yeah, sure things. So I'd say, you know, if you've got a really well-educated audience, but there's still probably going to be some stragglers out there, go out if you don't already run your own Bitcoin node. And ideally run lightning on top of that. if you are not the one who's verifying your own transactions, someone else is doing it for you.

You're trusting them and you're ultimately trusting your financial privacy with that institution or individual. So there's a lot of easy solutions out there today like Razpie Blitz, Umbroil, my node, start 9. There's countless solutions that are easy. Some are commercially, you just buy the whole box and you just plug it in, you're ready to go. But if you want to learn a little bit about Linux and how these systems work, I highly recommend the Razpie bolt guide by Staticus. And that teaches you how to set up your own Raspberry Pi installing Bitcoin D and L&D on the box with a hard drive or you should do a solid state drive. And, you know, taking full sovereignty of your finances. Highly recommend that guide.

if not at the very least keep pushing yourselves out there you know stay humble keep being open to learning stuff like you got to keep leveling up one way or the other so so yeah it's like stay humble keep pushing yourself try to take a little bit more sovereignty back every day and uh you know keep stacking satch you'll be fun awesome any uh do you have a piece of content recommendation Oh, yeah, just that Raspy Bolt guide. I think that that's definitely an excellent resource for just doing the whole thing yourself. It's the best. And that's what the first node I set up to connect to Zeus with.

So she has to Respy Bolt. And Staticus is awesome. I met him in Riga in 2019. Great guy. Yeah, nice guy met him in Miami. Awesome. Well, we'll rotate it over to Bob. Any final thoughts?

and recommendations? I guess just final thought is, yeah, there's no reason to not be bullish, right? That's the theme of the show. I think it's what we all said. I haven't seen a single thing that makes me afraid. Like, there's not a single thing. So I'm pegged at 100, right? I mean, I have no fear.

So on the Fear Green Index, I'm at 100. But I don't like that. Actually, I don't like that because I don't. I don't think that the two choices are fear and greedy. I always kind of objected to that. I think just because you're not fearful doesn't make you greedy. But anyway, reading material. I actually found Austrian economics way before I found Bitcoin.

I started studying Austrian economics in the early 2000s. I actually have a degree in economics as well as a technical degree. but I recommend like mystery of banking by Rothbard just just to you know go go kind of see what you know what was maybe in Satoshi's head what kind of things were rattle around in his head when he was trying to make this thing happen and you know what were what were Zabo and you know some of those guys pondering when when they started coming down this path. So, yeah, that one. And then obviously, I'm not going to recommend the Bitcoin standard or any of those sort of things.

But I assume everybody's read all those sort of books. But I think one, especially if you are in kind of the newer class, I'm class of 2017, right? So if you're from anything from that period forward, I recommend the book of Satoshi. and also, I guess I'll throw three out, and also the block size wars that, you know, again, what was going on in Satoshi said, read what he actually wrote. There's a lot of public information about all that he wrote. And then the block size wars especially really, really good. And I think it'll teach a lot about governance and when, you know, we're talking about things,

whether it's the latest BIP 119 or whatever. You know, what's really going on? How might it work? Where are the power bases? What can you do as an individual? I think all those things are really important. Awesome. Well, yeah, great recommendations there.

Block size war is great. I thoroughly enjoyed it for sure. But yeah, absolutely. I'll echo everything you just said. Let's toss it over to Q. as well. Any final thoughts and recommendations, man? My final thoughts are just that as we enter the deepening of this bear market that I'm fully convinced we are in. Just remember that everyone comes to Bitcoin for a different reason.

And like my final thought is just we need to have a lot of kindness within the Bitcoin community. This is a time notoriously where we've been known to chop each other's heads off. So let's try to not do that on this next bull run. That's my final thought. But for book recommendations, I will have my head chopped off if I don't plug something. So you absolutely need to go check out, check your financial privilege. I think it goes back to a lot of what Evan we were talking about earlier with the Territ stuff. I will post a link in the chat as well.

You can use promo code FOMO and get 10% off as well. I highly recommend Gladstein does an excellent job of just bringing to life people and struggles from parts of the world that most of us will never venture to. And not to knock those parts of the world, but it's just stories and humans that need to be brought to life that Alex Glassing does an excellent job. And another book that I do want to plug, not anything to do with me, but more so because it's taught me so much about just like capitalism and how we have never, in my lifetime, at least, maybe Bob can speak to it a little bit more, not to dig at you.

in my lifetime, we've never seen real free market capitalism. In this book, 23 things, they don't tell you about capitalism, really helped me to understand that. Shout out my buddy, Kyle Foreman, who gave this me back in college. And it's just like these little nuances

of things that the government has slowly done over the course of when capitalism became sort of the socially, globally accepted form of democracy. form of building out an economy and the little things that they've done to sort of change capitalism into what it is now and what it frankly was founded off of fascinating stuff in that and I highly recommend for any of my fellow diehard free market capitalists sweet Q who's the author on that one ha June Chang he is a professor of economics at Cambridge

awesome I'll have to check that one out I hadn't heard of that one So I've got a bookshelf full that I'm trying to get through. But it seems they stack quicker than I can read. So maybe I need to start splitting it between that and audible. We have the same toxic trait of just buy a book anytime you see it. I'll get to it eventually, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, I thoroughly appreciate your time. This is a lot of fun. I had some fantastic time having all these conversations. with you. Of course, all of you are welcome back anytime. Anybody watching, again, all of their Twitter handles are in the show notes down below.

So give them all a follow and you'll be able to find everything that they're up to through their Twitters, I'm sure. But guys, again, thank you so much for your time. And I'm sure I'll be chatting to you all again soon. Thanks so much, guys. All right. Cheers. I will talk to you guys later. Awesome.

everybody watching. Thank you so much for being here. As always, I hope you had a good time. Friday, always the best time of my part of my week where I get to just chill out with awesome bitcoins. It's a lot of fun. And these guys were no exceptions. So definitely give them a follow.

Links are all down below for them. Outside of that, like, sub, share, all those things. Really, really do help everybody in the chat. Thank you for being here and dropping your comments. Before we log off here again, just a reminder, we've got workshops coming up in Colonna or I guess just the Okinawagin if you're around. And in Vancouver in July. So I'll be there, Colonna, July 9th and Vancouver, July 16th, both are Saturdays on each day.

There will be a morning session from 9 till noon. And that's for the beginners. So probably not too many people watching the show right now, but maybe you've got friends or family that might be benefiting from some hands-on direct, like reciprocal learning. And they're capped to 20 people per session. And that beginner one is going to be all like hands-on self-custody. How do you start a wallet? How do you back it up?

How do you restore it if you delete it? How do you send and receive Bitcoin transactions? What is a Bitcoin transaction? How do you deal with Bitcoin fees? what are Bitcoin fees? And then some hands-on with hardware wallets too to hopefully send them down that pathway of self-sovereignty and get them kind of taking a look at different types of hardware wallets

so they can decide which one is best for them. So I'll have a whole bunch of samples there for them to take a look at. The afternoon sessions are deep dives on the cold card. So everything cold card from initial setup to backing up to seed XOR, to doing air gap transactions to using passphrases and decoy wallets. We're going to kind of run the gamut and those are four hours in the afternoon

from 1 to 5 p.m. Anyways, you can find links for that at BTCsessions.ca slash events. 10% of all profits from tickets are going towards me going down to El Salvador and actually doing free workshops for the locals.

Not Bitcoins that are affluent and are going down for a tourist reason, but actual locals that need that education, they will get it for free. So that's the goal there. Anyways, check them out, BTCSessions.ca slash events. And yeah,

come learn some stuff and help some locals in El Salvador at the same time. With that, I'm going to wrap up. Thank you guys so much for watching and or listening. Please do like, subscribe, share. If you want to help the show another way, you can hit up the sponsors down below, shake pay lead and bit refill,

Keystone, Bill Fottle, all down below. And if you really liked what you saw, you can drop a Bitcoin tip at my stream. strike page, strike.me slash BTC sessions. Type in any amount you want there. Hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice or if you tap the arrow to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code.

With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your daily session. Toddled to Bitcoin.