BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH: Feat, Ben Justman, Joey Tweeets, Bitcoin Walk ep413

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Why are we Bullish?! FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/BenJustman https://twitter.com/JoeyTweeets https://twitter.com/BitcoinWalkOrg BOOK private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted. https://bitcoinmentor.io/ 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: BITCOIN WELL is the quickest and easiest way to get Bitcoin directly into self custody. They also offer non-KYC sells and bill payments. Transparent 1% spread, no additional fees and no withdrawal fees. Check them out today! https://bitcoinwell.com/btcsessions COINKITE offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions NUNCHUK WALLET and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted mutisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ HODLHODL is a NON-CUSTODIAL, ANONYMOUS solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION DEBIFI is a non-custodial Bitcoin backed lending platform with institutional grade liquidity providers and no rehypothecation of your funds. Find them at: https://debifi.com/

What's going on, everybody? Welcome to this show. Another Thursday. We're doing it a day early this week, but another week, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. Got an awesome crowd in the background ready to come on and fill you in on why they're so excited about Bitcoin, I suppose. We're going to be diving in momentarily. Doing this a day early, I'm headed out to Vegas, not for the digital identity conference, but actually just going out for my, with, with my wife to take in a show or two. So I'll be out in Vegas, but hey, why are we bullish a day early? But of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live.

Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. Thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things super important. They help get this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

Before we bring in a panel, let's take a quick peek at the market to see where we're at. Currently, I'm pulling up timechain calendar.com and simultaneously, I'm going to pull up the live chat. Anything you say into the chat from here on in, it'll be live for the world to see for better or worse. Back to time chain calendar. We're sitting at $59,302 per coin. 58K gang was having a heyday today. So congrats to them. I'm happy for you guys.

But now, firmly above, well, at least a few hundred bucks above, a single U.S. dollar will snag you 1,686 sats. In terms of fees, next block, only 18 sats per byte, anytime 12 sats per byte. And in terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.69 million of them, that is 93.78% of the total supply. We are going to take a quick word from our sponsors and we'll get everybody in here right away. mission to enable independence by being one of the easiest and quickest ways to purchase Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. The best part about it, every buy goes directly into your own self-custody. They never hold your coins. You can add a Bitcoin address as part of onboarding. There's a transparent 1% spread, no hidden fees, no withdrawal fees, plus they have KYC free sales and bill payments on their website. They're also a publicly traded company under the ticker BTCW on.

on the TSXV. Check them out over at Bitcoinwell.com. Check out my full tutorial on how to use them. And you can check out the links in these show notes down below and sign up today. Linkai.com has some of the best hardware on the market today to secure your Bitcoin. The cold card queue is an absolute powerhouse

and is my daily driver. And on top of this, they have plenty of other goodies including the Mark 4, the tap signer, open dimes, the block clock, and much more. If you head over to their website, make sure you use code BTC sessions at checkout to get a nice discount. Links are in the show notes down below. All right.

Well, let's get rolling. We're going to bring in our panel now. So I want to welcome to the episode, Jacob from Bitcoin Walk. We're going to welcome Joey from the Canadian Bitcoin podcast and some guy who really likes wine. And also a Ben, also a Ben. So welcome, gentlemen. Glad to have you here. Let's do a quick round of intras before we get rolling.

Joey, I'll toss it to you first. Let people know who you are, what you do. Sure, buddy. Joey, half of the Canadian Bitcoins' podcast with my brother, Len, Bitcoin brother, not Blood Brother. Every Monday, Wednesday, we stream, lots to talk about on our show and lots to talk about tonight. Ben, thanks for having me, buddy.

Yeah, no worry. It's glad to have you back. And we'll toss it down to Jacob. Dude, good to see you as well. I think we, where did I see you last? Was it in Madeira? It is, yeah. Yeah, well, welcome.

Give yourself a little intro. Sure, I'm Jacob. I started doing the Bitcoin Walk and a simple thing. You know, every Saturday, every sat, we go for a walk and we talk about Bitcoin. Awesome. I love it, man. Glad to have you. Figure it was about time to get you on the show.

And speaking about time to get you on the show, another Ben from the High Council. So glad to have you here. Ben, can you give yourself an intro? Yeah, hi. My name is Ben. I'm a member of the High Council of Bitcoin Ben's, and I make wine and hope to sell it for Bitcoin one day. But yeah, no, I'm a winemaker in Western Colorado, owner of Peeny Lane vineyards,

and I'm a bit-coiner. So here we are. Dude. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming. And we're going to dive right in. the chat as well. Thank you for being here. Feel free to toss out your comments, questions, all of that throughout the show. But we're going to dive in. Anybody unfamiliar that happens to be

watching, this is, why are we bullish? Premise of the show is simple. Each one of us comes with a reason for being bullish. And the flow of the show is pretty easy as well. Basically, somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. That is their chance to rant on whatever topic they're currently interested and excited about. Number two, we're going to riff on that reason, comments, questions, whatever rabbit holes we go down. And then finally, number three, we're going to rotate until we've all

had a turn. So reason, riff, rotate. Gentlemen, I'll just say, the only major faux pa in the show that you may have is don't drop your reason for being bullish early. Wait until I directly ask you. Sometimes I have people blow it early and then I get to them.

I say, why are you bullish? And they're like, oh, I already already did my thing. So, yeah, anyways, we're going to go with it. Quick shout to everybody in the chat, Nathan, lightning goats. Also, have you guys seen lightning goats? Do you know what that is? Is it where you feed the goat with a lightning? It is, right?

Okay, yeah, yeah. This guy owned goats, and you can remotely feed the goats. It's fantastic. So, and yeah, Michael, Emil, Kendall, Knox. Good to see you guys. Thank you guys for being here. Let's dive in. I'm going to get us started with my reason for being bullish.

And it's been a rough couple of weeks. There's a lot of shit going on. A little scary in regards to these top-down pressures that we're seeing. And that does kind of suck and it does kind of rattle you. But at the same time, every. Every time there's this kind of top-down pressure, there's also a response to it in that better tools are made. And so you also get to see which tools out there are resilient and do well in these types of environments. So I wanted to, I guess just as a recap of what's kind of gone on, especially in and around privacy-related stuff, the samurai guys,

coordinator shut down to two co-creators arrested all of that we saw with sobby initially say that they were going to just block u.s. customers but as of today earlier today they're just fully shutting down their their whirlpool or not their whirlpool but their coin joint coordinator um so a bit of an end of an era in in those two things and so a lot of people are like well, I guess that's that. What do we do now? And so I want to give a shout out to self-hosting. And I think this is going to effectively,

like if things get as draconian as they seem to be getting in the U.S., you're basically going to have governments not only encourage, but force people to self-host their own infrastructure. And so first shout-up. would be start 9. Again, one of the many options out there when it comes to self-hosting your own infrastructure, and that's not just Bitcoin-related,

but, you know, like files and passwords and photos and all that kind of stuff so that you don't have them on somebody else's server, but, you know, Bitcoin infrastructure. And so when it comes to the privacy aspect, there's a protocol called Join Market, and that can be used for on-chain privacy. And if you're hosting a Start 9,

or there's any of the other note implementations that have this, you can run something called JAM, which is effectively just an interface to be able to do collaborative transactions to maintain your on-chain privacy so that if you happen to go and buy a T-shirt online, that person can't go and ascertain your net worth. Because I'll say it and I'll say it again, privacy is not a crime and it's not ridiculous

for somebody to not want a person that they purchase a t-shirt from online to know how much Bitcoin they have and to know their address, right? Because if that merchant looks at the, they can see the change. And if it's a big enough UTXO, it becomes reasonable if that person's an asshole for them to book a plane ticket directly to where they just ship that t-shirt and pay you a visit in the middle of the night with a $5 wrench. And I don't want that. I don't think anybody here wants that.

And so being able to self-host and to be able to still maintain on-chain privacy is important. And so Jam is this interesting little interface. And the way that they talk about it is they say, imagine that your Bitcoin is like discernible pieces of fruit and you have strawberries. and raspberries, and you can see the full pieces. But as you put them into these jam jars, you mash them all out, and then all of a sudden you can't quite tell exactly all the distinct little, it's just a uniform jam, and you're not quite sure what's what.

And they even have little jars within your wallet, apricot, blueberry, cherry, date, elderberry. So they have, basically, you can move from jar to jar in collaborative transactions. and you can move in collaborative transactions out of the jam interface as well. So nonetheless, along the short of it is, it's basically a protocol for collaborative coin-join transactions that doesn't really have a centralized point of failure. And furthermore, when the natural knee-jerk reaction to this is, okay, well, what about starting line? Isn't that going to fuck you over?

Like start and get shut down? And the answer is no. Reason being, again, fully open source, everything. Anybody can download and host their OS on any Linux compatible device. But the interesting part about it to me is the marketplace. So this is where you go and you download your apps and, okay, I want a Bitcoin app. Oh, I want whatever. And so you have your various apps and one of those is a.

but okay so somebody shuts down start nine and they they shut down the marketplace well the cool thing about the registry here is you can add custom registries and any person is capable of making and hosting a registry for apps and so even in the event that start nine gets shut down and the start nine registry disappears anybody can create their own registries and host these apps to be then downloaded and installed on anybody else's start nine device. So they've really kind of gone and thought about this in advance and say like, we want to be there to help, but in the event that we can't be, we want this to still function. We want this to go beyond ourselves.

So I love this. And again, when it comes to like peer to peer and being able to obtain and swap Bitcoin for fiat and everything, you can even sell. self-host things like Robosats, and then you can run it from your own Tor browser, and it's self-hosted on my Start 9, so I can swap from Fiat to Bitcoin via Lightning, and it's all hosted from my own device in my own home. So again, my roundabout reason for being bullish this week is, as shitty as everything is in terms of what's happening right now,

the response from people building things will be to lean towards not having that thing be, have central points of failure. And the stuff that's still around that still exists is it's becoming clear and clearer what is resilient already to this type of stuff. And so I'm pretty bullish on that. I'm pretty bullish on tools that we may not have yet, but are being worked upon. So that's where I'm at, Jen. I'm curious your thoughts in and around this.

How do you, like if I think about what happened this week with Samurai and what's happened, like even last year or two years ago, whenever it was with tornado cash and similar kind of, you know, crackdowns, for lack of a better term, the thing that bothers me. about the way that we've responded is that we're we were so quick in the tornado cash example to villainize that that team and say like this is why you know shit coin whatever blah blah blah everyone remembers the talking points with samurai now we're saying you know this is why you don't collect fees and tweet mean things at the FBI or whatever they were tweeting right everyone saw those and so I my concern I'm not saying you're wrong I think you're I think you're right I think this is like a more resilient model for sure my concern is that I don't think the people who are who are making the rules are playing by them. And when I see what's going on with Samurai and this idea that like, well, Bitcoin's not money unless we say it's money and you were transmitting it legally. And yeah, the service is decentralized.

Unless you take a fee for the service that you're providing, then it's not decentralized. You know, you're not really custodying it. But yes, you are taking the ones and zeros and doing certain things with them. And what was the phrasing they use? You know, multiple unique tools to perform these. transactions that are easily disguised. I would be curious to hear what Matt Hill and the Start 9 team have to say about what's going on with Samurai. I haven't seen them, you know, say anything publicly, but there's clearly a chilling effect here. And that's the intention from

the authorities, right? The idea is not to arrest everyone. It's to make a loud example out of the easy ones and everyone else just retreats to the basement, right? And that's my concern. I'm curious. you know, Ben Sessions, not Jussman. If that service you were talking about with the coin join there, I shouldn't say coin join, but the obfuscation sort of portal there, is there a fee structure for that? And if there is, where do the fees go? Yeah.

So that's the interesting part. You can have, you can basically put up Bitcoin yourself and earn a fee for being a person that requires that. makes you a target that makes you a target they make an individual a target yeah yeah but i'm all i'm getting at is there's no central server to shut down right um so so yeah but yeah otherwise yeah you can just like say hey i want to send bitcoin to myself from this jar to this jar and then just wait for other people to jump in so you don't have to be you know profiting it from it whatsoever um yeah It's just literally a protocol.

And in regards to Matt Hill, he was actually on last week, and we were talking about his kind of stance in and around the samurai guys. And obviously, you know, I think just about everybody thinks that, obviously, it's bullshit what's happening. He, I think along the same lines as you was kind of talking. talking about how, you know, they're going to try to make examples of the loudest people in the room. And they're purposely, the rules are so vague on purpose so that they can kind of selectively enforce and, and, you know, make people behave in a certain way. And it's, and it seems to be working. So, but nonetheless, yeah, his stance in terms of start nine is they're basically a hardware, hardware company.

They have open source software and everything like that. But again, should they not be allowed to do that anymore, doesn't matter. It's still, it doesn't. There's no, there's no win there in terms of stopping the activity because it just continues to work. So, yeah. What all this recently has just made me, made even more clear to me is just that we're in the, then they fight you stage and it's not like a guess anymore. It's just very clear. And

that for me has like made me think about the complacency I've had for my Bitcoin security. And I feel like I've been in a pretty good spot for a while. But it's also like I can always improve. And there's always other things to do. So it gets put to the wayside. And while I feel good about where I'm at, I've also had to reconsider where the environment that we might be moving into as far as needing a little bit more security and taking things a bit more serious and being completely buttoned up as far as what I want going forward. And so knowing that I feel that, I imagine that a lot of other people are feeling that right now. It's pretty, if you're paying attention, it's pretty hard to ignore just the vibes and vibes are never wrong. So I'm hoping and

pretty sure that a lot of people are taking their custody, their corn control, their privacy, all that stuff a little bit more seriously going forward. And like you said, Ben, it's a little bit of like when these things come down, iron sharpens iron, and we get better. We get better tools. Yeah, but also we just practice better, take it more seriously. And it's these little reminders that serve to make us more resilient in the long run. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Jacob, I'm curious your thoughts on around this stuff as well. Yeah, well, you know, it's, as Ben said, rightfully,

this is definitely, then they fight your stage, and they try to, you know, put a fence against a moving glacier, right? So, like, it's not going to, nothing's going to stop. It's impossible to stop that they might try to use. kid next time or use a bazooka that it's not going to work because there's going to be solutions. People will be creative and will come up with some new ways to work around that. What I'm slightly worried about is the fact that at some point a lot of people touch some centralized exchanges like you know, like some Coinbase and these guys have been running pretty much, you know, industry level

surveillance machines behind the scenes. So I wonder, you know, how far will this go? Will they be going after everybody who bought, you know, 20 bucks worth of Bitcoin at some point through that? Or is there going to be some kind of amnestia for, you know, until certain threshold? I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm inclined to believe that at least initially, because, I mean, there, they've gone pretty hard and like the classification or the what they've implied as to what is a

money transmitter and all of this stuff it just seems so insanely over the top that my my guess is is that they're they're going to basically overreach as much as they can and then pull back just a little bit so that it it feels like a win but it's not a fucking win it's it's not a fucking win it's It's still a massive loss comparatively, but people will get complacent with that little step back. You gave them an inch, or in this case, like a foot and a half, and then they come back later on with even worse, but then they pull it back a little bit. And I think, again, it's that regulatory creep. I think that's just where it's going to go. But again, I do hope, and I do see prominently.

promising things happening with various tools that very much have an eye to these actions and are thinking more carefully about, well, how do these things get set up? How do we create these systems so that there isn't an easy way to say, okay, that person, that person, that person will deal with them, and then everything shut down and it doesn't exist anymore. So we'll see, but, you know, anybody that's curious about this kind of stuff, I would start peeking at, you know, running your own node, hosting some of your own infrastructure, even if you're not doing it fully right out the gate, you can start to learn about these things. And the more people that are kind of privy to the tools, I think the better off we are in

the long run. So it's never too late or too early to to begin educating yourself in and around this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And we all move slightly upstream as far as like our commitment to all of these things where like as we learn more we continuously hopefully get better. And I'm just thinking about how the tools, some of them are getting changed, taken away, sharpened, whatever, but like the tools that we onboard our friends with are constantly improving.

And so they're starting from a better base. It's in a lot, I mean, maybe, maybe not. I think they're slightly improving, but we can start them from a better base. You X is better for sure. Like, you know, if you check out the new Ambril software, you know, it looks pretty much like Mac. You know, it's a plugin they think and works, we're smooth. Same start nine. So it's much easier, I think, to do right now.

Yeah. Yeah. It is getting easier. I mean, if you're going to fully self-host up, there's always going to be hurdles. It's always going to be harder than just using a centralized service. But when you no longer have the same freedoms you did by using those services, people will jump ship. And I think a good parallel right now, I would say, is I think we're maybe seeing a, a little bit of this happening in and around just media because you went from no real way to get

reliable digital media to torrenting to well Netflix is cheap and it's super convenient and easy to use and I can just get most of my stuff there to now you've got like how many friggin services every single month. And you're like, do I need, like, in order to watch other shows they want, I need like, what, four, five services. And they're now beginning to, even though I'm paying for the content, they're still injecting ads into it. And you're kind of like, fuck it, I'll just torrent it.

So I think we've kind of come full circle on that, or we're beginning to. And so I'm wondering if we're going to see that in and around Bitcoin where it's like everybody was like a cypherpunk running their own node and doing transactions. And then, well, Coinbase is easy. And now perhaps back to fuck, I better run my own node. I think we might see that. Well, like as all the other options get worse, the option that was too cumbersome or too much friction, you know, a year ago now is like the best one, right? You see, you're right, you see this a lot. The video of streaming is a good example.

The other thing I would say, and like I'm kind of on my own corner here with my reason for being bullish, so I won't go too long. But the other thing I'll say is that. Why don't we use this as a segue? We'll just go right into your. Sure. Like I think that we're going to see a lot of unification because of stuff like this in Bitcoin. But also, guys, like if I look across the landscape in sort of traditional finance too, you know, Ben and I are Canadian, the budget was released. a couple of weeks ago. And in that budget, there's tons of stuff that is pushing people into

this like, you know, pig pen cage of asset taxes and asset reporting and all these different things. And most of the time, in Bitcoin especially, you find that people, you know, we kind of calcify as a unit when the price is down 80%. And, you know, now for the first time, at least since I've been in Bitcoin, the price is going to rip here at some point in the not too distant future. And we're under attack in a major way. Like, you know, it's not just people talking online or on TV or on, you know, MSNBC about how this isn't a real asset. It's governments clamping down on what you can do with it, how much you can hold,

where you can buy it. I don't know if you know this, uh, SESH, but like in the, in the budget, there's a couple proposals up here that are crazy. Like, great example. And not enough Bitcoiners talking about this, not enough Canadian Bitcoiners. you have to report your sales in Bitcoin or your sales of Bitcoin every year for your taxes, right? That's pretty standard stuff. They treat it as capital gain.

You know that in the budget, there's a proposal that you have to report all your buys to? How about that? You know, like there's a lot of people who are looking at what you got. And it's not just about what you got in terms of Bitcoin. It's about what you got in terms of your business, your real estate, your stocks, your gold, your cars, your art, whatever. The state is thirsty for money in a way. that it's never been thirsty for money. And I think that you're going to find a lot of people who are in traditional investment vehicles are looking around and saying, what is going on here

for the very first time? Yeah. And, you know, we, I think as a community have not been great about welcoming them with open arms. That's probably an understatement. But I think it might be time this time around because I think we're all going to be looking at each other, looking for solutions and ways to protect our wealth and our purchasing power. And by the way, you know, this idea that, you know, another example of what was in the budget a couple of weeks ago, this idea that the government is going to look for a quote unquote public comment, never a more ironic sort of phrase and statement than that on the worthiness of Bitcoin investments in retirement accounts.

So, ETFs, micro strategy, Coinbase, the miners, who knows, right? Bitcoin well, great example, right? The guy, you know, he's sponsoring your show. I love Adam and Julian, those guys. you know, they're going to decide that those are no longer tax-advantaged options for you. Come on. I think a lot of people are going to start looking across at the other side of the room at the dance and saying that maybe we should start finding partners here, you know, unlikely bedfellows,

the gold guys and the Bitcoin guys, the real estate guys and the Bitcoin guys, the equity guys and the equity guys, because we're all fighting the same battle now for the first time as the cage gets dropped around all of us. And so I think there's a lot of good names and a lot of good people, a lot of smart people in the Trad V space who are so close to understanding why we've been in this thing for as long as we have. And they're going to be pushed over the edge by all these policies. And so much like the other options getting worse forces you to consider what you once thought was a difficult thing to comprehend, other investments being taxed at the same rate that Bitcoin is tax is going to force you to think about. man, maybe these guys had something right. We're actually batting for the same team here,

wearing the same jerseys. Let's, you know, what's the phrase? Let's fucking go, I think, is what I would say. I'm excited for it. I can't wait to see what this bull market brings for this new kind of community of people who are just out to make sure that no one gets debased, you know, into a post office pod. You know, I don't know if you saw that, Ben.

I'm sure you did, but it sucks. You know, that's what's going on up here. I'm sure it's a similar story in the States and overseas. as well. It's difficult everywhere. Everyone's going to be looking for the same ways out. And I think we got one. Let's make sure we welcome these people with the right tools and the right attitude. Yeah. To that point, we're doing our, we've been building kind of that local circular economy here. And we've had a couple sat markets. The next one we're doing is actually Canada Day. But we're doing it at, we've got a location just south of the city here.

It's called the Saskatoon Farm. And there's a lot of, they've got a pretty huge market of people that are very freedom-oriented. And a lot of gold bugs, a lot of silver bugs that have not yet been exposed to Bitcoin. So we've been able to kind of plug into their vendor list. And we're sending out a big blast to all of them and saying like, hey, we're doing a Canada Day market. All of you are welcome to come. The only condition is everybody there just has to be capable of accepting Bitcoin. We will help you do it.

If you don't want the Bitcoin at the end of the day, we'll swap it out for dollars free, no problem. But I think it's going to give a lot of those people that are primed to understand why Bitcoin's important, their first experience with it. And so I'm pretty excited about that. And again, to your point, I think there's a lot of people that we would be better off aligned with than not. at this point. And on that note, Ben, I just having done a lot of, I've done a lot of farmers markets for wine sales over the last few years and I've had a lot of people ask me about when people come up and buy wine with Bitcoin because they see the sales, they want part,

they want in on that, right? And I've varying degrees of success in explaining and saying why they should, but ultimately like a lot of people aren't going to spend Bitcoin just at a random place if that person's not a Bitcoin or you don't assume that it's possible. But just onto what you were saying is I think a lot of those people may just hold on to the Bitcoin because that's easier. Right. And speaking from someone who sells things that he makes for living, I see the value of doing that and getting it for Bitcoin. or getting Bitcoin for it. But it's the idea of having a little bit of Bitcoin, especially right now, maybe watching the price go up over the next few years and feeling that and being like, oh, what is this?

I should learn more. So it's a super positive continued experience. But it's also a lot easier to feel good about just holding it there when you don't put actual money that you see as being used for other things for that. It's less of an investment and more of like, oh, I. I just sold this thing and now I have Bitcoin. Like it's a little easier for me to hold on to that because it's not a direct dollar investment translation. It's, oh, I sold this widget and now I have a little bit of Bitcoin, whatever.

It was just one of those widgets. I sell a ton of those. And so that's awesome what you were talking about. I think that's a super cool way of doing it. I wish that it's great to see other vendors accepting Bitcoin, but without doing any sales, that that information just kind of disappears that knowledge. So yeah, I don't know. A lot of people ask me about it, but it's like unless you're doing a decent number of these, it's kind of hard to maintain it. But if you do go away, walk away with a little bit of Bitcoin, I think especially right now, that's just a super

beneficial long term. I want to learn about this kind of investment sneakily. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I think you're right. Do you want to tag in here? Yeah, well, you know, spend and replace, right? I mean, that's the way to go. And I've been trying to kind of, you know, preach that and encourage people to do that. So kind of, you know, exchange value for value and spread some stats around.

But it's hard. People get attached to them and, you know, to Bitcoin to SaaS and are not so eager to let it go. So we're working on that. you know, we've got, in Edinburgh, we've got not many places that accept Bitcoin. There's like two or three places around Edinburgh. So it's like nothing really. But there is one sausage roll kind of shop or stand, you know, basically in the park that accepts Bitcoin. They started accepting Bitcoin like two years ago after the Bitcoin conference in Edinburgh.

So we keep them going. We try to educate the guy, but it's frustrating because, you know, the guy, he's got like wallet of Satoshi and we make payments and, you know, we send him some ads. But he just keeps on accumulating and like I don't think he's done his homework in terms of, you know, learning anything about Bitcoin. Even though, you know, we were buying some sausage rolls when, you know, Bitcoin was trading at, you know, 15, 16K. So he's stuck now. It looks like, okay, that's better, that there's much, much bigger. But, you know, there's got to be a lesson there and some will. So, yeah, I think he just wants to hold, like, huddle.

And he doesn't even understand, you know, that it's not really in his custody. So, yeah. So there's a guy in the chat, Quick Codes with Daniel. And actually, I saw this on Twitter. This guy, Paytech Capital, was tweeting about how, I guess, square terminals now, will allow you as a vendor. Square is a huge vendor platform. Square terminals will allow you to convert some percentage,

fixed percentage of your sales. Yeah. And like, so Square does the custody for you, right? Fine. It's not ideal. But man, like,

you know, when we talk about like, you know, onboarding people, how much easier is that than what we had two years ago or three years ago? So you're talking people about lightning walls. I've been to conferences like in the last two years

or talks in the last two years. And like, we'll be getting beers before or after. And someone is like three pints deep trying to explain to a 20 year old girl why she should download a lightning wall, ticker tip in Bitcoin. It's fucking impossible. Okay. Like, no one's going to listen to that. But if the vendor already has the POS terminal from Square, it's two buttons. Done and done.

And now you got another guy on board. This guy would never have bought Bitcoin on, you know, an exchange, would never have gone to an ATM, would never have bought the ETF, has never considered it. only knows the price goes up and down. It's in the news every three years or four years. He's got a couple of buddies with tons of acne who like to fuck with this stuff. And now he's got this thing available to him right in his POS terminal. It's perfect. This is this kind of stuff that's going to make a difference going forward for sure.

And it's a great development from Jack and the team over there. Yeah. I've got it. Joey, I'm gutted. You just nick my why I'm bullish. There's more to talk about for that for sure. There's way more to talk about for that. I'll come up with that one.

So I was on the alpha trial of that for Square for the last two years. Nice. And I can say that it was extremely easy to deal with. I didn't have my percent set super high. So it was more about just using it. It was cool to walk away from the end of the day, no matter if I made a sale in Bitcoin with a few more cash. Do they use cash app as the default wallet? Or can you like auto withdraw?

Like, what is it like? Well, I set it up two years ago, so it might have changed since then, but I use Cash App as the default wallet. It opened my eyes. I'd never used Cash App before, and it opened my eyes to like Cash App's easy. I was always on Finmo for friends and then just Lightning Wallets. And so exploring Cash App a little bit was super beneficial to the point where it's like now I just like I'm going to recommend River or some other Bitcoin only. I've never some other Bitcoin only exchanges.

Someone wants to buy a real amount. But if it's just my friends like dabbling, buying a little bit, I'm just going to send them to cash up because it's got the brand recognition. It's a pretty big company. Yeah, they already trust it and it's it's super easy to use. I have Bitcoin and cash in the same spot, which is such an awesome concept. So it's really just that square is already there and the fact that it's, it's, there's no other options to convert 10% of your income. It's Bitcoin's the only option.

Huh. I wonder why they're offering Bitcoin. Why would it only be Bitcoin here? Maybe I'll just check that box and see what it's like. And you're totally right. It's a Trojan horse that a lot of people won't use, but it makes that everything going back to your first thing, Ben, All this stuff either makes it easier to jump in for the first point, or makes it more resilient when you jump in for the first spot.

One or the other, if not both. And it's just a super exciting development to see. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I have to do this during the show here. We got to do it. I really need You're going to buy

Goathe goats? There we go I'm going to feed the goats right now gentlemen It's fine Because goat guy's in the chat Lightning goats is in the chat I know I know Here I got to make sure

Wait is he going to go out there and feed him Like can we see him go out there No no It's just an automated feeder It's an automated feeder So I'm going to pay this from my FETI wallet So near perfect privacy To feed these goats gentlemen

I'm getting all in. Scanning it. Okay. Continue. And what? 16. How many sats do I need? Okay.

We'll just be nice. We'll send over 2,000 sats. Let's see. Where's this food come out? Let's see. Is that the black thing on top right? Just by the QR code. Feed triggered.

It should be put on. Here we go. Here we go. Oh, they hear it. They hear it. Yeah. Something happened there. Yeah.

It comes up. So it's up top and the top it's it's up here. That's the feeder and it just Oh, look. You get the white guy out there too. Nice. Yeah. They all know the sound. This is great. This reminds me of, remember like, I don't know, how old is that when this is going on like 20 maybe? So like, I don't know, a while going on 15, 16 years. Remember that like African watering hole stream that everyone used to watch? Oh, yeah. I think so. Yeah. Like we got to get we got to get the feeder on the. African watering hole where like, you know, mortal enemies just do a ceasefire just to get a sip of water in the middle of the night. I like lightning goats in the chat. I think it's clogged.

You might get a live feed. Is he going to be on the screen this minute? Let's go. Get him out there. I wonder if I could time a payment where I like spray him with the feed. I think here he comes. The boys are all coming out. This is good content.

for the audio version of the podcast. We need like the scripted video. So there he is, there he is. Okay, hold on. Here we go. Something clogged up. I'm going to wait. Give this man a roundabout.

This is like nothing you could see on any other YouTube channel. Oh, look at them. Look at them. Okay. Give a thumbs up. Give the thumbs up. Yeah. All right.

I love it. I just sent the other one because I do. How great is that? That's so good. That's so good. funny. I love it. I might set one of those up for my dog, actually. I think that's a good idea. Just stream my dog, getting through. It keeps on saying feed triggered. People watching this treatment. That's awesome. But, again, this is how you go right past having to convert at all.

Just set up a lightning goat feeder. And I like the comment. This is content. He didn't make good content, but it is content. Portnoy and Barstool could never put together a show like this. There's no way. This is amazing. Well, with that, I think high time, we do a little rotation here. I enjoyed that topic. But Jacob, I're going to toss it to you. I'll cue you up with the same question everybody gets.

Why are you bullish? Okay, well, Joey, he's going to be tough one. But I'll follow the news. I'll follow the hot one. So just from yesterday, Microstratory Orange, you know, going for enterprise-level software using Bitcoin. I think, you know, this is going to get more and more recognition. These are in our early days. So they're talking some digital signatures for emails and stuff like that.

But it's happening. How does it work, Jacob? Do you know how it works exactly? Like, I really have no idea. I can't be the only one here who doesn't really know exactly how it works. I saw the just, you know, the video that Siler and his coworker, I call it. or presenting, I think it's just an idea that basically you've got kind of ordinal in the email that you can verify. And it works like a plug into your outlook. So you've got a little tick,

orange tick effectively. And that shows you that, okay, this is a legit message. To be fair, you know, I'm not like ultra bullish on that in terms of like how sexy it is. It's probably not very sexy, but it's a start. And maybe in the corporate environment, this is actually going to be recognized as, you know, as something valuable. So that's, that's just my second best reason to be bullish. But I'll go with another one. I'll just bring an anecdote and it's a little bit of a deja view to what's, what's,

I think we discussed off the camera before. So, you know, we're doing Bitcoin walks. So, you know, we go for our walks and we, talk about Bitcoin every Saturday we've been doing that for over two years and just after the halving we had our our walk and one of the friends who's a regular now he's he's saying I have to say that you know this last bear market was much easier because of the Bitcoin work because our kind of support network and the Saturday and we talk and we reimburse like we we we make our really stronger and learn from each other so in this sense it was it was really

really nice nice thing to hear and yeah it's you know people are kind of creating this the support network to each other and you know I can I can see this transcend for throughout the know the meat space and the cyberspace as well of course where you know we've got this whole this common denominator to that connects us that you know we can talk about so 21 million right so in this sense I'm bullish because did you the genie is out of a bottle and it's going to be super hard to stop that. I love it. Yeah.

Isn't the walk idea good? Like people like I've been doing Bitcoin walks with my wife for a long time and I find that it's not really that fulfilling because she doesn't she doesn't come actually. So yeah, it's, uh, it's not really not much fun, but it's great. Like I would love to do something like this. I think it's a great idea because everyone just gets together. There's one in Calgary. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Is Ben go? Do you go Sash? You go walking with, uh, I've not gone yet. I don't know where they do it if it's probably downtown, but I'm like basically way out the ass end of the city.

So it's pretty far from me. But I'll probably try and make it out. I try and make it out to the meetups and stuff like that every once in a while when when parenting will allow. So I, yeah, I'm going to have to check it out where exactly they're doing it but I would definitely love to. I think it's an awesome idea. Again, anytime you can get Bitcoiners together for any, any reason is a good reason in my opinion. You know, the, the, kind of repetition and the cycle, the rhythm to it is kind of cool as well. Just recently, you know,

not only it's every Sat, Saturday or Satoshi, whatever you like, it's also, you know, I was thinking about that and you know, like every two weeks or every 2016 blocks, we have the difficulty adjustment. So half of that is roughly a week. So every, and we go for a walk for, you know, like two hours or an hour and a half, two hours. So that's about eight, nine blocks. So a thousand and eight, that's half of that. So every thousand blocks we meet for another walk.

So, you know, it makes a perfect circle and it's kind of cool. I like it. This is a good idea. Let me ask something. Okay. I had not heard of this before. today. So do you guys like, I mean, the organizers or some like central sort of, you know, Bitcoin walk, I don't know, Twitter account, did they like pick a, like, we should talk about

this this week or like bring your best orange pill story or bring your best whatever or just like people get together and it's all organic, whatever everyone wants to talk about. It's super organic. And I always, you know, if there is a new chapter popping up, I always say just get together, you know, if you're, if there's people who you don't know, uh, just gets, you know, get on a walk, starts, you know, walking and talking. And there's a cool thing because, you know, it's different to your usual in-person meetup in a pub or, you know, a bar or something. Because, you know, when we're sitting in a pub in a stationary position, like, I focus on

you and you focus on me and our conversation is kind of power struggle. You're telling me stuff, I'm telling you stuff. And, you know, like, no matter how good friends we are, there's a little bit of judgment, a little bit of, you know, ego coming through. Whereas when you're walking next to a person, you're focusing on your next step. And you know, you can, you see the horizon. You see where you're going.

So you have a better blood circulation as well. So your brain works completely different, man. You're open-minded. And it's easier to absorb knowledge this way. And to be open for any sort of ideas. And also, you know, it's a great idea for newbies, someone completely new to Bitcoin to just walk and listen. You don't have to talk.

You can listen to other people or have a conversation and any any sort of topic. That's actually how I learned most just by listening and you're following other people talk. So there is something like something really, really crazy, magical about that simple act of getting together and going for a walk and just repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, and doing it over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. I got to get out for one of those for sure. Ben, have you been on a Bitcoin walk yet? No, but I did just want to say that having community, finding other people around that are into Bitcoin, both in the meat space and digitally, is just so powerful.

I can't really speak to previous bare markets and how hard they were, how hard everyone had it. but I just got to say it like it was rough this last bit. It wasn't just the Bitcoin bear market. I felt like that affects a lot of your life when you go so deeply into it. And being able to like be around other people, have friends to like somewhat commiserate with and just like, yeah, no, of course we're still buying this. Like we're hopeful. They're all the stupid ones when everyone else is like looking at you like you're an idiot or. or you've just been proven wrong by the world in their eyes is pretty helpful as far as like maintaining both your conviction and just like confidence in the rest of your life.

I've always said that it blows me away that a lot of people went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, orange build themselves without knowing any other Bitcoiners or like even digitally, like they figured it out on their own. That blows me away as someone who had two good friends that were Bitcoiners before I got. Because I went crazy, man. The whole world thought I was crazy. I was so into Bitcoin. It's all I could talk about. And to not have anyone, both in the bear market and in the learning process, is hard.

And so, I mean, I commend everyone who made it through that. But I just say that to say the value of the community, the value of having other people around is, extremely high for me. You know, I keep on saying that Bitcoin is not only the most secure computer network, but it's also the strongest support network you're going to get. And that kind of works, right? I think that's fully true. I mean, in what other sect of society could you, like, waltz into,

any city on earth and just say, hey, where the, uh, where the Bitcoiners at? And then be able to just like sit down and have a beer with somebody that you've never met before and instantly have like a degree of connection. And at least like probably half or more of your views are going to be relatively similar and you're going to have plenty to talk about. You're going to have things that you can relate on. Like I've, I've been around the world and been able to just sit down with people and just chat and and that that's i i think that experience is very unique to to bitcoin like if you're

there's not a lot of other things where you can literally roll into a city and and just kind of put put up the bat signal in the sky and people will come running because they can't wait to talk about bitcoin with you or whatever your interest is um but bitcoin that is a thing that is a thing that is a thing You can just, you basically can stack friends around the globe. And, yeah, it's very, very unique. And on top of that, again, Ben, to your point, the idea of trying to navigate this space with nobody is just, it's, I mean, I'm glad that I'm not in that boat,

but I've met Bitcoiners that have been in that boat. there's a dude. So I went down to Costa Rica a couple of years ago and I just randomly tweeted out and said, hey, are there any big corners in the area? Ended up meeting with a couple different people. Funny enough, both of them Canadian expats

because they got the F out of Dodge when shit started getting locked down. But one of the guys, I mean, he had closed up his entire business, packed up his entire family and left the country as all of the restrictions started coming down.

A really hard decision for him. Also, he had never met another Bitcoiner. And it was his first time. So he's making all of these crazy life decisions. And he's like, I don't know if I'm insane or not, but I don't feel insane. And he got down there and like we sat down and started having a drink. And he's kind of describing to me like this, this just insane journey he's had. And he had like tears in his eyes as he was like, you're the fur of the big.

I've ever met in real person, in real life. And I, it's, it's just like such a weight off my shoulders knowing I'm not fucking insane. And so, yeah, yeah, like, it's an important thing. But like, if you're a bitconer out there and you haven't met other bitcoins, we're definitely stronger together. So, so go and meet your local bit corners and build those relationships. Because when shit, it's the fan, you want, you want friends that you can relate to and support. Yeah, so a very quick anecdote.

So, you know, the whole idea of regular Bitcoin walk started with me just going for a walk with my headphones on when we had our second second son. And I could only like, you know, snip out for a couple of hours, tops on Saturday afternoon to have the time for myself. So I would just go and listen, you know, to podcasts and audiobooks. And at some point, you know, the same thing happened to me. I thought I was like, I need to talk to someone. I'm so overwhelmed. Like this shit is like it's driving me crazy. Am I insane or, you know, is this going to revolutionize the world?

So, yeah, we set up, you know, a meetup page and that's how it started. That's amazing. It needs to be more of that. And I hope more people kind of take that initiative. There's one comment in the chat, Ben, about like, Opsack. People are afraid to do it because they don't want to get out of it as a Bitcoin. I don't know how you guys feel about that. but I would say like offsec is important, but there's ways to be secure and still have people

know who you are. We're all doing it. And, you know, like there's ways to make this work. You're, you will drive yourself crazy. Like Jacob said, if you just are like alone all the time, not talking to anybody except like, you know, Twitter nims. It's worth, it's worth seeing who's out there because I guarantee at this stage in the game, if you're living in like a first world democracy, there's going to be.

other people out there who are seeing and feeling and doing the same things you're doing. You just have to tell people, right? Be the first. Be the first. Okay. So like let's let's think adversarialially. If you're if you're a super upset conscious, you have a bunch of Bitcoin, you never interact with another Bitcoin and you just shut the fuck up, stack sats and just sit there. And let's say the worst of your fears is realized in that the government basically outlaws everything. You can't have Bitcoin. You can't own it. You can't use it. You can't use it. do anything with it. What the fuck do you do with your Bitcoin at that point? What do you do? You can't use it anywhere. But if you have a network of people that all appreciate Bitcoin and understand what it's

worth, you at least can go to those people and be like, hey, I need this. I know that you do this. Can I exchange some stats for that? You at least have an outlet to do that. You have a community that you've built together. It's really hard to shut down. you know, if you have a friend who has chickens that lay eggs, it's really hard for people to be like, I know you guys know each other, but you better not meet up and exchange some sats for eggs no more and not allowed. It's really hard when there's all those little interconnections of an actual community.

But if you're just an island and you never speak to anybody, and the worst of the worst happens, and everything's outlawed and you're not allowed to self-custy, and you can only own the ETAF, what in the fuck are you going to do? Nothing. Yeah. Sorry.

Tell me how you really feel, yeah. Okay, so before we do our last rotation, can we touch on this, on this, we touched on it briefly, but the sailor thing. So I don't know a ton about it. I've seen a mix of things on the internet about it.

So like digital IDs on Bitcoin or something like that, but it's like inscribed. So my initial, like I saw a lot of knee jerk either this is the greatest or this is the worst or the indifference. I'm kind of in the middle there thus far with what I know is I'm kind of indifferent. I don't think I think things like PGP are useful. I think they're useful enough to just use those, maybe make them a little bit more user-friendly.

I don't necessarily see the need for it to be using the basler of Bitcoin. I also don't, you know, in the long run, I also don't see the like, I don't necessarily see it as like some sort of threat because I probably just, if it was something shady, I probably just wouldn't use it myself anyways. But I don't know. I'm not well informed enough. I feel like, I do feel like there is a need for the ability, like with software, there is a need for somebody to be able to have like a reputational private key.

that can sign things and say, I did this. And I think that's going to be even more important for the general public moving forward reason being, with all the AI shit and everything, you're not going to be able to tell who has done what. Like the videos are always getting already getting scary in terms of accuracy, and they're going to get worse and worse in terms of not quality,

but in terms of what can be done with them to incriminate people for shit they didn't say or do. And so I think there's going to get to a point where where the world where individuals are going to need some sort of a PGP-type key to basically say, like, yes, this was me. This video is me and I'm using my key. It's going to be the only reliable way to in some way verify that somebody actually said or did something. And if it's not verified with the key, then then, you know, you can't. fully trust that it was them. But I don't see the need for that necessarily on Bitcoin.

So I don't know where I'm at with that because I don't have enough information. But I don't know if you guys have any other insight. Who's asking for it is what I would say to Mike? Exactly. I think, you know, this is like great tool for corporate use. So, you know, if you join a corporation and you're, you know, communicating with a bunch of colleagues on sensitive ideas or issues, then maybe this is the way to go. I don't think incorporation he would use the most of it.

They're not going to. Like this is what I mean. He, you know, he's building, I don't know, man. I think like I was going to come tonight with the why are we bullish reason.

You know, we're going to, this is finally the moment where we're going to slay sailor. And it feels like, it feels like he's getting close. Like, I don't, I don't know what to make of this guy anymore.

First of all, he's never said anything I like when he's wearing a fucking suit. So immediately I dismissed this idea of Mike in a suit saying something that's going to be valuable to me or something I'm going to appreciate. But the other problem I have, and maybe I'm crazy here, you guys can tell me, but he crashed and burned on Marty's show, you know, TFC, I think three years ago at this point. And since then, you know, short of coming on your show for a short stint on Christmas one time and maybe a few others over the years, I don't know, for like five or ten minutes at a time. or CNBC with Morgan, whatever her last name is, he's not done any real TEDA-TET, organic conversation style, podcast, YouTube video, anything, nothing. Everything he does is super tightly controlled, premeditated, and I think that he doesn't

engage with the host at all because he doesn't want to. I'll give you a great example. Stefan Levera, who's a super smart guy, technically and on the economic side, you know, just had sailor on for the better part of three hours, I think in December. I think Levera maybe said, I don't know, a hundred words in the full two hours or two and a half hours, something like that. So what that tells me is this guy's got a clear agenda, a clear message, and he wants to spread this message to people without being challenged. That's how I, that's how I view this. I mean, the MSTR earnings calls, same thing. This announcement of the DID thing.

same thing. And, you know, Jacob, you and I are kind of talking about, like, who's asking for this? He thinks it's going to be for corporate. Does anyone really think any corporate entity that uses Outlook is going to look to micro strategies, decentralized ID for verification as a verification mechanism? There's no fucking way. Yeah, I get that, you know, and I said, I don't find it necessarily, you know, sexy. But what I think is, what I think somehow matters is the fact that you know you've got a micro strategy boss you know so kind of bottom of s np 500 list yeah talking about building on bitcoin and you know everybody else kind of knows already that this is coming so maybe this could be you know encouraging other other corporations and companies to embrace

it and to to not to neglect bitcoin basically could be i i don't i don't necessarily disagree with that point of you. I just think that like Saylor, you know, the, yeah, he's in the SP 550, the bottom of the SP 500. I, that's, I think, fine. But the point I would make about those other companies, the guys who you really need to adopt something like that, you know, who really need it, they're not going, they're not going to do it, I don't think. And I think about like the way we would carry ourselves on Noster or Twitter, you know, as far as like verification, ID verification. It's difficult to do it with a video, sure, but it's, still pretty early for video in a lot of ways.

You know, something will come along that'll be easier for us to verify with video at some point. I think there's a lot of good options. Like the Noster verification is pretty simple to do whether you, you know, are a notable person or non-notable person. Twitter, obviously, you pay a couple blocks and you get your verification. The people who really need this stuff to be like bulletproof are media, big news outlets, governments, maybe.

I just don't imagine any of them using this. And so what I really want to, would like to hear Saylor talk about a bit is who's asking for this product. Don't forget. Sailor hasn't given and refuses to, it seems like, you know, support or give any money to open source devs. There's pros and cons there, but that's a data point. And instead, in this new micro strategy infrastructure project that he's doing, this Bitcoin development company that he's pivoting to, he's spending his time on this. Is this good for Bitcoin? I don't know.

You mentioned it, Ben. The fees are going to go up here. It's on layer one. He's using ordinals, which are red meat for a lot of people in Bitcoin, the maxis especially. I don't know what I feel about this. I think there's a lot of there was a lot of better ways to deliver the message. There's probably better ways to deliver the service. And I continue to be unsure about where he is in terms of his priorities.

That's all. I see him as, I mean, I think with Sailor, it's. to a hammer everything looks like a nail and he has he does a couple things he makes software and he has the job of preserving massive amounts of capital

so when he looks at Bitcoin he basically just applies those lenses to it right he wants to preserve his purchasing power into the future and then he's like okay well I'll build software

on top of it because that's what I've been doing for however long and and in a kind of proprietary way, right? Because that's how he makes money. It's proprietary software. And so I don't think he's super keen on open source.

I don't think he's super keen on, well, he's clearly not super keen on Bitcoin as like an actual monetary, you know, peer to peer. Like, he doesn't see his money. No. It's just like an asset to preserve a purchasing power. And so there's going to be people in that vein that. that's how they see it and that's how they use it. I disagree that.

Like when he says that, oh, it'll never be money, I totally disagree because I use it that way every single day. And so I think the question is aware, you know, which, which, which, which country, because there's countries where this is money and, yeah, no more money is the function. He's pro-osification, right? Like somebody tweeted this interview from him two or three years ago where he's basically saying we have to ossify Bitcoin now. Like, that to me is indicative of a viewpoint that isn't going to be good for Bitcoin long-term.

It's just not. Like, to your point, Ben, about the money thing. That's an easy, there's just easy wins to be had as far as, like, making this thing payments ready. He doesn't want them. You have to ask why, why not? And then that's the lens through which you would view this digital ID thing. What does he think it is? He doesn't think it's money, but he thinks his digital ID.

He thinks it's a store. value, but not money, but then a digital ID product as well. These things don't, they don't jive together, I don't think. And I'm just curious about what, I need a worldview from this guy. If I'm going to really support him and throw my weight behind him, you know, whatever small amount of weight that is compared to what he's got. But as a community, we've really revered this guy since the day he came on the scene. And short of, you know, three hour podcast appearances where he wax is poetic about how this is similar to some kind of, you know, bronze age civilization, making the jump from using the wheel for ceramics to using the wheel for propulsion.

I'm not 100% sure what I've seen otherwise besides the buys every month and the other stuff that he's done, you know, in terms of the messaging. Now I think a lot of people are starting to say, man, you know, this guy, maybe not the hero we thought. Maybe not the hero we thought. There's a, there's a tweet. somebody quoted a Bitcoin

magazine thing because Bitcoin Mac just dropped it Michael Saylor presents one of the best explanations of Bitcoin you will ever hear this guy has some choice words

Bart's name meanwhile 80% of the hash rate is concentrated in four mining pools privacy tools are shut down custodial lightning wall are forced to block U.S. customers Coinbase has 1.5 million Bitcoin in custody

and hash prices that have an all-time low. But yeah, keep them one-liners coming. That's it. That's what the guy does, right? Like at some point. And like you have to also just wonder in terms of like the messaging, you know, the man is tweeting out like in my opinion like corny AI photos every day with one-liners like

you just said. Like why? What is this? Show me the benefit. You know, you have all this capital available to you. Arguably besides Dorsey, the guy with the most firepower to support Bitcoin, growth. whether it's on whether it's on the development side on the legislative side on the adopt like wherever you want he's not doing any of it and instead he's doing digital IDs

there's something there's something there maybe just maybe this just turns him on in maybe he likes doing that Jesus Christ he's sexually think yeah it's a king again I think I think everybody's gonna say Bitcoin's a bit of a mirror right like whatever whatever your interests and your values are are going to be reflected like it back to you by by bitcoin and so i i think he sees it in where where he has value and where he has the most interest um i don't i don't know if i i don't see it necessarily as malice i just see it as self-interest i see sailor as a great marketing tool for bitcoin on on yeah he's a master marketer yeah i i think what i hope is um you know because because at some point

there's always division over certain details and how people are going to use this thing moving forward and so and so forth. What I hope and what I'll probably do in practice is the stuff that I think will make sense to people that I'm trying to educate about it that he has said, I'll utilize those tools, right? Because he is very good at speaking on certain topics

to get certain types of people to recognize the value in Bitcoin. But then when it comes to things about circular economies and actually utilizing Bitcoin, I'll use totally different mediums to educate about that. And so I basically now see a lot of his talks as maybe initial forays into Bitcoin, but then I'm going to use other types of content when it comes to other worldviews of how Bitcoin can be utilized, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I don't. Do we agree that Sailor in a suit's never a good idea, though? Yeah, yeah. We need less. We need less of that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think, I think peak, peak sailor was the Cyberhunter shirt.

Yeah. We should just be judging outfits here. Let's like, what are you wearing tonight? My 21 million cyberhont shirt. Anyways, Jen, okay, we're going to do one more rotation here. We'll cap that one off. But Ben, I'm going to toss it to you. I'm going to cue you up with the same question.

Why are you bullish? Thank you, Ben. I'm bullish on Bitcoin only as a positive brand association. We were talking about cash app. I think all of us are, are pretty full into Bitcoin only. And I just had a call yesterday with a guy who has a regenerative farm, had some grapes, and worked with a vineyard that was kind of like falling apart,

just old, unkept to make some wine out of it. using a winemaker who I am like basically hiring a winemaker who I'm friends with, familiar with, and about an hour and a half from me. And it was phrased to me as he was a crypto guy or doing a crypto wine when I first heard about it a few months ago, whenever I hear that from someone who then comes with, well, I don't understand it. It's not my world. I don't know if they mean Bitcoin or if they mean crypto.

I do generally assume crypto, but got a call from him yesterday. Just touching base gets another guy. I mean, I'm into a regenerative ranching. So many of the things he's doing phrases it as he's a bitcorner. I got into Bitcoin early, then got into Ethereum early, said something about how he thinks maximalism is negative for the space or is bad, but like I can see the positives or some things for it. I'm happy it exists, something condescending like that.

And then we started talking about how like just kind of creating a, like what he wanted to do with his wine. He reached out because he saw this, my Satoshi's Preserve bottle. And I just kind of talking to him, like, there's a lot of ideas in crypto that are intriguing to me. but they're more like still so in the idea stage that it's hard to think long term with any of this stuff and especially if you're looking to actually build a product for the long term how can you even put yourself on one of these other quote unquote platforms and expect to exist in the long term and so I've just kind of been talking to him it was like man wine is such a long term thing like the only way to build a community about it is to think long term and maybe want more one in the future or hold this and age it and age it and then you could maybe sell it in the future and like your ownership is kept on the blockchain or something but it's like I how can you even do that in a world where we expect half of these things to disappear in a couple of years if not more and it just

made me so much more like how could you associate your brain? brand. If you're looking to build brands, not sales, because you can make money in crypto. If you're looking to build brand, you're thinking long-term positive association. How can you build a brand in anything that's not Bitcoin? If you actually want it, if you're not trying to just get rich quick, if you're trying to build something that lasts, it really just makes sense to be Bitcoin only. And that the comment with the square, you almost got me to blurt out my, why are we bullish? Because it's so awesome that Square only has Bitcoin. There's no other asset you can convert 10% of your sales into.

It's just Bitcoin. And that's used by so many people, Square is. So we'll see if that's the norm, if more companies have that going forward. But Square does have enough of a, there's enough people that use Square that see that. It's just another reason of like Bitcoin is associated with Square now. Square is associated with Bitcoin. There's a positive feedback loop. You trust, you learn to trust both of those.

or at least have positive feelings towards both of those. And it's just, it's just such a, so many people want to make a quick buck these days. And I understand, like, I've read books about Weimar, Germany. People just with high inflation, with when you don't see a positive hope for the future, you want to gamble. You want to take these, these high-risk things to get that big reward because you can't really see how you can make it just slowly and steadily. but I meet Bitcoiners into just like working in the Bitcoin world. It's just so obvious to me that if you can just build a brand,

associate yourself with Bitcoin to get Bitcoiners to feel positive about you or associate Bitcoin with you to get the public to feel positive about Bitcoin. It's just such a positive feedback loop to build slowly long term. It's not quite slowly. I mean, we could see some crazy price inflection. But like I've never lived through that. I don't believe it exists. So I'm joking, but it's just, it just seems like it's such a great thing to associate your brand with Bitcoin.

And Bitcoin only not dilute it with things that are going to disappear in a few years. Yeah, I fully agree. I mean, imagine, imagine having the first feather coin branded wine or the first, you know, the first, you know, the first. nano or what were some of the other shit coins of like this the 2017 run the death like dash dashed

fuck that it's just it's laughable because they're all clearly trending to zero versus Bitcoin and just like and and you're right like the when you're trying to create a brand and

and and people associate you with quality and something that's going to be around long term, you want to be in when it relates to money, Bitcoin is the only thing that makes sense because everything else is just a rotating door leading you to a revolving door leading you to less sats. And it taints you, right? Like if you're the guy that comes out and you're like, hey, well, yeah, we support Dash and Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV and Ripple and like all this other shit

and then people get all excited about it and they're buying your stuff or like, you know, just or celebrating you because you accept it even though nobody's going to use it. It taints you when all of that stuff goes away. It's like, well, it was a marketing schick and you're like, well, I still accept Bitcoin. It's kind of that action. is tainted.

So yeah, you're right. It completely diminishes the brand and the quality of what you're doing. And, you know, when I see a service and, you know, I'm always happy when I can use my Bitcoin and paying it, but it also kind of diminishes it when I see it like side by side with light coin or some shit. Right? Like, and they're accepting Bitcoin on chain, but they don't have lightning, but they've got like whatever other crap that they're accepting.

So yeah, I fully echo that. I'm curious, you know, Jacob, what are your thoughts on around the Bitcoin-only branding and it's associated with, I mean, Bitcoin Walk, right? Yeah, it's not all Coin Walk. I'm going to come back to Benef a little bit. When you were talking about, you know, crypto wine, I was thinking about like Bojolet or something that goes off, you know, as a fresh wine. one season and then it's gone or it's no longer good um no do you know what i mean uh you like

once you well when you know when you when you go all all in and you're you're you're into bitcoin you understand that's okay this is a pristine thing and you just want to have you know attract most of it to to to into your portfolio into your wallet so not portfolio uh so basically so basically you know, like you understand that, okay, if you're a Bitcoin brand, you're going to be positioning yourself to people who have integrity, people who have, you know, businesses who have quality and integrity because otherwise they wouldn't exist. So you want to be this kind of business as well.

You want to be perceived as a business that is, you know, high in ethics and integrity and lives by those values. So, yeah, you know, in this sense, I'm not a toxic maxi in a sense where you know I've recently got invited to come and give a talk about bitcoin halving to something called Scottish blockchain meetup and you know I had my slot like number four or five so I had to listen to the first presentations of some guys that was painful but I was there you know and I was kind of okay fine you know and then I went on and since you know there was a guy before me who was talking about

he's he's like you know doing his consulting agency for tokenomic architecture whatever and and there was a question from you know from from from from the audience like what is the average shelf life of a token and then you know there's me coming on stage and and I say well you know this is the Bitcoin monetary you know supply this is how Bitcoin is going to be released until the year 2140. So there you go. This is your life shelf,

the shelf life, you know, at least. And then it kind of answers the questions. And, you know, at this point, from this meetup, we got like two or three people who actually came for the Bitcoin walk and they say, well, actually, do you know what? Like, yeah, that makes sense. You know, we, you know, I came there because I was interested, but, you know, Bitcoin, we, like, we give it to you know, Bitcoin is the only way, the only asset, you The other things might be, you know, might be toys, casino, you know, securities, whatever you want to call that. There is a fundamental difference. And people start recognizing that.

And there's, you know, if you're doing a Bitcoin wine, it's going to be better than the crypto wine, for sure. Spot on. Ben selling himself short a bit. I remember Ben, first of all, when you came on my show, you know, you had this, I think your sort of warehouse, your barrels behind you. that speech would have been so much better with that background. So tip for next time. Do it in the, you know,

the barrel basement there because that was fire. And it would have been sick if we could clip that when, when, you know, Sessions' wife goes through this for the clips. But the other thing, too, is that you don't dilute your brand, but you also,

in wine, I remember you saying to me that like you don't dilute your product either, right? There's a lot of wine companies that kind of dilute the product. And that's why people get like these weird headaches and gut, and they don't feel good after even one or two glasses. But you don't do that. Wine is like uniquely, it's uniquely suited for this mentality where it's so easy to

identify cheap wine, right? In a store at a restaurant, when you're at your friend's house, you know, you smell it. It's like hairspray. You taste it. It's like popsicles. But your stuff is not like that. The same way it's easy to identify garbage tokens when you see them. There's a discourse.

There's pumping and dumping. There's signals. There's ordinal and other nonsense. There's, you know, NFT scams and all these sort of, you know, this sort of garbage that goes into the product that dilutes, that dilutes the, you know, end result. And there's, you know, something to be said here for the old story in, is the Atlantic in like 1936. You guys have probably heard of this by this point. If you're in Bitcoin, Isaiah's job, you know, the way that we don't dilute our message. very often just to bring people on for shits and giggles or to bring people on to increase our numbers.

The message remains true in a lot of ways. And sometimes that means that we don't get all the people we want, but it does mean that the people we get are high quality. And that's a good way to run a business and a good way to decide where to park your savings. And it sounds like you're doing both over there. So big up to you. And if you ever decide to ship to Canada, I know at least two people on this call will take you up on that offer. almost immediately. Yes.

I had some help looking into it. And let's just say the bureaucracy runs thick up there. You don't say. Where is your vineyard? I'm in Colorado. Okay. Yeah. Make my way down there and get a couple balls.

We'd love to have you guys. But I bring this up, obviously, like, I'm my own example. example here, but I think about other brands as well. I went to the Bitcoin Ski Summit the last two years. And two years ago, I got to ski with Mark Moss all day. And that guy is just a brilliant guy, brilliant guy, brilliant business guy, brilliant mind. And he just kept pounding on the point that people really want to buy.

They want to vote with their money. whether they know or not, they want to vote with their money. And so they want brands that kind of stand for something that align with their values. And like the prime example that a lot of people have heard of is Black Rifle Coffee Co. Coffee is a commodity, but I want to give my money to people who believe in the same things as me. They're not going to sell to everyone and who cares. But when you have, when you as a brand stand for something and stand for something good, but yeah, sure a big enough niche and everything, but like stand for something good and don't waver.

I think even if people disagree, they respect that. And there's a huge degree of making it look like you don't actually stand for something when you accept for Bitcoin and crypto. It's like, oh, cool, you just want all the money possible, like of anyway. And so then everyone's just going to pay you in dollars. But when you take a stand and say, yeah, sure, I accept Fiat, but I prefer Bitcoin, people do, they resonate with that whether or not they believe it or not it's like it takes makes them pause for a second and just look at your brand slightly differently lightning goats i do want to take you up on your offer to

come help me figure something out you said you're only three hours away from me so we'll figure out how we can feed the wine or something different like that one of these days you know you know ben i was thinking one of my one of my favorite people when it comes to again quality workmanship in the bitcoin space somebody who comes comes to mine and i've beaten this quote of his to death but i will say it again and again when it comes up in this type of conversation um and that's madex um he killer bitcoin art he's awesome and uh and i remember in a conversation he was saying if in the early days of Bitcoin, you could get away with just like slapping a B on something and then selling whatever the fuck you're peddling and that would be fine.

But, you know, things are evolving and Bitcoiners are appreciating when they do spend their stats, they're looking for quality. And if your product is shit and you somebody gives them, gives you, their scarce Bitcoin, their scarce sats for your product, you will not retain customers beyond the initial sale. And I think that's 100% exactly what is happening and will continue to happen over time. Because I remember if I buy something with Bitcoin and it sucks, never going to buy it again, right? And it kind of plays through in my day-to-day life as a whole because I've been kind of on a Bitcoin standard for quite some time. Like I have some dollars, but that's a minimal

thing that I'm exposed to. And so... So they don't really count all that well. Yeah. It's the Canadian moose shekel is the correct term for it. But yeah, like it's when I'm spending on something, like I'm more likely to buy the higher quality, more expensive thing because I know it's going to last forever than by the trinkety shit that's going to break

and I'm going to need to replace it four times over with something that's not that great over and over and over again. And so, you know, it leads me to products that I think are better. It leads me to things that are perhaps local. It leads me to friends and friends of friends that build things themselves instead of just going to IKEA. My kitchen table was made by my good friend. And I was best man at his wedding. And he built this table out of like solid oak with like a marble top.

and the thing weighs like 400 pounds. That thing will stay in this house until it burns to the ground. But like that's what I want. And even like he did my basement too and I go down to the basement and everything's great and it looks amazing. And this is like a relatively new home. It's only built like a few years back. And then I come upstairs and I look at some of the stuff that the builders put in. And like the carpets like sagging and all rumpled and like there's cracks along like the stairwell and stuff like.

And I'm like, the shit fiat quality of stuff of people who aren't incentivized to do any better. And then the quality workmanship, people that actually care about their craft. And I will say that my friend is now, after listening to my bullshit for years, is a Bitcoiner as well. And like, I was able to pay him in Bitcoin for a lot of those things that he did for me. And so I think this is an ethos and a way of being that will permeate. Bitcoiners. And so not only will Bitcoiners be able to to accumulate and hold on to their wealth well into the future, but they're also going to have all the best shit. And everybody's going to be like, how are you, how are you doing so well and also having great stuff that lasts? And

there's an answer in there. Yeah. People want to emulate success. So I think that's just a great long-term orange-pilling thing. You got me thinking about my crappy craftsmanship because the house I'm living in, I built, but I was in my orange-pilling phase while I was building it. So I was that fiat carpenter who didn't really care and kind of did some stuff wrong. And I only have myself to blame for taking that high time preference approach. So I was just viscerally relating to your basement to upstairs psychotomy there yeah yeah you see you see the stuff that he actually spent time on and it's still working and then everything else is falling apart yeah that's awesome okay jent so i'm conscious of time here i'm going to start rounding out but i always like to finish

up the episode with a quick round of any final thoughts that you may have anything you you know you took away from the episode but more importantly a recommendation if you have something you think people should check out, whether it be a website, a podcast, an article, a book, a new app or device, something that you think is cool and worthy of attention, then you can drop that as well. So again, I think the biggest takeaway from this episode for me is, and it came through with just about everything, is community, actually. That's the thing that came through. So, Jacob, thank you for kind of putting us on that track. But like your, what you honed in on there permeated kind of through all the different things that we spoke about.

And if you don't have community, then none of that other shit matters. And so that community can come and align yourself with other good people and friends that you can support each other. It can align with people that you know that create products. It can align with people that you know that you can transact with and again have your little local circular community there. I think it's super important. And in that vein, I guess my recommendation in terms of things that can kind of help you as a community. BTZMap.org, find your local bitcoinsers that make things. SatMap.

dot app that's kind of more online based but same idea find your local bitcoins that are making stuff the orange pill app there's a market um there's a section for merchants on there as well so those are all tools that you can find bitcoins close to you that are making and doing things that you can support um and then if you haven't already start a meetup locally uh and and more importantly see if you can start a little market as well i it was as simple as going to your meetup and saying hey i'm you know, I'm looking for the following things. I'd love to be able to pay in Bitcoin for them. If you make this or if you do this, let me know.

Or if you know somebody who does, ask them if they'd ever consider accepting Bitcoin. And that starts a little smart. You can build from there. But yeah, and if you're going to be in Calgary on July 1st, which is Canada Day, then come to the sap market here. It's going to be a big one. Should be a doozy. Yeah, I'll leave that there.

Joey, I'll go to you. Any final thoughts or recommendations on your end? Great episode. Happy to be with you guys. Once again, Ben, thanks for the invite. I think on the serious sort of side of the recommendations, I would say that community is important. And if you can do something to help someone in your life understand Bitcoin

in a way that you had a hard time with when you first started, they'll become a node in a way that you've become a node for other people. And that's what we need right now at a time where we're very much. under attack, very publicly under attack. We have to be conscious of the way we're communicating our mission to people. And if that's something you can do, you can't do it. You can't do it enough, honestly. Everyone's got someone in their life who they think is on the fringe or just about ready to get into the Bitcoin realm of the Bitcoin space. On the less serious note, I started playing quarterback for my beer league team last year. Let me tell you something.

If you want to throw further, don't think about throwing your arm forward fast, but think about snapping your wrist faster. Little tip for you. Didn't know that. Very unintuitive, but I guarantee you'll add like 15 or 20 yards to your lawnbombs if you think about that when you're throwing a football. Something to consider there. I think there's going to be very, there's going to be a lot of people in the chat that

that really benefit from that. Jacob, I'm going to toss it to you, final thoughts, recommendations. Cool. So obviously, you know, go to Sats Market, go to your local meetup, go for a walk. You know, it's a super easy venue-free event where you can basically go and air your brain and pick up, well, pick the brains of somebody walking next to you. So great format, and I do encourage people to do that. you know who knows maybe will come to to the point where this will be our trading platform to do peer-to-peer exchange you know you never know where that takes

us when it comes to recommendations something that arrived just today the Dow of Bitcoin oh didodles right Scott yeah yeah yeah towards the cosmology of energy money I started reading it today just mind-blowing like you know a lot of based like really based misses stuff and a lot of things that makes you realize that this is how big this is and how connected we are in, you know, in many, many ways. And we'll still keep on discovering, you know, we'll keep those epiphanies coming. So that's right. That's all. Scott is a legend. He's super awesome. He's been out. He's been out to the SAP market, I think pretty much every single time. He makes me. I didn't realize of that. Yeah. He's, he, he's, he's, he's,

He hauls his ass out here, like, from, like, I think it's like an eight-hour drive to get in. He does fly sometimes, too. But he's, yeah, he's an absolute boss. Awesome, dude. So, so his book is now in Edinburgh. So, you know, I'll probably, you know, I'll probably, you know, I'll share it with some guys in the game here. So, yeah. Yeah, that's all.

Cool. Ben, I'll toss to you. Last final thoughts. Recommendations. Go ahead. Yeah, I just got a. thinking on the topic of incentives, going back to a little bit of what was said about Michael Saylor, I think it's a lot of times forgotten that he does have obviously the incentive to push Bitcoin forward,

but his incentives are not the same as everyday people. He holds a lot more Bitcoin, lives in a totally different world than us. And it's also speaking to a different audience in more people like him. And so I think there's a lot of miscommunication frustration in that because we're not his target audience, but we think we are. And then in addition, the incentive of voting with your money to try and create a better world, I think there's a lot of, like, you want to vote with your money on goods that you like, on people that align with you. But it's something I think you said, Ben, that people or I don't know, one of you guys, it's like, why would I spend my Bitcoin? I get it's a taxable event. Like there's reasons to not spend your Bitcoin. And I never shamed someone for not doing it.

But just to talk about the benefit of spending your Bitcoin on something is it's voting with your money on steroids. It's where, Ben, what you were talking about with the long-term time preference and being able to create better things, part of what you have to have to be able to think that long-term, to put that extra time in, instead of just making that quick sale, is you have to have a bit of money or just a bit of security to be able to not think about where you're not going to get your next meal, to be able to think for that next long-term thing. and when you vote with your money by spending Bitcoin, I think that you're basically giving the notion to that person you're spending Bitcoin to,

if they appreciate it, if they understand it, that, hey, I'm voting for you to continue making this low time preference, high quality good into the future and trying to give you this extra means to be able to continue to do so. So it's more like, I mean, I can say it. Obviously, it feels incredible to get paid in Bitcoin whenever I do. But I'm always trying to vote with Bitcoin and giving it to people who I know appreciate it. And so they can continue building good products going forward, build my network, increase the resiliency of all the other Bitcoiners, because we may need them one day.

As we've been talking about community, it's so important. So the best way to support your favorite producer, if they accept Bitcoin, is to give them Bitcoin. However, like I said, I totally understand wanting to spend Fiat. There's a way to vote with your money there too, but just to talk about the benefits of paying with Bitcoin. Yeah, absolutely. Support your local bitcoins with sats. You know, and hey, if you do something awesome, why are you not accepting sats for that thing? You know, we all have.

Also, man, how good is your stuff? Dude, people pay me Bitcoin for it. That's how good. That's great. That's great. Awesome. All right, Jens,

well, that's a perfect spot to round out. Thank you guys so much for being here. This is a blast. Everybody in the chat, of course, all these gentlemen's handles are on these show notes down below.

So check them out. Give them a follow, see what they're up to. And gentlemen, have a wonderful Friday tomorrow and weekend after that. So thanks, guys.

You're all welcome back anytime. Thanks, Ben. Cheers. Yeah, see you later. See you later. All right. And everybody else, stick around for just a moment. Thank you guys so much for being here. Everybody in the chat, again, give that like button a smash. Give this a share.

If you're not already, please do subscribe. That always helps a ton as well. If you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors in the show notes down below. And before we go, again, just very happy with the launch of this myself and my buddy Mike Cook here in Calgary. We've recently just launched Bitcoin Mentor, and so this is an educational platform for people. If you're sorting through all of the free tutorials on the channel, and that's all well and good, and just remember that it's always free information there. But if you find you need some additional handholding, if you need some one-on-one time,

you need to figure out exactly what you're doing and somebody to help you through it, well, I've been doing one-on-ones with people for ages now, but there's only so many hours in the day. So I needed to figure a way around that. well, we aggregated some of the best educators in the space. We went out. We put the call out. We had 350 people apply to be part of a Bitcoin mentor. We settled on 16.

And so we've got 16 people with us that are ready to educate people, help you through anything. Wallets, set up, hot wallets, cold wallets, multi-sig, running a node. Really, you name it. We can help you through it. So head over to Bitcoin Mentor.io. We have a ton of different stuff there, and you can just book in. And there's free exploratory sessions to just kind of see if we're the right fit for you.

And then you can go beyond that. Very excited about it. But either way, BitcoinMentor.io, I'll close that out now. Thank you, guys. Have a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.