BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Guy Swann, Nico Zm, James Lavish ep238

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

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What's going on, everybody? Happy Friday. Hope you're having a good one. Another Friday. Another episode of Why Are We Bullish? I wasn't sure if this week's was going to happen, but here we are. Welcome. Lots going on.

We've got some awesome guests today. I'm very happy to chat with them. If you're new to this show, you'll see what it's all about momentarily. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. Bill, take it away. We'll do it live. We'll do it live.

Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you haven't already, like, subscribe, share. Hopefully the thing that you like, subscribe, and share too will continue to be there for a little while. But without further ado, I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

All right, before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market. it right now. We're sitting at $40,008 per coin. It's hopping around a bunch today. 2,500 sats. You can pick up that many stats for a single US dollar. 90.3% of all Bitcoin have been mine in terms of fees, not bad, actually, three sats per byte, next block. Anything beyond that one sat per bite will do you. They were creeping up there yesterday. It was a little busy yesterday. So not bad. Shout out to shakepay.com. If you're buying Bitcoin, in Canada, easy way to do it, no deposit fees, no withdrawal fees, thin spread.

And if you use the link below, after your first $100 purchase, they'll give you $30 for free. Also, you get the same deal if you refer a friend. And then you can shake your phone every day for free SATs. They also have a Satsback Visa cards. So check them out, links are below. Leden.io, you can use your Bitcoin for a ton of different services, in particular, if you're in a pinch, you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, but you do need dollars. Well, you can deposit Bitcoin here.

Get a loan of dollars to your bank account. When you pay that back, you get back to your bank. same amount of sats. They also have savings accounts for Bitcoin and USDC and a B2X offering if you're feeling bullish. Check them out. Bit refill. These guys, you can pick up just any gift card your little heart desires in Canada or around the world. And you can pay with Bitcoin, both on-chain and via Lightning Network. You earn sats back as you shop. And they also can, they earn you a little bit more sats if you use your referral link for friends and family. So check them out. Keystone, you guys know these guys, one of my favorite and most used hardware

wallets. A hundred percent air gap. You never plug it into anything internet connected. That keeps the keys of your money safe and offline. And it's pretty badass and a multi-sig. Definitely upgrade to the Bitcoin-only firmware because that's what makes the multi-sig stuff work. It works beautifully with blue, wasabi, Sparrow Spectre, all the awesome wallets. So check it out. And finally, you're backing up any important wallet. Bill Fottle over at privacypros.com. Get it in steel. Paper doesn't cut it. Fire damage, water damage. I've heard of people discarding their pieces of paper with lots of money on them. So be cautious, be conscious, and get it safe. With that, I'll kill the screen here. I'm going to bring in my guess. We got Nico. We got James. We got Guy. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Let's do a quick little round of intros if you don't mind. Nikol, I'll toss it to you. Let people know who you are, what you do. Yeah, what's up, guys? I'm Nico, host of Simply Bitcoin. And I'm mine and host miners. You can check out my Twitter and have more information there. Before, Ben, I just want to say, man, thank you for all you do, dude. We love you, man. We support you. And we all have your back. Thanks, man.

I appreciate that. Let's pause down the line. Guy, you're up. Who are you? What do you do? Yo, yo. I want to say the same for what Nico just said. I know it's rough over there right now.

And you know, anytime I can help, anything I can do, just hit me up. but I am I am Guy Swan for everybody else I host Bitcoin Audible And a I just added to my profile I'm a high class Memecrafter But yeah just

Play with all the Bitcoin Tools All the software Test everything out I love it It's fascinating to me Been in space for a decade and yeah read i've read i've read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know if you if you guys aren't

familiar with this man's voice you should get acquainted with it he'll he will lull you with all of the great writings about bitcoin so check them out uh let's toss it down a line one more time james can you give yourself a little intro hey guys so uh yeah echo number three on the support for you uh and your friends so has not been a fun week few weeks it's been crazy so um but it's uh i'm the new guy on the block here for sure uh i say that in in bitcoin world um but i i'm my background is i was an institutional investor for a long long time in hedge funds mainly and so i came to this space a little bit late unfortunately uh as you as some of you know And but I have quickly ramped up my understanding of why Bitcoin, not crypto and what the,

you know, what the implications are for the world right now. So and I am, I'm fully on board with helping out and figuring out how to explain this in a way that not only helps institutional investors get on board, but just anybody. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you, man. And, uh, you know, you always feel like you're late. until somebody else feels like you were early. So you will have that moment too. So don't worry. So everybody watching, thank you for being here.

Of course, you know, all likes up, all those good things. Keep the chat going. I see everybody joining in. Good to see you guys. Uvis. Thanks for the super chat. I appreciate that. Lots of love.

And Mike, good to see you, man. Yeah, we're going to be doing, why are we bullish? We go by the three R's here. Super easy. Somebody's going to give a reason why they're bullish. Altogether, we will riff on that reason and then we will rotate to the next person to we each get a turn. Really, really, really simple. I'm going to start us off. And my reason's going to be vague, but I think the point will still be made. I'm bullish today. say because in the grand scheme of Bitcoin, I don't matter. The individual does not matter.

Bitcoin is just a network that anybody can use. People you like, people you don't like, people you love, people you don't love, just anybody. Anybody can use it as they see fit. Now, you know, people cannot like the way. it's used. They're entitled to. But the network still stands. The network continues to exist. And the network itself is not conscious. It doesn't understand right or wrong or any of the human meanings that we give to stuff. It just functions as designed and we'll continue to be there. So it's kind of a two-part reason why I'm bullish. One is that I don't matter and that knowing

individual matters and that Bitcoin will probably continue to be here well past everybody that's alive today. But the second part of the reason, my reason for being bullish week is how much learning is happening at such a fast pace right now. Not just this week, not just this past month, not just the past couple of years, there's been a lot of stuff globally that has happened that has taught a lot of people, one, that that Bitcoin exists and two, some of the details about how it works. And it's definitely on a global stage right now. And that realization that the world is going to come to of the implications

of that this network just exists and is indifferent to what people think is one that's going to be hard for a lot to grapple with, including, I think, us on this show. It's, it kind of transcends us. It transcends every individual. And the world is through one way or another going to have to come to terms that Bitcoin was discovered. You know, it was, it was. It was, yes, it was invented, but digital scarcity and all of the other great attributes of the Bitcoin network were effectively discovered over time and pieced together to create this tool for humanity. And so I guess if I were to sum up my reason for being bullish is that Bitcoin just is and that's enough. So I'll open to you gentlemen. Feel free to hop in with any comments, any thoughts, whatever.

This is ultimately, this is the reason for Bitcoin, right? Is that if you look at the world today, if you look at the world throughout history, the major problems are where there is irresponsible and unearned amounts of command over somebody else's life and property. like it's the it's the freaking story of humanity's failure and the idea that we can have a system of rules where we are all equal before it where no matter how stupid our subjective reasons of disliking each other no matter how absurd our reasons for thinking this person's account should be frozen or this person does not have a right to their life or their livelihoods that there's simply nothing we can do about it and that the rules themselves are equal,

we are all equal before the rules. That is the hope, that is the very raison d'etre of Bitcoin. Is that we are equal before the rules. And anything that you want to do, or anything that you hope to accomplish in the world, must happen on an even playing field. we are playing the same game with the same rules because as soon as you modify that all of the incentives all of the things that make the game honest are gone suddenly you have you have power that is separate

from any any idea of the truth of the value or the situation or the economic tradeoff involved and when you have that you just have all you have is an incentive that will poison society and it doesn't matter if it takes 50 years, it doesn't matter if it takes a century, it means that collapses on the way. It means that something is broken and until that rule can be applied evenly, until the economic situation, the reality of everyone is before the same subset of rules. I mean, imagine if gravity affected certain people differently. How messed up would everything be? Like, that is what we have in society right now. We have deep fundamental imbalances based on how these systems have been designed.

And it needs to be corrected. It needs to be corrected. Too many people are suffering. Too many people have been the victim of this for no good reason. In fact, for explicitly the wrong reasons. And it's time that it's done. I refuse to believe that the world cannot be better than this.

That this is the best it's ever going to get. no no absolutely not we will build it and maybe it breaks you know maybe it doesn't work this time fuck it what what what the hell else reason am i here for you know like what else am i going to spend my time on we'll just rebuild it we'll build it again we'll fix it you know i don't know i love that you guys you guys both come at it from uh idealistic and and uh and you know organic approach and i and i love that because it's that's um it's refreshing coming from the world i come from and you know before i before i started really digging into bitcoin um the system has served me well it's served the people i've worked with well um i mean i'm not

i'm not charlie munger you know i haven't it hasn't served me that well but um Even he will admit, as he did the other day, that all fiat's going to zero. His assumption is that the dollar is going to zero. And that's where he starts. So he knows the system doesn't work. He knows the system is broken. And so like Guy just said, you know, it's the system. And people are rewarded within that system that is structured to reward their behavior.

as we're seeing around the world right now in a way that is just, it's negatively asymmetric to the population, right? So, and it's having Bitcoin as our new standard, you know, it'll take a while, definitely. And if it doesn't, it's going to be ugly, you know, but it will take a while. And but to have that out there as a new standard for for us to reach to, it gives me hope, you know,

it just gives me hope that we actually have something that is not set up on a system that rewards people for two and four year political cycles, you know, that rewards people for their political, you know, active contributions. To have people elected by lobbyists is just it's just abominable that that's what we have set up now as a society.

And so it's skewed. It's skewed completely the wrong way. And we're getting more and more into a barbell system of the super wealthy and the super poor, the middle class has been absolutely destroyed here in America, and I'm sure it's being destroyed in Canada and other Western, you know, countries, obviously. So it gives me hope. So I appreciate that.

Awesome. I'm going to get you one sec. I'm just going to, there's somebody decided to join us. Hey, Greg, you there? Greg. Greg. hopefully he's you said he's driving and he listened he was listening he couldn't make it last time but i don't know if he'll be able to get the sound working gregg if you're there keep listening

i'm going to let nico have uh have have have had her so nico any thoughts here yeah um listen uh if the last two weeks didn't highlight anything it highlighted to the world i think that we have never been in a more dire place for a political money. This is a fight for our lives. This is a fight for freedom. And it's a different type of fight. It's not so much a kinetic fight, right? Where, you know, firearms, bombs, explosives, all that stuff.

It's more of an information fight. And what I say is we're in the midst of narrative trench warfare every single day, right? Every single tweet, right? You have the legacy media. You have, you know, independent media. just they're totally different narratives, right? Legacy media is telling you, look, the sky is black and then, you know, independent media is, no, it's actually blue, right?

And I think that this all started with the internet, right? The internet essentially disintermediated and destroyed the government or the states or powerful institutions monopoly on information, right? And what we're starting to, because we're definitely entering the then-they-fight-you stage, we're watching the disintermediation of money as well, right? So those two things are overlapping and it's creating chaos. But the thing that I want to tell everybody is, you know, we're all going to die one day. What is it that you lived your life for?

What is it that you want to fight for? What world do you want to leave behind for your ancestors for your kids? Do you want to leave a world of slavery because that's exactly what central bank digital currencies will enable? or do you want to leave a world of freedom? And that's exactly what Bitcoin will enable. So as we enter these dark times, hunker down, solidarity, and we will win this. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind. But it's going to be a tough fight because the powers of B aren't going to give over the keys.

That's absolutely clear. They made it very clear. So we have to hunker down. You know, we have to color within the lines, right? but we will win this. We don't have an option. It's Bitcoin or slavery. The only option to color within the lines.

They only provide crayons, just so you know. Clown World. I wanted to add to that, particularly to reinforce something that James said, is, you know, the people in power, I think they know. I think they know. It's all bullshit.

Like, I think they're aware that what they are doing is not good. I think it's a form of nihilism. I think they just think there's no alternative. This is just the way shit is. And so the best they can do is just benefit from it. And that, you know, somebody else is just going to do it if I don't. And that they excuse. use it every single time, which, yeah, yeah, which is true.

And I think it, you know, largely, you know, like I said, it's how it's built, right? Lobbyists elect who we elect our representatives. But I think most of them just are resigned to the fact that it just runs this way. And they're so heavily invested in it in every way. socially invested they're monetarily invested their skills their life path

is invested in it their dreams are invested in it everything they hope to think that they are how they are important in the world is invested in it and they're just like how could I turn around now and they're being pushed to the edge

of what they know even even in their ghost this this sad shadow of morality even they know they're being pushed to the edge of that even they know they're crossing over a line but they don't know what else to do they don't know what else to do

this is how it runs and they're not incentivized to do anything else they're not incentivizing they have they're incentivizing exactly what they're doing everything is just pain if they go if they take they make the right decision yeah and you know I hope that I think there's going to be increasingly people, even among them, who just are tired.

They're just tired of doing this. They're tired of fighting this and they're tired of hating themselves for it. We see it happening already. We see individuals saying, you know, I'm not in line with this. I'm not okay with this anymore and breaking rank and we're stepping down from positions and saying that I like, kind of throwing their hands up in the air and saying, I just like, I can't be a part of this anymore.

Like, I don't know what to do, but. And Bitcoin will be there for them. And Bitcoiners too. You know, like, I hope we welcome everybody who wakes up. You know, we were all there. I mean, I was, I believed all the normal approved things

for a very, very long time. And it was not fun. It was not fun to wake up. up to that. It was not fun to think that, you know, 2000, oh, I guess, good Lord is, 2010 guy believed some really awful stuff and even said some really awful stuff. Like, what an asshole that guy was, you know? And it wasn't fun. Like, I remember, I remember having to deal with the fact that I realized my country was not really, wasn't the good guys. You know, and I bet there's a lot of Canadians who are having to deal with that right now.

But, like, when I realized that the U.S. was just, damn, like, look at what they did around the world. Look at the monetary system we put together. Look at the things that they explicitly caused purposefully based on a set of lies that they openly now talk about they know were lies. Like, the just piece, like, point after point, And what's so hilarious is that somehow the current day, even if it's just something that happened like five years ago, it's like, well, now they're all telling the truth. Now it's all like the way it should be.

Different administration. It's the last administration. Well, I think, I think, just to add to your point, right, I think we're seeing it from two perspectives, right? look back in 2003 right in the war in Iraq I fundamentally believe that if social media was a thing we wouldn't have invaded Iraq right so I think the internet essentially has enabled right people to you know fact check or essentially confirm in an instant whether that politician is just you know speaking garbage or not and I think it's catching a lot of people by surprise and this is this moment in history

right there's a very famous saying right which decades nothing happens and in a year decades happen right and we're just living through that right now i think in really the the the election of donald trump set you know an event right whether you agree with the guy or not it just ripped the band-aid off um and things have been essentially you know in terms of the media the legacy machine, the establishment, the institutions, they're crumbling before our eyes, right? The legitimacy of them. But I'll tell you one thing, right? In this world of darkness and lies and madness, there is one thing that is honest.

There is one thing that is true. There's one thing that gives me hope for the future, and that is Bitcoin. And it doesn't matter where you are. It doesn't matter where you're located. It doesn't matter whether you're in a communist country. It doesn't matter where you're in North Korea, Cuba, whatever. if you have access to the internet, you could potentially download a Bitcoin wallet and you now have private property. And I think that is incredibly hopeful for the future.

But I think that there are so many people still stuck in this nihilistic, depressive type mindset because their unit of account is still fiat. It's this broken money. And I think that as, you know, time goes by, as more people, you know, you start transitioning to a Bitcoin. Bitcoin standard, right? I think that, you know, again, the old saying, you don't change Bitcoin. Bitcoin changes you. And I'm very hopeful for that future. And, you know, I fight for it. Again, it's not a violent war. It's, you know, a physical war. But I fight for it every single day. I'm in the trenches, you know, trying to get to that future. Because I think that it really fix the money, fix the world. Yeah. It's, it's funny listening to this because, like, You know, I, you know, Guy, you were talking about, you know, the viewpoints that you held years back and everything. And I mean, it was, it was much more recent for me. Like, you know, even as I was just starting to dabble in Bitcoin, because, you know, like everybody comes for, they initially see it for the number go up and then, you know, continue for.

Oh, shit. 20%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I, you know, I came in around then and, and in 2015, we, we. We were having an election here in Canada. And that was the election that elected Trudeau. And so I guess I'll give it some context. Our prime minister at the time was Stephen Harper.

And he ran kind of a shitty campaign. Like, just he did some shitty things that I just didn't agree with. So one of the things was He muzzled speech But this time from the right going to the left And so he basically said to scientists That were looking at climate and stuff like that He basically said like you're not allowed to say the following things

In any type of media Which for me I'm like no You should be able to say whatever you want and if the idea is bad, you greet it with a better idea and it gets a hashed out that way. But like stopping speech is problematic no matter what side it comes from. The other thing that he did is he created like an other.

He created a group of people that was problematic and needed to be addressed. Except for this time, again, it was from the right, coming to the left. And the problematic people that he brought up were Muslim women voting in their traditional like headdresses where their faces were covered. And he went at it from a perspective of, you know, this could be anybody that, you know, they're going to go and they're going to do these terrible things and vote. And it won't be. It could be a man under there.

It could be anything. So he went at it from that angle. when like realistically the the answer was couldn't you just have a female person there like step in the other room verify ID and then come back out um but he used this as a as a like a boogeyman he also used um he there was some act they were trying to pass about uh what was it barbaric cultural practices um about like if there are certain cultural practices basically a again, like trying to spook up outrage around a particular set of people that they're doing unacceptable things. And there was, he was making a hotline to call in and rat on people. Yeah. And this was, again, so from the perspective of like, Muslim.

Is that not like just the example of our age? Is that just not like, like, good God. Yeah. So it's so like I'm looking at this from the perspective of, you know, you're, you're trying to prevent people from saying things. you're being divisive in creating a group of people with broad strokes and saying, we need to get these people to drum up votes and drum up a base. And because of that, I was very, like the social media machine is very powerful, right?

You search what you want to search and it feeds you more of it and more of it and more of it. And at that point in time, 2015, I was like, I was so entrenched in like just hating this, this narrative coming from them. And that's obviously what was being brought up to me. And I was seeing all of these things. And I was like, okay, we, you know, we got to, we got to make sure that Harper is out. And so it was like a protest vote against one government to get another government in. And I, I fucking voted for Trudeau. I shit you not.

It didn't happen again, but I voted for Trudeau. Well, hopefully, the government gives you lots of very, you know, a wide range of options where, you know, they're not all just the same. They're not all just the same with different colored ties and, you know. I'll say, what do I see years later? The exact same thing. You're not allowed to say certain things. If you are, I'm going to group you in with these people.

that I've selected, I've created an other that everybody needs to hate. We need to crack down on those individuals. It's the exact same shit coming from the opposite side of the aisle. So silly. You know, it's funny because I kind of liken it to, you know, you guys know I played hockey. Somebody you know, I played hockey. And, you know, we beat the shit out of each other in those games. I mean, we hated each other on the ice.

Just drop the gloves and hated each other. And afterwards, we don't have a beer together. And that was just it, you know, because we were still in the same game. It was like, yeah, you know, he's a pain he has to play against, but he's still a hockey player. You know, we're all in the same game. You know, we all love each other. It's like that in Washington. It's like that in, you know, in your parliament.

It's just the same thing. It's, there's no difference. They're all in the same game. Well, because at the end of the day, right, they're close to the money spicket, right? You know, so that inherently creates corruption, right? And, you know, they're all, they're all circling around, you know, to get closest to the, you know, in the case of the United States, right, it's the Fed. Why is there's so much power in Washington, right? And I think that's why it's so important to separate the money from state.

And I think that only Bitcoin could do that. And if we don't do that, we're going to keep having these issues of corruption. And specifically in the United States, right? because, you know, Ben, you live in Canada, but in the United States, we're also experiencing some type of censorship, specifically this time is coming from the left to the right. But people forget back in the 1950s and early 1960s, the McCarthy era, right, is the right, is the right, is the right, is what you said, Ben. It's literally a pendulum, right?

And then electing and voting, right, which is, they're important, but it's not going to fix the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is that the money is corrupted. The money is political. And as long as it's political, it's going to be used as a tool to persecute the people that are against the people in power, period. Bitcoin is the only thing that fixes that. And as soon, just look at El Salvador, for example, just literally, it's been legal tender in less than a year. More Salvadorians have a Bitcoin wallet than a traditional banking account.

The economy grew estimated 10%. Gang violence is down. And I fundamentally believe, again, they fixed essentially the consciousness of the country. Right. Think about when you first bought Bitcoin, Ben, or when you first bought Bitcoin guy, when you first bought Bitcoin James. And you took that Bitcoin into self-custody. You felt free. You felt secure about the future. You felt hopeful. Right. We're in a Fiat standard, right? It's like, am I going to be able to pay rent? What am I going to do for the future? What am I going to invest in in order to I need to get two jobs, right?

So it totally changes the game. And I think so many people are still stuck in this Fiat mentality of dog-eat-dog, right? So it's really unfortunate, man. But I really think, Ben, I really believe that at the end of this, at the end of this mountain that we have to climb, I think it's going to be extremely bright on the other side. But in the short term, we have to bunker down and fight for our freedoms. It's going to be a, I'm getting in the feeling.

it's going to be a rough next little bit. I, you know, I don't think I ever thought that I would in any way kind of, like, be part of, at one of these moments. Yeah, you're just making YouTube videos, right? Yeah, like, I'm fucking, I'm creating tutorials. How do you use a wallet? But inevitably, if you do something that matters, which you do. Yeah, you're actually, you're the one who taught me how to put my, my, my, my Bitcoin in a wallet, get off, get off exchange.

Yeah. I mean, you're going to tell me how to do it's important. You know, it's funny. I have to look up on YouTube. Dude, we aspire to be BTC sessions. Like, that's what we look up to, right? We're like, oh, we got to get there one day, you know? So, yeah, man.

It's, you know, it's, no, go ahead, Nikon. I was cutting you off. Yeah, whether you like it or not, Ben, you know, you are part of a movement, right? You are, you know, you didn't choose this, right? It was, you know, it was given to you this responsibility. And the only choice or, you know, options that you have is what, what are you going to do with that responsibility? What are you going to choose, right? And, you know, you don't get to choose where, what responsibility you're given, but you get to choose what you can do with what is given to you. So, Yeah, man. We support you. We love you, dude. And we're in the trenches right next to you, brother. Thanks, man. Well, I guess let's wrap this incredibly vague topic of mine up. That was a good little round there. Thank you, gents, for the kind words. We'll keep it rolling. I just wanted to give a shout out to number one fan, David Wong, is in the chat. It's good to see you, man. Welcome back. everybody in the panel, if you don't know, David hates Bitcoin,

but he's here every Friday, every Friday is my number one fan. I love you, David. Never change, friend. But we're going to keep it rolling. We're going to go around. Nico, you're the next on my screen. So I'm just going to hand it off to you, man. What has you feeling bullish this week?

We are absolutely winning, right? The flank is, you know, most heavy over the target, right? You had the reaction, right, from governments, from the movement that is happening in Canada is a reaction of fear. They're petrified. You also had the United States government, right? A Senate committee of foreign relations release a statement on how they had to investigate the Bitcoin becoming legal tender in El Salvador and that potentially undermining, you know, the hegemony. of the dollar, right? You also had announcements from the Biden administration announcing that they're creating an FBI exploitation task force to go after crypto. You also had an announcement from the

Biden administration. Then next week, they're going to release an executive order to regulate Bitcoin and crypto. What that tells me is that they're fearful. They don't know how to kill this thing. They thought it would go away. They don't know what to do. You also have the intensification of the rhetoric from the legacy media, right? You had an article from the Guardian. It's called How Do We Decarbonize Bitcoin? They named Bitcoin, not crypto, Bitcoin by name. You also had an article by the economists saying that anybody that crypto in Bitcoin is a white supremacist tool, right? You had an article from the New York Times saying Bitcoin guns and God, trying to associate Bitcoin with right-wing ideologies, right?

So this tells me, right? Again, propaganda isn't necessary unless you're losing, right? So all of these things, they might seem, if you look at them from the surface, if you look at them like, holy crap, this is scary, this is, I've never seen it get like this. Yeah. But that tells me, right, that the people behind the scenes, they don't know how else to deal with this, right so that's what makes that's what has me super bullish in this moment in time we are definitely entering right the famous phrase first you ignore it then you make fun of it then you fight it then you

win right we are definitely entering the then they fight you stage it is the beginning of it and the best thing that you could do is take self custody and run a note right because this is going to get hairy. These people are not going to go gently into that good night. And that is what has me bullish, Ben. That's awesome. I'm going to open it up to you guys if you want to. I saw a guy unmute immediately. So I will absolutely second that. You know, always, I use an analogy that an abusive relationship is most abusive when both parties realize the relationship is over. And, you know, when someone is out of options is when they get violent. You know, when you don't have anything else to do and you can't save the face anymore

and your ego is just so strong that no other option makes sense. And the last thing that you could do is appear to look like you lost or appear to look like you are not the one in control of things, then you get violent. then you get violent and that is the stage that we are in because I think it's anybody who's even slightly

paying attention to Western governments of the world today have no fucking idea what they're doing they just don't have the slightest clue they've completely lost control they've clearly thought

that they could engineer their way through this thing and it's been a fucking disaster and everybody who has been underneath their thumb, the 40% of the population that has had their business stripped out from underneath them during all of this, the people who have had awful consequences to being forced to take something they don't want to take, the people who have had their livelihoods stripped out from underneath them, who have had their accounts frozen, just for sharing their opinion, just for standing up and saying, you know,

it just doesn't feel like this is a smart path to take. The abused are fucking sick of it. They're absolutely sick of it. And, you know, when they get, they realize that they can just leave,

when they realize they can get, you know, when the, there was a great story, I think it was from Afghanistan. He was Afghanistan. One of Alex Gladstein's articles followed. I'm not going to remember her name.

And I'll feel bad about it. But maybe I'll link to it or something. But a woman who was abused by her husband. Her husband did not allow her to have a bank account. She was female. She wasn't even allowed to without her husband or her father's approval. Like this was the law because the law is always, you know, the moral standard for society. right um and uh but back in 2016 2017 she started saving in bitcoin she started putting a little bit away

and it took three or four years she got other women involved in her company and she hired them and she did the same thing for them she taught them how to hold their own keys she taught them how to have their banking i mean their uh their bitcoin accounts and to have something that their husbands and the The men in their lives who were supposedly in charge could not do anything about. And after another, after another bull run, she fucking left. She fucking packed up her stuff. She took her Bitcoin with her and she got the hell out of there. And she has a different life today solely because of that.

Is this Roya? Roya. Thank you. I met her. She's incredible. I met her. I met her at the Freedom Oslo Freedom Forum

but only for like a minute. I did not actually get to sit down and talk with her which I would have loved to do. She was one of the first things I read about Bitcoin. There is that book, The Age of Cryptocurrency that Mike Casey and Paul Vinya wrote and it came out in 2014

I think 2014 one of the first books I ever read about Bitcoin and seven years after reading her story. She's from Afghanistan. The women that she was helping were part of the female robotics team in Afghanistan. None of them were legally allowed to have a bank account. All money was supposed to be managed by a man in their life. And she subverted that with Bitcoin. And seven years after reading that story that gave me my first inkling of why Bitcoin, I got to meet her. I got to sit down at a

dinner with her and chat for a good 15 minutes or so. And I got to have her on a panel on stage and chat with her. And it was pretty powerful. It's, and again, it's a perfect example of, you know, if the politicians, I saw this on a tweet from somebody today, if the politicians you love can confiscate and freeze the accounts of the people you hate, then the politicians. politicians you hate can confiscate and freeze the accounts of the people you love. And so it's it's a careful line that people are walking right now.

And if you're on one side of the aisle looking at this saying, you know, I hate, I hate those people. Good. I'm glad. I'm glad their their assets are being taken and they're not allowed to speak and they're not allowed to protest and everything. Just know that it's only a matter of time before a politician that you don't approve of is in office. And now the precedent is set to wield the exact same powers when they see fit. And that's scary. Nobody should have those powers.

And we've just seen that it can happen. You know, I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise. but I think everybody would do well to consider that, like we said, the pendulum swings. And when your ideals sit anywhere opposite or far enough from where the pendulum currently is, you could find yourself in a spot that you don't like. So just be aware of that. Yeah. If anybody else has any other comments?

Yeah, I was thinking of the same story, El Sulton, Bitcoin. If you guys have not heard his story, he's been on the Twitter spaces before and talking about how Bitcoin saved his family, got him out of Venezuela without giving up their entire savings. He actually saved them and got them out. So again, that's just, it's hope that they're, and people hear these stories, you know, they're starting to hear these stories. And that helps bridge that, that gap of fear, you know, because man, mainstream media is pushing the fear story as, as hard as they can, you know, the volatility that every time that Bitcoin's down 3%, they're, you know, it's like, they're all over it, you know.

And so, I know, it's just, you know, and that anything they've got, whether it's concerns about the energy costs, whether it's concerns about the volatility, the, you know, the risks of having your coins hacked or something. I don't know where they even get the stuff from. But, you know, they're instilling as much fear as they possibly can. And I see it as, you know, our job, our jobs is to bridge that gap. and to show them that it's not that difficult to, number one, buy it. Number two, custody it yourself, you know.

And those are really the only steps you need to take. It's not, it's not, but if people just get to that understanding and we can help them, which I know that you're doing a tremendous job of that, because you're actually giving people tutorials, you know, on how to do that. And that's, and for me, it's, it's giving. people around me the understanding why the fiat system is collapsing and how they can how they can protect themselves you know how it can be insurance how it can be uh something that they they should be a part of and we we come from a world that's so civilized here in the united states and we complain

about the stupidest things the absolutely dumbest things we're just so freaking spoiled you know we have no idea how hard it is out there in in third world countries how difficult it is in africa south america you know like we just have no clue in the middle east like you're talking about women's rights we just we we just gloss over it here like oh well you know um i'm not supposed to wear this in school right like who cares you know i mean like so um yeah and believe me my my wife is is as feminist as you can be. And she sees it. She sees how good we have it here.

We're not there yet. We're not there in a lot of things, you know. But again, we come from such a civilized spot here. But the scary part, what we're all seeing is how quickly that can break down. It can break down in a nanosecond. So if you do not understand what it's like out there, not in America, what it's like out there to be in a place that you're being oppressed, well, bad news. It could happen here in just a minute. So that's a scary part.

But again, you hear the stories of Bitcoin and how it's helping people get through that. That's, again, it's more hope. And we are winning a week ago. Absolutely. And I just wanted to add one thing to what James was saying, if you don't mind Ben, of course. Look, those two people, right, also Tung, which is a buddy of mind and, you know, that brave lady from Afghanistan, they adopted Bitcoin. Not for why we adopt a Bitcoin in the West, right? Number go up, right?

They adopted Bitcoin out of necessity. They had no other option. And it was Andreas Antonopoulos before he became a shit-coiner, said one very, very famous quote, never forget it, right? No one cares until the money breaks. In the West, we have lived under this illusion, right, of a false sense of security, which is what James was referencing, right? We have the bread and circuses, the Netflix, the HBOs, we have the cash app, we have the PayPal, all of these rails that give you this idea of like, oh, this is fine and dandy until they freeze your account for some reason, right? You know, because you're some things that I don't want to say. But, you know,

whatever reason comes out of, you know, whatever excuse, right? So is it really your money if the government could freeze it? Is it really yours? And again, right, in these countries, right, whether it's Turkey, Argentina, Venezuela, Afghanistan, right? And these countries, the guy on TV goes up in the suit and he says, Bitcoin's illegal. We don't want it here. Those people, they don't care. They don't give a crap.

Why don't they give a crap? Because the only thing that matters to them is, can I feed my family the next day or not? And through their currency, the local currency, that's not going to give them that option. If I'm in Switzerland, I'm trying to flee Venezuela, right, trying to, you know, pass the border guards. But they're going to check you, right? How are they going to take that 24 word seed phrase out of your head or that 12 word seed phrase out of your head, right? And that is the important part. And that's why I really believe deep down.

in my heart that we will win this because the incentives provided by Bitcoin are much better than the incentives provided by the legacy system. The legacy system requires coercion. It's a system of exclusion. Bitcoin is a system of inclusion. And the only reason that you're going to come to Bitcoin is by following your incentives alone, not by someone forcing it upon you. As much as legacy media would like you to believe, that's what Nain Bouquetta was doing to the people of El Salvador, which we know is BS. So just wanted to say that. I love that.

I think that's a good way to round out that topic, too. We'll leave it there. Great one. Thanks, Nico. And everybody, again, in the chat, keep them coming. I'm not pulling too many comments today, but if I see something that's relating to what we're talking about, I'll start bringing them up.

But we're going to rotate again. who am I on guy guy I think I'm on guy yo yo you're up man um you know I was gonna say Nico kind of covered what my my main topic was um there's something funny about like El Salvador and just the idea of what Bitcoin does is you know I think so many people and it's been

pushed um like reinforced as if like this is the this is the better way to see what's going on is hopelessness. Just straight hopelessness. There's no way to make anything better. Imagine thinking you're going to make the world better

by making everybody feel so fucking hopeless that they don't want to do anything. You know? And that's really what Bitcoin does. It's like, holy shit. We can actually build our way out of this. We really can. And maybe it only takes

a couple of years of truly devoting ourselves to this and learning the tools and breaking through that initial barrier and life is just better on the other side of things, you know? But

I don't, we won't stress that. I'll change topics a little bit. I'll change gears a little bit. Lightning. I think just in the realm of like tech and payment

platforms and things, I think payment processors that are about to find out in mass what lightning really is. I think this year for adoption of international remittances and merchant payments using the Bitcoin layer as Bitcoin and Lightning as infrastructure to move that capital, I think is going to get out of control very quickly. all the geopolitics aside, which we have clearly just,

we've just smashed through that wall, like, you know, the fucking Kool-Aid man. Just like, oh, yeah, let's do this. Like, clearly we are in that field. But at the exact same time, I think we're not, I don't think we're very far away from payment infrastructure, remittances, everything you think of as a money app,

opening up their connection to lightning to Bitcoin. And that is going to change. That's going to change just as much shit, just in a different way. And I'm bullish about that. Did you listen to Jack Muller's interview? I did. The internet network is just so good.

I mean, come on. The tortilla chip, the peanuts and the raisins. Brilliant. I mean, yeah. And I think you're, I think you're right, guys, that this is going to, I think the traditional payment rails are going to be walloped with this. I mean, Western Union, I don't even know what they're, like, they're, they're going to, it's, it's going to be a monumental collapse of market share. And it's not that, it's not that, you know, they're doing anything. wrong they're doing what they can within the system right it's just they haven't been incentivized to improve it and they take way too much margin and they're going to collapse it's just not i mean it's it's kind of laughable they'll be the first one to fall in my mind and then visa and master card and they're they're on they're on notice like guy like you just said it's it's going to be more like

it's just going to be a wildfire you know when people realize how easy it is to send money back and forth peer to peer to, you know, transact on this. Wherever you are, whether you're in El Salvador or you're in Mexico or you're in, you know, Japan, it doesn't matter. If you have a lightning wallet, you can transact with somebody else. It's incredible. And I love that interview. And I won't, you know, I won't put it, do a synopsis on it. But wow, if you haven't heard it, anybody's out there that's listening, you haven't heard it, definitely put it at the top of your listening list. You know, this is something that I had thought about a lot, but not quite as, I guess the idea wasn't quite as concrete or as defined as kind of Jack Mallor put it in that interview,

was the idea that, you know, remittances and merchant payments, like payments and like credit card payments are completely separate. They're completely separate. And I knew that they were different infrastructure. And like I had thought about this before, but not, it never just like, like punch me in the face the way Jack Miller said. It says it's because it's such a nightmare to deal with both individually that you have to deal with them separately. You have to create a service for remittances. And every, all of the problems and the overhead of dealing with that means that now trying to tackle merchant processing and just like normal credit card and stuff purchases at the same time.

Just no, let's not mess with that. Let's just focus on remittances and get this right. And vice versa for payments, for merchants. And the fact that not only is it like the same or similar, it's literally exactly the same thing. Like there is absolutely no fucking difference between me sending a remittance to a friend or to somebody in like, sessions. you're across a border.

I could send you, I could send you a 20 cent right now on Lightning. I know you have a Lightning wallet. I have a Lightning wallet. And it would be absolutely no different. You could be a financial service. You could be a merchant. You could be my cousin.

You could be anybody. And there's absolutely no difference. Bitcoin and Lightning doesn't have the slightest, doesn't even know that they exist. It's not like, oh, it's just really easy to get this across the border. it can't even begin to account for the fact that the border is there. It's just a peanut.

It's just sending a peanut. That's all it's doing. It's just sending a peanut. Yeah, that just, I was just like, oh, shit, man. It really is. It's just, well, I mean, the way that it, the way the money flows is, is so much more, like the, you think of the traditional way of how payments are made and sort of, that my camera just went out.

I'm swapping the battery as I talk. But you think... I think I'm confusing everybody right now, by the way, because I'm out here on the West Coast. I'm like, it is so bright here right now. Oh, no worries. Everybody else is like, I can see it's dark. No problem.

Here I am, yeah. But like a nice camera. You got a lens on that thing. Yeah, I do. I do. But, you know, just the way that money flows now with something like the lightning network, it completely kind of changes the conceptual ideas behind money in the first place, even just down to the way we do things like two-week pay periods. That's like, is that a viable

thing? Like, Jack Mallor showed a, showed a literal, like, timer, like, dripping sats per minute or per second to one of his employees. And so, like, it gets rid of that, that kind of broken up, like, you know, piecemeal way of transacting and makes it more of like an actual flow of liquidity. And guy, you see it with your podcast. I've done it with mine, Nico, I think you're doing it with yours as well, where people can stream sets per minute listening to a podcast. And that changes how content works too, because if you put out a podcast and, you know,

you've got a pretty beefy, like first five or ten minutes and then the rest of it sucks ass, that person is going to turn off the podcast and stop paying. And so that that monetary incentive to keep quality content throughout the length of the episode is there. And does that start in a world where like gradual like streaming payments take place? Does that change the quality of the content that is put out there? I think that it's early stages, but I think eventually that becomes one of the things. that changes in and around this stuff. And yeah, it's incredible.

And we, you know, as content creators, the three of us, it really changes the game from the ad model, right, which absolutely sucks to, you know, direct peer to peer. You know, it's like, I like your stuff, right? And you don't have to put in a credit card and go through creating an account and all the headaches of that, right? It's just as simple as like there's a QR code. Okay. Yeah, I like him.

I don't like him, you know, and it's as simple as that, right? So I think the future Bitcoin just makes everything better. Like, that's just the way it is, right? And I think that's just a really good example that, you know, and that, and I completely agree. I think that podcast, right? And I don't listen to the podcast very often. That podcast with Jack Mahler's and Peter McCormack is a must listen. It's incredible.

And the way that Jack Mahlers is thinking about it, I'm just happy he's on our team. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's a good guy to have in your corner, I think. Anybody that's watching this that hasn't played with lightning yet, even if you have no idea how it works and you just want to get like a quick idea of how to use it, there's a very simple, if you've just got like regular Bitcoin in a Bitcoin wallet, I tweeted it out before this because I was just thinking about lightning and kind of how far things have come.

I tweeted out an old video I made of Moon wallet, M-U-U-N. So if you aren't familiar with Lightning and you're like, I just want to take a little bit of my Bitcoin and get it into a wallet that can use Lightning, Moon basically has a single balance, but allows you to receive Bitcoin to a regular Bitcoin address or to a Lightning invoice and to send to a regular Bitcoin address or to a Lightning invoice. And so it's kind of just like one unified balance and then you specify how you want to use it. And if you scan a QR code, it will just, it will know intuitively what it is, whether it's a Bitcoin address or an invoice, and it will act accordingly.

So for those that are like, I just want to see how it works, just download Moonwallet and send over a regular Bitcoin transaction and then try, you know, going and, you know, find a page or, I don't know. What's a good website where somebody can go spend some sats on lightning? Like, I mean, there's a bunch of... Bitcoinaudible.com. Yeah, there you go. Go to Bitcoinaudible.com. There's a bunch of stuff there. Bit refill.

Yeah, Ben refill. Use fold. I'm trying to think of the ones that I go to all the time. Ellen Pay. Of course, a bunch of people use Ellen Pay for other things. Lightningstores. com. I got a great idea.

There's a link down below, right? It's strike.me slash BTC sessions. If you want to experiment with lightning, send it there. Thanks, man. Yeah, no, I mean, there's been so many incredible things. And it's one of those things where lightning, I think, it crept up on a lot of people, and a lot of people still don't know what's there. Like a lot of people, it has yet to creep up on them as, oh, this is available and it works.

Oh my God, I thought Bitcoin was slow and inexpensive. You still regularly hear that. And so I think lightning is still yet to make the biggest of the splashes it's going to make. Oh, yeah. It's barely like it just kind of, it's put its foot in the water. Just to just for people to know that it is there. No, we have not even got started. But like even just like just the adoption of El Salvador, which was actually a custodial,

service that utilized lightning. But the amount of, what was it, the lightning report by Arcane Research and Open Node, they said just in the month of September when that went live, the number of, like, so the network itself, I think, took like a 20 or 30% growth during the month. But that the number of transactions across like the subset of nodes that they polled, essentially was more than double in a single month it doubled um and i think that's just like that's the test bed like this is literally the el salvador is test net for like does this shit work oh it does it really does it's working it continues to work you know what was it a steve hanky

whatever his stupid name is um insisted that this was going to crash and burn that this was going to be a disaster, that so many people were going to lose money. And it like just, it just keeps working. Yeah. And I think the fact that they're moving money and that people are able to send that that girl, the girl in the freaking coffee shop, just posted an invoice. And, I mean, I sent her. I sent her something as soon as I saw it.

I was like, oh, shit, yeah, scan. But that from all countries all over the world, they sent her like five grand or something. something in a matter of like a couple of hours just because she accepted it at her cafe like that is crazy that is so fundamentally changing how the infrastructure works um the people who are ignoring this or even worse fighting it are so stupid so unbelievably stupid you know like imagine a world where that's just entrenched or they're just entrenched or they're just entrenched or they're just entrenched yeah they They worship the church of Fiat. That's what it is, right?

They're incentivized. Like, you think about Hanky, right? Hanky, you know, he sees himself as, you know, right-leaning economists and whatever. And it's funny because he posts, you know, tweets about freedom and all this stuff. And then at the same time, he's opposing Bitcoin, right? Which is totally hypocritical. But and then I was thinking about it was like, how is this guy not seeing it? Right.

And there's like a very famous quote by something Sinclair, Upton Sinclair. right, which is you're not going to understand something that is going to hurt you essentially. I know I totally butcher the exact quote, but essentially it goes like that, right? If you're not incentivized to understand something, you're not going to understand it. And I think that a lot of these people that worship in the church of Fiat, right, a lot of these, you know, bankers that are well connected and we have a saying in Spanish in Chufels, which is literally plugged into the socket, right? What incentive do they have to understand something like Bitcoin? In fact, not only are they not going to understand it, they're going to be aggressive against it because they're going to feel like it's a direct attack to them.

Look, I have the group of five friends I grew up with. And four of them already, you know, they unfortunately, they own some Bitcoin. They own some shit coins. I have one friend who still has not Bitcoin. He still has not Bitcoin. He still has not bought Bitcoin or shit coins. You know where he works? Goldman Sachs. And that tells you everything you need to know.

Amazing. Well, I mean, that's a good segue, actually. Well, let's do that then. Let's roll it because I, you know, I've thoroughly enjoyed the lightning stuff. But, James, let's dive into your reason while we're at it. So I think that your listeners would be disappointed having me on here and not talking at all about price. So, and I know it's not, I agree, it's not the most important thing. It's not.

But I am encouraged. And I know that, you know, a lot of people are discouraged out there right now because they see that the price is going down and that they've put a lot of their savings into this. And some people got into it this year and they bought at 50, 60, you know, almost $70,000. And they're scared. And so, you know, I'm actually, I'm not worried. There's just so much noise out there in the system. You know, the Fed is they're fumbling around.

They're going to have a policy error. It's going to be a problem. There's just no way they can get out of this. They're backed into a corner. And, you know, at this point, Bitcoin, BTC is being considered. It's seen as a risk asset. That's just what it is. It's tied to the NASDAQ market.

It's tied to technology. It's tied to an unknown speculative asset. It's not quite, it's gotten past the meme stage, I think. You know, I know. But it is absolutely tied to that area of the market. So why am I bullish? Well, first of all, you know, the high that Bitcoin made $69,000, you know if it retraced back to what it normally retraced back to would be down 80%.

It would be a $14,000, you know, price, right? That would be painful and no doubt about it. So, but we haven't seen that. We've seen major, major, major support in the $29, $30,000 level, right? So why am I, why am I so bullish on the price here? It's because we had China pull out of mining completely. and the hash rate has completely, you know, recovered, and it's now at an all-time high. You've got money just pouring into mining, especially here in the United States.

You've got the new BTC mining ETF that was just approved. You've got fidelity coming out and talking openly about Bitcoin, you know, Eurean Timor, and he's talking about exactly, exactly. You've got the El Salvador adoption. You've got the El Salvador bond that's coming out. You've got Texas, Arizona, Wyoming, you know, politicians all pushing for some sort of formalization of usage. We are getting some sort of clarity around the laws and the treatment of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin in particular from Washington in the next. in the next, I would say, 12 to 18 months.

Those are all huge positives. And the people I'm talking to, these traditional money managers, institutional money managers, I'm starting to hear of people, these are smart guys that they're starting to understand it. They're actually reading about it and starting to understand it. Now, they know that it's still a risk on asset. And so they're treating it that way. There's so much noise, though, because of the BTC. futures ETF, that's a problem, you know, it's, it allows for easy and sloppy hedging.

We won't get into it, but it's not, it just allows for that price to be suppressed. And it's, it's not, it's not a clean instrument. It's paper, you know. So when I'm looking at it and I look at the global assets that are out there, investment assets, You mean, you're talking about $120 trillion, $120 trillion worth of stocks, $140 trillion worth of bonds, $300 trillion worth of real estate, another $30 trillion of art and collectibles, another $10 trillion of gold. That's about $600 trillion. Then you go to the money, you go to M2, the money supply and the cash and checking and money instruments. That's another $130 trillion.

So you got $730 trillion out there as an addressable investment market for Bitcoin. And I'm starting to see money managers look at this with understanding. Now, they're not there yet. It's not widespread. It's a, you know, there's a lot of confusion still on the street. But institutional money managers manage many, many trillions of dollars. And they are looking at this now. and they're trying to figure it out.

They're trying to figure out when does it, if it does, when does it break out of that correlation to the risk assets. And when they do, they're going to dip their toe in. And when I say dip their toe in, that means like a 1% investment in their portfolios. So if you look at $730 trillion and $1%, that works out to be about $350,000,000 Bitcoin. 2% double it. 3% triple. You're looking at about a million dollar Bitcoin on a 3% asset allocation from on average.

Now that's without organic growth. That's with just on average, you know, 3% asset allocation from the world. And that includes money. So all the things we're talking about with, you know, the flight to safety. When it does get to this level of $100,000. dollars and it's it's at that level that stays there there's going to be a little bit of fomo in there and institutions money managers they don't they don't really care what the price is they have a percentage allocation they have to put in their from their portfolio and so if they have to put a hundred

million dollars into it because they're managing billions of dollars and they've got a percentage allocation they need to fill well it doesn't matter what the price is they're if they believe that it's going up they'll buy it it doesn't matter 120 150 they don't really care care. They're, it's not that they're, I mean, they're, they're, they're price sensitive to a point, but, you know, it's, it, it, it will cause more of a fomo into it because they need to get that allocation. So what does that mean? Well, if you look at the, what I just said, what the downside is, and you look at what I, what I believe the upside is in the next five to 10 years. I mean, we're talking about, that's like a, almost a 40 to one risk reward.

You know, your risk down to 14,000 versus your risk or your reward up to a million. That's a 25 times upside from here. You know? I mean, that is, it is an incredible opportunity to buy the, the hardest money out there right now while it's still being considered a risk asset. That's just incredible to me. And, you know, like when I was an arbitrage trader and, And so arbitrage is when you try to buy one security and sell another one that's a like security for your listeners and capture the spread between and collapse it. And it keeps the markets efficient.

There's not a lot of it out there anymore because the systems are so fast now that there's not a ton of it. But if you look at that upside of a million dollars per coin and you look at where it is right now, about $40,000, I haven't looked at the price. maybe it's 30. But you look at it, it's about $40,000. Well, that's telling you, forget about time value of money because there is no time value of money. So that's just telling you that the market is giving, it's attaching a 96% probability that it goes to zero and before it goes to a million dollars.

It's only attaching a 4% probability that it goes to a million dollars. That's insanity to me. So this to me is probably the most positive, asymmetric opportunity for investment that I have ever seen in my career. And that's why I'm excited. I love that. You made me think of a tweet from Andy Edstrom. And he tweeted out, it is truly strange holding an asset that you know is a safe haven, but traders think is a tech stock. and bingo that's it's a pretty solid uh encapsulation of of kind of what's what's happening in

the market right now like people are are grouping it in with all of that stuff and it's it's just a a misinterpretation of what's happening on behalf of everybody still in fiat world you know people people haven't put two and two together of what's what and it's hard to decipher but but the signal is making its way through the noise and you see people whose job it is to preserve capital and you see you know on both ends of the spectrum people that have been most disenfranchised by the fiat system and people that are doing quite well and manage a lot of assets that are also cluing into it. And it's slowly making its way towards the wind of the middle.

And that's going to take some time. But we see it happening and we see these little sparks happening around the edges as individuals figure it out on their own terms. And that's an exciting thing to watch. But I'll let you guys comment. That was some grade A hopium into my veins. That was awesome. Friday, Hopium. But yeah, look, obviously, you know, James has a good perspective, you know, from his experience and, you know, I'm sure he has some connections. But yeah, I'm super bullish for

the future. And, you know, the way that I see it, right, is there's going to be only, you know, in a much more simplistic sense, right, from the perspective of a pleb, right? There's 21 million Bitcoin and what, there's 8 billion people around the world. Right. And I think that it's just a matter of time before people figure that out and they rush in and just one little statistic, right? Naim Bukele tweeted it out the other day. I might add, I tweeted it out first, right?

But he said something really interesting. He said there's 41. He said 40. Maybe, perhaps. I don't know. But essentially, he said there's 41 million millionaires on planet Earth. And there's only 21 million Bitcoin

estimated that between two and three millioner loss. That means that if every single millionaire wanted to buy one Bitcoin, just one. they physically couldn't right sorry again so it's not as you know as as as with the nice bow on top as james but that's the nico opium for the day that's good math i like your math that's a great man you know there's also there's something in that that is just kind of a beautiful illustration of how Bitcoin works and why the further we move into this and the more important it becomes and the more obvious like going back to Nico's original point here is that you know we're

on the geopolitical stage in a kind of epic way now and what's fascinating is that suddenly and you know it's something that we as Bitcoiners have been talking about for years is that there will come a point where every single political decision, everything, every single corporate boardroom, every single Fed meeting of all the Fed and central bank owners and implementers, as they all sit down in their rooms, Bitcoin is going to be the elephant in the corner. Like, Bitcoin is going to be there basically putting a thorn in all of their plans. And they are going to have to recognize that their monetary decisions do not have the same outcome because here's this Bitcoin thing.

That I'm going to freeze all of these people's accounts because I disagree with them does not have the same outcome because here's this Bitcoin thing. These sanctions that we want to implement and this country of innocent citizens that we want to starve in order to punish their politicians does not have the same outcome because here's this thing called Bitcoin. That is fundamentally changing. And I think we are in the phase of, oh shit, here's this thing called Bitcoin that is ruining all of our plans. And that is where we have found ourselves, but there's something very beautiful about the fact that everybody is trying to selectively embrace it. This is what's happening in Russia right now. So, as a

they came out and they were like, oh, we're going to ban it and, you know, nobody's going to be able to use it. And then Putin and the ministry, like, like numerous people came out and said, no, no, no, that's not what we're going to do. We're going to have a meeting. Let's talk about this and we'll have some formal proposals here soon. Basically, what was said, very short summary of this is that if we ban it, this is going to do is no good. And it's not going to work. That, oh, we're just going to push this entire market underground, or we're going to shove it out of the country. So the better thing to do is heavily and very, very strictly scrutinize and regulate. And then at the same time, they saw the benefits of their Bitcoin mining, of being able to actually

bolster their grid, of being able to offload all of their excess energy into an economic battery into a way to store that economic value to use it later and make things energy sources that are currently too disparate, too far away from, you know, population centers, too temporarily unreliable in the context of like solar and wind, all these things that really suck as energy sources in a general sense, that they actually become profitable. They actually become manageable to build these things out. And suddenly you've got a really strong, robust grid if you take advantage of what is essentially a value bank for like a bank in the sense of a store, like a place to stash away all of the value of your energy to use later. And you can build out infrastructure without nothing but losses where you would have to deal with otherwise.

So as we enter this phase, as we realize at the same time that it's this incredible tool for international payments infrastructure, as countries like Russia realize banning it is a terrible idea and we should just try to get as collect as much data as we can, make sure there's all these licenses and be really strict about it, but then build out our energy infrastructure side of things. The value is going to go up. Without a doubt, we're going to have a larger network, more participants, And as that happens, it gets stronger. As that happens, it gets better able to resist exactly these sorts of problems, exactly that sort of overreach from those governments.

And we've smashed through the all-time high in hash rate. We are at the peak. Seven months, eight months out of one of the largest superpowers on the planet, the largest economic power on the planet saying, no, you can't do this anymore. We're at all-time highs. And Texas said, we'll take it. Texas said we will take it.

Texas is being friendly. There are states all over the world and in this country being friendly to it and trying to invite it. Russia is realizing that's the caveat they need to take advantage of. And Intel is getting into business. Intel is like, holy shit, I can't believe we haven't had a chip all of this time. Let's see if we can't disrupt the whole market. I'm not 100% sure they're going to do that, but regardless, they're participating.

As this happens, Bitcoin gets stronger. And it's a feedback loop. It gets stronger and more valuable. And it's because it gets more valuable, it gets stronger. Which is what you said in the beginning when I, when I said, I feel like I got into so late. It just reiterates how early we are. Yeah. We're still early.

We're still early. everybody from now until the end of Bitcoin will always be as long as as long as it continues to function and it continues down through the generations you know everybody's always early like I'm I firmly believe my grandchildren will be using Bitcoin in the future and they'll be like holy crap grandpa was early

they'll have a picture of you on the wall my friend he's the dynasty right you know like you know the old the old movies where they have like the whole family picture of yeah like you like this like with BTC session and

BTC sessions at the top bro his Twitter profile picture 100% facts but yeah transaction hashes I think as I get older, I'm going to have to, this, this is going to have to be like just a white streak. And then when it all turns white, it'll just be a brown streak instead. You got to flip it, right? It just happens.

That's the real flippinging. That's the real flipping. That'll happen. But yeah. Guys, I want to end on a high note. So I'm going to, I think I'm going to round it up here. Maybe we'll do a quick round of any final thoughts or anything that we want to touch on. And I'm going to, I've started doing this every, every Friday now.

I want to give any of you guys the opportunity to suggest maybe a piece of content or something that you came across in the last little bit that you think is worth anybody watching this going and diving in. It could be a podcast. It could be a book. It could be an article you saw, an app, anything that's, that you think is worth taking a peek at. Jack Muller's interview. Yeah. Yeah. Man, I was hoping I was going to steal that one. I was like, I was getting a correct. James. We can both say it. You know, actually, we should all just say it

because it was that good. Yeah. It was a good one. Yeah. I, so yeah, in terms of any final thoughts I have, again, I'll just reiterate that, you know, Bitcoin just is and it will continue. to be and the world is slowly going to figure that out, I suppose. And that's, you know, it's going to be a bumpy ride on the way there. But I think, Nico, you were saying on the other side of that mountain, it's, it looks pretty bright. So I look forward to seeing that. In terms of content, I don't have it in the room right now. I haven't read it yet, but I'm still going to shill it because I'm excited to dive in.

I just got my copy of the Fiat standard arrived by SAFE, Save Edina Moose, and so I'm going to be diving into that pretty soon. So if you haven't read the Bitcoin standard or the Fiat standard, you know, maybe give those, I can vote for the first one. And yeah, I'm sure I'll get something out of the second one as well. So that's going to be my recommendation. Nico, how about you? Any final thoughts? Any recommendations this week? Yeah. Look, guys, this is much bigger than any one of us. This is much bigger than getting rich. You know, we are in the process of freeing mankind, whether you realize it or not, when you take Bitcoin into self-custody, when you take wealth, energy out of the system, you're partaking in the revolution, whether you realize it or not, right? It is going to get darker, my anticipation, before it gets better.

But I think that the solidarity and, you know, the community that we've built, we're going to find a lot of strength there. And I just want to say, I want to reiterate, I've been reiterating this point, you know, this whole week take self-custody, take your coins into your possession. And in terms of some content that I want to recommend, I want to recommend one of my favorite YouTube channels. It's called BTZ Sessions. Thanks, man.

I appreciate that. And thanks for coming on. I enjoyed it. Let's toss it to Guy. Final thoughts, recommendations. Yeah. I'll say my final thought is, this is what we play for.

You know, we're in the place. We're in the chapter of, Bitcoin where this has been a fun, exciting thing that and all these tools and things that we have built and that I've watched being built, I mean, I didn't build that many of them, but that we have watched and this history that we have seen unfold and the tests that Bitcoin has gone through to date. Bitcoin is a teenager. and Bitcoin is about to become a man.

It is about to be an adult. Or a strong independent woman? Or a strong independent woman. Yes. But Bitcoin is coming into adulthood. And this is where all of the tests come to fruition. They see, you see the outcomes and the real stressors on this system. and I am excited

because everything that has led up to this point that has led up to where we are has told me that this is going to work that the feedback loops, the network effect, the security, the incentive structure, it works. And there's a lot of indication that it is still working. Even in this atmosphere,

what we suspected might happen appears to be happening. And, man, I just don't know what else I would bet on. You know? Like, I don't know what other future I could possibly want as an alternative that even appears as a possibility for one of our paths. And I can't imagine betting on the fools in power now. the structure and the system, the financial shit show that we are in the middle of the central banking institution, I cannot fathom. I would rather buy thousands of bags of salt and just hold my value in that than be exposed to this.

and the fact that we actually have something that not only could survive the storm but could prosper but that would actually get stronger you know it's an anti-fragile thing right like like teleb who doesn't know the first thing about bitcoin but has some really great philosophy um explains is that a anti-fragile thing that is not attacked, that is that is not among stressors, that is among, that finds complacency, becomes stagnant. It becomes weak. We're certainly not in that environment. We are certainly not in a stress-free situation. And because of that, I think a lot of the situations in the last few weeks, even a few months, have really made us realize what tools we should focus on where our big pain points still are that have been easy to just kind of push under the

table you know um and now they're in the forefront and now i think the discussion has changed about what we should adopt what the next piece of the puzzle should be and i think that's that's a great thing um and it's going to be a hell of year man it's gonna be a hell of a year you're in end of Check out Bitcoin Audible and show my meme and whatever. Awesome. Whatever that stuff. Love it. Awesome.

James, you got the final word. Any final thoughts? I know you, I know you really want people to watch that Jack Mallor's interview so you can stick with that or if you have anything else. You're welcome to as well. Actually, if you, you know,

your fellow Canadian up there, if for your listeners, if you have not read Jeff Booth's, the price of tomorrow, that's also offensive. past a book. That's one that actually orange pilled me and my wife. We listened to that driving from here to Texas. And that was that was very important to understand, you know, what the system is, what the what the Fiat system is battling against, how technology is advancing

and how inflation is, it's robbing the advancement of technology and all of the energy that we should be storing up and benefiting from individually. It's a great book. And so, you know, it takes a minute to wrap your head around. So, you know, you may have to read a few of those chapters a couple times and it doesn't mean that you're not smart. I read it a few times to get your, your, you're stead. in this mentality that it's hard to break out of. But once you do, then you just see,

I got it. I understand. So that's actually a great one. And I recommend that a lot. And then as guy is saying, you know, and Nico saying like we're, we're in a little bit of a fight here. And, you know, I think the the motto of the Navy SEALs, the US Navy SEALs, the only easy day was yesterday. And so, you know. But they also say stay groovy. That just means just keep your cool. It's fine.

Everything's going to be fine. Just stay groovy. I could go by that advice right now. I think I'll try and partake in that a little bit. Gentlemen, I can't tell you how much it means to me that you all join me on Friday. I took the past week or so off just to kind of, you know, step away from everything and chill out for a little bit. But I'm really glad that I was able to come back and chat with you guys for a Friday.

I always say these are the best point of my week. And this week was by no means any exception. So I've nothing but gratitude for your time. Thank you for being here. and you guys are welcome back anytime. Thank you. It was awesome. Thank you.

It's been an honor, brother. Stay strong. I will. And I'll chat with you guys soon. I'm going to cut your audio video. Have a good night, gentlemen. Later, man. Awesome.

Everybody watching, thank you so much for joining me. Again, I hope you all are having a good week. And thanks for joining and watching the show. So if you want to help out of the show, of course, like, subscribe, share. All those things are super important. I really value everybody that comes in and is in the chat. I see all you chatting there. Today I wasn't pulling as much up.

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See you guys next time for your daily session. Thank you.