BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Ian Major, Mike Jarmuz, My Livin Truth ep293

Episode Date: October 1, 2022

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What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? Killer panel today with all new first-time guests. So super excited to have these gentlemen on the show. We will get to intros momentarily. Of course, as always, this is live. Anything can happen.

So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Fuck it. Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share.

All those things really do help get this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is the bitbo.io dashboard. We're sitting at $19,288 per coin. Single U.S. dollar will pick you up 5,183 sats. 91.26% of all Bitcoin have been mined.

And in terms of fees, next block, little spike, 17 sats per byte. But if you're willing to wait a little bit, single digits should do you just fine. Shout out to sponsor the show, coin kite.com. These guys just have the best damn hardware in the game. I love my cold card mark four. It is super versatile. And side note, Nunchuk wallet just dropped the ability to use NFC with your Mark 4 if that's something that interests you.

Yeah, I tried it out the other day. I'm going to do a video on it soon. But super awesome to see more functionality drop. Also, CoinGy has great things like OpenDime, the block clock, the micro just started shipping, you know, stats card, tap signer, all this awesome stuff. Be sure to check them out, coincite.com. and you can use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store. If you're in Canada, shake pay, easy way to be stacking sats.

You can e-transfer in and out with no deposit or withdrawal fees. There's a thin spread when you get there. If you use the link down below after your first $100 purchase, they'll give you $30 for free. You also get $30 if you share your own link and somebody signs up and does the same thing. They get $30 as well. You can then shake your phone every single day for free sats. You can use their Sats back Visa card.

you can do the Shakepaid program, all kinds of awesome things coming out of ShakePay. So check them out. Again, link down below if you want that $30.000. Leaden.io, you can use your Bitcoin for a ton of different services. These guys have been particularly useful for myself whenever I have a bit of a cash flow crunch issue because I do earn Bitcoin. And perhaps in some cases, I don't want to sell certain Bitcoin in order to get those dollars. So I can deposit Bitcoin here, get a loan of dollars to my bank account.

pay back those dollars, get back the same amount of Bitcoin. They also have savings accounts for Bitcoin and USC with quarterly third-party audits in which you can cryptographically verify that your holdings were part of the audit so you don't get jerked around Celsius style. They have their B2X offering. They've got Bitcoin bag mortgages in Canada and soon as some U.S. states. Tons of stuff happening over there. Check out start.leddin.com.com slash BTC sessions.

and if you use that link, you can sign up fund your account. You get $10 for free. Bitrefill.com. These guys help me a ton when I'm living on Bitcoin. I can pick up any gift cards that I can imagine here. With Bitcoin, both on-chain and via the Lightning Network, you can earn stats back as you shop, more SATs back for the referral program. You can do phone top-ups, lightning channel top-ups.

And if you're in the U.S., you can pay your bills so you can get on that Bitcoin standard. So check them out. refill.com link is in these show notes. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, you may not just want it in paper. Solid steel is a much sounder alternative. You don't have a piece of paper flitting around the office. You're not worried as much about fire damage or water damage. So this gives me tons of peace of mind. So be sure to check out privacy pros. dotio slash BTC sessions. You can grab a bill foddle if you want something a little sturdier than a piece of paper. Oh, and last note, I'm going to be in Charlotte on October,

20 or yeah, October 21st coming up quick here, three weeks for Hotterween. But on the Friday, I'm doing a deep dive on the cold card. It's four hours long. There's only 15 spots available. So you can check that out on my website. Ditto coming up for Pacific Bitcoin the day after I'm doing a cold card deep dive there in Los Angeles on Saturday, November 12th. And again, same website, BTC sessions.ca slash events and 15 spots available for

that one as well. So yeah, check them out. They're coming soon. And with that, enough of my rambling. Let's get the guys in here. So we got Mike, we got Ian, we got Opti. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you all. Very excited for all newcomers to the show. So let's do a quick round of intros. So I'll go to you each and ask simply, who are you and what do you do? So we'll start with Mike. Can you give yourself a little intro? Oh, you're muted, by the way. there you go all right well um thanks for having me uh and this is great um so i'm mike jarmuz my friends call me muz and uh i run lightning ventures which is a boutique venture firm uh where we just invest in bitcoin companies uh same as some of the other people out there um still mark elise glean

and um 1031 and uh max webster we're all in this sort of bitcoin vc world And we raised a very small fund that we're deploying out of. That's a friends and family fund, very small. And we have a syndicate, which is really made up of a large group of accomplished awesome people who are specifically interested in investing in Bitcoin companies. Right. So, Benny, if you were in our syndicate and you had your eyes on some of the things that we were working on, you might be able to see that this really cool company is looking to roll out an affiliate program.

And one of their asks, we're looking for awesome bitcoins that are content creators to help us push this out. And you may decide to step in and help that company. And also it might be a good affiliate revenue for yourself, right, for something that is a product that you can stand behind. So we make some investments just through our fund. Sometimes we invest through our fund first and then we have an extra allocation that we have, we put out there to the broader misfit batch of Lightning Ventures folks. And that's pretty much all you're going to get from Lightning Ventures is Bitcoin deals. No flying cars, no vegan ice cream, no gas stations in outer space. But I personally like to help younger angel investors get started,

kind of demystify the process. People think you need a lot of money to do this. You actually don't. all of our minimums are always $1,000. And for a very low cost, you can get real equity and real ownership positions, real investment opportunities on the same terms as the leads, right? The same terms as all the big boys and the suits out there, you can invest in one. And actually, I have to give you a shout out because we just did a deal for foundation devices. And we were able to help them raise through our syndicate. I did a video with Zach.

And in preparation in our due diligence, right because we write these memos you know we do our work before we get started uh it was like this you know the same day uh you happen to release that complete uh overview on the um the passport batch two uh which i found really helpful um so yeah so i actually took a little screenshot you made it into our deal memo you were obviously much you were much more famous than that beforehand uh but yeah i i really appreciate that and um and that's pretty much So we've invested in about maybe about 24, 25 companies to date. And we're up and running and cruising.

And that's what I'm up to. Damn. That's awesome, man. That's good to hear. I'm glad to see behind the scenes people able to support companies and people that they see building things that they think will be useful. So that's encouraging to hear. And actually a little bit about what I'm going to be talking about in a bit here.

But nonetheless, let's do a quick rotation. Opti. Good to have you, man. It's been a long time coming. Maybe give yourself a little intro for people that might be unfamiliar. Well, thank you, Ben. And what's up, everyone? Yeah, I am a co-host of Simply Bitcoin, highly regarded creator of Bitcoin kindergarten and just a Twitter shit poster. I'm just a bitconer out here. I don't have, I just make content. I'm just a content creator. You know, shouts out to you, Ben, BTC sessions, a legend in my book. So I'm just happy to be here. dude i'm excited so short but sweet dude i've got to say that uh my my uh interview on bitcoin kindergarten the the i was i was told um i thought jokingly that the first 20 minutes would be hair questions and no we were serious the first 20 minutes ended up being hair questions. Ben, we realized over at Bitcoin

kindergarten, you know, once you're a Bitcoiner, there's only so much Bitcoin content you can, you know, digest every day that is just simply Bitcoin and you've got to just entertain your Bitcoin friends. And so that's what we do over there. It was a good time. I thoroughly enjoyed that chat. I mean, not just for the hair questions,

but for everything that came there after, it was a great time. Awesome. Ian, Ian, Ian. I am super stoked to have you on. I love, and I don't want to spoil what you do, but I love seeing people do what you do because it speaks to me, obviously. So maybe let people know who you are and what you do. Yeah, gentlemen, it's an honor. Thanks for having me on, Ben.

So I'm actually in my day job, co-founder of a company called Trubit. We are working in the Bitcoin reward space, taking what we think is one of the logical next steps for all of this. I'm going to try my best not to totally self-shill, but it also happens to be the thing that I'm quite bullish on. So I will pick that apart for you guys, lay out the thesis, see what you think. So that's the day job. But then as a side hobby, I do run a YouTube channel, which is basically just my name, Ian Major, all things Bitcoin. And I always joke, it's like a less cool version of BTC sessions. But in actuality, in actuality, let's say YouTube algorithms have a bad day, you know, plebs aren't getting kind of directly,

taken to Ben's channel. I'm there with like the second pair of catchers mitts making sure that clubs don't kind of fall through the cracks. So there's a lot of tutorials, a lot of kind of kind of like deep dives on emerging Bitcoin tech. But I will also make a shout out to you, Ben, because as I

mentioned to you on Twitter, you know, this was a while ago. You know, I had a couple hundred subscribers. I had just started and I see a comment from BTC sessions. I'm like, surely this is BTC session zero one, three, three, eight. whatever.

But it was you. And you had some very encouraging words. You said, you know, love this type of content. The community needs more of it. And, you know, I will never forget that. I think it is very indicative of the kind of community and, you know, what, what Bitcoiners do to support each other. So I'm forever grateful and thrilled to be here. Thanks, man.

I appreciate that. And I was, again, I've got to say that there can never be too much educational content. people very much doubt their own abilities until they have somebody just hold their hand, walk them through it and show them, no, you can do this. And the more of that that there is out there, the more self-sovereign people will become.

And that's a beautiful thing. So I'm always super happy to see more Bitcoin educators out there. So yeah, go subscribe to Ian Major because he's got the tutorials. And I'm sure there's, while there's overlap, there's also things that you're going to catch that I don't catch. There's going to be things that I catch that you may not have. So there's going to be different things that you can pick up on from each channel. So definitely go check out, Ian.

But with that, let's get into it. So this is, why are we bullish? Anybody that's watching that may be unfamiliar. Really simple, really simple concept for the show. Each one of us is bringing forth a reason why we are bullish. It can be a topic of our choosing. It can be a personal experience. It can be an app.

It can be a news story. It can be some sort of new device. It could be really anything. It doesn't matter as long as it makes you bullish, as long as it makes you excited about Bitcoin. So we're going to go by the three R's. Somebody's going to drop a reason. Then altogether we're going to riff on that reason.

And then we're going to rotate. Very simple. Reason, riff, until each one of us gets a turn. So I'm going to get us started today. And the reason I'm feeling bullish right now is because all of the building that has been happening while the world is seemingly asleep, right? Well, this isn't the first time that this kind of thing has made me bullish.

It happens every bear market, right? Because that's when shit actually gets done. That's when people have time to build things. And the slew of announcements of things that are happening in the background, seemingly to a totally unaware general public, is staggering because it's not just little, little things like, oh, and these things are happening too, but, oh, this application had an upgrade. Oh, this happened, this happened. So like large infrastructure builds on top of Bitcoin, like in Lightning, in companies that are basically putting forth Bitcoin to the world and companies that have largely been out of the Bitcoin space suddenly entering it.

And, you know, in a double-edged sword kind of way, making it more publicly accessible and acceptable. acceptable. So I have a few examples of what I wanted to mention. So I'm going to, I'll bring up my screen here really quick. But okay. So for instance, strike announces an $80 million raise. They paired 1031 was one of the main people in there that one of the main institutions in there that that dove in and helped with this raise. But there is $80 million like in the midst of a bear market. That's that's a good chunk of change for like the with Bitcoin down 70%. So clearly like people are are seeing that there's value here. One of the one of the quotes that I found interesting is, is that Jack Mallor's, he said something to the tune of he thinks that it's

it's possible that 50% of U.S. retailers or U.S. businesses could be in some way, shape, or form accepting Bitcoin or basically onto this technology strike in some form by the end of 2023, which is pretty, I mean, that's pretty ambitious. Jackson, ambitious guy. But like, for him to publicly say that, like, even if it was, you know, 20% of that 10% of that, that's still a large chunk of the businesses in the United States in which you could potentially be paying in Bitcoin. And the thing about his announcement this year at Bitcoin 2022 is I felt like it was a

sleeper announcement where when it initially drops, it's kind of like it didn't, it's not like everything happened all at once. It's not like he makes his announcement, hey, we basically integrated with this point of sale system. And it's in like one third of all point of sale terminals in the world. And they could all accept Bitcoin. They have to opt into that, right? They have to turn on that switch. They don't have to switch out their hardware.

But there's an action that needs to be taken and they need to opt into that. And that's not all going to happen at once. but at some point it will happen. And I think that's kind of the sleeper aspect of this announcement is that it will begin to happen. And then all of a sudden it'll be like, oh, just every, you know, most places you go, you'll be able to pay in this fashion,

which is awesome. And people won't realize it until the midst of a bull run. And they'll be like, oh, I can just use this everywhere. I thought like nobody took it. anymore. I thought nobody accepted it. And more stuff happening. So like micro strategy, they're looking to hire a Bitcoin engineer for building a lightning platform. They're doing kind of like a software as a service type thing. But they're like they're funneling money not just into buying Bitcoin, but into building products and services in and around Bitcoin.

You've got, you've got people like Swan. Swan acquired Spectre Solutions. And I, I, I, love Spector. I think it's a great tool. It's awesome in the way that you can manage your Bitcoin in so many different ways, hot wallets, cold wallets, air-gabbed wallets, multi-sig wallets. You can do all these different things with Spector. And I saw some cynical takes on this of like, oh, you've got KYC'd, you know, a KYC company integrating and acquiring this open source thing. The thing is this will encourage people that use Swan to funnel directly into self-custody where they may not have ever done that before. That's a positive.

And it in no way detracts from this self-solver nature of actually using Spectre all on its own if you don't use Swan. And beyond that, it will now be funneling. money into development to make Spector that much more user friendly and easy to operate and more versatile, have more features, all that stuff. It suddenly adds massive amounts of funding to that infrastructure that continues to be free and open source. And that's incredible. So all in all, like this is, to me, was a great announcement.

And again, anybody that's very non-KYC that was previously using Spector, you can, continue to have the same experience and not use any of the swan stuff too. So that's fantastic. Now, beyond that, we've got taro launching an alpha on Lightning. So again, like, not that I'm super stoked on stable coins or anything like that, but at the same time, a huge infrastructure layer in Lightning on top of Bitcoin that obsolete shit coins. Sure, I'm for that. Awesome. And then on the institutional side, well, actually, not even yet. We've got Ross Stevens and in Wolf's clothing. Again, lightning

accelerator basically working to build out infrastructure on lightning. All of this stuff happening in the midst of a bear market. And when the bull market comes along, there'll just be all this great stuff that was built and fleshed out when everybody was asleep. And the final thing I wanted to touch on was Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Citadel, NASDAQ, all these major institutions that are now getting into offering some type of exchange mechanism and custody for Bitcoin. And I'm not a big fan of Bitcoin custody, obviously. But at the same time,

you have all of this stuff that's happening in a bear market. And the bull market will come back around. And all of a sudden, literally anybody who's curious will say, oh, there's a product existing in my current financial institution. Those people may have never touched Bitcoin before. And now they've got IOU Bitcoin. But some of those people who get IOU Bitcoin will then fall down the rabbit hole of I guess I'm not actually custodying it or maybe I can't actually do this something with it or I can't

I see now that all of these places are accepting Bitcoin to buy but I can't seem to be buying it with the Bitcoin that's in my Fidelity account. Why is that? And there'll be questions arisen and there'll be people learning. I think that's a fantastic thing and the amount of stuff that's going on right now during the bear market again while the world at large is entirely essentially sleep is staggering to me because it seems like there's some big story dropping every week and not just like big story that you would hear in 2015 of like random store in random town is accepting Bitcoin and everybody was like whoa oh my God now it's like some of the largest institutions on the globe are starting to offer products and you know potentially 50% of businesses in the

United States could be accepting Bitcoin. Like these are all things that would have blown the minds of me four years ago. So it's wild to see. There's too much to encapsulate here. There's so much more than I'm sure I missed. But I wanted to get your guys take on how do you feel this bear market in terms of building compares to bears of the past compares to your expectations of what would typically happen in a bear market and what do you think the impact is going to be on the next bull market. So I'm going to open it up to anybody who wants

to dive in, thoughts, questions, whatever. I'll jump in. I came in last bull market. I came in basically the 2017 top and I definitely remember like the announcements of, you know, what seemed at the time big things and you look back and you're like, wow, we, you know, we get caught up in the hype a lot of the times but in in regards to this bull market um like you know i have beck over here hopefully you guys can hear it you know i am building like we are all building over here and and just to just to see the the mining infrastructure you know like the the companies the amount of money coming into mining uh to build out these companies the the the companies going public you know the the the home miners the amount of attention on home mining the the infrastructure and and not only that but

like the liquid cooling and the black box type stuff. And then furthermore, like the lightning infrastructure. And I am Bitcoin, like a Bitcoin only media. And I'm, I'm just as bullish on all the media out there because like you said in the beginning, you know, there's not enough Bitcoin only media out there. But to make my point, like, I really feel that there is no excuse now to like get caught up in the shit coins because there is so much good Bitcoin content out there that we have so many nets that it's hard not to just stay bullish when you're this close to what everything is going on.

And like what you just said about Jack Ballers over there, you know, 50% of all merchants getting on strike or lightning in general, you know, like I thought lightning adoption failed. And, and, you know, lightning is vaporware, you know, like what is going on here? And then furthermore, you know, I'm not a fan of, you know, custodying from institutions, but I say it all the time. Self-custody is the revolution. in Bitcoin, but these institutions do give Bitcoin, you know, the quote-unquote, like, mainstream legitimacy.

And the fact that we're building this heavy in this bear market and furthermore, that the price is holding up so well during such crazy times, I think it's hard not to stay bullish in what's going on with Bitcoin. And furthermore, like, it's weird that the price isn't pumping as hard as you should, you'd think it would be, at least in the past. Like I said, I came in 2017, 2018, and it felt like any time we got any kind of news, like the price would go up. And now it's like we're getting mega, mega huge news. And the price is just like, it's probably dropping on the news.

And we're just like, what is going on right now? Like, don't people get how bullish this is? And I get caught up in, and I'm a bulltart. Like I say it all the time. I'm bulltarded AF. And I try to stay as optimistic and as bullish as possible on Bitcoin. and it's hard not to stay bullish right now. I know there's a lot of bearish news out there

and we've got to try to stay realistic and all that pragmatism. But when you're this close to Bitcoin content and you're following all the news, it's like, man, we are really building out Bitcoin in such a way that this next bull run is going to be, I'm like, it's going to be absolutely insane just to see how far we go.

Like once we start popping, once the price starts moving, you know i i hate to do the like it's a super cycle this time because we all got caught up in that last time and i don't think this is where we are but it it really feels like right now we're building out bitcoin for you know to be ready for mainstream adoption and you know we're not we're not fully there in ui and and the the ux and all that but we're getting there like with that swan specter news and and all the other stuff you know like what unchained cap is doing what river financial is doing what what everyone is doing to ensure that people are doing the best practices in Bitcoin, that they are taking self-custody,

you know, putting their Bitcoin on the private keys and cold storage. It's like, it's hard not to get bullish because I'm convinced this next bull run is going to get absolutely crazy. And you guys just better hope that you got your pants on because it's going to pop so hard. Once it starts running, we're all going to be losing our mind and we're not going to be building. We're just going to be on Twitter, like dopamine receptors on being fried because everything is just absolutely insane. So I mean, this is, this is my, basically my first full cycle, my second bear market.

And I think that this next bull run is just going to be absolutely insane. I didn't, I wasn't here for the beginning of the 2017 bull market. Like I said, I caught the top. And, you know, I caught knives all the way down. And I, it's like the Batman Bain meme. Like, I was, I was born in the bear market. And, you know, you guys were born in the bull market. So, like, we're built different. over here but I'm excited for this next thing I'm going to be going bananas on Twitter like trust you me it's going to be crazy I love that I love it yeah it's um it is interesting to to the the the previous trend of every every like slightly good news item where you'd at least see like some movement now it's like nobody cares nobody and I mean like in a way it's it's good

because it seems to be the price happens and then everybody looks for a reason that it happened, at least in terms of like the mainstream news, it tends to be like Bitcoin fell because, and they'll just like search, why is Bitcoin dead? They'll like do a quick Google. And then they'll just take whatever comes up in the search

and that's like their news story. And I feel like it's the same in the bullmark. They'll be like, Bitcoin went up because of this thing that happened yesterday. And it's like, no, it's because of everything that happened over the past three years when you ignored it. That's why it went up. So, yeah. But I'll, I'll jump here to maybe I'll head to Muz.

And what do you feel about what's happening now and how it'll impact us in the coming years? Well, first off, you're supposed to come with a story of why you're bullish. And then you just, you just steal all my thunder. All right. All of everything that you mentioned. I got like notes here. And I'm just like, well, he covered that. Okay, that's out.

And that's out. You can go more in depth into them when we get to your reason for being bullish. So the strike news is monumental, okay? Not just because, you know, we're all super fan boys of the company. And what did you say? Jack Ballers. I've never heard that before. And Rockstar is over there.

And just an all-star team. But, you know, that's a lot of money. And we haven't had too many Bitcoin. IPOs, right? Kind of like none, right? I mean, there's some stuff in the mining space. And a lot of these companies will raise, you know, a million bucks and then two million bucks, maybe five or six, you know, maybe get to the 10 to the 20 around your, you know,

series A level. But we haven't, it hasn't been mature enough with a lot of these companies to really get there. So strike raising $80 million. That's a lot of cake. And not only that, but who else participated? right interesting you know uh not just led by 1031 congrats to uh grant and uh odell and everybody over there but uh you know Washington university in st louis participated in this round you know

they can invest in anything right they can invest in cancer drugs and gas stations in outer space i mean whatever right but they invested in strike i find that meaningful same thing with the university of wyoming right so um you're getting a lot of that money not only with your fidelity news and everything else, but they're coming into some of these rounds. Okay. And I mean, 80 million bucks is a lot no matter how you slice it. The Swan news is great. Not only are we an investor in Swan and we were lucky enough to invest a couple of times,

actually, but getting into hardware and getting, you know, they're already a beloved company in the space, right? Forget about the people screaming KYC trolls and whatever. You know, everybody loves Swan. Corey's just been on fire, nailing it. And I mean, they couldn't have a higher regarded company. I mean, in the highest capacity. In fact, I got, I got, I had one too many adult beverages in Riga and I bought one of these things.

I got one. He had one. I paid $200 with lightning. Just really awesome, you know, really great news. I don't know what they're going to do with it or how they're going to do it. But really smart purchase. The two things that I wanted to mention, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a late 2012 bitcoiner.

I remember that Thanksgiving table where they laugh me out of there. I guarantee you, I guarantee you they remember that now. So, you know, been through the bull bear cycle. But, you know,

I really think it's, it's kind of cool that right now when, you know, sentiment is not great, that we might be closer to closing this Mount Cox chapter. I still have a valid claim there. And I just think it's, you know,

serendipitous that right now, you know, maybe when sentiment, you know, people out there calling for all sorts of, you know, low prices and this and that, that we might get some, some reparations or whatever's going on to finally close that chapter. People are always saying, oh, you're going to, they're going to dump, they're going to dump all this Bitcoin from Mount Cox, right? I don't think so.

I think if you were a bit coiner in fucking, excuse me, in 2013. You can say whatever the fuck you want. All right. Yeah. If you were a bitcoiner in 2013, you're a hell of a bitcoiner now. I mean, there's no way you're coming in in dumping, right? Life events, things happen. That is what it is.

Right. But you know what they're going to be dumping from Mount Cox. All that be cash. Holy crap. You know, because they're giving you one to one, right? The first thing that's going to happen is everyone is going to dump the hell out of that. All right. So I'm not a trader, but yeah, I guess short beat cash whenever that comes out.

I wanted to say the more that I dive into liquid side chain. the Blockstream product and some of the companies that we're seeing, the more I'm really bullish about the future of Bitcoin for all these other things, not just the rare Toshis and the NFTs and all those things, right, that'll come to Bitcoin. Because a lot of people don't realize all innovation comes from Bitcoin. It will continue to, as did the NFTs, right? It's just Bitcoin's too important to pay all sorts of attention to that sort of nonsense. But, you know, issuing assets on digital, I'm sorry, on liquid, right, new ways that companies can raise capital, okay, transferring equity positions, all these kind of revolutionary ideas, super excited about that.

So, you know, I was going to lead with strike because I'm kind of talking about, you know, something that I know about, which is fundraising. I think there's a few other fairly not as big, but some pretty big funding. announcement news that should be coming out fairly soon for some companies that we all know and love in the space. And I'm just happy to see it grow and happy to start seeing the normies coming in and investing in some of these companies. That's awesome. I love that. I just lost my train of thought what I was again. Oh, so is it the Spector, this signer? What is it? I can't remember what it's called. It's got this car. here, you insert it, and then you spend the entire weekend locked in your room trying to figure

out how to use it while your wife is screaming at you in the other room, what the hell are you doing in there? We're supposed to be going out to eat. And then so I should might have that weekend this weekend. I don't know exactly. I got to get my hands on one. I think I may be grabbing one when I'm down. Actually, for Pacific Bitcoin in November, I might be able to grab one while I'm down there, too.

So, but yeah, that's, that's like one of the few things missing from my arsenal of, of, of hardware that I just, and also, by the way, I just set up in my office. I've got like drawers of hardware wallets that I can like reference and like, oh, I need this one and this one. And pull for tutorials. But yeah, I need one of the spectre signers to add to the mix there. But that's awesome. In regards to liquid, it's interesting because it's so, I mean, the only unfortunate thing in and around liquid, like, as long as you're aware of the tradeoffs, it's quite useful, but nobody uses it. It's just like, it's a ghost town. And so, like, if people were using it and there was enough people actually, like, you can still swap into and out of it.

but it'd probably be a little bit more of a pain in the ass for sizable amounts, I imagine. So, you know, it's not like it's not a replacement to Bitcoin. It's not a lightning network. It's not enough. It doesn't work like that. It's not like, you know, we're having this block size wars and, you know, we have lightning. We have liquid with me, all these other things. The exchange batching, okay, some of that usefulness.

That's great. Okay. But what it really comes down to, so to invest. invest like with us, you have to be an accredited investor, which is an absolute scam. And I don't even want to get started on what the government did with that. But you have these platforms, right? You have Republic and Seed Invest and WeFunder, usually littered with lousy deals, right? But those deals are okay for Aunt Mary and Uncle Bob. They can go ahead and they can invest, you know, 300 bucks into an electric bike company that's probably going to fail, right? But they're on one of these websites. And they can do

that. Okay. So what I wanted to do was figure out a way that unaccredited investors could invest in our deals, right? How do we get the PLEB? How do we get the PLEB fund? All the PLEB's involved to where if you want to support, you know, the Bitcoin company or whatever, whoever out there, you invest a hundred bucks or a thousand bucks and not have to be what's defined as a sophisticated investor according to the government. Okay. And and these companies and using Liquidin are figuring out how to do it, okay, to where the normal ways of, you know, I'm going to file an SPV and we're going to have all these companies and all these individual investors come in and this guy's investing through his trust and this guy's through whatever and whatever and put all together this paperwork

and there's all these fees and it's like a terrible manual process and it costs a bunch of money, right? And instead, you could have that same deal in liquid. Let's take, for example, the Blockstream Mining Note, massive success. Okay. They're almost done with their eighth tranche sold out not available to U.S. investors again because don't even get me started. So, all right, if you own the block stream mining note, you have direct access to their hash power, direct correlation, paid to you daily in Bitcoin. That's programmable. That is a programmable investment asset, okay, without questions. Super liquid. You want to take it to sideswap or one of these exchanges. I'm not talking about an anonymous exchange where you're dumping it, right?

You can't have something that represents a security assigned to somebody that you don't know who they are, right? There has to be a controlled marketplace to provide this liquidity. You can't just hop on decks and I'm going to sell this crap and whatever. Like that doesn't work with like real investments. Okay. But like a lot of these mining companies, if they follow suit with what Blockstream did with liquid and provide income, producing power, income producing dividends paid in Bitcoin. That's revolutionary. That's cool. Right. So what if we use that for real estate? Now all of a sudden you have all these multifamily

properties. A lot of these names fund rise and roof stock. You know, people get in and you know, you can fractionalize, not like NFT fractionalize, but this is what they do. Right. We're going to buy an apartment complex. We're going to offer it out to these investors. Everyone comes in and they manually like send you a statement and maybe they send you at 18 bucks every month for your you know whatever you get paid for that right that's going to happen on liquid right and when i want to am in a position to hopefully have investments that all the plebs can enter into company like digital markets is going to help me to to have these assets in a new way you know so i just think we're at the very beginning to your point and this is it i'll shut up i promise uh you know with bitcoin right

You know, you're saying nobody uses liquid, right? Nobody uses Bitcoin. Even less people use lightning and really no one's using liquid, right? But that's the same argument that we give. And nobody's using a shit coin. I mean, forget about that, right? But, you know, that's the same argument that we give for Bitcoin, right? It's horse and buggies.

It's automobile without roads and highways. You know what I mean? We're just early. So, you know, I would keep that same mindset for something like digital and the assets. and the future for that. Just take that weekend when you're locked in your room unless you've got your own thing that you're messing with and just do a deep dive on some of this stuff

because it's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I do like the flow of using liquid. I just, it's a shame that not more people are currently on it. Yeah. Well, it can't do anything.

It's not going to do anything. It's not like lightning. Yeah. You know, it's not like you're not going to pay. in person with liquid with liquid yeah yeah that's fair um a couple comments before i get ean's thoughts on uh what's been built and and where we're headed but uh one somebody would like to uh invest in your hair products um so if you've got fun for that then uh maybe we could go join because i feel like there's there's some there's some uh some alignment here where where hair product uh

venture, Bitcoin venture related thing between the two of us. I think that'll go well. And then a serious comment from fake. Love muz's talk and Riga while worth watching. And shout out to Miami room. Cool, man. Yeah. So let's jump to Ian. Ian, thoughts on kind of the state of things. What's currently being done through the bear market. What are your impressions of what's going on right now? Yeah, well, first, guys, if either of you want to donate, you know, some, some hair this way, very welcome, very welcome. But no, guys, it is relentless, right?

Like, as a founder in the Bitcoin space, you know, every day we feel like there's a fire under our ass. And that's like, I don't know, that's like partially self-imposed, but partially self-imposed by just seeing how much activity there is. Like, you feel this sense of urgency, right? And I also think a lot of people have neglected that this entire inexorable movement has a compounding effect, right? Every incremental, you know, bear market where people are building is building on the last one. So whether it's infrastructure that allows you to build faster, right? More FOS, more open source libraries makes it faster for teams to build ever more. and then, you know, think of it from a capital standpoint, right?

Like people who, you know, like Muz, you know, class of 2012, like some of those people have not sold anything, but like others have. And so there's personal capital, you know, founders are able to bootstrap products that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do because of saving in Bitcoin. And they're, you know, purchasing power going up. You've had funds, you know, more and more funds arise because of, you know, because of saving. of this. And so I think a lot of people don't kind of take that into account that like part of this is a compounding effect following what we've seen, you know, built in prior, you know, kind of bare winters. And just one of the thing that that sort of strikes me is we talk a lot about, well, obviously talk a lot about, you know, fiat exchange rates, right, price. And we talk a lot about building.

But I've also been thrilled to see like real world traction, right? Not just. building, but also real world traction, even now, look at like Bitcoin Island Philippines. They've signed up like 200 businesses in like, well, like a couple weeks. So I love to see these little local pockets, you know, and they, I think use their, I think it's called pouch, their lightning wallet, you know, similar to other kind of lightning wallet implementations we've seen in other jurisdictions. And so you have like all this building, but you also, I think, have a lot of real world traction as well, which is just incredible to see. And I guess my last comment is I think it's also somewhat interesting to observe and reflect

on the types of entities that blew up over the last few months and the types of entities that did not, right? Like time preference is such a central part of kind of Bitcoin culture. And it's also a central part for Bitcoin founders. You know, these are more kind of conservatively run companies in a lot of cases that, again, have done their research. They've done their work. They know how these cycles work. And they've prepared for both the good times and the, you know, the less than good times.

So I think that's also very interesting and, you know, and worthy to note. But yeah, it's relentless. It's crazy. I like what you were saying about the compounding effects. of building. And the, it made me think of, of the inverse is true. That Greg Foss tends to tweet this a lot, but, you know, inflation is compounding. And so the, the consequences of living in a Fiat society are compounding.

And the consequences of living in a Fiat society and building businesses within one are compounding. You look at the quality of shit that you buy nowadays. Plastic trinkety shit that doesn't last. That is meant to be replaced sometimes within the same calendar year, right? Imagine, imagine the compounding effect of building on a Bitcoin standard with companies that are adhering to kind of the realities of a money that is bound by the only the limitations of human ingenuity, but that is actually directly tied to reality through energy. The low time preference exerted through those companies is going to be astounding.

The quality of products built on a standard like that is going to be astounding. And I think you're right to kind of point out to the quote unquote types of institutions that blew up versus didn't. because while they were dabbling in Bitcoin, the ones that blew up were very fiat companies, right? They're very fiat minded in kind of what they aimed to offer and what the promises that they were making and kind of how they marketed themselves. those types of things are reserved for that fiat mindset. It's trying to pigeonhole into a fiat mindset company into a Bitcoin standard because they can't differentiate Bitcoin from crypto, I think is kind of the symptom there. But I can't wait to see what gets built after, you know,

cycles are no longer a thing because Bitcoin is just ubiquitous everywhere. God, the amount of innovation and the amount of like forward thinking building is going to be incredible. So I'll round out this topic here. And we're going to do a rotation. Now, I've got to, Mike, I've got to ask you, did I totally fuck your topic? Like, are we still going to be able to, or do you want me to, uh, to jump to Obdi or Ian and give you a little bit more time to like mold around what you wanted to say? I thought I was done.

You know, I mean, that's right. Strike, Swan, Liquid. I mean, there's a million reasons to be bullish, right? But why don't you go to one of these two gentlemen and then maybe. All right. Well, I mean, we did kind of like mash our, our reasons to. together. So that's all good. But I'll, I'll come back around maybe during final thoughts and I'll see if you have like any additional like, oh, I got shit I can talk about. All right. That's a whole

other thing. You know, but not just. Yeah. Well, let's go. Let's go opti first, then Ian. And then, and then I'll, I'll see if you have any, any stuff that I didn't trample all over in my initial rant. So Opti, I'm going to jump to you. I've got one simple question. Why are you? bullish. Beautiful. Well, my reason for being bullish, I brought a list of stuff just in case, you know, my, my topics got taken as well. But I think mine is simple, man. Like, what is written in the Genesis block is a chancellor on the brink of second bailout. And literally, we just had, we're seeing what, the third bailout like this week. And then furthermore, you know, I always harp on just the idea of like inflation is theft. And if you're holding fiat currencies,

now like we have first world nations with double digit inflation and you know that like we saw the the we always have the meme of oh bitcoin's too volatile and now we're seeing fiat currencies with higher digit in a year to date volatility than bitcoin and it's just so hard not to be bullish right now when bitcoin is literally the strongest currency in the world like bitcoin is the perfect money that we always talk about it being and it's no longer just a theoretical It's no longer just like an ideology. Like it's being tested in real time. And it's almost like Bitcoin was created for this very moment, people.

Like it's almost like Bitcoin is working exactly as design. And we're just sitting here at the front lines. Like the whole Fiat world, the whole legacy financial system is burning around us. And we're on Twitter ship hosting, having the time of our lives. Like this is the moment why we were born to be here. This is like why we're Bitcoiners. The Fiat world seems to be collapsing. You know, we can debate how long.

they can kick the can down the road. But Bitcoin is working. Bitcoin is still above all time high. And furthermore, like I said, I came in 2017, and I honestly thought, like, we would never see these prices again. And while it hurts me, because I unironically got myself on zero fiat, it's good to be here and continue to stack at these prices

and just see the adoption happen. And, you know, like the meme, like Bitcoin or Maxi star is rising because I look around on Twitter all the time. And there's more Bitcoins out there. There's more savage bitcoins. And this information is not only on Bitcoin Twitter anymore. Like the signal has been rising and it's all legacy media. Like Bitcoin is the best currency in the world.

Bitcoin is the strongest money in the world. Like the 21 million hard cap is doing what we want it to do. And furthermore, it's like Knut always says, you know, everything divided by 21 million. And it's happening in real time. And, you know, they can try to suppress the price right now. know we're in the bare market. We know we're getting wrecked right now. Yeah, in the short term, the volatility has hurt.

But in the long term, like number goes up. And I see more people talking about Bitcoin. But furthermore, the pre-corner's out there, they're more open to the idea of Bitcoin because everyone is feeling the pain. And look, we just got to intercept the idea that Bitcoin is the solution. And this is why we show up every single day to produce content. This is why we try to help people learn about Bitcoin. Because, like, this is, like, we were.

born for this moment. I, I, like, I'm fully convinced that I was born to be here at this exact moment and continue to push Bitcoin and, and just, like, understanding Bitcoin before all this crazy stuff happened, it, it, I just, I'm so bullish because, like, I'm on the safety boat right now, you know, like, I am okay. I am floating well. I am surviving. I'm thriving. Yeah, it's like, I'm not just surviving. I am thriving right now. And most people are worried about their next meal, you know, they're losing 10% plus more in inflation. And imagine just being in the ice cube, the melting ice cube that is Fiat right now. I would be so worried and I legitimately feel that I am in the best place mentally,

physically and financially than I've ever been in my life. And I know that there's more people like this around us. And like you were just talking about the compounding effects of Fiat on society. Like we're feeling it right now. You know, like what's the meme? Hard times create strong. man and I really believe that you know not to like pat my own my own back but I really believe like I've been getting formed into into a better person through this whole time and furthermore

seeing other people find Bitcoin and because they don't have a choice anymore it's like what are you going to save in most people don't have enough money to buy assets and now most people are realizing that the game is rigged against them and this makes me bullish this isn't bearish this makes me bullish because people are coming into Bitcoin and the signal can't be stopped. The legacy media can try to fud Bitcoin all they want, but Bitcoin memes are literally on, like, on the news. They're, they're in the biggest publications in the world. They're trying to dunk on us and they just can't do it. Like, Bitcoin truth cannot be stopped. And to me, this is the most bullish because like we've been talking about. We are in a bear market, but when you're this close to content creation, when you're

this close to Bitcoin like you guys are following Bitcoin Twitter all day and following every little news bite. We're seeing the infrastructure being built out right now. And I'm just excited for when, you know, that number goes up, comes back and people start to realize like, oh, wait, Bitcoin isn't dead. What about those Bitcoin obituaries I heard? It's like, no, Bitcoin is more alive than ever. Blocks are still coming in.

We're at all time high on block high. It's like Bitcoin works and you can't kill Bitcoin. I mean, China tried to kill Bitcoin last year, and we have all-time high in hash rate. The price is holding up steady as far as I'm concerned. Like, this is what Bitcoin was born to do, and it's working exactly as it was designed to do. That just simple thought right there just keeps me bullish because we got to zoom out sometimes. And the Bitcoin fundamentals have, in my opinion, never been stronger. It's never been a better time to buy Bitcoin than it is now.

It's probably the safest time to be buying Bitcoin today. And the signal can't be stopped. And now there is way more savage bitcoinsers out there that are meaming their asses off. And the signal just continues to get propagated in every way possible. So I keep saying it, you know, Bitcoiners just stay winning and the Bitcoin incentives just stay winning. And if that doesn't get you bullish, like you haven't studied Bitcoin enough. And so it's fucking awesome being a Bitcoiner. I couldn't be happier right now just being a Bitcoiner.

It's pretty stark to see all of the things that Bitcoin has been referring to, basically playing out in the news right now. Like your first point, Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for the banks. And we now see in the midst of double-digit inflation, a central bank saying, we know that inflation is bad, but also everybody. people's pensions are going to be wiped out if we don't continue what we're doing we're going to we're we need to buy some more bonds we got to keep this thing afloat sorry um it's it's interesting to to watch this point in in history where where kind of the foundational things uh a lot of the foundational stuff around which the financial infrastructure is built is is kind of coming to a point where there's a rock and a hard place right there's inflation is you know as no economist saw

coming is out of control and unless you continue down the path of of you know artificially propping up the markets they're all going to crash too So there's no more taking away the punch bowl. It's pulling out the fire hose. So it's, it's, I don't know exactly how it gets spun from here. But everybody's kind of realizing what a bit of a clown show, what a bit of a shit show it is right now. And, and you're right. Like people are going to look, because Bitcoin is.

gotten so much more coverage in the past couple of years than it has previously to the point where you would be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn't know, you know, roughly what Bitcoin is. And you would be hard pressed to find somebody that isn't actually a Bitcoin or that that maybe currently doesn't think that Bitcoin is dead or dying. That will then have that thought corrected within a few years. and that's going to be a pretty powerful thing when the majority of people thought something was dead only to see it reemerge and be plastered all over the news

because of new all-time highs yet again. That's going to be an interesting moment because that's going to be most of the world has had touchpoint number one, maybe two or three, and they're about to have touch point number two, three, or four when something actually incredible, happens and it emerges from the dead again. I'm going to ask Ian your thoughts on kind of what Opti is, the rabbit hole Opti's going down here.

Yeah, I mean, if you're not like absolutely shitting your pants watching the pension scenario in the UK, like I mean, if you're a bondholder of any kind, I mean, these are to your point, the types of events that fundamentally shake confidence, right? And, you know, it's kind of like you line up all the people in the world and there's a different, you know, level of shaking that is going to like take to wake each person up. Some people need a firmer shaking. Other people don't need a shaking at all and kind of, you know, flock immediately to the logical lifeboat and answer. Like, this is a very hard shake. So that even people who have, you know, boomers who have long sort of trusted the system that it is just never. going to do anything wrong to me. This is an absolutely confidence-shaking kind of moment. And I think it also furthermore emphasizes the fact that there is no way out of this.

Like, you know, more people are going to wake up to the fact that like, yeah, the can can be continued to kick a little bit, but there is no way out if you have something like that that came so close to just total collapse. I mean, there are people who have written great threads on like the mechanics of what happened. It's my. bottle. You also had, you know, the Financial Times article the other day that commented on Bitcoin's performance relative to the dollar compared to other melting fiats compared to the dollar, right? And sort of made this sort of commentary that like, whoa, this is interesting. Like, you know, Bitcoin has actually held its value, you know, a little bit better versus the dollar than other

kind of fiat melting ice cubes have. So, you know, and also I think like to your point, Opti, the, you know, we always have to remember that like part of the quote unquote price, you know, at least denominated in fiat, is also what's happening to that thing that we're pricing it in. So the dollar is getting wildly stronger. That's, you know, it's no surprise. You know, other fiat is flowing aggressively into the dollar. And so it's really that the dollar is getting a lot stronger. And yet, you know, Bitcoin looks, as you pointed out, relatively stable. Like, I think that's also very interesting. And, kind of alluding to what you said, Ben, like this decoupling that a lot of people talk about,

you know, when is Bitcoin the asset going to fundamentally decouple from a lot of the risk assets that, you know, macro traders and hedge funds sort of bucket it within. I think it's moments and events like these that bring that to light. And the whole kind of Greg Foss default insurance framework becomes a lot more obvious. So I don't know. I think it's only a matter of time. Each cycle, you get a, you know, you not only get the savages that are even more savage, but then you get more savages that get added or more people convert into savages. And so it's just like, it's just math, as our friend Greg always says. Buzz, I'm going to get your take on that too.

All right. Well, first off, I'm not upset by the bear market at all, right? And anyone who's been in Bitcoin a while doesn't care. And if anything, I wouldn't be upset the least for the next 18 months to see the price hang out right here. You know what I mean? Bounce between 16 and 24. I don't care at all, right? Because once you turn on, like I'm going through a huge accumulation phase.

You know, and that's, I'm fine with it. Right. So I think when you're a real Bitcoin or you don't care, you just get yourself into a position where if the price of Bitcoin tomorrow goes down to $3,000, I'm happy. And if the price of Bitcoin tomorrow goes up to $108,000, I'm happy. Right. You're happy either way. Okay.

And that's when you've really lost your mind. No, but, you know, it's not just Bitcoin, right? People want to pick on Bitcoin, pick on Bitcoin. Like some of these names, you know, bird scooters, you know, went from $12 down to 35. Okay. That's what, nobody's talking about that, right? I'm going to say, oh, Bitcoin's in a bare market, right? I mean, everything is.

I mean, that is just slaughtered. To put it in perspective, birds market cap as a company is $88 million, which is what strike basically just raised. Okay. That is how poorly, okay, bird scooters has done in the public markets. All right.

How about this one? This is great. Wish.com. All time high last year, $33 right now, $73. Okay. That is. murder okay so what did we go we went for 65 000 we're bubbling around 20 right now come on man you know i mean that is that is not that is not terrible at all okay that is my i might i

performing might i interject and just say that wish dot com is the perfect example of a fiat company like that is the most the most fiat like minded company of all let's make the cheapest shit that kind of looks like other shit and then it might it might show up It might show up sometime between now and next year with like no phone support. No, but seriously, you know, one thing that I'm bullish on, right, there's so many things to be bullish on, okay? I mean, we all remember, most of us remember maybe, you know, the block size war, okay? You know, suspicions of spanning the mempool, covert ASIC boost happening in time. There were a lot of like weird challenges, right?

you can pull up the mempool now you did it in the beginning i mean there is like nothing you know what i mean it clears and that's bitcoin working as a champ right that's not why i'm bullish but they're like everywhere you look there's a reason to be bullish right you know people coming out of the woodwork with huge support you know for the hoddle knot case you know i mean i think one of those donations you know ben price open sat i think one of those donations like 30 or 40 bitcoin um just crazy crazy stuff there um And one of the things as far as like an internal metric from the founders and the companies that we've invested in that I'm close to, you know, even in these like shitty times, they're having some record revenue. And, you know, besides mining, which is incredibly sensitive to the price, you know, we're not invested in any mining companies through Lightning Ventures, although I think we are starting next week. you know a lot of that stuff isn't it isn't like ken kruger pay with moon record volumes killing it

with disposable debit cards people like you guys living on bitcoin all right loading loading it things like as teco crushing it with volume coming out like you know everything from the rewards platforms which ian i hopefully we get a chance to to hang out and chat maybe sometime next week i'd love to like hear more about your company right but like you know the Satsback.coms, right? The fold type of companies. You know, people want more rewards, more sats when the prices are down, you know. And those are the type of things that we invest in, right? Whether there are exchanges all over the place, you know, like Amber in Australia or Swan here, they're all killing it, right? They're all crushing it. So from the exterior, Bitcoin price is

down, you know, the dog in the room with the fire, this is fine. But in reality, at least a lot of the companies that were focused on, they're doing great, you know, with stellar updates, you know. So that's one of the reasons that I'm bullish, because in a lot of these things, these companies that we mentioned, where we're talking about rent the runway, bird scooter, posh, Mark, any recent IPO that's just been like literally just, just killed. I mean, just bleeding to death. You don't even want to call the ambulance is too late, save the $1,500. I mean, things is just done, right? I mean, you look at their numbers when they have, you know, public earnings and they're terrible. I mean, terrible, right? So not only is it like, you know,

hey, you know, our IPO, $32, we're down to 80 cents. Not only is that terrible. And it's like, oh, my God, nothing's ever been more bullish for wish.com. These people don't get it. What's wrong with them? Like, it's the complete opposite, right? Where their numbers are like puking up a just terrible, you know? And with Bitcoin, it's the total opposite, right? You know, the price is depressed. It's still a risk on asset. It's going to be a risk on asset probably for a long time. I'm sorry. I'm going to about, you know, stability and whatever. Bitcoin's probably going to be a risk on asset. You need to eat. What are you going to sell first? It's probably going to be wish.com. And then you're going to sell your Bitcoin. So, you know, I'm super bullish. We get the updates from all of our

companies. And they're all doing great. You know, it's the over-levering. sort of nonsense that really got killed. And I think that's good for the space, right? Ultimately, if I didn't have what happened to me with Mount Cox, I would have never taken my own Bitcoin security seriously. Like that was the wake-up call. That was devastating. That was terrible. And I'm still waiting with envelopes and freaking Japanese here. You know what I mean? They keep standing. I don't even know what's going to happen. But like, seriously, like that was it. Then it's like, okay, I'm going to like master paper wallets. I am. going to buy a treasur. I'm going to like never let this fucking happen again. And thank God

it happened then and not now. You know what I mean? Ultimately good for this space. Everyone question exchanges, right? I mean, scrutiny, Big Vern with Cripsy. You know, I mean, the exit scams that all happened before, that Canadian guy, whatever, the quadriac guy. All of these things are ultimately good, right? That anti-fragility, whatever. And this sort of Bitcoin systemic moment of this sort of Lehman Brothers-esque sort of thing where there's, you know, there's all of this, you know, Three Arrow's Capital was tied, you know, Celsius made them loans and BlockFi made them loans and they all had fucking loans running this thing like a Gulag casino. And this will not happen again, right?

And look at the companies who didn't have any problems, right? Voyager's freaking done. You know what I mean? You like, you watch these guys on stage talk about this, that, and the other thing. Done. And like something like BlockFi, you know what I mean? You can give me all sorts of shit and everything's a lesson learned. But I invested in BlockFi pretty damn early.

And I met that CE, I met Zach at Consentis. And I basically told him to this phase. I was like, this is a scam. You know what I mean? Like, how do you even do this? And I got every word that it could be because I was still, that Mount Gok's wound is like, you're still licking it, you know, years later. And I was like, no way I'd ever trust it, blah, blah.

And then, you know, you leave some Bitcoin on there for a, month or two, you withdraw it, you kick the tires. I kind of like getting yield. You know what I mean? And made an equity investment in the company, small personal little angel check, right? Nothing in one of my own investments. And, you know, these people are hiring half a million dollar a year salary people from Goldman at Bank of America and top institutions, right? They are hiring the smartest people, okay in finance paying them more money than you could imagine okay and still it's a clown show like how do you even know how do you even let that happen you're getting paid to manage risk for block by your ex-goldman you know you got to go through like 14 interviews to get a job at

goldman sacks right somebody tells you they used to work at goldman sacks that's not an easy interview process right and then they come to blockfai and it's like oh no this is fine yeah we'll just, I mean, it's terrible. But look at what we're all learned, right? You know, your plug at the beginning in the show, uh, uh, Leden, uh, never had an issue, right? Unchained capital, uh, you know, didn't have an issue, right? And they all had to deal with these same things. So, because they had to be conservative, right? Like you, when you're dealing with an asset that's finite that there's, no matter what, there's risk involved, right? But if you, if you go and you fiat it, like if you if you go by the same rules that the fiat world goes by where if you fuck up enough

the central bank will bail you out that doesn't apply here so you need to be that much more conservative which means you're like you've got to actually you as a consumer but somebody as somebody that has to manage risk for other people you've got to be so much more conservative with this shit because the risks are there and the volatility is there and a volatility is there At the end of the day, there's no fucking central bank of Bitcoin to come bail you out. No, maybe they can bail you out with dollars, but they certainly can't make the Bitcoin holdings a whole. Yeah. Yeah.

And what central bank is going to bail out any sort of a Bitcoin provider? I don't see that happening unless it's themselves because they've stacked sats in the treasury for this for this date. Oh, I'll just print a bunch more dollars and buy some more Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a clown show, but like you said, all of these these failures are good for Bitcoin because you learn companies that that survive, learn why they survived. Companies that don't survive learned why they failed. So, you know, let's let's hope that, I mean, the shit coin clown show is going to continue because everybody wants to.

buy the next Bitcoin. That's, that's going to be around for a while. Um, you know, there's going to be continue to be rug pulls and irresponsible things going on. But anybody that kind of gets plugged into that, that like, you know, vision of, of kind of a Bitcoin world and what it could be. I think there's a deeper understanding and then there's a, and there's a better understanding of risk and, and the need to be relatively risk or, or like, very, very, calculated and risk that you take. And I think that's a good thing. I think it puts a pretty high bar in terms of being able to raise money for anything.

It puts a pretty high bar in being able to separate somebody from their sats, as it should be, right? If your money actually has value, you should be pretty calculated in where you put it. And I think that's a great thing. So, all right. So I'm going to round out this topic. Thank you, Opti, for that. And we've got one more. We're going to jump to Ian.

And Ian, again, I'm going to, I'll tee it up for you. Why are you bullish, man? Excellent. I am bullish on the several hundreds billion dollar loyalty economy being brought to a Bitcoin standard. So a couple hundred billion dollars. What is this? This is the value of points. You know, think of all the loyalty points.

You're probably, you know, many folks are watching probably part of some loyalty program. You get these points. You can redeem them maybe. You know, and then the rules change. And maybe you could, you know, swap them for something, but you probably pay a huge fee to, you know, to do that. But there's a lot of economic activity, you know, a surprising amount of economic activity happening in that, in that realm. And I think it's also helpful to kind of reflect on where we've been in terms of Bitcoin rewards. And this is certainly not chronological, but I'll often categorical.

I would like orically, you know, think of two main buckets. One is what we might call like Bitcoin back kind of affiliate model. A great example of this would be something like Lolli, right? You download the browser extension. You can either go on the Lolli dashboard or, you know, go about your day on the web. And if you land on, you know, a merchant website where there is a viable offer, it'll, you know, the browser extension will help detect that. And so that makes a ton of sense, right? Like Adidas doesn't necessarily have to care who Lali is, what they do, who they do, who they are, they basically say, hey, look, like affiliates of the world, we don't know or care who you are, but if you drive traffic our way, we'll give you a 5% commission, you know, et cetera.

Lolly can then turn around and I don't know how, you know, their model works with the split and all that, but they're basically able to pass that or some of that onto their users in the form of Bitcoin. Great. The other big category is, of course, debit credit cards, right? And, you know, fold being perhaps the most notable to this community, but, you know, you also have, obviously, the strike card coming out. You have big crypto exchanges that have come out with their own cards, et cetera. And so like both of these categories have, you know, they share this trait of being able to stack Sats for something you're anyways already doing. Right. Like, and that is so profound. And honestly, I still see Bitcoiners that have not kind of fully optimized on this dimension. I just

think that's crazy to be leaving Sats on the table. Right. Like maybe you don't have a big pile of dry powder to stack this dip. Maybe you had to, you know, tone your DCA down, right? Because times are tough. Like, but you're still making everyday transactions. And so we became enamored by this idea of stacking stats by doing something you're anyways already doing. And so, you know, we started thinking, like, what other domains in our lives might this dynamic be applicable? And we landed on loyalty, right? You know, brand loyalty. You know, imagine me as a consumer being able to sort of say like, I don't really out these points. Like, you can give me Bitcoin instead, or at least being able to kind of easily exchange my points for Bitcoin in a way that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg and, you know,

it doesn't have me going through this wildly cumbersome sort of product. So that's, you know, that's like the idea and that's where this starts. And I'll give you a real world example. We're very early. So, I mean, we're just kind of wrapping up our MVP. We've got our first couple of customer pilots coming up in the next couple months, which is very exciting. One of them is particularly exciting to me. And that is with an upscale gym. They're based in New York. And this owner wants to offer Bitcoin as this novel reward for his clients who meet or exceed a certain threshold of completion for their monthly exercise regimen. So this is a very, very bougie place. They get paired up with a personal trainer. They have this curated, you know, kind of exercise.

plan. And they even use an app that, you know, for like scheduling and, and different things like that. And so earn Bitcoin for working out, right? Like, you know, those of us, you know, here are probably like, that's awesome. Like, I would love to do that. But it's also important to kind of frame that in this, you know, gym owner's mind, right? He wants to track two KPIs as part of this. one is does this novel incentive lead to more of his clients meeting or achieving this threshold, which is a good proxy for meeting their fitness goals, a good proxy for longevity of that customer relationship, all that good stuff. And then he also wants to track new memberships. So he's going to do, you know, some social media marketing, right? And his model, again, Bougy Jim, if he gets like one

new membership from this campaign, the economics are such that it makes. a lot of sense. It's a win-win for him and us. So like I could have probably just picked that and gone down a rabbit hole on that. You think of Bitcoin as this kind of micro-incentive for health and fitness kind of outcomes. There's a lot of corporate programs out there that have some sort of reward if you hit a certain number of steps in the course of a given month. So that's just an example of something that I'm really excited about. And that's, I think, where this whole arc starts when I say bringing the world of loyalty onto a Bitcoin standard. And hopefully this has two effects, right?

One is pulling more consumers in because I imagine there's an awful lot of people out there who don't have the dry powder to stack the dip. Even if they had the dry powder, like they may not buy Bitcoin, maybe they're never going to get a fold card. Maybe they're never going to download a browser extension, right? but they shop a brand and one day that brand runs a campaign that says like, hey, you can earn some Bitcoin. And that consumer says, you know what?

I've heard of this Bitcoin thing. I'll, like, I'll do it. Suddenly they get their first SaaS and they're like, I should probably learn about this thing. And we all know that virtuous cycle that then sort of unfolds. I also think this could be an interesting kind of vector for pulling brands more into Bitcoin. I mean, you know, certainly not going to move the needle like 50% of.

of, you know, U.S. merchants being able to accept payments through lightning, certainly not, you know, in that regards. But this is just yet another way. And in fact, we have historically seen examples of that where businesses adopt almost externally a new technology, right? Like on behalf of their customer before adopting it internally. So that could be an interesting vector there. So I want to, that's like where this starts, but I want to leave you with one more. more thought about where this broader arc could perhaps eventually go.

It's been quite interesting to observe over the last couple of years, this concept of like open loyalty. You know, you'll see that and, you know, kind of some commentary there. And it's this idea that like, you know, I've got all these stupid silos with all these little points and like, you know, I can do some things, but not others. Like, it's a pretty well documented consumer pain point that a lot of loyalty programs have just a big lack of flexibility, lack of value. And so not surprisingly, you know, leading companies like Starbucks, you know, that really

set the standard when it comes for consumer loyalty, have started tinkering over the last few years about this idea of open loyalty, right? Like, what if we made our program more interoperable? And I think it's really an really interesting thought exercise because for the same reasons that you hear Jack Mallors espoused the merits of an open network such as lightning and how closed systems and closed networks really struggle to compete against open networks, like the same sort of dynamic can unfold. So you have this existing kind of trend that's starting to emerge.

And then, lo and behold, we saw two days ago, as you mentioned at the outset of this show, the initial tarot code gets released, right? We could debate the merits of asset issuance on Bitcoin in different ways. And, you know, Mike, you mentioned liquid as well. I mean, there's RGB, right? There's, you know, there's kind of multiple levers there. And we can debate the merits of, is this a good thing? You know, does this introduce more complexity?

Is that a risk? Like, I think there are relevant conversations to be had there. But, like, on net, it's a good thing, right? Like, you know, there are so many folks, particularly in emerging markets, whose first exposure to Bitcoin could be through a stable coin, even though maybe none of us. on this call would necessarily kind of use that. So you'll have, right, like that's the first big use case is stable coins,

you know, fungible tokens, fungible stable coins, riding on lightning rails issued through the Tarot Protocol. I wonder if you could eventually see fungible loyalty tokens, like the points themselves of these different brand programs riding on lightning rails. And instead of, you know, me going to some centralized marketplace to, convert my points into SADs, instead you have Lightning Node operators who are opting into providing liquidity and exchange services for, you know, these loyalty tokens. And so you create a competitive marketplace around that value exchange that has never been sort of possible for consumers

before. That's just like one example or dimension of what open loyalty on a Bitcoin standard could look like. But it's it's kind of interesting to think about. And, Dare I say, dare I say, collectibles even, right? I know this is a controversial topic, but like, I don't know. I, we could debate whether there's any sort of real utility or value in some of these kind of digital assets. But it almost doesn't matter because guess what? Like Starbucks thinks there is a couple of weeks ago Starbucks announced their Odyssey program. This is not a experiment.

This is not a trial. this is balls deep integration of their web three, you know, extension of their company's crown jewel, which is their rewards program. So they're doing all sorts of like digital badges, you know, and assets that consumers can buy.

And you could be like, okay, well, that's silly. Do you need a blockchain for that? It's kind of Gigi's bananas on a blockchain kind of concept. But I don't know. I think there's, you know,

at some point, like a narrative just becomes a thing. And, you know, A16Z is going to pump enough money for this to be a thing. And you better believe that Starbucks just set the standard that every other brand is going to look at and be like, shit, like, what do I do in this regard? And we could look at that and be like, have fun with all that, you know, nonsense. Or we could say, you know what, like maybe there is something here and maybe we should have a Bitcoin competitor in the ring, you know, for the reasons that I outlined earlier. So just a little bit of a fun thought starter on that last point.

I mean, as a company, we're certainly focused on like, you know, the Bitcoin back, that core kind of Bitcoin back use case, clear product market fit as evidenced by the other categories we talked about. But like, you know, we're also on the cutting edge of Taro for and, you know, RGB for, you know, for some of these other interesting use cases that brands may demand. And we're hearing that in our conversations that we have with brands. So I yield the floor. I love the I do love the the Bitcoin back as as like

in replacement of points and I think the the big draw with that is you have a card that has some sort of point redemption thing and then you're like what fuck can I do with this and and like you said there's that okay well can I

use it for this and you know oh I've got air miles I want what how do I have to call you physically to like redeem and like get a flight or something like how the fuck and and the difference in experience with something like that where it's so disjointed to oh i just like natively in an app you can you can literally just have here's places you can spend this like all of these places and you can just like tap and you have the money and it's just there and you can just use it right away. And like that,

that flow of I spent some money somewhere on something, I earned some Bitcoin back, it's sitting there and they're telling me that I can spend this immediately, potentially at 50% of all merchants in the United States.

So like that, when that becomes a reality, it becomes real for a lot of people. You're seeing similar things kind of in the gaming sphere, with like Zebedee, Thunder games, all that, you know, where players are earning sats for, for playing games, you know, winning and stacking sats. And then they're coming at it from a gaming perspective, but then they're realizing like, oh, I can actually, like, this isn't just bullshit.

I can go online and purchase something. I can get a gift card for Amazon and buy something that I need. or I can go online and buy food and I can do all of these different things with it as opposed to the hoops that I had to jump through previously with points systems. I think that's awesome. And I'm excited to see that.

In terms of the building on top of Bitcoin, again, there's a debate to be had there. I don't have issues with some people want the quote-unquote stability of a stable coin. You know, it's, it's, and and that's going to be a thing that's around for a while until fiat dies, which, you know, may be coming quicker than we thought. Yeah. But, you know, that's going to be a thing that's around for a while.

I don't mind the idea of like voucher systems. Oh, you can redeem this for something specific. The collectibles, I'm not super sold on, but, you know, people did dumb things. You know, I've got, I've, I've collected dumb. physical things. I don't see why some people wouldn't collect dumb digital things at some point as well.

The value will be subjective. But nonetheless, I think inherently reward systems based on Bitcoin instead of proprietary points is a niche market that can be dove into and

that I'm already on board with. I'm sad that I don't yet have the fold card here in Canada. I was assured, I think two years ago, Canada soon. I'm still waiting. It's not here. What's up?

But at least, again, like the shake pay card works good. You know, I can stack stats with that. So that's nice. But anyways, I'm going to ask Opti's thoughts. And then we'll jump to Mike afterward. But Opti, what are your thoughts on kind of what Ian was talking about here? Well, I mean, just the idea of getting sats back on the things I'm buying, you know, like I am all in on Bitcoin unironically or rather yet probably ironically at this point. But, you know, if I can spend my Bitcoin or rather, I like to say use my Bitcoin and get Sats back because the the merchants want a new market and we're providing a new market for them as a bitcooner, then by all means, you know, I am trying to use my Bitcoin everywhere I can because I need to survive on it.

But Muzz is wearing the Bitcoin company shirt. And I'm a huge fan of the Carman and the Ben Price connection. They're my boys. I'm going to hang out with them next week. And I love, you know, I'm a fan of Satsback. I love the Bitcoin company. They're my boys. I want to push them as hard as possible because I want to see them succeed.

But just the idea of getting Sats back on the things I'm buying. I think as a Bitcoiner, this is something that we all want. You know, if you can give me a discount and I'm using my Bitcoin, I think it's a win-win. but I am just waiting for just the simple 2% flat rate back on my Bitcoin purchases. I'm tired of having to gamify these apps. I just want to buy something and I get 2% flat back like my credit card from my, from my traditional bank. I know we're probably not there yet, but that's what I want to do.

I'm just trying to use my, you know, use my Bitcoin in the simple way that I'm used to and get the same rewards. And I'm tired of having to jump on the apps and having to, you know, figure out every every purchase what I'm doing. But I mean, I mean, like, I just, it's too much brainpower. Like, I have to go back every time and spin wheels. I'm just like, hey, caveat. I guess I'm the lazy bitcorner over here.

But I feel like, I feel like a rat with dopamine. Like, all right, let me get my dopamine every, like, I'm fried from Twitter. But anyway, just the idea of stats back, man. Like, I think all of us Bitcoiners want a deal first and foremost. You know, we don't like to drop our, our, our, our, for any reason, let alone having to overpay while we're using our Bitcoin. So I am all for these sat back programs because I mean, like I don't, I don't have airplane miles. I don't do any of other stuff. I just want a deal with my Bitcoin and get stats back and just continue to stack

Bitcoin that way. You know, like I'm, I'm friends with Michael from OSHA app. I think what he's doing is pretty cool as well. And so like I'm just trying to not only help these, these, like my friends my bitcoin friends push their companies but also use them and be a part of them because they are beneficial to me so uh you know i'm all for you making and and figuring out ways to save me some sads bro so i'm with it i was just going to mention you you pointed out the the bitcoin company shirt when when they i made a video on them and i think i crashed their website So I like I was like oh this is pretty cool because I they were telling me about it in Miami This is I guess a lot of people signed up through and like I'm not it's I'm not making like a ton of money here

But like once in a while it'll be like oh you earn like you know 21 sats or like a thousand sats or 45 sats or something for somebody buying a gift card But like this is the sign up screen of all the people that like apparently use that link in that video. Soft flex. And it's just, that's awesome. I was like, oh, no wonder they fucking site crashed. But that's super hilarious. I love what they're doing there.

I think it's super useful. It's been super useful for me anyways. I really, I don't know. And also, they're part of the High Council of Bitcoin Benz. So like, you can't not love them. So yeah. Anyways, Ian, I interrupt you. Yeah, real quick.

maybe Mike before you jump in. I mean, Opti, you kind of alluded to something really important there, which is like, and it goes back, Mike, to what you're saying of,

you know, some of the companies that are in your, your guys is kind of, you know, portfolio and wheelhouse or having a lot of success. I've been pleasantly surprised and it makes me bullish that,

like, you'd imagine like, oh my gosh, you know, like the end's going to orange pill these businesses, right? That must be like an excruciating

kind of educational process. But it's, and while it's not easy, like, it is definitely easier than I would have expected. And it comes down to the traits of Bitcoiners as a consumer segment. I know the former head of growth from Fold, and I think they did a really interesting consumer research exercise where they got like

a lot of really good data about who are Bitcoiners, right? And there's been other research done by backed. They do some loyalty reward stuff as well. right it's like you tend to skew younger not surprising despite the relative youth they tend to be higher income they tend to be savvy consumers they participate in more loyalty programs than the average consumer so it's like you and oh by the way you know rapidly grow so like you have these incredible traits wrapped up into this single segment and so you don't even have to talk to the brand about bitcoin like you don't even they're like yeah we've heard of bitcoin it's this i guess it's not a fad like

It's still not dead, is it? And you're like, no, it's not. This is all you need to care about. You need to just care about who you're sort of getting, who these people are, you know, extremely motivated as well to stack sats. You know, we've done consumer research of our own in surveys asking Bitcoiners like, hey, if you shop at brand A and brand B, their competitor started offering you Bitcoin instead of this useless punch card, like, would you switch? not surprisingly over 90% of Bitcoiners. Like I would absolutely switch. So that's the power of why brands would latch on to something like this.

And I think it's just a feedback loop of the clearer that becomes the brands, the more brands hop on. And then the more stats that you could get as a pleb. Or again, as I was saying earlier, like brand new people that just sort of stumble their way into this and get their very first stats for the very first time. Agreed. Yeah.

Mike, I'll go to you. tag in. What are your thoughts? Well, the brands don't know that they're paying rewards right to these companies in Bitcoin, right? And most merchants don't really know that the person at the point of sale for their sandwich could be paying with Bitcoin, right, with some of these debit card innovations. And I think it's probably going to be that way for a while. And that's probably not a bad place to be, right? The merchant cares nothing about Bitcoin, right?

So this kind of solves that. I personally, I'm upset. Nope. Sat's back.com or having them both running, right? And then you layer on top of that, you know, maybe you have the Gemini credit card and that's an extra 3% right, on the 6% and whatever. And you just find all these ways to do it, right? And you check the Bitcoin company, right, to see what the deal is, right? Because sometimes it's better there, right?

And maybe they have an Airbnb thing. or whatever it is, right? But, you know, if you think about it, we, we ordered some fried chicken one night. And like with the Sats back, it was like, it was like over 10% of between the credit card that we used and the deal or the gift card or whatever it was. But it was like over 10% on this fried chicken was paid in Sats back. And I just looked and, you know, the price was, you know, 18,000. And, you know, we're enjoying this chicken and kind of is a joke, but also serious is like when we have $180,000 Bitcoin price, this chicken's literally free. Yes.

Like we're not paying for any of this, right? So if you're getting, you know, you think about it, like some of those big merchants on on these platforms like Callaway Golf, right? If you're buying golf club or shirt or balls, whatever you do there, you know, you're going to get 17, 18% cash back in Bitcoin. You need a 5x from here. You're golfing for free, man. And, you know, you think that that's so funny, right? But if you started doing this at 5,000 and 6,000 or 4,000, the Bitcoin price back then, which the rewards were primitive, right?

We're all figuring this stuff out, right? You know, you open up the cash app and you get that one boost thing. And it's you get 5% back on one restaurant thing every, you know, once a week or every other week. You bet you're freaking asked if you're out at a restaurant, that bills $100 or more. you might as well use that thing, right? And you just get $5 in Bitcoin, right? But there's just so many different creative ways to earn Bitcoin. That might be a pretty good show to do is to really kind of round them all up into one

and kind of go over a lot of the different stuff that, all the different ways that you can make it back, you know. And if you're living on Bitcoin, if you're living on Bitcoin, you're probably using Bit Refill or the Bitcoin company, the Bitcoin company will have credit card rails launched soon. Okay. So that's what I want. I want to pay with the dirty fiat and I want to get back Bitcoin. I don't want to like pay a lightning invoice, you know, save something in Bitcoin and then have to run immediately to an app and buy whatever I just parted with, right, which is the other way to do it. But there's plenty of other creative ways to make Bitcoin.

I think that they're only going to get more creative things like Vita, right? Look at Vita came out of nowhere. Somebody wants to send you a message. You can even hook it up to your Twitter. It eliminates all your spam. As soon as some robot realizes they have to pay you 50 cents to message you, your like spam on Twitter just goes away, right? Or if you want to get someone on the phone or monetizing calendar things, you know,

for consulting things. There's this LNCal Lightning Calendar app where you can literally, I can book a time with BTC sessions. And it'll say, like, you know, however many sats per half hour. for whatever I want to talk to you about. And then I'll just pop up on your thing. And hopefully it's time well spent, right? So I don't know.

I just think there's all sorts of cool ways to get it back. And once you get obsessed, like I yell at my wife. You know what I mean? If she's got the Sephora thing, I'm like, did you get stats back? And it's this whole production. And then she ends up crying. And I'm like, no, it's okay. Just next time, do it that way.

We talked about Lolly. All right. I know you can do it. All right. Use that with the credit card, where we get the extra 2%. But now we're trained, man. So that's- People are not maxing this out, right?

And so what I'm proposing is yet another layer to, you know, you go to a restaurant, you swipe your fold card and you get instead of silly points back, you get, I mean, it's just, and you think of the flywheel that that creates, right? Like, you know, the second that brand A offers that and you see what, how people flocked, you know, how Bitcoiners flock to that, brand B, has to say, okay, well, shit, I need to now level my loyalty program up to offer that. And then brand C says, shit, I need to now level my, you know, so it's as an actionable as Bitcoin itself. I'm with you and I'll show up after this. But, you know, mileage points and these type of things, they should

absolutely be tradable and they should absolutely be transferable. What the hell does JetBlue care, what I do with my miles? Okay, that's a whole other story. All right. But a lot of the, a lot of these sats back things, you know, they're based in certain areas, right? Like, like Benny says he can't get, he can't get a full card in Canada, but you have coin miles. Okay. You have coin miles in Canada, right? There's no lolly in Europe, but there's sats back in Europe, right? So it breeds innovation based on these geographic sort of limitations that are out there, you know? So I think that that's pretty interesting, too. I don't know how they all come together in the end or how it consolidates. But yeah, depending on where you live, you just find the best way and then just get obsessed.

Absolutely. Really good point. I'm going to have to make a roundup video of all of these Satsback programs that exist and just kind of like a roundabout. Who is it available to? Where can you do it? How can you stack them to earn maximum Sats? I think that'd be a great, a great thing to focus on. But yeah, all the different credit cards, what's real, what isn't, right?

Gemini, if you had a restaurant, it's 3%, and at least it's real Bitcoin. Think what you want about Gemini and that whole thing, but at least it's real Bitcoin. You get the SOFI card. They're giving you 2%. You're redeeming it in crypto. And just like you said, right, those people have that wake up moment where they realize, this isn't even Bitcoin. What the hell am I doing with it?

What is it? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's, and this is going to be the difficult part to navigate as newcomers hit that. And they realize, like, some will realize like, oh, this is Bitcoin. I can, I can use it. And then there's going to be much like the assumption of, you know, Bitcoin is crypto. Crypto is everything.

Like, it's all the same. You're going to have that happening with the stats back versus, oh, we have a crypto token that we give you back. And like, there's going to be. a lot of bullshit in and around there, but at the end of the day, again, the learning will happen in whatever way

is most painful, I suppose, but it will happen. So, you know, I look forward to that. At least we'll be able to migrate towards the things that we know make sense and hopefully help some people along the way. Gentlemen, I'm conscious of time.

I know we've gone a bit long here, but I'm going to start rounding up. There's something I'd like to do at the here. I'm going to go around and just get a quick round of like any final thoughts you might have, but also I'm going to challenge you to recommend something. Now, this something can really be anything that has been helpful to your Bitcoin journey. It can be a video, an article, a book, it could be a device, it could be an app, it could be an action that you've taken. It can really be anything, but just some sort of a recommendation to people watching that you think can be

useful for them to in their learning journey, in their Bitcoin journey, whatever that may be. So I'll just kind of for my final thought, encapsulate everything we've been talking about. It's a lot about we've basically honed in on how much is currently being built, you know, at this stage of a bear market and how staggering what is being done is comparatively to years gone by and the scale at which things are being done. It's a stark difference from my first bear market in and around 2014, 2050, and watching that and the things we were getting excited about then versus now, it's, it's an entirely different ballgame.

And it's mind-boggling to me that people are still asleep on it. Like it was it was more understandable back then that the world was asleep because the price was down and it, you know, it wasn't like, oh, it's not skyrocketing currently and everything else being built was still like small and difficult to use and whatever that may be. But now it's it's different because you have, you know, all the instruments. that I mentioned, all of the software, the integrations potentially with, with massive, you know, like 50% of merchants and it's wild. So I think to sum it all up, a lot is happening. A lot of people have no idea. But a lot of people will be using all that stuff as if it was always here in a few short years. So yeah, take this time to reflect and be thankful for the builders out there.

With that, I'm going to do, I'll jump to Opti here. Ian had a power outage, so he's just on his way back in. But nonetheless, I'll jump to Obdee here. Any final thoughts, man? Oh, and actually, you know what? I've got to give a recommendation here. I'm going to go ahead and say, and actually this is a little, bit of a self-show

but it was something that I had put off for a while and I thought and somebody had made a recommendation that I should cover this but it was something

that I hadn't done and I thought that you know it had been a while or rather it had been a bit of a learning curve to to dive down this rabbit hole. Nonetheless, I made a video on on how to actually cryptographically verify signatures for software.

And a lot of people don't do this, but there's kind of this core ethos of Bitcoin. Don't trust verify, right? And so you can use a tool called GPG and you can go in. And if you're downloading a Bitcoin wallet like Sparrow or Specter or whatever, given we were talking about Spectre earlier, you can go in and you can verify that the actual developers that have keys that have been putting out previous releases are the same ones that have signed off on the current version

that you are downloading. So if you've never done something like that and you're curious and you want to go further down the don't trust Verify and the kind of self-sovereign and, you know, really, again, removing trust it's worth it's worth diving into so so take a look don't be shy there's a bit of command line there

but I will walk you through literally everything you have to do I do it from the perspective of using a Mac and and yeah so you know check it out play around it's something that I waited I slept on a bit too long and and I'm glad that I finally got to it I'm starting to dive a little bit more into Linux and command line now too.

This is done from the perspective of using a Mac. I will cover Linux soon. I don't have Windows. I don't intend on getting a Windows machine anytime soon. So sorry about that. But there is a program you can download as well. Nonetheless, that's my recommendation. Learn how to verify signatures on software.

But Opti, I'll go to you. Any final thoughts and recommendation? Yeah, yeah. I actually got a few. But first of, I think someone was pestering you on a Bitcoin kindergarten to do that. Don't Just Verify video. So, there we go. Shouts out to whoever that was because I can't remember.

But I mean, my last thoughts is simple. You know, Sat's on my stable coin. I love Bitcoin. I love all my Bitcoin friends out there. And I'm just so excited to be a Bitcoiner right now. Like we were born for this moment. Bitcoin is holding up so well. And then furthermore, like you guys, you guys are building stuff.

You guys are part of the companies. And it's super bullish that he. the things that are being built that I haven't heard about, let alone the things that I have heard about. And it's like, man, Bitcoiners are building. I am building. You know, so if you aren't bullish out there, I don't know what you guys are doing.

And first of all, I'm going to give a few recommendations. The first one is I'm a huge fan of Azteco. I love Azteco. And literally, like, I was able to build a non-KYC stack that I've been living on for the past couple of months. is why I'm surviving on it. And then the next one, shats out to my buddy Shishi. He's a huge seed signer advocate.

He's probably the most militant advocate out there for seed signer. And other really solid open source project that I think people should check out. And then I am known as just a shit poster, Memer. And I just want to give Odell a shout out because staying humble and stacking stats has been the salt, like the best meme in Bitcoin for me. And it's the only reason why I'm here. It's the only reason why I didn't get wrecked is because I took it to heart. I stayed humble.

I'd stack stats. And I'm just out here trying to provide as much value as I can for anyone that will listen. So, you know, we're just on the front lines as Bitcoiners. And I'm excited to continue to be in the trenches with everyone because we are in an information war, guys. And they are coming for us. And we better, better be prepared for it. So now is the time to be prepared because when the bull market comes, it's going to get crazy, guys. is real crazy.

But Ben, thank you so much. This has been an awesome time. I'm more bullish than I was when I came in. And, you know, it's Friday night. So it's going to be a good night.

Let's go. That's the goal, man. You got to leave more bullish than you came in. I love that you recommended Azteco and Seed Siner. Seed Siner is awesome. Asteco. I've been trying to play around within Canada, but the vouchers haven't been,

they've been kind of off and on when I've checked. So you need to find a, you need to find a friend that does Azteco. that's that's the real hack yeah yeah I got to I got to get in on that when I have access to it I'll be covering it I did do a seed signer thing though but yeah great recommendations and and thanks for that so I'll jump to Ian here dude I'll just ask you any final thoughts and any recommendations that you might like to give to the playoffs here yeah so so I'm here in central Virginia not exactly what you would think of as the kind of mecca of Bitcoin but my My kind of observation in line with the energy of this and, you know, all the why are we bullish is like, do not underestimate the power of your local communities. I went to, you know, the first Bitcoin or meet up. You know, there's a little fledgling group here where I live.

And I mean, the energy is just phenomenal. So like conversations like this are great, but there's something so special about, you know, in real life and whether that's a conference, that's great. But like I think there's something so powerful about, you know, local, you know, local community, local bitcoinsers. It doesn't get better than that. So that's, I guess, and sort of observation recommendation combo. But for actual recommendations, speaking of non-KYC, it's something I take very seriously as well. Shout to RoboSats.

If you have not tried RoboSats, you do not know what you're missing. And Ben, you, I think, retweeted this absolutely. absolutely elite strategy. I think this is applicable for folks who have a fold card, but one of the payment methods on Robosats, and I think BISC as well, right, is an Amazon gift card, right? So you could go with your fold card, buy the Amazon gift card to get a little bit of Bitcoin back because that helps offset the premium that you would typically be paying for non-KYC sad. So absolute cheat code, I think it's great. And then my final recommendation would be to check out a series that I think is pretty underloved. This is a breed love series that he did. It's called

Twilight of Gold. It's with an Anon, I forget who it is, but it's based on the book called Twilight of Gold. And it is super, super insightful. It really helped me, you know, there's a lot of like nonsense out there on, you know, well, well, this is why sound money failed. And, oh, the Great Depression was because of, you know, this and that related to the pitfalls of the former gold, you know, kind of standard. And so check this out because it debunks all of that in, I think, one of the more emphatic ways that I've heard. And so I was watching it the other day, randomly thought of it. Excellent, excellent series, as is usually the case from Breedlove.

But I particularly like this one. I think it's a little bit underloved. Awesome. I'm going to have to listen to that. That sounds really good. Very interesting. And also Robosats, yeah. Very actually smooth experience with Robosats.

I've got to say it's gotten better and better. You can do it through the Tor browser. Also, alternatively, they now have an app on the Umbrell App Store. So you can basically be running it because Umbroo goes through Tor. So you can be running it locally there and link up with people that way, which is super interesting. So anyways, worth,

worth checking out for sure. Mike, I'm going to jump to you last. Final thoughts, recommendations, take it away. Well, the first final thought is,

is listen, guys, we need something to catch on here, okay? Saying non-KYC, this is not good. We have to stop this as a whole Bitcoin group.

Okay? Listen, let's just get creative. Instead of saying K-Y, no KYC, why don't we just say no sign up necessary? You know what I mean? Every time that we're out there like non-KYC, non-KYC Bitcoin's, you know, it's just so much, it's just so much better to say, hey, I'm using this service called Robosats.

No sign up needed, right? All right? Everyone's listening, you know what I mean? Everyone out there's listening. I just, I hate that KYC free. You know what I mean? I think it's so much better to just say, no sign up needed. So, you know, what do people do when you get started, right?

I mean, it's different flavors, right? Different strokes for different folks, right? I mean, are you a tinkerer? Do you like to tinker? If you're someone like us, maybe, and you had your first computer, and I don't know, I'm older probably than all of you guys. But, you know, you remember that, like, the first time it connected in the 9600 bod and you're talking to your friend and it's a black screen, right?

You stay up way too late and your parents yell at you, right? If you like to tinker, then maybe downloading Bitcoin core and learning how to use a block explorer, making a paper wallet, right? All of these kind of things that you go through as a Bitcoiner, maybe that's the way in. It's just to start tinkering to get it and to really play around with it, right? Or maybe you're a reader, right? The Antinopolis old school videos, you know, I mean, those are freaking timeless, man. I mean, you put those on for anyone.

I mean, still today, they had, they, they hold up, right? All the books, right? The short books, you know, and mastering Bitcoin, if you're a little bit more technical. You can probably get through half of mastering Bitcoin and not be that technical, right? But, I mean, that was like the Bible, page by page. You know, it got highlighted, highlighted pages and everything else in there, you know. And, you know, to piggyback on what Ian said, really, no matter what you're interested, you know, no matter what it is. getting out and meeting bitcoinsers has to be it right there's probably a bitcoin meetup near you if

there isn't then you should start one right and you'd be surprised how bitcoins will just find you uh you know what i mean but go out meet people go to a conference you know go to unconfiscatable go to uh bit block boom you know go to california for cori's one you know get out and and meet other bitcoinsers and be surrounded by like that energy lift i'm not to say not a fish concert. It's not Dave Matthews show. All right. I'm going to talking about burning man. But you're around those like-minded people who are just fucking nuffballs like you. All right. And they like freedom. A lot of them are libertarians. They're fiscally conservative. They don't want to take a freaking shot. They don't want to do all these kind of things and whatever. You know, and you're right there with your tribe in the flesh, you know.

And, you know, become obsessed with sats like we were talking about. I love that sats back stuff that's right. our wheelhouse. I love investing in those companies. I mean, I love that stuff. Get obsessed with Sats, right? Do you have a business. Are you a freelancer? Do some income. Sign up on Zapwright. Start invoicing people and just putting a Bitcoin logo on there, right? Or a Bitcoin address on there. You never know what's going to happen. If you work for yourself, if you own a flower shop in any town USA, stick a Bitcoin sign in the window, go on some websites, and you'll get lunatics that are driving 35 minutes to your flower shop for just the you know for whatever reason right that's that's the way it is i had a bar in manhattan we were the second bar in new york city to accept bitcoin and we got all sorts of

crazies you know and it and it was a lot of fun maybe maybe you're sold right what what do you do like you got old 401k old uh old rath it's different in every country of course but you can hook that up to make it a checkbook IRA. You can start buying Bitcoin with those money. A lot of people say they don't have any money, but they worked 14 years, you know, for the power company and they got a decent retirement account that's just getting killed right now. You know, put that into Bitcoin. Like you can find the money, you know, oh, you don't have any of that, but you're working at a retail store, sign up with Bitwage, do Swan Paycheck, you know, direct deposit through strike. Start putting 10% of your income through some of these payroll services, right? There's always a way. So, I mean, those

Antonopolis videos are great. If you're a heady guy and you just want something to watch on the couch, if you're a technical guy, you know, maybe you end up doing it like I did hobby mining. You know, I had an old Canaan miner in a New York City apartment. I can't believe my wife didn't freaking leave me. You know, it's hot as hell. The thing was so loud as the smallest apartment ever kicks on at two in the morning. But, you know, that's a lot of fun. And it keeps your technical chops up. You know what I mean? Maybe that's the angle for you. If you're the type of person who wants to know why it works, do you want to know the block header for Christ's sake and every little thing that's in there? Maybe that's what you got to do is figure that out. You know, I don't know how the wall charges my phone, but damn, I know that if I plug it in, it's going to charge, right? And that's perfectly okay too. If your thing is just like, I don't know how Bitcoin works and quite frankly, I don't care, then start just learning about some more principles, sound money and all the the things that you guys are, you know, more qualified than me about with Reed Love and some of these other guys in the Simply Bitcoin show. And they get into a lot of that philosophy and stuff,

you know, maybe that's the route for you. And if you're, if you've been in Bitcoin for longer than like two years and you're bummed out right now about the price, you're basically pathetic. You're, you're, you're, you're weak, you're pathetic and you shouldn't be in Bitcoin at all. and it's sad. All right. That's like the guy, you know, that's like the guy who can't do more than like five pushups. Okay.

You should just call it right there. It's over for you. Okay. So that's pretty much it. You got to toughen up, right? I like that. I think you have some orange. I think that's the perfect round of,

if you're sad about the Bitcoin price, you're a weak and pathetic and you got to tough enough. I like it. That was fantastic, guys. I got to say, I had a blast here. I really appreciate all of your time. This is a good rip. We went for like two hours here.

Yeah, I mean, we said it all. We're, you know, we had some, there's some good sound bites in there. I'll be dropping those this week. But guys, I really appreciate it. You all killed it. And everybody watching all of their all of their

Twitter profiles are linked in show notes. You can go follow them on Twitter and then find everything that they're doing and follow all of their exploits from here on in. Gentlemen, I'll just finish up by saying thank you so much. I appreciate your time and you're all

welcome back anytime. Thank you, Ben. Pleasure, guys. All right. Thanks, man. Thanks a lot, guys. Cheers. All right. And everybody watching, thank you so much for being here. I really do appreciate it.

Um, how do you enjoy that? I hope you liked it. Make sure you follow all these guys. They're linked down below. Lots of fun. Really enjoyed it. Um, if you haven't already, again, like, subscribe, share. That really, really does help the show.

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And I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.