BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Jeff Booth, Alyse Killeen, Marty Bent, Vijay Boyapati ep187

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

Follow today's panel!   https://twitter.com/JeffBooth  https://twitter.com/real_vijay  https://twitter.com/MartyBent  https://twitter.com/AlyseKilleen 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Buy Bitcoin In Canada With Bitbuy - After your first $250 purchase get $20 free! https://bitbuy.ca/en/sign-up/?c=BTCSessions LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $25 free if you use any loan product! https://bit.ly/397rlLN Get Wasabi wallet for Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards, earn sats back while you shop. https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 BITCOIN tips: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? And we got a killer panel today. I'm super excited for everyone that is here. I'm sure you guys have seen the thumbnails. A lot of people were buzzing about this.

And also, if you jumped over from the Swan Lounge, which I was just on, welcome, if you're brand new to the show. As always, this, of course, is live. Anything can happen. So, no censorship or anything like that on this show. So I defer to my good friend Bill here. We'll do it live. We'll do it live.

Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. Fucking thing sucks. And those of you, of course, that are just joining us. Of course, smash that like button. Give this a share. And let's get even more eyeballs in the room. As always, I'm Ben with the BTC sessions.

This is your daily session. All right, before we bring in our guests, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. Over on the bitbow. Dot I.O dashboard, we're sitting at $31,797 bucks per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 3,145 sats. 89.33% of all Bitcoin have been mined.

And in terms of fees, still low, my friends, if you're looking to open up some, channels, if you're looking to do some coin join, if you're looking to just move around some sats if you need to move them to cold storage. Now is the time 11 sats per bite gets you into the next block. If you're willing to wait anything beyond that, you're probably going to get it through no problem with one sat per byte. And with that, of course, shout to sponsors of the show, let not ao. You can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services. If you're in a pinch and you need dollars and you don't want to sell your Bitcoin because that's scary, you know, taxable event might have to buy back into a higher price.

You can utilize them for that service. Of course, they also have their Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts and their B2X offering. If you're feeling mega bullish, links are below. If you're in Canada, easy way to stack Sats is Bit Buy, easy web interface,

dedicated app you can download. And after your first 250 bucks, they'll give you 20 bucks for free. So check them out. I do live on Bitcoin. Bit refill helps me do this. You can pick up any gift card. You can imagine.

You can pay for it with Sats. on chain or lightning and you do earn Sats back as you shop. Be sure to check them out there. Awesome. I just finished up my tutorial of the Keystone, formerly the Cobo Vault, air gaped. I love this thing. It's super easy. I really love it in terms of multi-six setups as well.

The air gaping via something like Blue Wallet is pretty slick. So if you want to check out that tutorial, be sure to check it out. It is in the links down below. And you can also check out Keystone, which is also linked there as well. And finally, if you're backing up any Bitcoin wallet, get it in steel, my friends. If it's an important one, paper is not always your best friend, flood, fire, accidentally discarding it. All of those things are horror stories that I have heard. But enough of my rambling, I'm going to start bringing in our guests here.

And they're all here. We've got Mr. Marty Bent. We've got Jeff Booth. We've got Elise Killeen. And we've got Vijay Boyapati. Welcome everybody to the show. I am so excited to have you all. And for those watching that don't know who they are, I'm going to go down the line really quick and let them introduce themselves.

Let's start with Marty. Marty, can you just introduce yourself for those that may not be familiar? Yeah, Ben, thanks for having me. Marty, Ben, I write a daily newsletter. Marty's Bent about Bitcoin, Macro-Economics and Liberty in the Digital Age. I host a podcast, Tales from the Crypt. When we do an interview series, we have a daily news show. My co-host, Matt O'Dell, Rabbit Hole Recap.

And then on top of that, I'm the director of business development at Great American Mining, company that mines Bitcoin in oil fields. Awesome. I love it. And that hits close to home because I'm up in Alberta, which is effectively the Texas of Canada. So I love to see it. Steve Barber is doing some good work up here too. Let's drop it down the line. Jeff, a returning guest to the show.

You probably joined one of my most prolific shows with the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. panel that broke the internet. But I'm very happy to have you back. Can you introduce yourself for people that may not be familiar? Thanks. Thanks, Ben. Entrepreneur wrote a book called The Price of Tomorrow why deflation is key to an abundant future. Awesome. And it's a great book. I always recommend it. If you haven't read it, be sure to check it out. And speaking of books, Mr. Vijay Boyapati, I bought the shit out of your Kickstarter. I'm very excited for, I'm excited for my color hardcover special edition copy that is going to be on its way soon. Welcome to the show. Can you tell people who you are and what you do? My name is Vijay and I'm an aspiring Bitcoin

player. That's great. That's great. We could just cap it there. That's perfect. That's all we need. He did write the bullish case for Bitcoin though. And if you haven't picked it up, you probably should. And I say that because I've just seen all of your other stuff and it's fantastic. And finally, let's pass it down the line to Elise Killeen. Can you let people know who you are, what you do? Right. Well, thank you for having me. I'm stoked to be here with you guys.

So I'm a venture capitalist that has founded a firm completely dedicated to companies building in the Bitcoin space and on lightning, on side chains. And that firm is called Stillmark. We're investing in precede seeds, series A stage companies. And in addition to that, I'm on the board of directors at Blockstream. Awesome. Well, welcome all to the show. Those that are watching for the first time,

very easy premise to the show. It's called Why Are We Bullish? And we just go by the three R's. Those are somebody's going to give a reason why they're feeling bullish. All together, we're going to riff on that reason. And then finally, we're going to rotate to the next guest for their reason. Very simple. I'm going to get us started off.

And mine's kind of, I guess a general reason for feeling bullish, but there's some backstory behind it. I'm feeling bullish on the, let's say, generosity of Bitcoiners. And the reason I say that is I effectively was after Jack Mallor's announcement regarding El Salvador, There's been a lot of chat around Central, South America, a lot of Spanish-speaking countries, and trying to get content to them that is solid Bitcoin content. Of course, I myself do not speak Spanish. And I was looking into the costs of just hiring out people to do that. And I just straight up couldn't afford it out of pocket.

So I didn't really know what to do. But the other day, I just said, well, what if I kind of open source it? And effectively, I threw a bunch of relevant tutorials that I thought could be helpful for people in some of those countries into a Google folder, like a Google Docs folder, and said, anybody that wants to translate these, overdub them, whatever, feel free. It's all yours. You can do that and then repost them anywhere you see fit as long as people have access to them. I'm happy. If you feel like giving me a copy, I'll put them on the channel. if not, that's fine.

But I had a bunch of people very nicely reach out to me, and I've now got a handful of people that are starting to translate stuff and are going through transcripts and starting to overdub. And it's just been, Bitcoiners are very willing to help with the cause, or very willing to dive deep and feel like they're helping further kind of the movement and opening this up to a lot of people. And, you know, Jack Mallor's is a great example of that. And kind of the drive that he lit a fire under a lot of our asses with that announcement

and what he's been working on. And it's refreshing to see. And I think that it can get lost in the midst of bull markets where it becomes, the media portrays it as very, I guess, selfish or just gambling, all those aspects that seem just very high time preference. But to me, it doesn't come across that way. And I think to a lot of bit corners when you've been around, it doesn't feel that way. So I think what I, in terms of the riff on this, I love to hear any of your experiences with bitconers being good, giving people, maybe helping with something that you're working on or things that you've seen and projects that you've seen.

that you've seen that have just been generous to the community and to the world at large. So I'll open it up to the floor if anybody has anything that comes to mind that they'd like to bring in or wants to speak on the topic. Well, okay, I'll start. So I think it's important to acknowledge that the Bitcoin community is self-selecting, right? So it's, you know, a free-to-join, free-to-leave space. and folks that were wanting to be involved in the cryptocurrency space just to enhance their own wealth and without any sort of, you know, care about cultural or global impact of the tech,

those folks have selected out into, you know, the ICO, the alt-coin spaces and communities where, you know, there's an opportunity to gamble and create quick wealth, perhaps. And Bitcoin operates outside of that sort of motivation, I think. And of course, there's opportunities to produce a return and gain an ROI on investment of time or investment of capital. But the opportunity to do that is probably quicker and looser in other cryptocurrency spaces and alt-coin spaces. And so when we're talking about bitcoins, we're talking about folks that are motivated by more than just wealth. I think not that wealth is a great motivation, but I think that this community is motivated by, you know, multiple things. And it sounds like you're seeing that with folks contributing towards the translation of good content.

Indeed. How about anybody else have in any of your endeavors, like whether it be Marty with TFTC, Jeff with your book, Vijay with your recently launched expansion upon your bullish, bullish case for Bitcoin. I'm just curious about community response, people that have helped you along the way with those things. Ben, so just what Elise said, I'd say the highlight point for this was the Bitcoin conference for me. And it was actually a state,

I was not expecting that, but to every single person I met felt like this could be a best friend. like this the people that you that and so you're around people that you just really enjoyed it you could disagree on different things but still agree on most of the things and the principles around this because when when you look at bitcoin there's just so much truth in it and so it attracts those people and at least said that really well it also some some people come into it just to make the money and they're gone and they're gone really quickly but the people that stay

It seems to be. It's a way bigger movement. And that's so powerful. When I wrote the book, I did not believe I would be here or doing what I'm doing now at all. And this is not what I get paid to do. I'm not trying to create a business out of Bitcoin or the book sales or anything. I love the people that I'm around in it. Like, I love the group that I'm around in it.

It keeps here. So actually, I've been so blown away by this community in general. So what it would say is it doesn't surprise me at all with what you just said. I think that's just a, it's a feature of this community. Yeah. And in all aspects, I was like personally, I've had Bitcoiners reach out to me to help with the podcast, the newsletter, information. give tips about great american mining everybody wants to help out and again it's the the open source

distributed nature of the protocol it's the beauty of it's like if not me than who so people feel compelled to to to help out and with the translations and things like that like most of the content is predominantly in english at least that i'm aware of especially the written content needs to be translated and and spread throughout uh other lands with other languages and beyond that like bitcoin beach is doing down there. I mean, that's the epitome of generosity and that anonymous Bitcoiner donated thousands of Bitcoin to get this initiative off the ground and it seems to have made significant headway and could potentially contribute to an ROI on his other Bitcoin stash these holding because it seems that the buzz that they made in Elante specifically was enough

to get the attention of the president. And I think you can make a very strong argument that contributed to El Salvador making Bitcoin legal tender. And then on top of that, in El Zante, in that specific community, I mean, just recently, I believe there was, I mean, Mama Rosa was a very strong member of the community down there. She had some medical issues in the Bitcoin Beach team,

shared hair lightning network. public key and Bitcoiners from all over the world donated to her. I mean, we've seen this time and time again. Again, it is the grassroots open source nature of the network, which goes beyond the code. It's also social as well. And it's the way it should happen, right, at the end of the day. And beyond that, you get the dev grants and, again,

just the free flow of information about what's going on to try to educate people. So for me, I mean, there are Bitcoiners all around the world, and there are a lot of countries and languages where they don't have that much educational content. And the thing that really blew me away was people volunteering to translate my writing. I mean, my article is pretty long. It takes quite a lot of effort. I mean, hours and hours and hours of work to translate it. And I had people from all around the world in 20 different languages reach out to me and say, I really want to translate this.

And that's really humbling to think there are other people who have the same passion and belief in Bitcoin that they want to put in the time. Really, at not much personal benefit to themselves, but to a benefit to their community or the people who speak their language. that was really humbling. And when I wrote my book, the other thing I'm really grateful for is all of the help I got from other authors in the space, people who had written Bitcoin books, people like Nick Bartia and Saferdeen, Jan Pritzko, I mean, a whole bunch of them who I reached out to and I asked for their advice and said, what, I've never published a book, what should I do here? And they gave me really great advice, which helped me along my way and, you know, pointing me in the right direction, like to self-publish, for instance, I never would have thought of that.

And they all pointed me in that direction. So I'm grateful for the amount of help I've gotten from the community. Certainly the point you're making applies really strongly to me. That's awesome. Yeah, it's, it's great to see. I like Marty's point, too, about, you know, Bitcoin, you know, if not me, then who. And I think it ends up being a bit of a call to action for everybody. So those that are passionate and get what this is about, they're willing to jump into the fray and do some work.

So I guess my hats are off to Bitcoiners in general for being a great bunch. By the way, I think I was saying in the Swan Lounge before this, I made a bunch of cold card videos and there's like a ref link in there. And it tends to build up. And I just have everything coin kite already. So keep those comments coming. I'm going to randomly pick somebody today and I'll buy you a block clock

as long as you trust me with your information to ship it to you. I know they're back ordered, but I'll still put in an order because I've just got built up coin kite referral length stuff. So block clock coming to somebody. But let's keep this show rolling. Before we go on, can I add something to Marty's point?

Yeah, 100%. So I liked how he called out the fact that the nature of the decentralized network calls for this sort of behavior of people, like, helping one another out. And I think a piece of that is that one of the, you know, we're, the winners are not a monolith, right? So we value very different things. There's all, there's people of all sorts of political affiliations. But one thing we know that we all have in common by value. decentralization is that we believe everyone regardless of who they are or how much wealth they have everyone should have equal access to financial tools and a platform and ability to verify

the record of transactions all of that and so i think it speaks to the sort of unifying value set that we have even though the community is you know so diverse in their their principles otherwise and so i you know just what's emergent of that from that is collaboration. Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. Again, I love the community and it's been humbling to

see when people need a hand. People are willing to reach out and offer it. So with that, I'm going to keep this panel rolling. I'm going to get onto our next reason for being bullish. If you're in here, make sure you smash that like button. Give this a share.

Let's get some more people in here. And I'm going to toss it to VJ first here. I know you're you're tight on time. You got family stuff going on this evening and I'm glad that you can join us. So we're going to get in your reason for being bullish and we'll start riffing on it as soon as you get it out. So dude, what has you feeling bullish this week? Well, I, you know, I think there are a lot of reasons to be bullish about Bitcoin right now. I could talk about a ton of different things. The fundamentals I think have never been as strong. But, I'll choose a simple one, and that's that a block was mined very recently.

12 minutes ago, block 6991-334 was mined. So Bitcoin continues to operate as expected and as it was designed without interruption. And just recently, we saw one of the most powerful nation states attacking Bitcoin, yet it continues to function without interruption. This is one of the most resilient systems on Earth, perhaps the most resilient system on Earth. You cannot kill it. And it's a system which makes something very important possible, which is I can send value to anyone on Earth without anyone else's permission. And that's never been possible before.

This is a historic development. And the system itself, just ticking away this heartbeat beating about every 10 minutes consistently without interruption. is really what makes me bullish. Bitcoin is not going away. And despite what people think, it's a system that allow something very, very powerful. It's a system for human freedom. And it's not going to be wiped away.

So the fact that it continues to exist, despite the efforts of various people or institutions that don't like it is what makes me feel really bullish. I love that. And I mean, especially given the last few months with the unprecedented amount of fud that we've seen in the news, whether it be, you know, it's being banned. And actually kind of successfully, this time around in terms of mining in China, you know, I know Marty's blown a gasket over the ESG stuff as of late. I know that there's just, even with the downward difficulty adjustment in regards to China, we still, at least a little bit, saw the mining death spiral theory playing out for the umpteenth

millionth time. Like it's crazy to see, but you're absolutely right. The longer exists, the more of these narratives just drop away because when it doesn't kill it and it's still there, people have to face that reality. So I'll pass it to the rest of the panel if anybody has thoughts on what Vijay just said. I don't think people realize the gravity of the migration out of China and the fact that Bitcoin is producing blocks at a downward difficulty adjustment to make it easier to mind to get closer to that 10 minute block production target. It seems like we're going to have a small difficulty adjustment on Sunday this week as well. after that, but you have literally estimates range from anywhere from 50 to 70% of hash rate

getting forced out of a country and forced to move outside of those borders, and obviously slowing down blocks for a period of time, but we had that difficulty, adjustment, as VJ said, blocks are still being produced. And I think that will be looked back on the Chinese banning of the mining and the mining industry successfully. Well, it's still yet to be determined if it's completely, successful, but it seems that miners are coordinating to get those machines plugged in elsewhere around the world, and some are getting plugged in already. That is a huge testament to the resiliency

of the Bitcoin network. And it's proof of work consensus mechanism specifically. If you try to shut it down in one country, the miners will just get up, move, find cheap power elsewhere, and plug back in and things will be back to normal. And it's beautiful to see. And I think we will look back on this moment is like one of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in the Bitcoin story compares to being able to mine like on your MacBook.

The opportunity that is being presented to the market in black swan fashion with the mining being banned in China for the mining industry specifically is is pretty massive. If people can take advantage of it, and they're going to do really well over the next decade, I think. Yeah, I would just, I would echo that. It's completely anti-fragile.

And for over a year now, I've been calling for, you knew China had to ban this, because Bitcoin is incompatible with communism. So it's individual rights and freedoms. and a free market and and and the only way communists exist is through the printing of printing of money and control of currency um so you you have a decentralized uh you have something decentralized up against a centralized system you know it has to be banned eventually and so so so when this happened and it created this event and he kept on the DJ just articulated it beautifully

And it just kept on ticking on and moving that hash power around the world. And this is what Marty just said. This is the best thing in the world for Bitcoin. I actually cannot believe people are more positive right now. Because it's unbelievable as far as it's being a buying operator. Yeah, 100%. Elise, how are you feeling about the resilience of Bitcoin, especially given these past few months and what's been happening.

Yeah, BJ is exactly right. Very sharp guy. So, you know, what should make us most optimistic, most bullish about Bitcoin is that it continues to produce blocks that we can trust. I talk about the security stability and dependability of the network a lot. And I think, you know, BJ hit it right on the head. And we should always remember that that's in fact what makes us most bold. about Bitcoin. So impossible to add to that, the beauty of that succinctness. But I'll say that I am on the

same page as Marty and Jeff, that the mining exodus from China is, you know, creates, you know, a really, like it's in Bitcoin's good fortune that that happened. And, you know, Will, I, I, I don't know. I suppose I also expected it, like Jeff has said, but, you know, it had been threatened for so long. The moment that it happens, it's still, you know, maybe I had become, you know, I don't know. It was still surprising because it had been threatened for so long. And to see Bitcoin B continue to be so resilient is, you know, of course, allows us to continue to expect even greater things. and trust in Bitcoin's presence in the long term.

Yeah, absolutely. I would echo that 100%. With every new thing that gets thrown at it, it's just another obstacle for it to overcome and then moot flood point from then on in. So yeah, I love that topic. You know, TikTok next block. I will add to this, though,

just having sort of being close of the situation as working for a mining company and talking to a lot of these Chinese miners and other North American miners and mining pools from around the world, the capitalist and entrepreneurial spirit of Bitcoiners and Bitcoin businesses is insane, just seeing it up front. You have people over here scrambling to build out capacity to take on this influx of hash rate, and likewise, alternatively, in China, you have the Chinese miners who, it must be said, like you have to separate CCP from the Bitcoin industry in China. The Chinese Bitcoin mining industry,

specifically up to this point in time of Bitcoin's history, has been one of the most ruthlessly competitive and capitalistic and innovative parts of the Bitcoin community to date. And they do not want to give up what they have worked so hard to build in their mining companies, and they are working hard to figure it out elsewhere. And it's just really inspiring to see just all the entrepreneurial and capitalist spirit that's taking on.

in the mining space specifically. It's, it's, I can't imagine it's easy migrating all that, all that hash rate. And, and I mean, like, what kind of, are, is there trouble getting outside of the, of the country for some of them? It's a worry. There is, at least from what I've heard, it hasn't been a problem yet. But people are keeping that on their radar. Are they going to stop us at the border? are so good. I think there have been a number of shipments that have made it out of China successfully,

but as we know with the CCP, anything would change over time. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Vijay has to head out here. So Vijay, thank you for your topic. I know you're very short on time, but I'm glad you could join us. And buy his book. See, Vij. You're on mute, Vijay, if you're trying to talk.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I just wanted to say, thanks for having me on the. show and I know I saw you guys just a few weeks ago but it's really good to see all your faces again so hopefully we'll see each other again soon. See you guys. Absolutely. See you, Vij. Awesome. Well, let's keep it rolling. Let's get another topic here. I'm going to toss it to Uncle Marty here and move it down the line. And I'm just wondering what has your eye this week? what are you excited about?

I don't know my video first for you guys, so I'm sorry if that awkward stare is that's okay. I'm going to let my audio think out. Yeah, I'm bullish. I mean, I have a background covering the Fed and I've been getting more intent on following the Fed the last few months

specifically as the inflation begins to pick up. And so my topic of what's making me bullish is the incompetency of the Fed and I don't know if it's incompetency or just playing dumb, but the inflation is running as hot as it is, the fact that the Fed is acting surprised by the inflation numbers that are coming in. The fact that Janet Yellen basically running a car narrative

with Jerome Powell after his trip to Capitol Hill this week, it's all making me bulletin. for Bitcoin, but a bit scared for the economy in general. I think we're seeing the products of the vast money printing that went on over the last 14 months begin to hit markets via inflation. I mean, I believe the inflation was here earlier, but now it's becoming apparent through the data that the Fed uses that it's here. And it seems that their inability to control their policy is something that people should be worried about, but in terms of what that does for Bitcoin,

I think it's bullish. Is it bullish for the price? Short, medium term, who knows? But I think just the inability for the Fed to be able to control monetary policies successfully in the fact that they're setting this policy with expectations, those expectations aren't being met,

and they're running hot, and we'll see if this inflation bout is transitory. I don't think it will be. And if it's not, I think you're going to start seeing the public ask some very hard questions for the first time that many people haven't asked. And I think that will lead to some people finding Bitcoin, which more does. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy how much the narrative has changed just this year from there is no inflation to there's not enough inflation to there's inflation, which is transitory to now we're seeing by and large inflation is good.

And even the ECB the other day had a tweet, something along the lines of fighting the vicious circle of low inflation, which I had never heard of low inflation, be referred to as vicious before. But what does it take for people to get to that tipping point where they need to ask those questions? Like where along the timeline are we when people actually say, this actually seems not so great. And I think I know why.

Does anybody have any idea where we might run into that point, that tipping point? I think one thing on that, we have to be careful because inflation could be transitory. The reason that it's so you say labor, businesses are having a hard time getting labor. Well, if they paid $100 an hour, they wouldn't have a hard time getting labor. They can't pay $100 an hour because no one would buy their stuff. So what happens when they can't get labor and prices are going up is they'll automate faster and they'll remove labor faster. In other words, you have two different trends going against each other.

And why for 30 years, Fed, CACB, everyone has said we can't get inflation to our target. And they've always said that is because technology is a stronger force going the other opposite way. And they're just pouring gas on this over and over and over again. Eventually you could drive enough fiscal spending to potentially drive inflation or destroy your currency. But when your currency is backing every other currency, it's hard to do. So I think what we have to be careful of in Bitcoin specifically is, is stepping into a landmine that gives the Fed more room to do the exact same thing. Because it's not inflation that the problem is the destruction of our society

and the centralization of all power and government that is a really long term or the negative implication. And you could get away with that because technology is going the other way. And so they could keep this narrative going for a long time and keep on going, keep on going. But the problem is it centralizes all control. You remove the free market from everything, and we know how that looks over history.

So I like to think about a different way. I like to think about it or to educate people in a different way. How could we, as humanity, every single person acting in our own best interests, look for more value in everything we do? And technology allows us to see more value. value and everything we do, we get more for less, but concurrently believe in a system that has to give us less value. So when you believe in inflation, it's like believing in fairy tale. It's just some, you're making up a system to make prices go up all the time against the natural

order of things. And no wonder that's breaking society, because why do you think we use Google? Why do you think you use the apps on your iPhone? You're constantly looking for more value all the time in everything you're doing. And human ingenuity tied to technology gives us that more for less on an exponential path. Yet we live in a system that does exactly the opposite. And most people believe in that system that it's required. But how could it?

Part of the Fed's mandate is they seek price stability by targeting two. percent inflation. So right there to me, like trying to attain price stability by increasing prices by 2 percent, it's double speed. And Marty, keep going on that. So or we're trying to get full employment by essentially making labor cheaper, right? Because the ocean is wage deflation, right? The other side of the coin is making your labor cheaper. so that you're trying to so we're trying to get a full employment by paying you less

that's really that nut of it what you're trying to do so we're trying to keep you working forever as a slave to consolidate all control well and this goes back to Marty's initial

article that he referenced or earlier in the oh maybe it was in the last show I was doing but somebody referenced the CNBC article, I think it was, where they were like the benefits of high inflation is higher wages, not putting together that the wages are going to lag the inflation and the purchasing power of, your average 9 to 5 worker is likely to not keep up with the... It wouldn't work if it was real terms.

Yeah. Yeah, they completely buried the lead, though. they're like, hey, don't worry, your wage is going to increase in the last sentence. They're like, they're not going to increase anywhere near the rate of inflation. But it's worth, and here's something to think about, at least. What would you do if you were Powell? What would you do if you were any central bank today? Because I'll tell you this, if you allowed deflation to happen,

the entire system unwinds to zero. It just resets every bank fails, every instance. every government fails. So if you knew what you were facing, and they wouldn't let it keep unwinding, they would go in and then nationalized banks and everything else. But can you imagine what pain on the street would look like as that credit unwind that the government owns and everything else just kept going and there's nothing backing it? It's just credit. And so if you allow deflation on a credit system, it just keeps on unwinding. So knowing that, yet, deflation is a stronger force from here in the future because of technology, it keeps on getting more and more powerful all the time, knowing that, that you can't let it happen, what would you do? And the reason I say that is maybe they're not as stupid as they'd keep printing. Print the crap out of everything. Great comment.

They could head fake all they want, I'm going to ease, or I'm going to, I'm going to quantitative tightening. The market would collapse and it would keep collapsing and it would keep it would keep unwinding to zero. So you could try to target so you could say that you might and everything else, but eventually they have to keep printing no matter what. So if you knew that, would you might you back? back-end rails to Bitcoin or something else on the other side. Like, might you try to do a regulatory framework back-in? But if you signaled to the market, if you signaled to the market, you were all in on Bitcoin, it would all unwind too.

Right? The entire global system would unwind immediately if the US went heavy, said we're going into Bitcoin. So it's just interesting to think about the game theory and think about maybe people are smarter than we think in this system, yet they cannot say to the market what they, what they're going to do. It's impossible. So this is worth thinking about. So, so what's everybody's wager on the endgame here?

Is it just print until, print until it breaks until there's no more faith in the US dollar? Or is there some interim thing where we actually shift? like that. If, Ben, if, if they didn't, if they slowed down printing and everything else and the,

and things started to unwind, the U.S. dollar would get way stronger and the, and everywhere else would get really weak. It would be a race to safety. So, so the U.S. dollar isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's going to,

eventually the long-term, game is it's going to, I think we're going to, it's going to be a Bitcoin standard. It's going to look like that. But the US dollar is not going anywhere anytime soon. So all other currencies are, they're in way worse shape. Yeah, China. They get the shit end of the stick, right? China has 300% debt to GDP.

If you don't count their dark pools of money. Japan's worse. Euro is worse. All over the globe, the U.S. is actually in relatives, relatively speaking, it's in a stronger position. That's why there would be a rush to safety. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. Like the, that has two options, right?

You like outright default, which would be incited by the, like, reversing the policies that they have now, or you default via inflation, which seems to be the path, default via printing, which seems to be the path that the Fed has taken. One's politically untenable in the short term. One's politically untenable in the long term, but it's like you try to push that off as long as possible seems to be the strategy. Yeah, it's where, and I agree.

I think they know exactly the position they're in. They're completely trapped. Completely trapped. You can go back to, who was it? God, who was it? In 2008, I'm having Paul Walker in my mind, but I know it's not Paul Volker. It's a guy from Goldman Sachs, the bald guy. Burnacki?

No. No, he was, that's more recent. Paulson. Paulson, Hank Paulson. That's where I get the Paul next up. Hank Paulson and basically went to George Bush at the time. He was transitioning to Barack Obama and said, if we don't fix this problem, there's not to be money in the ATMs come next week.

They knew it was not bad, and that was the solution with the current. Marty, and that was a global situation in 2008. So my company at that time was doing hundreds of millions, or over $100 million around the world. We had LC's letters of credit, counterparties at other banks. And there were three days in a row there. I knew that this was going to happen before it happened

because there were three days in the row there that we had money in the bank to, In fact, the LCs, no other corresponding banks would take LCs. They just stopped taking them all around the globe. And so you realize the entire financial system was effectively, when I said that credit collapse, nobody could trust anybody else's account, and it was unwinding in really great speed. And remember, like, we talked about $500 billion then,

and there were marches on Wall Street. And now we're talking about $5 trillion, and then another $5 trillion, and there's no marches. It's just math. It has to be, if it keeps going, it has to be that much, an order of magnitude bigger, 10 years from, five years from now,

order of magnitude bigger. It's just, it has to. It's because these two systems are moving exactly in opposite directions. Elise, how are you feeling about kind of this environment, and Bitcoin juxtapose against it. Like, are you, do you echo Jeff's worry about kind of the macro environment? Well, I think it's a great discussion.

So what I heard from both Marty and Jeff was a reference to the incentives of the system and how much transparency there can be about different stakeholders and what their incentives, their motivations may be. And I think that ties back to Bitcoin because, in fact, actually what Satoshi did, from my perspective, is that he found a way to align the incentives of various actors in the system that might be adversarial actors. And he aligned their incentives by the introduction of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency. And so, you know, and frankly, I think that Satoshi doesn't get enough credit for that. So we talk a lot about the technology, the software

that he introduced, which was based on a couple decades of prior work around how to create a digital, a verifiably scarce digital currency. But what he did that went beyond that was to think about the psychology of actors in the system and how to align what they were incented to do in a way that didn't trust altruism, right? This is one of the things that differentiates Bitcoin from Ethereum or from other cryptocurrencies

where you see this expectation that actors will act in a financial network in an altruistic way, right? So I don't know if you guys saw this, but last week there was a... a developer in the Ethereum space that wrote software to allow for miners to more easily reorg the blockchain and to get paid for it. And, you know, it was, it was informative to watch that conversation unfold on Twitter and to see the percentage of folks involved in the conversation,

I'd be surprised that folks were not going to be acting altruistically. And Bitcoin doesn't assume that, right? Satoshi didn't assume that. And so for that reason, we have a reliable monetary policy in Bitcoin. We're not talking today about refiguring Bitcoin's monetary policy to produce ultrasound money, right? That's not what we're doing. And that's because Satoshi put in the work to figure out what was wrong with the traditional system, to fix it to introduce Bitcoin.

And in doing that, not only did he solve the problems of the past, I think, but the problems of the future, what's been introduced by, for instance, Ethereum. Yeah, yeah. And that's, it's, it's, I mean, the difficult part where we're saying right now is we see this, this beautifully crafted system where those incentives all align and working in your own best interest is also in the best interest of others for the most part. but the transition, it necessitates the destruction of the previous or the failure or painful transition from the previous system. And so I don't, I kind of don't know what to expect for that. Ben, just on that, the system was going to fail anyways. There is no way that technology is congruent with an inflationary monetary system, where we're going. Actually, human innovation,

human ingenuity isn't anyways. Why it always blew up in time, typically 80 or 100 year cycles or something like that is, is essentially government's inflation is just a hidden tax, and they could get away with it because technology wasn't moving so fast, so people didn't notice. And so it took a long time to build up. But today with technology moving so far,

fast in the opposite direction, people are noticing. And so any single system that tries to drive inflation against technology today and into the future does so by concentrating all power in very few hands, period. You have to have a system that allows for that deflation to drive the abundance, from technology to the broadest possible hence. I've never thought of that, that pace of innovation and quickening, changing the pace of which we recognize inflation. It's a really tight connection there, I think.

Yeah, well, and Jeff, you always bring up the good point of, you know, we're measuring, we're measuring inflation based on, on, you know, what we can attain currently. But with the deflation of technology in the opposite direction, we should be like the natural state of things is already things getting cheaper. So they're printing enough to undo that and more so that things are more expensive when it should be going in the absolute opposite direction. They think they're measuring from zero.

Yeah. Measuring from 30 years ago they might have been measuring from minus one disinflation rate. Now they're probably measuring from minus four or five. Yeah. And so why they keep missing is that it's going the other way faster. Yeah. Yeah. That's the reason behind the low inflation rates is they're actually,

add a four or five to whatever their goal was and why aren't we hitting that 2% inflation rate up until now? I'd like to add to at least's point about me thinking about these networks as adversarial systems and

I'm very happy you highlight that because I remember seeing the tweets too at least like people are like oh you shouldn't do this you should disclose this behind closed doors patch it and it's like no like as a Bitcoin or me personally I want people to attack the network at all times to find these pain points so that we can build over them if need be at every moment of the day. Again, harpinging back to the mining migration coming out of China, that's like an attack I'm actually excited to see because it's like we're testing the resiliency.

And that's as somebody who actually believes in this technology and believes in Bitcoin or if you think you believe in another cryptocurrency, like you should be actively. trying to have the network attack and tested, especially at this point in time when it's relatively small so that you have more confidence that will be more, at least somewhat robust at scale when the masses are using it. Absolutely. And I'm going to kind of, I'm just mindful of time here. And I do love this topic, but I do want to round it out here. I think, I mean, the general sentiment here is, thank God.

there's an alternative. Because as Jeff was saying, like there was no way this system was going to be able to limp on forever. And so at least having this release valve available to people, no matter how painful that transition may be,

at least it's there. At least it gives us that outlet. And I'm so happy that, you know, and I think this is why Bitcoiners tend to be an optimistic bunch in terms of, I know we've just had a, a very foreboding chat about all this,

but I think most of my Bitcoin or friends over the past year have been the most positive, excited bunch about the future. And I think that may be why. But I'm going to round out this topic here. Everybody in the chat, thank you for being there. And we're going to move on to our next topic. And I'm going to toss it to you, Elise. What has you feeling bullish this week?

Okay, so maybe I'll get a little nerdy with my topic. what I'm particularly bullish about is that the trend of adoption where we're seeing adoption happen, for instance, in El Salvador and other folks in emerging markets signaling that they want to be a fast follow is converging with the technological advancements of Bitcoin that are happening. And so El Salvador is adopting Bitcoin through Lightning Network, largely based on the work, the protocol work that Lightning Labs has offered with... the L&D implementation of the Lightning Network.

At the very same time as advancements like Taproot at Bitcoin's core protocol level are adding featureful capability at the Lightning Network. And so I think the fact that folks are onboarding through Lightning right at the time as development is creating more robustness and more utility of the tech is incredibly auspicious for us. It suggests to me that folks are going to be able

to have a really rich and full experience of Bitcoin by onboarding through Lightning. And so I think, you know, the world is our oyster. And I couldn't be more pleased but to see countries like El Salvador be early adopters here. I love this topic. I'm so glad you brought it up. I've been so stoked on Lightning. And I think you're right. It's kind of, it's the proliferation in people using Lightning, I think, it's, it's, it's, the proliferation

in people using Lightning, I think it's, it's, is kind of hitting at a weird spot. I wish it would have hit like mid last year where you were seeing a lot of it. But of course, like, you know, you get into a bull market and you see a lot of things and a lot of new people. But it's the ease of use to just jump into lightning now

comparatively to when I was initially tinkering with it. I think 2018 I played it a little bit. It was not super easy. And if you want to get into the weed still, you can. But man, you can, like a perfect example of this, I think would be Moon Wallet, M-U-U-N. And it's just, it's a singular balance. And you can accept main chain transactions and lightning transactions. And it all reflects as a singular balance.

It's non-custodial. And it's just, it's such an easy onboarding process to be like, just download this wallet, you know, back it up like you would a normal Bitcoin wallet. But hey, you know, you can send to and from on chain or lightning and it automates everything. That kind of experience. And imagine, you know, a cycle out. Imagine like after the next having and you have a new group of people kind of joining the network. How much improvement there will be around that experience. It's amazing to see.

I use lightning every single day now, which is fantastic. But, you know, I'll pass it to Jeff and Marty. What are you feeling in regards to the onboarding experience for newbies as they're coming in and everything that's been built over the course of the bear market? From my perspective, I think a network effect, same thing that would happen on the internet. You can see that UX, everything to get better and better and better on top of this. And a lot of people's misunderstanding of Bitcoin on what it could be was same thing that they misunderstood the Internet for what it could be. And so they didn't say they, we have a, we all do.

We have a bias that we project to the future our present reality instead of projecting what is going to happen on technology. And so what you're talking about is really that. I'll say myself too, though, my base case did not have El Salvador coming on this early. And my base case didn't have El Salvador coming on this early because I live in Canada and my world doesn't need lightning right now. It doesn't provide a 10x over existing. But in El Salvador it does, and I missed that, how somebody else's experience. would drive it that fast, even with upward volatility, that people would take it as a currency this early.

But what it's telling you is how much, how valuable it is in a whole bunch of other regions and how fast it's growing. And it's just amazing. So even today, when we're looking at what you just talked about, Moonwallet or Lightning, we're looking at today and we're projecting that future forward. And it's getting better and better and faster

and more resilient all the time. So to me, it's inevitable, but it's really exciting. How about you, Marnie? How are you feeling about onboarding nubes with lightning and other things? Very bullish. I mean, I've always been very bullish of the Lightning Network, particularly, and I think the last two years, specifically, of everybody getting sort of distracted with DFI and NFTs and all that

and getting pushed in that direction, Lightning can be able to focus on building out the protocol and the implementations and the apps. Sort of in peace, in relative peace, if you will, has been incredible. And just the adoption has increased significantly. The usability has increased. I've been using it since the early days of lightning as well.

I never have problems paying an invoice. I never have failed routes with any of the wallets that I've been using. And like we've all mentioned, the U.S. is getting better. And that's one thing I think is pretty massive. Like Moon, like you described, from the sender perspective, has really figured out an incredible U.S. We don't even know which layer you're using.

And I think there's many, many design improvements that are still yet to be made, but it creates an extremely exciting landscape. So if you're a designer out there, I've read a newsletter about that this week, like the opportunity to to design new UIs and experiences around interacting with the Bitcoin protocol on behalf of users is is massive like if you want to innovate in the design space come to Bitcoin come to Lightning and work on this stuff like one simple tweak the what spurred that newsletter was two Bitcoiners talking about a little pain point they have a BTC pay server

where when they go to pay a BTC pay invoice you need to choose do I want to pay main chain or lightning and that's just like a point of friction for the user. We're like, hey, what I don't do I have to think about that? But there's a solution to it already. Like somebody responded to that. He was like, ah, this is annoying. I wish like we could fix this. Somebody's like, yes, you can create a QR code that has an on-chain address and a lightning network invoice like embedded in it. So like simple U.X tweaks like that for the end user are right around the corner. And I think we're going to see lightning apps, particularly payment apps

that are comparable to something like a Venmo, cash app, Allipay, WeChat, whatever it may be, with the point and click UX for QR codes that is just going to make it much simpler and increase people's comfortability with Bitcoin

because they're just going to be like, gosh, like any other app. Then on top of that, I mean, just the applications beyond payment specifically. When you think about lightning, it goes way beyond payments. You have the impervious team coming out. They're working on building an API that would interact with the Lightning Network and allow you to build like VPNs and stuff like that. You have Sphinx Chat, which you're embedding the Lightning Network in,

the content space and making sure that people can monetize content without advertising or any other means. It goes way beyond payments. I don't think we're like the top snowflake of the iceberg. I'm not even I think of it comes to light I love the idea also I was talking

and chatting with somebody about the whole idea of censorship resistant and encrypted chat via lightning like just like messaging apps and stuff like that

that's it's insane to me and it didn't even I didn't even think of that previously to lightning you just you're right you default to payments and you don't realize

how much fluid money Yeah, you got Sphinx. Look at all these notifications of chatting via the Lightning Network. It's like, it's crazy. And I, like you, you get, you stream sats, right? Your, your pod is via, what's it called? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And I, same, mine's listed on Breeze and I'll get going directly to my note. I'll see like, you know, 10 sats at a time or something coming in every minute. somebody listens to a minute of the pod, which is, it's crazy. And this is just like the initial, it's, this conversation right here sounds like that time on Letterman where Bill Gates was describing the internet. And he was like, well, like, you could, you could listen to a baseball game on it. And and Letterman was like, well, I could just do that on the radio. And like it's people, I don't, even I feel like I'm not fully recognizing what's going to be possible. in five years, 10 years, it's insane.

So can I add on that then? Yes, yes. One step further. And Jeff talked about, you know, like fitting things to the paradigm we live in and then recognizing opportunities outside of our experience. So one of the areas of pushback that we've had about why Bitcoin is applicable or not to emerging markets has been, can you expose folks in emerging markets to Bitcoin's volatility, right, in the exchange?

rate. But now with Taproot, one of the thing, Taproot puts us on a path to be able to denominate lightning channels in other currencies. So you can have a USD, for instance, denominated lightning channel by having a DLC within that channel. Now you can remove volatility for folks in emerging markets who just might want access to the tech, to the free and instant global transaction capability of the Lightning Network. They can opt into doing that in a way that doesn't expose them to Bitcoin's exchange rate. Maybe that's like their checking account, right? And their savings account could still be in Bitcoin. So this is what makes me bullish. It's the idea that Bitcoin Core Protocol is moving in this direction,

lightning is moving in this direction at an infrastructure and at an app layer and emerging markets are coming on board. And I think that, you know, that's what in my mind, that's what Bitcoin was introduced to do is to provide financial tools for all of us. versus a select view. And Marty said rightly that the market has been really distracted by DFI, right? What bothered me about that was that it was so niche in who it was relevant to, right? It's 100,000 traders, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less. But even there, we saw this week maybe another thing to be bullish about

was Jack Dorsey say that at Square, we're going to do defy on Bitcoin. I think that that's the right platform. So, you know, little by little or all at once, as Jeff said, even in our most optimistic scenario, did we think El Salvador would introduce Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021? I didn't have that on my bingo card either. And so the pace of adoption and the pace of technological innovation has just been insane. And on top of that, the real skill level and just grit of founders in the space, I couldn't be more bullish.

Elise, I'm wondering if you could just quickly, because I heard you talk about this with Preston Pish about the idea of having a U.S. dollar denominated Lightning Channel and how you don't need a separate token for that. And I thought it was such an interesting concept. Could you just briefly outline what something like that might look like? because you were in the in the pod you were basically dismayed that you would even need a token you said it's totally useless to to inject well you could do i think you could do both so i'm going to leave it up to you know so my what i love about my work is that you know i'm just here to see the vision that folks

have for the tech and how you know how they're able to introduce maximum value to their user community so i think you'll do both i think we'll see assets actually other assets besides Bitcoin present on Bitcoin's lightning layer, but also what you'll be able to do using DLCs is to have a Bitcoin collateralized channel that's denominated in USD, say, or another sort of fiat currency. And so what that would look like is that the other side of the channel would essentially have a long Bitcoin position, assuming Bitcoin's historical trajectory, continues measured by exchange rate and then someone holding Bitcoin basically but denominated in USD.

And I can imagine how that would be immediately relevant in places like El Salvador for the use case of remittance. And then the question is, you know, if it's even we, it almost looks like not remittance anymore, right? Just a global financial network where people can send value back and forth without the friction that's existed in the traditional remittance. system. Yeah, that's, that's fantastic.

I love that idea of kind of that balanced. I mean, could you, could you run into issues where, you know, if people start, you know, in an instance of an extended bear market where nobody wants to take the other side of that, that dollar denominated channel? Right. And also, because it's fully collateralized, it can withstand a certain range of volatility. not infinite amount of volatility. And so maybe perhaps that's why having an actual asset traded on lightning makes more sense.

But the opportunity for multiple sorts of technology solutions to exist and compete here, I think will be great. And it's one of the things I'm most looking forward to for Q4 or for early 2022. Awesome. That's fantastic. If anybody else wants to add any final thoughts to this, this topic, feel free. I mean, we're talking about lighting, but DLC is specific. Elise, we just described the contract for difference, right? That's how they create that stable coin. Right. So you, so DLC's discrete log contracts that can, you know, for sake of the audience, I know it's a very technology, sophisticated audience that you have. But basically what a DLC does is it allows you to incorporate real-world data

into Bitcoin as programmable money. And so a DLC uses data from an Oracle to say that this is the exchange rate, and then that exchange rate can help define the channel. Some folks doing really great work here are, for example, the guys at Shurdbit, so you know those guys. That's Chris Stewart. That's Nadav, Ben, Carmen, those guys doing really incredible work. Of course, you can imagine that some of the teams building Lightning network implementations

are thinking about these things. Ryan Gentry, for instance, at Lightning Labs has talked about this. You know that Atomic Finance is doing DLCs on Bitcoin's core protocol. They'll move up. I presume that's for Matt and Tony to decide, but I'd imagine that if there were efficiencies in offering DLCs on Lightning that they would move up. You know, and it won't just, those are the early movers. But I imagine that founders will be drawn, or I hope they will,

will be drawn to this technology and we'll find ways to make it useful very broadly, including to folks, for instance, in El Salvador. Bullish. I love the lightning chat. I love seeing what can happen with it. and I have had Tony from Atomic on the show before, and he's fantastic, so I'm very excited to see them continue to build as well. Great topic.

I'm going to round it out, and we're going to move on to our final one. Everybody that's watching right now, thank you for being here, of course. Smashlight, give it a share. We're going to toss it over to Jeff for our final reason for being bullish. Jeff, what are you excited about this week? I don't know if it's specifically this week. I think a lot of this is hard. Probably if I had to say one thing,

the thesis is stronger today on Bitcoin than it's ever been. You can see what's happening. It's getting stronger and stronger. Yet the price isn't. The users are. When I think about something like that, I think about on any asymmetric bet, almost unlimited upside,

for there to be that asymmetric bet, there have to be a huge amount of the audience that don't understand it. It's required. And I think that's what you have in Bitcoin today. So many people misunderstand it because of that. The other thing it could signal is we are either all wrong or it is the best asymmetric bed of our lifetime.

And I don't think we're wrong. And so when I see how many people misunderstand it and how many people are throwing a flood or believe in the energy, believe in climate can be solved from an inflationary monetary policy, it just makes you scratch your head. But so when I see all of that happening and it's still holding in here where are the prices and it being anti-fragile, it's hard not to get a hard to think of where this goes afterwards. Now, I am not in it for the money to make out of that.

I'm actually in it for way bigger because I think it's actually a requirement for humanity to survive. It's actually that big to me because I don't want my kids growing up in a centralized in a world where very few people own everything with artificial intelligence and robotics because that's the choice. And I believe that if Bitcoin doesn't do this, If a Bitcoin isn't that, then that's the world they're going to grow up in. And so it's a good thing I believe that Bitcoin is going to grow like this. And I look through historical examples. And I've never seen a technology that empowers individual rights and freedoms in humanity

that has been stopped by government. Ever. I understand why sometimes they want to try to stop it. stop it. But if you look at that type of technology, decentralized technology that does what we're talking about, how could that actually be stopped? And number two, if I'd go a little deeper in that, if people knew what they were doing in trying to stop it, I don't think they do. But if they actually did the math on what it looks like after their life is over and maybe their kids' life, they would not want to stop this technology.

Yeah, I would echo what you're saying in that most people don't understand it. And the reason, and we all kind of chuckled when, or we're all wrong and we all kind of laugh. But it's in the quality of the arguments on the other side of the aisle, right? It's stuff that we've seen a million times over over the past X number of years, depending on how long you've kind of been in the space. but it's been dispelled multiple times. And the conflicting fud where, you know, too much mining in China is bad, China banning Bitcoin mining is bad. And just things that don't mesh.

It seems like it's just the throwing kind of narratives at the wall to see what will stick, whereas the kind of narrative of the benefits of Bitcoin and what it's trying to do have been, in my opinion, pretty damn cohesive. over the past number of years here. So it just seems like a better put-together argument on one side as opposed to the other. But I'll toss it to the rest of the panel. Elise or Marty, if you want to chime in on Jeff's idea here. Well, Jeff said, you know, or maybe we're wrong.

And the reason why I chuckled was because the fact that Bitcoiners tend to, you know, evaluate to that level of depth and to engage at, you know, opportunities for pessimism and think all the way through it. That's another reason why I'm bullish, actually. I think it's differentiating for the community in that we are folks that, you know, I am a bullish. Oh, sorry, I think you froze for a second anyways. It was just the past like five seconds or so.

So Jeff makes me bullish when he thinks like a bitcoiner by saying, by entertaining the idea that we could be wrong and thinking through, you know, the sorts of thinking through the logic all the way. And so I guess I'm repeating myself probably, but I think that that's differentiating for the Bitcoin community. And I hope that we continue to hold on to that sort of level of critical thinking. Yeah. I mean, I saw this, well, I mean, watching Marty and Matt the other day. Marty was chatting about the exodus of miners from China. and Matt was playing devil's advocate and just kind of saying like, well, what if they're not? And I know, Marty, you've got kind of like the inside line and a lot of this stuff.

But, you know, Matt was just playing the part of good Bitcoinser, you know, I don't, I don't know these things for certain. Like, I haven't seen them with my own two eyes. So how can I be sure? And I think I love to see that type of discourse amongst Bitcoiners on the outside looking in, to the average person, it's like we're all just horrible to each other. And we're all, you know, we all just hate each other. But really, it's just Bitcoin teaches that ethos of don't trust, verify, and always kind

of question the, you know, what's the opposite outcome here? And yeah, I think you're very right to find that a bullish aspect. But I want to add to that because I actually don't think that we are horrible to other I think that what's asked in the Bitcoin space is that you can defend your arguments and that you can think through the trade-offs so that no one's given a pass to say, you know, this is my hypothesis and I don't need to think about what it means for decentralization. I don't need to think about what it means for users or for developers or other stakeholders. And so, you know, while that can feel jarring in other spaces, I think in Bitcoin, it's just

understood that you have to be thoughtful in your work. And that's why you see the levels of core developer talent, the level of entrepreneurial talent accumulate here because those are the folks that can defend their work and feel confident enough to do it. Awesome. Marty, do you want to add on to anything that Jeff said here? I completely echo what Jeff said. I think this is imperative that we do this for our children, for grandchildren, for descendants. We're at a critical juncture in human history, one that will be studied.

very intently in centuries from now, literally probably the two decades before this and after this, they're transitioning into the digital age. I mean, you do it correctly. I mean, you have all the central bankers of the world, Augustine Carstons, Christine Lagarde, Jerome Powell, coming out and People's Bank of China coming out and saying, we're going to do this central bank digital currency and when you hear them describe how it's going to operate it's frankly frightening i mean gustin carson saying hey people like to uh compare the cbc's to cash but it's not like cash at all we don't know where people are spending their hundred dollar bills or what they're doing with it like with the cbc we had the technology to issue the currency and then know how it's

spent and how it's being transacted with and we can control who people People can trans-and they're bragging about this out in the open. They're saying this is what we want. The system got, yeah, Jerome Powell on Capitol Hill this week. We're not going to need stable coins or Bitcoin once we have our CBDC. Like it makes them obsolete completely. I mean, again, whether or not they're ignorant and competent or they know what's going on, but they have to play this role.

Bitcoin's reason for being is to compete with the currency being issued by the Fed, whether it's the digital dollar that they have now or the CBDC that they produce, potentially at some point in the future. We'll see if they're even able to do it. But it's imperative. Anybody listening to this is imperative that we get this right. We have two directions, the digital panopticon, where very few people own all the things and they can control what you do or we get freedom in the digital age via Bitcoin.

It's that serious. Marty, can I build on, because you and I are totally, totally, agree there, to completely agree there. But I think because most people don't understand this, and I try to, and we, and let's say we do, and where this goes. And what's happening, as Elise said, is we're thinking this through not just the next step, but the step after that, a step after that. And very few people can do that.

And when they're stuck in an existing system, and let's say you can't pay your food bills or your rent bill and everything else and you're looking for a job and the government says I can give you a job or I can give you some money. The more that the government does this, the more the more people will trust the government to solve the problem. It's a big deal. It is a really, and the more the government gets control of the airwaves and the control of the messaging and everything else. If you look through history, this is how government centralizes over and over and people vote in those governments because they're so hurting. And so we're entering a period of society today where that's what it looks like.

And what I think we need to do in Bitcoin, and this is, we could look very much like we're wearing tinfoil hats right now to what most people know. And we've got to be really careful on that. You do a great job on your show to be able to. But I would say your audience, but you really do. Take it away. I put the tinful hat over my eyes. But again, your audience is most about a bunch of bit-cliners.

And we need to make this more broad. And so one thing I would say specifically to the whole climate debate, we shouldn't fight the battle down here, whether there's climate change or not climate change. And in realizing it in this way, 90% of the. people that are on the planet today believe there is climate change. And so further alienating those people makes Bitcoin harder to understand. What we should do is elevate the level of that conversation to a different level and say, okay, so how do you suppose you can solve climate change by manipulating money to grow forever?

So more and more things forever. And now you put the onus on the same. system that because inflation equals climate change. It is exactly the same thing. Now you put the onus on the system to come up with an answer for why that isn't true. And if you, if people have to answer that question, it becomes impossible to answer that question, impossible to answer that question out of the system, and then they look for another system that can can solve that. So if you have 90% of the people that believe something, you can either, you can either, you can,

fight them head on on their beliefs, but you won't change their mind or move the conversation to a different. And that's what I think in Bitcoin in our entire community and everything else, we need to think of, now, maybe it's coming anyways and it doesn't matter, right? Maybe none of this matters, none of what I'm doing matters, no matter what. But I would like to think, if I can get one more person on it, then that's a good thing. If I can get one more person, if I can reduce the power that the government has by the natural power of printing money to be able to give people more individual rights and freedoms, that's a good thing. So I try to think about it in martial arts.

You use an opponent's momentum against them. This is the same thing. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. I love that a lot, but I do appreciate that. And inflation is climate change. I like that one.

But it is. Have somebody prove that wrong. It is climate change. We're going to grow forever on a finite planet by destroying currency forever. So prices go up forever. things so you need more jobs forever to keep growing. Inflation equals climate change. Yeah. In an age of automation, in an age of automation where where things are turning to information and information is becoming free.

Yeah. So we'll just just have a bunch of people digging holes in a field giving them an hourly wage to do so. Yeah. Yeah. I I think I'm at a point where I'm wary of the transition, but I'm optimistic about the outcome from said transition. And, you know, I have high hopes for my children and for their children. And I'm bullish on all the Bitcoin babies I've been seeing happen lately. so and mine included so I'm I'm excited for the future and and what we might be able to give to them and what we might be able to fix for them in the process for that so I think what I'm going to do is I'm

going to round it out here I will say thank you guys so much for joining on this show I'm going to toss it down the line one last time just to get you guys to once again remind people where they can find you and any final thoughts that you may have. So Marty, why don't you lead us up, let people know where they can find you and any final thoughts you might have. Hang on on Twitter a lot and you find me at Marty Bent. I'd just like to echo what Jeff said there at the end. I lean into conspicuous consumption really does a lot of damage to the environment and makes

us consume more, whereas arguably we had a sound money standard via Bitcoin. and the opportunity cost of that consumption rises. So you're forced to be more efficient, which would help the environment. Absolutely. How about you, Elise? Where can people find you? And any final thoughts? Well, there's a link for founders on stillmark.com to reach out.

I have open DMs on Twitter, maybe a mistake. And, yeah, I'm just, it was a lovely way to spend a Friday, guys. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And Jeff, one last time, where can people find you? And any final thought you may have? I'm with Marty. Best places on Twitter at Jeff Booth.

And Marty, Elise, Ben, this was awesome. Thanks a lot for having me. Yeah, this is a pleasure. Thanks for putting this together, Ben. Lees was a pleasure to meet you finally. Awesome, guys. Thank you. Thank you guys all.

I'm going to cut your audio video and do my outro here, but all of you are welcome back anytime. Thank you all. and everybody watching here, thank you so much for being here. Now, I was talking earlier, and I was talking about a block clock, and I was trying to think of the best way to do this. I was talking about all the comments in here. And I'm just kind of seeing who stuck it out.

We still got 280 people in here. And I've got to say, there was one moment during the show, there was a comment that gave me a good, giggle. And, and I hope that the person is still here. The accountant, the Bitcoin Corporation, when he said, print the crap out of everything. And that gave me, I, I, that gave me a, a good laugh. It was perfectly timed with what Jeff was saying. So, dude, if you trust me enough with your information to send you a block clock. Yeah, you were very quiet during the show with nonstop caps locks.

Dude, if you trust me with your information to ship a block clock to you, I can do that. What I need you to do is just shoot me a quick email and I'm going to have to verify in some way, shape, or form who you are. Best way to do that. Or you can add me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is just BTC Sessions, or the email is BTC Sessions at gmail.com. And I will do my due diligence to make sure this is the right person. But just let me know that you're on the show,

and we'll chat and we'll figure some stuff. Yes, small caps are broken, I'm sure, man. Anyways, guys, the accountant, the Bitcoin Corporation, reach out to me. We'll get chatting and I'll make sure that, yeah, via Twitter. Cool. What's your Twitter handle? Put your Twitter handle in the chat right now and I'll make sure that I have the right person. And yeah, everybody else that's watching. Of course, thank you so much for being here. As always, make sure you hit like, sub, share. All of those things help so much. They get this in front of more eyeballs. And, you know, I always love having you all here. Also, if you want to help the show in another way, you can hit out the sponsors that I mentioned previously.

Ledden, Bit Buy, Bit Refill, Keystone, and the Bill Fottle over at Privacyprose.io. And finally, if you really liked what you saw, let me bring it up here, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip via my tippin.combe page super easy. Sorry, not tipping. What am I doing? I'm on strike. I'm a strike man now. My strike. strike.me page strike.me slash btc sessions. If you head there, you'll be gritted with a screen.

You can type in any amount you like. You hit the tip button and you're greeted with either a lightning invoice or if you click to the right, a regular Bitcoin address. And both will work just fine and dandy. So anybody, and I've been seeing some of those pouring from time to time. So thank you guys for the sats. Always much appreciated and they do help the show. But the accountant, I see you there. CDC M99. I will hit you up. make sure I'm following you. But everybody else, thank you for watching.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I will see you guys next time for your daily session. And let me get my splash screen. Your daily session. Have a good weekend, guys. See ya.