BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Jimmy Song, Rockstar Dev, Peter Todd ep438

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

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What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? Got an awesome lineup of guests this evening to get bullish together. Despite price action, we can ignore that. That's fine. But we've got plenty of to chat about this evening. I hope you're all doing well.

Of course, 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 thing sucks.

If you have not already, please do like, sub, share all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring on our guests, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market. Right now, I'm bringing up a timechain calendar.com. Simultaneously, I'll slap up the live chat over on the right hand side of the screen everything you say from here on in be live for the world to see for better or worse uh timechain calendar dot com we're sitting at fifty three thousand four hundred and twenty seven dollars per coin a single u.s dollar will

snag you one thousand eight hundred and seventy two sats in terms of fees low low single digits uh three sats per v byte next block and in terms of bitcoin mine 19.75 million of them that is 94.05 percent of the total supply. We're going to give a quick shout out to our sponsors and we'll be right in with our guests. So we'll see you in just a moment. Bitcoin Well is on a mission to enable independence by being one of the easiest and quickest ways to purchase Bitcoin in Canada and the US. The best part about it, every buy goes directly into your own self-custody. They never hold your coins. You can add a Bitcoin address as part of onboarding. There's a transparent 1% spread, no hidden fees,

no withdrawal fees, plus they have KYC free sales and bill payments on their website. They're also a publicly traded company under the ticker BTCW on the TSXV. Check them out over at Bitcoinwell.com. Check out my full tutorial on how to use them. And you can check out the links in the show notes down below and sign up today. CoinKite.com has some of the best hardware on the market today to secure your Bitcoin. The cold card queue is an absolute powerhouse and is my. daily driver. And on top of this, they have plenty of other goodies, including the Mark

4, the tap signer, open dimes, the block clock, and much more. If you head over to their website, make sure you use code BTC sessions at checkout to get a nice discount. Links are in the show notes down below. All right, we are back in and it's time to bring in our guests, at least two thirds of them and perhaps all of them momentarily. But I do want to welcome to the stage Jimmy and Peter. It's good to see you guys. Thank you for joining me. And we will have a third guest. Hopefully, we'll cross our fingers for that. But nonetheless, we're going to dive right in. And before we do, we'll just do some quick intros for anybody watching that is unfamiliar. We'll do a quick round of who are you and what do you do. And Jimmy, I'll toss it to you first.

Thanks for doing the show. And can you give yourself an intro? Yeah, I'm Jimmy Song. I'm a programmer. I'm a teacher. I do lots of Lots of other stuff, but mostly I promote my books like this one. Yeah, ruins everything. But yeah, I write books. I guess I'm a Bitcoin expert in some way, although I suspect Peter has that same title. I'm going to leave that one for him. So I don't want to step on toes over here.

So, yeah, there you go. Awesome. We're glad to have you here. And Peter, the Bitcoin expert, can you let people know who are you and what do? Yeah, well, I'm Peter Todd. You know, I'm not a real expert. I just go play one on TV. But, you know, sometimes I've done some work in Bitcoin core.

I'm responsible for the check off time verify off code way back when. And, you know, I think professionally you can kind of say I tend to do a lot of analysis, like, you know, recent example being like this L2 paper I was working on. Although frankly, you know, this may not be the right show for me, because I'm kind of my job is to be bearish and fight all the problems. That's okay. You've met Dave Bradley before. And he, I think he's been on the show three or four times. And out of all of those times, it was only the last one where he was saying that he might become moderately bullish.

He loves Bitcoin, but he's like, he's cautiously optimistic or realistically pessimistic. whichever way you want to look at it, but either way. Can't blame him. He's Canadian. Yeah. After what's happened, I wouldn't blame him for not being bullish either. Yeah, it's so much oppression going on over there. Yeah, yeah. Well, gents, we're going to dive in. Now, I will say that we may be visited in a little bit by everybody's favorite uncle,

hopefully, but we'll address that when and if it happens. Either way, we're going to dive in. And for anybody watching that's unfamiliar with the show, this is why are we bullish. Simple premise to the show. Each one of us comes with a reason for being bullish, something we're currently excited about in and around Bitcoin. It can take any form. It can pertain to a news item, a current event, a personal experience, an app, a device,

something happening with development. Doesn't matter what it is. Everybody gets to choose. But the flow of the show is pretty simple. Number one, somebody's going to drop their reason for being bullish. so their chance to rant about whatever they're currently buzzing about. Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, comments, questions, rabbit holes, wherever we decide to go.

And then finally, number three, we're going to rotate to the next person for their reason until we've all had a turn. So reason, riff, rotate, pretty simple. So we're going to get started. I'll kick us off today just to kind of get the ball rolling. And I have a reason for being bullish in and around, actually a tutorial that I was working on this week. And so to preface this, the beginning of the year was a little rough when it came to Bitcoin

privacy tools and the top-down pressures that came about in shutting down and arresting down and arresting the samurai founders as well as, and maybe I'll bring up this article here. this was when ZK Snacks discontinued their coin join coordinator as of the 1st of June. They had previously said, hey, we're going to continue running it

and this was much earlier, and they were voluntarily doing some type of on-chain analysis to say yes or no to those that were trying to coin join, which is kind of when I started opting not to use

that tool anymore. But in the end, they ended up just discontinuing the coordinator anyways. So we saw a lot of stuff that wasn't super promising in and around Bitcoin privacy tools. And so because of these top-down pressures and the reason that I'm bullish is I think that maybe not fully yet, but I think we're starting to move from the NAP stage of Bitcoin privacy tools to more of the BitTorrent stage of Bitcoin privacy tools. And what I mean by that is not quite as easy to clamp down upon. And so I ended up doing a video and I did it this, dropped it this morning, but I kind of worked on it throughout the week about using wasabi

wallet with different coordinators. And, and And again, it's still early stages, but you're starting to see various coordinators pop up, some of them with zero fees. And they are, and once again, enabling people to use coin join with Wasabi. And there is even a Likwisabi Noster account, which catalogs kind of the liquidity of some of these coin join coordinators. And so right now, it's very much skewed towards one particular coordinator. So this one here, in the past 24 hours, it's had 20 Bitcoin join in new for coin join rounds,

and it is currently remixing around 401 Bitcoin over the course of that period of time. Now, when you go down the next one down the list, you know, again, this totaling around 35 Bitcoin, and then it goes down to single digits from there. So it's heavy skewed towards one. But the reason that I'm happy to see this stuff start to pop up is, yes, you know, you could play whackamol and take out the top coordinator. But a lot of that liquidity will then move to another option, another option, much like, you know, pirou. Bay getting shut down and Pirate Bay too pops up like a few days later kind of thing. And so while it's early days for some of these coordinators and I recognize this, there's a lot of

nuance here. Just the mere fact that options are are popping up and tools are popping up makes me happy. And a secondary one, again, utilizing Noster in a different way. Again, the Likwasabi and the ability to find coordinators over on Nostor. is kind of due to the fact that it's hard to censor or take down posts. But Joinster looks very interesting in that it's using Noster relays to actually coordinate the coin join rounds. I'm yet to play with this. There is an Electrum plugin that's available right now.

It seems to the, we'll say we can cautiously, optimistically say eventually it'll be on Google Play, but that's obviously easily prevented or taken off the app store. But nonetheless, I'm just, I'm happy to see this move towards thinking at least a little bit more adversarially and building out some of these tools so that at the very least, it will just be an ongoing game of whackamol rather than pointing a finger at a singular registered, company and then arresting its founders. So that's why I'm at with my bullishness. It's, it's cautious bullishness. But I'm curious to hear your guys' thoughts in and around the state of Bitcoin privacy where the tools are at, anything that you've seen positive and or negative

around that. So whoever wants to dive in. Well, I think the irony of what you said there, I mean, you went and talked about, you know, the Pirate Bay and how you could get the Pirate Bay too and all this. in that world the pirate bay continually doesn't die and it's quite funny how in the world of torrents a lot of people actually complain about the pirate bay because it's this big centralized thing that doesn't seem to go away

it doesn't seem to get replaced by their stuff doesn't get replaced by any you know alternatives or decentralized alternatives or anything like that and you know it's the kind of thing where it almost looks like a fed off in some ways except it does work So like it's a funny example to go bring up because it kind of makes your points, but I don't think in the way you expected. And wasabi could end up being the same thing.

I mean, you could easily have a coordinator who just says fuck it and refuses to go to the pressure. And the nature of the internet means that unless entities are strongly censoring the internet, if there's some country which just doesn't care and allows a coordinator to be hosted, that could just go on in December. And currently, there is one major coordinator that seems to be running in the sort of wasabi world. It's kind of gotten all the traffic. And, you know, how long will I like going?

I have no idea. Well, we'll cross our fingers, right? And hopefully it's not the feds. I did want to quickly, before I get Jimmy's thoughts here, I did want to quickly show, again, kind of the ease of swapping. a coordinator just for anybody who's unfamiliar. Before, this is this is Wasabi and pretty much how it happened before is you just download it.

Everything would just kind of start up in the background. It would link to their coordinator and you just deposit and would automatically coin join. But since they sunset their coordinator, it's pretty much just a quick setting to change.

And it even does ask you off the top of the setup if you want to add a coordinator. But, more or less, like here on the Likwasabi account here, based on the liquidity, you can just click over to the website of the coordinator you want to use. There's a little box with this URL, and I can just copy it. And then in Coinjoin, or in Wasabi, you just go to coordinator and you just paste it in right here, and then you hit done and you restart the wallet.

And then you're pretty much good to go. You can also, as I've done, you can connect to your own node. So I've got this connected to my own Start 9. You can, you know, obviously connect your hardware and coin join directly into cold storage. But, you know, the switching of the coordinator is not a difficult task. And I'm glad that they incorporated it into the initial setup of the wallet. So maybe that also helps with. It actually going to point out something that just happened today.

And I'll preface this by saying, I don't quite understand the full technical details, exactly the nuance here. But I think what I'm about to say is basically correct, which is basically for blockchain information, Wasabi was running a central server that would provide block data and so on and so forth. And that central server has gone down to lot of funding. And as far as I can tell, having your own nodes connect to is really critical there, because it can use your own node and lose that central server. And basically, I believe, I could be wrong with this, but I believe the current status is it will work just fine without it.

Like I say, this just happened to say I haven't had time to go test it myself, for sure. But, you know, this is how I've always ran wasabi with my own nodes sitting on the same virtual machine that I run wasabi in. Yeah, yeah, it's, again, I'm funny enough, I posted this and right after that news, And there was a couple of people commented, oh, their back end is down to the time. Of course, the timing of it. But I actually didn't notice because I was connected to my note, at least as far as I understand, everything seems to be working just fine. So, yeah, there you go. Run a note. Jimmy, I'm curious to get some of your thoughts in around this. Yeah, it's funny because what you saw as the part that sort of made you hesitant about Bitcoin privacy,

which was a lot of these centralized services being taken down and the federal governments of various countries attacking them. I see that as the bullish part because that's how you weed out all of the single points of failure and that's how you make the system more robust. Once you take down the parts that are easy to take down, then you get solutions that are way more robust and sort of resilient to these attacks. So every time you get attacked, at least in any decentralized system, you get better solutions. And the things that survive tend to be the ones that are immune to the things that the other things that didn't survive.

It's kind of like a continual evolution. So I see those attacks as a good thing, at least for the long-term viability of Bitcoin privacy. And honestly, to a large degree, I don't think we've been attacked enough to have a truly robust solution. that's actually decentralized, that is very robust, that is very, you know, good for the user and has all of the properties that I think we all eventually want. We need some people to, you know, like kind of try things and then those don't work. And then, you know, you iterate. And it's sort of this like market back and forth.

And, you know, I gave a talk a while ago on how Bitcoin is anti-fragile and have how every time it gets attacked, it grows and strengthens. And I see privacy as definitely one of those areas where we could actually stand to be attacked a little bit more. So we know where our vulnerabilities are because every time you get exposed on a vulnerability, you get innovation and people like not covering just that vulnerability, but all kinds of other vulnerabilities. So, you know, we have different solutions that are trying to be more decentralized using

Noster to do the coordination and things like that. Those are very good innovations. If we had to rely on a single domain to make it work, you could just go to a DNS and just like shut it off or whatever. It makes it very vulnerable. So I see that as the bullish thing is getting attacked so that we can patch all of these things before we get the flood of people in the next few cycles or whatever. Yeah.

I guess go ahead I mean I got to jump in on one note there was that you know Noster is not decentralized I mean the way that these kind of coin joint ideas of a Nostra work is simply that you go pick

some Nostra relays and then you just go and relay the data it's really no different than Wasabi coordinator than changing a few details of protocol under the hood and you know when you compare that to a Nostra coordinator or sorry I'm a wasabi coordinator

The wasabi coordinator has a lot of advantages, though, because you can do things that a pure nostril protocol can do things protect you from attackers that are, for instance, trying to go pretend to do coin joints to go and be your only coin joint partners. So ironically, I would actually go say the wasabi thing is the thing that excites me more out of those two. And I also want to make the point that there's a very big difference between centralization of protocol like wasabi and centralization of protocol like bitcoin because when wasabi fails it's other than of course a potential privacy failure um any other type of failure is just an

inconvenience you know means you can't use it briefly but your coins are still there you know your coins are always under your control versus when something like bitcoin fails you know and hypothetically if bitcoin was a central server obviously that central server failed everyone to lose their money you know there's a very different set of trade-offs between a coin join protocol in like a you know something like an e-cash so what my question then would be is uh given that you're bullish on the wasabi thing versus the nostril thing wouldn't that type wouldn't that in and of itself being attacked also be that hardening of so you're saying like oh well there's there's going to be people that are doing fake coin joins.

There's going to be, you know, some types of attack that wasabi may have been able to prevent our now attack vectors. Do you think that over time that further hardens the ecosystem, though, and forces us to grapple with each one of these issues and create even more robust options? Unfortunately, like, unfortunately, that type of attack. doesn't because it's privacy attack. It's very hard to go and realize that you're actually being attacked. Whereas the attack, it's just taking down a central server.

I mean, you know it's happened because it no longer works. And between those two, this is why I'm much more bullish on wasabi, which accepts that it has the central server issue. Of course, you can change the server, but you know, at least in the near term, I mean, it's the inconvenience versus something like a coin to go over Nostra, which is still just as centralized, but then because it doesn't take advantage of the centralization is much weaker in other ways. I don't know.

What do you think, Jimmy? Do you have any qualms with what was said? I mean, I don't do that many coin joints, so I can't speak to the specifics. But I don't admit to doing that many. Yeah, I mean, you don't admit to do this. Well, I'm going to have to say that I can't reveal whether I do coin joint or not. But regardless, the point is that there's more things being tried. And the market's very good at finding what works.

And that's the beauty of the whole iterative evolution of all of these things, is that once they're found to be vulnerable or if there's an obvious attack back there, those things kind of get patched through either the same protocol hardened, or a different protocol together. I've got to also imagine that. If you can convince the public, the protocols are vulnerable. I mean, I think like Samurai showed,

that's not, that's a hard thing to do. And you know, the alternative to wasabi isn't like Nostro, you know, join, coin joints. It's something like join market, which is designed from the ground up to be decentralized and does a very good job of it. You know, it has different pluses and minuses

than wasabi, but both are good protocols that do well with the constraints of what they're trying to do. Yeah. In the coordinator realm, I've got to believe that over time, you know, if some of these coordinators continue to work, you know, that regardless of top-down pressures, that there'll be a gradual kind of, I guess, reputation that some of these get over time. And I anticipate the same with things like fetamints and cashew mints and things like that, where, yes, obviously, whether you like the idea of mints at all or not, I imagine, like, right now it's just kind of a, it's a crapshoot whether or not you get a good one. And the same could be true of some of these coordinators. but if they've been around for an extended period of time,

then some of them will gain a degree of trust, and again, operative word being trust over time and become a little bit more reliable to use. I don't know. Well, I mean, this is why having protocols that give you mathematical guarantees is so important, though. You know, we consider like, you know, Wasami doesn't work this way,

but consider a coin join protocol where the coordinator did know all the inputs and outputs in that kind of environment it might be that the quote-unquote most trustworthy longest running you know biggest volume apparently coin joins were actually the runs run by chain houses because they'd have the budgets go and you know do all this work to go to you know deanonautize you i mean you got to be careful with this stuff i mean this is precisely why was sobby created a very clever, very difficult to influence, very mathematical protocol to go and make sure that even they don't know the linkage between inputs and outputs. And that's so important to do things like that. Fair enough. Well, I mean, all we can do is, I guess, see how all this plays out over time.

I'm, again, optimistic. I'm happy to see things kind of working thus far despite I guess the back end going down for Wasabi today is still chugging away with my node

and yeah it's interesting to revisit Wasabi is the first time I've played with it since the old version like the 1.1.0 version so either way I encourage people to at least learn about this stuff and start

kind of you know maybe don't toss much in it but learn a little bit about how it works jam is great if you're running that on like a start nine or an umbrella or something like that that's another cool

one to play with and yeah I have yet to I haven't used Joinster so I have yet to form an opinion on that one but we shall see so either way I'll put bow on that topic and thanks for indulging me in that one but we're going to do a rotation here and jimmy i'm going to toss it to you now and i'm going to cue you up with the same question everybody

gets why are you bullish well uh i'm bullish in the long term for a whole host of reasons mostly around bitcoin being the hardest money in existence and all that but i'm i'm more bullish in the short term because of the Fed rate cut that's coming in the next few weeks. And I think that's an obvious political reality. And, you know, I don't want to put too much on the Fed, you know, like lowering it by a quarter or a half point or something. But it is sort of like a signal because they haven't lowered rates in a very long time. And that they're basically crying uncle at this point because they realize there's

too many things kind of that they're having to balance with unemployment and inflation and things like that. And there's obviously an election here and they want things to be good in November. So there's a there's a lot of political pressure. I don't think this will be the end of the cuts. They're almost always sort of like moving one way or the other. But it does mean that as low, you know, as they move and sort of like destroy the Fiat system from inside itself, you know, you'll get more loose monetary policy. You'll get more money flooding in. Though, like, we'll see.

It's entirely possible they'll cut rates and the market goes down or something because they anticipated even bigger cuts. So, but the fact that they're crying, uncle tells me that there, Something broke and probably several things broke. And, you know, the breakdown of the Fiat system is something that I've been waiting for. And that's what makes me bullish. We're actually on our third, we just had our third rate cut here in Canada this year so far. We're backpedaling quickly, I suppose.

But yeah, the rest of the world seems to kind of hinge and really react to what the U.S. does. It obviously has an overweighted impact on everybody else. Interesting that, again, I find that Bitcoin will have like a very sharp reaction to something initially. like you'll see spikes or drops. And it's, you know, people roll in the dice on, on certain news items. But then it's kind of like a gradual catch-up afterwards to the new economic reality. I feel like, again, people will, based on whether or not there's a rate cut or how large the rate cut is, there'll be an initial price movement, and then it'll just kind of go back to where it was

and then slowly work its way up into the right over time. But yeah, I don't know. Like Peter, do you have any feelings either way in and around the Fed, rate cuts, fiat implosion? I mean, see, that was kind of a funny topic because depending on your perspective, I would say I'm either bullish or bearish on that. And I think I would say I'm bearish on Bitcoin's price going up because of this kind of, general economic action. But simultaneously, that's because I'm very bullish about where politics is going.

You know, I go look at, as an example, you know, the new president of Argentina, who seems to have turned the economy around by just straight common sense policies. And, you know, he has certainly been looked at by so many other politicians who see it, hang on a second. You know, I could go pull up the same thing here and maybe, you know, win an election or not lose an election. And I'm not going to say this is going to happen in every country, but you know, you look at Canada, for instance, how a much more saner politician is, you know, is the one whose

projections go win if an election gets called. And it may be that election gets called much sooner than otherwise, you know, due to internal politics. I won't get into all that. But, you know, in that perspective, I think what Bitcoiners might find is that a lot of the course corrections, fixing the problems of the current economic system happened faster than they expect it to before Bitcoin actually, you know, gets the traction that they really want. You know, like it or not, like a well-run Fiat

currency, yeah, it's not going to last forever, but they do pretty well in the short term, and the short term can be a lot longer than you wanted to go hold your Bitcoin for. I, uh, I wonder how, again, because the, the, that politicians and central bankers take, obviously there's a lag to those having any, any real effect, obviously.

Like, you know, something moves and certainly there's an initial reaction. But it's, again, like, you know, we print a bunch of money. And obviously, there's no inflation, like, right out the gate. And so we just go on our merry way until a year, year and a half later. Oh, my God, we've got. Well, it could be a lot faster than that. I mean, you print the money and you print the money and get into the hands of a lot of people. Inflation happens pretty quick.

You know, we saw that with COVID when they just basically helicoptered in money to everyone. Yeah, I guess it depends what numbers you're looking at, too. Like, are you looking at the official numbers or are you looking at your grocery bill? Yeah, I mean, it's it's but I mean even with and Canada had a hell of a lot more Stimies going around than the US. What was Jimmy? What did they send out in terms of Stimmy checks in the US like over? I think six hundred dollars initially it was like twelve hundred if you're a married couple and then they had one with like depending on the number of children so I got a lot for that obviously but but yeah there there were

there were various things but the biggest one was the PPP loans which he didn't have to pay back yeah like that was there was so much fraud in that and pretty much every institution in the US that had more than I don't know even like 20 employees or something took money and it was just just a flood of money that that came in and hey the M2 I kind of showed it right like it went from 15 trillion to 22 trillion in like two years like two years. Yeah. And notably the way the PPP loans were set up is that you could create new institutions

go and collect them. You know, there were ways to do that suddenly the creation of new businesses suddenly goes through the root because people are fraudulently creating businesses to fraudulently collect these loans. That's true. And I mean, in Canada we had, it was if you couldn't go to work, which you were deemed that you were unable to go to work because it was...

You are non-essential or essential or something like that? Yeah, if you're a non-essential and you couldn't work and you couldn't work remotely, the government, like you were getting I think $2,000 a month. You could just get checks from the government. Oh, yeah, that was the other one, the 99 weeks of unemployment that you got.

That was pretty huge in the U.S. as well. And I mean, most people, like, there were people that claim that and used other excuses to get checks that they'll never be able to pay it back. And the government has tried to collect and probably has collected on some of it. But I mean, I personally know people that got money in a way that they shouldn't have. And they're like they have no financial means to even try to pay it back. And to be clear, I mean, if you did qualify for it, you did not pay it back.

You know, this was free, this was free money. Yeah. And for a lot of people, the nature of like how they qualified really made it relatively free money. Like, you know, a good example is if you had a job that on average was kind of inconsistent, you could consistently collect this on the basis that you're unemployed, even though in any, in any real circumstance you went to be unemployed half the time anyway yeah i i wonder again because when when we were seeing the the numbers uh you know in terms of inflation in the u.s versus canada um they it was pretty it wasn't too far apart again and these are official numbers

but I feel like we went a little bit crazier than the U.S. But maybe that's not the case because like the the business loans and stuff like that. Maybe we didn't. No, no, no. It was the case. You, you, especially on a per capita basis, I think you had way more money printed. Well, I mean, you had about the same number of same amount printed, but the thing is a US is the World Reserve currency. And there's always a, there's a bigger market for it.

So essentially the U.S. can export inflation to places like Canada. Usually it goes further down the line to like the poor suckers in Nigeria and Turkey. And of course, they suffered just way worse than Canadians did. But Canada isn't the U.S., so it suffered a little more. And I would say people in Japan and all those places suffered around the same amount as maybe Canada did. but the U.S. always suffers the least because they're the World Reserve Prize. It's definitely particularly pronounced nowadays the grocery store. Like I've heard of people coming across into, you know, Ontario from driving up from the U.S.

to visit family and going to the grocery store and go, oh, my God, what happened here? And I mean, even like Niagara Falls straddling the border there, more or less the same house on either side of the border. It's like the difference in pricing in the housing market is, is absolutely ridiculous when you look at and the cost. Again, adjusted for the U.S. dollars. It's unbelievable. Well, I mean, that tells you that there was probably a lot of the money

going into real estate and, you know, like from assets rather than into groceries. But even the groceries there, I was in Pirano a few weeks ago. I got to make an important point here, though. So one issue with real estate was that COVID made tons of people move. So real estate on top of just general inflation also had this bizarre thing where suddenly everyone's preferences changed. And tons of people moved around to get out of the cities. And I suspect, and also because you were spending more time at home, their general willingness to spend money on property

and to where they live went up. So, you know, you get this whole double whammy effect that isn't true of other things. It was interesting here. So I'm in Calgary. And, you know, Vancouver and Toronto real estate markets, I mean, they've always been stupid, but they're particularly insane over the past few years. And what we noticed here was our real estate market initially wasn't as insane. And when I say that, like, again, I'm in a newer home as of 2020, and it's still ridiculous.

But over the course, as Vancouver and Toronto got worse and worse to the point where it's just more or less unlivable in terms of being able to actually purchase anything if you're, you know, if you're Gen Z. If you're a young person, you're just not, not ever going to own a home there. let alone anywhere else. But we saw an influx of people from Toronto and Vancouver say, I can't afford these cities and then flood into Calgary as an alternative. And thus, our estate market, as they started coming down in the other cities, started going up in arms.

And so my home, since 2020, again, in Canadian dollar terms, is 75% more. like it's three years three three and a half years well i mean but that that's just that's everywhere around the world like literally everywhere like and like you go almost any any major city or a suburb around there um you're you're going to see similar price like the and that that's that's uh you know the money going to where it's going to get preserved right like you don't want to go into an asset that's depreciating as quickly as the fiat currency

that you have. So it doesn't surprise me. But I mean, the weird thing about Canada is they have like weird zoning and building new places apparently is incredibly difficult. Yeah. The licensing in Vancouver is some, I think it's like 50% of the cause of the home or some like some high double digit. A lot of rent seeking that you're funding with these home prices. But yeah, yeah, that seems to be the case. Well, and I mean, Canada, you know, Canadian population can is exploding right now not because Canadians are having more sex because they're importing a lot more quote-unquote Canadians so you know that that's on top of all this stuff yeah yeah the birth or i mean the birth rate in canada is is plummeting it's very low yeah yeah not the lowest

in the world they're places that are worse but you know yeah i mean you can't blame people for not wanting to have kids if they can barely afford to support themselves. Like it's just this nihilistic. I mean, the thing is like, you know, in the past, people would go have kids when they could barely afford it. You know, something has changed in culture. People used to have kids when like, you know, you have eight of them and two of them dies starvation. And that's considered good. You know, that's considered to be pretty damn successful.

Like, the culture is changed. Yeah. Well, I mean, but that used to be. when, you know, people, like 80% of the population were farmers. And for any sort of farming activity, you need a lot of labor. And having kids was a way to be more productive with the land that you had. So that was a lot of it. I think that's very trite, though. Like, that may be part of how this culturally evolved. But in terms of what people actually believe, I don't think you can really, like, pin it down so easily. And, you know, one example is you look at Baby Boom, you know, in

the West following World War II. Something happened with the psychology that said, all, we're going to go have a bunch of kids. We're going to all get married. You know, that wasn't because of a sudden increase in farming. That was something else going. Yeah, that was something else. Uh, I probably do to sort of like that experience of war and like just seeing that things were, uh, you know, things could end at any minute that, that sort of like one or the alternative, shit, we just won and we have Christian values and you know now that now we have all this wealth because uh all this you know war you know war manufacturing suddenly turn into something else i mean it's it's it's i don't think

there's an obvious conclusion there i think optimistic people are more inclined yeah if you have hope you definitely are more inclined to have kids under some cultures yeah and i and i and i would also argue there's there's something to be said about um the directionality of of I guess your living circumstances. A lot of people right now are growing up where their parents had

materially more than them. And so they were used to a certain living standard and they see that being diminished over time. And so then that I think probably plays into the psychology of like if it's gotten worse for me and I can afford less than what I was used to as a kid with my parents, then what are my kids if I had kids?

First of all, how am I going to be able to afford them to my previous understanding of what the living standard I should be at or perceived? And then what are they going to have to deal with when they're born? So I think that the directionality of quality of life plays into it. Because obviously, like, somebody who's not doing so hot by today's standards is living like a king, you know, compared to 200 years ago and, you know, people would have... You mean the water comes out of a tap? What? You can heat and or cool your home? Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to go outside to

poop. Yeah. Just gets taken away. The poo just disappears. Yeah. There we go. There's, there's a clip where we're bullish on poo being taken up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, I think in a general sense, there's there's always reason to be bullish in and around the Fiat cogs continuing to turn and gradually ruin themselves. So yeah, I agree. There's a lot of can kicking that can still be done. But yeah, I mean, as with everything Fiat related, this to eventually will be good for Bitcoin. So with that, I'll put a little, I guess, bow on this topic and we're going to do one final rotation. Before I do, though, I got to give one last shout out to show sponsor. So Peter, we're going to jump to you as soon as we get back.

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You can sign up with just an email address, and once you're there, you can start browsing offers immediately, whether you're looking to buy and sell, or whether you're looking to lend or borrow. You can check them out today at the links down below. All right, we're back in and we're going to give away some quick sats before we dive into Peter's reason for being bullish. So I'll just pull it up really quick here. Bitcoin Wellb Dashboard, we're going to use some of our accumulated points

to toss a coin in the Bitcoin Wishing Well where you can win somewhere between 500 and potentially a million sets. So I'm going to toss that in. I'm going to enlarge a little bit, so it's scanable. And 500 sats, whoever scans at first, one person can snag them away. If you do snag the sats, be sure to let us know either in the chat or hit me up on Noster or X or wherever you're watching this in the comments on YouTube and let me know. And so with that, gents, we're going to dive into the final topic here. Peter, I'm going to agree you up with the same question. Why are you bullish?

Well, as some of you may know, I did recently put out this big, she is like 35, 40 page paper on Covenants dependence L2 systems. And, you know, what I mean by that is, well, first of all, when I talk with L2, I'm talking about systems such as lightning that allow you to go trade Bitcoin. You know, we're trying to go of Bitcoin denominated L2 systems after all. And they have one of two properties. Either no one can basically economically perform fraud against them, or with a much more preferred option, you can always withdraw your coins on chain. And, you know, just putting it out there, that's kind of the definition we're talking about. That's why, like lightning applies to something like, say, liquid or e-catch doesn't because it's centralized. Now, what's interesting about this is there's a lot of things that are more scalable than lightning that are coming out.

And, you know, the issue with lightning, of course, is that a lightning channel needs one UTXO per channel. And if you want to go and scale lightning to like the entire world, you know, you need it. Everyone who wants to be fully custodial, sorry, fully self-custodial with their lightning walls and have a UTXO. And where the covenant dependent health use systems comes in is basically clever ways of having multiple users share when UTXO. So there's just less on-chain footprint. And I will say after writing that paper, I'm bullish for two interesting reasons. And the first of one is that lightning is actually pretty damn good. You know, I mean, a really interesting staff I dug up researching the paper was that in the entire world,

There's only roughly 4 billion people with a smartphone. And it's not a likely that NEMR actually goes down, given that overall birth rates are going down. You know, the developed, or at least somewhat developed world where people can afford a smartphone, that's probably going to go shrink in the future rather than increase. You know, smartphone penetration, I mean, you know, there's a limit to how many people to have a smartphone in the world.

And, you know, that's kind of the barrier to be. being self-custodial. You've got to have a computer. And for the average person, the phone is a computer. So long start short is when you work this out, it's likely that the existing lightning protocol with no really fundamental changes can support something like hundreds of millions of users. That's a significant chunk of like 4 billion people.

So we may find that we actually scale lightning up to basically everyone who wants to hold Bitcoin. you know, without that much difficulty. And then secondly, in the review I did a bell two stuff, it looks like there's some protocols that are reasonable. A particular ARC seems to be, you know, a protocol that's, well, it doesn't have the same properties as Lightning. It doesn't have the same properties that eCash.

It is properties that can make sense in certain cases. And us getting to a point where you can run ARP on Bitcoin, You know, you enable check template verify, we're probably basically there. I mean, it's not that much of a stretch. I mean, as it is, you can actually run a modified version of ARC where, you know, the people using it going to sign off a bit of a transaction. And that you can run on main that Bitcoin right now. People are actually writing this.

So I guess you'd say, you know, there's my bullishness. It's bullish on tech because we seem to have a pretty good job of coming up with new tech, yes again to go and push Bitcoin scaling further. And, you know, if you're required, of course, me being a professional bear, I've got lots of caveats there. But, you know, the general tendency, I think, is good. And much the same way, if you ask the same question 10 years ago, I probably would have said, well, you know, there's a bunch of caveats to this L2 concept.

But we'll probably get there. And sure enough, we did. Now, I've got a question then. In and around, I mean, obviously there's been some drum. in and around trying to introduce some of these things that enable covenants. Oh, boy. Has there been drama? Yeah.

So I'm curious, I guess, from both of you, because this is a bit of a blind thought for me. So I'm curious to hear the takes on, first of all, like, just a general gist of where's the drama coming from? And then, you know, I guess kind of laying out the case on either side what people are seeing why they do or don't want things like CTV or some of the other proposals out there. I mean, there's been a lot of different proposals. And that's part of the problem. It's sort of a fragmented landscape because there's literally like five or six different viable. code changes that would enable covenant some of them require you to like pre-sign a bunch of stuff others not um you know there there there's um there there's a lot of different sort of like pieces

and some of them work together to enable certain other things and stuff like that so it's um part of it is is that fragmentation there's no one covenants proposal that everyone is behind It also didn't help that Jeremy was pushing just so hard for Opsi TV for like a few years. Almost to the like he kind of turned off a lot of the people that were like kind of, you know, watching and saying, hey, like, okay, this might be reasonable. But he was just so much like, we need to get in get this in now. What do I need to do? He almost kind of treated it almost like kind of like a fiat. hierarchy almost like whose permission do I need to get to get this thing in and that's that's

not how consensus works right like it you don't you don't go get permission from the CEO of Bitcoin and then get this feature in but that's that's kind of almost how you approached it I mean he he built demos he did he did workshops he did all kinds of stuff which I think we're good but like in a sense like the the entire Covenants thing is, you know, there's a lot of cool things that you can do. And I get that as an engineer. It's very exciting because, oh, now you can open a lightning channel with somebody that without them being online or something like that. Like that sounds cool, right?

But here's the thing about like making changes within Bitcoin is you know what you're, you know at least some of the exciting things that you're able to do. But you don't necessarily know all of the drawbacks. and you're not entirely clear on like how this will come about or whether some of these exciting new cases use cases are actually going to make a difference right and this is a thing about like enabling some of this stuff if it turns out to be a dud then it's like you you put all that in work in for nothing and you used a lot of the social capital maybe or the momentum that you might be able to get for some sort of a soft fork and and you've sort of dissipated it on a complete dud.

And that, I mean, not to say that that would happen, but that's not, that's a non-zero possibility. And that's something that you have to account for. So, so that's sort of like the tension is, you know, like things were pretty good right now. And I think Peter just made the case that, you know, lightning just as it is without any, anything else, it's entirely possible that it can serve the needs of the entire world already. And by the way, Peter, I did not expect you to be bullish on the fact that we're reducing in population, right?

Like, that's not a reason to be bullish that I expected. It's bullish for one thing. It's not bullish for another thing. Much the same way as that I was very bullish and bullish simultaneously with inflation. But, you know, that's kind of the idea is that, you know, like, do we actually need it? Or are we just sort of indulging engineers sort of like desire to go build something that they want to build rather than what the, you know, the entire Bitcoin community wants? And that's the real tension here is that there is sort of like this desire to move forward and do cooler things just from an engineering perspective. And, you know, I mean, maybe there are real use cases that would be get heavily utilized.

But we don't really know that versus like a lot of users that are like, oh, do we really need this? Bitcoin kind of already works pretty well for my needs. And like there like as much as we talk about covenants, is there any company that's like going and, you know, providing sort of like versions of the covenant? functionality that's making money off of it. I don't necessarily see strong market demand for these things other than engineers wanting to play with it and do these cool things and things like that. And engineers aren't necessarily very good at reading the market and saying, okay, like this is what the market actually needs or not.

Well, I think like CTV is a very interesting. example of that problem because it would be in what two three years ago maybe when the ct was first kind of getting proposed and there was first a supporter of activity and i remember i wrote on the bitcoin dip mailing list uh response to this proposed ctv bp going through and saying hey you know you just have not made your case like you list these use cases but the use cases aren't very good you know and you haven't really flushed them out to the point where we can actually say yes this is the correct thing to do and i think like i think what kind of saved jeremy ctv is that other use cases were developed by other people stuff that i don't think he had really fully

conceived up um but certainly at the time i mean you just don't you know you just don't go and waste all that effort and put all that um risk into enabling something when you just haven't made the case now by contrast um you know of course i've done I've got my own software implemented, Checkbox on Verify. With Checkbox on Verify, I think, first of all, of course, the Bitcoin market cap is far smaller when Checkbox on Verify was being debated and discussed. So certainly the consequences are just less. You know, there's a lot less money on the table when Bitcoin's, you know, $10 or whatever it was,

and with Bitcoin's, you know, $50,000. But the other thing is that one thing that Check Blockton Verify clearly enabled was paying channels. Everyone could see this would be useful. And it's like, you know, we all knew this would be something that would get used. And the way it did it was just so simple that, in a fairness, CTTV is quite simple too. But, you know, I think between those two factors, well, really three factors, it was much easier to get it in. Whereas, you know, Jeremy didn't make that case. And then on top of this, the burned bridges, doing silly stunts, like saying, well, we're going to do a UASF for a CTV. You know, it's just not good politics.

You know, it makes people piss off. And I guess the credit of the Bitcoin community, I think the tech people are reasonable enough. It's not like, you know, now we've just said, oh, yeah, it's terrible. We're never going to look at it again. But if CTV gets implemented, the reason will not be Jeremy. the fact that the idea was good. If I'm not mistaken, Jimmy, we had a, I emceed a panel on Soft Forks with you, Jeremy, and Paul Stork in Miami a couple of years of those.

It's funny enough, it wasn't too antagonistic amongst the three. Well, I kind of understood both their positions, right? In the sense that they had been, well, Paul, like seven years and Jeremy for like two years at that point have been trying to get people excited about their soft work. It just, but like

the consensus kept changing on them so like they couldn't do it, right? I mean, I mean, at least that was the... I wouldn't, well, so with Jeremy, I think the consensus is changing on

CTV. With drive chains, I think the consensus among reasonable tech people has always been it's a terrible idea. It'll always be a terrible idea. If it ever gets impulsive or scrooge. Yeah. But what I could sense from both of them was that they were both extremely frustrated with the process. And, you know, the point I made during that panel was, okay, like, you're, you're never going to have like some fixed process to go get consensus. That's not how consensus works. And the consensus is always changing because there's always new people coming into Bitcoin

and new users. And like Peter pointed out, the market cap is growing and like Bitcoin at $10 is very different than Bitcoin at $53,000. And those are very, you have different tradeoffs and risks that you have to think about. And you're not necessarily going to be able to convince them. And I sense that frustration and that. And I can't. blame them for the frustration, but at the same time, like, this is kind of what you have to do if you want to get something in, is you really have to make a really good case before everybody and you have to convince them, hey, like, this is the right thing to do. And to Peter's point, I think Paul's gone, done way worse the job of that than Jeremy. Jeremy's more or less

shut up, which honestly has probably been the best thing for Opsie TV because it's sort of have shown it, shown like, okay, yeah, there are, like, kind of cool things that you can do, and other people are sort of making the case for him, which I think is more effective than him advocating for himself. Paul, on the other hand, is, like, talking about a hard fork or something and, like, launching his own coin. It's like, it's like weird, very weirdly influence the soft fork. Yeah. But it's, it's getting, like, further and, further off the rails because like this is kind of his baby or something and uh and that that that's a sense i get with stuff like that and i honestly i don't uh i don't expect either of those

to to get implemented anytime soon i mean i guess paul could through some sort of soft work that's minority or something like that uh but i i don't expect either of them to really uh get traction any time soon, in part because of sort of how long it's gone on and how I don't see the traction there for consensus. I mean, with something like OPCLTV, it was pretty obvious that it had, you know, it had at least convinced all the technical folks, hey, this could be very useful. And there was functionality that it would enable that we needed for certain things that we all wanted to do. But with Opsi TV or drive chains or something like that, I just don't see that level.

And again, the community is bigger. There are more people depending on Bitcoin and so on. So I think it's probably an order of magnitude harder or more than it was, say, six, seven, eight years ago. And that it's only going to get harder from here as Bitcoin gets, you know, like more higher in price with more use cases and more people depending on it. Peter, I let's just, I kind of disagree with you on this, though, where, you know, the difference between CTP and drug chains is not the person behind it.

That is not the big difference. The big difference is one of them is a reasonable idea and the other one is a terrible idea. If I decided to spend 10 years of my life trying to push for, you know, off-drive chain, I couldn't do it. Because there is no way to convince other people that's a good idea. It's just fundamentally a bad idea. Like, you know, maybe I could go do it with like really nasty political games and I try to force the issue. But there's no way I could do this through consensus. It's just a bad idea.

You know, that's just how it is. Whereas CTB, you know, I think there's a way to screw up the politics and piss people off. But because it's fundamentally a good idea, potentially, and I'm increasingly leaning to, it is actually a reasonably good idea. There is a way to go convince people, regardless what political mistakes you've made. You know, you just need to go get other people to say, hey, I actually need this thing for the end of this. and it kind of builds on that. And, you know, I'll make an analogy even to my own, like Checkbox Hub Verify, no matter how hard I tried, like, you know,

if I had hypothetically back in 2014 said, you know what, I see that CheckLothel Verifies a good idea. I am going to poison the well. I will make sure it never gets implemented. I would have actually failed at that because it's such a thing that Bitcoin needs that someone would have come off and said, yeah, that Peter guy was crazy, but let's do this anyway. So, Peter, how do you see this playing out in terms of CTV or some of these other proposals?

Do you think that, I mean, you must think that there's a reasonable possibility that's something that's implemented over time. Oh, yeah. No, no, I definitely do. And I think the most likely path at the moments that I could easily foresee is someone makes a good case for ARC. and then through ARC, they go and make the case indirectly for CTV. And basically the reason why what CTB fits this really well is, it's just fundamentally about saying that I want to commit in advance to how this GTXO split up. And you can already do this with signatures. The signatures have this very fundamental drawback that other things can be signed.

But this is actually, you kind of reminisce it to my own checkbox to verify, where prior to the check block and verify op code, you absolutely could make a covenant-ish-like thing where you said these coins can be spent in the future. But because it wasn't an op-code, there was always the alternative of spending them with signature. CTV is like that. You can always enforce a CTV-like condition

by just pre-signing a transaction, but you cannot assure that that's the only way it could play out. And CTV lets you say, well, we're going to do the equivalence of pre-signed transaction, but we will know that there's no hype cynical other signature. And that's the same reason why you can do ARC without CTB if every single participant agrees in every single part of the rank. Okay. So that's the, that would be the benefit or the functionality gain with adding CTV is, is just like you can't go back on your word of your intended eventual use of that particular UTXO.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think like what you said is kind of fuzzy, but I think it does encapsulate, you know, what it really means, you know, what CTV really mean in this context. You know, and obviously, you know, that'll be used in certain ways by protocols, but I think you're correct in saying, yeah, it's this way of committing in advance to how a coin will be spent. Interesting. I need to uh, brush up on my understanding of all. Again, it's, I always feel like there's, there's so much going on. There's so many proposals. And I guess it's not really my realm. It's more dealing with what is currently available to me right now. So in a lot of these debates, as things are being discussed

about what may or may not happen in the future, I find my bandwidth a little limited in in learning about this other stuff because I'm so preoccupied with all the tools that are currently available. And I think that's your role, right? I think that's okay because there are a lot of proposals that end up coming to nothing. So I don't think you need to learn about drive chains at all. Like I think it's ever going to get re-implented. So why do you need to worry about it?

In a sense, like the service that you're giving to your audience is showing them how to do stuff that they need to do. And if there is like a functionality that you think is missing, that's when you need to speak up and say, hey, like, we need something like this because it's a problem that a lot of people are having and so on. So for me, that that's how it should work, where, you know, there is sort of like robust technical debate. But, you know, not everyone needs to be participating in that debate and like knowing all the details of this stuff. Honestly, there's so much in there like with the different covenant proposals and how they're suddenly different and what it enables and, you know, what the savings are here and what the tradeoffs are there and stuff like that. that you know, you could easily get lost in the weeds and like, like, ultimately so much of it might end up just like not mattering at all. So I don't think it's necessarily great time spent. But I got to point out, though, I mean, yes, you know, as an example, the difference between like CCB and TX-Dash, it's kind of academic as far as people tell, you know, that's kind of the weeds thing.

But the difference between, say, CTV and OPCAT, that is a very big question about what do we want Bitcoin to do. Because, you know, CTV is an op code that commits to how you would spend a coin in the future. You know, it's currently restricted to. Offcat basically says, why don't we just go out of Ethereum like scripting to Bitcoin? You know, that could just do anything. And, you know, where our cat kind of raises a question for the wider community is what do we want Bitcoin to do? There's so many people pushing for our cash, they don't want it to go and make your Bitcoin trading marketage.

They want them to go bring very different things to Bitcoin, you know, things like Ethereum style marketplaces for tokens, you know, things like very complex financial instruments. You know, that's not just the technical question. That's also what does the Bitcoin mean you want Bitcoin to be? And that is something that, well, maybe some of the nuances aren't necessarily relevant to everyone. Certainly the bigger question of what should Bitcoin be is relevant to everyone. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely agree there. And as soon as you start saying, you know, this brings Ethereum style scripting to Bitcoin. I mean, there's, I mean, you kind of get that with Bivvm already,

but, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Not in like, not in a great way. I mean, I think, I, at least easiest way to explain BPM. It's like it's like you have a lightning channel with someone else, but the rules of how money can move can be done with a zero-dollar proof. That's very different than saying we can have a financial instrument with anyone that's reasonably efficient to implement that could do anything. In particular sense, of course, you know, the, what are they called? This big company right now is really pushing off cash for zero-knowledge of proof. because they think they can implement efficient and zero or not exclusive anything.

And then they would use that to then influence basically anything they want. That opens up a very big set of questions for Bitcoin. And a very concrete example of how this can be relevant is, of course, we've already seen in free spikes due to non-Bitcoin asset trading. Now, the way that stuff is implemented is impossible for us to have stopped. But with OffCats, you're potentially, even widening that markets in a way where we can't shop. We do not need to influence up that.

That's a choice in a way that token trading and testing at all is not a choice. Yeah. Again, I think I've in my limited understanding, I tend to lean on the side of being overly cautious with everything. I'm one of the crazy ones where Bitcoin is I'm just living on Bitcoin now and I do use it day to day and I do spend spend it and survive on it and earn it and everything. And maybe that's a little preemptive of me. But at the same time, I'd hate to see it no longer capable of doing the things that I want to do now. and hopefully that continues to be available to me.

Obviously, I know that on-chain, naturally, will become more expensive over time. But, you know, there are a lot of tools right now available to me. That makes me very optimistic for the use of Bitcoin as just day-to-day cash in the future as well. And my savings vehicle as well. So anyways, Jen, so I'm conscious of time. I've got to start winding down here. But there's a thing that I like to do at the end of every episode.

And I like to do just a quick round of any final thought or big takeaway that you have from the episode, but also, more importantly, a recommendation. And so the recommendation can take any form. It can be as simple as just a little piece of advice that you wish you had had through your Bitcoin journey early on. It could be a book or an article that you read. It could be, you know, a movie or a video or an app or a device or whatever you like, something that you think people watching will find useful. So I'll start off so that you guys have a moment to stew over that.

Yeah, I mean, my big takeaway from this conversation is that Bitcoin does continue. to evolve both on the base layer and in the tools in and around it and on subsequent layers. And there is always a flurry of activity despite people that are often alt-coin land, often pointing to Bitcoin and saying that it's stagnant. I think it's anything but it just depends on how much attention you're, paying to it. And again, as I was reiterating at the end of the last topic, I'm very optimistic in and around the tools.

They continue to be more and more useful to me. And as a person that is earning and living on Bitcoin and using it daily in various ways, the optionality that I have and the amount of tools that I have at my disposal continues to grow. and become easier to use. And so that makes me very, very happy. I recognize that it's not easy for everybody as of yet, but I think we're headed directionally into a good place. So that's kind of where I'm at.

In terms of things for people to check out, there is a book that I've now been reading. the last little bit. I'm just seeing if I can put here it is. Okay, I'm going to try and zoom in and bring it up here one sec here. So I had a guy on the show I'm going to say a few weeks ago now,

maybe a month, month and a half even. His name is Devin Rose. And he wrote a book called Chasing the Seeds. And it's a fiction book. And Bitcoin plays a, central role to the plot. And it's, you know, it's a fun little, I'll say, dramatic thriller. And yeah, it's, it's a good, like, just curl up and, and have, have a fun read kind of feel. So anyways, if you're looking for some Bitcoin adjacent fiction, go check out Chasing the Seeds by Devin Rose.

It's fun. So I'll toss it over to Jimmy then. And again, any final thought or takeaway as well as a recommendation if you have one? One thought that I've been having lately is about credit cards and sort of their convenience and how people use them. I'm becoming a little more anti-credit card as sort of like the CBDC world. is sort of like encroaching on us, right? Like this is something that I think is in the works. I think a lot of governments are looking into it.

Now, like governments aren't very good at IT, so I don't expect it to happen quickly or anything. But it's something that they all want because it gives them a lot of control. And credit cards, I think, are going to be in some way, shape, or form sort of like a part of that. I'm getting more used to the idea that you need to be using cash more often, not giving all of these places the data about what you're doing. And a lot of places don't even take cash anymore. But if you're the customer that has cash and you're not servicing the places that won't take cash, then they're going to lose some of your business.

So in the same way that credit cards and essentially became like a must for most businesses because so many people wanted to pay with credit cards, I think we need to do the same with cash to keep cash as an essential part of the economy and sort of make the businesses that don't take cash hurt. I think ultimately it's better for them anyway because they keep more of their money and don't have to pay a two or three percent tax to Visa or MasterCard or American Express or Discover or whatever other thing there is. So that's that's sort of like my recommendation for the day. I thought-wise, I mean, I think there's a lot going on in the Bitcoin ecosystem. I mean, I think this all coin lie that there's nothing happening is just so ridiculous.

Because as you said earlier, Ben, that you can't even keep up with all the different things that are happening. And most people in Bitcoin are the same way. There's just so much stuff, so many new proposals, so many interesting things that are happening. Almost like with new things coming out every day that all coins like can't even. come close to, right? It's, it's all, most of the all coin press releases are sort of like vaporware, hey, we're going to do this and we're going to do this. Whereas like the Bitcoin stuff, there's like people actually working on the software and there's like proof of concepts and all

this other stuff that that's actually actively working. And that, that to me is, uh, is the proof is in the pudding, right? Like it's a, it's a people that are creating stuff. Whereas, as, you know, it's proof of press release for most of these all coins. Fair enough. To your CBDC point, one extra little thing people can check out. If you're curious about the current state of development of CBDCs in your country, the Human Rights Foundation put together CBDC tracker.org. And you can actually search your country and find in what stages CBDCs,

are currently at. And if you hover over your country, you can also see the various projects, like proof of concept, like what they are and what's being done. So you can see like obviously there's the E Naira here, which is launched and then you click and learn. But you can see kind of how how close you are to that dystopian hellscape, if you please. So cbdc tracker.org is a good one to check out. But Peter, I'll toss it to you again for any final thoughts and a recommendation if you got one. Well, you know, I mean, first of all, I do need to go second the whole cash thing. And it just matters me every time I see so-called Bitcoiners paying with credit cards. Like or not, credit cards are to see, you know, central-based digital currency.

They may not be quite what, you know, CDBC is used it thought of. But from the point of view, the lack of privacy and the central control, we're already there. And, you know, if you're not using cash as much as you possibly can, you're a part of getting rid of this ability to go and trend that without third parties. It's like it or not. I mean, Bitcoin is just not that importance compared to cash. And also, Bitcoin cannot exist without either overwhelming adoption or cash. you know and in any circumstance where you don't have cash

you live in a world where your ability to use bitcoin is really realistically controlled by governments because they can always go put off the on-rance to the digital currency system and like it again credit cards and debit cards they are central bank digital currency equivalent they happen to be run by third parties but it's essentially the same thing so yeah you use cash I mean I haven't been in Ukraine right now And it's really refreshing to see the fact that, you know, I can pay for like a taxi ride with cash or even a bolt ride with cash.

I mean, Uber sent me a notification the other day, you know, reminds me, oh, yeah, you know, here you can go pay with cash. And of course, I'll pay with cash every single time I can. Like, it's just, it's just so essential to go and maintain this. Because once you lose this, cutting off Bitcoin is just so easy. Yeah. You know, if you can't buy yourself Bitcoin, you're screwed. Yeah. By the way, in a hyperinflationary scenario, no credit cards work because nobody is waiting 45 days to get paid. Well, I mean, that's what happens.

But the problem with that, though, is like that that's the thing that can be fixed and can be mandated. I mean, hyperinflation isn't guaranteed to make credit cards go away. There's this whole 45 days thing. That needs to be done. No, no, but that's No, no, but you go to places with hyperinflation, you can't pay with credit card. That's just the fault.

Look, look, I get that, but that is not, but that is an artifact of how credit cards happen to be influenced in those places. If the U.S. had hyperinflation was their control of the credit card system, they would just go say, yeah, you might go net in 40 days in theory, but we're going to go treat it like it doesn't

and just forces you. You know, you cannot rely on that kind of shit. Like or not, having I think merchants would revolt in that sort of area. It doesn't matter. They can go and change the like netting. They don't need it be 45 days. The facts could even be more of a disaster for merchants because they can go and do all kinds

of crazy stuff where if you know, there's a, you know, there's a charge back. We'll go apply the inflation rate to the charge back. Like that is not a good argument. It really isn't. The fact of the matter is the debt inflation, credit cards enable central bank digital currency, like aspects and they can go into all kinds of very course of things there is no alternative cash yeah i'm just saying that that's what ends up being the thing that people trust the most because they don't trust credit cards that's all and that and i think that's i think you're making

i'm just saying like your arguments is for a very specific way of credit cards being planted do not assume that'll say that way you know that's just because the countries that have high translation so far are shitholes that you don't have the control over debits and credit systems that something like the US does. The US gets into that state, guarantee you they'll go and change the way the netting works to go and extract every loss of value out of you.

I mean, I haven't seen it, and I haven't seen the will to change it that way, and I, I, I'll believe it once that happens. You never seen hyperinflation in a big Western country. Canada might be the first. What's Canada happy? Let's see. But all right, so let me go give my recommendation.

This is something I've read into repeatedly, which is do the fucking numbers, you know, and this is for all the tech people out there. And over and over again, I see proposals and stuff where people just haven't sat down and actually done the numbers. And, you know, I ran into this in my L2 paper because I seemed to be in the first person to notice, you know, certain things but off-pass, just how efficient was and so on. I'm not going to bore you with the details, but the important thing to take away from this is I did the analysis carefully, sat down with a sheet of paper and

worked out, you know, how efficient certain things would be, what they would cost, I ran the numbers. And it's just something I think in the tech community, we're actually kind of bad at. You know, there's not that many people who make proposals that are filled with math equations. Doesn't have any complex math equations, but like if you don't have some math equations in there, for the sort of things that work on money, you're probably doing something wrong. Fair enough. Run the numbers. All right. And you cash. I like it. Well, gentlemen, I'm going to round it out there. In the cash vein, I will say one final thing here in Calgary. We're running our sat market a couple times a year where we get everybody together. All the Bitcoin accepting merchants also accept cash. And we're doing that as a mechanism to, I guess, help Orange Pill independent and, we'll just say,

sovereignty-minded individuals, which there's more of, I think, here in Alberta than some other places in Canada. But yeah, we're working on that. And yeah, so if anybody ever gets the chance to come up to a sat market, come partake, spend some sats or spend some cash, or both, or exchange. some cash resets for vice versa. But with that, we're going to round out. Jens, thank you so much for being here. Everybody watching, make sure you hit up their links down below so you can give them a follow and see what they're up to. I did, Peter, I did drop the link to your paper in

the chat during the show as well. So hopefully people can click on and check that out. And with that, guys, thank you once more. Thanks for getting bullish with me on a Friday. And you're both welcome back anytime. Thanks, having been on. All right. Thanks, guys. Cheers.

And everybody watching, thank you for being here as well. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, make sure you follow those gentlemen. Their links are down below. If you can, please also do like, sub, share, all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. you can also hit up the previously mentioned sponsors in the show notes down below. And then finally, if you have been floating around the channel and you've been checking out the tutorials,

but you've hit a snag and you find you need some one-on-one help, then please do reach out to my team over at bitcoinmentor.io. We've aggregated an incredible group of Bitcoin educators that can lead you through anything, whether it be hot wallets, hardware, multi-sig, lightning, running a node, even some fine. home mining stuff, we'll say as a hobbyist, but plenty of different stuff you can learn about. Just reach over at Bitcoin Mentor.io. And with that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever it may be.

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