BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? John McGraw, Wesley Schlemmer, Kent Halliburton (Saz Mining) ep455

Episode Date: November 23, 2024

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://x.com/BTCMedellinConf https://x.com/bitcoinbaytpa https://x.com/sazmining FOLLOW BTC SESSIONS on X/Nostr: x.com/BTCsessions [e-mail] BOOK private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted. https://bitcoinmentor.io/ JOIN OUR AFFILIATE PROGRAM, EARN BITCOIN FOR REFERRALS! https://bitcoinmentor.io/affiliate-registration/ 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Use The Bitcoin Well - my favourite self custody bitcoin platform in Canada and USA! They offer KYC free accounts, 1% spread, no on-chain fees and tons of other incredible features. Check them out at: https://bitcoinwell.com/btcsessions COINKITE offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions HODLHODL is a NON-CUSTODIAL, ANONYMOUS solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION Speedwallet - your one wallet to send, receive, shop & earn. Simple, fast and convenient! Download now, use code BTCSESSIONS10 via this link & get 5,000 SATs on your first transaction. https://speedbtcwallet.onelink.me/cGph/ssbtcsession Bitcoin Keeper - No account creation required, use your own node, create multisig wallets, use inheritance document templates for smooth inheritance planning. Use the code BTCSESSIONS30 to avail a 30% discount on your first subscription. Learn More: https://bitcoinkeeper.app/ DEBIFI is a non-custodial Bitcoin backed lending platform with institutional grade liquidity providers, loan periods of up to 5 years, and no rehypothecation of your funds. Find them at: https://debifi.com/ #Bitcoin #Btc #Crypto

What is going on? Everybody, welcome to this show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. I hope everybody's having a great week. It's been an exciting one, that's for sure. We're just teasing just slightly below 100K the last day or so. And I'm sure yellow is on pins and needles waiting to be released from his purgatory of daily. Don't Stop Believe in Spaces. So, Yellow. I'm praying for you, man. Soon you'll taste that sweet, sweet release. But everybody, thank you for being here. We've got an awesome panel. Very excited to have these gentlemen on the show. And we'll do some intros pretty quick here. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can all write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you haven't all already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things that help a ton getting this content in front of our eyeballs.

I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market. I am pulling up. This is bitbo.io. We're currently sitting at $98,8,8502 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will grab you. 1,012 sats. That number keeps on going down. Grab them all you can. In terms of, in terms of market

cap, we're sitting at $1.95 trillion. That is absolutely wild. And in terms of fees, 10 sats per byte next block. And yeah, what a wild week. Crazy to see fees also so low. We did have some little spikes here and there have seen it up 30, 40. So there's starting to be more activity, but, you know, it's nice to still be able to afford transactions before things get spicy. But anyways, I digress. We are going to give a quick shout out to our show sponsors. And then we're going to bring in our guests. We'll be back in a moment. See you guys shortly. One of the best places to be buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And now with the advent of Bitcoin, well, infinite, high net worth individuals can enjoy.

an OTC desk with a white glove experience tailored to transactions of $50,000 or more. This helps high net worth individuals, family offices, businesses, and trust secure the best prices and execute large transactions with speed and efficiency. You can expect personalized service, rapid fulfillment, no slippage, custom trade structures, risk management guidance, and global buy and sell capabilities. And hey, if you're not a high net worth individual, not to work, where you can still benefit if you sign up and you refer people through your personalized link. Any fees paid on their first purchases will earn you 21% of those fees.

So you can check them out today. There's a link down below to sign up or you can simply scan the QR code on the screen. Bitcoin well, check them out today. Speed is one of the fastest growing Bitcoin lightning wallets out there. It is a fast and secure way to send and receive Bitcoin and stablecoin pay. instantly. You can even swap between Bitcoin and stablecoins directly in the app. Also in the app, you can buy gift cards for all the best brands and earn rewards in the process. To download speed, simply scan the QR code on the screen, click the links in the show notes down below,

and use code BTC Sessions 10 to get 5,000 sats for free. All right, we are back in. It's time to bring in our panel, so I want to welcome to the stage, John Wesley and Kent, gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you taking the time to come and get bullish with me on a Friday night. Let's do some quick intros around the circle and let people know who you are and what you do. So John, I'll toss it to you first. Give yourself an intro. All right. Great. Thank you. My name's John McGrath. I've been involved with Bitcoin since 2016. And I am an event. planner by trade. And so I'm running a Bitcoin conference down in Medellin, Colombia in January. I've heard a lot of excitement and anticipation for this one. There's been a few people poking me about it. And it seems to have a pretty good bit of hype around it. Yeah, we're trying our best. I think we have a lot of really great speakers. Kent actually,

in fact, we'll be there as well. But we have your fellow Canadian, Jeff Booth will be there and Maya from Suriname will be there. So it's pretty exciting. We have a lot of great. We'll have Spanish and English speakers and it should be really good. That's awesome. Well, I'm excited to see how everything comes to fruition there. That's great.

Well, thanks for joining me. And I'll toss it down next to Wesley. Wesley, good to see you. Thanks for being here. Give yourself an intro for anybody who may not be familiar. Yeah, I'm at Ben. So my name is Wesley Schlemer. I am the president and one of the co-founders of the Bitcoin Bay Foundation.

We are the first Bitcoin meetup to incorporate as a 501c3. And we help facilitate and manage the circular economy that's growing in the Tampa Bay Area. Oops, sorry, I was muted there. Awesome. Thank you for being here. We were just saying that I need to get over to Tampa. I've seen so much of Florida, but not been over that way. So it's on the list now.

It's on the list. Awesome. And Kent, welcome back. Glad to have you again. You're looking sun-kissed and vibrant as always, but for anybody that didn't catch you last time, let us know who we are, what you do.

Yeah, thanks for having me back on, Ben. So my name is Ken Ayla-Bernely, it's SaaS mining. We make Bitcoin mining accessible to the masses, the ultimate dollar-cost averaging tool, right, to acquire your wildsats. Excited to go see John again. We were, if I look sun kisses because I was just in El Salvador last week at adopting Bitcoin, did get lucky and I was able to snake out into the ocean and get up a couple waves.

I had wonderful time there. El Salvador's really got something special going on. But I'm really stoked to be here with everybody again and get to share and speak with John and Wesley again. Hell yeah. Well, thanks you for being here as well. And we're going to dive into it. everybody that is, of course, joining the stream in the live chat, everybody that's catching us on multiple places.

We're going to YouTube. We're on X. We're on Noster. We're all over the place. So thank you all for joining us and Rumble, too. And so we've already got like 800 people that have joined in thus far, or at least seen our intro here. But we're going to dive in.

If you're new to the show, this is why are we bullish? very simple premise. Each one of us is coming with a reason for being bullish in and around Bitcoin can take any form. It could be a piece of news. It could be something related to price. It could be a device or an app or something else that we're excited about anything that you like. And so the fall of the show really simple. Number one, somebody's going to drop their reason for being bullish. That's their chance to rant on whatever they're excited about. Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, comments, questions, whatever rabbit hole we decide to go down. And then finally, number three, after we wrap up that last topic, we're going to rotate to the next person and repeat.

So reason, riff, rotate, nice and simple. So I'll get us kicked off here and give these gentlemen a moment to think and consider their reasons. But the reason I'm excited is in and around something that I've been working on with my tutorials last little bit. So I've previously covered BTC pay server, which, again, for those, the uninitiated, basically open source, free software anybody can use to be able to become a payment processor and a merchant globally without any middleman, non-custodial, so you have full custody of your funds at all times. Just, again, just such an integral piece of technology for Bitcoiners as a whole.

and everybody that's working on it. Just absolute legends in my eyes. And so I did a video on a PTCA a ways back, and they just recently released version 2.0, which has some updates, but it's kind of adding in the back-end infrastructure for their grandiose plans that are going to be coming to fruition

in the coming weeks, months, years. And so I have just finishing, up the edit on my latest BTCPA server tutorial. And the reason I'm excited about this is, again, how granular and how much you can kind of cater it to your needs and where it's kind of gone to in terms of what you can do as a Bitcoin merchant nowadays and the tools at your disposal. And so, of course, with BTC pay, it's really easy when it comes. comes to on-chain stuff, if you just want to link an on-chain wallet and have a page up,

it's literally a few minutes other than if you're syncing, you know, doing a sync, but like the actual linking to your wallet takes no time at all. If you want to do lightning payments, they have a few options for you in terms of ease of use. If you want to be fully self-sovereign, you can absolutely go ahead. you can boot up a lightning node in a couple of clicks. But then, of course, you got to deal with getting lightning channels. And that's all good. And so some people are going to choose that super self-sovereign.

I'm going to manage that myself kind of thing. But they also have these plugins that allow you to, if you have a strike account, you can just link that and it'll just go straight to your strike wallet. If you use blink, I know that blink is used quite a bit in kind of central South America. like is huge in El Salvador, a lot of people down there. I know the John with me Premier Bitcoin, they tend to, you know, refer to that quite a bit. And it works great. The guys at Blink are fantastic.

So you can link that into your BTZ pay. And again, like, there you go. You're accepting payments, no problem. And even beyond that, you can kind of find this middle ground. They now have a plug-in for bolts where you can receive lightning payments. without having to set up channels, but it's also not exactly custodial either because you're swapping from lightning to liquid,

and you can actually hold liquid Bitcoin or on-chain. So you can use bolts that will kind of automatically deal with that stuff in the background. You don't even need to think about it. So there's all these cool ways that you can interact based on your preferences. And where I'm really excited in terms of the cool things that merchants now get to use is when I went to Madeira earlier this year, a team of BTC Pay worked with the Madeira, the Bitcoin Atlantis event there.

And they had all the merchants set up with BTC pay. They had all the merchants using this guy here. This is the Bitcoin Eye's point of sale machine, which you can link to your BTC pay server and accept payments. So they had these. And so, yes, you could scan the QR codes and pay on chain or lightning or whatever you wanted. But they also, if you look up top, there's this little tap and you can use preloaded lightning cards. They're called bolt cards and tap to pay there.

And if you were walking into the conference, you can actually buy these cards. Like you could pay in cash and they would preload a card for you and you'd get it. And you could just go up to any of the merchants, any of the vendors and pick up food or pick up, you know, T-shirts or something. and you just tap your card like you would with a debit or a credit card at these BTC pay merchants, and you'd be able to just pay that way, nice, simple, slick, and it was seamless. And so while I said, I just finished my first BTC pay video. It's part of a series. And so up next, this, which I'm excited to cover for the first time.

And then with this and BTC pay, they have a plug-in that allow you to create those cards. So you could be at an event and you could be, you know, taking cash and preloading cards for people and then having them use. So like if you have a local market, which we do here in my city and we're kind of spearheading it, I'm very, very excited at the idea of eventually integrating this into this into our local market. Like the Bitcoin Ice machine is pretty slick. It works really well. I like it. And here's our sat market that's coming up next month. We've got a Christmas market where we banded together with all the local bitcoiners. And we're all, you know, all of us offer goods and services and everything. And we're all willing to accept Bitcoin because

it's the better money. So I'm just, I'm just mega bullish on where the idea of people being able to actually use Bitcoin day-to-day as headed. And the tools, not only that have been put together by the team at BTC Pay, but the stuff that is being built on top of BTC Pay, so we've got this foundation, this open source, free-to-use foundation, and people are just iterating upon it and making just amazing things. So that's why I'm bullish, a little bit of a lengthy rant, but I don't know, I love all this stuff. So I'm curious. to hear your guys thoughts comments questions like if you have any anywhere you want to go i'll just leave it open to you guys feel free to dive in nice yeah we love btc pay server uh we use it at uh at our

foundation you know people we process donations with it we sell you know we sell our merch like our bitcoin bay jerseys we get from hardler's official um another canadian um we had our banking accounts frozen before our soaray last year um because they didn't like that someone gave us money so you know, the only thing we were able to do was process through BTC pay server. So it's, it's really a powerful tool and it's been amazing for us to use. It's so simple I can do it. You know, I do have my bend down here that runs the lightning for us, but, you know, we have a BTC pay server up. It goes to our donation page. We're plugging with ZapRite and it goes right to our node and our Zeus node and it's on my phone and I can process, I can process donations immediately without any issues. We can sell stuff. It's great. I love to see the

the continued improvement coming out of there. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome guys. Awesome guys for sure. Kent, have you had a lot of experience in and around? I mean,

you just went to a couple of conferences, and I'm sure you saw people that were, you know, merchants and things like that. Like, what has been your experience kind of witnessing what's happening in the merchant space with Bitcoin? Yeah.

I, you know, I have to reflect back to Madeira because I was there as well. And it was the first time that I had that experience of trading cash, getting a card filled up, and then walking around the conference and being able to buy whatever. That was quite eye-opening for me.

I didn't even realize that that tech had been developed yet. And, you know, the first time I played with BTC Pacer was probably 2020, I spun an instance up. My wife had a bit of a Shopify store for a little while, and so we were playing around with that. And it was cool, but it's something that I, I have not tracked until recently. And so I'm sitting here and watching you sort of do a product overview debrief on it.

I'm like, wow, I can actually see where this would be useful. And, you know, if we have a booth next year at Las Vegas, decide to sell some of our merch or shirts, you know, this would be a perfect way to accommodate that because I will say that for us, credit card payment processes have been like the bane of my existence. Our customers love to use them. And it is so difficult to keep those payment rails open. I love to see this tech developing, especially those, the Bitcoin eyes, pay, uh, portals, you know, to be able to, to just have to pay. So I love seeing where

it's going. I haven't been hands on enough since Madeira really to, the, to give it a spin. But yeah, it was very eye-opening and, and, uh, looking forward to playing with it again. It's, it's funny that, um, that, that traditional payment rails can be so bad and restrictive that they're literally pushing people towards things that are in the process of being built rather than deferring to legacy payment system. Like it's just people are, again, if you're not in favor with the powers that be, they get to say, no, no, no more ability to transact for you. And yeah, I mean, sure, our stuff, you know, we're still figuring it out.

But nobody's telling us no. It's just if we encounter a problem, we just got to troubleshoot to make it work. But as we iterate and continue to do that, it becomes unshakable, which is awesome. So, John, I'm curious your thoughts here as well. Well, I just think as like also, you know, from a settlement perspective, you know, know, tense, you know, it has some great points. And I think, uh, from a settlement perspective, it's, if you're a merchant, how many times have you received a transaction only to have someone say, like, oh, that wasn't me. And then you get the charge back and then the money's gone. And you

actually did fulfill, uh, your end. The like in so my in real life job, I, you know, run a lot of youth basketball events. And I have people that make a $125 transaction for, you know, them and wife to come in and watch their kids play. And then after the tournament, they'll go, I don't remember making that and they'll dispute it and I'll lose the money even though they did attend my event. So these things, like just all the other little points you came up with were amazing. But I think also from a business owner, a small business owner's perspective, you know, it's obvious that we don't want to have chargebacks when we render services and to be able to get

those to be able to get paid right away and know that the settlement is final when we deliver what we promise, you know, would be very beneficial to just a small business owner. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. I'm actually curious in your experience, aren't like credit card transaction fee somewhere around 4% and half of that fee is actually because of chargebacks? Like those are the numbers I've heard.

So I just to point out, the massive cost savings that you're pointing out would just have instant settlement that can't be charged back. Like that's huge cost-statings. Yeah, I did over a million dollars in credit card transactions last year. My basketball company did. And so we spent over, it was close to $40,000 in transaction fees. That's wild. That is absolutely.

I mean, we basically paid an employee's salary, right, for them to process the cards. That's my Lord. Yeah. So, so, Ben, just for example, like people buy mining rigs on our website, right? And we have to bake in the credit card fee into it. And it's why we have a 3% discount if people pay with Bitcoin or stable coins, you know, just because it saves us so much money. I mean, in your $5,000 mining rig, like, you know, 3% of that is not a trivial amount of money even for the end consumer.

Yeah. Yeah. And not to mention that, again, like, you don't want to be accepting, again, there's this whole bag of worms when you've got physical product, right? Like, it's just the final settlement part of it is what makes it a problem, right? Like that that's kind of one of Bitcoin's killer apps is knowing, you know, having having the highest degree of certainty that you actually have that money. And you just can't have that certainty with legacy payments. Yeah. Once you even have the money, you don't have certainty that you're going to have the money.

It could be 30 days and then they go, there's a dispute. And then 30 days later, they side against you. So it's 60 days down the line. You've already had the money in your bank account, and then they come suck it back out. I mean, Stripe and Square, both will suck the money right back out of your account. And this is part of it where the traditional financial infrastructure, it's all pull payments. You're basically saying, like, here's the credentials to take money from me. Please only take the amount that we agreed on beforehand, whereas Bitcoin is all push payments, right?

Like it's just you're not really giving up those credentials. You're saying, I'm going to give you this much. And if I want to continue getting services from you, I will continue to top that up. Right. Yeah. And to even further your point, even if you do, even if somebody is not trying to charge back or suck money out of your account, if you live in Canada, they might just shut the whole thing down. So, you know, there's that too. But anyways, jents, I'm going to put a ball on this topic.

Again, very excited with everything. BTC pay is doing. Very excited to check out Bitcoin eyes and cover that in a video and then follow up with bolt cards. And I'm sure there'll be more videos coming around the pike when it comes to all the cool plugins and intricate things you can do with BTC pay. So I just want to give a tip of the hat to everybody over there that's working tirelessly to create this incredible resource for us all.

But with that, it's time for us to do a rotation. We're going to bring up our next reason for being bullish. Before we do, we're going to give like a 20 second shout out to one of our show's sponsors. We'll be right back in. John, you're up next. So just have your reason ready. And we'll be back momentarily. See you guys in a sec.

DeBify.com allows you to borrow against your Bitcoin in a non-reesome. custodial way. Collateral is held in a three of four distributed multi-sig with trusted parties. It provides institutional liquidity providers, loan periods of up to five years with flexible conditions and the best rates. And best of all, no rehypification of your funds. If you want to check them out today, head over to debify.com or hit the link in the show notes down below. All right, we are back in. And John, I'm tossing it to you. Same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? I'm just, I'm super bullish because of the holidays.

And, you know, I've had some really, you know, I'm sure we've all been there. And, you know, I've had some really interesting holidays over the years of my family. I think they're, you know, tired of me. But at the same time, you know, I think this year there's going to be a lot more ears that are open to listen. And just too many things keep on happening that are in line with the things that Bitcoiners, keep saying like this is going to happen and this is going to happen. And so now we we keep knocking down milestones of things that we say are going to happen. And I think we're getting closer to a point where our families are going to listen to us a little more. And so this year I actually purchased a

hardware wallet for all the heads of the families in my family, my parents, my sister and her family, my brother and his family and uh purchase them each a hardware wallet and uh and then uh a little over a million sats each to to get them started so um and the only caveat is they have to sit with me for a half an hour on uh christmas day and learn how to use the hardware wallet and kind of maybe get a little tutorial about like why this important that they hold this this money and i and i certainly would encourage all other bitcoinsers like the people in their family they've been trying to orange pill, like buy them a hardware wallet and load some on there for them, and then they're going to be a lot more open to listening.

Because at the end, these are the people we care about, and we don't want to see them left behind, and we also probably don't want to have to carry them on our stack as, you know, so we want them to get on board here. I love that. Again, there's something that, I think I've heard. Francis Puglia say where he's like orange pilling somebody that's a that's a act of kindness. Like you were doing somebody a favor by by by trying to do that. And so he's like your your time is limited.

You know, you don't want to waste your time trying to orange pill somebody that that you don't necessarily care about. And that's that's very resistant to you. I see a lot of people that they'll argue with ardent no-coiners that are just being argumentative for no reason. And it's kind of like, I mean, why don't you go for, again, people that you truly care about, that you want to insulate from, you know, exactly what's happening in the world? And also the people that will provide value to society moving forward. Like those are the types of people you want to orange pill contributing members of society that that that that you know have a skill or something that they can offer like like that's bullish orange pilling those people and taking care of your your your loved ones. And, you know, I've got I've had family members. I'm I'm I feel lucky in that you know, I've had family members kind of come around to and be asking questions. My wife is an. Absolute legend. Like the other night I posted a picture of us and we were going through, you know, we're migrating some stuff and just kind of like simplifying our setup so that

she knows exactly what's going on. And I can't remember exactly what she said, but just little things where she'll say something. I'm like, oh, you understand this more than you give yourself credit for and you understand it probably better than a fair number of Bitcoiners. And she always thinks that she's like, you know, not not up to stuff on some of these things. And no, she's she's killing it. So, you know, if you've got people in your family that are getting in, yeah, spend time to educate them. And it's, it's great once they kind of get there.

John, I'm curious, like, do you, you don't have to disclose this, but like, what's your, What was your pick for hardware for family members? Or did it differ based on the family member? What do you defer to usually? No, I probably tried to just use the thing that was the easiest. I picked a Treasor, the Bitcoin only one. And yeah, that was kind of, you know, I wanted it to be simple for them to use. You know, I've kind of used a couple different things.

So I thought that was really maybe the easiest. And yeah, so that's what I went with. That's awesome. That's cool. Or were they receptive? Like they're, I mean, or have you, have you already done this? Or is this like, no, this is coming up Christmas. So that's what they're getting for Christmas.

Awesome. And a million sats. That's generational wealth, my friend. You just ceded future societies right there. Well, you know, it had to be a significant amount, enough amount to put onto a hardware wallet, right? So, you know, we didn't want to put anything with like a super small UTXO set on there.

So yeah, that's, well, that's great. That's awesome. I mean, I'll open it up to Wesley and Kent. If you guys, you know, wanna tug on any strings here or comments, questions, whatever you guys have. Yeah, I mean, like on my end, I've stopped, I've stopped trying to like evangelize an orange pill. I mean, the amount like, because,

It's your time is scarce and the walls are up on people. They think you're trying to sell them something. You're trying to scan them. We host weekly meetups. They're free. You want to come and learn. You come and learn. I help a family,

I help a family friend run a farmer's market booth at some of the local markets here selling salsa. And people buy it. I'm like, all right, we take cash card, Bitcoin, Venmo, cash app, Zell. I just put it in there and just don't even make a big deal of it. And at $92,000 a coin, at the last market, people are still laughing.

Bitcoin, that's crazy. I'm just like, no. No, it's not. You know, they're like, do you take Apple Pay? I'm like, did I say Apple Pay? I just listed six, seven options and none of them are freaking Apple Pay. You know, so, and the family, my family is finally coming around as well. I've been banging the drum since $3,000 a coin.

But, you know, we're ripping past 90 and they're like, oh, we need to get it now. I'm like, well, that's fine. You know, thank you guys. I, glad you guys finally want it. You know, we can talk about it. But, you know, I have, I've given up on the evangelizing. I just host. And if people come in the door, then they're already open to it.

They're a lot more receptive. And it's a lot more, you know, much higher ROI on time spent. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, why not go after the low hanging fruit, right? When there's, when there's so many people out there that are hungry for knowledge, focus your time there. Think of how many people you can reach doing that. And then you're in a way,

you're creating the next generation of Bitcoiners that can go and help others. Like your your your throughput is so much more when you can leverage keen individuals that are trying to learn themselves. So like, yeah, absolutely. Go after the people. or the people that are uniquely positioned to understand the value proposition of Bitcoin.

They don't need to necessarily be like a full-on Bitcoiner. But if they're curious and receptive, then sure, that's a good use of your time, I think. So, yeah. Ken, how are you feeling about all this? Well, I love John's reason, first of all, to be bullish. I do think that 100K is some sort of societal earthquake, right? I think that once we surpass that, like it's grabbing society's attention in a way that's just like,

holy smokes. Like I'm not seen anybody showing up and saying, hey, you were right or anything like that. I mean, you know, we want to kind of dance on the graves a little bit here as Bitcoiners, but I think as much as we'd love to,

it's sort of inappropriate to welcome folks in. And I also think that folks are ready to sit down at the table and say, okay, I've got something wrong here. What is it? And that's my suspicion. I think we won't really know until Thanksgiving and Christmas come around if that suspicion turns out to be true. But I think it is. And I think John's right about that. And I'm also with Wesley on, I've stopped the evangelizing. I mean, I went through a particular experience. You know, my wife has been the hardest person in Orangeville. She is now, thankfully. But it's felt like I've had to pull her through the not hole backwards. And, uh, you know, it's not a particularly pleasant experience. And I feel like we've all had that experience, you know, at least some member of our family isn't totally sold on the orange pill. And so, you know, what's that mean? People either take the orange pill voluntarily or the orange suppository at some point. So, you know, it's going to happen. It's inevitable, as we all know. But it's, yeah, it's, like you said, Ben, you know, you want to put your time where it's most valuable.

Yeah, yeah. I have a show and tell item here, just in and around, again, the idea of people beginning to get curious as price goes up and these milestones that we're hitting and the juxtaposition of people that are in and teaching, people that are in and are curious and those that are just beyond help. And so I love this tweet I've had framed and how well it's age. It's aging like a fine wine. And I feel like we'll have made it when this tweet has been fully realized in all its glory. So just one sec. It's on my shelf here. I display it proudly in the office here.

Hold on. All right. So of course I had to get the frame. like in a gold. But this is a framed tweet from Peter Schiff. And I'm just going to read to you what it says here. This was this was tweeted on January 6th of 2020. And just we had a little bit of a price bump at the beginning of 2020

before the crazy COVID sell-off and everything. But for those Bitcoin bugs excited about, about Bitcoin's 4% rally in 2020. Think about this. Hashtag gold is also up by about the same percentage this year, only with significantly less downside risk. Is this the best rally Bitcoin can muster? If it is, how would ever hit 50k, let alone one million?

When this tweet is fully realized, I will have reached this. ever ever possibly hit 50k and we're rounding 100 here so i love it i can't wait for that that million mark to i mean i think at this when it when this is fully realized i'll just get it as like wallpaper it'll just be my backdrop for the show from that on it yeah never say bitcoin derangement syndrome is not real yeah peter i don't i don't i don't i don't i I think he's just spoken so much about it and been so combative that like he can never truly, even though he, everything he tweets is wrong about in and around the Bitcoin role.

It's a shame because everything else that Peter says in and around the economy, I feel like he's pretty much on the ball with a lot of it. It's just he's just so horribly wrong about Bitcoin and so stubborn about it. that it's just like this glaring, it's hard to look away from it. And it makes it harder to appreciate the rest of his content. I think Peter's trolling us and engagement farming. I believe he actually has a bunch of Bitcoin. You think so?

I do, yeah. I mean, that would be a hilarious dynamic, especially if like down the line, he made a mistake and did something on chain that denotes that he owned it and then and then some on chain sleuth figured it out like revealed a stack or something that would be something uh like you said his non bitcoin tweets are pretty well thought out and he yeah pretty on the mark so yeah his son was on top of it for a while and then got bearish and then and then had some weird idea that AI was going to make everything incredibly cheap, which would happen with like a sound money, but in absence of that on a fias standard, it's just going to be candy on effect to the

extreme, I imagine. So it's not everybody that would be benefiting from those efficiency gains. So anyways, besides that, John, do you have any final thoughts in and around your, you're your topic that you want to tag on, any bits of advice that you might bestow on people as you're walking your friends and family through this? Or is that yet to be seen? No, I mean, the only thing I would kind of end it with is, I mean, I think I agree with these guys. I certainly, you know, don't go out of my way to try to orange pill anyone anymore. We all have just kind of bumped our head against that wall too many times. But, you know, the people that I do think are worth multiple kind of chances are your family and the people

you really love and care about. So I'm doing my best to, you know, if I can't get them to come to it, I'm going to just bring a little to them. And hopefully that gets them moving in the right direction. So don't give up on your family. That's the only people, I would say, are worth, you know, sticking with trying to orange pill. So. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. All right. Well, we are about to do, another rotation. We're going to give another shout out to one of our show sponsors and then we'll be right back in. But what we do, anybody watching, make sure you get your lightning wallets out because we're going to give away some sats as well before this next segment. So get them ready. But we will be back in, let's call it, 30 seconds here.

So we'll see you guys shortly. 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.

So we're going to be giving away some stats here. before we get into our next topic, I'm here on Bitcoinwell.com, awesome place to stack sats in Canada and the US. The way it works, and by the way, if you're not currently there, I'll get this out of the way off to the side here, maybe that's a better bet.

If you're not currently on Bitcoin Well, then you can check them out using the QR code there, but the way it works is you sign up, you earn points, you buy Bitcoin, you earn points, you refer friends, you earn points, and then those points can be used to toss a coin, toss a coin rather in the Bitcoin wishing well where you can win somewhere between 500 and a million sats every time. And so if you've got a lightning wallet ready, what's going to happen is I'm going

to toss a coin in the well. And whoever scans it first is going to snag the sats. And we'll see how much it's for right now. So I'm going to toss a coin in the well. Off it goes. And there we go, 500 sats. Whoever scans that first will steal them away from everyone else. Congrats to whoever snag them and of course if you do snag them let us know in the comments wherever you are watching the show and that's not the only way that you can earn sats this market uh this bold market uh i want to of course give a shout out to bitcoin mentor uh if you are um onboarding friends and family and maybe you just don't have the capacity and or patience to do so uh you can go ahead and you can check out Bitcoin Mentor or if you're a bit of a Bitcoin Ludite as well, maybe you've learned a few

skills over the years, but it's time to level up and audit your security setup or learn a new skill, run a node, set up a multi-sig, any of that, you can reach you at Bitcoin Mentor.com. But more importantly, as new people come on board, you can also sign up to become a Bitcoin mentor affiliate. The way it works is anytime you refer somebody to us and they sign up to do a one-on-one one session. You earn $21 paid in Bitcoin. And that's just not for their first session is for every single session they book. So you can be stack and sats. Well, new Bitcoiners stack skills. So with that, I'll get this off our screen here. We're going to dive right back in. Wesley, I'm looking at you. I'm going to tee you up with the same question. Why are you bullish?

You know, it's hard to choose. I mean, I'm bullish on Florida, obviously, always. But I'm most bullish because this week we were approved to bring the world's first Bitcoin parade float to life, pirate ship to life at the Gasparilla parade of pirates on January 25th. So we're going to be having a Bitcoin parade float. It's going down the on the road for those who don't know. Gasparilla is. is the, I think it's the second largest parade in the US. It's the longest parade because apparently Bayshore Boulevard is one of the longest sidewalks in the world. So we're going to be having a party, the float coming down the route, and then we're also getting a tent right on the route. So people can have a little space away from the madness

because anyone who's been would know that it gets a little crazy. So for all the Florida people or, you know, Tampa natives, you know, it's going to be a really fun time. You know, it's never been done before, you know, at least in the U.S. So we're looking forward to bring in that to the masses. And what the opportunity that I'm excited about is that it's essentially another touchpoint for almost a million people. You know, I mean, we had, I think we had 800,000 people at the last parade. And they're all dressed like pirates and drinking like them as well.

So it's not like they're, it's not like they're going to be there to learn. but it's like all the local stations cover it um you know i'm waiting for the fox 13 people are like is that a bitcoin float um and you know just bringing that next you know like i just it's in their head again you know they see it it's another touchpoint it's you know is that the one that's going to make him do it maybe probably not but you know everyone takes what it's like what three to five touchpoints on something before you find you finally, you know, make the decision. So we're really excited to, you know, do our part for, you know, mass adoption here. And we like to party, you know, John's, John was at our

swaree this year. So he can attest to that. That was good time. That's awesome. So, uh, you guys are going to need some type of, uh, Bitcoin pirate attire, I imagine. Does that, is that already arranged? Yeah. So, uh, we're partnering with, um, with Harlow's official, you know, for, so that he makes the baseball jerseys, but he now has hockey jerseys, and Tampa's a hockey town. So we are going to be modeling, we're getting jerseys made, and we're modeling them after the Tampa Bay Lightning,

Gasparilla jerseys. So skull, crossbones, you know, with the swords, but we're doing a Guy Fawks mask, Bitcoin in our logo, stuff like that. So, you know, everyone who's on the float, that will kind of be the uniform for that. We'll have them at the tent as well. You know, just, I love this thing. I wear this as much as I can. So always love to get new merch from Cory over there.

That's awesome. Tell me about the float. What's it look like? So I wonder if I have a, I don't have an easily accessible photo. But it's actually one of the oldest floats in the parade. So unfortunately, we're not building our own. It's about $150,000 to build one.

And we have a tough. That's a hard. Yeah. Yeah, you know, maybe in a year or two, whenever we, we, keep pumping we'll get to that but it's uh it's actually one like the the longest running floats in the parade uh the crew is what they're called um that the groups the crew was one of the longest was was was the largest running female only crew but they disbanded this past year sold off their float

the guy we're renting it from is actually a bitcoiner uh he's a you know he does all the per he does parade floats for the entire state of florida pretty much and he just happens to be bitcoinser as well so he you know we were going to do a normal float like a base thing and then just build on top of it he's like actually guys i got a pirate ship so you know it's uh it's the golden galleon um is what it's known as uh down here but you know we're going to be bit coining it up putting uh you know our flag on it and you know making it our own that's awesome what so um in terms of like are you going to have things that you can kind of i i mean i recognize it's a parade but are you going to have like people walking beside it, maybe hand and stuff out.

Like how is that going to work? What it, what, and what, what, what kind of materials are you thinking? Like, what are you doing? So we got, so typically about people like, you throw stuff. You know, there's probably about 15 feet between the floats and the site and where the spectators are. So we've got some, we got some custom beads made, you know, with our, with our logo on them. And QR code on the back that's going to take you to our website.

You know, we're going to be having like a Gasparilla promo, you know, during that time, see, you know, just like, see Daryl in the chat, so the toss out open dimes. If you want to donate for that, we can certainly make that happen. But we're going to be having, you know, like a Gasparilla page, you know, for that, for that day where people who are, you know, who scan that, you know, there's, we're going to do the same thing, you know, enter to win some free sets, have them, you know, just get it in as many people's hands as they can. And, you know, we're going to be having after party after that as well. We've got a local beef guy. We call the beef bootleger. So you can buy Bitcoin with beef in the Bay Area.

So, you know, we're just really just trying to go all in on like, hey, like this is like, this isn't just like an investment vehicle. This is actually in your community. People are doing business with it. And you can too. And if you win this, that's you can buy something right now. That's great. I think people get more comfortable when they're like. like, well, okay, well, I have this, but what do I do with it?

And while you don't necessarily want them to spend it right away, also when they do, they, you know, that's, again, it's a touch point. So it's a lesson learned later on, oh, geez, I bought whatever back then. I got that Bitcoin, I spent it right away or I did whatever with it. Oh, God, that would have been however much now. So yeah. Yeah, that's why whenever we have Bitcoin for beginner workshops, we just had one last night. And what I always do is I get, I, you know, we give, we give the first guy five bucks. And I'm like, send the next dude, four dollars.

Send the next. And they're always guys, you know, so I don't feel bad saying that. But it's, and so they easy chain it down. So they all get to experience sending and receiving immediately. You know, so like it caught. I mean, right now it's only 5,000 sats to do that. It used to be a little bit more. But yeah, it's all about the touchpoints, getting people's hands.

And, you know, it's just having fun while doing it because otherwise it's just, you know, it's just another job. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Kent, I've been talking over you for a bit. I'm curious to your thoughts here. Yeah, no worries, man. So I think things are like I'm hearing Wesley talk that I think are super rad about what you're doing here, man. The first is Bitcoin's intangible, and so the more opportunities to make it tangible, which is exactly what you're doing, I think the more people can actually understand it.

I mean, heck, we've been using light for how long and how people actually understand electricity, right? And I kind of think Bitcoin's akin to that. So I think that that's amazing. And then I think the second thing is a little while being in looking at Bitcoin before I realized, holy cow here is this massive asset that has no marketing budget like there's nobody that speaks for it there's no marketing department it's incumbent on each of us as bitcoiners to actually be the marketing department i think that that's hard to understand for a lot of people that simply like to look at

the the market cap of bitcoin and compare it to their favorite equities you know their favorite equities have our department you know several several folks on the marketing teams that are pitching these narratives and getting it out there. And, you know, we're just a bunch of a bunch of bitcoinsers, you know, banging pots and pans and trying to get people to pay attention to us. So I love it, man. And I think you're right. This is probably one of the best ways to make it real for people as, you know,

actual human beings that are involved with this. So good on you. And keen to see the photos when they make it onto social media. I think they're, you know, the first time that anything's done in Bitcoin, sort of there's a lot of hoopla. this is another first so i expect a lot of lupon nice john how about yourself what are you thinking here yeah i've heard about this and uh you know being a fellow floridian here uh i mean i i couldn't help but be happier i mean it's awesome what they're doing and uh and uh the bitcoin bay group in general

you know and not to not to be here just uh you know kissing up to to everyone but the bitcoin bay group is phenomenal. They do a great job over there. I mean, you know, they've had some great events, and I think they have a really good community of people. I've talked to a lot of the, a lot of the people that are involved in what they're doing, and it's really amazing, you know, that that community of itself, you know, is willing to get out there and really do these things and kind of put their money where their mouth is, you know, obviously with the gala they did last year, and this, these things cost money. And so they're putting, their own you know i'm sure they're working for sponsors and stuff but they're putting their time

and their effort and creating value and and really to you know to again create awareness and you know be the marketing team for bitcoin where no one's really paying you know there's there's no real you know r oi except maybe your number go up so you guys are out there doing it because you know there's something that you really believe in getting the message out to people about and it's amazing the work uh that that you guys are doing down there but also you know for people who don't know like gasparilla and wesley correct me if i'm wrong here but it's basically like a almost like a marty gra um on a place called uh ebo ebore or in an area called ebor city of tampa which is which is a lot like bourbon street in a way although probably a lot cleaner um maybe um it's it's been cleaned up

since i was uh going to i i lived in tampa in the late 90s and uh it was pretty wild down there back then. But no, I mean, I'm really looking forward to it. When actually is Gasparilla? What are the dates? It's January 25th. Awesome. It's a really good time. If you've never been, you know, Ben, this might be a great chance to go to Tampa because it's a really unique event that goes on there. That's really cool. I think there might be, I'm curious if there's direct flights from Calgary. I'm not sure. I'll have to check, but it's not it's not too far yeah we've got a great airport that's true yeah I'll have to be peeking around I'm uh I've I've been traveling a lot this year but I've been I'm I'm home all through November and December and then and then we'll see what the next year holds

yeah we're billing ourselves you know to the larger community as the as the as the vacation spot for Bitcoiners. So we love to throw winter events, you know, to give people opportunities to come down. I do. We do stuff all year. If there's a time that I would like to not be at home, it's like January, February. It's horrible here. Oh yeah. And it'll probably be 60 degrees and sunny. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I could use some of that. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'll, this is a great topic. I'm very excited. And I'll echo with John said, uh, can't wait to see the picture. pictures when they when they hit online. Jen's add, I don't know, Wesley, any final thoughts that you have in and around your topic that you, or anywhere that people can kind of see what's up and see what you're doing if they want to attend?

Yeah, our website is Bitcoin Bay. Foundation. Make it easier. We're Bitcoin Bay Foundation.com is an online gambling website, so not us. But everything's right there on our website. And we'll definitely be blasting it out here as we get closed. And we invite everybody down, you know, the float, you know, the float, you know, it's pretty limited, but the tents got more space and there's an open bar and a buffet. So, you know, if we can't, if, you know, we try to get people to come down. And if we can't do it with free, free booze and free food, I'll know what to work. Free stats are next, right? Yeah. Well, hey, scan the QR code in the back of the beads that maybe you'll win.

Awesome. All right. Well, gents, we're coming up on our final topic here. Kent, you're coming up next. We're going to give our final shout out to our sponsor here, and then we will be right back in. So we'll see you guys in about 30 seconds. Keeper is a fully open source Bitcoin app created to help you stack Sat's long term. Easily use your hardware devices or assisted keys to create multisig wallets and plan your inheritance. Head over to Bitcoinkeeper.com to download the app and use code BTC Sessions 30 to get a 30% discount on your first subscription. All right, we are back. Kent, I'm looking at you. Same question. Final one of the night. Why are you bullish?

Oh, man, I'm, I don't know the pressure up here going last, but I'm bullish because of, I am seeing this narrative and I don't want to be creating my own leather here. So maybe it's wishful thinking, but I feel like the Bitcoin community is about ready to show up in mining. What I mean by that is, you know, the, the Bitcoin. Bitcoin community at large is sort of bifurcated into the community and the miners, right? And those two groups don't talk together, but I've been lucky enough to spend time with Mark, the president over at Ocean. Bob Burnett is an advisor for SAS mining, and he's running barefoot, and then us here at SAS mining. And I think these three companies are sort of the first to really bring Bitcoin ethos into mining, which has traditionally been. something that's really been fiat-driven.

You know, you ask the question of folks, like, are you here to stack Bitcoin or stack fiat? And there's a lot of people here that are in mining to stack fiat. You know, no problem. You know, the incentives are there to do that. And I think that when the Bitcoin community has access, which it's just now getting with the Bitax, it surprised me that there's a strong, strong appetite. You know, people want to get educated.

people want to get hands on, right? And there's always been kind of the teen career community, right, that's trying to figure out how to heat their swimming goals and their bathtubs and all this stuff. And that's great, but that's not very accessible for the average Joe. The bid X has been accessible. People can have those on their desks. They can play with it. They can understand how mining actually works.

And I think that that's like a gateway drug for mining products in general, like what SaaS mining is building, you know, just a platform where people can own their own mining rigs and mine their own Bitcoin. And, you know, I spoke it in both a decentralized Suriname two weeks ago. And then in El Salvador about the concept of wild sats about how the sats that you generate from mining are fundamentally different because they're unsurveiled, right? They're going straight to your wallet. But you don't have to have the friction of the exchanges involved, right? You just provide a Bitcoin address and they show up there. So it forces people to deal with the fact that they have Bitcoin addresses

instead of allowing the exchange friction to occur and taking custody. And, you know, that whole dog and pony show we've all had to fight our friends and family to get them off the exchange, get them off the exchange. By definition, you just can't do that with Bitcoin because you're interacting when you're mining it because by definition, you're interacting with their protocol and you need a Bitcoin address. So for all these reasons, like, I'm seeing people starting to show up. They're realizing that, like, from a big perspective, holy cow, this is the ultimate way to DCA into a wild stats position.

And I think is that message is getting out there. We see just more and more of the Bitcoin community showing up and talking to us about it. And I think it's also being driven by, we have this really weird phenomena where I don't know if you guys have seen this chart. CryptoGuant put it out a few days ago showing that BigQuintzzi. Bitcoin liquidity on exchanges is drying up. This is the first full run that we've had where you see actually the amount of Bitcoin on exchanges at like a five-year low. It just looks like there's a fundamentally different dynamic of play here.

And I think I'm hearing some of the OTC desks are starting to whisper, hey, we don't have so much Bitcoin as we used to, you know? And some of these things going on, then you start to wonder, well, if exchange liquidity does dry up, like, where do you get your Bitcoin? So I think this is the, this is actually the cycle. that the dark horse narrative is bitcoins are going to drop through the trapdoor at the bottom of the rabbit and drop into mining and i think we're all going to wind up in playing around with miners at some some capacity here before too long i love that and i fully agree that the bidax is just this perfectly accessible way of acquainting somebody with mining without them having to break the bank to do so or get super complex with it. I mean, it's just, you know, I've got one, I've got a nerdax on my, on my shelf behind me.

You can just kind of see that light just past my mic there, but that's a nerdax. And so, I mean, I did a video on it, and it's literally you plug the thing in. There's a little QR code even on that one that you can just scan to link it to your Wi-Fi. and then you just go to any browser on your home network and it asks you a few questions like what you know how do you want to mine do you want to mine with a mining pool or um you want a solo mine do you want to have like a forever lottery ticket kind of thing and there's there's uh you know it's very accessible it's not loud like you can't hear it right now uh and it's not power hungry and it's a great ability it gives you a great ability to

to learn. And beyond that, again, it's just, it's just so, so accessible. It's not expensive to buy. And some of them, there have been, what is it two, three bit axes that have actually hit solo blocks in the last little bit. We're like over, over the course of the past few months. So like, I'm not, I'm not saying that every that gets a bitaxe in solo mines is going to hit a block. But what I am saying is it's, it's not. impossible to happen and it has happened. And so you some lucky people, they'll buy this $200 machine and plug it in. And then all of a sudden they get like, you know, the 3.125 Bitcoin and plus fees. And they're just sitting pretty from a fun little educational piece on

their shelf, which is amazing. I love it. There we go. And Wesley, I don't know. Do you want to tap in here? Have you had the chance to play with one of these? You've heard of them, I imagine, but. Yeah. So one of my buddies, Barn Miner, is a local, and he's been doing bidaxe documentation for Altire. I don't know if they're the ones actually sell the bid axes, but he's been having bid axes at our office for the past few months, messing with them, breaking them,

putting them back together. So it's fun to see him. They're tiny little things. And I actually got into, you know, this whole mess through mining. You know, I was like investing in Bitcoin and crypto and then made a bunch of money trading. And then it was the Canadian Truckers protest that was like, okay, this isn't a game. This is just Bitcoin. So I took all of my, you know, gambling coins and yoloed into Bitcoin mining at the top of the last market where there was $13,000 for an S-19.

and just rode that baby down the whole way. So if there was a bit X back then, I probably could have gotten to the same place where I am because that's how I met Barn Miner and then we went to the meetup together and then I met Ben and our other board members and now we're here. But I kind of wonder if the BitX existed back then

if I could have maybe got the same lessons with way less capital loss. But it's really cool to see that it's accessible because I wanted to keep my, I mean, I own, well, the bank lets me live in my house, but, you know, I'm able to do things to it. So I, I, I want to turn my hot-water heater into a Bitcoin miner, you know, but I get that that not everybody has the time or, you know, the money to do that. So it's cool to see that you're able to actually get this stuff into the hands of, you know,

normal people. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, uh, and again, we're starting to see a bunch of them, right? Like, the Bitax project is what spawns nerdax. Um, you know, there's an even smaller, like, no, you're never going to hit a blog with it, but there's the nerd minor. It's just that tiny little thing. And that's just kind of more, again, you're just curious and you're learning. But we also see the brains mini-miner. They've got that device that you can get at home. And then I've retrofitted before. I have just like an S-9. And so Crypto-Cloaks had like, they made a little manual of how to do it. And they have like

a 3D print of case. So I did a video on that. And like, that's sitting right behind me here. So as it gets cold in the winter, I'll plug that in from time to time and mine some stats while I heat the office. And then even beyond that, there's the future bit, which I'm going to cover. But that one, it doubles as a node as well. So you kind of, you get to learn about mining. You can mine from home a little bit and just kind of, you know, leave it as is. But it also in the midst of mining will allow you to have like node infrastructure and connect your wallets to it. So, like, you're seeing a lot of different options out there for people to play around with.

And people are curious. People do. It seems like there's an actual demand for this stuff, which is awesome to see. I love it. Yeah. John, I'll toss to you if you got anything that you wanted to have in. Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think people really are curious.

I mean, I've never, you know, funny. I mean, I hear so many different bitcoins talk about their bitcoins. story and mining is usually involved, but it hasn't been in my case. But, you know, I tell you, like things that have come along like Bitax really make like your average Pleb, you know, interested in learning and finding out more about it. So it's these opportunities, you know, where, you know, your average person who might not want to jump into mining or might say, like, well, if I can just have, you know, if I can just buy Bitcoin, you know, why wouldn't I do that as opposed to, you know, mining, these, these, you know, smaller, you know,

opportunities kind of give your average person a chance to do it and get a little more knowledgeable and a little more in depth with everything. And so, I think they're great. Yeah, absolutely. Hats off to Scott 9,000 for the Bidax Project and everybody else that's building John Stephanopoulos with Future Bit. And again, like awesome, awesome stuff coming out of them. Again, people that are curious, if you want to learn, can't just grab yourself a bit

axe or a nerdax or something that we mentioned today. And yeah, plug and play. It's such a cool experience to do that. And it's not always feasible to, you can't really be plugging in like, you know, an S-21 in your, like, apartment in New York and hoping that it's not going to, you know, ruin your relationship with the neighbors and, uh, yeah, no, and, and, and your electricity provider, I suppose to. But, um, yeah, awesome. Kent, do you, do you have any final thoughts, anything else that you want to throw in there, uh, before we wrap the topic?

Yeah, I, I, I'd be remiss without mentioning, you know, like these, these bid axes are, you know, plus or minus a tarahash, right? Of, uh, uh, power that you're contributing. into the Bitcoin network. And I think that that experience of being hands-on, if people want to continue on that journey, right? Like, I think that we're offering right now the highest end at the end of that journey where we've got a data center. It's the first of its kind in Norway, and it's been being rapidly, I've been actually shocked at how quickly people have been absorbent, but it's hydropower mining rigs that are generating about 25,000 sats a day. So you're able to dollar cost average in an enormous discount to the exchange rate. And part of the reason for it is

because they're using the heat to heat this building in Arctic Circle and dry fish for the local community. So it's a pretty rat project. It's going to be a showcase project once it's all finished being built out. But I think it's one of those ones where if your curiosity and bid axe takes you to, hey, I got to be a minor, but I don't have access to low cost power. There are solutions out there to continue that journey. Yeah, absolutely. That's great, man. Well, again, I feel like mining for me was a blind spot for a long time. And then being able to tinker with this was definitely my gateway drug. So your presupposition that that's what's happening was completely true in my experience. So, yeah, absolutely. Well, gentlemen, we've gone through our topics. here. What I'd like to do at the end of our shows as we wrap up is just do a quick round

with each person really quick. And again, if you do have any final thought that you want to throw out there, then you can. But more than that, I typically like to get some type of recommendation from each guest. And that can take really whatever form you like. It could be as simple as a piece of advice you wish you had before you started your Bitcoin journey. Maybe it's, oh, go check out this video or this book or this article or something or podcast that you listen to. Or maybe it's, hey, here's a cool app. Here's a cool device. Here's a cool service that I've tried. Just anything that you think somebody watching this would benefit from to check out. So I got one first, just to give you guys a moment to stew over that.

and then and then we'll we'll go down the line. Yeah, so I think having been working on stuff this week and kind of, you know, working on a few things in the coming weeks in and around vendors and local communities and everything, my piece of advice or my recommendation this week is to indeed, if if you feel that it's hard to to reach out and build and kind of orange pill and get your community going, I think starting with a very focused and kind of narrow segment of society is important, right? Like narrow your scope.

When we kind of decided here in town that we wanted to create a local market, it wasn't, it wasn't so much let's go blanket try and forcefully orange pill people we've never spoken to that have never expressed any interest in Bitcoin. It was like, okay, let's go to the Bitcoin meetup that exists. And everybody, it was very easy to make the case that, hey, you are all, you all have jobs, you all have skills and services and goods that you offer. You all then earn dollars and then you convert some of those dollars into Bitcoin. So why wouldn't you cut a step there and also offer your goods and services in Bitcoin and then just save that Bitcoin that you get? And everybody went, oh, of course.

I mean, we'd happily do that. And so then we had a base of people that we could start with. And, you know, you can start small. And then you begin to have friends of friends that are saying, oh, you know, like I'm doing this market. And I'm, you know, I've got a table there. You should do this. You should come down and give it a trial. I know you don't know a ton about Bitcoin, but if you're curious, you can come down.

We'll teach you. And so we begin to get people curious that are just friends with people that have been at the market. And so we're kind of taking it that way. And you have your base and that word of mouth begins to grow. And it's helpful that way. So you can make a lot of change just locally, just focusing on the, the lowest hanging fruit and then growing from there, rather than making it hard on yourself and trying to start from scratch with people that do not care and have never asked to care.

You know, make them care by building a big enough community that it's hard to ignore. And so that's what we're hoping to do over time here. And it's, you know, hopefully trending that way. But yeah, start with the people that are the most driven and then reach out from there. That would be my piece of advice. And this is my secondary show for the sat market, by the way. If anybody is in the area of Calgary, Alberta, so southern Alberta or even BC, Saskatchewan, Montana, like in and around that area, please consider coming out for the sat market that we've got going on. It is December 15th, Sunday, December 15th.

We've got a ton of merchants locally. And we're making a weekend out of it. Actually, what I'll do is I'll throw it up there. So if anybody wants to be a part of the SAP market, then please do. It is free to attend. If you want to be a merchant, you can reach out. We've got info on that link. You can just scan the QR code.

So you can reach out to be a merchant. And if you're, if you've never been to the mountains as well, on Friday night, we're going out to Banff. We're going to enjoy a night in the mountains. We're going to have a nice dinner. We're going to have brunch the next day. We're going to go on a hike in the mountains, like an ice hike, a guided one. And then we're going to come back and the local meetup has a Christmas party going on on Saturday

night. And then we've got the market on Sunday. So if you feel like coming and getting a winter wonderland for Christmas this year, then come on out 13th, 14th, 15th in Calgary, Alberta, and all are welcome. So hope to see you there. And even if you can't make it, scan that QR code, give our event a share and just let people know that something awesome is happening here would be greatly appreciated. But anyways, I digress.

Wesley, I'm going to toss it to you next. I'll let you finish up. If you do have any final thought, feel free to throw it in. Otherwise, a recommendation would be great. Yeah, you know, I'll definitely. I'll build on that. What I was going to say is what I always say in the other podcasts is find your local meetup and go to it. You know, get out in the real world, meet people that are doing the thing near you.

I mean, it's great if you've got three Bitcoin and cold storage, but how many people do you know within walking distance of your house, you know, that you can rely on in case something happens? And we had our hurricanes this year. you know we got thank god nothing like asheville but we got you know kind of double double smacked and we were going around and coordinating gas stations and sandbag lines and food and all that stuff so go to your local meetup if you haven't yet um if there isn't one and you want to start one reach out to me we have a seed packet what is money what is bitcoin you know like the presentations easy low-hanging fruit stuff that we don't have to do it all your yourself. You know, I see Delgado's Fuego in the chat, you know, talking about the vendors markets.

I met him, I met him at the Bitcoin Charlotte market. So doing the events and meet space, getting out there, it's much more important that you are actually living your life and meeting people that share your values than it is to just be stacking into cold storage. Because sure, your kids and grandkids might be set, but got to find a before you get to that point. You know, so that's what we do at Bitcoin Bay. We've got three chapters in the Tampa Bay area. You know, it's changed my life. I meet new people every week, you know, and I was not a people person.

You know, so I would definitely just say, get out there, get to your, you know, your local meetups. And also keep the pressure on for, you know, the samurai devs, the Romans, Roger Vair, you know, Ross. I mean, you know, Ross is not freed yet, and I see that, you know, right behind you. You know, I mean, we need to, the momentum is swinging back in our favor. So when you're meeting people in real life, talk about these things with them and keep applying the pressure while we're winning. You know, I mean, like, I don't know if everyone's felt a weight lift within the past couple weeks, I'm sure, at least in our space, like we now need to push and actually turn this into real wins as opposed to just rhetorical victories. Yeah, I love that.

Absolutely. I'm going to toss down to Kent next. Again, any recommendations you have? Go ahead. I love that message, Wesley. I think that's really rad and relevant. It actually ties into what I was going to say as a recommendation, which is, you know, I think if this is your first cycle and like you said, you've got three Bitcoin on a cold storage situation, you know, I think it's easy to get swept away by you, and new money, greediness, and making some stupid mistakes. And how you avoid that actually is by getting into the community and contributing, right? Like, keeping yourself grounded in reality and not letting yourself get out over your skis. The other thing I would suggest reading because it didn't come up so often, but was hugely influential. And my understanding of Bitcoin was actually the sovereign individual.

I love that book because it was the prophetic book, right? It was the book that was written well before Bitcoin was even a twinkle in Satoshi's eye. And I think it's powerful because it was written before Bitcoin existed. And so I think that that one is an important read. So, yeah, if you're getting overly euphoric, go read the sovereign individual and go help your community. Also, I'm pretty sure that's fake news because Scotty Pippen met Satoshi in 1903. I know the individual is 96, so he got you there. I should have been at Scotty's knee listening.

Yeah, and actually on the sovereign individual, there's a book by Neil Stevenson called The Diamond Age. That is like you take the sovereign individual thesis and then you play it out and you put it in a little sci-fi world. So it's a very cool read to kind of see how these changes that are talking. about work and like a near to mid future kind of thing. That's cool. I'm going to have to get that. The diamond reach. The diamond age when I'll Steve says it's really good until the last like three pages.

Oh, no. Oh, God. I'm ready to get down on my list as we speak, but I'm, you get curiously. Interesting. I'm uh there we go. I see it. Okay, cool. Um, John, tossing to you. You get the final word. Any, any, uh, final thoughts, recommendations? Go ahead. No, my final thoughts is, I mean, first of all, I mean, I think both these guys are right on point here, you know, 100%. And the more that we're doing at the local level, the better it is for all of us. So, so I, you know, certainly agree with, agree with their commentary. And no, I'll just leave it at that. I think they think it was great. Really appreciate you having me on personally and appreciate to enjoy interacting with the other guests as well. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have all of you. Thank you guys so much. Thank you to everybody in the chat. Thanks to the, what, like, 41 on, 400 odd, some people that popped in over the course of the show so far. And of course, gentlemen, you're all welcome back anytime. Have yourselves a great weekend. Thanks, Ben. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. See you guys later. And everybody, thank you for being here and watching. Really appreciate you guys being here.

Of course, if you want to help the show, like, subscribe, share all those things. They help a ton. If you're curious about any of the sponsors, they are listed at the show notes down below. And, of course, what I'll say is if you want to be part of the Bitcoin Mentor Army and be stack and sats while new Bitcoin or Stack Skills, scan that QR card on the screen. You can become a part, an affiliate of Bitcoin Mentor. and we can help anybody that you know. You can get your own personal link and share it with people,

and we can sit down with people one-on-one to help them with wallets, hardware, multi-sick, running nodes, lightning, BTC pay server, anything like that, we can help them through. So we'd love to have you as part of the team. And with that, I'm going to round it out. Thank you guys. What a good rip. I appreciate all the gentlemen.

Make sure you follow them. They're all in the show notes down below so that you can see what they're up to in the future here. And with that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your daily session.