BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Julian Fahrer, Martell Fox, Smeet Bhatt - BITCOIN CHAT ep380

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Join Julian Fahrer from Apollo Sats, Martell Fox of Layer 4 Talent, and Smeet Bhatt from Theya Bitcoin in a captivating video discussion. These industry leaders share their deep insights on Bitcoin's burgeoning potential. The conversation covers a spectrum of topics, from Bitcoin's role in revolutionizing digital payments to its impact on talent acquisition in the tech world. They also explore innovative developments within the Bitcoin network and its growing significance in the global financial landscape. This video is essential viewing for anyone interested in the strategic, technical, and economic aspects of Bitcoin. #BitcoinGrowth #DigitalPayments #TechTalent #BitcoinNetwork #GlobalFinance #BitcoinStrategy #BitcoinInsights FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/julian__fahrer https://twitter.com/Martellfox https://twitter.com/smeet_bhatt 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted mutisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ SEEDOR is one of the most robust metal backups on the market today. Get your SEEDOR starter set today! Use this link for 5% off. https://www.seedor.io/discount/BTCSESSIONS?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fprodukte For US based customers: https://www.seedor.io/btcsessions Canadian customers: https://link.thecryptoboutique.ca/BTCSessionsSeedor Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab Server Lite,One or Pro today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ 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, NON-KYC 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 Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/ Been watching the show for a while? Like what you see? Help me cover my video costs by sending some sats over on my Geyser Fund page! https://geyser.fund/project/btcsessions

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. Very excited to have this panel this week, all first timers on the show. So you get to meet a whole bunch of new people today. And they're working on awesome things. So I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about. I hope you have all been having an excellent week. It's been an interesting and exciting one. Lots of stuff going on. But nonetheless, we're going to get this thing rolling. Of course, this is live. So anything can happen.

And I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, of course,

please do like, subscribe, share. All those things that help a ton getting this in front of more eyeballs. A little like button just below the screen. Make sure you give that a smash. Share it on whatever socials that you are on. And help me on my quest to 100,000 subscribers. I'm on my way there.

We got some ways to go. But if you want to do that and help me out, then hit that subscribe button as well. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our panel, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market today. This is timechain calendar.com.

We're currently sitting at $37,679 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 2,654 sats. In terms of fees, lower than we've seen them in a while. So maybe you open some lightning channels, get stuff to wherever you need to get it, consolidate UTXOs. But 37 sats per byte next block. Anytime is 22 sats.

Mempool is still purging anything below. 10 sats per byte or so. And in terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.55 million of them, that's 93.11% of the entire supply. Shout out to sponsors to the show, hoddlehaddle.com.

If you're stacking stats and you have priorities in mind that include peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custody, and no KYC, it's a great place to be. You can sign up with an email address. Once you're in, choose a currency,

a payment method, and an amount, you can start viewing offers immediately. They also have peer-to-peer lending in which nothing is, is ever re-hypothicated. Check them out today. HottleHoddle.com. Links are down below. And I should have mentioned before I got into this that I am bringing up the live chat on the right side of the screen. From here on in in the show, all of your messages will be live

for the world to see for better or worse. Moving on, though. Of course, coin kite, you're going to want to secure your Bitcoin with some of the best hardware on the market. I do love, of course, the cold card mark four is my go-to. And then I've got all their other goodies to tap signers. cold cards, block clock, sats cards. I pre-ordered the hell out of the cold card queue as well. So I'm very excited for that. If you want to pre-order that or pick up anything else, they have their Black Friday sale going on right now,

up to 25% off, a ton of stuff. Use code BTC sessions as well for an additional, I don't know how many percent off on top of that. But yeah, you can use that. Links are down below. Moving on, backups are important. You want to get it in steel. You want to make sure that your seed phrases are protected

from the elements, fire, water, corrosion, all that. Seedore is awesome. They've got a disc and capsule design full sets so that you can back up one or two seed phrases. You can order additional capsules if you need. But anyways, links are all down below. I've done a full video on them as well. We also, of course, know of Nunchuk. Love these guys and what they're working on in the world of multi-sig. Their assisted multi-sig is badass. You can set out of with tap signers and cold cards and all your hardware options. And it's got baked in inheritance planning and the whole thing is no KYC. It's awesome. So check them out as well. And finally, Start 9, these guys are killing it with their plug and play node solutions and not

just Bitcoin nodes, but also, of course, your private data. So you can run Bitcoin Core, you can run lightning nodes, all that. You can run files, passwords, photos, Noster relays, and clients, and even AI stuff now as well. They've got entry level stuff all the way up to what I'm running, which is the Start 9 server peer. So go check them out, start nine.com. I do have a code, by the way, BTC sessions with a plus sign, and that will give you 18% off the server pure, I believe. So go check them out. Anyways, guys, enough my rambling. I'm going to get my panel in here. So I'm going to welcome to the stage, everybody. I'm welcoming a Julian. I'm a welcoming Martel and, of course, Smeat. Good to see all of you. Thank you guys for taking

your time on a Friday evening to join me. I appreciate you all. So just to, just to start off for anybody in familiar, can we do a quick round of intros? I guess I'll toss it to Julian first, and I'll ask you, who are you? And what do you do? Thanks, Ben. So I am Julian. I'm one of the co-founders of Apollo. And we are building the place to help people learn about and trust and discover and compare Bitcoin products. So we want everybody to find out what just the best Bitcoin products are to use and why. And we do that by providing a platform for people to review them, basically. Bitcoin has come to Apollo. They review cold card or cash app or anything, let people know what they love about them and earn SATs doing it too.

So that's what we do. Nice. So you heard it here. if you want some additional sats go check out Apollo and start reviewing hey awesome all right smit welcome i got to meet you in in l.A. just recently at pacific which is really cool um good to see you again even though it's virtually could you give yourself a little intro and let people know who we are what you do yeah absolutely thanks for having you've been um Smith, one of the co-founders of Thaya, we basically, you know, simplify self-custody and Bitcoin Multisig experience. This is, you know, obviously meant for folks who are interested in taking self-custody, but have sometimes, you know, hard time figuring out what the right solutioning is

for them. So what we have built is like a very modular multi-sig, you know, application that users can either use your mobile phones or, you know, sort of treasure wallets, you know, ledger wallets, other Bitcoin wallets as one of their keys. So yeah, we do like simplified two of three multi-sig volts similar to your other sponsor, Nunchuk, great company, great team. Love what they are doing. And yeah, you know, it's basically taking multi-sig more mainstream, taking multi-sig to, you know, folks who are not here on Bitcoin and excited about that.

That's awesome. And I'm so, again, I'm so glad to see the multi-sigs, mature and have so many great options out there. I think it does a service to everybody that's trying to find the best way to kind of secure their stack and not have single points of failure. So, you know, thanks for what you guys are working on. That's super awesome. Well, let's go over to Martel as well.

Good to see you again, virtually. But Martel, can you give yourself an intro for anybody that may be unfamiliar? Yeah. And thanks so much for having. Ben. So my name is Martel Fox. I'm the founder of Layer 4 Talent, a recruitment focused on technical and executive recruitment in the Bitcoin and Lightning space. I've built my career in building startups as a technical recruiter, head of talent, chief people officer, and most recently as the CEO at IBEX, a Lightning Infrastructure startup. And today I'm dedicated to taking all those

learnings and helping the very best companies hire the very best talent in the space. Awesome. I love to hear it. And I mean, that's bullish just for the bitcoins in the space that want to get working for some of these good companies. So maybe reach out to Martel. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, let's dive in. We're going to get this thing rolling. Okay. So anybody that's tuning in that may be unfamiliar, this show is why are we? bullish. Very simple pretense to the show. Each one of us comes with a reason why we are bullish on Bitcoin at the moment. And that reason can take many forms. It could be a personal experience. It could be a news item. It could be a book or a video that we saw. Or it could be an app that we're using

or some sort of technical development. It could really be anything. And so the flow of the show is going to be, number one, Sony is going to drop their reason why they are bullish. This is their chance to rant and get everything off their chest. Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, comments, questions, rabbit holes, whatever we end up talking about, all good. And then finally, number three, we're going to rotate until we get each of us to have a chance letting each other know why we are bullish. So reason riff, rotate, pretty simple.

I'm going to get us started off today. And I'll kind of lay it out there pretty quick, but I want to do a little example of why I'm bullish as well. So I'm going to do a bit of show and tell. The reason why I'm bullish is because we've had a high fee environment this last little bit. And so that's made a lot of people kind of evaluate how efficiently they are using Bitcoin on chain. You know, we all, lightning is becoming ubiquitous. A lot of people are using lightning. But also, it's important to note that You know, the custodial options are easy and quick, but of course, you're giving up custody. So there's tradeoffs there.

And on top of that, we just saw the wallet of Satoshi get pulled off the app store in the U.S. So there's less options in that realm. So that kind of phases us with the reality of like, okay, well, if you want to use lightning, you have to, you know, there's lots of options on mobile that is self-custody, but you also need to think a bit more about, well, how am I using this? And you need to have a little bit of idea about liquidity. There's learning to be had and there's optimizations to be had. However, I've been putting it together a video this week, which I didn't end up finishing the tutorial this week, but it'll probably be going out on Monday. And I've been experimenting around with

how can your average PLEB that's just stacking away little bits of Bitcoin here and there that's trying to dollar cost average still do that in a way that is as self-sovereign as possible without getting raked over the coals when they're dealing with on-chain fees and you know the initial thought would be well you withdraw it to lightning but if you're doing that in a self-custody-d-way, as you would like to, you're likely also still going to be incurring on-chain fees, getting multiple channels or splicing into channels. There's all these technical things that your average user is not going to fully maybe grasp or does grasp, but does know how to get around it. And so the video that I've made actually integrates three things.

Number one, an exchange that doesn't suck, an exchange that is at least being a and batching transactions and hopefully covering the on-chain fee because they're sending out to many, many customers all at the same time. So that's component number one. Component number two is one that I think is hideously underused and has a decent trade-off for the midterm or for the medium amount of stacking. And that's the liquid network. And the reason I say that is because you can peg into the line.

liquid network directly from an exchange. So even if your exchange only does on-chain withdrawals, you can basically send to a wallet called side swap. It'll peg directly into liquid. You're now on liquid Bitcoin, which fees to send around are like a couple pennies every time you do it. And once you're in liquid, you can actually more or less instantaneously swap between liquid and lightning.

And so this gives you two things. Number one, it allows you to stack in a way that doesn't incur on-chain fees or doesn't incur, you know, maybe singular if you're swapping out to your cold storage after letting it build. But it allows you to be, you know, moving around and it allows you to secure liquid with hardware, which you cannot do on lightning. And then secondly, you can easily swap into lightning into a self-custodied wallet in an efficient way that gives you a huge channel because you build up a liquid balance. You could send that whole balance over to a lightning wall and then swap back to liquid because the fees are negligible and then have this huge inbound channel to your own lightning wallet on your phone. So this is what my whole tutorial is going to be. But I just, my show and tell thing that I want to do here is I just want to show the speed with which you can swap from lightning to liquid using something called bolts. And I've got, I'll have two things up here, but I'm just going to show my screen for a second.

So I've got two windows here. One is just on the web. It's bolts. Dot exchange. And the other window is Blockstream Green. And this has both on-chain Bitcoin and then liquid. Okay, so I'm going to just open up a liquid wallet here. And I'm just like a regular Bitcoin transaction, I'm going to hit receive,

and I'm going to copy this address. I'm going to hop over to bolts, and I'm going to say, and you can swap these, you can go lightning to liquid or vice versa, back and forth. But I want to switch some money out of my. Phoenix wallet, which is a self-custody lightning wallet on my phone to liquid. So I'm just going to paste in this address. I'm going to say, and just to show an example, you don't need to have a lot of money on this. Let's do 5,000 sats. There's a base fee of around 428 sats. That's not much. But just to show, you can do these tiny amounts. But for this actual example, you know,

maybe I'll do 50,000 sats, something like that. Okay, so my fee is going to be 428 SATs, which is the network fee on liquid, which is compared to the 20,000 set fees we've been seeing on Main Chain. That's kind of nice. And then the Bolt's fee for the swap is a quarter of a percent, which ends up being 125 sats in this instance. So what I'm going to do here is I've got my, I've got my Phoenix wallet up on my phone. and it's just ready to go.

I'm going to hit Create Atomic Swap. This brings up a lightning invoice. I just scanned it. I just hit pay. That swap is done. So now if I jump back over, in a second, we should see an incoming transaction on to Liquid, which I can secure with hardware. There it is right there.

So I just swap from Lightning to Liquid instantaneously. this can now be secured with hardware, and I can actually have it in cold storage, albeit on the liquid network, which has tradeoffs and everything, but the seamless transactions back and forth, it's just so quick, it's so easy, and somebody could stack with liquid pegging in and out of it and moving into lightning if they want day-to-day spending. And then when it builds up enough, and they're like, hey, it makes economic sense to do an on-chain transaction, you can peg out a liquid directly into your cold storage,

into your cold card, whatever you're using. And then you can keep that for the long term. So I think people are going to get a lot more inventive with how they efficiently use Bitcoin and how they think about being as self-sovereign as possible, but also utilizing the tools that we have available to us. So this is where I'm at with my excitement in and around Liquid and the various tools that we have. I'm going to open it up to you guys. And I'm just kind of curious, I guess you can comment in any capacity in and around the fee environment that we've been seeing, but also like the tools that are available to us. I don't know. Do any of you have thoughts around this? I must be. Yeah, definitely. I think it's what's challenging but also

exciting about the current environment, not just fees, but also what we're seeing, maybe the pressures that have been put on other custodial solutions is that it's a kind of a forcing function to find new solutions like this, right? And that's what's really cool. I think liquid has, liquid's been around for a while, right? And as much as it like works great, one of the things people always say about it is like, well, what's the use case? But now this seems really cool. Like this is a clear use case. And I think self-custodial lightning has a ways to go. But how do we improve the UX? Like, how do we get people learning more about it? It's maybe some having some push factors like this that force people to kind of innovate and use it and figure out how to you it is like maybe

it's not the worst thing in the world. Right. I mean, people, I mean, I love, I love Phoenix. The Phoenix is great. maybe one of, if not the best self-custodial lightning wallet. But even for me and other people that use it too, like it's a bit of a learning curve. And for people who aren't super familiar with it, it's like, great. I'm going to use this lightning wallet and everything's going to be cheap and free. And then they start to do it like, wait a minute, 20,000 SATs fee for this transaction. Where is that coming from?

So the more people have a great reason to try out some of these solutions, I think the more that they will. And yeah, it seems like a great step. Yeah, absolutely. Smeat, you had something to say, too. I'm curious. Yeah, no, I think it was a pretty neat video that you did there. I think I'm going to physically the first time I've seen Liquid Network

being actually used for like a solid sort of, you know, legit application. I had no idea you could do that. So thanks for like that. I actually learned something new today. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. It is cool.

Again, like I think, I don't know exactly why it hasn't fully been, you know, why people haven't, maybe there just hasn't been a need up until now. But now it's kind of becoming clear that, you know, Julian, like you said, self-custodial lightning, there's a lot of misconceptions about it. And there's, you know, even just like interface wise, there's still a ways to go to make it accessible and understood. Whereas I think liquid, it's a very,

familiar experience as to on-chain Bitcoin. And so that's, I guess, why it surprises me that more people haven't used it up to this point. But yeah, nonetheless, Martel, I'm curious to get your thoughts in and around me. Yeah. Well, I was curious. You mentioned there's some tradeoffs with liquid. I'm not that familiar with liquid myself. Could you share some of those? Yeah, yeah. So I guess, I mean, we're all familiar that, you know, you've got these two extremes that are kind of the best of the best and the worst, the worst in terms of what you can do with, I guess, self-sovereignty and self-custody. And the worst of the worst is sit it on an exchange and never take it off, right? And the best of the best is on-chain, you know, self-custody, ideally secured with hardware.

Liquid sits in this middle ground where it's not as good as full self-custody, but it's also nowhere near as bad as sitting in on the exchange. And the reason for that is it is a what's known as a federated multi-sig. So you've got 15 companies around the world geographically dispersed that hold an 11 of 15 multi-sig wallet. And this federation, when Bitcoin goes into it, liquid Bitcoin is created one for one. In order to rug pull that peg, 11 of the 15 and entities would have to simultaneously collude and then destroy the peg and also their reputations. But it's not impossible, but it's also astronomically less likely than a single exchange going down, rug pulling you are getting hacked. And so the tradeoff is that federated multi-sig

model. The benefit is the fees are negligible. The blizzard. The blizzard. The blizzard. The block times are one minute. So a single minute, you get a confirmation after two minutes, the transaction is irreversible. And also the transactions are shielded, meaning that if somebody looks on chain, you actually cannot see the amount transacted. So it's not completely transparent for the average user to see even what you're doing. You can also have, you can have stable coins and stuff issued on liquid so you can utilize different assets. And because it's shielded, you actually can't tell which asset is being transacted. And then finally, of course, because the infrastructure is the more or less the same as Bitcoin

as well in terms of how the chain works, that's why you can secure it with hardware. So you can have liquid Bitcoin and secure it with, I've got a Blockstream Jade here, and I use Blockstream Green for that. So that's kind of, again, with the tradeoff with the federated multi-sig, you get those benefits. And so I wouldn't sit in liquid forever. But for me, as like a medium term, I'm going to let it build up. And then I'll do an on-chain transaction to get the best of the best with my hardware on-chain. I'm okay with that.

I think that's totally fine. But it's to each their own. And some people may be purists and may not want to do that. But that's where I'm at. Cool. Well, I'm looking forward to this tutorial so I can learn more about it. To be totally honest, I'm really hopeful that next year with this next bull market, we see a company come out that, you know, you can kind of have a one-stop shop where you're not having to move. You can buy store very safely. Hopefully, you know, the founder of that company's in this call with us

right now, Thaya, I'm starting to use them as my multi-sig solution. And yeah, I'm just bullish on companies building better products so we can avoid doing a lot of these more complex things in my mind. But can't wait for the tutorial. Yeah, yeah. You're so right. My hope is that I could just have a singular wallet that maybe has these things all in the background, but asks a few simple questions upon booting up the wallet for the first time. Hey, what are your priorities? Do you want, are you, are you slowly stacking towards long-term savings? Do you need some day-to-day spending cash in what percentages do you care about those things?

And then it just every time you receive Bitcoin, it kind of intuitively knows how to allocate and how the wallet should act just based on your preferences. And you don't know explicitly what networks and what you're doing in the background, but you know you have Bitcoin and you know you can use it as you see fit. and maybe just have little tweaks here and there if your habits change. I think that would be the ideal for everybody, right? Yeah. I think that's got to be where we're going, right?

I mean, abstracting away all of the protocol stuff and complexity from end users is, I just think it's the natural trajectory of how we get mainstream adoption. People don't, people don't like send an email and also understand. that it's like SMTP protocols and stuff behind the scenes, right? So we'll get there. Yeah, exactly. We just need the iPad with the easy app and swipe to send. And the email goes off and grandma's happy.

That's where we need to be, I think, probably. It's coming. That's coming. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I see it every day. And I think, again, the takeaway for me is, like, you know, I, I described a number of things where I have to think about how to efficiently do this.

And I think I've figured out a way where you can hop through these hoops and experience very little on-chain fees. And I see people navigating it and learning the tools with what's available and actually doing pretty well. But I think the combination of it being simplified and then it becoming normalized, worldwide. The combination of those two things, people are much more capable of learning than they assume. It's just, if it's unfamiliar, it's unfamiliar. And that's how it is. So I think we're going to make some leaps and strides in the coming years. So what I would like to do now, I'm going to put a bow on my topic, but I'll just say to the audience, if you haven't played with liquid yet, play around and you can do it really easy. Download a blockstream green wallet setup is the

exact same, and then go to bolts, go to bolts. And if you got a lightning wallet, you can swap to liquid very easily and just, you know, send over five bucks and just see how it works. It's kind of cool. And it's very familiar if you're used to on-chain Bitcoin transactions. Yeah. So with that, I'm going to do a rotation. And actually, I'm going to go to, I'm going to do a little loop on my, my,

screen based on who I'm seeing. I'm going to go down to Martel first and I'm just going to cue you up with the same question everybody will get, but why are you bullish? So I'm very bullish, especially lately and I'm most bullish about the talent coming into the space. So being in my profession, I get a firsthand look of the types of roles, companies are hiring, and the type of people who are interested in them. I've also, been spending more and more time in San Francisco, used to live there or have lived there on and off throughout my life. And yeah, I've been going to these AI meetups as well. And it's been pretty interesting to see that community. They're on this path to discover Bitcoin. So they're taking

more and more interest in decentralization. That's really important to the AI community. And, you know, some have already, you know, landed towards the end of that path and they're discovering how important it is to have decentralized money, and that's leading them to Bitcoin. So I'm seeing a lot of creativity in these communities and a lot of great experience. One thing, you know, when I started my professional career in the Bitcoin space, I was completely blown away by the talent. And that is kind of what drew me into the space, was wanting to be in these rooms with all these people, you know, talking about things that I barely understood at the time.

And, you know, today I'm seeing kind of a second wave of really brilliant people getting interested in Bitcoin. We actually were at an event. I co-hosted an event with Michael Rehani of CashHap a few weeks ago. And we had about 30 people there. And we had engineers or people of all types of professions from companies like PayPal, Cashap, Square, Block, Visa, Coinbase, Light Spark, Thaya, Apollo, there as well. Google Amazon. Yeah, Google and Amazon. Like everybody in big tech and they're all Bitcoiners and they keep a low profile, but it was completely fascinating and incredible and inspiring to see that, you know, under the radar, there's a lot of people in these big companies

that care a whole lot about Bitcoin and they're accomplishing a lot internally. And it's just making me very bullish. And we're talking a lot about institutions coming into the space, but big techs coming in, founders are coming in. A lot of people are starting their own company in the bear market. And I think we're going to see a whole new wave of talent, a whole new wave of incredible products in the next bull market. So I'm very bullish on that. That's awesome. I love that you brought up AI as well. There was an interesting thing, Just speaking of cool companies and products that are up in company. In that front, I went to a BTC Prague earlier this year,

and their official conference app was actually from Fedi. And so the Fedomints are something that people have been discussing a lot and kind of cool, interesting way of having privacy and integration with lightning and all these different cool apps so you can bake into it. But the app itself actually had an integrated AI agent. And so you could actually do AI requests from the official conference app, and you could pay it with the Feddi app, like with it's called Show Me and eCash. But nonetheless, you basically had a wallet that was entirely,

private amongst the cohort of people at the conference and you could send people sats blah blah you could withdraw via lightning but then you could also natively pay for computation of this AI app so you could say oh I'd like you to do some sort of a computation for me I want you to you know I'd like some feedback on my thoughts here or whatever and you would pay like a sat for it to compute for you or something like that So there's a lot of interesting, amazing kind of realms that Bitcoin and these tangential technologies are diving into. And I'm very excited to see how they all come together.

And I'm sure you other gentlemen will have things to tack on to this. So I'll let you guys take it if you want to comment as well. Yeah. I think like for me, going back to the event that Rehani, and Fox organized, I think that was really amazing because after a very long time, I felt that there are these real bitcoins at, you know, big tech companies that we don't know of. They might not be very loud. They might not be on Twitter.

But there are a bunch of people out there who understand Bitcoin, who care for Bitcoin and want Bitcoin to succeed. And I think we saw all sorts of people, but obviously the representation was like stronger from like the likes of PayPal, Cash App, Square. uh, Coinbase, um, right? And they obviously care about like payments and like lightning and how can we, how can we do better over there? And then it was really good to see folks from both like Google Pay and Apple Pay, um, those teams working on lightning and thinking about lightning. So yeah, I mean, it was really surprising. Um, I don't, we don't know if these products are going to be live

like say in next three months or six months, but I think there are people there are bitcoins at these firms working towards Bitcoin, you know, building on lightning, building on chain. So I'm kind of like very pumped about that. Yeah. That's interesting. The idea that right now you're sitting on, you know, you, you know, lots of people have their Google pay and their Apple pay and their PayPal and their Venmo and their whatever else.

But like, it's this walled garden where sure you can make a credit card payment or, you know, plug in a credit card. But like to pay, you know, to pay your Venmo from PayPal, like that's, there's this wall in between. But with like a lightning integration, you could just be like, well, there you go. That works. They're connected via lightning. So off, off it goes. I think that's, that's an interesting aspect to it where it does actually remove friction.

Yeah, I think like, I think Riani spoke about this, right? That the fastest way to send money from PayPal to cash app or other way around is actually Bitcoin lightning. Can you imagine the fastest way to send money from PayPal over to Cash App and other way is Bitcoin Lightning. And it's amazing. Yeah. What's really cool about that too is I think there are people who accompanies people building products who aren't necessarily Bitcoiners first, but they're payments people. And they're coming to Lightning not because they have a Bitcoin problem, maybe in the same. way that I do or I'm like, I just want to, I want to get everybody to adopt Bitcoin because that's

what I care about. They have a payments problem. They're like, how do we send money around cross borders and between institutions and between people as best we can? And so, like, they're starting from that problem and finding lightning. That feels kind of new to me. And it's super, super bullish. Yeah. Well, it's, yeah, it is very interesting that, you know, for all of us here, Bitcoin, you know, we came to it and it solved a problem for us or like we recognized it for its inherent qualities and inherent properties and came to it for a reason. And you're seeing these people that initially you wouldn't think that they'd be drawn to it because the initial thought was, you know,

Bitcoin's going to, you know, displace banks and things like that. But banks are also interested in sending money to and from without friction. So I guess it does make sense that these financial institutions and these neobanks and everything are also thinking, well, that's so much easier for us. in retrospect, I guess it was inevitable, right? Yeah, interesting. Now, what I'm curious is what that looks like for your average end user and how how regulations play into that and how they impact people's interaction with that, depending on where they are, in the globe. So like,

it's, it's kind of hard to say no to, to a lightning payment. Like, if you're able to natively create an invoice and an app that's lightning, then I think it stands to reason that you'd just be able to accept a lightning payment from anywhere on the globe and it would just go through. Of course,

it would, if you're on PayPal and it's accepting lightning, it would then go into pay. PayPal and PayPal, you know, is customing that. But from a receiver perspective, technically speaking, like that shouldn't in any way affect your ability to receive at that point. Sending out, they may have, you know, certain limitations on things like that if you're using a custodian. But, I mean, for the average person just doing a basic small transaction, that's going to materially improve that on a global scale. scale. But it's also going to, you know, the people that are purists, absolutely, you can still go.

You still have the option to fully self-custody and hold that money yourself. And now there's a network that interconnects you and everybody else that's still on the legacy financial system. So there's no more like differentiation. It's like somebody who holds cash also being able to globally interact with everybody that has a bank account. It's called fungibility basically, right? If you think about it, like Bitcoin becoming fungible with all kinds of like money and services and goods and value in the world, basically. Like you can move money around frictionlessly.

Institutions will start accepting it. They'll have infrastructure that's supported. Obviously, you know, I am building a self-custody company. I'm very so passionate about self-custody, but I do see a place for like sort of some form of like custodial finance, maybe a lot of traditional finance institutions will eventually become some small, you know, custodial nodes within within Bitcoin, which, you know, unfortunately, will continue to exist. But I don't think that really stops anything about Bitcoin. I think it will continue to like decentralize, it will continue to like have more and more like self

custodial, you know, platforms, wallets, on chain lightning, all of that. And that's, that's truly a free market. Yeah. And I think to a degree it's that meme where it's like the guy and he's standing up beside a pathway and the caption reads, the government banning Bitcoin. He's no. And there's like a fence on like a piece of pathway. And then there's like a worn path just going around the fence. I think it to a degree it's that. Like yes, could it could regulations and restrictions temporarily make things a pain in the butt for people? Sure. Does it actually? stop Bitcoin and all the applications in the way that you can frictionlessly send money to anybody anywhere in the world? Absolutely not because people will continue to build those things. Whenever there's a wall put up, again, to paraphrase the great Ian Malcolm Bitcoin finds a way. I think that's right. The one question I have, though, is on the question of friction, I guess, and what is real friction is what role is KYC AML going to play, particularly with the Lightning Network?

You know, there is a, there's like a, I don't know the technical details long I have to comment on it a lot, but it's a question I have, which is, is there going to be this version of lightning where we have a bunch of huge, yes, custodial, but basically a bunch of, of enterprise nodes who are responsible for a lot of liquidity on the network and in some sense are they going to end up being their own kind of walled KY seed garden. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I don't know, it's a, it's a bit of a concern of mine. Yeah. Yeah. And I absolutely like, the, the interesting part is, is the way in which, um, as a receiver, yes, there, you don't

have the privacy guarantees as the same as a sender, but also as a receiver, you can't easily discern who the sender was because of the hops that happen in between. If you put up, you know, if your node is publicly identified as belonging to a certain entity or person, then yes, like, hey, there's the channels that are going to you. But the hops that happen on the way there from somebody that's making a payment, that privacy is actually pretty decent. And so I don't know what that looks like if you can, you know, as a node runner receiver, you can say, all right, we're going to kind of try to clamp down on what you're allowed to do, but we have no way of telling who's actually paying you. Or it's very difficult for us to do so. I don't know what that necessarily

necessarily looks like. I guess as a person who just has Bitcoin on lightning as an individual, it doesn't really restrict your ability to spend to a degree. But I don't know. Yeah. And maybe it's just a question of like efficiency at a certain point. Like there are enough node runners and enough people with enough channels open that like your payments can find a way basically. But maybe you know, if I want to open up a channel to the pay PAL node or something, then maybe I just won't want to do that because I won't want to have to jump through those hood. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think you might see a little bit of that. But the, my favorite thing about the network is that there's always six degrees of Kevin Baconway to get your payment to find its path. So, yeah. I think on the KYC, non-KYC debit, I think it's going to be like a long, it's a long battle, I would say. If you think about it,

the existing sort of banking regulations and financial regulations in the US, you can make a strong case why custodial lightning should be KYC as for the existing law, basically. So I think the fight here is orange billing and educating folks in D.C., the lawmakers, and help them understand why this is not the case and why there should be more freedom in terms of how we use money. I don't think, I mean, if we keep the existing law stagnant and if we let the, courts interpret the law as it is right now, custodial lightning would come under a K-Y-C sort of bucket and you can't do much about it. So I think the battle year is probably more legislative and, you know,

sort of education-oriented like, you know, orange-peeling, you know, folks and like, the policymakers in D.C. I think that's, that's at least my take. Obviously, there are multiple battles to fight here, but one of the most critical component is having relatively more Bitcoin-friendly, you know, folks in Washington. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And to me, in that realm, it does seem silly to me that you would require that degree of personal information, especially in an instance where, like, wallet of Satoshi users, most of them are like people on Noster zapping 21 stats for notes, right?

They're sending fractions of a penny back and forth. Like, do you need my, you know, an arm, leg and firstborn child in order for me to do that? That seems kind of excess. It's absurd. It's absurd. Yeah. Yeah. So, but yeah, like, we'll see different solutions.

Again, like the answer around it, I guess is self-custody. And I guess the other answer around it is the return of progressive web apps, perhaps. It's another thing. Shout up to Mutiny Wall. it. But yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it progresses. And I don't know, with that, with that, Martel, do you have any final thoughts in and around that before I put a bow on this topic? Let's put a bow on it. I think we're going. All right. Sounds good. Yeah, no, I mean, there's a lot of exciting things happening. And I can't wait to see what the next Bitcoin epoch yields in terms of

new exciting developments. So with that, we'll do a rotation again. First off, everybody in the chat, Again, thank you for being here. Keep those messages coming. Also, smash that like button. Give this a share. And we will do our rotation. I'm going to go to Smeat now. And I'm going to queue you up with the same question here.

Why are you bullish? Can I say two reasons? Yeah, the world is your oyster, man. You take it away. No, I think there are several reasons that make me bullish for Bitcoin. And I want to highlight two. The first one obviously being just just macro. I think there has not been really a better time in terms of the macro picture for Bitcoin right now.

You look at equity markets, bond markets, the fiscal situation the US is in right now, all the geopolitical conflicts all around the world, a lot of uncertainty in terms of like, the monetary policy path forward, a lot of election uncertainty in major countries around the world in the next couple of years. obviously shout out to like, you know, Mielei's victory in Argentina. I think that's a great way forward. So all of that, the macro picture really is super bullish for Bitcoin.

I don't think in the last four or five years, I have been like more bullish in terms of macro. Having said that, the thing that really makes me bullish is I want to like sort of build upon, you know, models earlier comments around just like builders thinking now positively about Bitcoin. I'm not sure if, you know, Ben, if you come across this new emerging sort of movement around like effective actual racism, which is this idea that, you know, the path of progress is like techno capital in nature and essentially

it's about like building real world things, building sort of, you know, energy, building, you know, supply chains, building all sorts of infrastructure that will accelerate sort of humans and human civilization into the next realm, right? So I do personally feel that I want to believe for a good reason that we are at the cusp of like a, you know, techno-scientific exponential age. And, you know, AI has a very important role to play in that, especially open source AI. And that's where, you know, I've been spending a lot of my personal time outside of Bitcoin into like, you know, finding allies in the open source AI community because open source AI and

Bitcoin are like very, very congruent in many ways. I've been writing on this end on Twitter in the last few months. But by and large, you know, very similar dynamics, very similar sort of adversaries that both the networks face, both want to fight for decentralization. And yeah, they have they have allies, open source AI finds allies in the closed source AI community, but they don't have many allies outside of that. and a lot of like big techs of regulatory state, especially a lot of like EU regulations,

they want to like, you know, suppress open source AI and AI in general at the very part and I feel Bitcoin as sovereign reserve asset on different open source AI projects, on different companies building like real world infrastructure, real world stuff, you know, be it like aerospace, be it like energy, be it next generation, some of transportation, logistics. All of these folks can gradually be orange-built. I think a lot of them are looking for solutions outside the system,

and there is nothing more outside the system than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is truly the most decentralized and the most valuable network decentralized in the world. So I think there's a lot of congruence and alignment that we can find with a bunch of different acceleration is sort of forks and certainly you know open source AI so i'm i'm partially very very excited because of that as i said like these days i've been you know having you know almost like almost like delusional level dreams about like you know as i said the the technoscientific exponential age and i feel bitcoin has a very very very critical role to play as sound money um as sound

digital money um and yeah that that's that's what's been like you know capturing my imagination and capturing a lot of my my time out here. Awesome. I love it. I love it, man. Yeah, like, so I mean, in terms of all of these technologies coming together in a bit of a perfect storm and like how quickly things are moving, again, the AI thing, I was listening to Jeff Booth and Preston Pish.

They just did a show and they were talking about, they started. off the show with a bunch of the AI stuff that they're working on. I didn't even realize where it was at. And I'm using some of it myself to help expedite some things that would normally take me a while. But like Preston is training a version, like an AI, like a GPT, like of himself. And he's able to feed it books that he's written and transcripts of shows. that he's done and the AI can decipher where like even just with a transcript can decipher where he is talking and his guest is talking and then it gives waitings based on like his thoughts versus like the new thought that he would have ingested with what the person just said

and like it's and and then Jeff was able to then interact with his AI bot and see how it would respond to his questions to see if it seemed like press and he was like it's amazing it's amazing. And to have that, and I think you honed in on the one of the most important things is, is the open source versions of those things. I think that's incredibly important because like when it comes to, we're talking about the stifling of innovation with regulation in the U.S. in and around these custodial options. You know, it kind of seems like you could these regulatory motes could be built and then you get just a bunch of big players

that get to sit pretty because they're the ones that are allowed to bring us the AI and then these other options aren't on the table. My question to you is, do you think those regulatory moat situations even if they were to be passed, do you think they'd be effective? Or do you think that these open source options

will again kind of find a way to make it to make it, its impact? I think much harder, much harder than Bitcoin. I would say open source AI needs support. And I'm going to like make a argument why that is a case versus Bitcoin could actually like, you know, go around regulations and like still become a very, very valuable network. I think that's because like the physical reality, the thermodynamic reality of like Bitcoin mining, right? You can't, you can't like sort of unless you go and like ask Bitcoin miners like shut shop and like more. places even that has not been like very successful you know shutting down

bitcoin is very very hard I think shutting down opens us AI is far easier because there is no there is no like real world infrastructure there is no steel there is no silicon chips there is no energy thermodynamic processes that are like backing open source AI and to that extent it's just a bunch of repositories and you know code and things like that it is it is harder of course than any other technology but But I would say Bitcoin is in that sense the hardest thing to like, you know, regulate and stop. So I would say open source AI needs more support. I don't think it should be assumed given that because open source money movement made

its way to being a $600 billion network, open source AI will also likely see the same scale. I don't think that's the case because open source AI does not have the physical real world grounding of Bitcoin mining. And to that extent, I think the way open source AI movement can find grounding in the real world, in physical reality, is through holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets. So that's my sort of broad, broad, broad, you know, so education art that I'm trying to like tell people about that, hey, like just to become unscensurable, just to become uncancelable, as a company, as an institution, as an entity, as a project. if you hold Bitcoin instead of dollars or basically a combination of those two depending on your, you know, expenses and the kind of geography that you operate in, you become truly become unsensurable, right? So your code, when your open source code when merged with open source money is basically full proof in many sense. Versus open source code with fiat money, let's say you raise $10 million as an open source grant.

And if those 10 million dollars are sitting in a Bank of America account, hey, like, what's, what's stopping Uncle Sam from shutting down that AI project? So to that extent, I think there is a strong congruence in many ways, like open source AI moment needs Bitcoin more than Bitcoin needs AI. But I also feel that for the Bitcoin's, you know, Bitcoin, the long arch of Bitcoin number go up, which is like literally the long arch. exponential curve of Bitcoin needs, needs like, you know, hyper-proactivity, needs like nuclear energy, needs AI. And to that extent, like, you know, Bitcoin, Bitcoin being the base monetary layer for any kind of technoscientific revolution makes like Bitcoin valuable, makes Bitcoin resilient, makes those industries and those founders and those builders truly like outside the system builders with strong grounding in Bitcoin. So I think I'm like in super alignment with

booths of oral worldview about this new, new technoscientific age being hyper deflationary. There is a hyper deflationary force, the techno capital force, in terms of AI, merge with like open source money that is truly deflationary. So like it's basically a square of deflation in many ways. That's interesting. And my hope is that like you said, the the people that had the ethos to build open source AI are also the people that that, that, that, have the wherewithal to save an open source money and thus they become uncensurable with their FU money that they've accumulated. Yeah.

I love it. Julian, I'm curious your thoughts on this. Yeah. Well, I'll double down on something you just touched on, which is the, what I think is probably the reason why AI accelerates Bitcoin in particular. And that is how insanely deflationary. it is, right? Ben, you spoke about just using it to like do a few tasks, you know, already. And you can imagine like if you were to find someone on Upwork or whatever, like that's already dollars that you're

saving, right? And so like imagine that but times a billion. Like this is, it's such an insanely deflationary technology. And so like, what does that have to do with Bitcoin? Well, I mean, we know that central banks have an inflation target, right? Like this is a policy outcome that is being engineered that's trying to keep like fighting against deflation. I mean, Jeff Booth talks about this. We've got these inflation targets where it's like 2%, 4%, maybe now it's 6%. But like there's this whole manufactured economic system designed to keep prices going up. You know, you know, like there's this famous chart that everyone's probably seen where it's like tracking like what's been inflation, like what's gone up and price

and what's gone down over the past several years. And there's like the red lines have gone down, the blue lines have gone up. I don't know if you guys know this one. But it's like anything where there's like a free market, technological or whatever else, has all gone down. And anything that's gone up is basically where the government's got its grips around it. And as you know, it's like education or healthcare. Exactly. Right. And so this divergence is just going to accelerate and become unsustainable, I think. It would be, it would anyway, but particularly with AI, where the price of so many things is going to fall through the floor.

Yeah. And so what does that mean? It means this inflation target is like completely busted and other things too. And so what's what's going to happen? Well, more money printing, more other things. But, you know, this this reality of deflation. that fiat economics is like predicated on denying it's coming right yeah yeah it's it's interesting again you you the the deflationary nature and and and i guess i neglected to mention my my

main exciting thing that i'm using air for that meaningfully actually opened up a world to me that was previously inaccessible just for sheer cost is translation. And so I, my goal has always been to try and take the tutorials that I make and get them in other languages. And I needed to do it in a certain way. I was like, I can't just have, I can't just have dubbed like the captions underneath because people need to be able to look at what I'm doing and they can't be reading something and also taking in what I'm doing.

It also needs, so it needs to be dubbed, it needs to be somebody speaking over top of me, but then it also needs to be timed properly and it needs to be done by somebody that knows about Bitcoin so that the translations make sense. Well, I mean, flash forward to today, and like, first of all, the cost of doing that was impossible. Like, I just, I couldn't do it. All of the money that comes in would be immediately going out. And my family would not be super happy when we sold our house. So now flash forward to today, and I have a subscription that is like a monthly subscription for a couple hundred bucks, which is for sure going to fall in price as time goes on. But I got to show you this.

This is me. I took a tutorial. I plunked it into a website, and it spit this back at me. It's my voice in Spanish live dubbing a tutorial that I've done. And I'll just play a little bit of it, but here it is. It's crazy. The last transactions anterior is in the panel principal here. Actualization visible.

Transactions anteriores enter and and they're salemes of the billeter. If you'd saldo here, recuperarer access to him and capacity to enviar, into and out of the billetterer in question. Si, you, only a little point here,

your copy of security of 24 words is platform agnostica, what which means that you can use these 24... Is that not insane? Like, it's CGI's my lips. What's the name of that tool? That's brilliant.

It's called... H-E-Y-G-E-N. It's unbelievable. But like- You could have just told everybody, by the way, you could have told everybody that you've just been like practicing your Spanish on the side. And like I would have believed it. Yeah, I put it up on Twitter and I didn't. I was like, all I said was how do I sound? And everybody's like, whoa, I can't believe. Look at you. I was like, yeah, well, you know, do what I can. But yeah, like that's crazy. And so like that opens up.

whole world. I'm in the process. I'm creating a 10 video course to start. And this, the impetus with this came through Human Rights Foundation. I got a grant a while back. So I'm using the money to help build out this. But I'm starting with 10 videos that I'm going to do for human rights activists around the world. But I'm actively translating them to right now, Spanish, Hindi, and Mandarin. And so those are going to be the first three languages that I cover with that 10, 10 video course. and we'll go from there, I guess. I want to see our Hindi BTC sessions. Yes, I know.

I'm going to have to send it over to you to see how accurate it is. I heard the Spanish, they were like, it's like 99.7% pretty good. And like the few words that may be off or expressions that may be off are like, you can navigate around it and be totally fine. So I'll send over what I've got. You tell me if it's any good. Yeah, BTC sessions in Hindi is like, you know, that's bullish. I mean, it's one of the most spoken languages on the planet, right?

Yeah, it is. Yeah. I want to yourself, you know, reply back to Matthew out here. I think I'm on your camp, Matthew. Like, I think once Zeta Hash is possible, that's just like slightly more than doubling. I'm bullish. I think that's, that's, we're going to hit that. Absolutely.

So we're sitting right now. I'm just looking, just in terms of, I'm just going to. refresh. It says we're at, I mean, and this is a seven day average, but 506 X a hash right now. That's wild. Again, like, I remember us. It wasn't that long ago that we were looking at like 100 and then 200 and that seemed this stupidly high. And this is a bear market. Like we're not even back into all time highs again yet. We're a 500 X. This is insane. And this, to be Honestly, this wasn't even my reason of why I'm insanely bullish, but it is a good one, which is like this plus the halving coming. I mean, if you're the type of person that believes that there's a, there is a relationship between hash and price, which I am, it's wild. I mean, basically, even just on this one angle, right? Like, okay, a bunch of new institutional capital is always in some sense coming into the Bitcoin network and like there's always this choice, I suppose, like do we, you know, is that going

to spot or does it go into mining? And if the hash is continues to climb like this and stay at these highs plus the halving, then like all of that investment that perhaps some portion of it would have gone into mining and has in previous cycles. Yeah. It's going into spot basically. Yeah, that's true. That's true as well. And I think the missing piece of the puzzle that the people that don't understand why the hash rate keeps going up is minors are number one getting more and more efficient, but number two are honing in on energy sources that are just waste. Yeah. At an increasing, you know, at an increasing pace, they're finding all these places where, you know, that is something like 60. something percent or more, I think, of all energy produced ends up as waste just in like transmission or in the production process. Like it's an insane amount. And so like the Bitcoin hash rate could go parabolic from here and there's still going to be plenty of waste energy to

utilize. Yeah. Yeah. Plus nation states. Yeah. Maybe it's a little more speculative, but like it's going to be wild when the, when the environmentalists realize that Bitcoin is their friend. Just imagine. I think it's wild, right? I mean, Bitcoin is so, it is so generalized, it is so generic that it can align with, you know, for good or for bad, it can align with different sorts of worldviews, different sorts of, you know, political worldviews. Obviously, like, we want, you know, energy that goes into ways to go into Bitcoin. But then all of a sudden, like, there will be a whole different side of, you know, energy and structure that will be underwriting. that will be unlocked as environmentalists go wild about Bitcoin being different.

Yeah. Well, yeah, imagine because one of the main talking points about climate change is they're now starting to point out like, hey, methane emissions are like way, way worse than CO2 in terms of warming effect. And now there's major Bitcoin mines coming on that are literally just capturing the methane from the dump and then using that converting it into CO2, which has 80 times less warming effect. And they're mining Bitcoin with it. They're helping the environment and mining Bitcoin.

And that's going to make Greenpeace's headspin. Exactly. The fun part about this, yeah, we get to see who really cares about the environment and who just hates money. Who just secretly hates money. We need to have New York Times as Trump page saying, you know, Bitcoin is green. Yeah. And that's, otherwise they are just lying.

I mean, they're just like doing virtual signaling about caring about the environment. Once it's possible to be the most capitalistic that you can possibly be and also like unambiguously making the environment better. Yeah. That explodes some narratives for sure. Yeah. I love it when Bitcoin fixes things, which is a lot. Always, all the time.

Awesome. All right. Well, I think we can put a bow on this topic here. That was great. Thank you very much for that. And I think we'll do our final rotation. First, I'll give a shout out to everybody in the chat. Thank you guys so much for being here.

Again, smash that little like button just below the screen. That helps the time and give this a share on your socials. That always helps a bunch as well. But we're going to jump to Julian here. Final question of the evening, same as the ones before. Why are you bullish, my friend? Why am I bullish? So I have a general answer and I would describe it as vibe shift.

I'm seeing a huge vibe shift and I think other people are too. And it's a shift that is yes, like it's in the direction of being bullish for Bitcoin for lots of reasons. But it's like a pro-freedom vibe shift. Like, think about where we were like two years ago or one year ago. I mean, honestly, it feels like to me, the world was a completely different place. And yeah, okay, a lot of these problems aren't like solved, solved. But the Overton window in so many respects feels like it's been exploded. And I don't know if that's just like Elon buying Twitter, maybe precipitated some of this stuff.

But basically, I feel like the pendulum is swinging. whether it's like Millet in Argentina, obviously, but Pierre Polivier, I can't pronounce his last name, but Ben, you'd know much more about it. Good, actually. One of the best one pronunciations I've heard, Pollyam. Okay. Yeah. Polym, all right.

I guess what I'm seeing is like not just pro-freedom leaders emerging, but in many cases, like, specifically pro-Bitcoin leaders too. And I know a lot of Bitcoin is skeptical about any politician anytime and like for good reason. But I'm it to me it's like so good. It's so insanely bullish. Even if like half the promises some of these people make don't get even acted on, right? Or don't get implemented. Like the fact that we have aspiring leaders of major nations around the world talking

positively about Bitcoin and just like shifting public consciousness on it to me is it's like insanely underrated. Like we've got at least three US presidential candidates that have like a Bitcoin slash crypto platform as a presidential election next year. So to me it's it's insanely, it's just insanely bullish. Yeah. I love it. Before I, I, I, I try to in here because I feel like I sometimes get too excited about things, but I'm going to get some other thoughts. Maybe I'll, I don't know, Martel, do you want to chime in? Like, are you feeling this vibe as well? Definitely. And I think we need much more of it. And part of the vibe shift was also what Smeet was talking about earlier with IAC, but I'm loving the optimism. I think the leaders

in power today, they're very pessimistic. And they're using fear to govern people. people, fear to control people. And it's all this doom and gloom and the world is a terrible place. And a big reason why I love this community we have with the Bitcoin community is that we're dreaming of all these possibilities. There's a utopia that we're on the brink of. And I think, yeah, vibe shift. I'm observing it. I'm seeing a lot of people have hope again, even outside of the Bitcoin community. But I think it's permeating, especially like as we've seen with Malay, In politics, we have someone for the first time who's just being honest, calling people out, calling out the bad actors, and he was elected.

I mean, let's see what he actually does. But just the fact that the people gave that a chance, they're giving hope a chance, they're giving liberty a chance. I think that that is something that we could all look forward to. I hope that that could happen in the U.S. as well. So let's see. Yeah. You're right. Like it's the I think Bitcoiners are just, you're, you get this mindset shift where you go from, you know, the, if you're still living in the legacy world, if you're, if you're pre Bitcoin, you're, you know, most people that I know are very nihilistic. Like everything is, world's going to hell. There's no coming back.

There's no, you know, as we would say, bright orange future on the horizon. And the Bitcoiners that I know, you know, they're there and, you know, Julian you alluded to this as well. They are, they are adversarial thinkers, which is, in my opinion, a positive thing to have. But they're also incredibly optimistic. And so like there's this shift of just like throwing in the task. for the average person versus Bitcoiners saying, like, not only am I optimistic, but I'm working towards that future. I'm building things. I'm building a community. I'm trying to find other like-minded people and lift them up as well. And again, like I, I feel like, I mean,

Bitcoin has changed me. I feel like you guys would probably echo that sentiment. And it's changed the quality of people I surround myself with as well, as well as just like the quality of my life in general has vastly, vastly improved since I. And I know it's specifically because of Bitcoin and the people that I've encountered because of Bitcoin. So I don't know, like, Smeet, are you going to echo this as well as this? I mean, it's hard to even say that I agree with this. I agree with it, all of this. I think it's so amazing. I think, like, you know, I think Martel put it right.

I think there is a pro-freedom movement happening, I think, within obviously, within Bitcoin, but outside Bitcoin as well. And I think, like, Miele's victory, I think, is going to be less bullish for Bitcoin just yet as much as we wanted to happen. I think it's a victory for hard money politics. It's a victory for, you know, straight shooting politics, sort of, you know, libertarian politics. And I think that itself is a major win in my opinion. You know, expecting Argentina and like Bitcoinize overnight is a little bit of a fantasy

where I am standing at right now. But yeah, like, you know, Argentina in itself moving to a more hard money standard, sort of motivates and inspires other, you know, Latin countries to like see that as a way out of, you know, hyperinflation and socialist policies. So I think that's pretty strong. I'm going to very, very bullish in that sense. I think US politics is still a little, we'll see how Bitcoin plays a role. I do expect, by the other thing I want to start to call out is that while we're also

not very, very pro-bitcoin and we only want Bitcoin to succeed, most of these politicians are going to take a little bit of a more broader stance and unfortunately will likely be both funded by crypto organizations and continue to hold pro-crypto narrative. which I don't know how to exactly think about. But I think, you know, yeah, over time, we know who's winning and who's not winning. So I think we should we should rather consider that as an intermediate step towards eventually all of them being truly orange-billed. Yeah. So, yeah.

I'd agree. I think, I mean, fortunately for many of us, our roads to deciphering. how Bitcoin is different from everything else, wasn't done on a public stage, but it very much will be for a lot of these politicians and all of these very visible public figures that come to this and realize there's something here, but have to navigate it through a copious amount of noise, because you're right, there's going to be money thrown around, left, right, and center, and how many people are going to recognize, the misaligned incentives with that and be able to step back from it and say, no, I'm not

going to take this money. Exactly. Who knows? But I think one of the cool things, again, to hone in on, I guess the freedom aspect of it and this shift, is that we don't need the entire world to do this all at once because I think that Bitcoin was the final piece of that puzzle for that sovereign individual thesis to play out. and the pockets of freedom that we're seeing pop up right now are going to multiply, and you're going to have either just jurisdictions that are saying,

hey, come here, this is what you get. If you're paying taxes, this is what you're going to get for it. Instead of you better pay your taxes or you're going to jail, it's the inverse where they're going to be effectively advertising to potential constituents to say, like, hey, we're providing great services or minimal, absolute, minimal services from a government if that's what you're looking for. And that's going to have an effect on brain drain. People are going to go to these jurisdictions.

And even if people don't move, they're still going to be able to establish local connections with people and interact with them as they see fit. And I think you're going to see a lot more circular Bitcoin economies pop up in small towns, in small groups of people, in large cities. You have a small cohort of people where they're just going to interact with each other and get what they need locally for SATs. On a larger scale here in Canada, I feel like I'm on the cusp of a pretty unique happenstance where both the leader of my province and the leader of my country will be Bitcoiners inside of two years. because right now my province of Alberta, the premier, they're known as Danielle Smith, is a bitcoiner. And I know this because she had a radio show years ago and she had me on three times to talk about Bitcoin.

And she's had Francis Pooley out on and Dave Bradley, who's a co-founder of Bull Bitcoin. So she knows Bitcoin. She gets it and she's a freedom-minded individual. She's also pushing back a lot against federal overreach, which further leans into the idea of that sovereign individual thesis where you have like a splintering of the states. Our next door neighbor, Saskatchewan literally just told the federal government to go pound sand with their carbon tax and said, we're not even going to collect it come January 1st, so tough, which is amazing. And then on top of that, again, Pahliav, like Justin Trudeau is his poll numbers are abysmal. If there was an election today, not a snowflakes chance in hell would he get reelected? Could he pull some tricky BS and create some sort of a coalition go?

That's how it works in Canada. You can team up with other political parties and take control, which is unfortunate. it. But like right now, if there was an election tomorrow, Pauliev would be the leader of Canada. So, yeah, there's a very real possibility that inside of two years, I will be feeling the exact opposite of what I felt at the beginning of 2021 when bank accounts were getting shut down and people were being trampled on by horses. So let's cross our thing. That's awesome. Yeah. I think I think you,

like you mentioned something really important, which is maybe I think the most important piece to this vibe shift, let's call it, that's maybe not so appreciated, which is the pockets of freedom. Yes. I think too many people get stuck into this paradigm of thinking, well, there's either the regime as it exists or that, you know, and so it's like I either have to be subsumed into, like that's why I want to make a difference in some way. I want to try and affect some change. Either I have to participate in this corrupt, broken regime or you know it's like the other end of the spectrum which is I don't know I just want to blow it all up and I'm going to be like a you know kind of idealistic revolutionary who just kind of opts out but but really I think there's so much middle ground there whether it's like individual

pockets of freedom like El Salvador or other places that like you said can bring people in But even just like finding, you know, little circular Bitcoin economies and so much other, there's like a lot of space, basically. There's so much space to try new things, new ideas for like how should states be governed? How should they even exist in the first place? Like this is kind of like paradigm that might be breaking a little bit.

And I think a lot of experimentation is going to come. So that's exciting. Yeah. You're absolutely right. It's an exciting time. It's a volatile time to be experiencing all this, but it's also exciting because, as you said, we're all in this optimistic wavelength where we're trying to build the future that we actually want to see. And that's what I love about all you guys and about all the other people that I've met and interacted with. It's, if the quality of the people are in any indication of the quality of our future that we have ahead of us, it's going to be a great one.

So with that, unless anybody has any final thoughts on this topic, I may begin to start to do just general final thoughts from everybody. So does anybody have anything else they want to tag on here before I dive into that? I just want to say that me and my wife book tickets for Buenos Aires after Millie won. So we are visiting Argentina in January. Awesome. I love it. I love it. That's great.

That's amazing. All right. Well, okay. So we are going to just move into the final portion of the show. And what I'd like to do as I wrap up is I like to do just a quick round of any final thoughts that you may have and recommendations. And what I mean by recommendations is this. This can come in any form.

It can be, I wanted to be something that you think that the audience may benefit from. And so this could be, oh, maybe I read a book and I really liked it. Or I listened to a podcast or a video and you should check it out. And I think it's worth checking out. Maybe it's an app that you really like. Maybe it's a device that you tried and you got a kick out of and you think people could get value from. Or maybe it's a personal experience that you had and a patient. piece of life advice that you'd like to impart on them. Whatever it may be, if you think people

could benefit from it, then this is your chance to get it off your chest. So final thoughts and any recommendations you have. My final thought, I'm going to talk, just tag on to this pocket of freedom mention here. Go out and grab it, right? Go out and do it yourself. If not you, than who. And so I'm excited to be trying to attempt that here in my home city of Calgary. On December 16th, I'm hosting the first Saturday sat market. And it's going to be Bitcoiners getting together with all of the goods and services and things that they make and offer. And we're all going to be accepting sats. We have a venue booked. It's going to be in downtown Calgary. It's on the meetup pages and everything that I've created.

And we've got 30 merchants so far. And we've got people coming in not just from around the city, not just from around Alberta. I've got people coming in from provinces on both sides of us, some people getting on planes and coming into Calgary, other people driving upwards of seven hours just to be here for it. It's going to be amazing. And the support, the whole of support I've had since, you know, saying that I wanted to do it last week. is crazy. And so I'd encourage everybody to do the same. Get to your local meetup. Say I'm looking to buy and get the following things with Bitcoin. Does anybody do this or know anybody that does? And then if you start to see that build up a bit, think about doing a market, you know,

quarterly or twice a year or once a year or whatever it may be. Build that network, build those connections, build those relationships so that you can become truly uncensurable. Because if If you have good relationships with people that are willing to accept sats for the amazing things that they make or do, then it wouldn't matter if somebody kicked in the door to the market and shut it down indefinitely. You already know the people. And that's the important part, the human connections. So go out, do it, build it. I encourage it. Let's go around.

I love that. I just want to so quickly respond back to Matthew. Thank you. I mean, I don't know what that question means. I'm bullish about Bitcoin being the largest currency by 2050. Let's put it that way. I know we are entering a Bitcoin standard. It won't be like any time soon, like imminent. But I think it is coming and it will come in short order. And Bitcoin's already the largest currency that matters. So. Awesome. All right. So I'll go to Martel first. final thoughts you might have just generally for the show. And then if you have a recommendation to toss out there in whatever form, feel free. Sure. Yeah. I think keeping it simple, let's all stay positive. The world is a beautiful place. I'm sure everyone listening has a lot of

freedoms in their life and try to use that to inspire you to keep this optimistic view alive. I would say for recommendations. One thing that I've done recently, so upon entering the Bitcoin space, I loved it so much, I wanted to spend all my time with Bitcoiners. And then more recently, I've been getting in touch and getting involved in my local community, building more local friendships with people who aren't Bitcoiners. And I think that's the best way for us Bitcoiners to make an impact and to orange pill other people is to not just close off to ourselves, but to go.

out, make connections, bond with people, be a figure in your own community. And you're leading by example. And more and more people are going to be looking at you in this optimistic world you're living in and wonder, huh, how is Smeat so happy all the time? How is Julian? How has Ben? Why are they always looking on the bright side? And it's a huge contrast from what the mainstream narrative is. And it's very attractive. So I've seen it in my own life most recently that a lot of people are looking for something to have hope in, and you can be that in your own community. That's great. I love that. Awesome. I will toss it over to Smeet then. And same thing. Final thoughts, recommendations. Go ahead. Yeah, no, I just want to build upon what you said earlier about

Bitcoiners actually not being dumerous and nihilists. I think like Bitcoiners are are very optimistic. we don't think that we can reform the system from within so we think of solutions from the outside you know there's no way satoshi could have reformed the the u.s federal reserve from inside like you know doing a PhD in economics and going up to the ranks of being the chairman of federal reserve would still have not made him possible to like reform the federal reserve but whoever they you know he or she they are they they certainly you know reformed it uh from from the outside and I think that truly captures the definite optimism of Bitcoiners and maybe I'll spend like 30 seconds on this framework that Peter Thiel's were popularized back in

2010 was this axis of definite and indefinite and then optimism and pessimism. We are on the on the bucket of like definite optimist which is basically we are optimistic and we know how we will get there versus being indefinite optimist is just delusional optimist right like We just keep saying that we will get there without really knowing how. In case of Bitcoiners, I think we know we are going to make it. We know that human civilization is going to make it. And we know how Bitcoin and other technologies play a role in that versus a lot of indefinite pessimism that we see in the real world that Martel was talking about is,

a lot of people are just nihilistic and, you know, doom-oriented and apocalyptic in many respects. And I think Bitcoin really sort of shows hope. through being a definite optimistic channel. And yeah, I'm trying to play a small part by building a Bitcoin company. Like, you know, I think that this is the best thing I can be doing to Bitcoin is working on making it easier and simpler for people to become self-sovereign

and not really have to rely upon like third party, counterparties and risks. And that's all, you know, that's all that matters. So yeah, I'm, I'm excited in terms of recommendation. Again, you know, very much echo model. What I have been doing is going around my communities and then talking to people about Bitcoin

and how Bitcoin aligns with the things that they are doing, a lot of my, you know, founder friends, builders, other folks that I interact with in Silicon Valley. I'm trying to like, you know, show them, fix the money, fix the world a paradigm. And the way I do it is by asking questions instead of telling them about Bitcoin, right? So ask them questions around, okay,

Why do you think college education is so expensive? So let them know, so go through the analysis of why college education might be expensive on the Fiat standard. Why is, you know, why don't we see the architecture of 16th and 17th and 18th century Europe in the broader Anglo-Western civilization anymore? I recently actually Orange built a friend through pure architectural pitch, which is just insane.

Like I was able to show her how, you know, great architecture and great buildings and great things were built on the gold standard and it took 100 sometimes years you know 200 years to build build a beautiful you know church and like you know other other monuments um but it was worth it i mean we still are odd when we walk when we walk in the streets of barcelona and paris and vienna why can't we build that anymore so and and i i explained through the the concept of soft money and hard money and she's like yeah it finally clicks he's like hey why are you like so of selling me this libertarian, you know, and cap stuff, you know, Federal Reserve and Tradify and

U.S. bonds. I'm not, I don't care about those things. I care about like beautiful architecture and aesthetics. And I'm like, yeah, Bitcoin literally fixes everything. Yeah. I love that topic. And just to this is, I spoke about this on a show with somebody a few months ago because I had traveled. I was in Italy through a lot of the summer. And, and the thing that stood out to me most. The line of thought that stood out to me most was all these buildings that are beautiful and have lasted for centuries, they were built by people that in many instances knew they would never see them to completion, but they built them anyways. They built them in service of a generation that they would never meet. And today, it's the inverse. We steal from a future generation to

build shitty disposable buildings. And it's like the money corrupts everything. And so we need to get back to a place where we're building for future generations instead of stealing from them. Yeah. It's a nihilistic world. I don't want to take a lot of time here, but I think like anything that is purposefully made ugly and not built to last,

I think it reflects something like very deep, deeply like, you know, sort of nihilistic. And it's just not positive. I think there's a lot of ugliness behind that thought process. And I think Bitcoin is a definite way of like building towards, building towards like a great, you know, sustainable. Yeah. Our buildings are like a mirror to our inner values, I suppose. Yeah.

Julian, I'm going to toss it to you last. Final thoughts, recommendations. Go ahead, man. I think my final thought is. that nobody is bullish enough. I'm not bullish enough, none of us are bullish enough, and I think amazing things are coming and they're coming soon. And that it's important to remember that it's always ethical

and it's always moral to connect people to the Bitcoin network in some way. It's never a bad time to shill. It's never a bad time to send somebody some sats or to chew somebody's ear off. And I think it's hard to do with the bottom of a bare market. But it's also hard to do at the top of a bull market as well. And you never know. In six months time, we might be there and it might be just too hard to cut through the noise because it will be like super noisy.

And so in some ways, like maybe now is the best time. You know, nine months ago would have been hard. In nine months' time from now, probably will be hard again for different reasons. Like, now is the time. So, like, get out there and shill is my advice, my recommendation. Perfect. You heard it here. Go forth and chill, everybody.

Please do. That's awesome. Well, guys, again, what a great time. I got to tell you, I just got a message off screen here, but I just got a DM from D++. and she wanted you all to know that she loved the show. And I've got to say, I love her. She is such an amazing educator. I don't know if you guys have ever sat in on her talking about how lightning works or how mining works.

And like those are just invaluable experiences. So again, what an amazing person. And also anybody watching, if you ever get the chance to go the D++ in whatever. she's teaching you, go do it. It's amazing. She's she's so incredible. So anyways, now that I've showered her with praise, I want to shower you guys with praise. You guys are all amazing. Thank you so much for this wonderful, wonderful discussion. And I hope you guys all had a good time. And of course, you are all welcome back anytime. Have a great weekend, you guys. Thanks so much. Have a great weekend. I love you, Dee. Thanks for the support.

Awesome. Thank you guys. I'll see you later. Thanks. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for being here and joining us all for Why Are We Bullish. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, smash that like button below the screen. It doesn't take more than a second, but it does help a ton. You can also, of course, share this again to anybody you think may have a good time watching it. And please do help me in my crusade to 100,000 subscribers or getting there. I'm giving myself to the end of the next year to do it. We're sitting in the low 80s right now. I think we can do it.

I think we can do it. And shout out to everybody in the chat, of course. Thank you guys for being here and being part of the conversation, really value it. I see yellow popping in last minute here. Yellow, good to see you. And with that, of course, I want to also say that you can also help the show in another way. You can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors and the show notes. Of course, those were hoddle, hoddle, coin kite, Ced, or Nunchuk, Start 9.

They're all down there. Check out everybody that was on the show. all of their Twitter handles are in the show notes, and from there you can find everything that they're doing. And then my final kind of self-shill here is more about that market I was talking about. I'm very excited to have it happen, and I could really use your help to get the word out. Of course, it's local to me, but that doesn't matter because I want people to replicate it other places, too. I'm trying to make a blueprint of it, of the mistakes that we make and the victories that we have, but I think it's so important to have those connections and build those local

communities so that you become a robust, independent, you know, this community that can't be shaken. And I think we can build that together. So if you want to find the event, you can find it a couple different places. One would be on the Orange Pill app if you're already on it. Pretty awesome to connect with local bitcoins, but you'll see it under the Saturday Sat market. You'll be able to search that up. But if you're not on OrangePill app yet, then of course, you can go and find it on meetup.com as well. And again, it's under the Saturday Sat market. It's hosted by myself. And I have a BTC Sessions Bitcoin Education group on there that can be

joined. But all the details are there. We have a venue. We have a time. We have a date. And we have a whole bunch of merchants. If you want to be involved as a merchant, great. Reach out to me contact at vtc sessions.ca.com. If you just want to show up, please just show up and bring your friends and family. Every merchant will be capable of accepting sats. And on top of that, we're also going to make it so that merchants can accept cash and things like that so that the Bitcoin Curious can still come and feel included. There's going to be a lot of great stuff there. We've got so much going on and I can't wait. So please, please help me spread the word, tweet it out, share it on Noster, get it on whatever socials you can, and get people to bolster it up

and replicate it as I'm freaking yellow out here. Yes, replicate it. Go forth and replicate. I am a replicator and help us bootstrap the Saturday Sat Market globally, globally everybody. Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap up here. Finally, I will just say, If you need some additional help, if all of the tutorials that are for free on the channel aren't enough, of course, go check them out, they're all for free. But if you need some 101s, you can also contact me for that. There's a QR code on the screen that will take you directly to where you can book me one-on-ones for educational sessions for hardware, software, lightning, nodes, privacy, all that stuff. You can go check that out if you're not on the live stream and you're listening to the pod instead. Just head to BTCsessions.ca.

Anyways, with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. And I will see you guys next time for your daily session.