BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Kal Kassa, Pierre Corbin, Chris Smith, Ben Gagnon ep243

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

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What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? I am still south of the border, south of many borders. I'm still down in Costa Rica. So thus the beach bomb look. And I've got all new guests on the show today. Very excited.

You'll get to meet them momentarily. I've got my beverage going. So happy Friday to you all. And of course, this is live. Anything can happen and, you know, where a bunch of us are actually on not our typical Wi-Fi connection. So we'll see how things go. But anything can happen. We're going to go ahead with it.

So 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. A fucking thing sucks. If you haven't already, like, subscribe, share, all those things.

Super important. They really do help get the show. in front of more eyeballs. Without further ado, I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our panel, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is the bitboe.io dashboard. We're sitting at $38,972 dollars per coin.

It's been ping pong in a whole bunch. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up, 2,567. That's 90.38% of all Bitcoin have been mined in terms of fees, nine stats per byte next block up a little bit. But if you're willing to wait an hour, one sat per byte will still do you, of course. Quick shout out to sponsors of the show. If you're in Canada, shake pay is a super easy way to stack stats. Easy deposits with e-transferers, no deposit fees or withdrawal fees. What else?

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You earn SAT specs to your shop, and they also have a referral program to stack some extra sacks in the process. Keystone, you know, these guys, one of my favorite and most used hardware wallets. It's 100% air-gapped, meaning you don't plug it into anything internet connected. It's all done offline via QR code, and that keeps the keys to your money safe and away from internet connections. highly recommend you upgrade to the Bitcoin-only firmware, and then it works beautifully with things like Blue Wallet,

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With that, let's stop my rambling. I'm going to start bringing in our panel. We've got Pierre, we've got Cal, we've got Chris, and we've got Ben Part 2. Gentlemen, welcome to this show. I'm very happy to have you all. Let's do a quick round of intros. You've now been shuffled in my view, so we're going to go in a slightly different order, but that's okay. So maybe let's go to Pierre.

Pierre can let people know who are you? What do you do? Yeah, hi, everyone. So I'm Pierre Corbin. I'm a full-time Bitcorner, try to be. I quit my day job last May to just focus on Bitcoin, education to start, and many other kind of other projects. And my first project is actually a documentary film, full feature film that is called The Great Reset and the Rise of Bitcoin that I recommend everyone watching. It's a very, I mean, a lot of work was put into it. It's got a lot of views. We just crossed 500,000 views.

on YouTube and it won some film festival and was selected to others including a sunscreen film festival in Florida so very exciting very happy to be here thank you for having me yeah and in I'm in I'm exploring Bitcoin spending some stats yeah there could be lightning network yeah absolutely and I will after the show I'm going to link to your your your movie in the show notes. So everybody, be sure to check that out. But either way, your Twitter handles on the screen right now. So give them a follow and take a peek for that film that he put together because it's pretty

awesome. So let's jump down the line next. Cal, you're up. Can you let people know who you are and what you do? How's it going, guys? My name is Cal Casa. I'm in Ethiopia right now at Disava. And I work on open source Bitcoin education.

As well as I have a role with Oseki. I am a head of business development where I can't quite tell you exactly what we do. We're still in stealth mode, but we should be releasing our product soon. So happy to be here, guys. Good to see you, man. And good to see you. Again, I think the last time I saw you in person would have been at the Human Rights Foundation Freedom Forum down in Miami last October.

Is that right? That's right. That's right, the Oslo Freedom Forum in Miami. Yeah. Good to see you. And are you going to, is there any chance you're going to be in Miami again in a month's time for the conference? I'm pretty sure I'll be there. Yeah, I think I'm going to make a stop in Austin first just to round out the month.

And then I'll join you guys out in Miami. Awesome, man. Well, I look forward to it. Let's jump down to Ben Part 2. another friend of mine that I frequently see often in the same city where I reside. So Ben, welcome. It's a shame that we don't see each other more in person. Let's fix that.

But let people know who we are and what you do. Thanks, Ben. Good to be here. Hi, everyone. My name is Ben Gagnon. I'm the chief mine officer for BitFarms. Basically, we're just a big globally traded public Bitcoin mining company. I mean, we operate a number of Bitcoin mining facilities out in Quebec, Washington State.

I'm right now in Argentina taking a look at our new buildout down here in Argentina. It was in Paraguay two days ago looking at our new site down there. We're just a big old global Bitcoin mining company. So great to be here. You love to see it, man. Well, welcome. I'm glad to have you. And Argentina, huh, interesting.

I would love to get down there. Maybe I will someday and peek around. It's very carnivore-friendly. So we'll have a good time. Perfect. And Chris, dude, thank you for being here. Can you let everybody know who you are, what you do? Yeah, thank you for having me on.

My name is Chris Smith. I'm a senior at Lipscomb University. I'm actually still a full-time student. I graduate in May. I'm also working full-time for Bitcoin Magazine and getting ready for the Bitcoin Conference, as you mentioned, here in April and Miami. And mostly what I do is I do a lot of media partnerships with the conference and just

getting ready for everything that's about to happen in Miami. It's going to be the largest, I guess, gathering of Bitcoiners ever in the whole entire world. And we're just super stoked to have everyone down there. Awesome. I'm beyond excited for it. Last year was incredible seeing so many awesome people. So yeah, I'm very much looking forward to it.

And I guess I'll see you in person as well. Sounds like it's going to be a bit of a party. So yeah, guys, we are here. We're ready for why are we bullish? Those that are watching that are unfamiliar, just a little rundown. Basically, everybody here is coming with a reason why they're bullish, something that they're excited about in and around the Bitcoin space. So the way that we run this thing, very simply we go by the three R's.

somebody's going to give a reason why they're bullish. Then altogether we're going to riff on that reason. And then we're going to rotate to the next person until we've all had a turn. So really, really simple. And I'm going to get us started as per tradition. And my reason for being bullish this week is, I guess a bit of a personal experience. Given that I'm currently in Costa Rica, but I've experienced this multiple other places that I've been, is just the the hospitality and the warmth of bitcoins that I meet around the globe.

And I want to give a shout out to two individuals that I've met in basically over the course of the past week within Costa Rica. And I'm actually even going to bring up their Twitter accounts right now just to give them a shout out. So Adrian Barrick, him and his family, literally had my family over. He's never like, he doesn't know who I am. He just knew I was a bitcooner in town. And he was like, yo, come have dinner and come for a swim and everything. And their family is awesome. They're big into Bitcoin.

And he's a, we'll call him a Canadian refugee escaping Ontario to come be in Costa Rica. and he couldn't be a nicer guy. And fun fact, he's writing some Bitcoin fiction. So he's about halfway done his books. I'm very much looking forward to it. And I also want to give a shout out to, I'll just call him his voice handle here, JPB. Again, another Canadian refugee in Costa Rica, funny enough.

And he took, again, his whole family, he's come down to Costa Rica here. but I was honored to be the first bitcoinser that he's ever spoken to in person. He's been into the Bitcoin space the past year and a half, two years. He's fallen hard down the rabbit hole. He's done a lot of reading, thousands of hours of reading, podcasts, all this kind of stuff. He's now mining. And he's just an all-around awesome guy.

So, you know, if you're on Twitter and you want to make acquaintances with. a couple good bitcoins and then check these guys out. But I was going to say that I'm kind of amazed that anywhere you go around the globe, you can kind of just gravitate to and find some like-minded, incredible people just by reaching out to the local Bitcoin community. And I've experienced this in so many places, and it always blows my mind that I can, wherever I am, reach out, say, hey, are there any bitcoins in town, get linked up with somebody,

and then just sit down and have a fantastic hours-long conversation about what we're passionate about and all of the extraneous things that come in with it. And also experiencing JPB's first in-person chat with a Bitcoin or being that person for him, I remember, you know, the first time I got to speak with somebody else who was as crazy as I was to latch on to this, this weird internet money, it was, it was an interesting and life-changing experience. And you have this moment of, I'm not crazy. There's somebody else that's at least as crazy as me.

And I got to chat and fall down a rabbit hole with them for a few hours. And so I think hopefully it was a good experience for him, but he seemed to, pretty excited to chat in person with another Bitcoins. And so rather than just kind of leave it wide open, I'm kind of curious to get some of your takes on experiences you guys have had, either meeting Bitcoiners from different parts of the world and what that experience is like, or if you so please, maybe tell me about the first time you ever got to speak to another Bitcoin or in person and what that was like.

So I'll open it up to whoever wants to jump in first, but one of those two avenues that you want to take, feel free. I would love to go. Let's do Chris and then we'll do a count. Okay, cool. Yeah, I would love to jump in here. I'm going to tell this story because I love this story. It was the first time that I walked into the Bitcoin Magazine office.

And we were actually talking about that the other day and how working in Bitcoin is really a peace of mind. And it's not only monetary freedom, it's freedom for your mind. And the first time you work in Bitcoin, the first time you work surrounding that common goal, being around an environment where everyone is like-minded is truly something that is very bullish, in my opinion. Because not only are people working for revenue, people working for profit, obviously everybody has to make money, but there's a bigger goal in mind. And being in an environment where that resonates to every single person who you work with, you can always get grounded in that fact. And so back to when I first walked into the office, it was like no environment I had ever been in before. And I would go to say like Bitcoin meetups are that way as well.

I don't know if you all have a Bitcoin meetup that you go to. But if you don't, I highly suggest you find one. Or if you can't find one, you start one yourself because it is so awesome to just put yourself an environment with those light-minded individuals where you can truly find peace of mind. Yeah, I 100% agree. And I agree with your point about if there's no meetup near you, just start one. Even if there's like one person that shows up the first time, it's well worth it. So yeah, absolutely. Cal, you were about to say something as well.

Feel free to jump in. Yeah, sure. So I fell down the rabbit hole in early 2020. And I guess because of that, I didn't really have any, you know, in life, you know, kind of in real life. friends or anyone to kind of chat with. So it wasn't until probably early 2021 when I happened to be in Austin, Texas, Unchained Capital at the time was holding, you know, biddebs, still is, I think, in a new location. So yeah, walking into that, you know, their office on, I think it's Fifth Street. And, you know, it's a large office, but because there are so many

bitcoinsers just looked so small right it felt so small and um you know and just walking in and having access to you know parker lewis and jimmy song and you know i was kind of in the midst of my heroes right so it was a pretty great you know experience to have and it kind of helped me you know kind of tie myself into the community so now when i you know travel around or i'm in ethiopia i always have a good reference point. I always have good kind of sources and citations. So I was really kind of blessed to have that opportunity. Awesome. Yeah. And you bring up a good point of being surrounded by some of the people that you may have kind of watched or listened to prior. Bitcoins are especially ones that have been around the block are incredibly accessible. So surprisingly to me, I think my first time I

I met Adam back at Bitcoin 2019. And I'm like, here's the guy that was cited in the white paper that has basically been part of the cyphor punk movement has built a large portion of the backbone of, of, you know, what Bitcoin was based on. And I just walked up to him and started chatting. And you can get those, if you can read social cues, you know, if you're in a conversation with some. somebody often if they don't know you, you get that where the body is kind of tilted and the feet are facing facing away and they might feel like they're basically signaling like, okay, well, I'm ready to exit the conversation and go chat to other people. And Adam back as a guy who, you know, he's, he's, he's been around the block. Everybody wants to chat with him. And he,

he definitely has more important people to talk to than me. But no, I walked up to him and it was just straight attention focus. He sat there and talked to me for like 20 minutes, half an hour with no indication that he had anywhere else he would rather be. And it was it was astounding to me like the how generous Bitcoiners are with their time. And there's been many other examples of that. But it definitely strikes me. So I'll pass it to our other two panelists to comment. Maybe I'll do if it's okay. do Pierre first and then Ben. But Pierre, do you want to comment either on, you know, your first chat with another bitcoins or how it's been meeting bitcoins abroad?

Yeah. So I've been traveling a lot the past year. I've basically don't have a home anymore. I just travel. And so I've met a few on the way, but very interesting is meeting them here in El Salvador because I'm just around the corner from the original Bitcoin beach. So, I mean, you can just head there and talk Bitcoin whatever you want. They're very open people. And just with anyone that you meet, because everyone that is here is also just a bunch of travelers. Everyone goes for drinks and just wants to meet others.

So there's a lot of meeting people and there's a lot of Bitcoiners, obviously. And it's really, it's really great the interactions you can have. And I was having a conversation with a guy. He's called Dave that is from Canada, in fact, but lives in the US. And he's in his, I don't know, late 40s or so he's just invested and very interested in Bitcoin. And he was saying how this is the place where like he has to be, had to come visit and has to come back because it's just like attending Woodstock or any kind of major events that happen. It's the source of, you know, nation state adoption. And there's just a lot of passion even in someone that doesn't necessarily work in.

Bitcoin. So yeah, just all around great, great interactions with people here. Awesome. Awesome. And I'll toss it to Ben last. Any comments on any of this that you'd like to throw in? Yeah, of course. You know, I always think Bitcoin is just such a great filter for people. If you meet somebody and they're a Bitcoiner and they're into Bitcoin, you know that they just get it, right? Most of the people that you meet in the world, chances are they don't, they don't get it or haven't gotten it yet. And I'd say it's only true for Bitcoiners. You know, it's not true for crypto in general.

But when you meet another Bitcoiner, you're all on the same page. And, you know, it's a big club and we're all in it and it's permissionless. I mean, it's, you know, you're right. It's very accessible. Every time when I was getting started in this industry and I've been all over the world, meeting people building mining facilities and, you know, striking strategic relationships and all this stuff, I'm always surprised every time when I walk up to somebody and I start talking and it's, you know, hey, this is the head of this company. This is the founder of this thing.

You know, and everybody's, you know, all in this together. Pretty amazing thing to find those like-minded people. It's like having a Tinder app and, you know, you can just filter out 99% of people that you don't want to talk to without doing any swiping. So it's just a great filter. Yeah. Bitcoin meetups are the ultimate swipe right, I would like to say. So, yeah, you're right. No swiping required.

And you know what? I will say that while it's great meeting Bitcoiners in person, one person I really want to meet. You know, my favorite no-coiner is David Wong. And he is back again this week. and he's my favorite person. He never misses a show. He hates Bitcoin, but he's here every Friday. So, David, it's really good to see you.

Thank you. David will like everybody to know that Bitcoin is a cult. They smile, they talk of nice things. They appeared to be in apartments and use cheap mining heat. So thank you, David. Love you, man. Glad you made it. But with that, we'll wrap up that topic.

everybody in the chat welcome i see yellow yellow has joined us uh yellow good to see you we can relax now you're here thank you uh and and good to see the canadian bitcoinsers in here canadian bitconers had some nice things to say about uh ben genio he's they're saying that you're one of the smartest minds in bitcoin mining and bit farms is very lucky to have you on staff so uh shout out to to lenn and joey over at canadian bitcoins you guys are awesome and i can't we i'm having you guys on again sometime soon in the coming weeks. So I'm excited to see you guys again. But with that, let's let's change gears. Let's jump to our next topic. Pierre, you're next on my screen. I hope I'm not throwing you under the bus or cat me off guard here, but I'm going to toss it to you. What are you excited about this week,

man? What are you bullish about? So I'd say Bitcoin education. I want to focus on the topic of my film. that Bitcoin education can also get just more mainstream. By this, I mean the fact, celebrating the fact that the film was selected for a sunscreen film festival, which is, I mean, an achievement I never thought would ever, you know, happened for this film, because it's a, I mean, it's a really big deal. So, so very, very exciting. Yeah, that's, that's the page of, the Twitter page of the film, where you can, you know, have access to the, to the website and so on. And yeah, and it's just the idea that as bitcoinsers, we, for some crazy reason, I don't know, we just want to educate people about Bitcoin and, and, you know, how it works. And that's exactly what I wanted to do with this film, you know, just be able to, in a short, concise way, put the information that I thought was relevant today for people, which meant understanding our economy, the state where,

at right now inspired on an article written by Dylan LeClair but also video how the economic machine works made by Ray Dalio and just refreshing this with the current data so people really understand what's happening what strategies are usually taken by central banks and where we're at which is the limit of where we can be and and then explain everything about the inflation CPI and Bitcoin and simply how Bitcoin fits into this picture which I have you know the conclusion of the film of course it's very biased the conclusion of the film is essentially that you know it's an infinite divided by 21 million Bitcoin and just showing how

and who is getting into Bitcoin now and why eventually everyone will will get into Bitcoin simply because I mean if you compare it to Fiat Fiat you have a hundred percent certain they will lose value. Bitcoin against that in theory should appreciate. And on top of that, at the economical context, which is that, you know, we have already now a big, you know, crisis that is going to hit us, the stock market that is, that is dropping. And that this money will eventually have to exit and where is it going to go? My bet is on Bitcoin simply because traditionally this used to go towards bonds and government obligations this now will be a bit harder since no one really can trust them in bonds in some places are negative yielding and so on so yeah so

then just this film I'm very happy about the success of it and happy that big earners are willing to push it forward and just spread the word about it as much as possible and yeah I was going to say not only are they willing to push it forward, but they're willing to watch it on date night with their wife. So I don't know if that's Joey or Len, but. Yeah, that's Len. I was on their podcast, and Len was telling this very amusing story. And in fact, recommended anyone watching to watch it on Valentine's Day with their date. So, you know, I guess it means it's good enough, right?

Yeah. And beyond that, I'm also happy that a lot of Bitcoiners have reached out after making this film. Some are willing to help with some translations for the subtitles. I have also one guy from Russia that is doing a dubbing completely of the film, so that people in Russia can also get a better understanding of what Bitcoin is. So both for Russia and Ukraine, right? I think it's very important, especially now for them to be able to understand what Bitcoin is, how it works, yeah, and how it can benefit them. So, no, so yeah, really good, really good stuff.

And I'm also planning on. We'll see how this turns out. But for the Bitcoin conference that I will attend as well, I want to have a screening and a cinema nearby. Hopefully have a bunch of bitcoins come around, watch it, you know, maybe just meet up to talk about the film, watch the film together. and maybe a Q&A and something like that at the end. I would love that. Let me know if that happens. Yeah, I think very, very high chances.

Like I'm already in touch with the cinema there, a big chain of cinemas. They're all good. The pricing is fine. Like I think, yeah, it's looking good. Awesome. Yeah. If you get more details on that, shoot me a DM. And, you know, I'll, you know, if it's on, if I don't have other obligations,

then I'll definitely be swing down to that one. and try and rally the troops to come down. That'd be awesome. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. And you're absolutely right on the education front, this drive of Bitcoiners to create and provide tools for those that maybe, you know, haven't gone yet the pre-corner of the world, which there's so many.

Man, the explosion of good content, like your fitness, that has come out in even just between say 2017 and now is insane like I think of what was available when I kind of started in Bitcoin like 2014 15 in and around those times and and holy crap like it was it was basically if you were not watching like an Andreas Antonopoulos talk which you know know even back then those were a few and far between like what else was there to like in terms of visual media there just wasn't a lot to latch onto and now it's like i could i could have a 24-7 stream of videos and podcasts of the utmost high-end quality and i could never get through it all which is incredible because though when people start down that

that learning rabbit hole, they need good content. And now there's no shortage of it. On top of that, I think the other big thing is the consistency of quality and message from the Bitcoin-specific content. Because the narrative on, you know, whatever other coin out there, it just, you know, it can flip-flop and go to and fro. Even if you just look at Ethereum, the narrative has changed the umpteenth time in the past. like five years. Whereas Bitcoin has been pretty consistent. And the ethos and the, the lessons that have been learned,

there's a pretty cohesive narrative through the years of how things have gone and looking back in retrospect on things like the block size war and everything. There's an excellent story to be told there. And a lot of people are doing it a lot of justice. very happy to see that. So I'll open it up to the panel. If anybody else wants to jump in on either Pierre's film or Bitcoin education in general, yeah, anybody who wants to jump in. Sure, I'll do it. Yeah, I think education is super important and super key. I mean, we're swimming around in a world of misinformation. So to be able to deliver the correct information to people is,

you know, the key on how they get out of it. Super, super, super important to be, you know, doing that work. I'm glad that other people are, you know, picking up that torch in a more meaningful way. I do think it's funny, though, that she said you're happy that Bitcoiners are, you know, speaking up and, you know, chatting about Bitcoin because I haven't met a Bitcoiner that can stop talking about Bitcoin in my seven years. You know, it seems like once we find out and once somebody asked, about Bitcoin. It's like opening up the champagne bottle and it just keeps going and going and going and you can't get us to stop. So good to be doing it a little bit more formal manner, Pierre, I think, and reaching a broader audience instead of just all these one-on-ones that turn into rants. Nice to have a little bit of organization and structure to it.

Absolutely. Chris or Cal, do you guys want to dive in? Yeah, sure. I'll say something. I've watched your film yet, Pierre. I'm definitely going to go watch it after this for sure. I'm super excited about that. But I think it's really good just the cinematic experience and the artistic nature of being the part of something that is worth being artistic about. And I think that kind of separates Bitcoin from a class that it was to the class that it is now. Because we see not only your film, but just artists in general. people can't stop painting about about bitcoin like ben said people can't stop talking about bitcoin people

can't start stop making films about bitcoin and you see this kind of trend and when creativity and a certain topic kind of get intertwined um i believe that makes the certain topic this being bitcoin even more powerful than it was um so i'm super excited to see your film and um super excited that the people who are artistic are really taking advantage of this. Yeah, so actually, if I can just intro to your point, I've had people reach out to me on Twitter saying, so I'm a graphic designer, I do illustrations, this kind of stuff. Here's my work.

I made it my mission for 2022 to not let low quality visuals be out there when it comes to Bitcoin content. So reach out to me if ever you need any kind of new visuals for future projects. So yeah, definitely. I love that. Cal, do you want to dive in here? Yeah, just to say that, you know, I think, Pierre, you're absolutely right. Education's probably one of the most important things we can focus on.

And I'm a very visual learner, so I'm really happy to have documentaries like yours that I can, you know, put on repeat and fall asleep to. and have, you know, it kind of come through, through osmosis and all of these things. So I'm really glad to have content, you know, from podcasts, you know, really long form stuff that, you know, I could now use to kind of, you know, challenge even my own kind of mindset and thoughts on that. So, you know, thank you for being a creator and giving us all of this art. Yeah, and also actually to that point, when working on the film, so of course, you know, it took like over six months yeah it was a quite a long process and i had a lot of conversations with people and everyone

was telling me yeah but don't you think you know it's better to have short content you know maybe have it in episodes and this kind of stuff and and i just you know i was i was very stubborn and i think i did very well to be that stubborn to have it a long feature because it's it's important to have long content because it allows you to get deep into a topic directly right you have someone's attention uh you keep this attention and you you know it takes time in order to get into the deep topics so so yeah long content is important it it's harder hitting right it's you know everybody can click on a a two-minute video but when you when you spend an hour plus with something it means that you've sat down and

committed and you take something from that even even when you don't you can't fully articulate what you took it's something of it imprints itself on you and then leaves itself with you. And it helps you in your later understanding as you encounter other types of content. And it helps you kind of form that, that worldview. So, you know, that long form content is important to have out there. And I'm glad to see it being done professionally, like with yourself. So, so thanks, man. I'm glad I'm glad you've done it. And again, everybody that's wanting to check it out. The, the Twitter handle if you're on Twitter right now, at the Great Reset A1.

Is that right? Yeah, that's right. You can find it on my Twitter profile as well, of course. Perfect. And then the website is the great resetfilm.com. And you can find all the stuff there. So, yeah, definitely check that out. But with that, and I also got to give a shout out to,

we're talking about all this high-quality content. And, of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention also So the low quality content like Yellow and the meme factory, putting out their episodes, interviewing people, or rather cornering them into a group of meme creators. So yellow, you're right. We've got to tip the hat to the low quality content as well. So thanks, man. Let's keep this going.

Of course, everybody in the chat, thanks. Keep the comments coming. Like, subscribe, share all the good stuff. But we're going to dive down the line. Cal, you are next on my screen. Hopefully I'm not surprising you. But let's throw it to you, man. What are you excited about this week?

What has you bullish? This week, I'm excited for the Bitcoin for nation states. And I think that's actually been my interest for a while now. And just kind of looking at kind of geo-politics and kind of what the world is going through. And, you know, we have, what, 160 countries on the world, roughly, right? I know about 54 of them in Africa. And we look at these countries and even if you make the point that we might need some currencies at the nation-state level for transactions, a lot of these countries don't have currencies that will survive, right?

Even the strongest one, United States dollar, we can reasonably argue that it'll be, you know, gone within 50 to 100 years, right, in terms of all of its value. I think the Warren Buffett's and the Charlie Mungers have kind of also agreed on this to where the United States dollar was slowly go to zero. And so, you know, what that means for countries I think is going to be really important. Because, you know, not only do you have relationships that are, you know, an individual versus its state, but you have states versus states, right? and that of course, you know, affects individuals. So to just kind of follow that, I think will be really interesting. And, you know, hopefully with that comes not just an element of watching, but also supporting and serving, right? So civic engagement, right?

I think there's like, you know, kind of a popular quote, one person's, you know, civic engagement is another person's rent seeking. And I'm kind of also learning that in Ethiopia, right? How do I place myself? Where do I go? What type of examples do I said? And, you know, what things are, am I doing for the community? And how could that potentially not serve the community, right? So kind of being careful and walking kind of a thin line because I think we're all very early.

and we want to set a good precedent and be good leaders. And so, yeah, that nation-state kind of conversation is really interesting to me. And I think some of the developing countries are kind of the global south because they're so young, they're going to see some very quick adoption. And so the things that Blockstream is doing with Samson Mao and El Salvador, you know, that's really interesting. So I'm looking forward to follow all of that. I want to pose a question to you. And I, you know, I'll kind of leave it open to whether or not you want to get into specifics.

But when you're looking at, you know, the next domino to fall after El Salvador, are there areas either globally, like specifically geographically, I mean, that you think are particularly more likely to follow up with something similar to what El Salvador is doing. Do you have specific countries in mind? Or if you don't want to specifically comment on that, what qualities in a country do you think lends them to do what El Salvador has done? Well, one, I think, you know, the inflation rate is a good measure as to us, you know, a populace is pain, right? And so once that, you know, passes 50 and heads towards 100, you know, all bets are off, right? You'll start to do anything to for your family, right? And Bitcoin is on the table and it's probably an interesting and good alternative to the fiats. what countries might be next. It's very hard for me to say.

I won't speculate, but I also look at, you know, I've been in Ethiopia for the past two months now, you know, supporting adoption, giving presentations, lectures, you know, X, Y, and Z. And I can already see that there is adoption here in a de facto sense, because you can use the refill, for example, to load up your telecom on your, you know, government-owned telecom credit, right?

So it's already here in terms of usage. So we'll see. Interesting. Yeah, it's, it's funny with El Salvador, there was this, it happened. And then it's that age old, people overestimate what can happen in a year and underestimate what can happen in a decade. And, you know, El Salvador happens and everybody's like, end of the year, there's going to be like three, four, five, ten more countries that do this. And, you know, we came up with a donut.

But I think what we're going to see in the coming years in, you know, again, the next decade could be pretty staggering. And we see rumblings of it. We see things like smaller, like states or municipalities that are. are leaning towards adopting Bitcoin in some way, shape, or form, as as insignificant as it may seem in comparison to a full nation state, any, any of those mentions in the news prior to El Salvador, we'd all be salivating, right? And so that that Overton window has totally shifted. We're like, it's not a country. Yeah, whatever. But, you know, how quickly things change. And again, I think we'll see some other surprising things in the coming years and decade or so.

But I'll open it up here to anybody who wants to comment on the idea of nation-state adoption and countries that are particularly uniquely positioned to move into the space for anybody who wants to dive in. Well, I mean, I can just share my experience with El Salvador. I've been here one week, so still early. Yeah, I'm still here for another three weeks to stay a month total. Yeah, so for me, like, you know, as I said, I just have a lifestyle where I travel. So I thought next destination before going to Miami would be great to come over here. And yeah, I think what you mentioned also, you know, what can happen in a year versus what can happen in 10 years.

I think even for a country that adopted Bitcoin, the way El Salvador did, it's still very early, you know, like around here, Elzante, Bitcoin Beach. I mean, I pay everything in Bitcoin. But other than that, you know, a lot of people, they don't even understand it. They know that, of course, it's here, but it was mostly for tourism. And then I think that that's, you know, the truth. In fact, there was a lot to attract foreign investment and increased tourism and the great, I mean, great idea in reality. But other than that, it's not used that much.

And they don't understand it so much. So, but, you know, this will come and it's coming more and more. And I think Bitcoin is coming here is a great way to help people. I mean, I'm planning on doing a screening of my film at Bitcoin Beach. So, you know, the idea of just spreading this information. That's great. Maybe, yeah, it's maybe in the future you can do another documentary on El Salvador the first 10 years. You know, I think that geopolitics is a really interesting angle for Bitcoin.

And I too am very excited about nation-state adoption. I think it's going to happen in a bit of a different way, though. I don't think it's going to be the countries that run their own fiat currency and are inflating them that are going to be the most incentivized to switch over to a Bitcoin standard. I actually think it's going to be the 30 to 40-odd countries that import U.S. dollars and use U.S. dollars as their default currency. Because when they started doing this, this was really, really about having financial discipline, right? They knew that if they ran this themselves,

it would be corrupted and destroyed to nothing. And, you know, they wanted the financial discipline of somebody who was a little bit bigger and more stable, you know, outsource that liability to them. I think with Bitcoin, they can achieve the same thing, right? You know, that counterparty that they trusted originally is no longer as trusted as it was when they started these systems 30, 40 years ago. And now Bitcoin gives them that same opportunity again to enact financial discipline, have a stable and prosperous economy for everybody. I think, you know, the countries that are running the money printer are going to continue to run the money printer because there's a really, it's really hard to stop running that thing once it keeps going. You know, if we look at Venezuela,

and they're the most inflationary country in the world. I don't think they're switching over to a Bitcoin standard anytime soon, you know, they're just going to keep pouring more and more gas on the fire. So I think we should look out for those smaller countries that are utilizing the U.S. dollar and, you know, really want to make some good long-term investments in the country. And adopting Bitcoin as a standard or illegal tender is a great way to do that. Change your unit account, change your time preference, and focus on those long-term investments that are going to bring, you know, great long-term dividends to your country and your citizens. Yeah. And I like your point that, you know, a lot of these countries were dollarized for that, for that discipline,

which has, that discipline has been more or less thrown out the window the past couple of years. But also there's the dynamic of they dollarized because that was the World Reserve currency. and with current geopolitical shifts, that position is potentially not what it used to be and could continue to degrade relatively quickly, potentially in the coming years. So, you know, in that instance, not everyone will obviously jump on the Bitcoin train, but there may be few as they're as their, as they're, searching and deciding what what's next, what replaces it, some of those dollarized nations may think, well, you know, do you know it's been a few years and El Salvador seems to be

doing all right? Maybe it is a viable option. So yeah, I guess we'll see. But I'll, again, I'll open it up. Cal or Chris, do you want to touch on anything here? Yeah, I think it's really fun to speculate exactly which which countries are adopted next. Hear news from presidents, hear news from governmental agencies about bullishness around the world geopolitically. But overall, I think it's important to recognize that as bad as a country needs Bitcoin, they are more fearful of being a threat to the United States. And what I mean by that is they would rather swallow the pill and not adopt Bitcoin

then be viewed as a threat to the United States government due to the financial strength that the United States and specifically NATO, the BIS, and the World Economic Forum, have created on this dollarized system. So I think that there are the outliers such as El Salvador, maybe Turkey, maybe Argentina, that go out on a limb and adopt it. But I don't. think that as long as that fear is there that many nation states will put their neck on a line and go ahead and bite the bullet per se. But I think once the dominoes really start falling, they're going to fall really fast. And once countries start adopting Bitcoin, I don't think we will see one adopt one year and then one adopt the next. I think when we see two or three

countries adopt back to back to back, we're going to see 10 countries adopt that year. 20 countries. I really think that once that ball gets rolling, it's going to be an avalanche that truly can't be stopped. But to get to that point, I think that there is still a lot of work geopolitically that has to be done around the world. Yeah. I think you also, in the current environment, you need like a, you need like a, you

need like a yolo head of state like bukelly to just to just be like oh fuck it bitcoin why not i think i think you need a little bit of that of somebody who just who will shit post and and tweet at the i mf and tell them to go blow themselves like that's i think it's necessary at this stage but eventually you'll be able to have like a you know a relatively you know non-backwards hat wearing president that just legitimately says, hey, you know, this is a good play. It's not outside the realm of reason to do this. And I think it'll take, you know, a number of nations having done it and a track record of years of it having been a good call for that to be a regular thing. So, yeah, you're right. It's fair. It is early, but, you know, we'll cross our fingers.

I'll leave it up to any final comments, Pierre, if you want to add in anything, Cal, if you have any final thoughts about what the other guys said. Well, just maybe going back to what Ben was saying, about these USD nations, right? It's just adding the fact that there are the countries that can indirectly suffer from, you know, the U.S. increasing their monetary supply. They the US can do this in order to you know put this money back in forms of stimulus put it back in their economy and so on They can get some benefits out of it let's say at least in the short term Whereas all of these countries that are based on the US dollar

They're only going to get the negative effects out of it and are completely They have no power over it and I think that's the kind of thing that can lead to a fast shift Absolutely and now I couldn't have said it any better I think that, you know, I think these world views will start to shift and will begin to have new borders and hopefully no borders and, you know, hopefully have, you know, identities that just exist, you know, by virtue of you being you and sovereign and, you know, you being, you know, an interesting and able and valuable person in the world. And, you know, that should be enough, right? if you have a bitcoin wallet you know you have uh enough tools to to to build so um you know

hopefully that the world looks something like that and uh and it'll be interesting awesome well uh i think that's a good way to wrap this topic cal thank you for that one i'm i'm glad we we dove into this uh and uh just so you know uh david would like everybody to know that any real money would need to need to be backed by a physical thing that can't disappear. So gold is the only one left that fits the bill. So thank you, David. You're right. The historical president of backing paper money by gold has never been diminished or ruined by any individual. It has never broken a peg. It's clearly the only solution. So thank you, David, for that. I value your input. And we're going to move on here.

Ben, you are up next, my friend. Tell me, what are you excited about this week? What has you bullish? Yeah, so, I mean, nothing that really broke this week, but it's stuff that's been trending around, you know, lately in terms of the numbers. No surprise. I'm really bullish on where the mining network is right now.

You know, we had a really scary period right after the China mining ban, where we lost 50% of hash rate almost overnight. A lot of uncertainty crept into the market. and what was going to happen with China, what was going to happen with the manufacturers, what was going to be the value of this equipment, you know, when we're going to recover. But we, you know, we're there. I mean, it's been almost a year, but hash rate is a little bit north of where we were post-China, or right before the China mining ban.

We've had a huge major decentralization of hash rate all around the globe, all across brand new facilities, new owners of that hash rate. That's incredibly bullish thing for me. We've proven that anti-fragility aspect of the network through decentralized mining operations all over the world multiple times with the China mining ban and then Kazakhstan and then recently with a little bit of action in Ukraine and Russia. And finally, we've got hardware prices that are starting to come back down into a normal and more expected range. we had incredibly high hardware prices going into the China mining ban. The China mining ban completely reversed the supply constraints on new hardware, but the price didn't drop and the price basically stayed flat for the majority of the last year.

We've only now, over the last month or two months, as we've been down here consolidating, how we start to kind of get back to more reasonable levels. And now that we've had a lot of consolidation, both in the network and in price and in mining, I think it's an incredibly bullish thing looking forward. We're ready to spring forward. All these mining facilities are ready to look at, you know, hopefully incredibly high profits as Bitcoin is is rallying up to previous and new all-time highs, which makes me incredibly excited. And I think one of the things that algorithms trade on, because there's so few. real world variables to plug into Bitcoin.

It's just not correlated to anything other than time. What else do you? What else do you plug in? I think people plug in things like network hash rate. And so when China mining ban happens and there's a 50% drop in hash rate, you know, I think Algo is going to panic mode, not knowing what to do and start panic selling. You know, now we've kind of recovered from all of those positions.

and we're at a much higher ratio. The most secure the Bitcoin mining network has ever been is right now today. Just incredibly bullish on all those aspects of mining. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that distribution of hash geographically because we saw where was China at in terms of percentage of hash compared to. to the rest of the world. And how have we kind of seen that play out? Where did that hash kind of get distributed?

Yeah, I mean, China was a little bit north of half of the network. It's unclear where. I think it's around 65, 70%, but it, you know, there's a pretty decent margin of error in that, in that prediction. We did see a 50% drop in hash rate, you know, so there should be approximately 50% of that hash rate that was turned off. but, you know, some of it would have been turned off in stages. Certainly some of it was never turned off at all.

So it's a little bit unclear. But what we have seen is that miners have gone to North America. A lot of miners have come to the United States and Canada. We've got, you know, mining coming into South America. We're here in South America right now. I think there's great opportunities to come down here. You've got new opportunities, I think, on the sovereign side, where countries are finally realizing, you know, here's a product that I can actually manufacture

and export kind of irregardless of any other national competitive factor other than power, right? And something that's a lot easier to leapfrog than trying to develop a whole new industry and technologies. So that's why, you know, Bekele can start mining on volcanoes in El Salvador. You've got, who is it, Lord Fujitsu and Tonga, who's also talking about doing the exact same thing down there in Tonga. You know, they're going to go wherever the power is. But primarily, it's U.S. and Canada. That's interesting. Yeah.

And I'll give you one more short question and then we'll open it up to the panel. So the other thing I was chatting with actually one of the guys that I met here in Costa Rica, the topic came up of, is there, and I don't see it as much of a threat, but do you want to talk a little bit about the dynamics of if there were to be some type of, and we saw this early on and then reverse course, I believe with Marathon, about only mining certain types of transactions or certain types of blocks or excluding certain transactions from blocks that miners in certain jurisdictions were, what would be if a subset of the hash rate of the network were to attempt to exclude certain types of transactions that they, for some reason, didn't want to include in blocks, whether it be, you know, it's not

approved transactions based on a jurisdiction or whatever. what would be the net effect? What do you think the game theory would be that would play out there? Let's say if the U.S. and some Western nations said only approved transactions will be mined in our blocks. Well, I don't think that, I mean, that might happen in terms of this is a goal that we want to accomplish. It can't really happen in terms of practically enforcing it, right? And so there's always a big difference between what the law says and what they actually are able to enforce and enact. And you can write a law that doesn't make sense technically. They make lots of

laws that don't make any sense. You know, that doesn't necessarily, it's not really a prerequisite for making a law. But what I would say is that generally speaking, there's no incentive for me as a minor to support that. And so how are they going to get us to do that, right? I'm incentivized to preserve Bitcoin and to secure the Bitcoin network from these kind of egregious attacks. And all all the other miners around the world are equally incentivized to do so. It's when we stop, you know, and start filtering out and censoring things that we're actually not communicating on the same language anymore, right? We're not communicating on the same bandwidth anymore.

And so if people did that, you know, they would eventually have to, you know, I would assume either fork out or become irrelevant, you know. We've seen lots of forks on Bitcoin in the past trying to accomplish all sorts of crazy ideas. and none of them have been successful. You know, you can look at Bitcoin cash today. I think it's like 3% of Bitcoin's hash rate. Then you can look at Bitcoin SV, and I think it's 3% of Bitcoin cash rate. You know, these are very unsuccessful projects.

And if a ban did come into place or regulation did come into place on the exchange, I think you'd get a lot of country arbitrage taking place at the pool level. You know, like it you saw with the crypto exchanges, especially as they left China, they bounced around a lot. I mean, one month, finances in China, then it's in Hong Kong, then it's in Singapore, then it's in Malta. You can really move the company around very quickly and change a lot of the rules and the regulations that you're subject to. And there's lots of countries out there. One of them or many of them are going to be supportive of this. and it's going to become like whackamol.

It's just not going to be enforceable at all. Not to mention that as the block size or the block reward diminishes and more and more of the reward is just transaction fees over time, if you're excluding specific transactions, it just means that those transactions will pay a higher fee to get into a block in a nation or a constituency that will, will do the block, which means your percentage of the rewards for mining is going to dwindle because you're excluding that high reward for including those transactions in your blocks. And that's what's beautiful about Bitcoin and mining and it being, you know, permissionless and open.

And, you know, we don't care whose transaction we're processing. All transactions are the same. You know, and there's an incentive to preserve that. So if they want to choose to do that, they're not going to maximize profit. and they'll eventually get wiped out. Absolutely. I'll open it up to, you know, Pierre, Cal, Chris. I don't know if you want to tag in with anything

or if you have any other questions for Ben regarding mining, given that he's the guru. But yeah, go ahead. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, what I find very interesting about mining and how it's developing is just the incentives that are there for miners, right? So it incentivizes the whole energy. market to just become more green. And so it will put big miners at the center of this energy

shift that governments have been supposedly pushing for years and also put them down the road at the center of the money creation, right? Because we of course believe in a world where Bitcoin will be in the middle. And that's in fact maybe a question to you, Ben, is it already happening? And to what point or when do you think could happen the shift of rather than miners looking for the cheap energy and contacting energy producers turning to energy producers contacting miners in order to stabilize the grid and you know be able to leverage this cheaper energy themselves like is there already this shift happening as bit farms being in contact already or when do you see this really grown because i think this is when the hash rates will potentially increase

even more, right, once these big players themselves get into this. Yeah, I mean, it's a great point. The vertical integration with the energy industry is really key. If you're thinking long term about Bitcoin mining economics and a reward having every four years, obviously, unless the price continues to outpace the network by a considerable amount, you know, you're going to have compressed margins, right? and margins that get continuously smaller over time. So you're going to need cheaper and cheaper sources of power.

And that can only really come from monetizing that energy that nobody else is using. So the vertical integration is here. I mean, we've been curtailing at some of our farms in Quebec since, I think, 2018, maybe even 2017. And at the beginning of this year, the program was so successful over the past couple years, it was implemented across the entire province at every single mine. Texas is doing the same things. They have all sorts of curtailment programs for Bitcoin miners. And so it's really starting to enter into the mainstream space.

You'd be surprised how many oil and gas companies and energy companies, power plant companies, are doing their own small mining projects and pilot projects. You know, these are massive companies. They don't need to press release something so small. They can do this under the radar. They can get comfortable with it. And I think what they're all learning or have already learned, is that Bitcoin mining should be seen as like a buyer of energy,

or a buyer of last resort for your energy. And so, you know, energy is very interesting market. Energy is very easily stored, but electricity is not. And so once you've converted it into electricity, it's a flow of electrons. You can't really put that genie back in the bottle so cost effectively. And Bitcoin mining is a way to maximize utility

and get all that full financial value. value out of it, which is a boon for everybody. It will reduce our costs. It will increase their profitability. It will incentivize more production, more development, more power generation, which should lead to increasing levels of human flourishing all over the world. Every time there's increases in power development and energy utilization, you have huge increases in human flourishing.

I think this is what Bitcoin mining is really incentivizing. that's awesome um i wanted to share one thing i just saw it shortly before we came on here and it was from troy cross who was on the show last week um he tweeted out this uh according to cambridge there's enough flared gas to power five bitcoin networks all while converting methane to co2 methane is 80 times uh as warming as co2 over 20 years methane is responsible for one-third of all warming, which would be a huge win contrary to what most mainstream individuals believe that Bitcoin can actually be helpful in terms of preventing emissions or lowering their effects, which is fantastic.

I don't know, Ben, if that doesn't seem correct to you? No, it's right. I mean, when I met you, Ben, I was working with that, my previous company, Lutech in Alberta, and this is what we were doing. We were doing containerized Bitcoin mining for flare gas mitigation because this is a, this is a brilliant merger of many different things. And if you're a government or an NGO or something along those lines, and your goal is to reduce emissions, you know, ignore every argument as to why you're reducing emissions. it's irrelevant. If your goal is to reduce emissions, is there a better technology on the planet for doing that

other than Bitcoin mining at flare gas? I mean, there's no better technology on the planet that actually provides a private economic incentive to anybody with this resource to reduce that emission, right? Every other technology on the planet to reduce emissions is funded by public subsidy. This is the only natural economic incentive that exists in the world to reduce your own emissions.

So it's lining proper moral economic behavior, you know, with actual real world results. And it's a beautiful, it's a really beautiful thing. Damn. That's, it's, it's, it's so interesting when you see the, again, the incentive structure that that exists here. But I'll, I'll pass it to, I don't know if Chris or Cal, if you want to add anything in or ask your question, feel free. Now is the time.

Yeah, I have a little add-on, which will kind of lead into a question. I think it's humorously you just showed Troy. I was actually about to talk about the BPI and what him and David Zell and Grant McCarthy are really doing to counter all the FUD that's going on with Bitcoin mining. And I guess my question for you, both Bins,

if anybody really has an input on this, I guess the first question is, do we need to have a loud voice? And if the answer is yes, then how do we get our voice louder? And I think there's institutions like the BPI, the BAC, that are doing really, really good work with this. Nick Carter and particularly, but clearly that voice is not loud enough because maybe our five-person stroke row right here can bat bat off ideas with each other and agree on things. but most people don't and that's the reality of the situation that most people that don't know about bitcoin think that bitcoin is bad for the environment they just do um people who don't own bitcoin no coiners people who are from the ages 10 to 70 who really don't care about finance or investments at all

you know um they they think that it's bad for the environment so i i I guess, yeah, I'll leave it at that, Ben, if you want to touch on that at all. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a great point. You know, this Bitcoin mining will boil the oceans narrative is a really frustrating one because it's just overwhelming how much they beat the same drum over and over and over again. I've written a couple of pieces on it for Bitcoin Mag and, you know, looking into where this whole came from and what's the source of it?

I mean, it pretty much all comes from one source, and it's digeconomist. And it's just taken with no analysis, no critical thought, it's just taken verbatim. But, you know, it's fraudulent. It doesn't follow his own stated methodology. You can look at his numbers. None of the numbers make any sense. We have a 50% drop in China mining ban, and emissions and electricity consumption went up. How do you have a 50% drop in network cash?

rate and an increase in electricity consumption and emissions. In order for that to happen, you'd have to replace all the newest machines with all the oldest crap. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. You know, so he calls us greedy and at the same time, we're ignoring profitability and we're doing what's in our worst interest. It's really frustrating. But I think the difference is with Bitcoiners and most of the other world is, you know,

they're so engaged in narrative. And Bitcoin's so engaged in building that the people who are working in Bitcoin, they don't really care. They're shutting it out. They know that it's nonsense. They know it's noise. And they're saying, I'm focusing on building what I think is going to bring value to a whole network and community of people around the world. And that's what's going to prove them wrong.

And that's what's going to drive Bitcoin value up. You know, it's really hard to fight against a narrative when it's, it's coming from so much unlimited funding and it has intense bias. I don't know who is going to be that great voice of reason. I think we're going to have to prove them wrong with the math and with the numbers and with real world facts because it's by the time you debunk one thing, they've already put out four or five other things based on the first thing that you debunked. And now you got to play catch up.

So I think the narrative game is really hard. But I think companies like BitFarms using the curtailment and balancing out the grid and Canada is doing good things, clean spark in the United States on flare gas, great American mining, upstream data. I mean, there's tons of these companies out there that are doing this work that are getting the story out there with boots on the ground and containers on the ground. So I think that's really what's going to change the narrative at the end of the day. And again, our friend in the comments, David, is, I think, a victim of some of these narratives, right? Like we see him saying, which we hear is the fallacy of each Bitcoin transaction consumes X amount of energy, where there's actually no linkage between the amount of power consumption and an individual Bitcoin transaction. and narratives like that completely ignore the idea of layer two networks which facilitate, you know,

the lightning network millions, potentially millions of transactions per second. Like if, you know, with proper liquidity and everything, it ignores all of those metrics that allow for much greater capacity. It ignores the idea of things like batching transactions. it ignores the fact that, again, there's no specific correlation between the amount of energy. There's a base amount of energy that it will take to secure the network. And whatever happens on top of that is whatever happens on top of that. And there won't be a need for additional energy on top of that per se. You know, once it kind of hits that equilibrium, we don't know kind of where that energy.

energy demand will go at some point. But again, there's no direct correlation between number of transactions and energy per transaction. It's just kind of a moot point. And, you know, Bitcoin miners get more efficient. There's so many different things in here that are at play. I'm 100% certain. David got this from Dig Economist's website.

100% certain. And it's, you're right. It ignores all those other scaling aspects. of layer two, of side chains, of all these other things, it ignores all the transactions that take place on exchanges, which is effectively its own little side chain. I mean, it's a really silly and bizarre concept of trying to attach it to those metrics, because it's pretty ignorant. It's not really what Bitcoin miners do.

I mean, I know we process transactions, but that's only one part of what we do. Really, what we're doing is we're manufacturing security. And, you know, when we are enabling transactions to be processed at the exact same time, we're preventing unlimited amounts of fraudulent transactions from being processed. That's the reality, right? Because we're enabling people to be able to send the bitcoins that they own and they can prove that they own. We're also making sure that nobody can send your bitcoins if they can't prove that they own them. Right.

And that's the real value that we're bringing to the network in addition to, processing transactions, we're preserving it and making sure that nobody took your transactions every single 10 minute. We're preserving your Bitcoin in your wallet. We're manufacturing that security. And this is the only asset in the world whose security can scale in perpetuity indefinitely as Bitcoin's price goes up, you know, relative to the value of the asset as a whole. There's no other asset in the world that can do that. You can't just keep adding inches of steel to the gold vault. You know, I mean, there's no extra security there.

Bitcoin's the only net, the only ass on the world that does that. Awesome. Well, is there anybody else that has any comments, questions they want to throw in before we round out the topic? I don't know if anybody does. I think we're all set. Okay. Well, Ben, I'm so glad that you were on here to chat about mining because it's, it's between,

you and if I ever get Steve Barbaron or Marty Bent or Adam, aka Denver Bitcoin, I always love the insights that come from this because it's a concept that as far as Bitcoin goes is very foreign to me because I've never dove into mining myself, which is a goal of mine this year to to get a better understanding of that and actually get my hands dirty with it. But yeah, I appreciate the topic and I hope a few people. learned a few things from that little chat. But I'm going to keep us rolling. And we're going to move on to our final topic.

So that means, Chris, you are up. Dude, what are you excited about this week? What has you bullish? Awesome. Well, thank you again for having me on. And I felt as if it would be a shame to not talk about exactly why you brought me on, which was my article that I wrote back in February about my fraternity, opting Bitcoin putting in on our balance sheet and accepting dues in Bitcoin through the Lightning Network.

And I thought for being bullish, there's nothing more right to talk about than an application layer of a real world example of how Bitcoin made someone's life or in an organization's life easier and gave them custody of their assets back. So I'm going to tell a short little story about kind of why we did that and why I'm so bullish about Bitcoin for not only fraternities, but just student organizations and organizations in general around the world who currently don't have control of their assets and their ability to get it back. So this past summer, we ran into an issue. Like I said, I'm an executive of a fraternity here in Nashville, Tennessee. And we were receiving donations from our alumni in order to fund the next year and do events. And we do a lot of service work with the different special needs programs in Nashville. So we needed money for that. And we were raising money through alumni.

And the only way that we were able to get money from the alumni was through a wire transfer to an on-campus bank. account, which the school then told us that we were not allowed to actually custody that money or those assets. We had to invoice back out of the school, and we never actually controlled those dollars at all, even though they were being donated to us. And we as an organization didn't view ourselves inside the school necessarily because most of what we do actually does not relate to the school at all. So we wanted custody of those assets. And, And me and my friend, his name is Sean Hagan, he's one of the smartest guys I've ever met. He was also an executive alongside me.

And we said, what's a better way than follow Sailor Sue and do the Sailor Stratt on this? So we decided, okay, well, if you're not going to give us custody of our assets, then we're going to put into Bitcoin and we're going to take that custody back. And that's what we did. and we put all those donations that we had into Bitcoin. We bought the dip. We gained back custody of our assets. And we created ourselves to be the Trojan horse for student organizations all across the world to follow in our footsteps and gain custody back of their assets. And that's why I'm bullish on Bitcoin because if it can help a little student organization in Nashville, Tennessee, think about what it can do.

for the Ukrainian refugees, right? Think about what it can do for the Russian citizens. It's just over and over again this past year I've seen real world use case after real world use case on why Bitcoin actually is changing the world. And if you look at Ukraine specifically, I was talking to my friend and he's abroad right now in Europe. And he was in a train station the other day. And he said there were thousands of Ukrainians. in the train station. They are complete refugees and all they have is the shirt on their back. That's all they have left. They brought with them nothing and they couldn't bring their wealth, right? Why? Because they don't have Bitcoin. And this is, Bitcoin is actually the solution

of that to custody all around the world of being able to retain your wealth and no matter what tyranny is above you, whether that's as small as a school, Nashville, Tennessee are as large as the Russian government, right? And that's kind of like what my point is with saying all this, that Bitcoin is the greatest custodian of all time. So yeah, that's why I'm bullish, and that's my real world example. So I'd love to hear what you all have to say. And if you have any questions, I'd love to answer them.

It's crazy to me that this was the situation for you, even within your school. And it's cool because, again, it's like a, a micro example of how important self-custody is and how Bitcoin provides that. It's like the most extreme version of property ownership that you can partake in. Right. It's just when the legacy system fails you, whether that be having to go through a school to to custody your assets which you never actually have control of up to you know certain donations being deemed illegal up to escaping your country with with your wealth um it's it's wild

how many examples you're right have been presented in in the past couple of years of this is why this aspect of Bitcoin is indeed important. Again, I'm just wondering, like, why don't they want you to custody donations that are specifically going to the fraternity? Like, did they give like a specific, hey, this isn't allowed because or was it like, this is just how it is? Yeah. So this is why I think, I'm pretty sure written in some pretty small fine print somewhere

in the contract. says something along the lines of this, we're going to take a certain percentage of this donation and house it as the school due to being the custodian of this asset. So it's actually, and it's not just my because I did a lot of research into this after it actually happened to us. And it's funny because these student organizations provide so many donations to the school. think about the alumni that donate to the school that fundraise to build the buildings to pay their teachers you know most of the actual profit that a school has isn't from tuition it's from donations from alumni and most of those alumni in schools all across america and all across the world

were a part of student organizations and now the school wants to be the bank on that student organization and earn a little fee and It's just funny because I just feel like it's such the epitome of the fiat world, truly. But yeah, gatekeepers and middlemen inserting themselves into situations. And what was initially probably a, oh, we, you know, we can, we can do this for you. And then, oh, we're going to, well, we'll take a small fee for doing that because there's some admin to, oh, you don't. No, you have to do it this way because, you know, we are taking a fee from it. So, again, like just an easy way to sidestep it is just not even use a currency that they're even capable of dealing with, which is fantastic.

I love it. But I'll open it up to everybody else. Anybody want to tap in? Ask a question. Anything that you found interesting. Yeah. I really liked Chris's example. One, it reminds me of being a fraternity and kind of trying to, you know, test the limits of the system, right?

But also, you know, when you look at, you know, past 20, 30 years of Africa's history, when you look at South Africa and what they went through during apartheid, they had a real ally in student organizations and student groups in the West. So you had different university campus students standing up and saying, you know, we want divestment, right? We don't want our endowment funds to be put in, you know, pension stocks and X, Y, and Z that, you know, have something to do with, you know, this blood money, right? So, you know, Chris standing up and saying, you know, there's a better way of doing this. There's a more sovereign way of taking custody. and there's a better value system. I think, you know, resonates all around the world. And hopefully, you know, his actions can kind of lead to, you know,

divestment of terrible fiat currencies and, you know, lead into Bitcoin adoption. So that's a really good story and a really good example. And hopefully it, you know, it resonates with more people. Awesome. I also think something super important to resonate kind of like what you said is most people won't adopt it until they really need it until they feel the pressure, right? And I think the Canadian Truckers Convoy, I know Sessions, you were a huge part of that. And I think that really opened up a lot of people's eyes because they felt that pressure and they felt it hard and they felt it fast. And just like we did, it's such a micro.

example, like you said, but once you feel that pressure of the legacy system, you can really appreciate and understand and have the wherewithal to get on a Bitcoin standard, whether it's your organization, yourself, your company, et cetera. But yeah. Chris, I'm pretty bullish on your story. Not going to lie. I mean, you know, 12 years ago, I was in college and had an opportunity to buy Bitcoin from a fellow class. made in business school who was just mining on his gaming PC in this dorm and selling it for beer money. I had a good chance to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin with a friend of mine for about 73 cents per Bitcoin. And we decided, you know, we'd also like the beer money. So that's actually

how I got started is this terrible experience with Bitcoin and watching it go to 1,200 and back down to 200 and getting scammed and all sorts of things. So, to hear you 12 years later as a fraternity, converting your fraternity over into a Bitcoin standard and using Bitcoin as a unit of account for your parties and beer, I think that's just, that's just great and incredibly bullish. Good on you. Well, thank you. And we do use strike. I know Sessions was kind of promoting strike a little bit earlier, but strike is the way it's the new vimmo um this makes you bullish as well i don't vimmo my friends if we go out for a beer if we go order a pizza i request them on strike talk about a little

tide shift there um i do believe it starts with the younger generations and strike is a better vimbo sorry it just is well i might hate me but uh i don't even know what venmo is I want to watch the Bitcoin. Good, good. Yeah, I think it is quite an epic story. In fact, I wish I had a story like that. It's awesome. And in general, yeah, it speaks just as to how we can become just sovereign individuals, right?

Whether as an individual, but also as a community, a group of people. And it's awesome. It's this kind of story that has to be pushed forward a bit because people don't necessarily understand it. And to your point with people from Ukraine, that's a, I grew up and lived most of my life in Poland. So it's the neighboring country. A lot of people from Ukraine are entering Poland now. So it's a lot in, you know, all my friends feeds and so on. And if they knew this was a possibility before this crisis happened, you know, maybe some would have gone for it. And because anyone can do it, right? I'm myself on a Bitcoin standard and just got rid of all of

my property and just go around, right? So it's doable, literally anyone can do it. So it's the kind of story that has to be, that has to be pushed. And it's a great one. Well, yeah, I love that topic. And again, it's just so, so cool to see the same concept playing out on, on so many different scales. and you know as localized as as a fraternity and as wide reaching as as the outbreak of war as a tool for people that are impacted by that. So yeah, really, really incredible to hear. I think what I'm going to do now is I'm going to wrap, but I'm going to go ahead and we'll do a quick round of just any final thoughts. you may have on anything that was said today.

I'm going to put a challenge to you guys. I tend to do this. And it's basically a challenge to recommend a piece of content, whatever that may be. We've been talking a bunch about content. But my challenge is not your own content, because I know that everybody here has a piece of content that they've made. But a piece of content that you've enjoyed, that you think people should check out.

It could be recent. It can be from forever ago. Whatever comes to mind, then feel free to share. So in terms of final thoughts, again, great panel all around. Really cool to see people taking the initiative and basically plugging in them and their efforts to Bitcoin in different ways. And it's always such a cool thing to see such unique perspectives. In terms of content, I wanted to, this just dropped earlier today, didn't realize, but regarding that we just mentioned the convoy, reason did a piece, like a 13-minute documentary on basically what happened with that or what's ongoing and happening with it.

And I thought it was really well done and balance. They talked to me. They talked to Nick, aka Nobody Caribou, and they talked to JW as well. And so, yeah, it was, it's an interesting piece. And I think they looked at it really objectively. And yeah, so thanks to Zach for interviewing me and interviewing the other individuals and putting this together because it was great. I retweeted it. So you can just find it on my Twitter account.

So with that, let's go down the line. I'm going to go to Pierre first. Any final thoughts for the day? And what would you like to recommend to people if you have something? No, in general, it was really, really cool to be on. Thanks for having me. It's great to meet everyone. I really liked what Ben mentioned.

I never thought of it this way, how miners manufacture security. That was really cool. I like it. And in general, I think in terms of content, you know, there's a lot of the stuff that goes around on Twitter. I think that there's one that many bitcoins haven't read. even though they've been hardcore bitcoins is just a Bitcoin white paper. So just at least people should do their homework and reread it at least because it has to be read minimum once, you know, twice.

Awesome. Cal, how about you? Any final thoughts and anything to recommend? Final thoughts? Just, you know, to piggyback off with what Ben was saying, just how important mining is. And I'd like to see, you know, countries like Ethiopia move into into mining. We just put, you know, I think about 6,000 megawatts into the system. I think we might be on the first phase now. So hydroelectric energy will be kind of a big thing for us. So putting that to work, you know, having the electricity grid kind of stabilize and increasing electricity energy for everyone in Ethiopia is going to be really important. In terms of content, I really enjoy Alex Gladstein.

He writes a lot of articles for Bitcoin magazine. He's done several pieces on Cuba, China, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia. So I think the article I enjoy is called Check Your Financial Privilege. And it talks about surveillance and security and all of these kind of interesting, dramatic things that we see. So that's a good piece of content. He actually just dropped his book of the same name. That's right.

I haven't read it yet, but I think, yeah, it looks nice. Yeah, yeah, it's on Amazon now on paperback. So I'm picking up a copy. So, yeah, and part of that will be donated to the Human Rights Foundation. So anybody wants to pick up a copy, just search, check your financial privilege by Alex Gladstein on Amazon. And you'll be able to grab it there. Awesome. Thanks for bringing that up too. Ben, you are up. Any final thoughts?

And what would you like to recommend for people to check out? Yeah. Just one final thought. I kind of thinking about it after we ended the topic with the nation states and who's likely to go next. I just want to remind everyone, you know, the incentives as an individual in a country versus the incentives for a country to go to a Bitcoin standard are very, very different. and they're likely going to be inversely related. So, you know, the people who are most likely to want to benefit and go out of Bitcoin and are going to be those in a hyperinflationary country, but the government's going to have very little incentive changeover. And, you know, same in the reverse.

It's going to be a country who wants to gain back their financial sovereignty and financial discipline and control. They're going to want to de-dollar rise and Bitcoin eyes. And, you know, it's going to be the people. who are in the country who are going to see, you know, be less incentivized to switch over just because, you know, it's, for them, it's new and untested. So the incentives are going to be in the inverse. I think we should, we should watch out for that and understand it, you know. So as these things play out, it's, you know, maybe a little bit easier to understand. As for content,

Balmy investor put out a pretty good piece on hash rate price index.com. They've got a blog pretty technical, There's a lot of cool stuff happening right now about trying to understand what mining is worth and the mining economics and publicly traded miners. He does a pretty cool job of going through that. And then, you know, if nobody has on the noob side of things, if you're looking for some content, you know, to try and educate people and to Orangeville people, the one thing that's worked for me the most is actually Mike Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money. he does a really good job of, you know, logically going through the problem, the solution. And he does in a way that's clear and simple for somebody with zero, you know, starting knowledge to digest and understand. So I've always found that to be a good piece to view and share. I love that you brought that up because that was one of my early series that I dove into as I was getting down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole.

I mean, not super early. It was a couple of years in, but I went through all of those and I loved them. So glad you brought that one up. But yeah, let's grab Chris last. Any final thoughts and anything you'd like to recommend? Yeah, I guess just one short final thought, and that's the best Bitcoin conversations usually happen in a bear market, which I think this is a prime example of tonight.

I thought this was a really good conversation. but some people just don't stick around when the price is super high. I think it goes to show the ones who are really working on stuff and the ones who are only in it to make money. But yeah, as far as content goes, sessions, I linked the Declaration of Monetary Independence and the private chat, if you want to pull that up real quick. So this is actually really cool news.

I guess it's public now, yeah. Ulrich, Ulrich Patillo, Mike Hobart and Mark Mariah, Mark Goodwin, and I, we're all on what we'd like to call the Domey Committee. And basically, we are in charge of spreading the word of the Declaration of Monetary Independence. And we kind of announced in the last couple of days that we are going to have a 20 by 30 foot version of this in Miami. And people are going to sign it. So we're going to have thousands of Bitcoiners. all over the world come and sign this document, 20 by 30 version.

Some of the artists at Bitcoin Magazine have developed like a really cool version of it with a 1776 vibe. And this is going down in Miami and April. I hope we could get 20,000 signatures on this thing. I think that would be super dope. So yeah, Declaration of Monetary Independence.org. Go there. Sign it. Put your name on a document.

You never know what this document could do. And just putting declarations out there, I think is such a good thing. And I think it's really good that it's happening in Miami because this is going to be the largest gathering. Like I said earlier, Bitcoin, Bitcoiners in the world ever. So be looking out in Miami. Go sign the declaration while you're there. I love that. I'm for sure going to go do that.

Yeah, that's great, man. I'm going to have to take a look through that. That's really cool, though. And I think it's a really unique idea. So I'm glad you brought it up. Sweet guys. Well, again, I've got to say thank you all so much for your time. I really appreciate that you all took the time to come and chat for a couple hours here.

Love the topics. Loved all the conversation. And of course, all of you are welcome back anytime. So again, thank you guys very much. Thanks, Ben. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you.

Thank you. Awesome. And I'm going to kill all your audio video right now, but again, thanks, guys. And we'll see you next time. Yeah. Thank you, Ben. Cheers. And everybody watching, thank you so much for being here.

Again, Friday, always favorite part of my week. I get to hang out with Bitcoiners. What more could you possibly ask for? Greatest part of my week, obviously. Um, if you haven't already, like, subscribe, share. All those things are super important. They really, really do help the show. They help get more eyeballs on it.

Uh, all of the guys that were on the show today, all of their Twitter handles are linked in these show notes down below. And they've got a ton of great stuff that they're working on. So follow them. Check them out. Check out pier's film. Check out, uh, the blog from, uh, you know, check out the, the blog regarding the, the, um, the fraternity, uh, and the monetary, uh, um,

Declaration of Independence. Check out Cal and what he's doing. Go and check out Ben and BitFarms. There's just so much knowledge and a wealth of knowledge there to check out. So for sure, go follow all those gents in the show notes down below. Of course, if you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Do I dare try to list them off all right now?

Yeah, sure. Shake Pay, Ledden, Bit refill. Bill Fottle at Privacyproes.com. And the Keystone wallet. They're all linked down below. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. That is strike.

dot me slash BTC sessions. You go there. Type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button. You will be greeted with a lightning invoice or if you tap to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code. So 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.