BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Kevin Rooke, Natalie Brunell, Nico Zm ep281

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? We got a killer panel today. A couple of returning guests and a first timer. Very excited to introduce you to all of them. Plenty to chat about this week. A lot's been going on. And I think my reason for being bullish this week is tied to some of the drama we've seen in and around other coins. I'll leave it at that. Nonetheless, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. I'll do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live.

The thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share. All those things help get this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our guest, Let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. We're sitting at $21,130 per coin.

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So they've got you covered here. Check out PrivacyPros.com. To get yourself a Bill Fottle. And without, I am going to stop rambling. I want to get my guests in here because that's who you guys came to see. We've got Nico. We've got Kevin. We've got Nat.

Welcome, everybody. Thank you for being here. I think it's in order that we do a quick round of, who are you? And what do you do? So, Nico, you were just on yesterday. You're becoming a staple of the session show with the newly anointed Thursday Simply Sessions.

But for those unfamiliar, introduce yourself, Matt. What's up, guys? I'm Nico. I founded BitVolt. We host Bitcoin miners. And I also, I'm the host of Simply Bitcoin. And now I help BTC Ben on Thursdays to the SimplySys. to the Simply session. My favorite part of the show is this is your Simply session. I love it. I love it. Well, dude,

glad to have you on for the Friday. Let's rotate down. Nat, can you give yourself a little intro? Let people know who you are. Yeah, Ben, thanks so much for having me. And nice to see you, Nico and Kevin. I'm the host of the Coin Stories podcast and a new show called Hard Money, which is going to give CNBC a run for its money. And yeah, I'm super grateful to be back on the show. Awesome. Well, thanks for being. in here and you guys are both returning guests, but Kevin, you're a first timer. So for those that are watching the show that are maybe unfamiliar with them, with you, let them know who you are and what you do. Well, thanks for having me on the show. I'm excited to be here. Primarily an investor. I've been helping out early stage lightning startups grow and content creator as well. I have a podcast

called The Kevin Rook Show. Awesome, man. Well, I'm happy to have you on. I've been watching some of your stuff, really enjoy it. So this should be good. Well, let's dive into it. For those that are watching that are unfamiliar, maybe you're new here. You're not sure what the show is all about. The show is called Why Are We Bullish?

And the function of it is basically each one of us, we've got the three R's that we're going to go by. Somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. It can be really anything that you want. Then altogether, we're going to riff on that reason. And then we're going to rotate until each one of us gets a turn. Really, really simple. And I'm going to kick us off today.

So my reason for being bullish has to do around some of the, though getting too deep into it, some of the rumblings around certain alt coins out there. And the question of decentralization and censorship resistance and how some, you know, a lot of other coins. have opted to go a route that in order to achieve certain features early on, they make massive tradeoffs in other areas. And one of them can sometimes be the ability of anybody to run a node, which consists of a full copy of every transaction that has ever existed, as well as the rules that govern the network.

But Bitcoin and Bitcoiners have been very, very mindful of trying to keep. bit so that anybody who chooses to do so can do it with relative ease. You can download Bitcoin Core. You can run a plug and play box. You can do it a lot of different ways. So the reason I'm bullish this week is in the midst of all of this uncertainty around censorship resistance in other areas and, you know, a history of blockchain bloat in other places and the difficulty and uncertainty around even just auditing the supply of certain coins,

it's still relatively easy for an individual to run a Bitcoin node. And so I'm just going to pull up my screen here because I just want to talk about a few ways that people can do this right now. So of course, one of the easiest and cheapest ways to do it is just download Bitcoin and core on your computer. So you can just download this for free on a laptop, on a home computer, wherever you want, and it will download the entire history of Bitcoin. You can prune it so it doesn't take up all of the space on your computer.

You can make it. So maybe it only takes up a couple gigabytes. And then the rest is kind of validated and then discarded afterwards. But it can run relatively simply on a regular computer. And then you can link it up to. any other desktop wallet you may have. So a good example is Spector. It actually requires you to have Bitcoin Core or some other node to reference.

Or Sparrow wallet is another great one for desktop that both of these can just automatically detect if you have Bitcoin Core downloaded on your system and then refer to it as its beacon of truth as its rule set. And I guess before I get too deep into some of the other options here, this is important because it allows you to have a say in what you say is Bitcoin. So if you're running a Bitcoin wallet on your phone, say, and you're not connecting it to your own node, you are then trusting somebody else to run a Bitcoin node for you and feed you that information. and hopefully they're giving you truthful information. But there's always that possibility that maybe that's not the case. They also would get to dictate what Bitcoin is.

And we saw this kind of manifest in 2017 when the 50 largest companies in the space, 80% of the hash rate all said that Bitcoin is going to change. It's now going to be this protocol. And all these other developers that have been contributing to Bitcoin Core, We're going to dump them. We've got a guy. And this is the new guy. And maybe we'll get some others.

But this will now be Bitcoin. And one of the things that helped prevent that from coming to fruition was the ability of people to run their own notes and basically say, nah, not for me. I'm not with my economic power. Am I going to let that happen? There are other factors there as well. But it is an important thing. You get to decide what Bitcoin is.

Now, other options for running a node. I know some people dislike certain aspects of the free and open source, basically the rights in and around Umbrell. The code is still open. You can still audit it. You can still fork it, but you cannot profit from creating a fork of Umbrolet. But nonetheless, I've got to say that Umbrolet is probably one of the Umbrolet. of the easiest user interfaces. So if it's a question of you running a node or not, and the main thing is UI for you, that will is the deciding factor. Umbral is incredibly intuitive once you get

down to it. It's super awesome. If you're looking to get into running a node, this might be a good first step for you. I've also done videos on my node. Again, it's pretty much plug and play. You can buy it pre-built or you can build it yourself from from a raspberry pie and or some other options that you can pick up on amazon um there's the noddle it's just you can just plug and play by the whole thing and be running right out of the gate um i'm also currently running a ronan dojo that's on my shelf behind me um and this one can be a back end for uh privacy tools like uh running a samurai whirlpool as well um so i found that one to be super useful I am currently sinking my Razby Blitz for the first time.

I'm going to be playing with that. I'm going to, it's all going to be nodes behind me here pretty soon. But this will be node number three, I guess technically four going up because I don't have a online node running right now. But I'm about 39% of the way through sinking with that one. Very excited to play with that. And then on the docket for me, I've also got start nine that I'm going to be playing around with I've got my crypto cloaks stuff here ready to assemble once I get finished with Raspberry

Blitz. So I just, I want to try out all these different things. And I wanted to highlight how many options there are out there for people. Like this is crazy to me that there's so many great options for people that want to just run notes from like totally free and just like on your existing laptop to plug and play options that you can build yourself or buy pre-built to ones like start nine where yes you're you're paying a license fee for uh to purchase the software but um you're getting uh some very refined and and well thought thought out software in the process and then if you opt to if you're a digital nomad but you still

think it's important to be running your own node while on the go you also have options like voltage where I don't think that every single person should have a remote node run by somebody else, but it's super useful if you want to be putting up like a BTC pay server and be able to receive payments without having to trust really anybody else and have an intermediary. Stuff like this is just so, so important to have access to. So I guess in conclusion, I love that Bitcoin has focused on keeping the base layer accessible in a way that anybody can run and validate a full node. And I think it's important that we have not compromised on that while still being able to build a top in layers and get the benefits that other chains were too impatient to wait for.

So I'll leave it there. and I'm going to open it up to you guys. I'm going to start with a question and anybody can jump in first. One would be, depending on what you're doing, are you running a node and which one? And if you're not running a node, what has been the biggest roadblock

and where do you think you might start? So whoever wants to dive in first? Absolutely, man. But I might be a little bit biased here. I'm running a noddle because they sponsor us. I also built my own. My node is great. my note is great. Start 9 is good, but it's a little bit different. Umberl's a great free option as well. The UI on Umberl is fantastic. All great, great options, man. And just to kind of add to what you were saying, Ben, the resource requirements in Bitcoin are low enough where it's inclusive, right? And if you compare that with something like, you know, our favorite shit coin Ethereum, because the resource requirements are so high,

you have a centralization of servers, right? Because that just makes it easier for everybody to run. And you find yourself in the predicament that the Ethereum community has found itself over the last two weeks, where they're coming to terms with the fact that Ethereum is run by Jeff Bezos and controlled by the U.S. government, right?

And just seeing the cognitive dissonance is beautiful, man. And I think the last time I checked the Ether node thing, it was like 60% of Ethereum nodes are run on servers, 50% of that is AWS, Oracle, Google. You know, if you compare that to Bitcoin, and this is why the fork words are so important, right? It cost, what, $300?

If you want a fancy node, it could cost up to $1,000. But it's low enough that anybody could just join. And if you really don't want to get a dedicated computing device to run the Bitcoin software, you could just run it on your computer. I don't recommend that, but you could do it if you really want to, right? And I think that's really what makes Bitcoin special, that we put. decentralization above all. And if you want to separate money from state,

it needs to be decentralized. Because if it's not, it will inevitably be captured by governments like what we're seeing with Ethereum over the last two weeks. Nice, man. I agree with everything you're saying. I think that a lot of people were maybe hoodwinked into thinking that having running a node be

accessible was an unnecessary thing to strive for. I mean, we saw tweets from Vitalik early on saying just on this show the other day, you quoted him talking about, or sorry, I was chatting with somebody the other day

and they brought up an old quote from a tweet saying it was a weird mountain man fantasy for everybody to be running their own node or something like that. So I'm mincing words here, But when you have a still public founder of a coin basically saying, you don't need to run a node. And then you see the fruits of that coming to manifest now,

it should kind of send a signal as to why that was important in the first place. But nonetheless, I'm going to maybe ask Nat here. Are you currently running a node? Have you played with running a node? So the only one that I've played with is Bitcoin Core and you inspire me. This is why I've mentioned you on other shows because I don't, I want to upgrade and I want to run a more sophisticated note. But it's one of those, you asked, you know, what's holding you back. It's more just like a time thing.

I want to sit down and make a conscious decision. And I would like to set up a raspberry. So that's on my to do list. And I think your videos are fantastic and I'm very bullish on you for creating these resources for folks. So, but to both your and Nico's point, I mean, this is the crux of Bitcoin, the decentralization, which provides the security. This is why it's, you know, people want to rip on it and say that it's slow and you can't do anything with it.

Well, the point of it is to be slow so that it's secure forever. And I won't touch on it too much. But, you know, why I'm bullish is the article that I'm going to show later from Jeff Booth, decentralization and security and scale. are why Bitcoin is the best blockchain out there and why so many of these other projects will very quickly go to zero and fail because you need the decentralization in order to make it real money and make it have value. And it makes me think of Sapening's tweet a couple days ago. Bitcoin's the most conservative technology ever invented. And it really is that. And there's a purpose

behind it. So I know that everyone gets excited about these bells and whistles and different projects built on other on other cryptocurrencies, but you know, long term, how are you going to make sure that they're secure? How are you going to make sure that they're not too expensive? And a lot of these issues will be, you know, for when. And I think that Bitcoin will be the one that survives. So yeah, I'm very inspired by all the all the work that you do to show the different nodes that can be set up. And I definitely need to upgrade mine. I, well, I'm excited for for you to dive down that rabbit hole. Let me know when you do. And I'll, yeah, I'll hopefully point in the right direction.

But I would encourage you to dive down that rabbit hole sooner rather than later. It's actually not, it's actually not all that difficult. You just need, you know, if you're going to build it, just a list of a few things to pick up on Amazon. They show up. It's literally like snapping together. Like and play. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty intuitive. And then you just plug it in and you let it sink for a, like, a,

couple of days and then you just go through your browser and you can start poking around. It's it's great. So yeah. Kevin, what about you, man? Where are you at with nodes? What's your experience, thoughts? So I got, I started running a node for the purpose of playing around with lightning. And this was through Umbrell. And so I actually had set out. I remember it was about this time last year, maybe a little earlier. I set out and I said, I'm going to commit to a weekend here. going to sit down, get all these pieces together and figure it out over the course of the weekend. Of course, I was done, I was done in like 12 minutes, and it was just like set up and ready to go. And Ben, I think I had seen some of your videos on setting up on Umbrell and just learning

how to use lightning. It was a fun project, but, you know, I had given myself two full days to figure out how it worked, and it was quite a bit easier than I thought it would be. But I still feel like there's a lot of room for improvement here. I don't, I don't, I don't think we're going to get to a point where we have a billion people setting up raspberry pies, even if it does take 10 minutes. It's a concept that is not super familiar to anyone who's not technical. I think that we're making efforts towards like simplifying this process. There are there are lightning nodes you know you got breeze and things like that where you can run these light nodes on your phone. You got remote nodes and things. I know we're going to

we're trending in that direction where we can make it easier for you. for people to onboard. But I think we've got a lot of work to do. You know, we're still at the point of, I don't know what the correct number of Bitcoin nodes is today. There's a reachable Bitcoin node number that BitNodes puts out. And there are about 14,000. But I've seen various figures.

I imagine like the total number of people who have nodes or have once had nodes is probably still under 100,000. It's definitely under a million. And so we've got a long way to go if we're trying to get to the point where everyone's running a node. Yeah. I would totally agree with you there. And I don't think it's necessary that everyone runs a node. But I do think it's necessary that it remains accessible for those that choose to.

So in the instance of 2017, when it became apparent that that was an important thing, you know, back then, more or less, everything that I discussed here didn't exist. Yeah. Other than Bitcoin Core itself. Connecting external wallets to it was like was a veritable nightmare. I had no idea how to do it. Now it's it's it's so much easier. But yeah, you're right.

Like not not everybody's going to do this. Not everybody's going to go down this road. What I would say in regards to this, and yes, you're absolutely right. there's much more room for improvement. I'm going to go on a tangent here, but I see a lot of people, they'll sometimes shit on Umbrol and be like,

oh, it's so easy because there's tradeoffs made and everything. Well, if you want people using your implementation, then that's the bar that's been set. Umbril came into a space where not a lot of people made note or ran their own notes, and now it's become a more common thing amongst, Bitcoin just be like, oh, yeah, I'm running a note. I'm running an umbril. And that's because it's not scary to do it with umbrel. It's it's sleek looking. It's familiar looking. There's an app

store where you can get different applications. It's a familiar setting. And it doesn't, like, you're not in terminal typing out commands. And so that's kind of the bar. That's the threshold that we've learned. You have to reach to get some degree of adoption. So rather than bitching about oh well there's tradeoffs that have been well we'll fuck you make it better make make it beautiful so that people want to use yours there's your goal there's your goal post um and i and i think that's a positive thing and i can't wait like you said to see that progress be made um i i hope to see it continue but i mean the amount of stuff that i just rattled off there again didn't exist five years ago that's that's insane um yeah so i

Do you have any further thoughts or does anybody have any further thoughts on the node thing? I 100% agree that the rate of innovation is picking up really quickly, which is nice to see all across Bitcoin. It seems like there's more people building on Bitcoin today than any other point that I've been around in the space. I've been here since 2017 and haven't had a moment like this where I feel like there's so much activity happening on Bitcoin. Yeah, I'm just really excited about that. Yeah, absolutely. Anybody else, any final thoughts or should we give it a rotation? Yeah, I think the Bitcoin node is the foot in the door for peer-to-peer computing. I think that what we're going to see over the next decade is, and we already have a dedicated device that's not a Bitcoin node, everyone has a dedicated device that just sits in their house.

It's called the router. It's inevitable that I think we're going to see a merger between routers and Bitcoin nodes. It's going to be there. You're not even going to know, right? And then that's going to have your dedicated email server, dedicated pictures. And instead of relying on how the whole internet works today, right, which is what we are not promised, right? So if you stream a YouTube video, you stream some pictures, it goes from you to the server back to you. Or let's say I'm sending a message to you, Kevin, right?

I have to send it to, let's say, the signal servers, it goes to the signal servers, it goes to you. Why can it be peer to peer? And I believe that the Bitcoin node is the foot in the door for the future of peer-to-peer computing. But it's interesting because you see some of these implementations going that route, right? Like Umbral went from where a Bitcoin node to where like a decentralized, you know, your personal server and you can link. So now you don't even have to run Bitcoin on it if you don't want, but you can host other things, right?

Like you can host a VPN service. You can host file storage to interact with it remotely. And you see that coming out of Start 9. You see those types of things being thrown into a lot of these implementations here, which is, that's interesting. Yeah. They all know it. And it's a race to the top.

They all know it. I love it. Yeah, that's great. Awesome. All right. Well, guys, I think we'll do a little rotation here. I will finish up by saying, if you're watching this, if you're not currently running a node and you're thinking,

well, I've got to learn all this stuff before I run a node. You do not. The node itself is the learning tool. All you need to do is take that first step and grab the parts or just buy the pre-assembled box from any of those things that I mentioned. And once you have the parts, you snap them together. Again, I've got tons of videos on how to do that. Or again, the thing shows up at your house, you plug it in and you just go on your browser and you're off to the races.

So the tool for learning is the node itself. Once it's up and running, you can start to say, all right, what's the first thing I can do with this? I can connect a wallet to it. Great. How do I do that? Step one. And then you just keep going from there. So awesome.

With that, let's do a little rotation. Quick shout out to everybody in the chat. Thank God, Yellow's here. I always want to make sure that he's here every week. But yeah, we can relax now. Thank you, Yellow. I'm glad he came in the door. We're going to rotate.

Nico, you're up next. What has you bullish this week? What are you excited about? Yeah, man. What has me bullish in general? I think that to be bullish, you kind of have to look past what has happened in the last three years of Bitcoin. You've been in Bitcoin for quite a while.

You always thought that these things were inevitable, but through just studying or believing in the game theory, but what we've witnessed is absolutely mind-blowing, right? We've had two countries making it Bitcoin legal tenders, Central African Republic, El Salvador, and then Panama kind of, but counts, I guess, in my book. Then you have the absolute, you know, the move by Michael Saylor, right the first time a public company is using bitcoin as an alternative to fiaz alternative to cash right he's

really groundbreaking there everyone's mocking him right now but in three years he's going to absolutely he's going to look like an absolute stud genius right so you have the move by michael sailor the move by tesla that kind of pulled back and then of course fidelity offering bitcoin 401k what the eff and then what we covered this week banner was last week right you had black rock black rock has nine $1.5 trillion under assets. It's very obvious that the herd is coming, that the herd probably is already here, right? So that's what really has me bullish. Look, the last time Bitcoin was at this price, none of those things were true. None of those things were true. And now they're true, which means that us, we have a 60 to 70% discount from where we were a while ago and look at all

the things that happen. Not to mention the fact that the amount of addresses that are holding 0.01 continues to go parabolic. The amount of plebs that are stacking continues to go parabolic. The amount of addresses that point one, that's the same. The amount of addresses that have one Bitcoin continues to go through the roof, right? Lightning network capacity also doing really well, Ben. I know you love that because you like making tutorials. I don't think we could have ever imagined back in 2017, right, when we were shaking in our boots during the fork wars, like, holy crap, the Bitcoin cash hash rate just surpassed Bitcoin's what's going to happen here, that the Lightning Network was going to go to as far as it's gone. Like, this is absolutely unbelievable, man. And I think that

this is just the beginning. I can't even imagine where Bitcoin's going to be in five years. I don't know. I don't know how else to say I'm bullish, but that's why I'm bullish. I love that. It's interesting because you have all these exciting things going on. You have, I would say, pretty smart people starting to understand and recognize what this is good for. And they're able to ignore the short-term price action. And then you have like a whole subset of people that are still trading this thing like it's a tech stock. Right. And this is like the benefit that we get to live through of how many people don't understand what this is.

And are, you know, oh, it's down. I'm going to, I'll dump it. And the people that are like, this is very important are trying to scoop it up. And so, I mean, bear markets are a blessing for those that understand and that have forged good habits. like spending less than you earn and actually saving and then, you know, saving in in a money that's not going to be debased over time. So those that have been around the block that have learned that have set forth those habits into reality, they're going to benefit from the lack of understanding from everybody else. So I don't know, I'll open it up to Kevin or Nat.

to tag into what Nico said? I think you made a great point there about, you know, this is not a tech stock. And eventually people are going to recognize this. These correlations have been pretty tight for the last six or nine months. But it's like clear to anyone who's taken the time to study Bitcoin to learn about what it is. It's like it's not a tech stock. And when you see Bitcoin come down 60, 70 percent, you've still got millions of people all over the world who are buying up as much as they can, who believe in this system and understand

the properties that make it useful, when you have a tech dot come down 70%, it's just like a ghost town. You know, oftentimes, like, there's not that same level of participation. I think there was a, one of the hedge fund managers, maybe Paul Tudor Jones or Bill Miller was was talking about how in that, in that 2018 crash, like, you know, most of the people who had bought in had never sold and that it was, he viewed it as a religion almost. And I mean, you know, for better or for worse, whatever we want to use that term or not,

it's like, I think that is, you know, one reason why Bitcoin has this strength in a bare market. It has a floor to it because there are millions of people around the world who have kind of committed to this and recognized this is the way money should work. and, you know, are, they're using that as, as there are a reason to continue to buy. And eventually that that turns the price upwards. Absolutely. Now, how about you?

Anything to tag in here? Yeah. I mean, I really want to add sort of the media perspective because I learned about Bitcoin back in 2017 when I feel like it first hit sort of mainstream awareness a little bit more because people saw that run up to 20,000 and, you know, Cyprus around that time was in the news. And I remember pitching a story. on Bitcoin at the station. I worked at the time. I was working in the California State Capitol and I got so much pushback and I ended up doing a story on like a Bitcoin ATM. But my producers

and everyone around me thought that I was potentially sharing something that if people invested, they could lose their life savings and they really were wary about me covering Bitcoin. Fast forward. It's been five years. Now we have it on a ticker on all of them, you know, big channels for financial markets. It's on CNBC. I'm going on Fox business now talking about it, but I really had to do the homework on my own because unfortunately within media, even the folks that work in finance media, there's such a lack of financial literacy. It's, you know, and it's, it's not the fault of necessarily any of the people that are working, the production or the anchoring or the reporting jobs, but truly our education system, right? There's a lack of financial literacy

that teaches anything except for inflationary Keynesian policies. And so people aren't even aware that, hey, there's this other deflationary economic theory. There's, you know, Austrian economics and capitalism needs to maybe be rethought. And so it's just, it's really interesting to see how it's being covered now and how early we still are because five years later, I'm still, now I'm one of the only, I feel like, media people who, is out there really saying that this can solve a lot of the problems and saying there's, there's clearly an issue with the current system. And we shouldn't just be talking about equities and real estate. We should be moving people toward hard money based on technology.

So I think it's really interesting that now we have these CEOs, you know, the Michael sailors who are willing to leave their posts and focus on Bitcoin full time, including Jack Dorsey. And we have the Black Rocks changing position saying, oh, we're going to actually take this seriously, some of the big, big financial names that one said it was ridiculous and the stupidest investment. Now they're actually saying that Bitcoin should be a part of everybody's portfolio. You know, I can't imagine what's going to happen in the next five years. And I will say I was surprised that Bitcoin went under its 200 day moving average and went as low as 17,000. And I'm hoping that that was the bottom. But at the same time,

we've also never been in this macro environment of this much debt and this much money. money being printed in response to the pandemic. And I think that there's never been a better use value proposition since the pandemic. I think that's what woke up a lot of people like the sailors and like some of these big company leaders who said, we can't keep, you know, we can't keep investing the way that we were before. And we have to think about our cash flows and our reserves and put it into something that's truly scarce. And so I just the transformation that we're witnessing in real time is amazing. I think we need to get more education out there, especially to folks in media and in politics who are who have such a platform to share information and also make

regulatory decisions and um i just hope that people get educated and that's what we're here for so yeah i i it's funny that you say the the the lack of financial education um that that people come out of school with i i remember i was uh it must have been last summer but i remember i was going to the gym there was a girl that works at the frank counter and she was taking economics in school. And I was like, oh, yeah, I, I, I work in and around Bitcoin. And, and then we kind of got into a conversation. And I said something, I said something to the tune of, you know, a deflationary currency

would not be inherently bad. And she called me a conspiracy theorist. And she's, she's taking economics. So if you, if you know that, like, the, if, that's any indication of like the quality of education that you're getting even as you're specializing in economics when somebody says that a deflationary currency would not or a disinflationary currency currency would not be the end of the world and you get called a conspiracy theorist like you can imagine the types of things that are being banged into people's heads and they're

paying a ton of money for is is hilarious so yeah it's um i think there are pockets of people that are understanding it. And we're going into a period of time where there's going to be a lot of confusion. A lot of people are going to be very mad. There's going to be a lot of blame thrown around. But at the end of the day, people are going to go to whatever thing insulates them best from it. And it's going to be maybe hard for some people to see what that is.

I imagine we'll have a period of time kind of like where the chart of gold in the Weimar Republic where it's just like up and down like crazy. But hopefully more and more people will kind of key into the signal there and see the writing on the wall. But yeah, any final thoughts on the topic at hand that anybody wants to jump in here? I think we're all good. Awesome. All right.

Well, we're going to do a rotation. We're going and actually I'm I want to bring up somebody in the chat here I'm bearish because I want to sell my truck and buy Bitcoin at 10.5k I'm crossing my fingers for you Robert let's hope you get you can stack those sats but we're going to do a rotation down Nat you are up I'm maybe I'll pull up the article that you had in mind here let me just get it over but I love that you chose this because Jeff is an absolute legend. By the way, before we get into your reason for being bullish,

you got to swing by his cabin like a week after I did. Yeah. Just outside Vancouver, how was it? Amazing. Jeff's family and friends are incredible. They have like this little community they've taken over in Canada. And Jeff is the most athletic human being I think I've ever met in my life. Like you would never know just from, you know, seeing how.

how serious he is and like intelligent in his, in his, uh, in his interviews. This guy like rock climbs and wake surf and does like all the things. It's just incredible. He's so outdoorsy. So, um, yeah, I had a great time. I wake surf like you. I was, I was impressed when they were like, oh, yeah, well, go. I was there with my wife and my kids and they took us out on the boat.

And then, um, they're like, yeah, well, we'll try some wake surfing. I've never gone wake surfing. Uh, I tried wakeboarding. once ever. I've been snowboarding like twice. So I wasn't super confident that I was going to be able to do it. Then Jeff got out there and he was, you know, kicking ass. Then his wife jumps up there.

He was kicking ass. I was like, well, I got to give it a try. So I ended up getting up. I ended up being able to, I still held onto the rope. But I was doing all right. And then my wife got up there and just like blew me out of the water. She was like through the rope and was just like surfing no assistance, whatever. I was like, oh, come on.

So I got thoroughly embarrassed there, but she did awesome. But we both got up. So I was stoked about that. And what a great place. And again, his family was so fantastic. So, yeah. I know. Incredible.

Shout out to Kelly, his wife. She is an incredible chef. And she's awesome. She wakes her and does all the things. And their kids are awesome, too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they were all so gracious to have us. there. But let's get to your reason for being bullish. I pull it up for you, but I'll let you chat about

this. Yeah. So I can't imagine a better time for this article. And I really, really recommend that everyone check it out. Jeff Booth wrote this amazing article called The Finding Signal in a noisy world. And it really just talks about why Bitcoin not crypto. It really reinforces the fact that Bitcoin is completely incomparable. And to be really careful when you're examining these other projects. And for me, he sets up something in the article that I think is really the best argument for why Bitcoin is the best form of money that has ever existed. And he creates this triangle, which is not a, it's the features, the three best features really of Bitcoin, but it creates a trilema for some of the other cryptocurrencies out there. And that triangle, if you scroll down,

is the decentralization, the security and the scalability. And so, he really just goes into detail with how what money is and how Bitcoin really is able to achieve all three of those really, really, really important features. And then he talks about Web3, defy, other cryptocurrencies and poses questions really for the reader to answer. Because I think that blockchain has become this word that everyone wants to throw around. It's a buzzword, right? Every company wants to get onto the blockchain trend. But is it really? necessary for certain companies or certain projects to have a blockchain or would it make more sense to have a database, right? Is it economically feasible? Can you scale it or do you end up sacrificing

security? I mean, he talks about, you know, how important the energy component, the fact that Bitcoin mining is secured by energy, how that keeps it both secure and decentralized. And so I just think that everyone should really read this article, the more that the conversations are now happening, especially with regards to the Ethereum merger and some of, you know, there are people out there right now saying after this merger, Ethereum is money. And so I think this article is excellent. And there's four questions that I want to bring up from the article. And I'll read them out loud.

This is part of what Jeff wrote. And so maybe you guys can can share your thoughts on it too. But he poses the question, how could decentralized finance occur on a centrally controlled blockchain? Because again, he argues that many of these will end up becoming centralized due to economic factors and scalability factors. How would Web3s promise be any different than today's monopoly power in technology if it was built on a base layer that was more costly and controlled by very few? What is the long-term value of a digital copy, NFT, of something connected to a blockchain that fails? And finally, if a lower cost through layer two and three and decentralized alternative

existed that enabled gaming and virtual reality companies to control their own destiny rather than risk their future on a centrally controlled blockchain, what would these entrepreneurs choose? Wouldn't it be more likely that this new protocol instead of essentially controlled one form the foundation of the metaverse? And so arguably, maybe a lot of these things that people are very excited about could be built on Bitcoin eventually. So I'm really bullish because of that. I think, again, it's a really important time for this article with some of the discussions happening. And I think that people are just feeling like a little bit, I don't know, nerve endings seem a little bit raw lately in this bear market people are are more apt to to debate and get a little heated right now

so i think it's a good time for people to find signal through the noise uh awesome well i've i've been replying first so i'm going to leave it up to maybe kevin or nico if you want to jump in first here after natalie's topic go ahead nico yeah look um i think you you hit the nail in the head natalie when you were saying your bit. And I think Jeff is absolutely right. All other cryptos, the fundamental problem, is that they never separated the monetary policy out of the hands of human beings, right?

If you look at Bitcoin, it's rules without rulers. And look, Ethereum, XRP, the fact is that if there's enough political pressure, you could change the rules. Right? With Bitcoin, can't do that. You'd have to convince people is why it's so important to run your own node. You have to convince the people that are running their nodes to download that new software that has inflation.

Or that download that new software that is OFAC compliant, right? And good luck, right? And these cryptos have not figured that out. At the end of the day, every cryptocurrency that was invented after Bitcoin, it didn't have a virgin birth. The founders knew from the very beginning that they could make money off of it. Bitcoin was discovered. It wasn't invented. It was discovered as an experiment.

And then it was given value over time. Right. So, yeah. In this world of darkness, right? In this world of mayhem and this world of chaos, Bitcoin gives me hope for a better future. And BK, his handle is just so perfect, right? deterministic optimism. And that's why I think Saylor bought the domain, hope.com, because that's what this is.

Bitcoin is hope. And the cryptos, they provide a false sense of hope. Once you look under the hood, you'll realize that it's just a continuation of the system that we've had for years and years and years and years. There's a group of elite that get to decide the monetary policy and everyone rides along. Bitcoin is fundamentally different. Sailor, even though he has a lot more purchasing power than I do, and he has 100,000 Bitcoins,

he has no more influence over the Bitcoin network over me. He can't hold that over my head. And every other crypto, whether it's Ethereum, Solana, XRP, BSV, Bitcoin Cash, they could be fundamentally altered. And the little guy has to pay the consequences. So, yeah, that was an awesome. article. Thanks for sharing, Natalie.

Yeah. Kevin, how about you? Yeah, I agree exactly with what you're saying, Nico. I think specifically on the scalability point, I think we're now starting to learn that as the Lightning Network has grown in the last year or so, it's kind of come into the

focal point for Bitcoiners, we're starting to realize we have this system that is far more performant and more scalable than any of the other blockchain-based systems. And it was built, it was built the right way. It was built, you know, we took the high road on it and we built it right from the ground up.

And there's no, we don't know what the limits are of the system. Like it is so much better than using any other blockchain for transmitting value. And that's something that, you know, I'm incredibly bullish about that. There's, you know, this system now that we have focused on for half a decade building. And it's now coming into the point where people can use it to send any amount of money back and forth. And you look back at a lot of the other coins in the space and you say, like, there's just no way they can compete now. Like, it's not even close. It's like you can't beat instant and you can't beat fees that scale down to zero.

It just, it's game over as far as I'm concerned for transmitting money. it's so interesting how um again the a lot of the the alt coin um ethos was in and around well bitcoin exists so what can we do that bitcoin can't and and yeah there's going to be massive tradeoffs in achieving that but whatever we're we're different we're doing something different but now you're starting to see all of those tradeoffs that they made it's it's all for not because those things are coming to Bitcoin. You know, in 2017, then the number one thing that I would hear from people

was transactions per second, transactions per second. How many TPS does it do? And, you know, they're like, oh, that's why light coin is like the silver to Bitcoin's goal. It has more transactions per second. And, you know, it had, oh, it's ASIC resistant. Well, I mean, one, that failed. to the transactions per second are irrelevant with the advent of lightning. Bitcoin cash irrelevant.

Everything that boasted about transactions per second, like you said, how do you beat instant and like as cheap as you can possibly get? So, I mean, there's that aspect of it. And I think that we're going to see this time and again. Whatever is top of mind is going to be the next thing that all the developers are working to create on top of Bitcoin. You see things like taro popping up for lightning. Now, that's totally aside the point whether or not those tokenized things on

lightning itself will be useful. If it is useful, people will use it. If not, they won't. But nonetheless, it's now becoming possible. Privacy is a big one. That's been top of mind lately, especially in the news lately. and the swarm is coming for the easy centralized ones that they can clamp down upon, but it's coming for Bitcoin too.

But we're in such a good place in and around privacy, a starting block comparatively from what we were for scaling. 2017, early 2017, we had nothing. We had nothing on chain. We had no layers. Five years later, I'm getting fractions of a penny per minute on the podcast as people stream it. That's amazing. We're starting from a place where privacy is top of mind right now, and there's already so many tools.

You've got various coin joint implementations. Lightning already has more base layer or more default privacy assurances than base layer. You have things like state chains where you can swap ownership of Bitcoin with no indication that anything has occurred on chain. You have side chains like Liquid Network, where it shields. with confidential transactions, and it shields the amount and even the asset dealt with. So there's all of these tools that are already available at the start of privacy being top of mind. Imagine five years out going from scaling with nothing five years later to millions of transactions,

like only limited by your bandwidth to today all these tools five years out. What's going to be possible on Bitcoin in terms of privacy? So I'm very, very excited to see where that goes. Any final thoughts? Anything that anybody wanted to tag on here? No, the last thing I think I'll mention is just beware of VCs, you know? Like they have to put their money somewhere. And it used to be in those dream tech companies for stocks.

And now I think it's in the dream crypto companies where they can pile a bunch of money in and the earliest people make money in the pre-mines. And then boom, they cashed. out and over a long enough time horizon, all of these fall by the wayside and Bitcoin lives on. Yeah. Yeah, I'd agree. And, you know, keep your eye to, yeah, where that capital is being allocated because sometimes if you raise too much money and it has to begin being allocated, it's still a small space. And so you may start spreading yourself thin and being forced to allocated into into bullshit that doesn't make sense.

I'll leave that there. So anyways, Nat, great, great mention. And again, everybody go and read Finding Signal in a noisy world by Jeff Booth. Google it. You'll be able to find it really quick. But with that, let's rotate down. And Kevin, you are up.

What has you bullish? What are you excited about? Sure. So I'll start off with a little story and just a little background on my experience with Lightning because one of the things that I've noticed in the last couple of months is how the payments happening on Lightning are not these like simple one-to-one payments anymore. I started a podcast about a year ago on Lightning and I expected at the time this podcasting 2.0 idea, I expected it was going to be I create content. if listeners like it, they can send stats to me. And it's just like a one-to-one payment, easy, done. And I'm like, great, can earn a bit of extra Bitcoin. Well, over the last few months, I've noticed there's a bunch of different apps in the Lightning ecosystem that are also allowing any creator to earn money. And they're all interconnected. And what I just looked at about a few weeks ago, I was looking at the podcast that I had started and I was looking at the payment flows. And there are hundreds of connected participants that are being paid or are paying with every single episode I create now. It's a massive web of payments.

It's like we have show splits on Fountain. So a listener sends in stats. They automatically get distributed to guests or to the Human Rights Foundation to Fountain to the podcast index. I post a clip of the episode on Stacker News. you get tips from that. You post a, if you post your lightning address, you get tips from Albi. You get, you know, you have a little boost button on my website. I get tips from MASH.

You have calendar tools, LNCal. People can now book time to chat with you. Vita, same idea. And you can earn stats from that. And I'm starting to notice, I'm looking around. There's like, all these different streams. of money flowing in and around this one piece of content. And then on top of that, I'm not doing transcripts with stack work where hundreds of stack

work workers from all around the world who I've never met are contributing tiny little pieces to a podcast audio clip and turning it into a polished written transcript and being paid sats for that. And it's just this big cycle of earning and spending. And really to me is like the beginning of the beginning of this. the circular economy, right? Like we've been talking about this moment and hoping that we get here in Bitcoin.

And that's the most exciting thing to me on Lightning right now is the emergence of this circular economy where you can earn and spend. And, you know, if I could show you guys a graph of what I'm talking about here, you'd see just like all sorts of lines pointing between different participants.

Again, there's literally hundreds of people that are either sending or receiving funds every time a podcast is created. And that means, you know, that's one little tiny piece of content. What happens if we can do this for Instagram? What happens if we can do it for Twitter? What happens if we can do it for Facebook and Google? And every single app that we use today that involves a transfer of money, we can do it much easier and much more cost effectively on Lightning.

And so I'm really excited about that. I think if you take a look at every single app on your phone, you open up your phone, look at the main screen, and be honest about which apps on your phone involve the transfer of money, you'll find that most of them do. And if you then ask yourself, you know, which apps would benefit from instant transactions and lower transaction costs, you'd find that all of them would. And so I just see this as like a huge open door. And we've opened up this new area of exploration.

And this is an extension of it. idea I was talking about earlier where there's just a lot of people building on Bitcoin. And I think a lot of these ideas are being built out today. And a couple of years from now, people are going to wake up and realize, whoa, you can earn money on this. You can send payments faster than ever. There's no borders. There's no time delays.

It's just incredible to watch. So that's my kind of reason for being bullish. I list out maybe, I think there were eight different Lightning apps that I was using this week that I either earned or sent money through. on Lightning, all tied to one little piece of content. So that's my reason for being bullish. That's amazing. See, I love all of this stuff where Lightning's being integrated and people are, you know,

the value for value thing or just being able to monetize in any sense. Even when it comes down to, I mean, we all go through a lot of different articles and it's always, oh, buy a subscription. I mean, Nico, you do the news six days a week. And I know that you end up having to pay for subscriptions for a lot of mainstream news outlets. But like how much easier would it be to pay? Like most people just click away, right? They'll get there.

It'll be like, oh, you got to pay for a monthly subscription to whatever it is, to the New York Times or whatever. And I can't even be bothered. I'm just going to, I'm not going to pay monthly. I just want to read this one article. Well, what if you could do a lightning transaction? for that one piece of content and just have it pro-rated. Like that way, I would, I would gladly pay just to have the one article that I want to read. I will never purchase a monthly subscription to any, any pieces.

I'm always searching for the, oh, well, do you have the archive link? I'll just use that. Like, but if it was, if I could just send like 10 cents or something for to read a quick article, even it was like 50 cents, I don't care. Like, sure, I'll do that. No problem. But there's so much that it can be used. for. I love that you're talking about the splits

with podcast creators. I know some people have done splits where oh, you know, this is going to whatever, you know, maybe there's different people that are involved in a particular episode or

maybe there's a charity that they've opted to send all the stats directly to. I think that's super awesome. I wanted to show an example of so this is like my my lightning note here and these are like per minute people that are listening to the pod so like this person set their threshold at 59 sats per i think he was off by 10 i think he meant a different number but anyways um so but like you can just scroll like this these are all people that are just like

listening to the pod minute by minute and and just a steady stream of sats from different individuals and it just you know i can keep on fetching more but you you get the point you get the point point. Other interesting ones, there's stacker news, basically Reddit style, oh, post an interesting thing, Bitcoin related. And then you can upvote things. You know, here's Dusty did an AMA. So you can just upload it and you send a SAT. So this one has already learned or earned 23,000 sats for this particular post. And then you can even go into the comments and same thing. Oh, this is a great comment and you send a sat to it. And so it based on how many

sat something gets, it'll move up the rankings, but it's actual skin in the game and it prevents like spam in and around content posts because there's a real cost to it. And then the other interesting thing in around that is

things like gaming and being rewarded stats for that. So like Thunder Games is one of these where you can earn stats as you play different mobile games. There's lots of examples of stuff like this. But I think it's all great. And again, to your point, this ecosystem is being built out and it's becoming so

intricate where there's just this constant stream of value between individuals based on their preferences. And I think that's fantastic. So, yeah. Yeah, I want to jump in because I recently started to take advantage of this value for value thing using Fountain. an app and someone someone actually signed my podcast up for it. I didn't know about it. And now people can stream stats, but also clip portions of the interview that they liked and share it with each other,

which I think is so, so, so amazing. And one thing that this makes me think of as well, not really in the, in like sending sats to podcasters or content creators, but really that idea of being more responsible for what you're posting with the whole idea that Sailor has proposed, like attaching a lightning wallet to an account, say, so that you can't spam, you can't be a bot, or it's going to rack up, right? There's going to be a financial penalty and a financial cost to doing something like that. And I think that if lightning can empower something, a system that's a little bit more, I don't know, that isn't so full of spam, because I'm sure that you guys have that experience as well on your social media. But I think that there should be like a lightning

wallet where you get like an orange checkmark or whatever that prevents you from basically doing something malicious unless you're willing to basically lose whatever's in your wallet. So I think that's an interesting concept. And just the idea of lightning in general also makes me bullish. So I'm glad, Kevin, you brought it up. Lynn Alden just released an amazing article about the Lightning Network. It's extremely, extremely long. So you know, you might want to sit down, have like a coffee or something to eat while you're reading it. But, you know, this is really what's going to, I think, scale Bitcoin and take it into the hands of billions of people. And I am super, excited to see how that happens. Because, you know, if you went to the Bitcoin conference and you

heard the type of announcements that people like Jack Mallors are making of, you know, payments and getting like merchants really in on Bitcoin, we really do need to scale it. There need to be more lightning nodes. Like, we're not ready for that mass adoption yet, but we will be soon. So I'm excited about lightning as well, excited for value for value super super super cool. So thanks for mentioning it. Awesome. Now, now, I know you're on a timeline here. I know you've got to run. But I wanted to first, before we jump to Nico for his thoughts on this topic, I want to say thank you very much for taking the time to come out. And I imagine, will I be seeing you for Pacific Bitcoin, maybe in November? That's right. That's right. And I'll also be at Bitcoin,

Amsterdam, if any of you guys will be there. I unfortunately can't make it because I've literally been out of town once or twice a month for the past six months. And I'm, I'm kind of dying. So, so, yeah, two months at home and is in the cards after I go to surfing Bitcoin on Tuesday. Oh, that's fun. Well, this has been super great. Thank you so much for having me. I love all of your work. So thanks and have a great weekend and keep stacking, guys. Awesome. Thanks, thanks, Matt. Appreciate I'm going to toss it to Nico. Nico, I'm going to let you weigh in on. on the lightning buildout. What's your experience?

What are you excited about? What do you have to say about what Kevin was bringing up? Yeah, first of all, like, yellow in the chat is dangerous because he just makes me laugh the entire time. So, like, oh, man, yellow. God damn it, man. I'm trying to be serious. But, but yeah, no, Kevin hit the nail on the head, man.

This is a game changer for all content creators. is a content creator. Kevin, you have an awesome podcast. You're a content creator. Of course, the legendary BTC session. We know how hard it is to monetize sometimes. How, and going through a third party and then just taking a cut is extremely painful. And just lightning enables this peer to peerness, man. That's, that's really what I'm bullish about the whole value to value. The fountain thing is just beginning, right? And it has me so you see the comments from people. and you know and they send you you know they send you a couple sats and you're just like like nico i love this part they make a clip of it you're just like i don't even know people liked me this much you know

and it's it's so like you could tell what's on the horizon but you can't quite make it out and i i think the the kevin hit the nail in the head it's like why you know you post i don't really use instagram but let's say you know i used instagram and it's it's nico with his shirt off on the beach and for some reason someone liked it, you know, 10 Satoshis, right? And what you said about the paywalls, man, like Bloomberg, 3499 a month. It's absolutely atrocious, but I need the goddamn subscription to do a good job Nico Jonesing, right? So like, it's like, why can I just pay for each individual article a dollar, you know? Like, that would just make everyone's life easier.

Why do I have to pay for the entire thing, right? So, yeah, I think, I think it's true, Greg. Freaking potato. But yeah, it's, you know, no one likes me that much, but I don't know about you guys, but I'd definitely pay a hundred Satoshi's for a picture of BTC sessions. I don't know. I thought you were going a different direction. I thought you were going to say that a picture for a bag of potatoes.

I posted the hottest picture of Greg at Bitcoin 2020. I caught him from across the room. We were at a restaurant. and he didn't know I was there. And I zoomed like uncomfortably close on the back of his balding head. And then I just tweeted that picture and tagged him in it with no context whatsoever. And then I sent it to all of the meme factory people for them to start retweeting it and waited for him to see his notifications blow up.

So anyways, it was fantastic. So I love, I love how everyone knew that it was him. Yeah, yeah, it was fantastic. Yeah. But yeah, man, I mean, lightning infrastructure is amazing. It's still so early and there's so much happening. And I can't even, I can't even keep up with it. Like, I haven't played with the splits and stuff like that.

I haven't played with like making clips and everything on Fountain. I have not dove into like a lot of the gaming in and around, you know, earning and having sats and native in games. there's so much to play around with and it's it's pretty astounding like even just like the bolt card I've been playing around with which is from coin corner and you can have like gift cards and tap it to your phone and redeem it and breeze or there's there's so much there's so so much happening and and I think we haven't seen anything yet yeah I agree tip of the iceberg and this is going to flip the internet monetization models upside down we're seeing

a little bit of that with Fountain, we mentioned, they have listened to Earn now. We've been working on it for a while and listen to Earn is basically flips the ad model on its head. You know, we don't, we don't recognize how much value Facebook and Instagram are earning from us. It's about $100 a year if you live in, if you live in America per user, Facebook's earning over $100 of revenue per North American user. That money stops at Facebook. It goes from advertiser to Facebook and right in their bank account and it stops. But it's not Facebook that is creating the value.

Facebook built a platform, but the users brought the value. The advertisers are really trying to get to the users. And now we have the tools for them to reach the users, specifically paying the users. Like this is the list of earn ideas. What happens if the advertisers can take that money, instead of funneling it to Facebook, route around Facebook, and just hand it off to the users. Like, you know, this is going to flip upside down these trillion-dollar businesses, and it's going to set up a whole new,

it's too early to say exactly how it's going to play out, but it's going to be a wild few years determining how the new business models of this lightning-enabled Internet are going to work. It's going to involve money, and I think a lot of people are going to get paid, and it's going to start with earning. Like that, I think, is the big theme for lightning on the Internet, is people are going to be earning money for the things that they already do. And they just never believed they were worth anything.

But because we have this money, we can now split into any denomination, send as fast as we want without any fees. We can now reward them for the tiniest contributions or the biggest ones. So that's kind of my final thoughts on lightning there and just kind of wrapping up the idea of helping people earn Bitcoin. I think it's going to be a really powerful idea. That's awesome. Well, yeah, anybody watching, if you haven't, if you haven't even dabbled with lightning yet,

go download a wallet, try Breeze, try Phoenix, try Moon, M-U-U-N. There's a lot of good options out there. And if you haven't tried streaming sats, found is great. Breeze has a baked-in podcast app in that wallet as well. Lots of, lots of other options out there. But start playing around. It's pretty amazing what's being done. But with that, gentlemen, I think.

we're going to wind down here. We'll just, I want to finish out by giving each of you a chance to have a quick, any final thoughts, anything you wanted to say off the end of the show. And I'm going to challenge you each to give a recommendation of something to check out. This could be anything. It could be a piece of content, like a podcast or a book or a video or a magazine article or something, whatever it may be. or an app or a piece of hardware or something that you have found valuable in and around your Bitcoin journey.

So I'll get started here. I think all of this kind of ties back to the initial topic was keeping the base layer accessible for all. Because a lot of this stuff would not be possible without the way that scaling has come about on Bitcoin. keeping it possible for everybody to run a node if they see fit, keeping the sanctity of that base layer, setting a precedent that you don't make non-backwards compatible changes to it, willy-nilly so that you can be assured that those base layer promises are sound. And then you can build on top of that.

And I'm so glad that the development process of Bitcoin has been one of patience so that we could allow that to flourish. And now we're starting to see the fruits of the labor that went into that. So with that, I'm going to recommend a piece of content. I'm going to say, and this is one, I saw it remmentioned recently, but fiction. If you guys have not read it, The Mandibles. It's a good, great book.

It's actually, I'll just grab it here really quick. So I quite enjoyed this. John Valles did a book club of it, a Bitcoiner book club a while back, and I was on it with a few people. But anyways, really fun book. Well, it's not fun. It's pretty dire. But it's called The Mandibles. And it's about the collapse and the hyperinflation of the U.S. dollar from 2029 to 2047.

So it's set, you know, just under a decade into the future. It talks about a future president defaulting on the U.S. is debt, the money printing that runs rampant, and the dire living conditions of everybody under that. As the world around the U.S. moves on from the U.S. dollar as a world reserve currency, and they create an alternative reserve currency that is, again, backed by something. things scarce. And the U.S. tries to navigate that and institute laws in and around ensuring that people only use

that currency. And it's just, it gets pretty dark, but it's also super interesting. And it's a very kind of like human tale of like, how would people that knew what it was like to live in the U.S. prior react if this type of a situation were to play out? So again,

the mandibles, it's by somebody named Lionel, Shriver. Well worth a read. Give it and check it out. Nico, final thoughts and any recommendations? Yeah, first of all, absolute honor to be on Why Are We Bullish.

I absolutely love this show. It's one of my favorites. I got to stop fan-boeing over Ben. I also want to give a shout out to the most legendary Bitcoin podcast that ever existed, the meme factory. Just kidding. Maybe I'm not. Does it exist? We never know. But anyways,

the actual article that I want to recommend And the reason I want to recommend this, Ben, is because, and Kevin, is because it really helped me understand what fetamins are and how it could potentially be a good solution. It's not 100%. There's tradeoffs, but it is definitely better than a lot of people holding their Bitcoin on exchanges, right? And that is Fedomans, right? And the name of the article is, can Fedomans help Bitcoin scale to the world? It's an article by Alex Gladstein. It's on Bitcoin magazine. And Odell was trying to explain it to me for like a month. And then I still, it wouldn't click in my head.

And then when I read that, I was like, okay, this is like proton mail. Like, this is literally like proton mail. And it really opened my eyes. It really explained what the use cases are and how people kind of have their own version of fettiments, but with different things and how, you know, the air. Arab culture kind of have some in Africa they do it. It's popular and what it basically is is like most people don't have the technical know-how to take complete self-custody and what this is it's basically it's a federation. So a group of people are responsible for the custody of that Bitcoin now is it ideal? No, right? Of course it's not it's not better than self-custody, but it's definitely better

than what most people do today, which is just leave their Bitcoin on an exchange, right? And the reason that they do that is because it's very easy. Fetamance makes that custody a little bit easier. It makes it, it's not as technical as self-custody. So I do think this is a bridge in the gap, specifically for people that just don't, aren't very technically savvy. And on top of that, this could be a back-end thing. So the user might not even know he's using. a fetament wallet, right? And that's what makes me so bullish on it. And the, the proton mail analogy

is the one that I always use because think about proton mail. You sign up, you're using, you don't know, unless you know and you look behind and you read the advertising, you don't know that you're using an encrypted email. You don't know that people don't have ACSA, can't read your emails, right? You don't know that. For you, it looks basically the same as Gmail, right? But it provides a whole layer of security, right? So I think that the custody problem is a major issue. If this is a revolution of self-custody, if enough people self-custody, we win this thing. And the fact is that most people still have their Bitcoin on Coinbase and they leave it there. They're like, I bought Bitcoin. I have it. Right. So I think Fetamint might be a good solution. And that article that I'm

ranting on a little bit, that article definitely made me understand it. which is why I recommend it. Awesome. Go check it out. Can Fedomints help Bitcoin scale to the world? It's on Bitcoin magazine. Awesome. Thanks for that, man.

Kevin, you're up. Any final thoughts and any recommendations? I have a lot to learn about Fedimints. I think that's going to be an important part of Bitcoin moving forward. And I'm excited to dig into that article and learn a little more. One other, I'll just kind of finish off with one book recommendation that I've only started, but I'm enjoying so far is a Bitcoin is Venice, Alan Farrington. It's an interesting one so far.

I'm only about, I'm probably not even a quarter way through, but I just picked it up the other day and excited to dig into it. It's a different, it's a fresh perspective on Bitcoin, which is nice. It's, yeah, it takes a different approach than most educators or people in space. It's not as, yeah, it's a different approach from what you know. might find the Bitcoin standard or some of the other like fundamental books for Bitcoiners. Awesome. Yeah, I've got it. It's queued up on my shelf here. I'm trying to get through a bunch of them, but Bitcoin in his Venice is one of the ones that I have sitting there.

I heard it's a bit of a deeper read. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes sense given the authors. So yeah, I'm excited for for this read. So yeah. Great recommendation. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me. Again, I appreciate all your time and hats off to Nat for joining us earlier. And Yellow, of course, I'm glad to see that Yellow made his way into, oh, there he is. There is. Yes, he is. Yes, he is here. I'm glad that he could join us too. But guys, everybody watching, of course, both these guys and Nat, their Twitter handles are in the show. let's go give them a follow and from there you'll be able to find everything else that they are working on and of course you guys are always welcome back and nico see you Thursday see you Thursday man awesome to be here Ben thanks thanks for having me on really enjoyed this one cheers awesome all right and everybody watching thank you so much for being here hope you enjoyed that let me know what you thought about it in the comments if you are watching or listening

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Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. See you guys next time for your daily session. They'll get bit more.