BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Knut Svanholm, Prince Philip of Serbia, Niko Jilch ep355
Episode Date: July 21, 2023FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/knutsvanholm https://twitter.com/PrincFilip1 https://twitter.com/NikoJilch 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best i...n class assisted mutisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab Server Lite,One or Pro today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/ Been watching the show for a while? Like what you see? Help me cover my video costs by sending some sats over on my Geyser Fund page! https://geyser.fund/project/btcsessions
Transcript
Discussion (0)
What is going on, everybody?
Welcome to the show.
Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish?
This one's a little bit special.
This is my first one coming to you live from Italy.
I am traveling around with the family.
And with that comes the, how should I put it?
The absolute cluster fuck of figuring out what you're doing as you're on the road.
So I've got my mobile setup here.
The internet where I am, which is on the Amalfi,
which is beautiful, but the internet here is spotty at best.
And we shall see what happens with that.
Of course, you know, that's the name of the game.
The show, I always do my intro clip of anything can happen,
but this one applies especially for any shows on the road.
So I defer to my friend Bill here.
We'll do it live.
Okay.
We'll do it live.
Fuck it.
Do it live!
I can, I'll write it.
and we'll do it live.
The fucking thing sucks.
Of course, if you have not already,
please do like,
subscribe, share, all those things.
Really important.
They really help get this show
in front of more eyeballs.
Shout it to everybody watching
on YouTube,
Twitter, Rumble,
and all my nostridges.
We are coming to you live
on Noster as well.
I am Ben with the BTC sessions.
This is your daily session.
Hodel the Bitcoin.
Before we bring in our guests,
Let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now.
This is timechain calendar.com.
We're sitting right now at $29,827 per coin.
A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 3,352 sats.
In terms of fees, next block, it looks like 23 sats per byte.
If you're willing to wait a little bit, 13 sats per byte should do you.
And then in terms of Bitcoin mined, 19.44 million of them.
and that's 92.55% of the entire supply.
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And with that, enough of my rambling. I need to get my guests in here.
We're going to welcome to the stage.
Canute.
We're going to welcome to the stage, Nico, and we're going to welcome to the stage, Philip.
And I'm very excited to have all you gentlemen.
Thank you so much for being here.
I think Canute has been on, but the other two gentlemen, first time on the show.
So let's do a quick round of intros, just namely, who are you and what do you do?
Canute, let's start with you.
Welcome.
Thank you, Ben.
This is my third time here, I believe.
and we go way back
and I'm an international village
idiot at this point
writing books about Bitcoin and
going to conferences and
advising a couple of Bitcoin companies
and doing all sorts of fun stuff
nowadays.
Yeah, that's me.
I got to see a little bit
in
I got to see you in Prague
and I got to
I got to pick up your book and get a signed copy of it, might I mention.
Added it to my bookshelf.
It's now a prize possession.
So, yeah, it was good to see you, man.
Good to see you, too.
I mean, always a pleasure.
And good to see you here.
And looking forward to seeing you, IRL soon again as well.
Yes, absolutely.
Nico, welcome.
First time that we've really kind of done much interaction online.
but I was I was kind of poking and prodding Twitter
for suggestions of people that I should have on
and you came up quite a bit
and I was poking around at the stuff you've been doing
and I'm glad to have you man
can you give yourself a little intro?
Well, hi Ben, thank you for inviting me.
Hi guys, I'm glad to be here.
So I'm Nico, Nico Yilich.
I'm from Vienna, Austria, where I'm sitting now as well.
I'm a financial journalist.
I do a podcast, a German podcast.
It's called What's Bitcoin Brinked and a YouTube channel
and I also do an English newsletter and a podcast on Fixed Money.net together with Yale with my companion.
Yeah, that's basically the very, very quick summary of what I do.
I've been a mainstream journalist for most of my time, but I quit everything to do basically only Bitcoin one and a half years ago.
And so far, I like it.
I love hearing about the brain drain, all the people that understand Bitcoin and have,
have other occupations, they're slowly but surely migrating to focus their attentions on
what I think will be a pretty important innovation.
And people do take notice.
When you look to the other side, you know, people in the traditional media, they lose their
jobs and then they look at this crazy guy who went with the Bitcoin route and has followers
and viewers on YouTube.
It's pretty cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm very glad to have you, Nico, looking forward to this check.
Me too.
And we'll toss it down the line to Philip.
It's good to see you, man.
I saw you again in Prague as well.
But we've met up in multiple locations.
And it's been a long time coming, having you on the show.
Obviously, time zones are always a factor.
So I think this is a great opportunity.
Yeah, no, maybe you invited me when I first went to Miami.
And here we, and I think it's like 10, 11 o'clock my time.
So thank you very much for visiting Europe and doing it here.
Yeah, my name is Philip.
or otherwise known as Prince Philip of Serbia.
The crazy prince now that's into Bitcoin.
I'm the CSO of Jan 3.
Jan 3's nation state adoption company started by Samson Mao.
I don't think he needs any introduction.
And I'm calling him from Belgrade.
This is where I live.
This is my home.
I've been living here for three years now.
I moved back three years ago during the pandemic.
And here I am today with, yeah,
Well, what can I say? Yeah. To talk about Bitcoin.
I guess.
Awesome.
Well, I'm glad to have all you guys.
And this should be a good one. I'm very excited.
This is a banger to kick off my series of European chats.
So thank you all for being here.
We're going to dive in.
I also want to give a shout out to everybody in the chat that's here as well.
keep those comments coming.
They're going to be overlaid on the side of the screen the whole time.
So yes, everybody on the live stream can see all of the comments for better or worse.
And that's just the way we roll here.
So we're going to dive in.
Anybody that's watching that is unfamiliar, this show is called Why Are We Bullish?
Very simple premise.
Each one of us is coming with a reason or a topic as to why we're bullish on Bitcoin.
Quite often, I'd say it's, I'd say it's,
very seldom about price sometimes, but typically it can be an eclectic mix of really anything.
It can be a personal experience, a piece of news, an application, a device, whatever it may be.
We all have a reason that's currently top of mind that we're excited about Bitcoin for.
And so the flow of this show is, one, somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish.
two altogether we're going to riff on that reason and discuss and then three we're going to rotate until we've all had a turn so really simple reason riff rotate
and so I'm going to get us started with my reason for being bullish and it's a pretty simple one actually
and I want to give a shout out to a gentleman Knut's definitely familiar with but I want to give a shout out to Mateo
because this week in the context of traveling around when I'm not actually at a Bitcoin-related
event, I'm just somewhere in the world where I'm not typically at.
The Orange Pill app has been kind of cool and an interesting way to get in touch with
local bitconers wherever I happen to be at.
And so I've been playing around quite a bit, even more so than when I've been at conferences,
because I've always, you know, you're around Bitcoiners that you know and everything.
And but when I'm just out and about and I'm looking around and I'm traveling with my family,
it's really cool.
It's been honestly very interesting to just jump on and then see people locally and say,
hey, you know, I'm, I'm in Rome or I'm in Amalfi or I'm in Matera and I'm going to be a whole bunch
of other places and just seeing, oh, there's some Bitcoiners here. And then being able to
figure out a, you know, let's get together and grab a beer or a coffee or something like that
and just meeting people on the fly. I think it's unique in that it's a, it's location based.
And so you can find Bitcoiners close to you as opposed to, you know, yeah, Twitter, you know, all the, everybody in Bitcoin is on Twitter.
And it's very easy to converse.
But like, that doesn't give you the, I'm here right now.
Who's nearby?
Can I go grab a beer with you?
People might not see your tweet.
Same thing with Nostr.
Nostr is awesome for the different set of reasons, you know, send the censorship resistance aspect of it.
But again, as of yet, it's not, it's not like a location.
There's no like location based layer to that.
And so I'm excited about Orange Pill app just because you can just kind of be anywhere and say,
I need that Bitcoin fix and then find somebody in the area almost immediately and then be able to link up.
And so that's kind of my mission.
So what I'm going to say is if you're in Italy, and I'm going to go as far as to list where I'm going to
be at because I want to meet up with Bicorners while I'm on the road. Right now I'm in the
Amalfi coast. I'm in Amalfi itself. But I'm also going to be in Matera after this and kind of
that East Coast region, Puglia, I think it's called. And then I'm going to be back in Rome for
five days. I'm going to be down to Sicily all over Sicily for a while. I'm going to be in
Malta for a little bit. And then I'm going to be in London.
So I'm going to be trying to look on OPA on Orange Pill app every place that I am and hopefully try and meet up with a Bitcoinser in every one of those locations sit down.
I just love meeting new Bitcoiners.
So yeah, super excited about that.
I'm going to leave it at that.
And I'm just going to kind of open it up to discussion.
And it can be like, again, if you're not currently using OPA, that's fine.
I'm just kind of curious everyone's experience with meeting B.
bitcoinsers in the wild and, you know, the ease or difficulty in which you've been able to do so.
So, yeah, and anybody who wants to dive in can touch on this.
Maybe I might even toss it maybe over to Canute because you've been keen on OPA a little bit as well.
So I'm curious to your thoughts.
Yeah, I love OPA.
We should put in a disclaimer here, Ben, that we're advisors for the R&Sill app.
Yeah, and I'm an advisor because of the value that I see in it, of course.
Yeah, exactly.
You wouldn't be, I wouldn't have said yes to that if I didn't like the idea.
And yeah, I recently came back to Sweden, which is where I am now.
And to my surprise, there's quite a lot of Orange Pill app users here as well.
I could find people on Orange Pill app.
and it seems to be the right people.
I don't think scammers like the idea of paying a fee every month to join a network.
But for people who want to separate signal from noise, it's a very good tool.
So yeah, I love OPA and I made a lot of connections on it.
And there's a lot of new features in the pipeline.
BTC map is integrated so you can find
retailers and other stuff like Bitcoin ATMs or whatever you might need
and there's an event function so you can make your own meetups and stuff
and there's a lot of cool stuff coming as well
not to forget that the OPA organized
giving each Congress member of the US Congress a copy of the Bitcoin standard
So they had an event in Washington, D.C.
like a month back, maybe a couple of weeks back,
where they made sure that there's at least a potential bitcoiner on each and every seat
in that particular building.
So I really like that.
Yeah, that is super awesome.
And I mentioned actually while I was down here,
I knew that Nat Brunel,
was going to be around.
But it was really funny jumping onto OPA
and then just seeing her there,
oh, she's literally, you know,
X number of kilometers away.
And then we had lunch yesterday.
So, you know,
and there's a few other bitcorners
that I know are going to be over in Italy this summer.
But it's really cool to be able to connect with them
as they travel.
And yeah, I don't know.
I think it's a pretty unique,
a unique thing that Bitcoiners have in that you can pop into any corner of the globe,
any city, town, whatever.
And if other Bitcoiners know that a Bitcoiner is in town,
they are more than keen to get together and just chat.
And it's one of those unique things where you already at a base level,
you have a certain set of values and beliefs that already align.
And so you can kind of skip a lot of the BS.
small talk in order to establish a rapport.
And you can kind of dive into more interesting topics right out the gate, which is really cool.
Yeah, and you can have some bone broth and some raw liver and a glass of water together if you want.
Yes, exactly.
So I'm curious, maybe Nico, I'm curious about your experience in kind of, have you,
Many bitcoins are broad.
Yeah.
And so I did just spend the last weekend, I did just spend with with 200 of like the most
hardcore bitcoins from the German-speaking world in what we call the Bitcoin Citadele,
which we've been doing for for three years now, has been very important for me.
So we get together.
So Citadele is obviously Citadel, right?
So we get together in like a farm or a castle.
and it's an event, but there's no speakers.
There's very little program.
It's mostly about getting together, like, almost a family meeting, really.
I met my man painting Bitcoin there, who has provided the awesome art that's in my office here.
So please check him out.
He's amazing.
He's also done the art in El Salvador for the adopting Bitcoin.
He's done Bitcoin Block in Munich.
So the, let's just, I mean, I don't want to, like, bring.
brag or anything, but in the German-speaking world, meeting bitcoins is not a hard thing anymore.
They're literally everywhere. It's quite insane, actually. I spent the last three days,
I spent with an artist slash entrepreneur who is 84 years old. And he's been a bitcoins since
2012 because he's been in computers his whole life and he immediately saw Bitcoin. And it's like,
I mean, we do YouTube videos why proof of work is important. He can demolish
proof of stake and any alternative within like half a sentence.
It's quite amazing.
And it's interesting to see, I mean, to meet Bitcoiners.
And the thing is that, you know, because I do YouTube and I do podcasts,
so if it happens that people will come up to me and say,
are you Nico from YouTube, you know?
And if they know me, obviously they're going to be Bitcoiners.
And I always say that Bitcoin really works as a social network
because you you find people and you really have something to connect over,
you have something to talk about and not even talk about Bitcoin,
but it's basically you literally have the same values,
like in a very literal sense, right?
Maybe not political values, maybe the one is old, one is young, one is tall, one is short,
but that doesn't matter in Bitcoin.
And it's really interesting to see that, you know, like politics and nationalities
and all that stuff, you know, gets thrown to the side really quickly with,
with bitcoins.
So yeah,
I mean,
if you're asking me
why I'm bullish,
of course I'll say
because you can see
the effect of Bitcoin
and people.
And it's absolutely insane
to see that
coming from the
I actually on the
tidaldaa
I did a talk about
these phases
where you first you
lower your time preference,
you sell all your chairs,
you know,
you sit on the floor,
then you start,
then you start building,
you know,
you start building yourself up.
You maybe you want to work
in the Bitcoin space.
But I do want to open
another thing because I do have to say it because you are asking why am I bullish.
So I am very bullish because of the community.
But the things don't dive into your reason.
Oh, I'm not a lot. Oh, we're still riffing, right?
We're still riffing.
Okay.
Yeah, we'll do a little bit more riff.
But I will ask you, I will ask you to elaborate on your reason momentarily.
I just don't either lose it too early.
It's just so, so it's really like we stay with the community and I have to say I haven't
even used Orange Pillab because I'm not an advisor.
So, no, seriously, I've heard it's great, but I haven't used to it because, you know, I'm in like 100 different telegram groups where I can meet Bitcoiners if I want to.
So it's just, I get invitations, you know.
I can literally go to any town like 300 miles from here.
I can visit Bitcoin as and it's absolutely crazy.
And I know that, you know, they're going to be nice people and there's something to talk to.
And maybe something that I also saw is that.
It's often people who are closer to reality.
By that I mean, it's people who are, you know, you work with their hands,
who work in nature, who are a little bit less disconnected from reality than maybe, you know,
university professors or economists or that, you know, because I get lots of people asking me,
you know, why doesn't this, why doesn't this economist get it?
Why doesn't this politician get it?
You know, that Bitcoin is a solution.
And I always say, yeah, but these people are not looking for solutions.
They're looking for votes and they're looking for money, but they're not looking for solutions
because if there was a solution, then they'd be all of a job.
So it's very interesting to see that, you know, quote, unquote, normal people get it really
quickly, you know, especially, I don't know if you have like, if you do sports, for example,
if you have a sports coach, whatever, if you learn tennis, you'll very quickly find
the sports coach that accepts Bitcoin because before they would just do it in cash and now
they do it in Bitcoin, the little things, right?
And that's pretty amazing.
Yeah, I agree. Again, it's that easy connection. Again, regardless of the method that you're able to connect with people with, you're absolutely right. You can, you can wander into any town anywhere and you've got a base of easy friends that you can connect with. And that's a fantastic thing.
Philip, I'm curious your take as well on, on again, meeting Bitcoiners in the wild and making those connections and kind of this phenomenon of having this social layer globally that has formed.
I think, yes, so when I came out the closet about being a Bitcoiner about a year and a half ago, I got a lot of attention on that video, that three-minute clip on that talk show and here in Serbia,
the Even Evanovitch show went viral on Bitcoin Twitter.
The next thing I know, I'm in touch with all my Bitcoin heroes
that I've been secretly following for a while now.
And next thing I know, I'm on Daniel Prince's podcast.
I'm on Safegin's podcast.
And the next thing I'm getting invited to Miami.
And I meet you, Ben, and I meet you, Newt.
And that's also where I get off of the job for Samson's new company, Jan 3.
And since Miami, I've been to maybe about 10.
conferences and that's why I always meet most of the Bitcoiners.
And I echo everything that everyone said on here so far that
you don't really have much small talk.
You cut to the chase and you can talk about the bigger picture about
how we actually should be perceived in the world.
And yeah, you know, you mentioned Nico that normal people get it.
I like to say that I'm not normal and I was working a financial job in London
in the city, you know,
asset management, you know, pure Kentian environment, but somehow I got it. So there's hope.
Yeah. I think maybe it's like an inner disdain for the system you're working within and
I wrote in a forward for Nuit's rehash of his two first books that I always knew there was
something amiss in the world that something wasn't quite adding up. But, you know, I kind of wanted to be
comfortable work in finance and do what a do what your parents.
thought was a good idea for you, but always with the suspicion that things were not
right. And then when you introduced to Bitcoin, 2017, you know, I also get distracted by
shitcoins and all that. But then 2020, that's when I really started to pay attention.
That's when I really started to study more. As you saw what happened with the whole COVID
bullshit. So I studied more. I joined Bitcoin Twitter and read like read the Bitcoin standard
because apparently that was a thing to read. And I think within within,
within as that CNBC presenter said, I think within 20 pages, I was like, oh, so.
So, yeah, so when I go around meeting Bitcoin's going back to the top, to what you asked,
I think everyone is very humble.
There's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no egos.
The ego is about, it.
It's no arrogance.
I think that's the word.
There's no arrogance.
There's confidence, which is a good thing.
And there's, yeah, there's a lot of love and a lot of appreciation.
and it's just hard workers.
People to just get it.
And it's a really is a beautiful, wholesome community to be part of.
And the great thing is, it's a growing community.
And I've noticed that whenever I speak,
because I do a lot of traveling that's not Bitcoin related
and I try to induce it to people.
And a lot of people just don't get it Bitcoin yet.
It's a really misunderstood technology, if you can call it that.
Yes, it is.
So there's potential. That's one reason why I'm very, very bullish as well. It's just the potential people of unlocking a lot of a lot of indoctrinated minds out there.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's, and again, to the earlier point, you know that I've just dove into Bitcoin. They've, they've had that unlock. They've had that key turn and their minds have been freed from the confines of fiat culture, I suppose. So it's, or at least there's, or at least there.
They're peeking out the gate anyways.
So there's more potential to kind of dive down deeper conversations and understand somebody
a little bit more than you would from a quick convoy from a random person on the road.
It's because when you get into Bitcoin and you might buy some and then you take it into cold storage,
what you do is you take responsibility over your life.
And that is not something that is common in fear the world.
So you do this step without even noticing it, and afterwards you see the changes.
Yeah.
With freedom comes great responsibility.
Yeah.
I think that's also why it's so interesting.
I like that you touched on that, Nigo, because there's many aspects of one's life
in which you can take more personal responsibility for.
And you get people coming to Bitcoin that are quite knowledgeable.
Obviously, they did something before Bitcoin.
They're going to be particularly knowledgeable in that area of expertise.
And if that person has an affinity for personal responsibility,
they're going to be attacking that area of expertise in the most personally responsible way.
And so there's such a wealth of knowledge to learn from other Bitcoiners because you know on a base level of values that they're approaching those other topics, if it's their expertise, if they believe in kind of the,
that personal responsibility of self-custody and, you know,
responsibility over the fruits of one's labor,
they're likely applying that to their other areas of expertise,
or they're more likely to do so.
And so I think that's why it's so interesting and why we see like these
subsets of expertise in different areas,
specifically within Bitcoiners,
that you can get some pretty good,
knowledge around, I want to say tangential talk to Bitcoin, but really it's, it's just personal
response. Did I chop out a bit?
A little bit, that's okay.
Okay.
I can tell you a story about, I can tell your story about normal people if you want to.
So we have, so we have in the German speaking world, we have what's called folk's music,
which is basically what for America, that would be country music, right?
There's normal people in Germany?
I said the German-speaking world.
No, no, I love all the Germans.
I love all the Germans.
So the thing is that,
for example, basically, if you're not into that,
you don't know what's happening there.
But it's huge.
There's hundreds of thousands of people following it.
There's huge concerts.
And there's one band that's called De Pal Dau.
I didn't even know about them.
I know about them now.
Because three days ago,
you had this clip going around from them singing, right?
And everybody on German Bitcoin Twitter was freaking out about this big band
that you didn't know about before,
but hundreds of thousands of people love, they were singing, right?
And I listened to the song three times,
and it was like about love and hope and blah, blah, blah.
But it wasn't about Bitcoin.
So I didn't get it.
I didn't get it.
And then I called the Bitcoins who posted it.
I said, what is going on?
What's going on?
And he said, look, just look.
So the guy, the singer, is wearing a huge Bitcoin B on his t-shirt.
I saw a picture of that.
And they were all wearing not the same t-shirt.
He was the only one wearing the Bitcoin thing,
but their clothes were made for the show, right?
So he did that.
He did that by himself or he wanted to do that, right?
And the guy I talked to the Bitcoin, his mom is like a huge fan.
They were both flipping out.
And this is what I can see more and more.
now is that people like from all this is why like if if you really want to be bullish about
because look from from how many different angles and nationalities and and backgrounds people are coming
to bitcoin and and it's happening more and more now yeah i i totally agree that's that's awesome i'm going
to have to look up that picture now i want to see that uh that performance that's awesome you sure it wasn't
Canute on stage.
It may have been.
Awesome.
All right, gentlemen, I want to do a rotation here.
We're going to dive into another reason for being bullish.
Again, everybody that's watching, thank you.
Give it a share on whatever social platforms you're on.
Keep diving into the chat and everything.
I'll bring up some more messages, by the way.
And shout out to Rabbit Colony.
He says the value of our time really spoke and is still speaking to me.
So, yeah, we're going to rotate over.
Canute, I'm going to toss it to you.
I'm going to queue you up, and I'm just going to ask you, why are you bullish?
Yeah, why wouldn't I be?
It would be a better question.
But all right.
Where to start?
Like, one of the most common questions I get asked after having gone full-time Bitcoiner.
is what is Bitcoin?
That's the question we all get.
People want us to explain it to them as simply as possible.
And the simplest answer I have, someone has their microphone on, I think.
I hear a lot of noise.
It's that it's just an agreement on a fixed set of rules between people.
And these rules are very, very hard to change.
And that's the whole point.
And speaking of responsibility,
it's up to each and every one of us
to verify that the Bitcoin we got were actually real Bitcoin
and not some cheap copy or some paper bitcoins or whatever.
And it's easier to do that than people think
because basically all you have to do is look at a number
and see how many zeros it starts with.
I'm not going to go into any more detail than that,
but that's the gist of it.
And what this responsibility thing means is that those among us most willing to take responsibility for their own actions are the ones that are going into Bitcoin first, which means that they will have, be able to extract the most value out of it if they can, if they can stop themselves from spending it.
which in turn means that the people willing to take the most responsibility will be the most powerful people among us
and if you think more about what a computer is and what a Bitcoin node is and what a miner is
you realize that the computer is just a fancy abacus that helps the node owner to do the calculation
And the same goes for the mining computer at the ASIC.
It's just a fancy abacus.
It's nothing but that.
It helps us with the calculations needed to verify that everything is going on
and to mine for the Bitcoin and whatever,
which is basically just guessing a number over and over again.
So the miner is not the computer that mines.
It's the guy that bought the computer that mines and shows to run it.
The node is not the Raspberry Pi running Umbro or the Start 9 server
running a Bitcoin core, it's you, Ben.
You're the node when you fire that thing up.
And the same way, the Bitcoin users, they are the Bitcoin's.
There's no sense.
Bitcoin is just information.
It's all in our heads.
It's all about keeping a secret.
So anyone who can keep a secret owns that Bitcoin in a sense.
So you have ownership, possession, and now an even deeper layer than that,
and that is keeping a secret.
which is the same as owning the Bitcoin.
So not being bullish, what this means is that not being bullish on Bitcoin is not being
bullish on humanity.
And so you might just go hang yourself if that was the case.
So because we've got this thing now.
And even further than that, so Bitcoin is everyone in the Bitcoin community.
But it's also everyone who's not in the Bitcoin community yet, but will be in the future.
Because we Bitcoiners, we trade with other people in other currencies too.
And that influences our decisions and that influences our lives.
So in a sense, everyone's connected to the Bitcoin network via proxy because there's no such thing as a circular economy.
It's all connected.
So not being bullish on Bitcoin is not.
not being bullish on humanity.
So that's why I'm bullish on Bitcoin.
I like that.
I love your framing of, of, you know, like, you are the node, you are the minor, you are the network.
Because, yeah, of course, without people behind it, if I, if I spin up a Bitcoin node,
and then I plug it into a wall
and an internet connection
and I leave it in a warehouse somewhere
and I never refer to it.
Is it doing anything?
I mean, not really.
No, and this is, by the way,
this is also why artificial intelligence
isn't really intelligence
because artificial intelligence
does not have agency or free will.
It does not make decisions on its own.
It needs a human to tell it what to do.
And this is what separates us from everything else on earth.
Like we can choose our destiny to a certain extent.
We can influence it.
So when people say we're all Satoshi, they're missing an S.
We're all Satoshis.
That's it.
I should tweet that.
You spin up that tweet right now.
No, that's 100%.
like that's without the people behind it without the people trying to claim their own self-sovereignty
without the people trying to actually gain control over there the fruits of their labor
then the network itself has no meaning you know it it serves no purpose and it just remains stagnant
you know you can have you know you can have the remains of the network sitting there but
if nobody's using it, what is it? It's nothing.
No, in that sense, it's not backed by energy. It's backed by human action.
It's backed by people choosing to sacrifice energy. And of course, well, humans run on energy
too, but still, it cannot function without people with agency.
Like people, people who decide, who make a decision to join the network in any way, shape,
perform. Yeah. Wow. Nico, I want your thoughts on this. Are we the network? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's, I think it, and I mean,
and this is coming from the talk, the talks I had in the last couple of days. I think it's going to get
actually a bit more complicated now that, you know, the big boys are getting involved. It doesn't
change anything about Bitcoin, though. And yes, we are the network very much so. I think, I think it's
important to understand with Bitcoin is, one of the things that Bitcoin is money, right? I mean,
we can agree on this. And money is not something that you buy normally. So we buy it as an
investment or that's how many people get into it. But there will come a time when people won't be,
you know, buying Bitcoin. You can only work for Bitcoin. You know, you have to provide value to
your fellow human beings and then you can receive Bitcoin. So it's, it's, you cannot think Bitcoin
without this socially.
And I think what Knut says ties beautifully into what we talked about before, you know.
It's, I mean, in a very real sense, you don't even have to own Bitcoin to join the network.
Obviously, most people who will have joined it will own some in some way or form.
But there is no Bitcoin without the people using it, you know.
And Bitcoin itself doesn't even know we exist.
That's how it cannot discriminate.
So it solves the discrimination problem, but not even knowing that people exist.
But I'm totally with him.
I've heard this idea of Knoot that we are Bitcoin because we carry it within us a couple of times.
And it grows on me.
So does that make it the virus?
There's no host.
It is the virus.
You know, a human body consists of about 15% old viruses.
And viruses are not necessarily bad.
So, yeah, it's definitely a mind virus.
I like that.
Philip, how's the mind virus treating you?
Thoughts here?
I know, I've got to say Bitcoin is with the greatest story ever told.
Yeah, it's, it's, what would I start with this?
I think the social proofing side of it is really important.
I think, yeah, what Newt was saying, when you were talking about as well, Nico, is seeing people around the world and passing them the knowledge of Bitcoin and just seeing them attached to the idea, not just being individuals, but now we're seeing this with the big institutions, as you said, Nico, and also nation states.
And when nation states and institutions start to talk about it, then this is really waking up other people because they, because those,
those people perceive those institution nation states as something credible,
even though they're not really credible at all in our eyes.
But when those guys start to talk about it,
then that really starts to spread the social proof side of things.
And that's one thing like we try and do one of our strategies at Jan 3
is just strike conversations with nation states, with institutions,
with influential people.
And when other people start to realize that they're talking about Bitcoin
or they're interested about Bitcoin, they're like, hmm, maybe I should start thinking about it.
And there it is.
That's how Bitcoin spreads.
It spreads by us speaking to other people.
And you can help to accelerate that by maybe targeting some of the biggest information spreaders in the world that we have today.
Yeah, Bitcoin is a bottom-up approach.
There's no arguing that.
But there is some top-down that needs to be taken care of and done the right way.
And I think that's going to play in a really important part.
And I'm going to say I'm partly excited with the likes of BlackRock and fidelity and those things are releasing an ETF.
I don't think it's right.
I don't think it's correct.
But I think it's very bullish.
My pocket's going to be happy.
You know, my mind is going to be happy because I guess the Bitcoin is in my head.
That's where it's all held.
I'm going to really feel my brain exwell, swelling richness.
who who okay so uh you now that we're on the virus uh tick who's i'm going to throw it out to
everybody who's the who's the super spreader uh who's who's the bitcoin super spreader like if you
could uh coin the greatest bitcoin super spreader of them all i i like no sorry if i buttoned
and this is the obvious answer for me who was also very pivotal um in my uh
in my journey to become fully orange-pilled is Michael Saylor.
I think his presentation, the way he talks about it,
talks about so many different angles,
and how eloquent he is about it,
it was really quite something.
So he's a great, he's a great maxi to have on our side.
Yeah, that's the first name that popped into my head too
after seeing the standing ovations in Prague and everything.
And Michael's great.
But the second phase that popped into my mind is the person that has coined the best ad for Bitcoin ever.
And that's Christine Lagarde.
She said, if there is an escape, that escape will be used.
And I can't put it better than that.
And neither can anyone else.
It's perfect.
I think someone else in the chat pointed out Jeremy Powell.
I think there's a lot of memes going around about the Bitcoin marketing team
and putting basically all the uh all those uh all those characters your legarde your pals your you know
your different pre your presidents here and there and i don't know who else is in that in that room yeah
greta maybe greta is it yeah she's she's a great super spreader yeah um nico do you have a
favorite super spreader so is this can i already tell you my reason for being bullish or is that too
early because it really ties in here i'm okay let's i was after this i was a
vote to rotate it. So let's go from Super Spreader to your reason for being bullish. Let's take it
on a journey. What's your segue? So first of all, in my little collection of art, I have Christine Lagarde
back there, a couple of other people taking the orange pill from Canuto, who is a brilliant
Bitcoin artist. So he's always there with me. And also my 21 energy Bitcoin heaters. I'm actually
mining Bitcoin here when it's cold. It's not cold enough for that today.
about being bullish and about the super spreader, right?
It's not a very original answer, but I think it's very important.
I mean, all of us who have been coming into Bitcoin from, you know, special, special, you know,
Fiat jobs or whatever, at some point we took the plunge and there was always reputational risk as well.
Bitcoin has this, I wouldn't call it an image problem, but in normal world, we were just seeing
the FOT coming again from Greenpeace and from from this actor guy who thinks he's the expert on
quote-unquote crypto.
But I think that if you look at what's happening right now and you can think it's good or
bad that it's acting this way, but it is happening.
June 15th, 2023, the day BlackRock filed its ETF filing, that was basically the day
that all reputation risk died.
It died.
It's over.
And anyone who is anybody who ever said anything bad about Bitcoin now has to check their story because Larry Fink is not bullish.
And I don't think that anybody really knows how important that is.
And I don't think that anybody really has a clue.
I think that the talk that he gave a couple of days ago and CNBC gives us a clue because it's interesting to see that there's a very good podcast about GLD.
that's the gold ETF.
So I was, before I was a Bitcoin, I was a gold buck.
I was still a bit of a gold bug.
It's shiny, right?
And the GLD ETF was new, you know?
It was new when it was introduced.
It was something that has never been done before, a commodity ETF.
There is a podcast on that, I think from Bloomberg.
Very interesting.
And BlackRock missed that.
BlackRock did not have the first gold ATF.
They have the second gold ATF.
And their gold ATF is not the biggest.
And I think that every time Larry Fink gets up in the morning, he thinks about that and he cries a little.
So now he really, really, really wants to be the first and the biggest Bitcoin ETF because that's where he thinks BlackRock needs to be.
And we can talk about the whole politics behind that.
And if there were strings pulled and if others have not gotten the ETF before him, it doesn't matter.
What matters is that you've got this important figure sitting on CNBC saying that Bitcoin will transcend national currencies.
It's completely insane.
I mean, I don't think we have ever, we even know what's happening here so far.
So, yes, right now he's probably the best, you know, quote unquote super spreader.
I mean, always, you know, thinking that he will get it.
If the ETF, you know, does not get approved, then we can talk about it again.
But right now this is, I think, the most important reason to be bullish on it, obviously,
because obviously, for the record, Bitcoin does not need an ETF.
You need an ETF if you have problems holding the asset yourself, right?
Like stocks, you can't hold 500 stocks in the S&P 500.
You cannot hold 30 kilograms of gold.
You can, but it's hard, you know, but you can buy the ETF.
So for the record, Bitcoin does not need an ETF.
But people within the traditional financial sector who have rules and regulations
and maybe problems with going to Coinbase or Swan or Krakken,
They can buy this ETF.
They need this ETF.
And when you look at the price of gold, I mean, just pull up the chart and check out the price of gold since 2004.
That's when the gold ETF started.
There will be an avalanche of money coming into Bitcoin.
And I think that BlackRock knows that because Bitcoin is basically the only single asset that could add one or two trillion dollars to their portfolio.
You know, you cannot do that with stocks anymore.
It would just be inflation.
So I think this is extremely important.
I think that the Americans, and then now you have Robert Kennedy, you know, Robert F. Kennedy.
I'm not even going into that, you know.
But I'm going to say one thing.
Did you see his talk about how he's going to back the dollar with Bitcoin?
Yes.
Yes.
And well, what can I say?
I had to take some paracetamol after that.
The interesting thing about it is not, although he said he's going to back the dollar with
Bitcoin, I don't think that's going to happen.
He's not going to get into office probably, right?
I mean, weirder things have happened and Trump was elected, but let's just assume that's not
going to happen.
But he also said, we're going to back the dollar with Bitcoin, and then he said, the
hardest liquid asset in the world.
That's his direct quote.
He says, the hardest liquid asset in the world.
And I think that's a new quote we should go with, because it's true, because after the
next halving, Bitcoin will have a higher stock to flow ratio.
than gold and even global real estate at 120 stock to flow ratio Bitcoin will be the hardest liquid acid in the world.
And once people realize that, and then you have the Bitcoin ETF and you have the other stuff going on,
because with BlackRock entering the market, basically the whole narrative is going to change.
Mainstream media is just going to flip on the dime here and just, you know, I'm on the record saying that the top,
the next top of the bull market will be when Nassim Taleb turns bullish again
by telling everybody that he was bullish before, so he was right all along.
That's my, I'm calling it.
And then I'll sell a bit.
Kind of too.
Oh, we're losing you, Ben.
We're losing the host.
Oh, I'm sorry.
The virus has lost its host.
Okay, now.
Better.
I'm a little toe here.
you got me
yes
I think it's working now
maybe we can
continue to continue talking about
about the ETF
I see a lot of comments
yes
talking about how
Bitcoin ETF is negative
which
I mean can I said one sentence
and I'll stop
sure please go for it
the thing is that
yes I see all the arguments
against an ETF absolutely
I see all the things that it's going to manipulate the price.
There's going to be paper Bitcoin, all of these things.
But it was going to happen regardless.
So the positive side is the narrative side, right?
And all the media flipping bullish on Bitcoin and that stuff.
It was always going to happen at some point that we'll have this, you know, this phase of the adoption where, you know, the mainstream or the Fiat system tries to, you know, go down the same route with Bitcoin that they went down with gold.
that we have to see where it leads, but it's not something we can prevent by just moaning about it.
We have to show the other way, absolutely.
But for now, it is a bullish.
It is a reason to be bullish.
And it doesn't change anything about the Bitcoin that's in my head or in Knut's head if there is a Bitcoin ETF.
And also the paper Bitcoin thing, yes, but I think that there will be websites and they will add all the Bitcoin that's in ETFs.
And once we go to $22 million, everybody will try and sell.
Yes, I view this as the moment Fuji film starts,
their new service is to print digital photos.
Or this is like when Blockbuster videos start selling candy instead of DVDs.
This is the moment, this is the equivalent moment here,
when you get all these Fiati big players starting to,
fiddle with Bitcoin and they're just
they're just like
on top of the rabbit hole but haven't
fallen down yet and they have no
idea what they're in for like they have no
idea what they're doing to themselves
but in the long run this is
this is the beginning of the end for them
also another point going back to the
paper Bitcoin thing
then that was obvious huge
huge problem last the bull run with
the likes of FTX and all that paper Bitcoin
crap that happened
this time
with the likes of Black Rock Fidelity and stuff,
there will be a little bit more rules set in place
as well as what you talked about, Nico.
And I think it'll be harder to fake that paper Bitcoin.
So there might still be some, of course.
You'll never get rid of it,
but it will definitely be closer to one-to-one as well.
So this next four-o-one.
Go ahead.
No, sorry, yeah.
So that, and I think really the main,
what I wanted to repeat from before is that it was when you have people like Blackboard people,
I mean, institutions like Blackport talking about it, it's just going to make me people more
interested and that's going to just capture it.
And it's going to spread the narrative of the greatest story ever told to new people and they're going
to realize, okay, so what is Bitcoin?
And it's our job now to make sure they get the right, they get the right narrative.
They get the right, the real story of what Bitcoin is.
And that's only going to do, it's going to be wonders to spreading, to spreading network
and making the network rich all parts of the world, which has already, but as in it's just, it's inevitable, really.
But with these big players, it's just going to speed it up.
I mean, what you can say is that it's true that Bitcoin does not need the ETF, but BlackRock needs the Bitcoin ETF.
And that really tells the whole story.
Yeah, and the same goes for RFK and all these politicians.
Like, Bitcoin does not need a politician to approve it.
Like, that's not, it's not democracy money, it's anarchy money.
So, like, that's the whole point.
So being a politician and saying, yeah, I'm going to make this perfectly legal,
and I'm going to make sure you're allowed to do this or that.
Well, that's cute, but it's not what this thing is about.
I was just going to say there's two things that play here right like there's there's two competing there's there's the narrative and there's the paper bitcoin risk but the narrative being propelled by these players coming in what is that narrative well the narrative is we need a sound money that is verifiable and if that proliferates then that begins
becomes a Trojan horse in the legacy finance system.
And so you get into an instance where like, is there paper Bitcoin?
What's going?
Maybe we should do some verification.
I think you just see a repeat time and again of everybody thinking that the next larger institution is the one that's the shining example of no fire.
Right?
Everybody thought Mount Gox was the last Mount Gox.
Then Quadriga happened.
Then FTX happened.
Well, what the hell happens when large paper bitcoining, you know, Bitcoin.
Well, the same thing on a larger scale.
I think Odell, it was Odell that said on Nat Brunel's podcast,
path to hyper-bitconization is society being rugged again and again and again and
hear it out every single person.
And I think that's probably right.
I'm not necessarily it's going to be institution A or B, but it's going to be some of them.
And the thing with Bitcoin, because it settles so quickly, because you can demand settlement,
because you can verify supply, fuck around, find out happens very quickly compared to legacy
you can't define that. So you can kick that hand down the road for a long time with infinite
printable money, not with 21 million. The other thing that we're at here that I did want to
touch. Can I just reply to that? This is my opinion. Dark plan. Yeah. Yeah. So if you extrapolate,
Like if you do Mount Gox and then FTX and if we extrapolate that into the future, the United States of America is somewhere down the line.
That also falls into the same category and disappears.
Yes.
So one one, sorry, just one thing about is what we talked about is responsibility of holding your own keys and being self-sovereign.
I think some people are not quite ready for that.
people still want the third party
still people don't have that need for responsibility
we've been cushioned too much in society
that we make mistakes we can
we can just print more money essentially
and this is something that's going to be hard to shake off
but in time hopefully this is something that will spread
and people will learn
because they have no choice really
because at the end of the day I think
I think they
as you said Ben
too many rug too many rugged
too many ruggings will end up from people
to be forced to one
to take responsibility of their wealth.
Nothing that exclude malicious individual or entity
from being a super spreader as well, right?
Like one of the greatest super spreader SBF, right?
Speaking of rug pulls, Philip,
have you ever had a red carpet pull?
Did anyone ever pull the red carpet from about your feet?
not physically
there's no
there's no footage to me
like a cartoon yeah
that's a great response
that's what they did
that's what the commies did
like that they pulled
the ultimate wrongful
that's why we're all
Bitcoin is here
is because we are
it's the commies is all about
taking away your private property
and we are all staunch
advocates of
individual property rights
and everything
was stolen away from my family in the in the 40s and you know still is confiscated to this day so
I guess maybe that could be subconscious to one of the reasons why I understood bitcoin quickly
because that's one thing that they can't take from you unless I don't know unless you can
hack someone's brain when you especially when you talk to many American bitcoins and you and you
probe long enough there will be some communism family backstory in 80% of the of the of the
like when you when you when you talk to american gold bugs 80% of them have German heritage
it's just it's it's a weird thing but obviously it's not a weird thing maybe it's it's very
it's very logical actually you know when your family has has had this experience with communism
then you know you you have somebody that will understand this within your personal life
and that will give you the confidence to talk to
talk about this outside of your personal life.
And then there is, you know, people who come to it for some other reason that is hard to
understand.
So we'll have to do studies of that.
I know.
That's interesting.
I want to touch on one quick thing here that we jump or jumped away from.
But I think it's important to mention.
Somebody brought up in the chat just regarding the ETF.
And I brought it up earlier about BlackRock forking Bitcoin into like ESG Bitcoin.
I think the only refutation that needs is war.
And that's basically an exact blueprint of how this would go.
If you think that a large entity can change as a Bitcoin, I would much refute that.
At the time when the block size war happened, it was like the top 50 company.
It was 80% of the hash rate.
It was basically like all of the muscle that people perceived to be behind Bitcoin was thrown into array by nothing than people running nodes and a futures market off of that fork would be.
and turns out it would be worth a fraction of what actual Bitcoin would be worth.
So I think the worry of, and as we said, it's the narrative, the narrative sells of what Bitcoin is.
And the narrative of Bitcoin continues to be, hey, this is censorship-resistant global money that can be used by anybody and that has a cap supply and is sound.
And so if we, again, you know, we need to do our jobs and we need to make sure that people realize that that is what Bitcoin is.
But you're going to have a hard time forking Bitcoin into something other than that.
And I think it's too ingrained at this point to be able to sell somebody a different narrative of what Bitcoin is.
You can you can fork it.
You can create ESG Bitcoin.
In fact, there already is proof of stake Bitcoin.
it nobody uses it I mean the only existential crisis Bitcoin ever had I'd say was the
the the block size wars and that's done it's gone I don't think we have anymore any any any
forking crisis is ahead of us and we already have ESG Bitcoin and it's it's not Bitcoin
proof of stake it is called BTC and it trades on crack and on Coinbase and
we all know that you know you know if you want to go down that rule we all know we all
know that Bitcoin ticks all the boxes, environmentally friendly, yes, socially, yes, what's the
G governance? Well, we got that covered, right? And it's, it's, so for this, like, scare about BlackRock,
I'd say it's a lot easier to change the definition of ESG or to change the perception of Bitcoin
within the ESG framework than to change Bitcoin. And, and it's important, I think it's important
to see it, you know, if it walks like a dog, you know, and it barks like a dog, it's probably a dog.
BlackRock is in this to make money.
They're not in this to, you know, because they see Bitcoin.
Yes, maybe they see Bitcoin as a threat because Bitcoin is a threat to the business model in so far as that it will take out the store of value premium from stocks and other paper products that they sell to people.
So their basic business is basically taking the savings of the world and putting them into stock indices.
But if they can take the savings of the world and put them into Bitcoin,
and hold like, I don't know,
two million Bitcoin on one hardware wallet
and call it a day and charge some money on that,
they'll do that, you know?
They just want to be the first and the biggest.
I think that that's important for them.
And the whole ESG thing basically has run its course anyway
and they're just going to pivot to something else now.
And maybe it's called BTC.
Yeah, I think, yeah, they just want to extract their fees
where they can.
Yeah, I'm not working.
about them protocol and and really it doesn't say yeah we're going to fork big takes them
point and then connect all of us that are using bitcoin and moving it around and all of us running modes
that are saying no that's not bitcoin um convinced the world that they didn't make a change that we
changed somehow which was the narrative of b-cash it would it would be a b-cash narrative all over again
so yeah i don't
I don't think it's an issue.
Yeah, if you want to, if you want to be on the same network as us for here on this channel, run your own node and run the same code as we do.
Yeah.
100%.
Awesome.
All right, gentlemen, I'm going to go on with the conversation.
I'm going to do a rotation.
And I'm going to toss it over to and I'll cue you up with the same question as the other gentleman got.
Take it away.
Why am I bullish?
Why am I bullish?
I am bullish because there's, as I mentioned this before,
that there's so many people who don't understand Bitcoin yet.
And everywhere I go, there's so many people who would just,
who could, it would help their lives so much better.
And just recently I had a meeting with,
with someone who is bright, who's intelligent,
and he's an advisor to a certain president in our area.
and he never really heard about Bitcoin properly.
And then I talked to him about it,
and I told him about how it's secure your sovereignty,
it protects you against inflation,
all the things that we know about.
And all of a sudden,
you could see his brain just working,
just understanding it.
And these moments I have quite often and around the world,
and with people who can be,
not I would say influential,
but just intelligent people who've just not understood what Bitcoin is.
And I think these untapped minds around the world that can help spread the word of Bitcoin
are so many.
And I'm bullish because there's only a very small percentage of the world that actually
understands what Bitcoin is.
I mean, I'll leave it at that, really.
Right, I'm going to toss it to the other gentleman.
my sound is crap so if you want to dive
Knut gone
sorry I got
distracted here
so I didn't get the use
I can continue saying that
you know I was last year I was
in Argentina and
I was in Al Salvador
and as you know what's happened to Argentina
this year you know
it's its inflation has
again reached double digits it's really
really tough place
to live in financially
but the society
see that it's still very, it's still very, um,
presentable.
People are very, uh, it's,
it felt like really, I was like in Europe,
not, not, not anything bad against Latin America,
but it felt like I was in a very developed country.
It's just the money situation there was horrible.
Like, when you get money, when you go get, um, exchange,
exchange, uh, cash dollars for, for, for their, um,
for, for their, for their, pay, pesos.
You'd get like a stack, like the low, a stack of pesos that the lowest denomination was like,
thousand pesos, which is the highest denomination, sorry, is a thousand, a thousand pesos,
which is like $3. Now that's probably about a dollar. And you have to carry these wads of
cash in your pocket. And that was the best exchange rate you can get is by exchanging in cash.
If you did it by credit card, if you buy things in credit card, you'd get half the value.
Absolute shit show. And here's this country that really, really needs it more than most
countries. And now, like, for example, what we're doing at Gen 3 is we're going to release a
wallet that's completely self-custodial. And yes, it's going to be using lightning, but also
liquid. And we're going to be using putting USD. This is another conversation that's
been happening and seen online. I've seen the likes of McCormack in Argentina recently saying
he's had to use shit coins like Tron and Ethereum to transact it, to transact in USD, because that's
people use there, but now you can actually, we'll be able to use USDT on Bitcoin, on liquid network.
So there's that.
And this is why our product is going to be such a big, a big breakthrough for Latin America,
for a lot of these parts of not just in Latin America, but also in Central America and around the world.
People want to be able to have exposure to a currency like the US dollar, but also, that also gives you,
gives you a point of understanding what Bitcoin is about as well.
So if you see USCT and Bitcoin on your mobile, on your mobile, you'll get, you know,
you want it just for US dollars, but then you see Bitcoin there, you're going to get interested
and you're going to start storing in Bitcoin.
And that's basically allowing the free market to decide.
A little bit what El Salvador has done with their top-down approach.
And then yet again, Bitcoiners, Maxis, who just want our,
hold self-custody in Bitcoin, that's doable as well.
But then if in case you're like a Peter McCormack who goes to Argentina,
doesn't want to use a shit coin and transact in USD,
you can do it without having to buy any Tron or rely on any, any REC20 bullshit.
So there's that.
I like that.
Yeah.
All right, Mike.
You go.
You want me to comment, Ben.
There's a bit of a lag with your, whenever you speak.
So that's why we speak over each other every now and then.
Anyway, this is the thing.
I think Bitcoin is going to help the people who need it the most, the most.
So people in countries like Argentina, people in countries like Venezuela,
if they just, you know, acquire some Bitcoin and find a way to not spend it too early,
they have a chance of surviving hyperinflation.
And yeah, I know that this is one of my first, like, real goose bump moments in my own personal Bitcoin journey
was then when I got a personal message from a guy who had fled Venezuela with Bitcoins in his head.
And he thanked me for some article I had written.
And so that was a really, really, you know, holy shit moment for me.
So I think this is very beautiful.
And if we can get people informed in those countries and if we can get them to acquire just a little bit of Bitcoin and hoddle it for five years or something, they may be able to or even just convert whatever else they have into Bitcoin and flee the country.
And even better if the people in the country can just start a, for lack of a better word, circular economy in that country,
using Bitcoin.
That's of course the best thing.
I think it's also important to not underestimate or to not forget that we,
even if it doesn't feel like it, we're still very early.
There's not many people who, you know, have gone down the route of using Bitcoin
as their unit of account, there's their day-to-day money even.
And for a very, very long time, maybe for our whole lifetime and maybe even for our kids'
lifetime, there will be this, this fight of systems. There will, Bitcoin will exist,
fiat will exist, you know, other experiments will exist. And it's, I think it's getting
increasingly easier. I think Philip and Nune have talked about it's getting increasingly
easier to show people the advantages of Bitcoin itself. But it's also, I mean, the most
powerful thing you can really do in this, especially in the West where people will not need
Bitcoin immediately in Europe and in the US, you know, other, like South America, Africa, Asia is a
different story.
I mean, I've done a podcast with a young woman from Ukraine who's got her money out of Ukraine
when she had to flee the country.
So, and she's not the only one, right?
But what I see in my day-to-day life, really, where everybody's going crazy about
inflation and politics and the war and this and that.
and, you know, the weather.
You know, Bitcoin is just very relaxed because they have something to rely on.
And once you've, you know, you've been into the rabbit hole for long enough, you know,
you get this relaxed aura and you have this, you know, like we talked about,
you have this social network of people that you can always tab into.
And there will be 99% of them will be good people who will want to help you if you need,
if you need help because, you know, I think people are in handily good.
And I think that Bitcoin just releases this inherent goodness, if you want to call it, because we don't have to worry about money anymore.
Nobody can take it away from you, not even through inflation.
So I think that this relaxed stage is actually the best one to be in for the next couple of years because things are going to get extremely crazy.
And if we panic at any given point, then there will be many points.
and there will be many points between we can panic on,
or we can be the relaxed bitcoins, you know,
who just stack some sets and then go for a beer
and just live life like it should be, I guess.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm going to keep my response short and simple here
because I know my sound is crap.
The chat is asking if I'm sitting on a taser.
I am sitting on a taser,
so maybe that's part of the sound.
but I wanted to say I think liquid work doesn't get enough of
I think it's incredibly unique stable coins
and there's again stable coin inherent counterparty risk we know this
so you know use the least shit coin thing you can and that that's liquid in my opinion
there's also some something to be said for stable sats which blood is
doing, which is light-daining native, but besides the point, you don't need a token in order to utilize a stable coin. And so why bother?
Outside of that, Philip, I just wanted to, because you mentioned a wallet, but people may not familiar.
I'm sharing my screen.
Aqua Wallet is this where you can use Bitcoin, liquid, and again, and tether.
You can also do the same through something like Blockstream Green.
Yeah, anyways, lots of options there.
Yeah, you don't need a to accomplish using a Bitcoin.
using a stable coin and i think that's fantastic people will use u.s dollar and so why not use
in tandem with bitcoin and get curious and then they can might they're already using stuff like that
go ahead philip we have a comment philip yeah sorry no i wanted to just continue about quickly
about arco wallet that it's what stamson started at block stream they have they have green but he
actually started this at block stream and it's a Bitcoin Central wallet and you and it will as
you said it's it's going to have UST liquid and USD and go ahead can you guys hear me which
yeah no yeah so I'll I'll finish from saying that's uh aqua wallet will be out soon and it should be
it should be big in uh in Latin America and and other parts of the world and helping to grow grow
our network and I'm very bullish about that.
So Ben is not, Ben's situation is not very good at advertisement for internet in Italy,
you know, poor guy.
Yeah, maybe we should take over a bit then.
Sorry, guys.
Am I, am I?
I think it's better now.
Are you guys hearing me okay right now?
Okay.
Now yes.
I'm going to start to round out if that's okay.
Yeah?
Okay, cool.
There's a bit of a delay, but we'll,
power through. Fuck it. We'll do it live. I like to finish each show with a quick round of
any final thoughts and any recommendations. So I'm basically going to toss it down the line.
Anything that you didn't get off your chest and anything you'd like to point people to that may be
abused. That may help them in their Bitcoin journey or something interesting you think people
should check out. So I'll toss it to Knut. Dude, final thoughts, recommendations. Go ahead.
Yeah, I'd like to show you guys something. It's my most priced possession.
And I'll tell you why in a minute. It's this thing. Can you see it?
There's a lot of reflections here. But this is fractal encrypts,
infinity key number one out of 21.
So I got this here with me.
Where did you guys go?
You're on your own.
All right.
So I got this here with me because today is the 21st of July.
So there's only one single month until Bitcoin Infinity Day, 2023 happens.
and we're going to try to celebrate that in a special way this year.
We're doing a live session, four-hour live session on the Freedom Footprint Show,
which is my podcast.
If you're not following that, you should,
so look up the Freedom Footprint Show.
It's on a YouTube channel called the Consensus Network,
which is the publishing house that publishes my books, by the way.
And we're doing this live from BTCX's,
offices in Stockholm.
And BTCX is one of the world's oldest Bitcoin exchanges.
And if not the oldest at this point, since all the others are probably not around anymore.
And they have some beautiful offices in Stockholm.
And I'm doing the pod live from there with some VIP guests.
And we're going to release some exclusive tickets for the event.
So if you're in Stockholm around the 21st of
August or if you'd like to come. You guys are all invited, of course, if you can make it to
Stockholm. But we'll try to talk to a lot of people during this four hours and some of our
old guests will pop in and tell us how they celebrate Bitcoin Infinity Day. So don't miss that on
the 21st of August. Awesome. Nico, I'm going to toss it down the line to you as well.
because my connection is correct.
All right.
First of all, thank you for having me.
This was great.
Second, I'd say this because I've lying,
I have them lying around here,
and I really have to say, you know,
I mean, this is not very new,
but I've got here,
I've got Czechia financial privilege by Alex Gleitzin here,
and I've got the brilliant, brilliant German version,
which is called the, the Stoyangche,
so they changed the title to the Drozhen horse
of liberty, of freedom.
And I think it's a very, very important picture.
And it made me read the book the second time.
And I have to say, Alex is really a good writer, excellent writer.
And this is actually one of the more important books.
There are many books.
I actually have a little thing for like obscure Bitcoin books.
So I ordered one from Indonesia the other day.
And I paid like a hundred euros just for getting it here.
But I paid in Bitcoin.
And so I'm collecting obscure.
Bitcoin books, but this is one is actually brilliant
to check it out. And this idea of the
Trojan Horse of Freedom is extremely important.
Bitcoin works as a Trojan Horse of Freedom. It doesn't
matter if it's in a central bank or
if it's in Black Rock or anywhere else.
And I have to say,
you know, if you go and read, you know,
this is a little plug, if you go and read my newsletter
at Fixedamone.net and my English podcast,
I write about my work that I did in the last
20 years as a financial journalist. And actually, I got
to meet, you know, I got to meet Larry Fink.
and talked to him about Bitcoin five years ago, and he hated it.
And I have a story about CBDCs,
I have a story about me going to see the actual gold in the central bank,
and I've got all kinds of stories and even more coming up.
And I only say this because I want to say one thing to any Bitcoiner,
like worldwide who's watching this.
And that's the main message is buckle up
because things are going to get fucking insane.
and the next one and a half years are just going to be a wild, wild ride.
And I'm certain of that when I see what's happening in the Bitcoin world and when I
see what's happening in the Fiat mainstream world, these are colliding, but not in a very bad way.
And things are going to get wild.
I love to hear it.
I'm going to toss it to Philip as well for final five nations.
Didn't realize.
Yeah, I didn't realize this was going to be a show and tell.
So I luckily had this on my desk.
This is a Jan 3 mug.
It has some old coffee inside.
Ethiopian coffee, very good coffee.
And yeah, I'm bullish about what we're doing at Jan 3.
And other things I want to get off my chest are we've opened up a Bitcoin hub in Belgrade,
the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub.
I don't know if you've seen this on Twitter, where the likes of 2.7, that's 21 in Serbian.
and they sort of copied.
I mean, they took the idea from Einstein, if I said that right.
It's 8n-Swantzeg.
8th, yes.
And we've opened up a great location at the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub,
and we organize weekly meetups there,
and it's a place for a workspace,
a place for Bitcoiners and anyone around the world to come and work there
and just to show up, meet up, but also to do presentations,
and we've got books, resources there,
we've got a miner, we've got some harder wallets to play around with there.
And so I invite everyone who's been to Serbia and who has not been to Serbia to come back
or to go visit Serbia for the first time because we are spreading Bitcoin,
the love of Bitcoin in Serbia and the rest of the region,
and all over the world, of course, because that's what we do at Jan 3.
Love to hear it, man. That's awesome.
Hopefully you're a day now, but I'm going to run.
round everything out.
First off, thank you guys so much for being here,
for being part of the show.
It's a long time coming for Philip.
And again, Nico, great to have you.
Knoot.
Super happy to have you back.
And apologies for my crap sound.
But fuck it.
We'll do it live.
Here we are, and we made it work.
Shout out to everybody in the chat.
And gentlemen, I just want to say,
thank you so much.
and you're all welcome back anytime.
Pleasure.
You're welcome.
Sorry.
Thank you, man.
I'd say, you're welcome back to Europe more often
so we can do these shows
that are more reasonable time for us.
So thank you.
Yes, and your connection might be crap,
but you still have great hair, Ben.
And I'm seeing one.
What about my hair?
What about my hair, Knud?
Yeah, no comment, no comment, Nico.
Incredible.
And yes, yes, to one last comment there.
Yes, I'm trying to work on getting Mirovok to be a Bitcoin.
He is a freedom fighter and he needs to be a bit corner.
So I'm working on that one.
That's amazing.
Awesome, awesome.
All right, gentlemen, thank you so much.
I'm going to sign you guys off.
I'll be an outro so I don't talk over top of you guys anymore.
Have a great rest of your day.
Thank you, man.
Same to you, see you.
See you.
Bye.
See you guys.
All right.
Everybody.
Thank you so much for being here.
Again, apologies for all of the technical difficulties.
Italy on the coast.
I mean, I'm sure Rome is fine.
Malthy Coast, maybe not so much.
I'm going to play this one more time because it deserves it, but...
We'll do it live.
We'll do it live.
Do it live.
I'll write it and we'll do it live.
The show deserves two of those today.
That's, um, anyways, uh, thank you guys.
So much for being here.
I'm not going to chat two more.
Uh, but of course, you enjoyed what you saw.
Like, subscribe, share, all those things up and a lot.
Hit the sponsors that they're all in the show notes down below.
And if you really liked what you saw, you can always hit up my website,
BTC sessions.
Dot C.A.
Book me for one-on-one.
Um, I'm doing those as well.
here in Europe at more re-ones for you all.
But also, shoot me a tip.
If you really liked what you saw, the QR code on the screen goes to my Geyser Fund page.
And that's where you can leave a comment and you can shoot some sats if you so, please.
Anyways, guys, with that, I'm going to head out here.
Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be.
I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.
Hoddle their Bitcoin
