BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Ledn Team Takeover! ep177

Episode Date: May 29, 2021

In a week of optimistic Taproot signalling from Bitcoin miners and grandiose virtue signalling from Bitcoin “mining councils”, today’s panel guests riff on what has them feeling bullish 🐂. ��� Mauricio Di Bartolomeo: Co-founder of Ledn. https://twitter.com/cryptonomista 👉 Adam Reeds: Co-founder and CEO of Ledn. https://twitter.com/adamreeds 👉 Carlos Ng: VP of Operations at Ledn. https://twitter.com/therealCarlosNg 👉 Mario Gibney: Part of Ledn and co-host of The Unhashed Podcast. https://twitter.com/Mario_Gibney 👉 Anton Livaja: VP of Cybersecurity at Ledn. https://twitter.com/AntonLivaja 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $25 free https://bit.ly/397rlLN Get Wasabi wallet for Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Cobo Vault: secure your Bitcoin! https://bit.ly/2GgMFlH BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions Audio-only version of the show: https://anchor.fm/btcsessions Telegram channel: https://t.me/btc_sessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is going on, everyone? Happy Friday. Welcome to another fine edition of Why Are We Bullish. Cheers to you. I am sipping on an old-fashioned made out of the most Canadian whiskey ever. It's called Caribou Crossing. And it's delicious.

So I'm excited for this one. We've got a killer team. We've got five members of the team from leaden.io. And these guys are awesome. I've had a number of them on the show before. And we get to riff on why we're feeling bullish this week. I hope you're feeling bullish because regardless of price action, the macro environment is insanity right now. And this is why Bitcoin exists.

And we'll get into that momentarily. But as always, please do make sure that you smash that like button. Give this a share. Let's get a ton of people in here watching this stuff. Very exciting. There's already like 130 people here. So let's pack the room, everybody. As always, this is live.

Anything can happen. Quick disclaimer from my good friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks.

This should be a good one, guys. Again, hit that like button. Let's get this thing rolling. As always, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we bring in our panel, let's just take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. We are sitting at $35,300 and some odd dollars per coin.

A single US dollar will grab you 2,829 sats. Stack them well you can. 89.15% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, 70 sats per byte will do you to get you into the next block. If you're willing to wait an hour, 37 sats per byte will do you. I think there's a downward difficulty adjustment just around the corner. So maybe if you've got some time, wait on that. You could probably get some cheap transactions in this weekend.

Or open up some lightning channels if you're so inclined. I do have a tutorial for that. Check it out. Of course, these are the guys that we have on today. You've heard all about them in every show for the past two years. These guys are legends. I love them. But hey, let's butter it up for them since they're all here.

This is ledden.io. You can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services here. My most used in case with these guys is their Bitcoin back loans, where if I am in a pinch cash flow issues, anything like that, I don't want to sell my Bitcoin, which would just be absolutely catastrophic to me. I can actually deposit it and get a Canadian or U.S. dollar loan direct to my bank account within 24 hours. And then when I pay back that money, I get back the same number of SATs, which is an absolute relief. Highly recommend as opposed to selling your SATs.

Don't sell your Bitcoin. Friends don't let friends do that. Of course, they also have their Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts with interest rates of up to 12.5% annually paid monthly. and they do have their B2X offering, which if you're feeling mega bullish, you can use the sane loan mechanism to instantly buy yourself some more Bitcoin. So be sure to check them out. Links are down below if you click that link and off to use their loan program. They will give you $25 for free into your savings. Of course, I do live on Bitcoin.

One of the ways that I can do this is through Bit Refill. They fill in all the gaps. When I can't pay my bills direct, I can get a gift card for just about anything. my little hard desires and pick it up here on bit refill. And I can pay with Bitcoin via main chain or Lightning Network, which is super handy. And the beauty thing here is I do earn stats back as I shop. So be sure to check them out. Links are down below.

And I do have a tutorial on how to use them. Pretty simple, though. You probably don't even need the tutorial. And then finally, if you're backing up a Bitcoin wallet, paper might not always be the best option. You know, that opens you up to fire damage, water damage, or just accidentally misplace. or throwing out the damn thing because it's on paper. If you get it in solid steel, it gives you a lot more peace of mind,

or at least it has for me. This is how I back up all my important Bitcoin wallets, little tiles into a solid steel plate, and you keep it somewhere safe, and that takes away a lot of those risks that I mentioned before. Check them out, privacyprose.io. And with that, let me end this screen here, and let's start bringing in our legendary panel.

I'm going to bring in, we've got Mr. Maricio. How are you doing, man? Pretty bullish, brother. How are you? I'm fantastic. We're going to start bringing in the whole team here. We've got Adam. Adam, how you doing? Ben, good to see you, man. Very bullish. Good to see you as well.

We've got Carlos. How you doing, man? Good, Ben. Thank you for the invite. Very bullish. Awesome, awesome. We've got Anton. How you doing, man? Hey, great. It's the weekend. Happy Friday. Yes, cheers to that. Cheers. And, of course, The man, the myth, the legend, the, I think Samson-like powers with the hair there. Welcome, man. How you doing, Mario?

Thanks a lot. Man, stuck to be here. Awesome. Awesome. Well, the panel is here. The whole team, how have you guys been holding up? It's been volatile. I'm sure you've had your work cut out for you.

Any craziness over the past two weeks? It's been a big week. It's been pretty busy. We've had, obviously, the volatility, you know, is. is something that we work very hard to make sure that our loan clients are able to react to and make sure everybody understands how to protect their loans. In addition to that, we've been really, really busy with our announcement, which I'm sure we'll get to.

It's a kick-ass reason to be bullish. Awesome. Yeah, it's been wild. I know that a lot of Bitcoiners have been kind of, you know, their thumbnail, their, you know, fingernails are probably getting a little worn down, biting it, especially if this is your first time, out to the rodeo. This is pretty part for the course

if you've been around for a full cycle. But yeah, nonetheless, it's always a little bit of a gut check when it goes down, but there are so many reasons to be bullish right now. So if you gentlemen will indulge me, I'm going to start us with our first reason to riff on. And I'm a little at a loss for words with this headline here. I'm just going to bring it up so everybody can see.

this this was today Biden to push a $6 trillion U.S. budget for the next fiscal year. So I'm just here it says President Joe Biden will seek $6 trillion in U.S. federal spending for the 2022 fiscal year, rising all the way up to $8.2 trillion by 2031. They then go on to say later on,

hey, yeah, we're going to basically, this is our entire assuming they have eight years in office. This will take them well through that. And then they say around 2031, they're going to start cutting that down by about $2 trillion, as if whoever is in office at that point will make that decision. So basically they've kicked the can down the road to the next administration already. I mean,

they've created more U.S. dollars in like basically since March of last year. I think it's like 30% of the entire monetary. base, possibly more. Just crazy. This is the exact reason that Bitcoin exists. I'm dumbfounded by this. I don't really know how to interpret this. Like the 30 to 40% of the monetary base, you know, at this point is $6 trillion.

It'll be a little less percentage wise moving forward. But is this the new normal? I'll pass it down the line. Mauricio, seeing that I know you didn't see this until just before we came on, what do you look at this and think? The first thing that comes to mind is that the Venezuelization of the world is happening way too fast. That's the first thing that comes to mind.

Having something not, I wouldn't say it's necessarily similar, but what I did experience in Venezuela was that when you start just creating these social programs and start giving things out for free, regardless of whether what the reason is, if it's a fair reason, unfair reason, you can't take it back. So I'll give you an example. Venezuela has had a gasoline subsidy for, I think, probably 35 years. And every single president that has tried to end it just gets overthrown. And so this just gave up trying to end it. And they just, you know, went on like nothing happened. And today in Venezuela, you can still fill an 80-liter tank with a half a penny. Well, it's like subsidies are a one-way street, basically, is what I think.

That's, that's wild. By the way, if anybody hasn't watched it, I think it was two years ago, me and Mauricio did an interview. It's like a deep dive, like hour and a half, two hour long conversation about his experience kind of growing up in Venezuela, a history of what happened there, a crazy story with your brother. I highly recommend, please go back and watch that. It is, it is one of the most epic stories I've ever heard. And you told me that over a Brazilian barbecue in Edmonton, I believe. Yeah, that was a fun time. That was a fun time.

Missed this conference, man. Hope they get back. Yeah, yeah, 100%. That was a good time. I'm going to pass down the line. Adam, you see this headline here. Is this the new normal? Is this just what it's going to be?

Is it going to just snowball? Yeah, you know what, Ben? I was thinking about those numbers. And I think the hard part is, is how much is six or eight trillion worth in 2031? That might be like 20 bucks today. So it sounds like a lot of money. But we're talking about some big inflationary numbers. And, yeah, the projections are just outrageous.

So, yeah, who knows? And, yeah, you guys, on the topic of Venezuela, I mean, I've known Mauricio for 15 years. And I still hear a new story about Venezuela every week. So definitely some interesting lessons. and we have a lot of Venezuela versus Canada stories. And, you know, I think I was always, yeah, right, Maricio, like, you know, 10 years ago, as we talk about this, like, you know, these things will never happen here. And, you know, I think we're still extremely, extremely privileged to be in this amazing country.

But there's inklings of things that you start to question and not, you know, just in Canada, on, you know, any, any, you know, I guess, lucky, wealthy nations. nation. So yeah, interesting times. Yeah, it's pretty wild. Mario, you know, it's looking backwards in time, looking at 2008, it was so unprecedented when they were talking in the hundreds of billions. And now $6 trillion is like, well, that's kind of high. But what are your feelings on this? Yeah, I'm just numb to the numbers at this point.

Like, to be perfectly honest, like, I don't have a good intuitive understanding. of the difference between like 10 billion and 6 trillion. Like, you know, I know the 6 trillion number is bigger, but like at this point, like, you know, it could have been 60 trillion. And I, like, you know, my intuitive reaction, that wouldn't have been any different. But, like, it sounds pretty big. But so I, yeah, I don't know. It's, I don't know, I don't know what that's a sign of, the fact that I just, like,

it almost doesn't phase me anymore. But, yeah, I think the, I thought it was a funny angle before that it's kind of almost like self-correcting and that's like the numbers get bigger. but it's worth less, so it's not as much. But yeah, that is, it has been concerning if you think about it in that way. Yeah, it's pretty wild. Anton, are you feeling the numbness to the numbers? Do they mean anything to you mean?

A little bit, yeah, definitely, like, don't understand really what it means, the amount of money that's being printed. And the thing that's interesting is, like, this is something Mao and I have talked about, is when the U.S. fires up the printer, right? and the printer's going burr, the rest of the world looks at them and they also fire up the printing press, right? So this is not just necessarily isolated to the states.

The rest of the world is going to look at what they're doing and follow. So you can bet that the rest of the world is also going to be doing that type of thing. So that makes me even more worried. And it's, you know, events like this that make my friends who were, you know, proponents of MMT, go like, actually you know what things are starting to kind of look a bit shifty and things are breaking down so yeah it's definitely not a good not a good look it's it's weird how i mean the the the the actions are done i again it's it's hard to interpret intent um but like the stated intent is to help

people right but if we look at the the wealth gap it seems to consistently have the the the desired effect. It's, it's, I don't know. I don't know where that stops. I don't, you know who, you know which people it helps? The people that want to get reelected. That's the people that it helps. That's true.

That's true. The wealth gap, the wealth gap gets destroyed. Yeah. But it gives you a quick, it's almost like short term gain for a world of long term pain. But a lot of people just can't grasp that that that's the consequence. Yeah, it's pretty wild. Carlos, is there anything that you've heard that's kind of resonated with you? Do you have any thoughts on this topic?

Yeah, I agree with what Marisa said. I think it's a very slippery slope when to start printing money like that. But at the same time, on the other hand, you have to do that to help the economy and to help the people that are in need. So it's, but at the end of the day, I think this is good for Bitcoin, right? Yeah, 100%. Right? Like, it's, it's, what people seem not to grasp is, you know, there's, there's a limited amount of goods and services within an economy based on the productivity of the people there. And adding more units to the currency doesn't create more stuff.

It just kind of reallocates who has the percentage of purchasing power within said economy. And then they try to allocate it in a way that they think will be helpful. but it's very difficult to say that that works well with the track. Like did the GDP increase by 30%? I know that houses are 30% more expensive. And I don't think a lot of salaries have gone up to that tune. So yeah, I guess we'll see. Anyways, guys.

One of the things that I've noticed actually in the last month is that the concerns about inflation have, I've started hearing them from non-bitcoin people. because I've been used to hearing that stuff like, you know, for four years, like, you know, I guess we are in a lot of ways the canaries in the coal mine. But yeah, in the last like few weeks I've noticed that like from some of the, you know, kind of voices I follow, there's been more concerned about that from, yeah, beyond just our little bubble, which is, that's kind of the biggest new step I've noticed there. Yeah, when Normies start being like, why, they're printing a lot of money. When that's a, when that's a topic that comes up outside of a Bitcoin conversation, you know shit's going on. the rails. It's it's been I mean, again, the past year and a half has been horrifying to watch, but also Bitcorners have never had more things to point to to be like, this is why we're doing

the thing. This is why we're here. Yeah, it's it's wild. But let's let's let's cap this one off. Again, thanks for all the input on this one. This was my again, just another crazy headline to point of to and say this is why we Bitcoin. But we're going to, um, we're going to keep rolling. We're going to move on to our next reason for being bullish. There are 200 people watching live. Smash that like button. Give this a share. Let's pack the room.

And we're going to move down the line. Now, I'm going to kind of tailor the way that I'm divvying out these reasons for being bullish here. I'm going to go with Maricio first. And then we'll kind of go. I'm just looking at the order on my screen. So Maricio,

please do enlighten us. What has you feeling bullish this week? Ah, my reason for feeling bullish this week is courtesy of Mr. Ray Dalio. And for those of you who don't know Mr. Ray Dalio, he is Mr. Bond. So he is essentially a demi-god in the Bond world. Just completely, like miles above everyone else, the largest asset, like the largest fund manager in the bond world. And bonds are in a world of pain right now. and they're about to be in even more pain as interest rates continue to rise.

So Mr. Dahlia went on Bloomberg two days ago and said, and I quote, I would rather own Bitcoin than a bond. Who would want to own a bond now? I don't know how, so just to give people some reference, I have to look at the numbers, but the size of the bond market is absolutely absurd. and the level of thought leadership that this gentleman has in that industry is cannot be understated. So when Ray Dalio goes on TV and makes a statement like it's the equivalent of the,

you know, a person that has been doing this for their entire careers. They have built literally their entire career and the professional life around bonds is going on TV saying they'll rather own Bitcoin than a bond. It's like Peter Schiff doing it. It's something like that. Ray has taken a while to come to terms with Bitcoin. But to your point, I think this speaks to how this conversation is shifting away from just Bitcoiners

and now permeating just general finance. And if we, so I say this often about gold. If gold, if the asset base of gold were to shift by 10% from gold into Bitcoin, Bitcoin would more than double from current levels. I have to check what the size of the bond market is, but I think it's bigger than gold. And if this market, again, you have markets that have these types of Bitcoin is like a magnet right now. And it's trying to suck capital from all these ginormous asset classes. So like if you look at equities, equities are all-time high valuations.

If you look at bonds, they have a downtrend. They're staring at a cliff. And so it's crazy to have someone like Ray say, I'd rather own Bitcoin than a bond on TV. I just blew my mind. Yeah, it's crazy. I'm going to toss it down the line. Adam, do you have, did you see this news? Do you have anything to add on here?

Look, I think the more respected leaders that turn, like, we're seeing a massive shift, right? We're seeing this across the board of people getting interested in. And I think it's a completely different run as I think consensus has a lot than 2017. You had a ton of retail in 2017. And I think there, at least a thing. the time, if I can say it, you know, the respected figureheads in the traditional finance, you know, just weren't paying as close attention as they're now, are now. And now they're forced to. And I think, you know, back to the piece that we talked about about the money printing is it's

making people talk. It's making people answer that question that you have to answer when you get into Bitcoin is what is money. And when you print so much of it and you have to ask that, how can you do this? It starts to answer that question and people realize that there's nothing behind it. So the question of what is behind Bitcoin becomes a lot more valid and forces that back into it. So I think it's just that that narrative shift is fascinating. And we're seeing it across the board. Awesome. Yeah. How do I hit the like button from within the video? Smash like everybody. Yeah, 100%. Let's toss it down the line here. Let's do Carlos. Do you want to add anything to this? Anything that, you know, come. basically calls to you and makes you more bullish out of,

out of this particular Ray Dalio topic. No, not this one in particular, but I can go next if you want. Well, let's get anybody else's thoughts on this. Anton, if you want to add on, Mario, if you have anything, feel free to jump in. Sure, yeah. I think it's, yeah, it's really good. Like, we're so used to the way things are that it's really hard to imagine a financial

or economic system that works differently. And to Marisi and Adams' point, like this is starting to actually get people to really question what's going on. And like, yeah, what is money? And like, does this actually make sense? Is this sustainable? And so, yeah, this type of news is really good

for kind of getting people to really start asking the questions that will eventually lead to, you know, a change. And so, yeah, this is really exciting. I mean, it's scary to see news like this. And especially for people who are out, outside of the, you know, crypto and digital assets here because it's, you know, even weirder to them. But even to me, it's kind of weird to see this happening in such a big way.

And I think this is really a catalyst for change. So yeah, definitely bullish on this. Yeah. Mario, you've got somebody in the comment is saying, uh, Ray, Ray also said, uh, don't invest unless you can afford to lose 80%. Do you concur? Well, I mean, like, depends what you mean by lose. You got to be, you got to be ready to weather those downspings.

We lost like, what, 85% from the peak of 2017 to the bottom of 2019. So if you're willing to hold through that, I mean, that's similar to what I tell my friends and family. If I'm encouraging to get into it, like, be ready to hold for at least, you know, five years and it might go wild. But I'm not sure that's what it means by lose, but whatever. I just love how much the Overton window has shifted. Like, it seems like only a few years ago, we were stoked if, like, you know, if, you know, one of these finance guys would even mention Bitcoin in a passing way that it wasn't dismissive. And now there's just like, it seems like there's just universal acceptance that it's here to stay and it's part of, you know, the like part of the broader economy. It's not going anywhere. You know, so now that, you know, the difference between like, you know, the pro versus like anti-Bitcoin comments. You know, you'll still have your neural ravines out there and stuff. But like for the people actually in the finance industry and like the rate values of the world, it's a question of like how good of an investment it is. It's no longer a question of like whether or not it's, you know, here to stay. And it's like a legitimate. part of the system now.

So it's, yeah, it seems like I just have to really, really fast. Yeah. It has been a crazy shift because, I mean, it's kind of been normalized. Like it started with Sailor and then we started seeing more, you know, Guggenheim and then Tesla and, you know, lots of treasuries. There's a little, the mere fact that there's a website now, obviously put up by Rodolfo Novak, but, uh, Bitcoin Treasuries. org, I believe, the fact that that exists compared to 2017.

If you could go back in time to, you know, 2017 or even better, 2018, as the bearer market got underway and said, hey, 2021, there's going to be a website dedicated to all the companies that have their reserves in Bitcoin. That would have been like a pipe dream, right? Because it was kind of unheard of. you're right the overton window has shifted quite far but when you're sitting right in the middle of it or at the fringes to the positive side of it you notice less i suppose so you know we're spoiled and we're fretting that we're sitting at like 35k right now so i think we're doing it'd be so funny to go back to myself a few years ago be like listen it's 2021 and bitcoinsers hate tesla for not being bullish enough And they hold like a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. Like that would be a fun one to explain.

I do love that. Yeah. Okay. I love that topic. That was great. Thank you, Maricio, for that. We're going to keep rolling. We got 250 people watching here live.

Smash like, give this a share. Let's pack the room. We've got lots of people in the comments, too. Keep them coming. I'm trying to bring them in whenever I see them pop up and they're relevant to the conversation. but we're going to move on. I'm going to skip Adam for now because we're going to save him for last.

But I'm going to jump to Carlos and I'm just wondering what has you feeling bullish this week, man? Thank you, Ben. So for me, the other day, I saw this news article come out saying that PayPal was ready to allow its clients and customer base to withdraw their crypto to their own third-party wallets.

And so this goes into the same ethos and narrative that there's more and more mainstream adoption. And what this means is it's good for the ecosystem in general, for Bitcoin. And at the same time, this allows more control of the people purchasing the crypto to have and just either keep it on their own wallet, or just send it to Latin for interest. And so just this flexibility, it's just incredible. And it's great to see a company like PayPal pushing this forward for their client base. Yeah, I concur. I saw the PayPal news as positive.

And as much as I'm not like a huge, huge fan of PayPal, mostly due to its constraints within traditional finance, the fact that they kind of bent the need to the demand for people to be able to withdraw their Bitcoin from the service is fantastic. And I think there was a lot of worry that you might get into a situation where if you have money on one of those platforms, that they'll never allow you to withdraw. and then it makes it easy to kind of 60102 order that and confiscate it all, which still, you know, keep that in the back of your head, only put stuff on any platform, and, you know, full disclosure, including Leden,

keep in mind like if you're using any sort of custodian, just keep that in mind with the total amount of your stack. You don't want 100% of everything, you know, at least for me, with any custodian, right? And so you got to keep that in the back of your mind. but the fact that they kind of bent the knee and went the opposite direction of, hey, you can withdraw now. I'm very happy for the people that maybe didn't understand what they were doing initially.

And they jumped on a PayPal. They're like, I'm going to buy some Bitcoin. And then they figured out, oh, shit, I can't, like, I can't take this off. Like, maybe they just figured out what a Bitcoin wallet was and then went to withdraw. And that's not available. So I think this is positive. It makes a better. case to be able to say, hey, you know, you should use this feature and withdraw to your own

self-custody. Anybody that did experience a taxable gain that wanted to withdraw and previously had no choice but to sell and re-buy elsewhere and actually incur those taxable gains, now we'll be able to withdraw. And I hope that this prods Robin Hood to enact that even sooner. They've been talking about it, but they haven't enacted it yet. So in general, if you. you can withdraw from any service and take it into your own custody when you choose to,

I think that's a positive thing. So yeah, let's kind of, go ahead, man. I feel like you should almost have to have a disclaimer that like if you're purchasing Bitcoin or platform and you're not going to be able to withdraw it, it should let you know ahead of time. Because all the time, I have friends come up to me and are like, oh, I want to invest in Bitcoin. I'm going to buy it on like Revolut or some, some like fintech company that does this, what you just described.

Like you can get exposure to Bitcoin, but you can't withdraw. And yeah, I find myself explaining this again and again. And it feels a little bit like just not transparent and honest, you know, to not be upfront about that. Yeah. I totally agree. I think you're right. There should be some sort of a, hey, you know, you have Bitcoin,

but you don't really have Bitcoin kind of disclaimer on any, any IOU platform that's not going to allow you to withdraw. So I totally agree. Mario, do you have thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean, like, when PayPal first launched their like, you know, you can, you know, buy and sell Bitcoin, everybody was like talking about, oh, it's not actually Bitcoin. I was like, it's got to be a matter of time before they just allow deposit of withdrawals because otherwise the competitors eat their lunch. You know, once one of them does it, it's just, it's such a, you know, it's kind of a no-brainer if you're thinking about, okay, do I want to Bitcoin on this platform and this platform, one of them lets you withdraw, one of them doesn't. you know, and then if you know anyone in the space who has been around a while, you know,

like, yeah, a commenter just said, not your keys, not your coins. Like, if you can't withdraw it, you don't actually own it. So, yeah, I think this is great. This is just, you know, basic capitalism competition at work. And I think, yeah, Robin Hood will have to follow suit soon. I imagine wealth simply or in Canada will as well. I mean, that'll make it a lot easier because I have, you know, friends who like have wealth up accounts and they're interested in buying Bitcoin.

I tell them, well, you can't actually buy it there yet. But I think, you know, within a year or two from now, I would expect it'll be weird to have places where you can buy Bitcoin without being able to withdraw it. It's, yeah, just market forces at play here. Yeah, I think that's great. And good point to the, you know, the Canadian platforms. I'm glad you gave them a shout out. Well, Simple has been hard on the advertising for their crypto platform and

allowing people to buy Bitcoin. Another one is MoGo, I believe, in Canada. They've been kind of advertising pretty hard on the whole Bitcoin front. And anybody out there that's relatively new. just know that at current time, you cannot withdraw Bitcoin from those services. So maybe look elsewhere for the time being. And if they allow withdrawals in the future, then maybe take a look. Adam, do you have thoughts on the whole PayPal thing?

What I like about it is it increases competition because it makes it more frictionless. So if you don't like your assets on these platforms, you can move them around, right? Obviously, if someone has gains and previous to this, if they had to withdraw, they may be paying taxable gains. to do that. So when you have that, when you remove that friction and can withdraw the native asset, now it means all these, all these systems have to perform better, right? So we see this at Leden. If you don't like your Bitcoin on Lennon and you don't like the rates, you'll move it to another platform. So we have to work hard. It's pretty frictionless to do that. So I think, you know, that that ecosystem of making sure that we have the best rates, others of the best rates and

products is good for everyone using Bitcoin. Yeah, 100%. I agree. Again, the competition point, fantastic. Because with a company, like such a public company as PayPal, public facing, I mean, coming out with an announcement like this, if you're a smaller competitor or somebody on the same kind of level as them, you're basically going to have to offer it in order to just be comparable to them. So that's all good for me. Maricio, how about you? What do you think about the whole PayPal thing? Yeah, I think I love it because it's fly it flies on the face. So to me, it speaks to what people really think Bitcoin is.

Like if you show up in something, and this actually flies in the face of a lot of these, you know, financial pundits that are trying to compare Bitcoin to like avocados and like lumber and things like that, just to make it look like it's a speculative thing. if that were the case, you know, I don't see the people complaining about not being able to withdraw their lumber futures, right? Or withdraw these ridiculous speculative things. But people complain about not being able to withdraw their Bitcoin. So what that tells me is that the masses, when they go to this platform, their understanding of what Bitcoin is, is not a trading sardine. It's sovereign wealth that you need to be able to have the option to self-custody or go to custodian.

But the whole optionality is core to Bitcoin's value. If you don't have that, then you don't have Bitcoin. And so, you know, I don't prescribe to this idea. There's one way to use Bitcoin, right? Like there's people that are comfortable with self-custody. There are people who aren't like my dad. Right. And so it's not to say that if you use Bitcoin in one particular way or the other,

you're not a Bitcoiner. But I do think that if you don't have that option, if you are not able to withdraw to custody and make that decision, then you don't have Bitcoin. Yeah. I love that sentiment. It's it kind of speaks to the quality of people, at least the initial quality of people that have kind of siphoned into Bitcoin. I mean, the bull market is different.

You get all kinds. Your number go up can be an enticing drug. And it can entice all kinds of people. But like that core group of bitcoinsers that have been around the block, have stuck it through a bear market and continue to be. present, they understand the value here and why they're here in the first place. And again, through this bull market and assuming that history rhymes, through the subsequent bear market and so and so forth, the people that stick around will understand what the value prop is here.

And if they don't see the ability to capitalize on that value prop, they won't use your platform. So, yeah, I love it. Great thoughts, everybody. Let's keep it moving. 250 people here. Smash that like button. Give this a share.

We're going to keep going. I'm going to jump to Anton for your reason for being bullish. What has you tickled pick this week? Yeah, so I have a few things. I'm always different levels of bullish, but mostly bullish. So maybe I'll just briefly mention one, but actually like go with a different one as my reason. So this morning I saw a tweet about convenience chain store in the States called Sheets, accepting Bitcoin as payments, which I was very happy about because people always complain like,

oh, you can't buy anything with Bitcoin, which is false because you can already buy a bunch of stuff with Bitcoin. But this just was another step towards, you know, being able to buy more stuff with Bitcoin, like regular things that you'd buy from convenience store, which is great. But the thing that really made me bullish was China. banning mining again. I don't know if it was, you know. And because one of my concerns is that the concentration of power

with regards to Bitcoin and China is so great. And that has always been something kind of a looming, you know, existential threat to Bitcoin if it goes too far. And so this couldn't be better news in my mind. And it gives the rest of the world a chance to catch up. And, you know, for the system to kind of distribute itself more. properly rather than being so highly concentrated in China. So I'm really bullish about that because it's a good thing for Bitcoin resilience overall. So I was happy to see that. A lot of people

reacted to that very negatively. I was actually thrilled. I just I don't like China to have too much power of any one thing, especially Bitcoin. So it's really great to see that. I like that topic. It's funny. I don't know if any of you saw the meme where it's like the guy sweating and there's two buttons and the one button says China controls Bitcoin and then the second button says China's banning Bitcoin. So there's another one too where it was like, what was it? It was China, it was something along the lines of, there's too much coal power mining out of China.

And then the other button was, it's scary that China is banning the coal power mining Bitcoin in China. It's very confusing. And like not, this is not to say that I think that the network is really susceptible and that there was a real danger. It would have been under very particular conditions where like a lot of people would have to coerce together. And like it was still, you know, it would be a difficult thing to pull off. But it's less likely now. So that's, you know.

Yeah. I think in general, we seem to be trending towards a pretty well distributed hash rate. Like obviously a lot of it was happening in China early on that still is. the case. But there seems to be more people cluing into, hey, if we've got cheap energy, if we've got waste energy, we can really capitalize on that and actually, you know, in some cases, be cutting down on emissions while making a further profit or capitalizing on renewables. There's so many different ways.

And furthermore, you know, a lot of the, to your point about the ban and, you know, that kind of dives into the methods through which Bitcoin is mine. There's been so much environmental flood lately. But a lot of the problems with some of these renewable grids is the idea that the infrastructure, the upfront cost of infrastructure with the lifespan of that infrastructure can sometimes not make sense. but if you can subsidize that via Bitcoin mining when the demand is not there, because every grid has got to kind of perform to peak demand. And that's kind of part of the problem is that cash flow there. They're not efficient. And like that's a common misconception.

I don't know. A lot of people seem to think that, you know, electric grids are perfectly efficient. And that's, you know, the farthest thing from the truth, right? So it's just not the case. There's wasted energy all the time. and there's energy shortages all the time as well. Yeah, there's a pretty, I'll try and bring it up here, but I'm going to pass it down the line.

Maybe, Carlos, do you have any thoughts on, like, the ban on mining in China? When you hear about this, do you inherently think that's scary, or do you think that's good, or are you indifferent to it? Where do you sit here? Right. I mean, first impression of when I read that headline, it was like, oh, crap, right?

But once you think about the implications about it and what will happen afterwards to Bitcoin, you kind of get down to the conclusion that overall in the long term, it's going to be a good thing for Bitcoin, right? Going back to the competition point, right? Now that China bans miners of Bitcoin in China, then there's going to be other people picking that up around the world, right? It's going to be better for the rest of the miners, and that means more profitability for them. And so they'll come up with renewable power and other ways to sustain that network. And so I think at the end of the day, that's something good. Yeah, 100%.

I mean, efficiency is name of the game in Bitcoin, regardless of where it comes from. Maybe I'll toss it over to Mario. Do you have thoughts on the kind of the umpteenth time China has banned Bitcoin in some sense? Well, I think it's hilarious that it's almost a little bit real this time. like more so than most and it turns out to just a little bit more than you know well I mean like I guess there's always like some headline you point to but like the first time I saw this I was like okay you know they're trying to advance bitcoin is like oh it actually looks at the arc racket down on miners oh and it's actually a good thing for us great yeah

I could just like echo what you guys said I mean I think there was really good tweet from Hsu he said most concisely he was like we're about to invalidate two of the biggest anti-bitcoy narrative at the same time china's mine by coal or bitcoin's mine by coal and bitcoin's control by China. Like, you can't say those things anymore, right? You know, like, like, I mean, so it's hilarious to me that the price dumps on news like this. Yeah, it's great. I, you know, and like, over time as well, I mean, if, if, I think one of the angles I've been thinking of is almost like, I wonder if, you know, we could do better to almost like direct the fud in beneficial ways, because, like, if all this concern about, like, Bitcoin energy use, it's like, you know, concern of theirs, like,

I have no idea how much this impacted the Chinese government's decision, probably not a lot. But like, you know, it seems clear to me that if you can like actually get certain regions that have too much hash power to then like have cracked down. Like, you know, that's not going to be pushing for it because Bitcoin doesn't need that. But it's really funny to me how the end result of a lot of this hand wringing is, you know, policies that end up benefiting the coin anyways. I almost, I love your, I love that point. Because I almost wonder if Bitcoiners should just roll with the fud and then like actually make it out as if it's a big fucking deal so that we can get some cheap sats. And then when it's when it all like resolves itself as we know it's going to, we're like, oh my God, we solved the problem, guys. We may as well, may as well just buy a bunch of Bitcoin right now.

Like that's literally how all of this is playing out. It's just we all know that a lot of these concerns are total bullshit. and they've been brought up in previous, like previous cycles. And, you know, all of us are actively going, oh, God, this isn't, it's not real. It's not, you know, here's historically what's happened. Maybe we should just buy into the fud and just entertain it and just be like, yeah, this is, you know, I wonder how we're going to address this. And then just let it play out and stack like hell in between.

until everybody else clues into what's going on. I think that's an excellent. That's a good strategy. That's a really good strategy. I love it. Adam, what are your thoughts on the China stuff? Yeah,

for sure. A few different points on this. So I think I saw a tweet after this about all of the different, you know, companies that were banned from operating China and they're resulting growth in stock price after the ban and just what happened. And, you know, I think that's interesting.

So being banned, you know, in this from operating in that type of environment isn't always a bad thing but i think like what's what's the root of the issue right the root of the issue is capital flight so in my opinion china is not concerned about uh about mining bitcoin with coal that there's there's lots of things uh all over the world uh being powered with coal you know you'd have to crack down on manufacturing uh if you wanted to talk about uh the environmental impact of coal electricity right what what you're concerned about is using local currency uh to buy a piece of computer hardware that can then, you know, obviously create Bitcoin.

And this is, Maricio knows this extremely well from Venezuela. And this is the, so I think that's the root of the thing. And I think that shows, you know, Bitcoin is working, right? So this is a real concern and it's solving a problem that government is unfairly trying to stop because it's at the detriment of people trying to protect their savings. So I think that's interesting. The other thing on the energy piece is, This is really close to home for me. And actually, Carlos and I previously worked together managing and leading investments in renewable power for a Canadian company. And so I originally got into Bitcoin because of its connection with electricity when Mauricio was coming back from Venezuela to ask where to find low-cost electricity in Canada.

And the majority of low-cost electricity is renewable. So all of the mining in, you know, where do people want to build Quebec? You know, this stands, right? You know, places, countries like Georgia, where there's very, very low cost hydroelectricity. And then, of course, also oil and gas where you're capturing methane and natural gas that would just go up in the atmosphere. So it is going to converge. And I think once that narrative builds and people really understand it, it's complex to understand. But I think once that gets figured out, you know, all this, all this fud is going to go away.

It is actually a great use of electricity. and it will help clean the grid, not make it dirtier. Yeah, I agree. Actually, to your point, I want to bring this up. This is something put out. Jay Gold tweeted this out. So comparative energy consumption annualized. So global total energy generated 160,000 terawatt hours.

And then the energy lost due to inefficiencies is 50,000 terawatt hours. And then you see energy consumed by the Bitcoin network on the world's electric grid is 120 terawatt hours. So Bitcoin uses less than 0.1% of human energy production worldwide. And Bitcoin consumes 0.25% of the energy wasted. So Bitcoin kind of continues to do its thing and I guess lean towards all of this wasted energy because it's kind of low hanging, fruit, you know, we can capitalize on that at the lowest price point to be mining Bitcoin. There's 50,000 terawatt hours worth of energy to be consumed at zero additional detriment to the environment.

So we can do multiples, multiples of what's happening. About 400 times more. Yes, 400. We could consume 400 times more energy. without technically assuming that it's waste energy without actually having a further impact on the environment than the globe is already currently having, which is wild.

Mauricio, I'm going to toss this to you to see if you have any final thoughts on this topic. I think Adam captured it just beautifully. China doesn't care about mining. China cares about capital flight. Have you ever tried to buy a dollar in China with you on, it's absolutely horrid. Like you actually, even as a tourist, they make you show you your ticket.

They make you show your passport. It's absolutely insane. And so coming from a authoritarian place, when government starts, when people start distrusting their government, they start selling the currency. And to the government, that is a very, very bad thing. because they certainly don't want that. What Bitcoin allows you to do, particularly in China where all the ASICs are manufactured, is that you as a corporation, can invest in computer hardware and just say this computer

hardware is sitting idle. It's not really making anything. But in the background, of course it is. And you know, you're just protecting your savings from the government. But you're basically using your own. production force to create your own assets that you're able to buy with local currency and you get hard currency. So you're literally my this.

You're turning part of my language, but shit into gold by like literally being able to build the device that with this crap fiat that you have, you buy this device that creates Bitcoin, which is way more valuable. So I think Adam captured it entirely. I have not much more to add. Yeah, 100%. Somebody in the comments, EEVG was saying,

how is Bitcoin consuming wasted energy? And the comments afterwards basically fill this in, but natural gas flare off burns. So what Chuck is getting at here is when you drill for oil, there are gases that come out of the ground, methane and natural gas, that effectively have to be disposed of or used.

And a lot of these wells do not have the infrastructure necessary to pipe that stuff out for use on market or it's way too expensive to afford to do that. And so what happens is they either just literally burn it on site or they vent it into the atmosphere, which is way worse environmentally. And so what Bitcoin miners can do is they can literally just bring up a skid. Upstream data is a great example of that here in Alberta. And so they just bring up a skid that has a bunch of Bitcoin miners on it. They convert that natural gas into usable energy, which actually cuts down on emissions, cuts down on carbon taxes and allows that oil well to be more profitable instead of operating at a loss because of said taxes or being regulated and forced to bring that natural

gas to market rather than burning it. So that's one example of waste gas. And there's just a lot of wasted energy, whether it be hydroelectric in China is actually a great example where you have hydro dams that are built for kind of remote locations. The problem is they have a lot more energy than they need for these smaller settlements around these hydro dams. and given kind of the energy loss trying to get that to far away grids, it becomes impractical to even build connections to grids that are far away. And so that energy is basically, they'll just shut down the dam when it's not needed anymore.

But you can just leave that dam running and collect all that energy. And the surplus goes to Bitcoin mining and basically scoops up that unused energy that has zero additional impact and mines Bitcoin. secures the network in the process. So hopefully that kind of explains. That's like a cliffstone version of it. Hopefully I didn't misspeak too much, but that's the general concept. Anyways, I digress. We're going to keep going. It's not just in China though. I mean, even in Quebec, they sometimes curtail extra power from the hydrodams, which was insane a couple years ago. They had actually kind of regulated a lot of miners out of the province and then were later

curtailing excess energies. Crazy when that happens. I did see that where a bunch of the miners were like, oh, great, you guys have extra energy. We'll dive in. we'll use that and then they're like yeah we're going to pump the prices on you and all the miners were like okay cool bye like of course obviously like no idea what they're doing anyways governments oh how do you say baited switch in french where's frances poolie out i'm sure to be able to help you out there um okay let's keep rolling with that uh everybody that's in the chat thanks for uh joining in the chat thanks for uh joining in we've had close to 300 people at one point watching this live stream smash that like button

give this a share we're going to keep moving now we've had uh let me just reiterate we've had what maricio carlos and anton have all given the reasons am i correct here yeah that's right okay cool perfect all right so we're going to dive into mario's reason i'm excited about your reason i'm going to bring up a supporting graphic for it but uh mario why are you so bullish I'm bullish for the technical developments because they haven't gotten a lot of spotlight in the last few months because of all the kind of news out

with the price action and various CEOs and business magnates making a variety of comments but there's been a tremendous amount of work going on in the background technically the biggest thing people know about there is taproot tap root signaling is now at like 97% which means it's overwhelmingly likely

that within two and a half weeks we will get it locked in for later this year which is going to be our first protocol update in four years since Segwit. And this is actually even bigger than that, I think, because this is in a lot of ways, a very, very healing thing that's going on right now. There was a lot of tension and worry about how software activation

would go after the kind of giant mess we had back in 2017. So the fact that this has actually turned out to have gone relatively smoothly, kind of suggests we'll probably have an easier time getting softworks added in the next few years. And there's a bunch more stuff coming, like beyond this like, you know, a SIG-ash Annie Privout,

which is going to improve lighting network deficiency. You know, there's check template verify. Jared B. Rubin has been championing, which will unlock things like covenants. And, you know, and there's also just, you know,

I'll try not to go in too much longer, but there's also, you know, just the, you know, basic work in cryptography. That's just making, you know, validation more efficient. There's been worked done by, you know, Tim Ruffing and Jonas Nick and, you know,

and Peter Wellella in the background. And, you know, these things don't get a lot of spotlight, but these are the foundations. that Bitcoin is built on and it just keeps getting more efficient and I love it. I love that this is happening seemingly out of the eye of the public in the midst of a bull run because it's so akin to what was happening in in 2017 because we were trying to lock in segment in the midst of a bunch of China banning Bitcoin flood. you know,

low and behold, it's so, it rhymes so much, but you're right. Having tap root act, I mean, I'm looking at it right now, 97,

just over 97% of all miners signaling for it and barring any shenanigans, it looks like next signaling period, we should have it basically locked in. So the signaling period right now, basically every time that, the difficulty retargets roughly every two weeks, that is a signaling period

and miners have the ability to signal that they're ready for taproot. And yeah, so 91. something percent in 21 hours we roll over into the next signaling period. This signaling period, obviously, it's not going to lock in, but it seems like a shoe in next time around. Again, barring any funny business, it looks like it's going to lock in.

So yeah, it's interesting. I like that you brought up that it may be, easier to implement some things in the coming years. I was under the impression that Bitcoin was becoming ossified in some way, shape, or form that maybe it might, we might not be able to implement stuff, but it seems like that may not be the case. We may have a little bit of runway in order to do a few things as long as it's backwards compatible, at least.

So, yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'll toss it down the line here. Anton, do you have any thoughts on the taproot thing and how close we are to ossification with Bitcoin? Yeah, I mean, to me it's really exciting because for a long time, like one of the things that I wished that Bitcoin had, and I just wasn't sure how we'd get there, it's just better privacy.

And, you know, here it is. Here's the first step towards that. And yeah, it's really great to see such a huge upgrade to the network. Like Mario said, you know, first one in really four years on this scale taking place. And the best part is it's a double whammy because it also helps us transact cheaper. So it's kind of mind-blowing that such a huge upgrade is happening right now. And yeah, Mario's totally right. It's like there's all these other news that are kind of taking the stage.

But this is huge. This is really bullish stuff right there. Like I'm really excited about the thing. technical upgrades that are happening. Yeah, I'm pretty excited. It seems like the market is pricing in the fud that we know is fud and has not paid attention to any of the actual stuff being built. I don't think to understand.

I mean, most people still think that Bitcoin's like, you know, a privacy coin. It's like, that's true. What? Yeah, it's, it's, I think people are very much misinformed. But what are you going to do? Carlos, how are you feeling about Bitcoin having some upgrades in the background silently with nobody really knowing what's going on? Yeah, bullish about that.

It's kind of like everyone's busy with their own thing, but Bitcoin is quietly in the background doing its own thing as well. And lower fees, it's going to be amazing for the network in general because Bitcoin comes under a lot of scrutiny, how it's not efficient in terms of transactions. And so this is going to help push that as well in the mainstream and just allow people to just be more comfortable transacting with Bitcoin and have a higher adoption. Yeah, I agree. And Mario, I might jump back to you for a sec.

So my understanding is that obviously the most kind of data intensive part of a Bitcoin transaction is the signature. and this allows you to aggregate a number of signatures and kind of hash it together into a single signature. Is that, am I at all representing that correctly? Yeah, yeah, that's pretty close. I mean, that's part, that's one of several things that Tapper ads. There are kind of two different types of signature aggregation.

Peter Well, correct me on this recently, so I got to make sure I get it right this time. So the ideal version we want in the future is going to be you have two signatures, and then you can just combine them into one and use it. And we don't have that yet, but if you have different participants with a multi-sig, they can cooperate directly with each other and then produce this signal signature. So the subtle difference there being not anyone can do it with the two signatures,

you actually have to have them cooperate back and forth. But yeah, so essentially a multi-sig contracts, as long as the different participants are cooperatively closing them, will take up the same amount of space as single-sig. So it's going to save a lot of money for people using more. secure solutions. And it's good for privacy because, you know, there's less, it's not, it's not directly observable on the blockchain. What type of contract is being signed there? Does this apply to coin join? Yes. So, or no, sorry, this version of Tapper doesn't,

but it is a necessary stepping stone moving towards coin join. Because actually, it does affect, let me think. So for coin joins, you need something called cross-input aggregation where you have a whole bunch of multiple inputs and then you combine their signatures for a single signature that signs for them all.

The tap root version that's coming out later this year doesn't allow you to do that, but it implements a bunch of the cryptography that will be later on used for cross-input aggregation later on. So in a way, Segwit was an important step to allow us to more easily add taproot.

Taproot is going to bring us one step closer to cross-input aggregation, which will help with coin joins. Awesome. So I'm going to jump over to Adam here. What are your thoughts on the fact that effectively the market is totally unaware of the actual positives in the background? while totally focusing on the stuff that we've already dealt with over the past for eight, eight in some cases, yours. You know, what does that say about kind of the average person that's coming into Bitcoin

right now? Like they're just learning, where are we sitting right now? Yeah, I think what's needed is upgrades like this do need to be made more mainstream and explain to the general public and understanding of Bitcoin. because I think one of the major misconceptions of Bitcoin is that it's stagnant, right? And so obviously, especially in 2017, and now somewhat again, we're seeing the portfolio approach to investing in cryptocurrency, right? So you're saying, how do I know Bitcoin's going to win?

Well, the truth is there's a massive community behind it. And there's a lot of work and intelligence that went into something like the Taproot Upgrade. So the fact that you have that larger development community going is, you know, there's no Windows 95 problem, right? You know, it doesn't become legacy. It always gets upgraded. And you have, you know, ability to have, when there is challenges, there's resources and really a community behind it.

So I think this, I don't know, I don't have the answer of how it gets, you know, better, you know, market it because, of course, Bitcoin has no CEO. But I think the fact that this upgrade is happening at the time when there's a lot of attention on Bitcoin, I hope those two, those two collude and collide, sorry, and that we, that we can see this, you know, makes into the mainstream news that not only is their attention, but Bitcoin just got better, and that people don't have to worry about Bitcoin being out of date, because it can always be upgraded if it so needs to be. Now, Mauricio, how close do you think we are to the protocol being ossified and, you know,

upgrades like this no longer being able to happen? I was saying that I thought that we were approaching that pretty quickly already, but this seems to indicate that we do have some runway. Where do you see us being currently? I like one of the things Mario said earlier, which I completely echo. I remember the last upgrade, and it was literally, there's a book written about it called Block Wars. So it was like incredibly contentious.

And I think what this speaks to is like how much of these toxic, egos have been ejected out of Bitcoin. And the fact that you don't have these types of New York agreement meetings anymore and like a steering committee for Bitcoin, it feels like a lot more grassroots. And that I do think it's a positive thing that the community has come together so organically and so quickly. I think it was like a week ago, Mario, when you were showing me that Taproot signaling was 17% or something.

Like it's just gone. it's just gone, you know, parabolic. So I find that as a very, very good sign. I like that you mentioned that, you know, certain groups have kind of been ejected from Bitcoin. Or rather, they weren't specifically ejected, but they opted to go on their own path, we'll say. They're still around, but they know their place.

That's fair. It's funny because, again, again, like, there was some fishy stuff going on during that block size war. There was the whole, I can't remember the name of it, but there was a, there was a, an advantage that Bitmain had. Asic boost. Asic boost, yes, that's correct. So they were basically able to capitalize more on, on mining Bitcoin without Segwit enabled,

then with it enabled. And so they were purposely kind of not signaling, for support and that resulted in what I personally to date was one of the most bullish things I've ever seen in Bitcoin which was the resulting you know as Mauricio and and Adam were talking about the block size war um basically users came out and said hey I'm gonna I'm gonna run a node and we're we're not going to upgrade to this supposed supposed upgrade um which would have basically gutted all of the current Bitcoin Core devs

and replaced them with I think just one. Just Jeff Garzik I think that was pretty much all they had in their arsenal. Yeah, so and that would have been terrible, but it was pretty unprecedented to see a bunch of just regular dudes

on the internet effectively get the top, all of the top companies in the space and 80% of the hash to back down. It was wild, but you're right so like it seems that that type of contention you're right to say Mario that they know their place I think miners now understand that they provide a service to people that are using Bitcoin and if you opt to mine something that is not Bitcoin in the eyes of all the users

then you've just expended a lot of energy and capital to mine something that nobody wants Yeah. Yeah, it's Yeah, miners, like cash rate follows price. It's not the other way around. It doesn't matter how many miners you have. If no one wants to use your coin, you're just burning energy.

Yeah, 100%. And I think mainstream media tends to not get that right now, and that's why they'll say things like, oh, China runs Bitcoin or we're worried about centralization of mining. You know, the miners are just wherever the cheap energy is if they can't kind of get in line with what the majority of Bitcoin want, then, you know, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. And somebody else will jump in and provide that service for us as we see fit.

So I think that's a great thing and a great kind of defense mechanism for Bitcoin. I just wanted to add something because it didn't really directly, like, answer your question on like ossification of Bitcoin. Frankly, I think it's already been doing what it's meant to for years. Like even if it doesn't really, you know, start doing anything new, it's already doing its job. And that's why I'm so bullish on it. It's solved the use case that's trying to, right? It works. And, you know, it's nice to get upgrades, but it's already good enough, you know?

That's true. Bitcoin already functions pretty damn well as is. It'll be nice to get a few things implemented. But if it were to stand still right now, I do believe that it would still be good enough and that it would be difficult to have something better. So we shall see. Guys, we are on to our last topic for being bullish. Everybody that's in the chat right now, thank you for being here.

As always, keep these questions or comments coming. I will try to pull them up as I see them as being relevant. And we're going to jump to our last one. Smash that like button. Give this a share. And I'm going to toss it to Adam. I'm interested to hear. Why is so bullish this week, man?

Well, Ben, I got to make a shameless plug here. So this week we raised, I think it's equivalent to 10 trillion Venezuela and Bolivars, which is about 30 million bucks U.S. And what makes us bullish about this is it's not just Latin able to do this. There's a lot of companies raising money in the space right now. There's a lot of Canadian exchanges and other groups in the ecosystem doing very well. And we're excited about what this means for all of us to be able to hire more, more smart people that can contribute to this industry.

And obviously, we can't change Bitcoin to Anton's point. Bitcoin's already doing its thing. Bitcoin's fantastic. But what we can do is try to make it easier for people that access Bitcoin and try to allow them to do more with it. And so with that, you know, we're excited to bring as many talented people we can on the team. And that's what makes me super bullish is that, you know, we've got, obviously, I have a pleasure of working with the group here every day. And we've got another 35 people behind that. And we've got a really, really fantastic team.

And it's just like, it's the best thing about this. And I'm bullish for all the great people that are in this industry and more to come. So thank you, everybody. Awesome. I'm very excited for you guys. you know, I've been working with you guys for a couple of years now and you've grown a lot. I continue to use you all the time. And I've had a great experience with you guys and I was using you guys prior to ever working with you guys.

But, you know, I've known a lot of you for a long time here. And, you know, I'm happy to see you guys enjoying a lot of success. now some people watching this may have no idea kind of what I mean obviously they hear me talk about you guys at the beginning of each show but I was wondering if maybe Mauricio if you wanted to touch on a little bit of

not just what benefits people like here in Canada or the US but you guys have been dealing a lot with Latin America and I'm just wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about how you've been able to help some people in that area. Yeah. No, that's a great question.

It's something that frankly, I'd love to talk about. So one of the most fulfilling things about this business is the fact that we are able to, because a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin, regardless of whether it comes from Colombia or from Canada, we can essentially treat an application from Colombia with the same speed, quality of service, customer protection is everything that we treat a Canadian. And a lot of times in these places, there's a couple of things that basically combine to make this product so relevant to them. One, access to credit is just, there's just nowhere to be found. So it's actually easier if you're somebody in Latin America to get a loan back for your Bitcoin,

then they get a mortgage or that they get a loan to buy a house. And so that's why it's to, and the other piece is that anybody that's grown up there has seen a local bank go under. that wipes your whole family's wealth, has had a farm be expropriated because some guy walked over and said, I don't like this. And so even those assets, those assets that typically have property assurances,

like when in your mind would you ever think that a home in Canada would be taken away from you? So like that stuff, that stuff is like unthinkable there. And what that leads to is people not feeling like they can ever escape this savings trap. So I think what Bitcoin does for these, for these countries is that it gives you you probably hearing my daughter and I'm sorry. That's all good. I've got kids, man. I feel I feel it. I'm just lucky I have a wall in between my. So, so I think one of the coolest things and I say this

over and over is the amount of times we get people telling us that we have been the first loan that I've ever been approved for is is amazing. And it's fulfilling and it's exciting. And at the same time, it makes us feel that we're having an impact, right? Like we've lent dollars to a broad spectrum of people. People in Canada, want to put Bitcoin in collateral to buy a house, we'll do it. People in Latin America need, you know, their family had an emergency. They need somebody to buy medicine. They don't want to sell their Bitcoin.

And so they'll take our loans and they'll go buy medicine with it. And so it's the amount, the spectrum of the people that we help is just so broad. And that's what's so exciting about this. Because for the most part, you know, not for the most of a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin. So that enables us to treat everyone the same. So I'm pretty excited. And over 60% of our clients are outside of North America.

So that's something that's pretty cool as well. I think Chuck did a pretty good job of encapsulating it. So lead and enables undeserved or I guess underbanked people, financial inclusion and economic empowerment. I think that's a great. That should be your mission statement if it isn't already. Well said. Yeah. Yeah, like, it's easy to forget that, you know, a lot of critics of Bitcoin are very privileged living in, you know, the leading countries of the globe that have stable financial systems.

I don't know if you call them leading, but they have relatively stable financial systems. And so if you're not looking at countries like Venezuela or Zimbabwe, Argentina, where, you know, Bitcoin, as volatile as it is, is much more stable and reliable than what they have available there as a fiat currency. then you start to really understand what the value is. So I feel like a lot of people miss that, and that's kind of the exact thing we're going after, you know, helping people who are stuck with unreliable governments. Yeah, 100%. And I just add, like, I think, I think, Ben, there's an important differentiator there

is like, I don't want to pretend to be too altruistic that we're, you know, like waking up every day, you know, trying to like exactly nail the mission to only serve the unbanked. we want to treat everybody equal and we can. So that's what we're doing, right? We don't have to go above beyond to do anything different. We just have to treat everyone the same. And with Bitcoin, you can do that.

And so that's what we're super excited about. It's not favoritism and it's not targeted. It's just treating everyone equal. Yeah. And that's historically just not been the case, right? That's just people don't have access to the same types of services when they don't have access to the same types of money. and yeah, that can be difficult depending on where you're lucky enough to be born.

Now, Carlos, you've been with the Lenn team forever. I've been interacting with you via email forever. The first time we're actually chatting in quasi real life here, but you've been there for a while. You must be excited about the raise, excited about the growth and everything. Are there some things that you particularly like about? being with the team here. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it's been delightful and I'm very proud of how far we've come and what we've achieved with the team. And I tell Adam and Maricio this every day. Coming to work, Levin doesn't feel like work. You just come naturally. You just do what you love every day and just get on with it. We all try our best and give us our best to our clients, to the team, to everything we work on.

and everyone puts their wholehearted into the team and the work. So it's very, very rewarding to see where we are at today and just look back how far we've come from. Awesome. I love it. And Maricio, you're a new edition. Previously, Mastermind of Blockstreet. Maricio is not the new edition. Sorry, Mario.

I'm the new edition. Baby. Maricio has never been like brand new straight. I'm the co-founder now. Yeah. Mario. Mario, but the previous mastermind at Blockstream, helping all the customer service concerns.

And now you're part of a team that I also very much admire. You've worked with two excellent companies in the space. What's it like? What was the switch like? What's it like being there now? You know, what excites you? Honestly, man, it's been awesome. It is.

I had pretty high expectations coming over and they've been exceeded. I was a pretty early client of Lennon, like, back in, like, when they first launched the, when we first launched our interest accounts, back then it was there. But, yeah, so I, like, hopped out of right away and I was kind of pestering Maritio once a month. Yeah, you guys should do this. You guys should have this. And so when he reached out to me a couple months ago to see if want to join the team, I, like, yeah, I mean, it was just a couple quick calls, and I was pretty sure it was the right move.

And honestly, it's it's such a cool, just tone inside the company. You know, like, big shout out to like, you know, Ritzhwin Adam for, you know, the company culture is going to be primarily set by like how the founders behave. And it's like people are super encouraging, really approachable. And like people are extremely competent and hardworking. I like, I feel like really grateful to be part of the team. And like, you know, we've got all this stuff. You know, things need to be really, really taking off right over the time I join.

So I get to. get to ride off of all your guys's hard work from the last years. And now I'm just trying to make my own dent. But honestly, I like super privileged to be here. And if anyone's listening, guys, it's a great place to work. Give us a look. Yeah, you guys are looking, aren't you? Are you guys looking for new people?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we're at 35 people today. And actually, 40, if you count 35 people in Canada, another five people that are working internationally. So 40 people total. And we hope to be at 100 by the end of the year. So we're looking all over the place.

We need tons of engineers on the team. It's all that they're listening and have requested features. We're working on every one of them. The faster we can hire, the faster those features will come out so we can get a little bit of sleep. But yeah, please get in touch with us if you're looking. Where can people? So first of all, I'll ask really quick. What kind of, so everybody watching, if you're looking for a job,

in Bitcoin and you haven't been able to figure that out yet. Maybe this might be your avenue. So what kinds of people are you looking for and where can they reach out? Yeah, we have careers at leaden. .io or you can email me as well, Adamatledin.org. And we're looking for, as I mentioned, software engineers, really all facets, right? We need to cover more help on the marketing and growth team, client success to make sure we can keep up really good service times on getting back to everybody, you know, accounting and finance,

really any skill set, I think we have a place for it. So when we're hiring that that quickly, we need everything. And we're very focused on pulling people from all diverse industries. So if you're new to Bitcoin, that's okay. We like to think we have expertise like Mario on the team. Mario does lunch and learns every week to help us stay up to speed on the latest developments so we can help you learn if you're just getting into it. All we care about is that you care and you're super passionate about what you want to do. Awesome. I love it. So yeah, guys, if you're if you're looking, you're curious, you're looking to make a shift. Maybe the pandemic restrictions kind of hit you hard and you love Bitcoin. Head over. It's just leden.com

slash careers or slash EN slash careers. You'll find it. But yeah, maybe. Just an explicit plug. We need also specifically DevOps engineers and security engineers. So if you're a software DevOps or security engineer, please send us a message. You can hit me up at Anton atledon.org.com.

Or you can just come here to careers and apply. Yeah. Perfect. And most positions aren't posted, but we'll get them posted as quick as we can. So if you're looking, just reach out anyways. Sweet guys. That's fantastic. Any time that Bitcoiners can kind of do what they love for a living, I think that's fantastic.

I'm going to do an on-air request for you guys at some point in the future. Given the connection of Mario between lead and block stream, I'm going to silently, not so silently because we're live streaming to a bunch of people right now, but maybe if you guys want to incorporate liquid at some point that could be cool. So anyways, I'll just, I'll leave that in the back of your minds

at some point. This has definitely been discussed. It's not the first time Mario's brought that up. Mario mentioned it. I never would have guessed. Yeah. Anybody that's watching and curious and doesn't know what the hell liquid is, I've done a bunch of videos on Liquid Network. Feel free to check him out.

But yeah, anyways, I bet. that's the end of my request there um guys i'm going to say this was a fantastic chat this is always the best part of my friday um i really enjoyed having you guys all on and i continue to love working with you guys so um what i'm going to do now is i'm just going to go down the line really quick um and i'll get you guys each to just drop a couple things any final thoughts and where people can find you of course like you know the leaden website and everything but you're any personal Twitter or any social media, anything you want to drop, feel free. So let's start it off with Mauricio.

Dude, final thoughts? Where can people find you? Not too many final thoughts. You can find me at Cryptonomista on Twitter. And also, if you don't, well, the team, you know, I press send. But we write a newsletter every week called the Bitcoin Economic Hander that essentially talks about what you need to know for the week starting Mondays. we can check it out.

All of our clients get it just by being registered. So that's it. Awesome. Adam, how about you, man? Every week's an exciting week in Bitcoin. I don't expect next week to be any less. And yeah, I'm on Twitter. Adam reads all one word.

LinkedIn. I'm on email, Adam atlellan.a.o. As I said, please reach out if you're looking. We'd love to meet you. Awesome. Carlos, your turn. Any final thoughts? And where can people find you?

Yep. So same here for me, Twitter. I have my handled called the Real Carlos Heng, not so private. And on LinkedIn as well, Carlos Singh, if you want to connect, feel free to send me a connection. Awesome. On to Mario, take it away.

Cool. Yeah, you guys will find me on Twitter, Mario underscore Gibney. And you can also find me at Miami next week. If anyone's going there, you want to meet up, hit me up. My DMs are open on Twitter. We're going to do some sort of leaden thing, right?

We've got to finalizing details. We're going to do something for the leaden clients or any leaden client curious folks out there. So yeah, just keep an eye out on our leaden Twitter on mine. And I'll see some of you guys down there. When do you guys get there? So I'm going to be there from Monday to Monday, 31st until the 7th. Oh, damn.

Okay. I get in on the second. So I'll give you show when I get there. Sounds good. Awesome. Anton, how about you? Final thoughts? Where can people find you?

You can find me on Twitter. Anton at Anton L-I-V-A-J-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-N-L-A-A-A-A-A-A-V-A-A-V-A-A-V-A-V-A-W-A-A-F-A-W-A-A-W-A-R-E-A-W-A-E-A-W-A-A-V-G-E-R-E-R-E-E-L-E-A-V-E-L-A-D-W-S-E-A-E-W-S-E-E-E-W-E-S-E-E-W-E-A-L-W-E-E-G-E--W-E-E---E-W-L--E--L------------ you all on. Thank you so much. And congrats on the raise and congrats on the continued success. I will be happy to have any and all of you on at any point in the future, as always. So thank you guys. Thanks for having us, Ben. Cheers for having us, man. That was awesome. Thanks. Have a great weekend. Cheers. I'm going to cut your audio and video now. I will stick around if you do want to say a quick goodbye after we go offline. Feel free to, but I'm going to cut your audio video now and do my little outro here.

Guys, everybody that was watching, thank you so much for being here. Again, always the best part of my Friday. I get to chill out and chat Bitcoin with my favorite people. And everybody that comes to watch this

and people in the comments, you make this possible. So thanks for being here. As always, please do like, subscribe, share, all of those things. Help so,

so much. You have no idea. This show has grown since inception. Why are we bullish? Just continue to grow. I love just the interaction with all you guys. So please do those things that will help.

As always, you can hit up any of the sponsors down below in the show notes to help the show in another way if you so choose. Of course, the legends at Lennon, but there's also BitRefill and Bill Fottle over at Privacy Pros down there. And finally, if you really loved what you saw, you can always hit me up with a lightning network tip at my tippin.me page that is t-i-p-p-p-in.m-me-slash at B-T-E. TTC sessions. With that, I'm out. Have yourself a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be. And I'll see you guys next time for your daily session. Toddled by Bitcoin.