BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Lisa Hough, JC Crown, Brandon Quittem ep274

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

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What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. Got a killer panel today. Very excited to have all of them here. And we'll be bringing them in shortly. But of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here.

We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. Yeah. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things super important.

They help get this show in front of more eyeballs. And thank you to those of you that have been doing that regularly. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is the bitbow. Dot I.O dashboard. We're sitting at $22,768 per coin.

A single U.S. dollar will snag you $4,000. 3991 sats. 90.95% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, yeah, it's been a volatile ride the last little bit. They're sitting at 22 sats per byte for the next block. But if you wait a little bit, you can probably get in somewhere between 2 and 6 sats per byte. If you have anything imminent, then keep those fees a little bit higher or, you know, use

RBF or something like that just if you want to sneak in some lower fee transactions. it to sponsors of the show shake pay.com. If you're in Canada, super easy way to stack sats. You can e-transfer in and out, no deposit or withdrawal fees, thin spread. If you sign up with the link down below, after your first $100 purchase, they'll give you $30 for free. You also earn $30 every time you refer a friend and family member that does the same. You can shake your phone every day for free sats.

You can use their sats back visa card. There's just a ton of different stuff you can do with them. So be sure to check them out in the links down below. So ledden.io, you can use your Bitcoin for a ton of different services. These guys just completed their fourth, I believe fourth proof of reserves. So they've got independent auditors that go through all of their books and make sure they're not jerking you around. But nonetheless, I find them particularly useful if I do need dollars, perhaps as a cash flow issue or whatever it may be. I can deposit Bitcoin, get a loan of dollars.

When I pay back those dollars, I get back the same amount of Bitcoin. They do have savings accounts for Bitcoin and USDC. their B2X offering, the rolling out Bitcoin back mortgages across Canada, and soon to some select U.S. states. Check them out at start.ledden.com slash bt sessions. Bit refill helps me a ton with living on Bitcoin. I can pick up pretty much any gift card I can imagine on this site with Bitcoin, on chain and via lightning network, which I use regularly. On top of that, you can get things like inbound liquidity to your lightning node. You can do all kinds of great things. You earn stats back as you shop.

You earn more stats back with the referral program. And they just started rolling out bill payments in the U.S. So if you're in the U.S. looking to get on a Bitcoin standard, there you go, check them out. Keystone, one of my more often used hardware wallets, 100% air-gapped. You never plug this thing into anything internet connected. It's all done offline via QR code. And that keeps the keys to your money safe and away from internet connection. Definitely upgrade to the Bitcoin-only firmware, obviously.

It works beautifully with blue wallet, Sparrow, Spector. written a multi-sig all around pretty awesome. So check out my tutorial on that and you can check out their site below. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, get it in steel, friends. Paper just doesn't cut it in my opinion, fire damage, water damage. You might discard it if it's just flitting around the office. So I tend to back up my stuff with a bill foddle over at privacyprose.io. Check them out.

And with that, I'm going to stop my renting here. Let's get our guests in here. We've got some awesome ones today. We've got Lisa. We've got J.C. And we've got Brandon. Welcome to the show, everybody. Let's do a quick round of intros so that people are familiar with you.

So I'm going to start with Lisa here. Lisa, can you let people know who you are, what you do? Yes, first of all, I'll tell you my last name is pronounced tough. Everybody always asks me. I work for, so Ben, this is new, new announcement. I've left Unchained Capital. They are awesome, though. They are awesome.

It was tough. to leave. I'm with Levelfield Financial. We're in Houston. We are bridging the gap between digital assets and the traditional financial sector. So you know I'm a fan because I will tell you, I mean, I have been attacked for leaving unchained. I've been called not a Bitcoin Maxi. I've been really like poo-poot upon and I'm telling you I the Bitcoin Maxi is alive and well in me and I believe in what we're doing at level field so we're helping people just you know get on to digital exchanges and have all the financial services around them in a safe secure and simple way that's our slogan awesome that's my only show of the night that's what's new with me literally

i look forward to reading all about it and seeing what you guys are doing this is news to me i never knew but congratulations on the show yeah awesome cool well let's uh let's uh let's uh Let's jump down to Brandon. Brandon, for people who are unfamiliar. Who are you? What do you do? Yeah, how's it going, guys? Good to be here with you.

I currently am the head of comms at Swan. I've been there since 2019. It's been a while dried. It takes a lot of my time, and I absolutely love working with those guys. I'm most well known in the Bitcoin space for some essays I wrote in the past, exploring Bitcoin through a biological lens, exploring it to fungi, and some other newer, similar topic essays. I also advise SAS Mining, which is a hosted mining company who is making moves but still very young.

Yeah, excited to be here. Awesome, man. Glad to have you back. And let's jump over to J.C. Dude, welcome back and let people know who are you. What do you do? Oh, you're muted. Sorry.

I muted you because you're echoing in the back. Been on a few times. One of my favorite shows, definitely. Always Bitcoin only. Who I am. I worked with a few Bitcoin startups. I've been doing Bitcoin education for a while, lots of videos on Lightning. Pretty big Lightning Advocate.

I've been living on Bitcoin basically since 2017, probably, as far as literally 100% Bitcoin, not even any fiat except for getting around town type of deal. Made a cool video in 2020 with Guy Swan called Living on Bitcoin in 2020. Still fun to watch that. But yeah, then I'm just like everybody else here, I think, just enjoying being here in Bitcoin and seeing everything is happening. Awesome. Well, dude, I'm glad to have you back. And yeah, let's dive into it.

So anybody watching that's unfamiliar, this is Why Are We Bullish? So the premise of the show, we go by the three R's. Somebody's going to bring a reason why they are bullish. Then together, we're all going to riff on that reason. and then finally we will rotate to the next person until we've all had a turn. Really simple, casual conversation. We just get to talk about the cool stuff that we like. So I'm going to give us a little start here.

I'm going to start with my reason for being bullish. And that reason this week, and you'll pardon me if it's not a fully formed reason yet because I'm still learning. But I'm super interested in what's going on with Fedham. And I hadn't previously dove down this rabbit hole, despite many people telling me I should check it out. But I do find it very interesting. I recognize some of the tradeoffs therein, but I think it's something really cool. And it gives kind of a good in-between option between full single-key self-custody for yourself or multi-sake self-custody with your own responsibility. then there's obviously the all your money is with somebody else and then there's this thing in between that can happen here.

So I'll explain my understanding of it. If any of you have a better understanding of it than me, then please do interject. But my understanding of it is that this is meant to be more of a community created. So it's an open source protocol that can be used with Bitcoin. but it's meant to be more of a community-driven protocol. So you could get together with groups of family members or people that you inherently trust and create what is effectively a large multi-sig with multiple, they refer to them as guardians. And then how it works is you'd have a large pool of funds here amongst multiple individuals,

but you'd also have people that weren't quote unquote guardians that still had ownership of specific amounts of the UTXOs within this multi-sig. This then allows them to trade amongst each other within the fedament in a privacy preserving and efficient way in terms of it doesn't add to the blockchain. privacy preserving in the aspect of on-chain analytics could look at the total amount sitting in the fetament. It would potentially look like just an individual using a multi-sig. There would be no way to know who owns what. On top of that, any of the key holders within the fetament cannot tell who owns what portion of what UTXO or where. and when transactions happen within the fetament, they're all blinded. So basically you as the recipient know how much you own or how much you've sent,

but people that are managing the keys are not privy to that information either. You can also then withdraw from the fetament. And this is where I'm fuzzy on processes of entering and exiting the fetament to full self-custody, And then the other part where I'm fuzzy, but sounded cool, because this is very like you've got a walled garden of certain subset of people that are using Bitcoin within a community. There was a mention that adding lightning to fetament or using fetament with lightning would allow different fetament federations to interact with each other and open them up to the entire Bitcoin network. So this is my cursory understanding from listening to a couple talks and just starting to dip my toes in. And I think we should be careful in how we talk about it in that saying, you know, full self-custody and having your own keys is is kind of like the gold standard of, you know, owning your own assets. However, in an instance where perhaps you have family members that just refuse to act, that just refuse to take self-custody or for whatever reason, whether it would be lack of technical prowess or perhaps just sheer laziness or whatever it may be, this could be kind of an intermediary option because, again, the talk that I listened to, Obie,

from the UK who previously had an exchange for about or ran in exchange for eight years, said that in his experience, getting people to self-custody was, was incredibly difficult. And so, you know, in his view when he's looking at it, he would like everybody to self-custody, but if he's being optimistic, he's saying in the long run, you know, with the way things are right now, maybe you'll get generously speaking 20% of people self-custodying overtime. I hope it's more than that. But if this could be kind of an intermediary option, then I think it would be better than just a blanket. Everybody leaves their coins with trusted third parties at all times.

So anyways, I'm bullish on it for the privacy aspects and for the scaling aspects of it. and the let's push people in the direction of taking more responsibility for their own money and see how far we can get them to go. So with that, I'm going to open it up to you guys. Thoughts on any of this, you know, if you're unfamiliar with Fetiment, if certain aspects sound interesting. So anything that you have to throw up me, feel free. So whoever wants to jump in.

I'll start. Ben, I'm waiting on you to. put a video out on Fetamette. I'll work on it when the, so FETI, there's two different things, by the way. There's Fetamint, which is the protocol. And then there's FETI, which is an interface that OB and a number of others have created and they just raise some money for it. My question in that they're raising money and they did a seed round for it is how they're

going to go about monetizing that, because if it's an open protocol that anybody can use, what's the monetization strategy. But yes, when that drops, when there's an interface that can be used to do it, video time. So anyways, go on. Yeah, no, I was just talking about it with someone else today. Really, for the first time, I saw that there was some venture capital

that got invested in the space this week and a couple of Bitcoiners that I think a lot of are involved in the project. And so that makes me feel like, God, I got to know more. right. I think as somebody always says, everything's good for Bitcoin. Yeah. It's, it's interesting because it makes me think of the way that it's structured, it makes me think very much of liquid network, except for the keyholders are not like mystery keyholders to the quorum that manages the peg. It would be community members and people that you know and trust ideally with this situation. So it's a different take on it, but it enables a lot of the same stuff in that, again,

off-chain transactions, privacy, all that kind of stuff. How about Brandon or JC? Either you guys want to dive in? Yeah, sure. I can jump in next. I think the big takeaway here for me is that this fits in really nicely in developing countries. Why is that? Because one, they may have extremely hostile regulatory environments, outright bans, strong punishments, maybe lack of rule of law. And they probably are going to have worse currencies. And I predict this decade we're going to see an absolute destruction of the lesser currencies.

And so I kind of see that as a really important tool for those folks to save the fruits of their labor. I think it also fits in nicely where there's no exchanges or there's fewer exchanges. Right. So it would be more of a peer-to-peer type economy, like what we're seeing in Nigeria, with, you know, lightning for services, connecting all of Africa together with exchanges, with services, sorry, without an exchange. And so I think it sort of fits in that sort of off regulatory books, dark, dark money, which I think is really important.

And I also think that you can build cool community programs. protocols or community banking. I forgot the words to name these things, where everyone puts in a little bit of money each month. And then one member of the group gets to pull out a large capital thing once a year. And they get to buy a washing machine or some capital investment for their business. And so I think there's more cultural relevancy for these community banks in that environment. The other thing is that managing private keys are hard. And humans have no relationship to protecting information.

And a Bitcoiner that I'm sure everyone on this call is well familiar with, Gigi, he explains us really well with the map is the territory, meaning the information, your private keys, your 12-word seeds. That is your Bitcoin. And, you know, we have a lot of history and practice storing physical things. We know to bury gold or put money under a mattress or in a bank vault, but we're not really good at information. And so anything that makes that process easier is really important. And of course the reason is if the supply is held in individuals custody, it acts as a deterrent for any would-be state-level actor or other nefarious actor. Essentially, it says good luck attacking us because it's going to be very hard. And as long as you increase the cost of tyranny, I predict that that will repel the attacks because it's going to be really obvious how hard the attack would be to make.

And so I don't know enough about the protocol to say, but the finer details, but that's my sense. Yeah, I like that. And I like your, you know, Nigerian example. I think it, you know, there'll probably be instances of even rather than even just countries, like even small, tight-knit groups, tight-knit, small towns or something, having a fetament or whatever it may be. Or in the future, a fetiment for a citadel, perhaps. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. goes. But yeah, no, I love that idea. G.C. thoughts? Hard to add to all of the great things that Brandon and Lisa have said. But I think in general, you know, we're going to see a lot of people get really creative about ways that they can practically benefit from the properties of Bitcoin, the protection from corruption, for example, while making, let's just say, I guess,

more local trust assumptions rather than, I mean, who wants to trust? you know, the entire world's, who knows what happens after it goes into that internet wire, you know, on your computer. But having local institutions is even a good word, even more local than that. Sometimes maybe in like a family, a family held. I mean, families have always been, especially in the past when I think money was more real. Families have always been very important, and that's why, you know, you had your dynasties and everything else. And that kind of maybe comes to Citadel's too, but I think families owning their own things like that, and it's around their own personal banks where, you know, reputation is one of the strongest forms of trust, especially in

those local communities. So that stuff is essential, and we're just seeing the beginning, I think, of what is to come. And I think the best solutions, whether they've already been kind of worked on now or not, will become apparent when people actually start needing to use them. And I think that's when the most important work gets done. I mean, I think Bitcoin was created out of a real need. It wasn't a need in the future. It was a need right now and people used it right now because of that. It's not like, of course, everybody doesn't use it, but everybody on this call, we all use Bitcoin for what it's for and we didn't have to wait for everybody else to do that, to do that ourselves. And so that's where we see, you know, fundamentally what's good.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, again, you're right that Bitcoin was created out of a at the current time, not forward seeking. And I think it's no mistake that stuff like this is starting to pop up now where, you know, the past number of years, scaling was kind of top of mind, and now privacy is becoming top of mind for a lot of people. And a protocol layer that addresses both of those things is, again, it's no mistake that these things are happening now. So I look forward to seeing how it develops.

Anybody watching that wants to kind of learn a little bit more. There is, I believe, fedamint.org, but a really good talk from Bitcoin 2022 by Obie happened. If you search on the Bitcoin conference YouTube channel, it is from day three of the conference on the open source stage, and it's just shy of the four hour mark. that Obie gets on stage. He does a little talk. And then there's another panel talk afterwards with one of the creators of the Fedomint protocol.

So check that out. Worth a listen and kind of help me wrap my head around a lot of this stuff. So with that, let's do a little rotation. And everybody in the chat, by the way, thank you for being here. I'm going to start pulling up more of your comments now that it's not my topic. So I'm going to pass the torch down the line. I'm going to jump to Lisa here. I'm going to let you take it.

And I'm going to ask you, why are you bullish? It's a great question. I've given this some thought this week. And I think what fills me up is that Bitcoin is reaching more and more people every day. And what I mean by that, I guess I'll just start by saying, I am in Bitcoin for the people that are on the other side of the globe, don't have access to money. That's the compelling reason that makes me want to work in Bitcoin. I would have probably invested in it, but what really drives me to work and educate in Bitcoin is spreading the word to, you know, in my job, you know, working with folks in Texas

to help them understand Bitcoin. But really, I see the benefit in them, you know, if they buy Bitcoin, it helps a woman in North Korea or it helps a family in Afghanistan that holds Bitcoin. And what I'm finding locally is that people are putting these pieces together. So I'm in Texas, obviously, you know, energy capital of the world. Just this week, I've attended two large gatherings of people. And one with a bunch of producers here in Houston, the chairman of Conoco Phillips spoke. And I got a chance to speak with him briefly.

And he's extremely interested in Bitcoin. and they've got some people that are, you know, exploring, exploring this world. And he was very receptive to more conversation. I learned this morning something really cool. One of our huge power providers here is looking to incentivize folks to turn their thermostat up. And in exchange for doing so, they're going to give you stats. Really? Yeah.

And so what I love about that is not, you know, the gamification of Bitcoin is not my favorite thing, but that it is going to be accepted by ConocoPhillips and one of Texas largest power providers. And they're going to, and they are going to do the work of bringing the retail client to Bitcoin. Like, I, I love that. Does it get any better? Like, because, go ahead. I was going to say, it makes me think of, because a lot of Bitcoiners on Twitter, they'll flex about how. thrifty they are. Like you'll get some dude posting a picture of his socks with like six holes in them and be like screw socks stacks ads. How many how many bitcoiners are going to be

taking a picture of their thermostat showing their house at like 15 degrees or something like screw heat, stack sets? Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's just you know it's personally just it fills me up to know that every day this this mission that we're on is is spreading. I think, you know, I approach it, I guess, much like you guys, just from a more philosophical standpoint of, you know, this fixes so many problems that we have. And, you know, although it was not created to meet particular needs, it's filling these holes and filling the gap, whether it's improving the, whether it's, you know, spreading access to electricity, strengthening the Texas power, which we seem to hear a lot about, giving oil and gas assets a

place to go, you know, a buyer of first and last resort. You know, so improving the economics of existing companies. It's improving the economics of small towns that maybe lost businesses, which, you know, it's, I see that, I see how this will spread globally. And that just gives me a great deal of hope because it, so that's my local reason for being bullish. On a global scale, I'm really bullish that all of the government, so many of the government, so many of the governments continue to bash it and want to ban it and say that, well, you can't trade it here or the banks can't hold it or, you know, they're putting all this regulation. If they didn't care about it, if they didn't think it was worth anything, they wouldn't pay any attention.

But the outcry of government to me is a hugely bullish sign. Yeah, I absolutely agree with the idea that it's, it's, Not only reaching more people, because I mean, it reaches a lot of people in a bull market, but I don't consider that to be people being reached. But you see these movements where the people that are taking actions that actually have been reached by it at a deeper level, right? The people that, I mean, for instance, the energy industry. I mean, Bitcoin was always married to energy. it's just that most of the energy industry didn't realize that they had the ring on their finger yet.

And they're gradually looking down and going, oh, I didn't know that. So I think the energy industry is waking up to the fact that Bitcoin and them are inherently linked and that the relationship is going to be a great one. And so I look forward to seeing that develop more and more. again like shout out to people like Steve Barber who lives in my neck of the woods and was one of the early people on that train trumpeting the fact that Bitcoin

can greatly help energy producers in that they can capitalize on the waste that would have just again gone to total waste and then they can also all the emissions that they are putting out, it also reduces those. So, you know, that lowers the carbon taxes associated with it.

It helps in a myriad of ways. And you get Bitcoin. So it's a win, win for a lot of people here. And many are just waking up to it. Yeah. And just one more thing on the energy front. I mean, I feel like the energy industry has been so beaten down, right? Investment banks that were in Houston have closed their offices

because they're not investing in oil. their banks won't invest in oil and gas projects or help in that process. Certainly the energy companies have seen just, it's just been incredible backlash with the ESG narrative. But with them getting involved with Bitcoin mining, it helps everybody not sell the reason for energy, but if I am Exxon or if I am ConocoPhillips and I bring energy out of the ground and I put it to work in a Bitcoin miner, they are protecting the most precious thing on earth. They are protecting those miners,

the energy companies, and then the miners are protecting the most precious property on earth that belongs to everybody. That is what excites me. Yeah, I love that. I'll open it up to Brennan and JC if anybody wants to jump in. Feel free. All right, I'll jump in here.

Let's see. The first comment is around sort of your beginning comments here, Lisa, which was that we're all part of this global infrastructure project that is Bitcoin. And you flirted with an idea that I think Jack Mallor is hammered home for me the first time, which is that it's a public good and it is a money that we can all work with. So anyone anywhere in the world who's building on this open source project actually makes my savings worth more. That's a beautiful thing to align incentives with our entire planet. And it doesn't out of where you are or where you're from, there's no barriers. So that's a really special thing

and truly unique. Yeah, we don't have anything like that. The other point about the asset, before I get to energy, is you sort of mentioned a passion around helping the people that maybe need it the most, right? Forget the old elites. Let's let anyone around the world adopt this new thing and take advantage of the price appreciation in the early stage. And my favorite part about this is that there's an inverse correlation between how credentialed you are and how long it takes for you to grasp Bitcoin. So the PhDs, the economists, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, all the old world, the legacy elites, they actually really struggle with Bitcoin. And many reasons why I think primarily is ego gets in the way and then their social group,

which reinforces their high status that they feel so good about, everyone around them dismisses Bitcoin because it is outside money. It is a revolutionary force. It more or less questions their own identity and everything that they've built. And so, and then it juxtaposing that with normal people with common sense. And they say, hey, inflation's bad. I don't trust the government. Maybe I should get some of this just in case. Right. And so that it's poetry and it pleases me to no end. It's, I was going to say that very much reminds me of this article from Cresis.

I was just going to mention it. There you go. There you go. Go ahead. Yeah, creases is the man, really good thinker. He used to work with us at Swan.

And yeah, he essentially lays it out. What I was just going to say is that the in-group signals to you that Bitcoin's bad because it's outside of your wheelhouse. And he has a nice management consultant approach. which was a two by two quadrant down there somewhere. But everyone should read this one. I think it's a top 10 article for Bitcoin, honestly.

And the main reason is because on Twitter, we're always bumping into people and we're like, oh, they're smart. They have a background. Why don't they get it? This is the missing piece in my mind. I don't know if you had any more comments there on that one, Ben, before I go to energy.

I just love this chart that he has here, where he has propensity for Bitcoin maximum. based on color, which this is a horrible chart for me because I'm colorblind. But nonetheless, he's got two axes and up and down is IQ and side to side is trust in the system. So people that don't have trust in the system but have a high IQ tend to lean towards Bitcoin maximalism. People that have a lot of trust in the system tend to stray away. from Bitcoin maximalism because the existing system has done them very well. And if there's something that's going to upend it or make vast changes to it,

they likely don't want any part of that or will be much more likely to dismiss it. So yeah, anyways, I'd echo your thoughts that this is, yeah, and there's the typical Yuppie elites in the top right. But yeah, you know, I love this article. I thought it was super fun to read. And there you go. People who fall for Bitcoin. Eventually, everybody until the very bitter end for a select few.

So anyways, worth a read. But go ahead, Brandon, go move on. Yeah, someone has to be our exit liquidity at $20 million a coin. Anyways, all right. On to energy, which is, honestly, in my Bitcoin journey, I would say I dismissed mining early on. I thought it was boring. It was confusing.

I thought it was uninteresting. And then I realized that it clashes with energy. And then I fell on that rabbit hole. And that's the only part of Bitcoin that interests me right now. Yeah, okay, everything's interesting. But really, that's the part that captures me. And I think it's especially important right now if you look around the world. We're running into physics, right?

To steal a line from Duneberg, when your platitudes and physics fight, physics always wins. So it doesn't matter if you proclaim ESG or you want to have more wind turbines. Good for you for that. People are going to starve and they're not going to be able to heat their homes and it's going to cause all these issues. So now is when our relationship to energy as a species really, really matters. And the central planner types would like to coordinate with their big brains and their PhDs and their ivory towers. And they think that they can somehow coordinate the most complex thing we know of, which is our relationships as a species, our interconnected, subjective economy, whatever we want to call that.

On the other hand, Bitcoin is a simple system that has new incentives. These are very simple, very small, slight things, but an incentive can have an outsized impact, right? And the central planners, they'll make a move, they'll change a policy or whatever it might be. And inevitably, there's unintended consequences that might actually make the system worse. and it's really hard to know ahead of time, and humans are full of hubris, and so we continue to make this mistake. However, I see Bitcoin is a complete opposite. The incentive is that now energy, anywhere in the inner planets, like literally within our hash horizon. So from here halfway to Mars, make a sphere of our Earth.

That's a hash horizon, so roughly like 10 light minutes from Earth. Anywhere in that sphere, you can now harness energy, and there's a global price. That's amazing. Now, you can go harness that energy and humans are creative. We respond to these incentives. So if we give ourselves another 20, 30, 40, 50, 500 years of that incentive, what do you think is going to happen? Humans are going to get very creative at harnessing energy. We're going to get extremely efficient.

And it's because of that simple incentive that we can now monetize it. And we don't have to bring it to the customer anymore, right? the market to the molecule, as the gam guys would say. But essentially just an incentive for humans to master energy. And energy is the master commodity. It's upstream of all human flourishing. And if we want to increase the quality of life of people on our planet, we want to make them rich.

And the way we do that is by giving them more energy and letting them build things and letting the human creativity be unleashed. If you look in developing worlds, They pay about five times the energy cost of what we pay in the United States. How are you going to build a manufacturing plant when the cost of inputs are so high? You're not. So what are you doing? You're relying on imports or your hamstring in your economy or you're relying on predatory loans from the IMF.

That's not a formula to flourish. And so I'm very passionate about making energy more widely accessible at a lower price. and Bitcoin, I think, is the best tool that we have to do that. And so it's going to make financing new energy assets cheaper. So we're going to literally bring more energy online because the barriers are declined. And all energy producers are going to be more economical. And so again, there's going to be more capital here. And it requires a long time horizon.

And luckily, I think Bitcoin's here for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years. And so, yeah, it's just the missing puzzle piece. in where we are right now. And, you know, physics versus platitudes, I'm choosing physics. I love it. J.C., I'll toss it to you. Hey, so super bullish now about some.

If I had to pick one thing, should I try to say that? Well, first I'll get your comments on Lisa's topics before we. Oh, well, I was agreeing with Brandon so much as I was saying to talk. When it comes to people, really lost much going to thought here. All good. All about, you know, it's impacting so many different people. There's an energy aspect to it, but the how many people Bitcoin is reaching in the long run. Absolutely. And that's, that is one of the most bullish things. I think Nigeria is a great example and I see it all around me now, especially like even just locally. There are

communities forming that are massive. It's never happened like this before. Our local meetups are a good example where, you know, usually during bear markets, there have been times in the last five years where it's just three of us hanging out at Starlets or something. And now, you know, we're in a middle of what looks like a big bear market and there's 30 people taking up an entire half of a bar every Tuesday. It's just massive. And the culture of the people, I mean, even the ones that are, you know, just figuring out about what this is, it's, it's really getting through to people.

And not even in a way, you know, in the past, it was always more about the gambling, I think, for a lot of new people. And now it's people that are understanding what it's for and the money. And they watch podcasts like ETC sessions or listen to things like Bitcoin Audle. And I mean, we're just seeing everything that we've been waiting for happening right before our eyes. It's just almost like, almost like we were more psychic than even, I think, most of us would give credit for. It's like, yeah, it's actually literally that simple. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm down the energy road, I'm wondering if this was, the missing piece of the puzzle to make people's thoughts in and around energy, obviously not in the short term, but in the longer term, make them think about energy production more rationally because of the direct monetary incentive around it, but also to make people understand how and where Bitcoin can collect its energy. I think it brings a lot of interesting topics to mind. Like for myself, before Bitcoin, I didn't understand that grids operate at peak capacity at all times in order to prevent roving blackouts when demand actually reached that peak. And that that energy couldn't just be indefinitely

held and used later. I didn't understand a lot of those things. I didn't understand that you couldn't just grab energy from a hydro dam in the middle of nowhere and then, you know, stick it in something and then bring it to to a different part of the world. Like a lot of those things that energy producers just kind of understand because they have to, the vast majority of the world doesn't have a clue about those types of things. And so you get people talking even about the opportunity cost of using stranded hydroelectric to mine Bitcoin when you could have used that energy for something else, I think the conversations that will be had in the coming decade, two decades will hopefully wake a lot more people up to how energy works inherently. Hopefully we all get a better

understanding of it over time or at least those in positions that get to explain this stuff and advocate for things, begin to at least understand for themselves. And I think we're getting a little bit of a lesson with that right now, where all of a sudden, you know, you have Germany that shut down a whole bunch of different energy sources and then realized, oh, we've just been sourcing this from Russia. Oh, shit. What are we going to do? And now nuclear is green. So I'd say that's a net positive.

But we'll see. We'll see where it leads. Anyway. Sorry. One final thing on that. I mean, we don't know how things work, right? We don't know how anything works until it breaks. And so we are seeing all over the world that money is broken.

And we are seeing, you know, especially in Texas, that the electricity, the entire energy, the mecca that is energy is broken. We're not investing in energy. We've created a narrative that it's terrible. So yes, to your point, I think Bitcoin was the thing that was dropped in our ecosystem for us to go, wait, we got to look at this again. We're thinking about this all wrong. Yeah. And it's both things are reaching so many people at the same time, right? Everybody's kind of got their mind towards energy right now because of the cost of it going up.

And energy producers are starting to pay attention to Bitcoin right now to reduce their own costs. And so it's only a matter of time before those two things mesh together. And you start to be getting hopefully a better understanding on the part of the average person. I'm going to round out this topic here. But I got to give a shout out in the chat here to my favorite person. he's here every week, almost every week. Long time fan of the show. He is here all the time, sometimes hours in advance.

Mr. David Wong, he hates Bitcoin, but he's here all the time to tell us how wrong we are. So David, thank you for being here and bringing your commentary. We love it every week. He wants us to know that Bitcoin mining operations had an annual energy budget nearly equal to the entire country of Argentina. Fun fact, the market cap of Bitcoin is much larger than the GDP of Argentina. So I'd say that's pretty damn efficient.

But he also goes on to let us know that the EU won't have enough energy for daily life, so they will not welcome Bitcoin miners. So David, I appreciate your input. He also wants you guys to know that Bitcoin is not the answer, and that one more price sell-off will crash Bitcoin forever. So thank you, David. Again, incredible insights from my number one fan. Glad you were here.

Never leave, never change. But we will rotate down. I'm going to pass it down, sorry for the noise, this construction. I'll pass it down to Brandon. And we'll get your reason for being bullish. What has he bullish this week, man? Yeah. What has me bullish is that David Walsh.

as leading the way to get all of humanity to stop using our washing machines and our dryers and instead wash our clothes in the river with rocks and then hang dry them. It would be a huge boon for society. Yeah. I was also thinking of walking to the Pacific Bitcoin Conference from Canada, much, much less impact on the environment doing it that way. So much less. I should probably leave now. You might need to wrap the show a little bit early so I can make it in time for November. But you know. Okay, in all seriousness. Continuing on the energy discussion,

what has me bullish today is a new Bitcoin company that I think recently came out of stealth, which is Vespian energy. And for the nerds out there, yes, that is a Starcraft reference, one of the resources in that game, which is a big part of my childhood. But what Vesbain does is they go around the country

and they capture methane, which is a byproduct, of landfills. So you bury a bunch of garbage. Biology takes over, it heats up, and one of the byproducts is methane. Methane's 84 times worse than CO2 for the atmosphere. There's the website. And so what they do is they take this horrible for the environment free waste product and they burn it and they convert into electricity through a gen set and they mine Bitcoin with it. And there are thousands of these all over the country. Most of them are owned by local municipalities. And so it's kind of a big problem.

And timing-wise, the EPA or similar regulatory agencies in the U.S. are saying, hey, landfills, you have to clean it up. So you have to invest a bunch of money to now capture that methane. And at a minimum, you have to flare it. And so all of these landfills are facing a large capital cost in the near future to comply with regulations, incomes, vespain, who will then take that and mine Bitcoin with the waste. And then they have some sort of a profit sharing agreement with the municipality owners. And they're doing a lot of work with the EPA and other governmental bodies to make sure that this is accepted and sort of leaning into this idea. Okay. So that's the rough pitch.

And I just learned about this like 72 hours ago. So I may have gotten a few details wrong. But I'm obsessed with this idea. And here are a couple of reasons. Now we kind of know what it is. Why is this making me bullish? a few reasons. One, let's see.

Actually, a couple more benefits. So it's good for the environment, CH4 to CO2. It's good for increasing the wealth of municipalities. So it's bringing money back to these local municipalities. And it's creating public sector allies everywhere they go. That's a big one. So now we're turning people who would traditionally either have a neutral or maybe even negative stance towards Bitcoin.

We're turning them into our allies. And we need all the allies we can get in this type of relationship for, future fights to come. And the last benefit is a regulatory cover fire and also narrative cover fire. As the EF boys transition to proof of stake, assuming that goes over smoothly, we better expect an enormous attack from that group. I bet there will be Dow's dedicated to PR and all this nonsense coming after proof of work, which I find despicable, but I also think it's inevitable. And so I think converting them into Bitcoin supporters is massive. And what's interesting about BestBain is they're starting with California.

Traditionally, the most bearish on Bitcoin mining state. And that's where their pilot project is. So imagine the narrative violation when the state or county in California is mining Bitcoin and BestFane convinces them to keep it on their balance sheet. That will be a huge deal. It's also the strongest case for the Bitcoin's good for the environment that we have. There are other examples that are carbon negative or good for the environment, however you want to describe it, such as flared methane. But flaring methane, that's a byproduct of drilling for oil.

And so the environmentalists would say, well, you're just adding more revenues to the oil companies. We don't want to help them. We want them to go away. That's obviously poor logic for many reasons. But it's a salient narrative for the Greens, where in this case, it's a 100% bulletproof, good for the environment. there's no way around it. So I think that's really nice. Yeah, that's probably enough on that.

I'm bullish. Awesome. I love that. I had not heard of these guys before. I had heard a little bit about the idea of converting landfill methane, but this is the first I've actually seen a hard example of it, which is super awesome. I love that it's launching and their pilot project is in California.

it's it's I think that'll melt some brains when when you actually present that to people and say well actually this this this ecological problem or this environmental problem that we needed to address was only addressed through this or a large part of it was addressed through this there's a similar project as well and I'm just going to see if I can pull over here. Not exactly similar, but like the idea of heating homes with the heat generated from Bitcoin mining. And this is Mint Green in Vancouver. And they're doing a pilot project to mine Bitcoin. I think also using a similar tactic where there's waste involved and they're mining with that. And then they're using the excess heat from the mining to heat homes in the winter in Vancouver. Vancouver. And so this is Colin Sullivan's project, I believe. And yeah, so I'm I'm super

interested to see how they, how they build this out. But it looks very, very interesting to me too. But it's in the same vein, right, where people assume that Bitcoin is just energy use is bad and that you're going to ruin the world with it. And they don't put the human equation into it, nor do they realize that this can actually help in many areas. So, yeah, super interesting. But I'll let either JC or Lisa comment here on your topic. Oh, there it is. It's working now.

You're good. Cool. Yeah, super bullish. Always bullish on new ways that I think, as you're saying, you're kind of putting it politically that the Greens can appreciate. how good for the environment, or at least for the energy industry, that Bitcoin actually is. I think there are so many. You know, I grew up more in politics on AmNow, and if anything, I leaned a lot more left than right.

And I never got, you know, huge on the energy, but some of it, except to the extent that it's common sense. Some things are common sense, you know. You know, if you can spend a tiny fraction of your factories, revenue, to put a more expensive filter on a pipe that's billowing a bunch of nasty looking smoke out. And sure, I mean, that's to me, like, it's just kind of selfish if you don't. People have to, you know, be offended by the smoke everywhere. But then a lot of it gets into, you know, just things that nobody will ever see and can never

verify for themselves. And you start using it as a means of controlling entire industries. And oftentimes for the benefit of some, just an industry that's just as bad, like the battery companies that use tremendous amounts of energy to shill solutions that are far less energy efficient at the end of day for the environment. And when it comes to Ethereum lobbyists

and proof of stake lobbyists, that's my real concern. They're not so much the Dow's except to the extent that Dow successfully able to fund some of these political initiatives. But we already see a little bit now with Coin Center and they act like they're an ally to Bitcoin because Bitcoin traditionally has been the only thing anybody even knew about.

But as they are less reliant on Bitcoin's brand and all the more reliant on the all the coin industry's money, I think we're going to see them in politicians' pockets as one of the largest kind of anti-proof of work on the environment's for the environment's sake groups. But I think that ultimately things like what Brandon is talking about and many of the things that are happening are going to make those talking points hopefully short-lived for the thinking class in our society.

That's a, I'd say a lot of giving a lot of benefit of the doubt there. But I do think ultimately that I'm really bullish on that. Yeah. I agree with you there, man. I do worry about the Ethereum angle of, and not that it would kill Bitcoin, but it would just be, it would just push off the inevitable even longer. And I'm going to be super annoyed if I have to sit through a decade of that crap. So Lisa, thoughts on vespine, mining with methane, you know,

the necessity of having examples like this when it comes to attacks on Bitcoin from an energy front? Yeah, I mean, obviously I love all of this. I love any innovative use of energy. I have a lot of respect for folks in the energy business. They've got the best technologists and they've got access to infrastructure that's in place. But I think what I love about you highlighting this for us, Brandon, what I've told me, my daughter for a very long time, she can't predict where she's going to work when she grows up because it hasn't even been invented yet. And we're looking at these use cases all the time, right?

Bitcoin is creating jobs and companies and use cases that we could have never imagined before. So that's some phenomenal examples. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm going to have to look more to Vespian and maybe who's behind it? Do you know? Yeah, I was just DM me with the guy on Twitter. I forgot his name maybe David. I'll find it in a second.

But he recorded a podcast David Wong? Could it be David Wong? Oh my gosh. I lied. It's Adam Wright Digital underscore or on Twitter. Awesome. I'll have to get him on. Maybe I'll get him and Colin Sullivan on a show together. We'll see.

You should. He recorded an episode with Peter on what Bitcoin. did it was good i got to listen to that that's awesome huh interesting well that's uh i'm glad you brought up this topic uh i i again learn something new every day and i'm excited to dive into that awesome i hammer one more point on that before we move on yeah go ahead okay this one's somewhat selfish but it's going to illustrate uh the big picture here nicely so i wrote an essay about bitcoin called Bitcoin is a pioneer species. And this is the most, I would say, most fun, recent example of Bitcoin acting as a pioneer species. Okay, what's a pioneer species? Let's say a volcano erupts on an island and

kills all life on the island, right? Is that island destined to be just a dead igneous rock for the rest of its life? No. There are certain types of organisms that's role in our ecology is to colonize desolate landscapes and start the ecological succession process of turning a barren landscape into a more complex ecosystem. Yeah, the graphic there starts as a rock, ends as a complex ecosystem, right? And those species are typically a lichen or some sort of a seed that travels through a bird who poops on the island or some sort of floating seed in the ocean. Lands there, it all of a sudden starts decomposing the rock, turns it into soil, then it gets more complex. And as soon as it gets more complex, actually those original pioneer species, they get

out-competed by these more complex species. And then that pioneer species hopefully reproduces, finds a new barren landscape to convert. And, okay, Bitcoin miners are actually a like the pioneer species. They're seeking out these untapped natural resources, which they can then turn into energy assets. Okay. So for example, a river in the middle of nowhere. Okay. We have gravity. We have water. That's a potential energy asset. Bitcoin miners enter the equation because they make financing that operation at a lower cost. Improve the energy investment economics. They come there. Now we have a hydro dam. Great. We have all the this power. And it might take three years before they build a high, high voltage transmission

to move that energy to the source of demand. And in that period of time, you wasted a lot of money on your capex and you have no customers. So Bitcoin acts as that captive demand in the short term as sort of bridges you to your future state. Right. And that's like the ecosystem on that island becoming more advanced over time. And eventually we allow the complexity of society to build up around that energy asset. So it sort of gives us an opportunity to, instead of build population centers around ports, which are good for transportation, water, food, many other reasons. It allows us to use energy assets as the nucleus of human civilizations going forward.

And so maybe Bitcoiners create some sort of a movement online, and we have this new constitution, bickonia, and we go buy an energy asset, in the middle of nowhere and create a special economic zone. And we have all the energy we need, Bitcoin mining, you know, supporting that, et cetera. And so I think that's kind of a cool example. And the final point there is the Bitcoin miners, right, they sort of seed that energy asset. But eventually demand builds up around end users like you and I. We'll pay way more for the energy than the Bitcoin miners do.

So those machines actually get out competed by the more complex society. And then those machines will go somewhere else. And again, seed prosperity everywhere they go, continually bringing more energy assets online. And so I think a Bitcoin miner is sort of as little citadel seeds. They're just spreading human prosperity wherever they go. That's super interesting. I love the idea of, you know, metropolitan and community centers being built around different kind of pillars rather than, what has been done previously because that could kind of upend the state of of current cities and things that we see right now like that there could be mass migrations based on on that incentive structure in the future oh I want to go work towards work in this center where previously it was pretty barren but there was some sort of stranded energy source here

and people go there to work and mine Bitcoin and then it becomes an economic center and a community is built around that that center. And I mean, could, I know, I know that there's definitely scrutiny to be had for Bitcoin City, but is that the first kind of trial run of something like that where there's a city based around an energy source that was prior stranded? Yeah, I think that would be an example. I find that example on the cringier side, but it is an example, right? And I think this will take place over decades, right? The trend now is still urbanizing globally. Developed countries, we sort of get our suburbs and our SUVs and whatever, but underdeveloped countries, they're still massively urbanizing.

And I think that that's, if we look forward to the technological future, which is a grand surveillance state, CBDCs, the urban centers are going to be dystopian hellholes from my perspective. Other people might like it. I like steak. I don't like bugs. And so I would like to maybe be on the periphery of society rather than be in these megastates or megacities essentially with less freedom.

And so it's sort of a self-preservation tool as well. It allows people who don't agree with the narrative, sort of an opt-out method. As long as you have, we can put a nuclear reactor pretty much anywhere. So we can go buy land, put a nuclear reactor there, build society around it, work remotely, you know, start doing some ranching or whatever. And you sort of start to take back certain tools that allow humans to self-organize in a way that's not necessarily dependent on the state. And so our money is digital. We work remotely. Our energy, we can finance ourselves.

And I don't necessarily want to live in this weird Mad Max world where we have like a nuclear bunker. under a mountain or something. I just want more symmetry with the state. And as technology becomes more advanced, that increases the asymmetry of whoever wields that technology, meaning smaller governments can control larger populations, go look at China. And I would like tools in the West to preserve

what we would consider Western liberal values because I think those are the best values we've come across. And I think tools like this help us do that. And so I want symmetry with the state, and I think this is one little puzzle piece. in that end. You think this drives more localized governance in the end? Definitely.

Yeah. That would be my hope. I think that population growth has, I mean, the population that governments used to govern was, was considerably smaller. And so the responsibility of set governments has not only, like, from where they started, it has become too unwieldly for the size of the population because there's so many different subsets of people with differing views like look at the the u.s is what 330 million people more to have a singular government um and i know that you guys have your your individual states and

state laws and everything but like you know i i think it can be argued that that the the federal government deals with too many aspects of day-to-day life on bar on behalf of two too many people. And that getting back to that localized government, governance makes things more suitable for each individual group of people in a localized sense. And maybe Bitcoin married with energy gets us there. So our founding fathers knew that well.

Yes. Yes. Go look at what they were talking about. Yeah. It's been a little lost. It's drifted over time, right? Yeah. That creep.

right, that governmental creep. But yeah, I love this topic. I'm glad you brought it up. I'm going to have to reread Bitcoin as a pioneer species. When I loaded up the page, I was like all the way down to the bottom. So clearly I'd gone through it before, but I need to give it a reread to refresh myself. But with that, we'll do one more rotation. So I'm going to toss it down the line to J.C.

you're up, man. Please do. Let me know what has you bullish. All right. So I think I've been more bullish about lately is the massive seemingly, it's not new, but it's happening more now than ever. All of these people that are coming to, let's say, Bitcoin meetup or that are meeting online in communities or on Twitter who are just learning about Bitcoin are already very passionate about it.

But the difference is that they already know through all of the information that exists out there, that they are only interested in Bitcoin in the so-called crypto industry, that they are not interested in, you know, a bunch of yield generating so-called defy or whatever these things are. You look at it with a clear mind, you can see why many of that is not a good idea. And in the past, certainly there were a lot of people that identified as Bitcoiners, But when you'd get newer people, if they were, they would either be ignorant to the difference of most things. Or if they only liked Bitcoin, it's probably because they only heard of Bitcoin.

They never heard of these other things yet. So as soon as they get on YouTube, they start saying, wait a minute. Look at this roadmap for ice cream coin coin. Whatever. And that's happening. That is dying, I think. This last alt season, if you want to call it that, has really exposed so many people to what an alt. to what crypto trends are, to kind of that whole dynamic of a buy the hot fang and

hope it pumps. Like that's new to some people, which is why they get so excited about it. And then there's others that's not new to them, but they love to gamble and they'll continue gambling all bear market. But then there's people that are actually just looking for the signal in the noise. And for those people, it's much easier than ever to find resources on Bitcoin, why Bitcoin, and to see for yourself the reason why it matters. Some of those principles matter.

The reason why it's hard to change supply. The reason why it's hard to change the issuance or that the transactions are transparent. Privacy is obviously incredibly important, but in my opinion not as important as fully transparent verification. You want both of those things, but verification is fine. and more important.

Because what's the point of having a private thing that you can't trust? So that trend in particular, the people that are meeting who are new and yet somehow very knowledgeable on why they like Bitcoin and nothing else explicitly. And I'm seeing the opposite of that in some of the talking points now with some people if you listen to some of the other podcasts with Udi, Wordheimer, for example, I was talking to him before I got on the show. And in his mind, I don't know how we can be so opposite because he thinks that this is happening less, not more.

And I'm just like, how is it possible for you to think that? Like, I've been doing this for a while, and it's undeniable now how many new people are coming in as people who aren't looking for a get rich quick scheme and who understand what Bitcoin is. And that's the whole point. And that's why I'm so bullish on that. I love that. I've definitely noticed this too, right?

Like this is this was the first cycle where I saw newcomers that had just for the first time bought anything and either immediately or very quickly gravitated to Bitcoin only. And I think part of that is due to the number of great resources that that. that are out there that kind of point out the difference. And the cohesive message around it, right? Because if you look at the narratives around a lot of these other things, they're constantly shifting to make themselves appear relevant versus Bitcoin. Right. So anything whose only purpose was scaling,

because Bitcoin quote unquote doesn't scale is now irrelevant, right? Like look at Bcash and Bitcoin SV. That was, you know, they literally forked themselves in half because they couldn't agree how much they needed to scale. Now you have people delisting Bitcoin SV because they can't even run a node to offer the coin. So it's kind of clear which way that is gone. And at the same time, you know, back when these arguments start, there were no scaling solutions on chain or off chain. And five years later, I use lightning every single day.

I was looking at my known today. And I just scroll through seven days of people streaming sats to the podcast. There's probably somebody listening to me say this right now. And they're streaming me X number of sats per minute. And if you are listening to this right now, drop a boost and tell me that you boosted at this exact moment, because that would be poetic. But, you know, I think that, again, the cohesive narrative of why Bitcoin's important, why it stands out, the kind of firm principles that's been built around that are uncompromising.

And then it's uncanny ability to bake in all of these features that these other protocols made massive tradeoffs to achieve to be the only one that could do it until that was no longer true. I think that's going to happen again and again and again. Right now, top of mind for a lot of people, as with my topic, privacy is a big one. However, we're much better off right now in terms of privacy, in terms of available tools, than we were in regards to scaling in 2017. Five years later, again, you know, Bitcoin's scaling pretty well.

Is it done scaling by no means? Are there UI improvements to be made? Absolutely. But it still doesn't change the fact that I'm having micropayments streamed to me minute by minute for a podcast for like negligible fees whatsoever. That's pretty amazing. And so even today with privacy, we've got, you know, whether it be, you know, coin join, whether it be state chains.

whether it be lightning itself, which is also a scaling solution, whether it be things like Fetamint on the roadmap, there's a lot of interesting things that are happening that help improve Bitcoin privacy. And I think this is going to be the case with a lot of things, whether it be smart contracts, whatever. Whatever is actually useful can and will be ported in layers to Bitcoin. The main difference between these things is time preference.

Ethereum existed because of an impatience of allowing some of those things to exist on Bitcoin and building out a solid foundation. I mean, it's fine that people experiment and build in the interim. But I think if we're realistic about where things go over time, it's that you're going to want a global language for value. and applications that are useful to be built on top of that global language. So yeah, I love that. I love the idea of people coming in Bitcoin only. In terms of what Udi was saying, if you were talking to him about this and he thinks it's happening less,

I don't think so. I think what he's seeing is he's seeing instances more often of people getting angry with a discourse on Twitter in and around Bitcoin only because, you know, Bitcoin maximalists let's, you know, can be quite blunt. I think that's that that can irks people the wrong way. I think there's maybe a difference between being unapologetically drawn to a singular asset because of the qualities of that asset versus just saying things to be a dickhead. like that aren't related to the actual message that you're trying to convey. I think those are two different things.

But at the same time, I think he's seeing instances of pushback towards how people present themselves online and how they speak to each other online. And he's interpreting that as as a break from Bitcoin itself. I don't think so. I think it's just you're going to see more people that can't handle the cutthroat discourse that is Bitcoin Twitter. That can be difficult to handle at times. You're going to have tough skin for that. But again, I think you're right. I've never seen more people come and say Bitcoin just makes sense.

And the quality of people that are seeing it is going up. And usually if there's a rift in that, you can typically find some sort of incentive that would drive that particular position in part. So anyways, that's where I stand. I'll open it up to maybe I'll toss to Lisa here if you have any thoughts on this. Yeah, well, and I love what you said, Bitcoin is a global language for value. It is. J.C., I wish that I was seeing people who came just first to Bitcoin, right? I feel like, in fact, yesterday I was saying to somebody, I just feel like at times just like quitting.

Like I want to get home and just quit having a fight with people about whether it's Bitcoin or Ethereum or all this other crap that's out there. I mean, you cannot put your value system onto someone else's value system. You can't tell them what kind of food to eat, what kind of art to buy. You can't tell them that, you know, public school versus private school, which one is better? What are the pros and cons? You can't put your own values on somebody else. So I've just gotten to the point where, because I don't see that, I do see people who I am around on a daily basis in my personal life who say things to me like, I'm finally going to buy Bitcoin and I think I'm going to buy this basket of other stuff too. And I'm like, like, really?

Like, you see me and talk to me every day. Like, I, but it's, it can't resonate. It doesn't resonate. Everybody goes on their own timeline, right? I first bought, I don't know how many 10 or 20 or however many different cryptos way back when. I mean, and then I just discovered what the, you know, the absolute pristine thing that Bitcoin is. So I just quit fighting with people and just say, okay, you know, just be accepting, try to be nice, try to be kind, try to provide information. But good for you.

It sounds like you're hanging out with great people crown. I guess it depends, too. Like it doesn't necessarily have to be somebody's first step into the space, right? Like inevitably, there's going to be a degree of all I dabbled on this and that. but I've definitely seen quicker transitions from people, right? I've seen quicker, oh, I get it. And it's a symptom of, I guess, when you enter the space too. I think people that maybe enter it in and around this time or late in the bull market

and then see things kind of get wiped out and see a lot. They witness a lot of the rug pulls and they witness a lot of the problems with some of the projects, maybe they're more likely to also understand some of that. But I guess it all depends on where you allocate your capital initially too, because you could be directly incentivized not to understand the difference. There's probably a degree of that as well. I don't know. Like when you have, when you speak to these people and they say,

oh, I'm buying a basket of other things, are they privy to, what they're buying? Is they're like, do they have like, oh, I'm getting this because this? Or is it just like, I'm going to spray and pray? Like, what, Lisa, what's been in your experience? Yeah. Well, in this instance that I'm really referring to, it's someone that I'm dating that I care a ton about.

And we've been dating a year and a half. And he has been very resistant to Bitcoin. He's his wealth manager last week. And his wealth manager just made this enormous case. for how Solana was going to change the world. No, but I have to all of these other things. And I'm like, okay, first of all, your wealth manager, like, what does he really know about Bitcoin?

Well, you know, they're starting to pursue it. And it's a guy at J.P. Morgan. It's, I don't believe that, I don't know how to say this. I don't think wealth managers should be counseling their clients on where to invest unless they truly understand the space. I think it's reckless. I think it is malpractice. I think if you were a doctor and you were prescribing these, you know, unproven treatments to your patients, you'd have your

license taken away. It's just, you know, it's one of these things that I come home and I'm like, okay, I can't argue, right? I give up. Do whatever you want. It's like, oh, your neck hurts. Here's a bottle of oxy. That's what he does. just lobbed, lobbed into his pocket here. So, uh, that's unfortunate.

I don't know. Um, Brandon, did you have, I saw you might have something here. Yeah, Lisa, I'm sorry,

he's a 10, but he believes his wealth manager's advice on Salana. So, so I, I tell him all the time. I'm like, I think I'm going to have to break up with you because you're stupid. Right?

And he's really not. I'm sure he loves that. He's, he laughs. He has the best sense of humor. Oh, that's good. I don't think raw intelligence is actually that good of an indicator for grasping Bitcoin.

I think this is a tangent before I make my actual point. I think it allows you to go really fast to accumulate the knowledge needed to appreciate Bitcoin. But I actually think it's more about open-mindedness, how much you trust the system, ego, being able to put that aside. I think those are actually better indicators for grasping Bitcoin. And sometimes intelligence back to the yuppie elite, it works against you because your institutions you were brought up in, you know, they don't help you accept Bitcoin. Yeah, anyways. Okay. Comments on this one for you, Crown.

So I have lots of comments here. One, I think timing in the cycle really, really matters here. So when the price is pumping, it's 20% APY. Let's go. You know, we're just making money. And Bitcoin is lagging behind. because it's a bigger asset. It takes more to push it around.

And then we have a bear market and now people are starting to ask the question, but where does the yield come from? Thanks to our friend Alan Farrington for hammering that point home. I think it's the most distinct way to deconstruct the Chicoin games. It's just asked that one question. Nobody likes the answers. And so, yeah, in the bear market, that's when Bitcoiners are minted. Right.

That's when reality sets in. That's when self-preservation. sets in, you start to look around. And I also like to think about this concept of how fast do you become a Bitcoiner or what's the ratio of new people, where are the onboarding? The micro and the macro, like, what's happening to an individual? What's an individual's journey like? And the macro is like, what is the context for people at this point in time interacting with Bitcoin?

And so on the micro scale, you know, we would like to believe that humans can learn lessons from reading or thinking or conversations or things like that. But the reality is it seems like most people need to learn lessons the hard way, right? They need to touch the stove. And that's how it was for me. I consider myself a deep thinker, a critical thinker, blah, blah, blah. But in 2017, I got caught up with the Shikoyne narratives and I learned a painful lesson in early 2018. And I decided to double down because I'm stubborn.

And I decided to relearn economics from the ground up, changed my inputs. probably just trying to justify why I lost money trading these shirk coins. And then I found out that Bitcoin actually is the thing here and sort of had a new foundation to keep going. But again, I had to touch the stove. And I think most people do. On the macro side, I think this is an, I don't think this idea has permeated through Bitcoin well enough yet, which is that Bitcoin really hasn't changed that much since it was launched. It's been micro improvements the whole way, but no mean. meaningful changes, no material changes.

It's all just little evolutions. And they're necessary and there are necessary for these things to occur long term. But the core is the same. But what has changed? The context in which Bitcoin exists in, right? This is the first time we're having a credit contraction period in Bitcoin's history. It's the first time where energy markets are breaking. We're in a commodity supply shortage, which will take years to bring more supply online.

And so it kind of actually matters now. And so I think this is Bitcoin, I think it's Bitcoin's true test. We're going to face real enemies now. We're starting to see this. And I also think it's the potential for acceleration, the adoption curve is way, way higher. So in other words, the curve will steep in if we're right about Bitcoin in this next decade because it actually matters. And so I think that's kind of how I see from that perspective.

in terms of are people going to all coins or Bitcoin first? I think the challenge with onboarding straight to Bitcoin or understanding Bitcoin only, why that thesis is rational. The problem with that is you have to understand what money is. And nobody knows what that is. And we're also arrogant to think that we do know what it is because we use it all the time. We spend so much of energy thinking about it. But we're not thinking about it on a deep level. We're just being, we're just little rats in a maze trying to get her a little

tickets. And so I think the prerequisites are holding people back. And I think it probably takes on average, an average person at least 100 hours to grasp Bitcoin to even get close to a deeper understanding or appreciating that at least. And if you're smart, maybe you can do it in less. And so I see it more like we have more context for Bitcoin. There's more content so people can speed run understanding Bitcoin. You can understand it way faster. because there's great content. There's more podcasters. There's more social signaling.

It's no longer as weird, right? And that all speeds up the time to Bitcoin. But I think the process, the proof of work has to be done before you can appreciate this thing. Yeah, you can follow, you can trust a friend and just follow them into Bitcoin and be Bitcoin only because you trust Lisa. But that's not a durable position. And so I think the work has to be done until it's extremely obvious, we could say. Yeah. inflation is coming in, self-preservation.

And yeah, I guess that's how I think about it is there's going to be a lot of people going to the shirkgoings because technology is an easier lift. We can think about Silicon Valley and we can go that route, whereas money is so abstract and it's really hard to grasp, genuinely. Yeah, I think in terms of JC's topic, I think proportionally, like we're going to get more people coming into the quote unquote crypto space as a whole, but percentage wise of all those people, we're going to eke away at a larger chunk of those that are understanding Bitcoin quicker.

But with the influx of so many people, that means that when you look at it on its head, there's just going to be so many that are, coming in and, you know, buying baskets of salana and things like that. Because that's kind of an inevitable part of many people and most people's learning process. But when you're in and around kind of the, the, the, the, the, the coiner circles. Yeah, it's definitely been a year where I've noticed a lot more even like I just, so I just did a workshop in Vancouver on I did like a self-custody workshop and then I did a cold card deep dive

and at that at that workshop I had somebody that volunteered to help out over the course of the day I met them last year at Bitcoin 2021 and or maybe I met him this year but anyways so I had met him in person previously. But yeah, he volunteered to help out. So he was there for like the beginner self-custody walking through wallets. He was invaluable hopping from person to person when I couldn't get there. He would explain stuff to them. Then we did the cold card deep dive.

And while he didn't know of all of the features and hadn't tried them yet, he was still helpful enough to be like, hey, this is what, you know, this is how this works and help people with like, you know, some of the basic functions of it. He understood Bitcoin only. He was definitely on that. He understood like and actually why he had that position. He even, you know, was nice enough to as, because I was sending Bitcoin to, to people there so they could test transactions and everything. He's, he's got mempooled out space pulled up and he's letting me know how many blocks in front of me are in front of me and what the, what the fees were like and everything.

So I could act accordingly. and actually he's in the he's in the chat right now so shout out to tj um he was awesome and then he drops this bomb that he's been in bitcoin for like a year and a bit and i was like damn so you not only got in in in the midst of a bull run in just a flurry of shit coinery uh it managed to to whether that lead yourself down the path of understanding why Bitcoin and then also become knowledgeable that you're literally helping me out with a workshop like I'm going to be out of a job soon if more people started coming in with this quality. So shout out to TJ and all his help. It was amazing. But you know, this is just an example of some of the things I've seen this

year and you love to see it. Yes, is it as prevalent as, you know, I just, I just diversified my crypto portfolio. No, but it's becoming a larger portion because I had never seen it before these past two years and seeing it a handful of times in the past couple of years here has, I just had no idea that it could happen. I just assumed that people's trajectory. would maybe be like my own, where it took years to get there. And it's taking far less time. So yeah, I'll leave those thoughts there. Any other final thoughts on this topic of people coming into Bitcoin and

understanding things more quickly? I guess I'll leave it there. What I'd like to do is I'm going to start, I'm going to start rounding out here, but what I'd like to do is usually near the end of the show, I go around and I just do a quick round of any final thoughts on anything that was said today. And number two, a challenge to you guys would be a recommendation of a piece of content. Whatever that may be, something that has helped you in your Bitcoin journey. It could be a book, a podcast, an article, a movie,

you know, some abstract thing that you've come across. So I'll get us started. So you guys have time to scramble for that second thing. But I'm going to recommend, let me just pull it off my bookshelf here. And I have yet to get through this. But I obviously have his two other books. And one of the guys at the meetup was telling me about a particular quote from this book

and I just loved it. I'm not going to pull it up right now, but it's excellent. Actually, maybe I will because it was, it's worth, it's worth repeating here. So let me pull it up. Anyways,

those of you familiar with Knut's Fanholm, this is where it's from. And I'm going to, I'm going to read out the quote here. By the way, the book is called Everything Divided by 21 million by Canute's Fanholm.

It is his third book. The foreword is by Jeff Booth. I enjoyed his first couple of books. They're just really quick reads. This one, a little bit longer than the last two, but still, like a short,

manageable read. I'm going to, I'm going to read an excerpt from the book that was brought up to me by Murph, a guy that I met at the workshop that he just loved. More false promises, more money printing, more problems, more fear. A vicious downward spiral emerges.

More and more individual rights are given away in favor of causes, supposedly of a greater good to society. People tend to forget that society is nothing but the individuals in it. The crucial fact is often lost somewhere along the path to totalitarianism. Society is you and me. Few fights would be left to fight without terrorists, junkies, poor people, climate change, and viruses. In such a world, politicians would serve no purpose.

Therefore, it is not in their self-interest to ever solve a societal problem, only to wage a perpetual war against it. You're the terrorists they want you to be afraid of. You're the junkie they wish to imprison. You're the carbon they wish to reduce and the virus they hope to contain. You're the poor person that won't vote against his own livelihoods. which only they can provide. To put it in another way,

you're the victim in need of a savior. Assigning a politician to solve a societal problem is a bit like hiring a convicted pedophile to babysit your kids. So this is an excerpt from the pointed mind of Knut's Fanholm's book, everything divided by $21 million. He has a unique way of framing things.

And we did a chat with him at Bitcoin 2020 when Pierre Corbyn was doing a showing of his film called The Great Reset. And great film, but we did a little chat afterwards. We did some audience Q&A with the director, myself, and him. And Canute is very adversarial when it comes to, like, if somebody says something incorrectly, no, no, no, you can't say that. And he's very, he wants to make sure that people get it.

And he wants to make sure that people understand his point of view. And if they've said something he views as incorrect, he will not leave it. He will. So anyways, excellent, excellent stuff that he's, he's kind of, I find them thoroughly entertaining. And there's some definite nuggets of interesting insight in these books. So check it out. In terms of final thoughts, I love that we had a kind of funneling towards the idea of energy and the world at large kind of waking up to Bitcoin inevitably.

And those two things definitely are explicably married together. So yeah, I just had a great conversation. So I'll leave it at that. I'll go around the circle now. So I'll pass it to JC first. Dude, do you have any final thoughts and recommendation? Anything you'd like to share? Well, I like to, you know, it's so hard to find good content sometimes online.

Of course, you know, because it's hard to find people that are not taking money from other things like gambling things. But BBC sessions, but everybody here already knows that. all the Bitcoin Audible stuff is always my favorite. And it's so easy to recommend that because, you know, he's cultivating articles from the entire Bitcoin space. So it's not just his views. It's like all the best thinkers like Gigi and others. And so that is always a consistently high signal source that I like to send people to it,

including actually Swan Bitcoin, even though it's an exchange or really, not really an exchange, more of a place to buy Bitcoin. They have amazing educational tools. tools and I trust them and so much to say that, you know, they know what's important and they've hired amazing people to put that information out there. Yeah, I mean, this has been a great show and hearing everybody's points of view as always and just super bullish about what we're going. And to the mention of like, oh, you must hang around really good people.

That reminds me. We have here, I live in Raleigh, in North Carolina. and we have the the Raleigh Bitcoin Meetup and it's amazing people there guys like Steve that have been running it for years. I don't know if they're only to say their names, but I'll also say

JP he's been doing an amazing work with Bitcoin trusts. Bruno and I've got to say of course Brooks has been one of the guys I've been hanging with most. He works at CME but even though he's here with us, he's got his

office in Wall Street. But all these guys, I mean, And these are, this is the real Bitcoin community and everybody's real community should be local. I mean, it's great. We know each other from the internet and like that's a much bigger fish tank so we get to hang out with awesome people. But your closest people should live close to you. And so I encourage everybody to find people like that around them. And if it doesn't exist, then you should make it. But being around real bit corners every day, it's the best way to stay grounded because, you know, Twitter can do what it.

and it gets kind of crazy and it can almost gaslight you into thinking whatever it wants. Sometimes you're like, that's the point of it. When you have real people around you every day that keep you, you know, on the same page, that's his priceless. Awesome. That's great. Let's do a rotation. Brandon, any final thoughts and recommendations for me? Yeah, absolutely. So to hammer the energy point home one more time, energy is good and more is better. Don't be shy. We want it. If you care about people, you want more energy. We really need to reframe this. If you're for the environment, but you're anti-nuclear, you're just stupid. And so let's think about these things rationally. Physics versus platitudes. Physics always wins. In terms of content,

I was going to say, I'm going to say two, but really it's one. Bitcoin is worse is better by Gwern. That's like my pet favorite article was written in 2011. an extremely lucid thinking. I think it still stands the test of time. So if you haven't seen that one, just Google Bitcoin is worse, it's better. Truly, truly mind-blowing that that was written in 2011. But the point I really want to hammer home is actually about social scalability, which is a term coined by Nick Zabo.

So you can go to unenumerated, that's his blog, or just search money, blockchains, and social scalability. Social scalability is essentially a human's ability to cooperate better. And so we have these certain types of technologies that allow society to scale. Right. So if we have rule of law that allows us to operate in the economy because we all know the rules. And by doing that, we can offload the cognitive burden of, is my trading partner going to kill me? Probably not because there's consequences.

Right. And there's many other such examples of social scalability. I think Bitcoin is the most important one right now. It allows us to create a monetary system that humans can't. corrupt. Okay. This is a huge, huge, huge value point for Bitcoin. The Eiff boys, they miss this entirely. They want to be the new central bankers. But the reality is we want to remove people from the process. And that allows us to say, okay, we have an economy, we have this money game here. Well, the fact that we can't change the rules, that will prevent us from even trying to change

the rules. That reduces the incentive to politicize the money to get close to the power source because it's just not possible if you waste your time. So what does that do? It forces everyone to say, well, I can't cheat, I can't lie, I can't use political games, instead I have to be productive. And on net, that will lead to more productivity per human and a more fair game, right? It's a meritocratic money. Back to Obie, I think that's his quote.

And Purpose takes the opposite of this. It's always vulnerable to capture. And yeah, it works, quote unquote, but how long will it work? before it becomes captured, right? Fiat money works, the petrol dollar system works, but then all of a sudden the system corrupts and over time it breaks. And then there's huge dislocations in society

and it creates a lot of waste. So let's go with Bitcoin, let's remove the humans and let's scale socially. Yeah, that's my point for today. Love it. Thank you guys, really appreciate time. Yeah, no worries. Lisa, you're up finally.

What would you have for any final thoughts and or recommendations? Yeah. Okay. So one of my favorite books is the psychology of money, Morgan Hussel. I found that when I was on my Bitcoin journey, I really had to have a, I really had to have a heart to heart with myself about my relationship with money. Not to get super personal, but I mean, we had massive change in money circumstances I was growing up both directions. And that's pretty eye-opening, especially when you're left with kind of

no money at the end of the rainbow and not loads of money, right? It's like, no, it's not happily ever after. So my journey in Bitcoin was really the, you know, what is a function of money, what's responsible money, et cetera. But this book will help you understand how you think about money and what your personal relationships with money are. And once perhaps you have considered that, you can start to consider what is money inside of the Bitcoin ecosystem. And our final thought would be if you are not in the Bitcoin world and you want to be in the Bitcoin world, please pursue that.

Reach out to folks that you know on Twitter or reach out to your friend that's involved. I've had I'll tell you we interviewed somebody today who is a physicist. Are you there? I can hear you now, but you broke up for a second. I don't know if you can still hear me, so I'll still talk. Just get into the Bitcoin world. Just get into the Bitcoin world. I mean, if she doesn't come back, we can, at least it ended on a,

point to dive into. So yeah, anyways guys, I will say I very much appreciated all of you being here. If Lisa comes back, I'll get a final word from her. But not bad timing. So either way. And the psychology of money.

Oh, there she is. The last we heard from you, and we heard basically all of that, the last we heard from you was just get into Bitcoin. And then it was. Yeah, I'm sorry. All good. Who knows? I interviewed a woman today who's a physicist, and she worked in national defense on some radars for defense purposes, just extremely educated and has decided that she's going to look into some other opportunities, and she's fascinated by Bitcoin.

And so I've also been talking with a guy that works for a hedge fund, and he waits tables at night. both of them know so much about Bitcoin that it is it gives me a lot of hope that there are people from all aspects of life that are coming into Bitcoin. You don't need a financial background. You don't need a college degree. You don't need anything except for the interest and the drive to learn it. And, you know, so I would just say everybody follow your heart when it comes to life because it's, you know, it's going by pretty fast.

and we all, I believe, are put here to do good things for others. So as the swan guys say, like, let's get on the mission. Yeah, absolutely. I love it. Well, with that, I think that's a good way to end it. Let's get on a mission here. Thank you all for being here for the show. Great conversation, great topics.

And, of course, anybody watching, you can follow everybody down below in the show notes. All of their Twitter handles are there. From there, you can likely find everything that they're doing and working on. So yeah, thank you all once again, and you're all welcome back anytime. Thank you, Ben. Thanks, so good to be with you guys. So great show. Awesome.

Thank you guys very much. All right, I'll see you guys soon. Everybody else is watching. Thank you so much for being here. Everybody in the chat, TJ, thank you for coming out. I was stoked to see you pipe up when I started talking about you there. but yeah everybody I hope you enjoyed the show be sure to follow everybody they're all super awesome and you know keep up with what they're doing um of course if you want to help the show uh like

subscribe share all those things super important you can also help the show by hitting up the previously mentioned sponsors in the show notes those were shake pay leaden bit refill keystone bill fall they're all down here and if you really liked what you saw you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. That's strike. dot me slash BTC sessions. You get there. Type in any amount you want and hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice or if you prefer tap to the right. You'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code.

With that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.