BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Louis Shulman, Hodl Magoo, Nate aka BeefOrBacon ep222

Episode Date: December 11, 2021

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What's going on, everybody? Welcome to this show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? We got a killer panel going on today. We've got actually all new guests that have never been on before. So I'm very excited for this. If you haven't already, smash that like button, give this a share. Subscribe if you're not.

All those things are very, very important. As you know, 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. All right. Let's get this thing rolling. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Okay. So before we bring in our guests, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now.

Bitbo.com. dashboard, we're at 47,550 some odd dollars per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up over 2100 sats, not that stack them all you can. Hey, at some point today, so I hear, we're going to be eking past 90% of all Bitcoin being mined. Interesting. Next 10% is going to take, what, 120 years? So yeah. And then finally, in terms of fee, eight sats per byte right now for next block. But if you're willing to wait any period of time, one sat per bite will still do you.

So get in there. Open some lightning channels. Coin join. Do whatever you need to do. Of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, shake pay.com. If you're in Canada and you're buying Bitcoin, so, so easy.

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They've got just a ton of gift cards. You can't even name them all. A bunch of different countries. And you can pay using Bitcoin on chain and lightning. And you earn stats back as you shop as well. So this has been a lifesaver for me. Check them out. Keystone, one of my favorite and most used hardware wallets.

It is 100% air-gapped, meaning you don't plug it into anything internet connected. It's all offline via QR code. So that keeps the keys to your money safe and away from potentially malicious internet connections. It works with a ton of different wallets, blue wallet, wasabi, Spectre, Sparrow, and it's pretty badass in a multi-sig. So check it out. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, get it off paper and into solid steel. Bill Fottle will help you with that at PrivacyPros.com. You know, fire damage, water damage.

The usual helps mitigate those risks and gives that peace of mind. So check them out. And with that, I'm going to finish rambling here. I'm going to bring in my guests today. So we got Lewis, Nate and Magoo. Gentlemen, welcome. We're going to get a quick round of intros out of you guys so the audience can be acquainted with you. Lewis, how about yourself first?

Who are you? What do you do? Yeah, I'm rocking the handheld mic today. I left the stage at the other studio, of course. My name is Louis Schulman. I am a media specialist at Bitcoin Magazine, kind of working on the growth marketing team. I handle a lot of various responsibilities. that relate to Twitter, they relate to growing our email lists for a lot of our different products,

and other general marketing needs. I've been there for about six weeks. And just before that, I graduated from the University of Alabama with a comp site agree. That's kind of my quick intro there. Dude, nice. Congrats on the new job then. Thank you, thank you. I hope it's going well so far. How are you doing? Definitely. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to see you there. I'll be seeing you at Bitcoin 2020. Absolutely. Probably. A couple months away. Yeah, man. Crazy. Let's move down the line. Magoo, first time on the show, but you're always chatting with Bitcoiners.

Let people know who you are, what you do. Yeah, so by day, I am a computer scientist working in the financial industry, specifically in the Bitcoin space for an unnamed company for obvious reasons. And by night, I am a Twitter autist who is shouting and screaming at no-coiners and alt-coiners and teaching people about Bitcoin. That's great. I love that. Those are the best kinds.

Build during the day. Scream at everybody by night. Perfect. Well, welcome, my friend. And Nate, we have seen each other many times via video calls. You explain lots of things about lightning to me. But first time on the show. So welcome.

Let people know who you are, what you do. Thanks, Ben. Yeah. My name's Nate. Folks might know me as beef or bacon one on Twitter. stuff. About three months ago, I joined a Bitcoin team known as Voltage full-time. So I work in Bitcoin full-time for the past few months, which has been amazing. An awesome team building really, really cool products. So I'm happy to be there. Been a Bitcoiner for a while, 100%.

I read all the books. I'm going through Fiat Standard now. I'm just all in on this. And yeah, I'm just a Bitcoiner. Conviction levels of max. You know, Bitcoin loses, humanity loses. So we're here to build it and we're here to do our best. Awesome, man. Well, I'm glad to finally have you on. And to the rest of you guys, I'm really glad to have you on for the first time.

I'm going to kick us off here. So anybody watching that's unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish? And the premise is each one of us comes with a reason for, being bullish. And we go by the three R's. Number one, somebody's going to drop their reason and get to rant on a little bit. Then we're going to riff on that reason altogether. And then we're going to rotate to the next person. So as a general flow of the show, so I'm going to get us kicked off with my reason for being bullish this week. And I've got a visual aid for me right here on sec here. I've got to bring up my screen. So this is a tweet from chain alysis today.

and they said, soon chain analysis will support lightning network transaction monitoring. Yeah, so basically they tweeted this out and then they were just inundated with replies, basically telling

them that they're cancer. And they ended up, if you actually click on it, you can see that they've basically prevented anybody from replying further. and they've they've hidden all of the replies.

There's even somebody lightning junkies here replying. You're literally going to hide all replies. How intellectually honest of you. So you can only see like a few replies here. You see people with some screenshots of them getting blocked. But that's all you can see. You can just see some of the replies to the other replies. And that's it.

So why does this make me bullish? This makes me bullish because Bitcoiners, have this ability to look at hurdles and challenges and come up with solutions. And so the challenge here is, well, chain analysis is selling a service and also pitching it in a way that makes it seem like it's necessary for businesses to use their service to be compliant when that's not exactly true. And then they're trying to disseminate all information of, you know, what's going on on the Bitcoin blockchain. And now the Lightning Network through the Bitcoin blockchain.

But there are a lot of people continuing to work on solutions to what these guys are doing. And so earlier I tweeted out, a short list of things that you can do if you're not a big fan of that. So just as a few examples of things that help preserve privacy. So obviously there's Samurai Whirlpool, which you can use via Samurai on mobile, or you can check out Sparrow Wallet has implemented it now as well. Obviously, there's also Wasabi coin join for larger amounts, but you can also take a peek at that as well.

There is with tradeoffs, liquid network, which has confidential transactions. There's kind of a new entrance in a relatively new novel idea for privacy, which is mercury wallet slash state chains, which is effectively making a UTXOs of Bitcoin for set amounts. And instead of sending them on chain between people, actually trading the private keys. that control those coins so that there's no record of it ever having changed hands

but basically breaking their heuristics with that. And then of course, running your own node is important on a network level. And with any of these methods, feasibly, if you're careful and you had an anonymous lightning node, you could open up channels. You can actually make it so that withdrawing from Mercury wallet could feasibly open up a, lightning channel or you could feasibly, I suppose, make it so that you could coin join directly

into as it leaves, you know, say sparrow wallet. It could join directly to to a lightning channel if I'm not mistaken. So there's a variety of things out there floating around. There's a lot of people building really cool shit around this. And I just love that these guys are a catalyst for Bitcoin becoming more private. So with that, I guess I'll open it up to you guys first for whoever wants to jump in. But what was some of your initial reactions to this announcement? And actually, I might ask this specifically of Nate first since you're working a lot in Lightning. I don't know if you've dove very deep into it yet.

But what are your initial thoughts here? Yeah, so my initial thought was good luck, you know, the Morgan Freeman thing. Just because you, the lightning network is not a public ledger, right? So payments can bounce around. There's private channels. At the current way that you open and close channels, it multi-sig is apparent because the weight is more than a normal transaction. So you can sort of decipher, oh, this is a two-of-two multi-sig. to see that. So that is going to hopefully be fixed in the future with the tap route and everything.

So I'm not sure what else they can do, but I haven't looked too deep into what they're trying to do on that. But you brought up privacy and stuff, and I wanted to bring this up later. But if you go to flow.vultage. cloud, we have a product where you can register a ticket that you can get liquidity for, basically, and we can go into details on that later if you want. But the cool thing about it is when you get that ticket and register it and you get a lightning channel, that uses voltages UTXOs, not yours. So that is a privacy benefit if you wanted to open up channels that way. So I just wanted to bring that up since you brought up privacy.

But, you know, I think as usual, Bitcoiners are going to use this. It's motivation to build. It's always a cat and mouse game. And I think they're the ones that are playing Chase most of the time. Yeah. It's always tough to keep up the regulators and those that are trying to appease the regulators are always, you know, behind the A ball, right? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

Like, I think that part of their business model is making themselves seem smart to people that want to buy their services, not that they're actually smart. That's just my personal opinion. That's fair. Magoo, go ahead. Do you want to say anything about it? Well, on to Nate's point. It's not even that they're trying to make a perception of them being intelligent and even discerning realistic UTXO movements or even off-chain on lightning.

It's that the regulators and the powers at B think that they know what they're doing and they're delivering on KYT in a regulated fashion. because that's all that has to happen is if everyone thinks that KYT is being done properly, like KYT, you know your transaction and regulators believe that it's happening and everyone else does as well, well, it doesn't matter if it's actually working or not because there's not going to be much scrutiny until something rather large happens, like some money laundering,

some of the various activity that goes on that actually passes chain analysis KYT, and then is later determined that it was bad, and chain analysis kind of dropped the ball on it. So that's yet to be seen. But what Nate said, realistically, being bullish on the Bitcoin community to always stay one step ahead of these actors

that are trying to de-anonymize Bitcoin at the core level or even the second level that is, but Nate's spot on. Nice. I like that. Lewis, any thoughts? Yeah, I definitely don't have the,

degree of technical rigor that Nate has about, you know, reasons that we shouldn't be as concerned about this and actually missed the kind of initial tweet. Like, I didn't know about this until you brought it to my attention. There's just, you know, loss happening all the time, as we all know. But I think, you know, one thing, uh, I think about a lot is just like a very generic kind of retail person's experience with Bitcoin and how their understanding might be like a very generically, you buy it on exchange. You send it using exchange tools. And I think that, you know, they see something like that and they're like, oh, this fundamental province has been destroyed. But just for people who haven't done that research for you to be able to come in and make a reply thread with like,

well, here are eight other tools that kind of already exist that kind of circumvent a lot of these things. Like people are just so unaware of existing ways that Bitcoin is way more sophisticated than just buying on like an exchange or doing like a very traditional level one interaction. Not like layer one, but level one interaction isn't like beginner. And if you just do a little bit more digging to see a way around this, again, like the kind of perception that a company like this puts out to be like, we've broken Bitcoin, like to like make these big headlines really don't map, like don't carry nearly as much weight just after like a very, very small amount of digging. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it, I mean, even in the list of tools that I mentioned, there's,

there's ones that, um, uh, you know, things like pay to end point, which is basically every, every transaction becomes like a mini coin join. Like you throw in extra UTXOs, to make it seem like a two-person coin join and to to basically make it so that you can't really tell the amount that was a meant that was meant to be transacted. Things like that, they just completely destroy all of these heuristics that they're using. And when they become commonplace, and I know that Blue Wallet is is working on, on adding things like this, Green Wallet, Samurai already does like their version of it called the moots and stonewall yeah so so a lot of these and bTC pay uh i believe has integrated

or is in the process of integrating pay to endpoint so a lot of these things just yeah sorry nate i know you you want to say no no no you're you're right um yeah you know btc pay has that if uh if the merchant enables it yeah yeah so it's it's i'd like to see it um use more widely but the fact that these tools are available and can be thrown out there to really screw with things and especially paid endpoint where you can't even tell that it's, you know, you can't even tell what's going on really. I think that's fantastic. Yeah, pay join is what is.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I, you know, in the end, like something that on its surface looks shitty is still indeed good for Bitcoin in the long run. As long as you lower your time preference, this too is good for Bitcoin.

So I guess I'll wrap up that topic there. But if anybody watching is curious about that, you can go back to Twitter, just find that thread. If you're curious about a lot of the different things that you can try in and around Bitcoin privacy. Yeah, there's tons of fun stuff to dive into them. So check it out. One thing that is coming out, well, we don't know for sure when it's coming out. But rumors are it's Q1 of 2022 is Wasabi Wallet 2.0. Yes.

And what they're really going to enable the common user to do with basically removing the restriction of how much coins you have to have in a mix is going to allow way more people to do a coin join than is today. Because currently today, I think it's 0.1 BTC. You need to join in on a mix. and you're paying fees of upwards of 0.3% if you have anonymity sets of 100. And so it's not only costly to begin with to have that much to be mixing, but also the fee associated with as well. So really looking forward to Wasabi 2.0.

Yeah. Yeah, ditto here. What a lot of people don't realize is that coin, like only a small percent of the entire network has to use some sort of coin join properly for the entire ledger to, have their heuristics really, really put into doubt. I think it was like 10 to 20 percent. I think if the whole network was sort of coin joint in some fashion, then plausible deniability for the whole network is pretty much achieved at that point.

Yeah. The only, you know, like a reasonable way. The only, the only bearish thing I have on that is if you, if you've read the Bitcoin standard and you agree that's how transactions are going to be done in the future in terms of basically having Bitcoin banks and very few individuals actually transacting on the base layer. Those individuals are probably going to be financial institutions and very large individuals that are going to be adhering to regulation KYC, KYT, all that stuff. So to think that the average user or even 10% of the on-chain network is going to be doing coin joins is I don't think realistic. Like this is stretching it out 15, 20 years. Like this isn't the next couple of years, right?

Because for that fee market to develop, the fees have to go up externally for the amount of, and also the users and the consumption of the block space has to go up in very big numbers. And I just think that if we, when we get to that point, the majority of the people making on-chain transactions are not going to be your average user just making on-change transactions. If they're going to be, they're going to be institutions at that point. if we have more wallet makers that make it sort of like hidden but like happening right i think that's probably the only way to achieve that i don't think we're going to have to rely on people to like actively go out and do that i think the wallets will have to do that yeah the ux and

the ui just kind of obfuscate that it's actually happening right and there's there's companies already out there that are doing that like bull bitcoin for example um i'm pretty sure they have a mixer built into their withdrawals of their software um because they're non-custodial exchange. So like that is the way to basically put it under underneath the skin of the UI and actually just do it without the users actually knowing. But you're right. It'd be it'd be really good to see a lot of not just exchanges but mobile wallet users and all these other things to actually build that into their wallets and their software. I like the way speaking of bull Bitcoin. What I love about what they're doing in the background. So they do use wasabi in the background.

So they coin join everything that comes through there. And so what that, in essence, what that does is when you're buying coins on bull Bitcoin, you can't go back through the history of that and see whose coins they were previously. So it breaks that ability. Obviously, they are, you know, they're a regulated company within Canada. And so they, you know, they still have like KYC and stuff like that. But it does break that ability to somebody to retroactive. look at the history of the coins they've just purchased, which can prevent certain attack vectors.

But I love the angle that Francis has taken on it. And what he has said is he looks at the regulations in terms of in and around user privacy. And he says, by not coin joining, he would be breaking the law, saying that he's giving up history and potentially information about individuals. and how much they hold outside of bull Bitcoin by not coin joining everything that comes through because somebody could retroactively look back and see who owns what after it goes through an exchange. So I like that idea. I like the angle that he's taking there.

I think it's a fun way to basically look at the regulations that are here now and interpret them in a way that can be used for user benefit, rather than to their detriment. And I was going to say one other thing just on the topic of other ways to help with privacy. And Magoo, we were kind of talking before the show started, but the transfer of physical Bitcoin, aka open dimes, that, you know, like, chain analysis can't see that, right? When I put something on an open dime and I hand it to somebody and that's changed hands, It's the physical representation of what's happening with state chains, the exact same thing. The keys change hands, but there's no record of anything having happened on chain, which is awesome.

So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's another way that that breaks their algos, right? That's completely off chain with the open dimes. And then to another degree, like local Bitcoin, when you're doing like peer-to-peer type of transactions for certain things. You're really breaking a lot of links, right? Because like I was talking about earlier, chain analysis specifically has their own

algo to determine with on-chain UTXO movements to determine if they've actually moved hands like from one entity to another versus just moving from a UTXO to another UTXOs. Things that they use are basically, did you move the whole coin amount from one UTXO to another UTXO? Then they can basically be like, well, this is probably the same person. they look at time from how much time has passed since that last UTXO has accessed and then also moving down the road in the future, how fast was that UTXO moved when it got transferred from the old UTXO. So they look at a lot of things to determine if it's actually been moved to entity to entity rather than just UTXO to UTXO. So there's things you can do there as well, even on chain to mitigate their algos, basically thinking that, oh, this is the same person.

you can trick them into thinking that it's another person as well, depending on how you set up your transaction and what you do. So there's a lot of different ways that you can kind of fool their holistic algorithms. But that takes a little bit of knowledge to do and maybe even some insider knowledge to know exactly what their algos are doing. But there's plenty of ways to kind of break that down. Yeah. Yeah.

That's great. Well, I think I'll round up this topic here. And again, just to summarize anything. that puts up a hurdle or a challenge for Bitcoin. Bitcoiners tend to step up to the plate and solve that problem. And I look forward to more of the same, because that's been the historical president so far. So let's keep this rolling.

Of course, everybody that's here in the chat, thank you for being here. And I'll start pulling more of your comments up now that it's not my topic. But, of course, hit that like button, give this a share. Let's get some more plebs in the room. and I guess I'll toss it down the line here. I'll toss it to Lewis and yeah, I'll just ask you, what are you excited about this week?

What has you feeling bullish? Yeah, I was thinking about this kind of the week leading up to the show what I was going to say. And the kind of script I had in my head was something along the lines of I'm relatively new to Bitcoin, like the Fudd I here today. I've only like recently studied Bitcoin history. And then I kind of like compare the two. And I'm like, oh, the things today are like, you know, way smaller Fudd than they

used to be. That's kind of like a, you know, any plebs new to Bitcoin can say that. Because then like what changed my mind and made me want to talk about something different, just this kind of random experience I had just a couple of days ago. I'm kind of obscure the details of as to how it came about. But I met like a recent refugee from Afghanistan a few days ago and had a pretty extensive maybe hour long in person chat about some of like, you know, obviously the reasons for leaving are pretty self-evident. It's not a good situation there right now. We're discussing like the kind of additional challenges on their path because, you know, they left, but not

everyone that they care about has had that same opportunity. And we're discussed and immediately what comes up is like, well, how are you getting money to the people back there? And they're telling a story about the challenges they're facing with, you know, obviously with the essentially like all essential government services changing operations, like changing the operator from, you know, who was before to who it is now. And a lot of them just having no new operator, it's like impossible to use the old Fiat rails to send money back there. So, like, one thing they did is, like, literally find someone in the U.S. and exchange Fiat in the U.S.

and then, like, get a counterpart of people who knew each other that were both there to exchange physical currency. So it's like a super abstracted, like, your friend in the U.S. will trade for you. And then my friend who's still in Afghanistan will trade with someone you know who's still there. And, like, that's how they had to do it because, like, the Fiat provided no rails to doing this.

And I kind of, like, pose the question. Like, why, like, you know, why is Bitcoin not coming about here? And of course, I'm, like, very, I don't want to say ignorant, but I know very little about, like, day-to-to-day life in Afghanistan. in especially now and even more then. I'm like, to what extent do people have smartphones? To what extent do people have internet access?

And his answer was like high across the board, like Android and Apple phones, like pretty decent internet access. And it's kind of one of these stories of like an extremely clear scenario where there's a huge group of people that would massively benefit from like, you know, widespread Bitcoin adoption that don't necessarily know about it. And this person I was speaking with is someone who's very technically proficient,

like trained in like a technical discipline, not someone who's not native to the internet. Someone is very familiar with all these tools. And the fact that they did not know about it, think of it as an option on the existing infrastructure is there. It's kind of like, this is a very base layer initial use case of Bitcoin that's not been fully realized.

That just has the potential to massively help a lot of people's lives and reduce having money in a very unstable situation. And with a currency like in rapid decline now, that started happening these past couple weeks there because the new regime has kind of run out of operating funds. So they're having to use inflation to adjust the exchange rates and things like that to keep things going. So this is becoming increasingly important every day. And it seems like Bitcoin's a possible solution.

That's just not being talked about broadly enough. Yeah. I love this topic because it kind of brings up. And Alex Gladstein does a lot of good work in and around this space talking about how Bitcoin can benefit people around the globe in, in dire conditions in totalitarian regimes and places where, you know, for whatever reason, they either don't have access to or aren't allowed to access financial rails. And so one of the first books I ever read about Bitcoin was back in 2014 or 15. It was called The Age of Cryptocurrency.

It was by Mike Casey and Paul Vina from Wals. Street Journal. And the first chapter talks about a girl named Roya Mabub from Afghanistan. And she was head of the women's or the girls robotics team in Afghanistan, which was basically very difficult because at the time, you know, it wasn't looked, it wasn't looked upon as a nice thing for girls to be doing technical and intellectual things. And on top of that, women are not allowed to hold bank accounts. So for any type of funding for this project of hers, she basically wasn't allowed to transact without the permission of a man.

And so what she started doing is she started using Bitcoin. She basically subverted all of the rules and regulations around women not being able to do their own finances. And she started paying the girls from the robotics team with Bitcoin. And this kind of came full circle when the Human Rights Foundation hosted the Oslo Freedom Forum in Miami just a couple months ago, a few months back. And I went down and Alex Gladstein was nice enough to have me down and help and see. And I got to meet Roya, the same girl that I read about back in 2014. And it was just one of those moments where you realize that Bitcoin is actually indeed helping people around.

the globe. And unfortunately for, for Royal when she was there, well, you know, people caught wind of what she was doing. And they, they tried to kill her. They tried to kill her.

And she had to escape Afghanistan. But in doing so, she was able to leave Afghanistan with her assets as well, with Bitcoin. So that's huge. That is huge. That's a huge use case of Bitcoin that you don't even hear people talking about anymore. Because the latest stuff that you hear is,

when when institution, when price go higher, you don't see people singling out these super important stories where Bitcoin was actually discovered. Like why? Why it's being being prompt to basically be the financial asset of the world is because it's actually fundamentally solving these problems of the world, the unbanked. And that's, you're just pointing out one specific use case of unbanked because of a specific country and their regulation and their religious beliefs that are holding certain individuals back from having a bank account. And well, Bitcoin solves that.

Somebody in the comments, MG, but NBC told me that Bitcoin is for white supremacists. Well, it wouldn't be. It wouldn't be. It wouldn't be funnier if he was actually joking and that was a troll. But like that's actually the narrative that they're pushing.

Like at least the tweets that I've seen like they're pushing a narrative that's like literally is for it's like literally for right ring individuals that are well this was today this tweet do you see that this yeah this is what i'm talking about yeah the bitcoin surge was a windfall for white supremacist research finds and they say that 600 addresses used by white supremacists and far right extremists uh made money like how many millions this this this whole argument like their underlying thesis here is such a fallacy like do bad people People use cars. Yes. Do bad people use pencils? Yes. Like that's not the point. You know, cars are up a lot in value this year. Yeah. Right. Like so. Or just like do bad people hold Fiat assets like stocks? Yeah. Exactly. If they want to play this game like let's play it with them and saying what's the number one currency that used for terrorist activity in laundering around the world? It's the dollar. Like so even on their own fallacy argument like they get wrecked. Like not actually even talking about the fund. of the argument in a philosophical way that they're completely wrong about.

But it's just laughable, like how how ignorant they are. But like the sad part is you know they're not ignorant. They're smart and they are actually trying to drive a narrative and push forward a narrative. And they know they're not right. They just they're paid to push a narrative. Yeah. Yeah. It's unfortunate.

But again, like people can see through this. Most intelligent people can see through that argument. Like even in talking to my friends that aren't into Bitcoin, I'm like, oh, yeah, they said that, uh, they said that people who were white supremacists made money on Bitcoin. And, you know, some of the first responses were like, well, didn't anybody holding Bitcoin make money? Like, you'd be, you'd be surprised. Because they're white supremacists, right? Yeah, exactly.

They got extra leverage on finance. It allowed them to do that. No. But like being realistic, they're. you'd be surprised. I talk to a lot of people that are quote-unquote educated people that are still ignorant. Not because they've researched it and they've found otherwise. It's because they haven't taken the time to research. And instead of saying, I don't know, they think because they're educated or whatever it may be that they're entitled to have an opinion or need to voice an opinion

that's not educated. And they just come off as, well, stupid. Yeah. Now, to Lewis's point about where it's where it's helping people in other nations, like there were so many great stories down in Miami. You know, we had, what's his name is, Fodei. He's from Senegal. And Alex Glaston did a really great piece on kind of the economic,

colonialism that's still taking place between a bunch of African nations and France, where basically France creates their currencies for them and gets first rights to bid on any exports of goods or resources. And in doing so, can then print the money to buy said resources or goods. And so they can basically debase these countries' currencies overnight and just siphon away all of the economic power in these regions. So Fode was, you know, he's from Senegal, and he basically experienced this right before he was going to come to the U.S. for school. They debased his currency by 50% overnight.

And luckily, his dad was able to leverage his book deal that he had to basically get an advance on potential profits from the book to get just enough money to cover the visas. necessary for him to get stateside. But it's insane how disenfranchised these people are by this, again, economic colonialism that's happening down there. And Bitcoin serves as a way out because they don't let them have other currencies there. There's no easy way to get into and out of other currencies. You're all, you're stuck with whatever the hell you have and whatever France deems the value of it to be.

And it's really unfortunate. There was also Farida from Togo talking about similar topics down in Miami. And yeah, there was a lot of really unfortunate things. There were people from now I'm losing my Belarus because the election there, basically people that were protesting and creating content in and around opposing the existing government. Well, they all had their bank account shutdown and everything. And they were actually using Bitcoin as a way to fund their projects within the country. So you see it a lot if you look for it.

But you're absolutely right. It's it's not the thing that makes the news. It's the price fluctuations and the and the scary stories about all this scary white. It's too bad. Yeah. It's because, unfortunately, we live in a time where all financial markets are not based on fundamentals anymore. they're based on narratives. And even in most cases, bad news still somehow pumps the price of assets all around

just because it's news and it's a narrative. And so I think we will get back to a point where underlying fundamentals will be the main driver in markets. So there's that to look forward to. It's just that right now that's not the case. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Nate, anything you want to add in here? Yeah, just a couple of quick things, I guess. I consider myself a pretty okay student of history for the most part.

And I think there's a lot of times in history where a lot of people who wanted to leave their homeland or whatever had, but decided not to because they're leaving 30, 40, 50 years of their labor behind. Right. And they decided to stay. And then like the worst possible thing you can imagine happens. You know, Bitcoin fixes this right now, thankfully. And yeah, in the Afghanistan thing, I've heard rumors, I'll just say that, that there is sort of a remittance black market sort of going on with Bitcoin over there. Like they don't have Bitcoin ATMs, but they have people I've heard about.

Oh, there's remittance black markets for Bitcoin everywhere, like not just not a certain country. Yeah, I just want to say like that specifically, though, because ever since, you know, the whole shit went down and they brought all it, you know, families got split up, you know, and you're trying to take care of them. Yeah, like not to touch on this more, but another country is Venezuela. I'm seeing a ton of individuals that are fleeing Venezuela. They're coming with most of their their net worth intact in the form of Bitcoin. And they're actually using Bitcoins in remittance to get money back to their family that weren't able to make it out. Because if it wasn't for Bitcoin, they'd have to use traditional Western Union. And that stuff is very dangerous in countries like Venezuela and Afghanistan.

I'm pretty sure Afghanistan have even had their remittance lines cut off from American companies like Western Union. So it is a huge human rights fundamental piece of technology that is saving. a lot of people. So maybe even maybe that's like a good stacking goal. I mean, it's kind of arbitrary for everybody, but it's kind of like stacked to the point where you'd be happy to like grab your wallet and leave everything else behind. Like you have enough to at least do that and be okay.

Yeah. Even if you're in a first world country, I still think that's worth probably. Yeah, because that's because to me, that's not even indicative of like the quote unquote stacking lifestyle because they're not looking at this as a way to get gains or alpha for their portfolio. They're looking at using this as an underlying piece of technology that's going to allow them to live probably, or at least be prosperous, and not have their money basically inflated away.

Or in a very worst case, they're able to send money back to their family that's still in those jurisdictions that are very, let's just call them non-profitable areas of the world. Yeah, I think it's kind of just part of the broader media sci-ups type stuff we see all the time, right? Like the media will tell these stories about Bitcoin being crazy, volatile and unpredictable in terms of price, right?

20, 30% drawdowns, whatever. But you're not seeing like, like no one can flip their finger and switch like a light switch and it goes to zero or you just can't receive it. Again, it's just like you, it's a tradeoff that. who understands it is very happy to accept short-term price volatility of 20 to, let's even get really generous and say like 80% when the alternative is like a complete shutdown of like your,

you know, frozen assets in Belarus or something. Yeah. Yeah. And not to mention that the majority of the volatility, if you zoom out, it's volatility to the upside, right? Yeah. Well, we live in this Fiat world of short-term thinking, right? Like, you know, you get everybody. We're still more than double this time last year. Yeah, and nobody likes to think in years. People are thinking in weeks, maybe months, maybe quarters. Yeah, yeah, five minute candles. Oh, yeah, I love it.

I love the DGens just posting one minute candle chart. Tactical analysis. I just, I try not to smash my face on my desk every time I see one of these T leaf readers posting one minute charts. I'm like, oh my. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me the log chart zoomed out for the past 13 years. I'll take that one.

exactly yeah uh cool all right well yeah this was a great topic thank you louis so much for bringing this one up uh because it's it's an important one and it's one that um you know even with all of glad scenes work that he's been doing it doesn't get nearly enough attention for the unbanked i don't think there's such thing as too much air time for that uh release name yeah yeah yeah amen well uh everybody watching uh of course smash that like button give this a share subscribe if you're not already we're to keep it rolling here. Oh, and keep those comments coming. I'll bring them up when I can. Magoo, you are up, my friend. What has you feeling bullish this week? What are you excited about? Maybe not particularly this week, but kind of an overall thesis of the last year and a half of what's been

happening. I have an underlying thesis that most models that people are shilling to people in wherever they may be shilling it around price predictions or technical analysis. on-chain metrics, whatever their model is. I think it's fundamentally flawed just because they're all going to be broken, like not to quote Chad Saylor, but like all your models will be broken, like eventually. And I don't mean just like models be broken up to the upside. Like they can be broken to the downside and to the upside simultaneously or not like right away, but eventually, right?

Like all you have to do is look at plan B's. Like everyone's like, oh, this is too. bearish, it's going to break to the upside. Well, where are we? We broke to the downside, right? Model invalidated. Right. So I think that is like the destiny for all models. And I think the only underlying fundamental thing that you can look at in terms of gauging anything of where the price is going to be going is the hoddle rate and the overall adoption, right? Because at the end of the day, Bitcoin's call it a commodity and it has a certain demand versus supply versus demand economics around how many new coins are coming onto the market, whether it be from block rewards or individual

whales or people deterministically selling at a given price point. Those are the coins coming on to the market. And on the demand side, you have institutional's, high net worth individuals, retail investors that have high conviction and they're periodically taking coins off the market for a very long substantial period of time. And what I've noticed over the last year, the whole meme of the DCA into the market has like went parabolic and the amount of people that are actually DCAing in and not even caring what the prices or what the current narrative is or what anyone's chilling for a price model. They have a DCA set and that those are coins coming off to the market every week, every day, every month. And that is growing. Like those people are growing more people that are

DCanging on the retail level, on the institutional level, on every single level, there's more and more people that are just buying. They have very high conviction. They don't care what's happening. They're just buying. And that's the end of the story. And they're locking those up for a long period of time. So I think the only thing that we can rely on is just looking at those individuals and these

entities that are just nonstop buying. They don't care what the price is. You can point to many different people like micro strategies. They're just buying. They don't care what price they buy at. They don't care if it corrects or whatever it may be. they're just buying and to the end of time. And I think that group of people and entities has drastically increased over the last year and a half. And now that you've gotten institutional into this in a big way,

and you're going to get even bigger institutions coming in over the next few years, I think that hoddle, that hoddle rate is going to drastically increase, which just automatically, they shift the supply demand economics into the favor of the price going up. So that That's what makes me bullish, right? Like, I don't look at the short term and I look at the long term like four, five, six years, 10 years down the road. And I just see the fundamentals that are actually increasing in a very positive way. And I just think that's eventually what's going to drive us to some pretty insane numbers.

I just sent my, my wife has been saying, you know what? For the new year, I want to set up a DCA plan. So she's going to be DCAing. Boom, one more. One more into the pile. Yeah, exactly. And I like that this has become the meme that, that, you know, all the solid bitcoins or all the solid bitcoins out there are starting to, you know, they recognize it for themselves. They start doing it themselves. But then that becomes the advice that goes out to the newcomers that come to them as like the Bitcoin person and in their group of friends. They, they get to be the one to say, you know what? Just you need to ignore everything. You just set it and forget it and have it every, you know, every week, every couple of weeks, once a month, whatever it may be. Just set it.

Don't look at it and don't even look at it for like five years, whatever it may be. Yeah, just let it accumulate. Because go ahead. Yeah, because realistically, Bitcoin as an asset, not a network, the asset, it's either worth nothing or it's worth like millions of coin. and so you put in your own research. Don't don't take financial quote unquote advice from individuals that are selling retail merchandise, like hats and T-shirts and giving you financial advice. Actually go out and do your own research into what Bitcoin is and what monetary theory is

and what the monetary environment is. Come up with your own conclusion if you think Bitcoin can address the market that it's trying to address being basically the global store value. asset and you run the numbers and it's either going to succeed or fail. And if it succeed, you're talking about a 200 to a 400 trillion dollar market and it fails. It's a zero. So this is that the risks reward payoff, right? So it's pretty obvious to me, like once I do the research on how little risk this is compared to how big of a reward this is. Now, the other, the other phenomenon that we're seeing more, and you see it with like, you know, what Jack Mallors is

doing and with, I mean, myself with a lot of other Bitcoiners, they're, they're now trying to get their salaries in Bitcoin or, you know, the hashtag, like pay me in Bitcoin. I think that's a great development. And there's, yeah, and I love that idea, people taking a portion of their paycheck and they automatically get in Bitcoin. And to take it to just one more extreme courtesy of laser hoddle. I love the hashtag get on zero as in zero Fiat. Just move to a full Bitcoin standard, which is basically kind of the path I'm at right now. So he's like he's saying stop averaging out of Fiat, just get on zero. You know, he's got some good tweets on it.

Man to man to folks on the lifeboat. But won't there be taxes? I love some of the memes coming out of this. But like the general message is, you know, which money do you want to be most exposed to? And for some, you know, the volatility is difficult and may not work. And it depends kind of on your cash flow. But like for me, I made that leap. And basically I'd say 90 plus percent. of my income is in Bitcoin.

And then I use like full Bitcoin to to pay my bills or or I have my shake pay card if I do have Fiat and I earn Bitcoin back when I use it. And that's kind of the world I like to live in. So it's not a bad place to be, right? It all comes down to risk management. Right. Like if you're an 85 year old lady who's on a fixed income, well, I obviously, and we shouldn't recommend.

her going on to a 100% Bitcoin standard, right? Because, well, that's just not good risk management. Like, I know a lot of people, like, when they talk about modern portfolio theory and how it's not compatible with the monetization of a global reserve asset in the making, but you still have to take risk management into account when you're allocating the Bitcoin. Me personally, myself, like, I'm almost at 100%. but I'm in a specific situation, right? Like, I'm not going to get into it, but like you got to look at your own situation.

Like, you can't be putting money in money that you could desperately need, like, that you actually need to live and survive on. So you just need to be very calculated on what decisions you're making with and your risk, risk allocations. You kind of, to your point, especially initially, I think that's a good tactic of like, okay, make sure you've got money to the side in, in the yacht that could cover you in the event of some sort of a financial hardship. But it's funny, as you allocate more and more to Bitcoin, it becomes less and less

necessary because over the years your next gig of Bitcoin, it builds so much so that even a massive like 80% drop wouldn't wipe you out in terms of purchasing power. So then it becomes like, well, I don't necessarily really need the the Fiat cushion anymore because the market could get decimated and I would still be better off. Yeah, no. And not only not only that, but usually as you start allocating and you allocate more, over time, you're actually having a vested interest in it and actually researching it and that just builds your conviction and you're less worried about it at that aspect as well, because the more

that you research Bitcoin, at least for me and what I've noticed people around me is the more hours you put into it and researching it, the higher conviction goes. Show me somebody that fundamentally understands every nook and cranny about the Bitcoin economy and Bitcoin itself and show me that they're bearish long term. then I'll show you a liar. That's a good point. Like who reads, who as they're,

you know, educating themselves, loses conviction, right? Or loses, I don't know. I've never heard of such a thing. Yeah.

That's what I mean. Show me somebody. Show me somebody. Yeah, the only time my conviction shakes is when I accidentally plug into Fiat news sources and Fiat education sources. You know,

just click a wrong link in an email or friends sends you an article about something unrelated. and then you get the ads on that website for the other stuff. Anytime you actually hear a Bitcoin or explain Bitcoin in Bitcoin terms, you're like, yeah, brings you back to the center. Yeah. I love the, I love the meme, how to protect yourself from Bitcoin FUD and it's just somebody putting in the earplugs. No, that's that that's spot on, right?

Like, and even better, like I don't even engage with a lot of the FUD anymore because like for us that have been in the space for quite a while, we've seen the same FUD be. regurgitated over and over again. We addressed it in 2014 and then it came up in 2017. And now it's here and end of 2021. You're like, guys, like if you're going to throw FUD in our face, can at least be educated, new FUD, not completely recycled, basically already been squashed down and proved wrong FUD over and over again. Like so at that point, it's not even fun for me to troll them because it's why I've already

trolled them in 2014 and I got my laughs. And now it's like, you guys aren't. even original. That's why everyone's got to read their Bitcoin history books. Yeah, no, they definitely do. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, and that's why it comes with time, because everything being recycled, if you're long enough, if you're around long enough, you'll be through all of the different fud points at least once. And then when you see them start to repeat,

you're like, ah, I made it to the promised land. I've, I, nothing can shake me anymore. I don't know if this will direct us completely, but this is something I completely wanted bring up that I forgot to just speaking of recycled fud being reversed just like the hash rate hitting all-time highs within months of the China ban I mean that's pretty yeah so that's that's huge that's part of my my underlying thesis on the front the actual quote unquote fundamentals of the Bitcoin network of the hash rate being one of them the hoddle rate being another one and then the commerce happening on like block space for for example right and when you have literal a hash rate hitting all-time high or near all-time highs when the price is like dumping from wherever we dump from 68 to wherever

we're at right now it just shows you that the market is not reacting to fundamentals whatsoever yeah bullish yeah absolutely well again great topic thank you magoo for that i uh this is a solid one um yeah let's keep it rolling then uh everybody in the chat of course like sub share all those good things we're going to toss down the line for a last reason for being bullish of the week. Nate, you're up. What are you excited about? Yeah. So, okay.

So I work at Voltage. Voltage is a Lightning cloud hosting provider, but we do a lot of other stuff also. And one thing that we came out with is a way to request liquidity from the Lightning Labs pool auction server. in a way where you don't have to create a pool account and you don't have to sort of have sats to get sets. So for example, if I'm a new merchant and I want to just accept payments, all I would need is this little ticket and you paste it into Lightning Terminal, which is available on Umbrell and My Node and whatever, and you are now requesting liquidity from a pool of other Lightning Node runners who are looking to lease their liquidity to you and make a yield. on it right so um it's it's an awesome way if you are running a lightning node to make a few sats or if you i mean not flow specifically but pool flow is just for getting liquidity um and i i don't want to

like encourage everyone to go to flow dot voltage dot cloud and play around with it it's really really cool but um i wanted to segue that into the real bullish thing i got this week which is merchant adoption right um specifically on the lightning network uh for and i got a couple examples one of the big examples that i kind of think flew under the radar but i think it's huge was last week in austin there was the first bitcoin block party where um there's a street in austin called rainy street which is a bunch of bars and uh restaurants and stuff and um shout out to mike atwood who uh is the head guy at the OSHA app OSHA, which I encourage everyone to also download and try out, got a bunch of merchants to accept Bitcoin for a night using the OSHA app, which is a really, really cool app

because you essentially use your own phone to make the order, and then the merchant just scans the voucher that you bought it with. And then they could do sad specs, sets reward, all this stuff. It's a really, really, really cool concept, and I'm sure they're going to grow it out. I really sort of ever since, ever since strike has this whole pay lightning invoices or on-chain addresses with dollars, essentially, I've been thinking more and more about sort of merchant adoption. And I think that disruption is right around the corner for Stripe and for Clover. and I really see I'm just super super bullish on that merchant self-sovereign stack where you know you can have an automated I mean I see it I know it's going to happen you can have like this automated liquidity thing going on under the hood with with lightning with the pool service or whatever else comes out in the future and then BTC pay server or whatever and it's all it's all yours and maybe on the back end I'm I've already know that the guys that BTC pay are actually working on a way to, when someone pays your invoice through BTC pay server,

it automatically sends it to exchanges and liquidates it. So if you want Fiat on the backhand automatically, that's soon going to be possible. So I'm really bullish on the merchants that are actually Bitcoin curious and stuff, but I think that the merchants that are like sick of paying 3% plus 40 cents on a $5 cup of or latte or whatever, like that's ridiculous. And I think I'm bullish on them figuring out better solutions. And I've been talking to a lot of small business owners.

That's part of my job as support engineers to try to help solve some of these problems that businesses are having. And I'm really excited because there's more and more that are sort of figuring out that there's a better way. So that's that in a nutshell. I like that. we've kind of gone through and who was I talking about this with the other day

oh I was talking with Jean from Shakepay but we were talking about kind of the progression of the excitement of what's happening in Bitcoin and so like initially you know you go back to 2014 2015 it was all like merchant adoption merchant adoption everywhere but they were going at it with on chain and you know from

we should have known from history already with Satoshi Dice, which was just like an online gambling platform that that settled everything to the blockchain completely and basically started spamming blocks full of these, you know, online poker games and everything. The good old days. Yeah, yeah, back in the good old days. We should have known that that on chain for everything was going to not be the desirable way to go. if we wanted to maintain decentralization and keep running a node accessible,

well, we kind of, we went past that and then, you know, the ethos of, and the understanding that Bitcoin is like the soundest money that humanity has ever seen, and it's this amazing store of value, and you can stack stats. And there's the, you know, there was the mentality of never sell your Bitcoin, never let it leave your site and dump your fiat and everything like that. But now, actually tying into what Nate is saying here and the merchant adoption that's happening now, I think that pairs nicely with the hashtag get on zero because it's like that midwit meme where it's like spend your Bitcoin and everybody's excited. And then the midwit of like never use your Bitcoin, it's never going anywhere. And then like the genius that's like spend your Bitcoin because there's nothing left else to spend.

fiat is is a distant memory and there's only bitcoin yeah and so i think i think we're going through that progression of like people that are are more so based in in bitcoin and it's you know there's obviously it makes sense to have those um easy transactions and cross-border transactions stuff like that with with you know minimal or or or very very small fees remittances and all that but on a grander scheme i also think the idea of merchant adoption is very important too. So anyway, I mean, I could totally understand why a Bitcoin or doesn't want to buy stuff with their Bitcoin, right?

You want to spend the crappy money first, which totally makes sense because that's what I do also. But, you know, when strike came around, that sort of set off a light ball, you know, and the cool thing is if a merchant is offsetting those savings from their point of sale system to the customer or not even just discount, but like SATs back. Like that sounds a lot cooler to me, right? So like IQ strike, pay a lightning invoice with dollars, and get stats back for it. Now as a Bitcoiner, I'm like, all right, this is sweet.

So there's so many cool little things like that that I'm just super pumped for. Absolutely. Mugu, do you have any, or Lewis, do you have any thoughts? I was going to say, you know, Bitcoiners might not want to spend their Bitcoin, but like a lot of merchants that quote unquote get it will certainly want to get paid in Bitcoin. So they'll come up with their own ways to incentivize it. Yeah. from that perspective.

To me, the way that I look at it, the only Bitcoiners that don't want to spend their Bitcoin are Bitcoiners that still have Fiat, right? So they either have whatever, a nest of Fiat, or they're having a constant stream of Fiat from their Fiat farming, aka working. So anytime I hear somebody say, well, I don't want to spend my Bitcoin, that tells me right away that they don't have enough Bitcoin because they still have Fiat, right? And this is the whole meme about getting on zero, right? Like if you truly have conviction around Bitcoin and you're only, you have sufficient enough

cash flow that's coming in that can basically allow you to live the lifestyle that you want to live, well, then there's no reason why you shouldn't be automatically converting that to Bitcoin in excess. anything that's not that convert that to Bitcoin. And everything else, you can either spend that in Fiat or you can convert it and hold it in Bitcoin and then spend the Bitcoin itself, right? And then that comes down to actually promoting adoption, right? If you want to promote adoption, you actually want to show retailers and merchants that there is a demand for people spending Bitcoin. And so if you tell them, I'll buy your stuff, but I want to buy it. in Bitcoin. Well, that creates a whole incentive structure for merchants to actually go out and

make sure that they can accept Bitcoin, which obviously just exacerbates the adoption and the underlying fundamentals of the network. I wanted to touch on what Lewis said about merchants wanting Bitcoin, wanting to get paid in Bitcoin and incentivizing it, either through discounts or as we've seen with some Bitcoiners that make Bitcoin related content and, and goods. They only accept Bitcoin, right? Like Citadel 21. I love that magazine. They only take Bitcoin. I know that. I know that there's a limited print of every single magazine. And I was willing to part with my stats for that subscription because I like what they have. I like what they're making. I like the quality of the articles. And for me, I like having the Bitcoin memorabilia.

I think as Bitcoiners, we appreciate having some Bitcoin memorabilia, like a little piece of history because we feel that this is something important happening. And maybe I can get a little piece of that. So, you know, crypto cloaks, ditto, I, you know, I will spend stats on stuff that they make. There's a lot of good Bitcoin related stuff. I just got my copy of Bitcoin magazine showed up. El Salvador edition. Yeah, man.

So there's a lot to say about El Salvador in merchant adoption, obviously. that's a whole other conversation. Yeah. Yeah. One person that is kind of furthering Bitcoin adoption that that doesn't get enough credit that ultimately tries to troll Bitcoin. And that that's Peter, Peter Schiff.

Peter Schip actually accept Bitcoin on shift gold. You can buy his stuff with Bitcoin, which he thinks he tries to paint the narratives that will automatically getting converted to Fiat and I'm getting Fiat. But little does he actually know that. that's incentivizing the Bitcoin economy because he's willing to accept Bitcoin, whether it's through BitPay or not. That's one more merchant that takes Bitcoin.

Notice this not automatically converted to gold. Yeah, let me just get it on my chisel so I can do my transactions and chisel off a little flake of gold and pay people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I think it's it's definitely shifting. And again, to your point, Nate, about kind of what strike was kind of getting at with integrating lightning and then allowing for balances to be held in dollars. I think we'll also see that as a bit of a segue, some of those lines where people start using the network for the conveniences of the network. merchants like in El Salvador have the option of what they're going to settle to, whether it be dollars or Bitcoin. Over time, Bitcoin asserts itself as a solid store of value in the long run.

And people, you know, some people prefer to take it that way. And other people are just using the network. But as they start seeing, oh, well, this person saved Bitcoin and they seem to have more purchasing power over time, even the people that are just using it for the benefits of the easy use of the network, then begin to hold Bitcoin and then begin to spend Bitcoin. So I think it's just seeping in everywhere and we're seeing it pop up in different flavors for different people depending on their current situation. I think that the competition for the point of sale, both in online shops and brick and mortar,

can, you know, I think I really do see this disruption coming. And I know, for example, Square is working on a Bitcoin thing where maybe they'll have Bitcoin and Visa and everything sort of built into one. But like we're trying to not have a sort of, you know, I love Open Node and everything, but Open Node is K.C. Open node takes a percentage. You know, I want I want a really robust stack and I can see it existing that is totally sovereign. And just. just as easy to use. Yeah. The only bearish case I see on that type of adoption from retail to merchant is, obviously, the United States is going to try to disincentifies that as much as possible. And they've already do that with the current tax regulations around basically, if I buy an ice cream cone, then, well, that's a capital gains or potentially. That's a taxable event, right?

And so they're really dissentivizing people doing micro transactions just because, one, it's an incredible headache to do that your cost average basis and your taxable events. If you're actually inside the United States and you're living on a full hundred Bitcoin standard, it gets to be an incredible nightmare for taxation purposes, even if you're trying to be fully above board. And two, that desensivizes merchants from taking it as well because most of the, you're trying to be fully above board. merchants live on very thin margins and they're having to basically use most of the the capital that's coming in to keep the business running and reinvest it into the business. And if they're having to worry about taxable events after they receive the Bitcoin and then buying things like produce, let's say they're a sandwich place, like and actually worrying about buying ingredients, paying electricity bill and all that stuff, that's just another headache for them to worry about

is worrying about all that taxation, right? So that's what the government's going to try to do to disincentivize this from actually being a quote unquote currency. So I think you're going to see other nations around the world first truly go on a full Bitcoin standard in terms of the full realm of the economy from one person to the next. But eventually some countries won't have a choice but to do that. that's that's one of the cool parts my job too is we don't work just with america anyone in the world

can come to voltage and we can help you out and uh and that's been a lot of fun also so i i do absolutely agree and i think that if if um those sort of accounting things start to happen i just i guess all i could say is i hope that someone recognizes that as something to build and make easier but yeah i I totally agree. It's a huge headache for accounting and everything. Yeah, because one thing that's happening behind the scenes that hasn't been very public is the travel rule, what they're trying to implement with the travel rule. So not now only are they trying to implement travel rules as in KYC information going from one institution to the next or to a proxy. They're trying to now get the cost average basis of a UTXO or particular coins being in the travel rule. themselves. So if you actually send information, or not information, but if you send a transaction

to one regulated institution in the states to the next, as part of the travel rule, they're also going to require the cost basis of those. So the next person, the next institution that is going to be holding those coins can automatically do the potential taxation forms for you, depending on what you're doing with those coins. And so that cost average basis is going to follow your coins. when you keep it inside of the regulated wall of guard. Like not many people are talking about this, but that's what they're trying to do. Hmm.

Yeah. I think it's going to be a battle for markets and government. It's going to be, you know. Oh, yeah. It's going to be. It's just beginning. Yeah. It kind of brings us full circle, hey?

We're back to the privacy chain analysis thing. There's a lot that this stuff should be used for. And this, this is a thing that, I mean, that could screw with those plans, couldn't it? Yeah, it really can, right? Because I think, like, if this asset is what we think it is, there's going to be a lot of volatility. People think that the volatility is going to be muted because the bigger the market cap gets, the harder it is going to be to move the market.

But what I think is more likely to happen is the volatility is probably. going to remain the same due to how big of players that are going to be getting into this market, whether on the buy side and the sell side, because there's going to be institutions. As we go up and to the right, there's going to be institutions finally caving to this narrative and wanting to get in at a better price point. And they have the power, they have the traditional power to create these narratives and to be able to create like institutional foot to move markets, right and there's going to be countries that are going to try to do this as well and so this is going to make sure that volatility remains fairly high for the foreseeable future um and not only that

the attack vectors from the sovereign states as well like what we're talking about with taxation um there's a lot of things that they're going to try to do to mitigate uh tax loss and all these other things so you just need to keep that in mind i think at the very least you know if the dollar gets just so weak that business owners are like freaking out and people are sort of freaking out. Maybe they'll be pushed to, you know, this, I don't know when this would be or anything, but like push to accepting the better money regardless of whatever because, like threats or whatever, because you have to live, you know, so I just hope that we're ready. If that ever comes, we have the infrastructure and the products and whatever they need ready to go.

Yeah, and on that note, I think the biggest thing that we can do to close certain attack vectors is to really, really make it clear that not your keys, not your coins, is one of the most imperative things that we voice. Because if we turn Bitcoin into an asset where very few people actually hold the underlying asset in terms of holding the private keys, there's no telling what the markets can do, what the institutions can do to this. Because look at gold. Look what happened to gold with the paper market. They've basically taken gold and have been able to control it very well in terms of price movements to kind of hide actual inflation because before the paper market's gold was actually an indicator of inflation. And then since the paper market has come with gold, big institutions have been able to

control the price to hide the inflation. We've seen this with, I think it was JP Morgan being issued fine. with basically ghost trading the gold markets and they got fine. I think it was like $50 or $60 million for doing that. And the only way they're going to be able to do that with Bitcoin is if they can keep all the Bitcoin in a walled garden and not allow anyone to ever call bullshit. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that, again, I think Bitcoiners, over time, step up to the plate. I think that, you know, you're seeing the gradual conversion of even people in positions where, you know, we would look at them as adversarial as adversaries. But some of those people are getting orange-pilled, too. And so you're starting to see pushback from within institutions, from people within those institutions as to what they're doing. And so, you know, it started slowly. There's there's a few notable ones out there. But I think more of that is coming as as more people see this. I mean, like a perfect example, somebody was like, somebody's tweeting today being like,

Jack Mallor is going to go talk to the World Economic Forum and like saying like, oh, this is a big red flag, blah, blah. I don't know. I don't, you know, I'll judge the content for what it is. is when when he goes to speak but i think knowing jack mallors and uh having heard him speak previously i think if if anybody is is well spoken enough that would potentially i mean obviously the the people with the most vested interest won't be budged but for somebody to to walk into that room where you just know everybody's like how do we how do we screw this guy um to potentially orange pill

somebody in that room would be interesting, even if it's low key. But he's planting seeds. And I think a lot of those seeds are being sewn right now by a lot of different bitcoins in a lot of different places and a lot of different jobs and positions. So I think, again, given a low enough time preference and a strong enough work ethic, Bitcoiners overcome a lot of this stuff. I think that might be a good place to start getting final thoughts. So I think I'm going to do that.

Nate, awesome. Thank you for the topic, by the way. Let's go around the room. And so again, first of all, I'll thank you guys for coming on. This was a solid conversation. What I'll get is I'll just go down the line and just any final thoughts you may have on anything that we talked about today. And also let people know where they can they can find you and what you're doing and all that kind of stuff. So, Lewis, I guess I'll toss it to you first. Any final thoughts? And where can people find you?

Yeah, I'll make this a quick final thought. One point I wanted to bring up earlier, we talked a lot about getting on zero, you know, zero fiat. But as someone newer to the space, I kind of think a lot about the opposite perspective. New coiners getting off zero and getting some Bitcoin through DCA. That's kind of my call to action. And if that's, there's a lot of ways, one, with, like, apps that just want you to, like, sign up for your app and they'll give you free stats for doing that. Or just use something like strike or any other way you can buy Bitcoin for a cheap DCA, get off zero fiat. So that you can eventually, you know, get on zero fiat. But step one is getting some Bitcoin.

My call to action. I don't know how bullish am on Twitter long term, but that's for now the easiest place to connect with me. You know, at Louis Schulman. That hopefully will be linked. And I kind of engaged with some of this content and I'm tagged in it. So you can find me that way if you don't want to have to hear how I pronounce that and spell things. And from there, there's like other ways you can find me. But that's a good entry point for the time being.

Awesome. Thanks, man. Let's jump down the line to Magoo. Let people know. Well, actually, any final thoughts and where can people find you? I guess last final thought is kind of a thought on game theory. Don't forget what phase we're at in the game right now. We're not at the phase where we can be.

go head to head with the big Gajonais and win. We're still in the Trojan horse phase. So whatever you can do to help push the Trojan horse into the rear ends of certain individuals and entities and sovereign states that you can do without being very abrasive and being loud, I suggest you do that. And just keep in mind, like, that's the phase that we're in. And we're still pushing the Trojan horse in. And there will come a day where we are going to have to come out of the Trojan horse and start slaying. But we're still pushing that horse in the doors right now. So just keep that in mind.

And where they can find me, mostly on Twitter, I'm usually on there quite often yelling at people. But you can find me at Hado Magoo on Twitter. So yeah. Awesome. Thanks, man. And Nate, you up next. Any final thoughts? And where can people find you?

I can't explain it, but I think next year is going to be a really interesting year for Bitcoin. I think we got a lot of things coming. I think that I don't want to talk about price too much, but I feel like this jack in the box just keeps getting tighter and tighter. You know, we hit 90% of the Bitcoin is already out there. That is insane. that makes you want to like go drive ubers at night to stack more if my wife would let me I might even do that wait you're not doing that already Nate right I want I want you next time you're on the show to be streaming live from an Uber I think that'd be really cool streaming live

to the bitcoiners as they tip me in Bitcoin as I entertain them as I orange pill all the people getting in my car that would be great I'd watch Um, no, so I don't know. I'm just, I'm always happy to wake up and, um, and work on Bitcoin stuff. And I want, uh, I just want everybody to be able to store their time, which is finite in a finite asset. And at the end of the day, I think that is what's most important and what's going to push humanity forward through this great filter. I really believe that. I subscribe to that. And, um, I'm, I'm excited for next year. Happy New Year's guys. Awesome. Thanks, man. And, uh, Thank you all so much for being here. I really appreciated the conversation, and you guys are welcome back anytime. So thanks, guys. No, thanks again for us and us.

Thanks so much. Sweet guys. Cool. I'm going to drop your audio video now. Thank you guys again for being here. Everybody that's watching live right now, smash that like button, give this a share, all that good stuff. That was a great conversation.

I had a lot of fun with that. So some awesome guys there very much. love having people. Speaking of great conversations, holy shit, guys, I got to shill something to you that is happening in less than two weeks now. Oh, my God, the Christmas special.

Let me just rattle off some names here and what's going on. So I'm doing a Christmas special on December 23rd at starting at 5 p.m. Eastern time. There's going to be bullish panels on a bunch of different topics. Okay, and each panel is going to be about 30 minutes long with four guests just on that single topic. Here's a list of people that are going to be there.

And it's going to, there's a last panel that I'm still adding people to. But Bitcoin Tina, Preston Pish, Eric Yakes, Greg Foss, CK from Bitcoin Magazine, Camilla, Peter McCormon, Gary Leland, Natalie Brunel, Dennis Porter, Joey from Canadian Bitcoin podcast, Robert Breedlove, Elise Colleen, Pierre Richard, Francis Poolyat, Matt O'Dell, Nico from Simply Bitcoin, Amanda Fabiano, Steve Barber from Upstream Data, Lily from Compass Mining, Guy Swan, Len from also from Bitcoin Canadian Bitcoin podcast, J.C. Crown, Desiree Dickerson, Mark Moss, Jan Pritzker, John Valis, Brandon Quitam, Tip, and Z, Coin Icarus, also from Simply Bitcoin, Jeff Booth, Richard James, Cryptomags, Yellow, Greg, and Pubby. It's insane. It's going to be like a five-hour marathon. I'm still filling out five more spots for the final panel, which is basically just a pleb after party where everybody's going to be drinking. I might die. I might die. We will see. But it's going to be crazy. So M.G is asking no sailor this year.

Hey, if he wants to join the Pleb after party, he's more than welcome. I did ask him about the macro one. I didn't hear back. So we'll see. You know, bug them on Twitter. If you want them to be part of the festivities, I'd love to have them. Yeah, it's going to be a monster. I'm very excited about it.

So set your calendars. There's already an event set. artwork is being worked upon. God. I don't know what to say about that one. It's going to be wild. But yeah, stay tuned. We do have another episode of Why Are We Bullish next week.

Tons of stuff going on in the meantime. But yeah, say your reminders for that one. It's going to be crazy. And again, guys, thank you so much for being here. Of course, like, subscribe, share, all that stuff really, really does help. If you want to help the show in another way, you can hit the sponsors that I mentioned down below. Shake Pay, leaden, bit refill, Keystone, Bill Fottle, all of those are in the show notes, along with the Twitter handles of everybody that was here for the show today. And if you really like what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page.

That is strike.me slash BTC sessions. You head there. You type in any amount you want. You hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice. Or if you tap to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be.

I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.