BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Max Hillebrand, Adam O'Brien, Carlo Campisi ep304

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/HillebrandMax https://twitter.com/adamobrien_ https://twitter.com/carlo_campisi 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $10 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $10 free with a savings balance of $75 or more for 15 consecutive days! https://start.ledn.io/btcsessions Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards, earn sats back while you shop. https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 BITCOIN tips: https://strike.me/btcsessions

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to this show. It's Wednesday. And we've gotten an episode of Why Are We Bullish for you? A slightly different schedule as of late. We did a Sunday show. We're doing a Wednesday show because I'm still in L.A. And the family's coming down.

We're going to spend some family time. So I had to make sure that I'm pumping out the episodes. But you're going to have to self-sustain for a little bit while I take my kids to Disneyland. But you've got like you had like a triple dose of bullishness. We still did Friday show live from Pacific Bitcoin, though it was on Twitter spaces. We had a Sunday one and we get a Wednesday one. So you just, I mean, if you're not bullish, what are you doing? You're thinking about it all wrong.

Anyways, we've got a killer panel today. I'm super stoked to have all these gentlemen on a couple return guests and a first time guest who I'm very excited to. have on a long time coming actually to be honest and we're going to talk about it all i hope you guys are all doing well i hope you're uh you've battened down the hatches you've got all your shit in cold storage your weather in the storm you're doing a victory lap of i told you so's um all of that good stuff because this is this is the time this is the time where you know one group of people is learning, you know, some of what has been preached prior. And then, you know, right now the Fiat groupies get to do a little bit of a victory dance, but that's going to be very temporary

a couple of years. Right now the Fiat bros get to say, I told you so because they think that Bitcoin's dead again. But we'll see. Anyways, guys, 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. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. Yeah. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share, all those things super important. They help get this show in front of more eyeballs.

So if you're bullish, do it now. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Toddled the Bitcoin. Before we dive into the show and get our guests in the room. Let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. We're sitting at $16,687 per coin, U.S. dollars per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 5,992 sats. 91.47% of all Bitcoin have been mine. In terms of fees, 21 sats per byte for next block.

Still, even if you're going to wait for a little bit, 14 sats per bite. Now, I just wanted to touch on this little bit because fees have seen a spike. I just want to show you the mempool, 115 blocks backed up. So it appears as if Binance just started batching and consolidating UTXOs just like all at 14 sats per byte. So just to be sure, make sure if you need anything getting through in any reasonable amount of time, you're setting it above 14 stats per bite. All right. So just keep that in mind because if you look at the mempool, see that big middle like lump. These are all transactions between 12 to 15 sats per byte. So set it just over that and you should be fine. But if you're setting it at like 10 sats per byte, you're going to be waiting until all of this clears.

So yeah, just just keep privy to that and maybe use RBF in case you need to bump anything moving forward. Shouted to sponsor the show, coincite.com. I mean, do I even need to say anything here? Get your shit in self-custody, guys. I love my Mark 4. It is a wonder. It is beautiful. It's a fantastic way that I secure my Bitcoin.

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I will concede the ref link and I'll say check out their tweet earlier today. There's a different, I can't recall what the code is, but they're given like 15% off everything in the store. So I don't give a fuck if you use my riff link. Go use whatever the code that they said if it means that you're going to get in self-custody. Go use that link instead and enjoy even more stats back. I think you get an additional 5% off if you pay in Bitcoin. It's a good time to grab some hardware. Up next, shigpay.com.

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Now, I want to touch on something here because I'm not. I'm sure lots of people are curious. It's very much pertains to everything that's been going on right now. Leden, everybody's like, shit, contagion, what's going on? So the Lennon guys have been very, very conservative, but I still think everybody that uses any type of service like this needs to be very conservative as well. Historically, I've only ever had maybe 5, 10% of any of my Bitcoin in here at any one time.

and that's because I'm a pretty conservative person. And I usually use it based on business needs, like if it's a cash flow issue. But nonetheless, right now, because there's no need for it for me business-wise, I don't have any funds with any custodian at this time. And I think a lot of people have been spook lately. So again, exercise caution with all stuff like that. These guys have thus far been, you know, doing all right. They've been very, very conservative.

They did tweet out earlier this morning. Lennon has no exposure to Genesis and remains fully operational. When Lennon did first begin, Genesis was their primary lending partner over time. They reduced concentration risk through the diversification of our boroughs. As of October 2022, Lennon no longer has any active lending relationships with Genesis. Reason for that tweet was because Genesis halted customer. or withdrawals earlier today. So guys, again, exercise caution.

Just be careful out there. Again, like, they've been super conservative. They've been careful. But as we've seen, you never know, like, if you're partnered with another company, like you sometimes don't get a whole lot of insight into what a partner of a partner has done and then that partner gets fucked and then so again um be careful with shit like that um only need use what you absolutely need um and that's pretty much all i can say about that uh most people should only ever leave stuff with with the custodian if it's absolutely necessary uh but right now

all my stuff is in self custody just so you're privy uh nonetheless i'm going to stop there you get to get these gentlemen into the show. So I'm going to welcome Adam. I'm going to welcome Max and I'm going to welcome Carlo gentlemen. Thank you so much for being sort of for my rambling at the beginning, but I wanted to, because there's been lots of questions

as of late as to like, holy shit. It's been it's been a fucking week, guys. It's been, there's been a lot of stuff going on. But before we get into all that, let's let's chat, let's do a round of intros. So I'll simply ask, who are you? And what do you do?

Let's start with Adam, man. Let people know who you are, what you do. Yo, I'm Adam O'Brien. I'm the founder and CEO at Bitcoin Well. We're a Canadian non-custodial Bitcoin company. We have Bitcoin ATMs, buy Bitcoin with Visa, Debit, and Interact E-Transfer. You can pay your bills, sell Bitcoin, all that good stuff, all in the presence of self-custody. Awesome.

Well, dude, I'm glad to have you. And yeah, I'm sure you've, I'm sure you've had an interesting week. Lots of calls, lots of fun things. So yeah, glad to have you on. Let's do a rotate. Carlo, can you please let know everybody know who we are, what you do? Hey, what's up, everyone, Ben. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so I'm at ShakePay and I'm on the Communications and Policy team. So working on orange-pilling heads of states, that's my title at the office. But yeah, here in Ottawa today, part of some work that we're doing with MPs. And yeah, it's just slowly going through the early innings of what is a long process of educating and hopefully moving the needle forward slowly every day to get more favorable outcomes for Bitcoin on the policy side. I bet you've had your work cut out for you like as of this week. You've got a few hurdles to jump over. Yeah, the narrative, the conversation, you know, it's like wartime, which is really fun, actually.

Yeah. So you no longer have to kind of motivate the conversation to happen. It's coming at you. Yeah. Interesting. I'm sure we'll get into that in a bit. Max, welcome back. How you doing, my friend?

Let people know who you are, what you do. Yeah, thanks very much. Ben for the invite again. Well, Max Sillabrand. I'm an economist by trade. Felt on into the Cypacobunk Bitcoin Rabbit Hull hard. And since then, been working on a bunch of free software projects, building some of the tools for individuals to protect their properties.

Most notably, that's wasabi wallet right now. I do a bunch of things there. So that's a wallet for receiving and sending Bitcoin privately and effortlessly. We have the 2.0 version out, and it's been running smooth. Awesome, man. Well, I'm glad to have you. It's good to see you again. I think the last time...

Years ago. It might have been... Were you on when I was in Greece? That might well be you. I think that was the case. I think I was in Greece and I was still doing shows over there and you came on because the time zones

worked out a little bit better. Not so favorable for you this time. It's probably a little late there, but you're being a trooper and you're here. So thank you. do it all for the good conversations. Question for you, Ben. Which countries haven't you

broadcasted from? I mean, for a non-travel show, you are by far the most traveled Bitcoin podcaster, I think. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing, by the way. Not knocking it.

That's really cool. Well, I mean, the bulk of my traveling was before I started the show, but then, well, then I, no, no, as soon as, as soon as, I think a month into starting the show, I then backpacked Southeast Asia with my wife. So that started off with a bang. So, yeah, man.

Awesome. So good. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, thank you all for being here. And thanks, everybody that's already here in the chat. Good to see you guys. We are going to do, why are we bullish? And so for those that are watching that may be unfamiliar, very simple friends to the show,

each one of us brings a reason why we are feeling bullish. We go by the three R. Somebody's going to drop a reason. We're all together. Number two, going to riff on that reason. And then number three, we're going to rotate. So reason, riff, rotate all the way through until we each get a turn. So I'm going to get us started with my reason for being bullish.

And I think the best way to summarize it is that Bitcoin is based in reality. It's tied to the laws of physics. There's there's there's not any misinterpretation. There's no bullshit when you look to the to the base layer of Bitcoin. It's just it is what it is. It's not like a representation of the thing. That's why you can't say Bitcoin is backed by. It's Bitcoin is the thing.

It just gives a simple explanation of where people have placed value. value where people have placed the fruits of their labor and it gives us a picture of that. However, having a tool or a mechanism, which is kind of incorruptible, that just kind of shows the state of where value is placed and you can't corrupt it by debasement, it's inherently incompatible with a lot of our legacy ways of doing financial transactions and in particular institutions that would hold money for people and then go about doing fiat things with them. And I think we're seeing that right now. We're seeing what happens when you shove an instrument of truth into a world of of opaque bullshit. It's kind of, it's breaking the system from within because everybody's going about business as if nothing has changed, but something very fundamental has changed in how we interpret and communicate value. I think it's going to keep on happening, if I'm honest.

I think that we've introduced this instrument for truth. And people are going to point to this and say, this is the reason everything is breaking. And in a way, I think they'll be right because it's breaking the dishonesty in the system. And I think it's going to continue to happen. And it's not that we get to choose. It's that the world has to parse through the fact that this now exists and it's inescapable. Because what would the messaging around that be? Well, I know some of the terminology that will be used.

Oh, this is breaking our system because this money is not elastic enough. It doesn't respond to the demands of the market. It doesn't, we can't expand and contract the monetary supply so that we don't have these crises. that I think will be some of the language that is used as people begin to realize like oh shit we can't behave as we did before with Bitcoin in our world but what they're really saying is we can't we can't print our way out of mistakes and that's true and I think that even with that messaging although temporarily it may rile people up. They may get angry. They may say Bitcoin broke this. And, you know, like, let's

picture a world in the future where all the sudden we get the next iteration of systemic failure. So, you know, you go back. Mount Gawks, Quadriga, FTX, and all the other shit that happened this year. But like, it's the same story just consistently at a larger scale. And I think that, I don't know the timeline, but I think that we see that again where, I mean, SBF was held up as, oh, this, you know, we've, we've matured. This is, this is what a Bitcoin exchange should be. It's, you know, as parents are regulators, it's, it's safe. It's, you know, it's robust to quote Kevin O'Leary. He's going to back him again, I think.

Yeah, I know. It's just insane to me. But like, everybody thought, okay, this, now we've attained where, you know, we've gotten to a place where it's mature. And then, no, it was just a bullshit Ponzi scheme. And my anticipation is we get to a point where, like, banks start offering this en masse and everybody piles into those type of products. But I don't think that changes the behaviors that banks have. have today. I think the end game here is that at some point you see some sort of SBF, FTX style implosion where banks have done their fiat banking thing, re-hypothecated the shit out of their Bitcoin and something, something breaks. And there's some sort of implosion. And then what's the scapego?

Well, you know, Bitcoin's breaking everything. But in that endgame, the reality is they're just saying that, oh, we can't, we can't inflate this. And people figure that out and people say, well, I want that. So I'm bullish because Bitcoin injects truth into a system of opaque bullshit. That's where I'm at, gentlemen. I'm going to open up to you guys. What do you guys think? Thoughts shows over.

Yeah. I see everyone. throws his mic and drops the mic. I don't know. Bang on, man. It's like when virtue signaling meets physics, physics always wins. Someone told me that. He was telling me about how his son is a vegetarian and works at a at a stakehouse.

And I was like, how does that work? Like, isn't that against his virtue? He's like, well, he's got it. He has to make money. So when virtue signaling meets physics, physics wins. And lo and behold, it's the same thing. The virtue signaling of elasticity of monetary policy and budgets balance themselves and who could think of monetary policy at a time like this.

And all the other things that are crazy prime ministers said about money in Canada, just virtue signaling doesn't make a difference. Bitcoin comes and bends it over and does what it needs to. So I, yeah, bang on, man. Totally agree. It's definitely been, I think they're going to regurgitate, like you said, all the same things that they said. during the gold, like when they removed the gold act in the 70,

1971, like all those people now that were old enough to know what was going on then, they're all getting old and senile and dying off. And our younger politicians that want to take control are just going to regurgitate the same things. And the new generation now has an option, right? Back in 71, you didn't have an option. There was no Bitcoin.

There was no opt out at that point in time. So hopefully, hopefully this is a win for humanity here. Yeah, I hope so. Slightly, yeah, I mean, Ben, the idea that, you know, you hit on this, you know, these iterations of cycles, right? What do we lose, $8 billion worth of human capital in this last fallout, right, with FTX? I mean, think about what that represents in terms of energy and humans' productivity that is just like gone to where. waste and still probably, you know, a pin drop in the grand scheme of things. And unfortunately,

like human nature doesn't change overnight. And there's going to, that's where the root cause is here, right? Both from, you know, the people who are, you know, at the spigot, deciding what the policy is going to be for the rest of us and people who take hard lessons, take a lot of hard lessons to learn something that would otherwise be obvious or simple. And I think, you know, next, like, you know, that didn't happen to me means those guys were dumb because they shouldn't have gotten into it in the first place. And I unfortunately think that there's going to be this sort of, you know, the Mount Gogs people learned a lesson. And Ben, you said this off the top. And then, you know, the FDX people have learned a lesson. And there's these like tranches of a million people

at a time. And maybe next time it's five million people. And this sort of like builds the calluses that it takes to get through this. But yeah, there's, you know, this, this is not like the coup d'etat. I don't think that's going to, you know, bring Bitcoin to like the promise land tomorrow. But it is, unfortunately, what it takes. Everyone's learned a hard lesson, right? There's like tuition. That's what, that's what it comes down to.

So I think this is what it takes to get to make monumental change is, unfortunately, having people, you know, like a trust, a system that's based in trust is going to expose bad actors and we have to flush those away and it comes with collateral damage. Yeah, it's hard to last one for a lot of people. Max, you go ahead. You know, as Adam said, like when virtue signaling meets physics, then that's where the shit hits the fan. And I found it so funny that Sequoia, you know, the venture capitalist fund a couple days before the whole blow up, they had this beautiful article

of how like the founder of SPF, he has a savior complex and so should you. You know, like the peak virtue signaling just a couple days before his entire Ponzi scene collapses. That's, it's just beautiful. You know, and then like even worse,

like these guys have no idea about risk management, about proper treasury management. Like after the blowup, The guy is on Twitter now saying, like, yeah, I think we had like $5 billion of leverage. Two tweets later, he's like, no, actually, sorry, I was wrong. I think we had $12 billion leverage. Like, how the fuck don't you even know what your leverage is if you're managing a money warehouse? Like, that's just absolutely ridiculous.

Or something like that. Yeah. So like these guys have no idea what the truth is, not even in their own balance sheet. So yeah, obviously they're going to get wrecked. But in the meantime, they're going to be nice and virtue signaling that, oh, yeah, we're doing so much philanthropy here, right, and saving all the poor children. But no, you're just stealing from a bunch of people. And that does way more harm than any philanthropist effort could ever do good. Yeah, how much, how much was donated to the Democratic?

40 mil. 40 million. 40 million bucks. $900? Wait, $40 million or $40 billion? No, 40 million with a promise to like a shade under a billion in the next. But it was, yeah, it was 40 million like within a couple of weeks ago. Yeah.

And no one has like no democratic politician is like demanding for the arrest of SB. Like it's it's just, it's horrific the manipulation. And this is a reflection of the money that we have. This is this is literally like Bitcoin is just exposing what's already happening in the world. Right. The only reason we're seeing this like the banks have been doing this forever. like running fractional everyone's up in arms that FTX are running fractional and they should be but like literally every single bank is taking customer funds to deliver it to politicians and call it a virtue signal or and call it a donation it's it's this is this is always been happening yeah i'm i'm gonna pull the room here i'm gonna be like super honest before staples center branding FTX i haven't i didn't even hear of FTX and i'm involved in this and like a lot of people that i spoke to like this this thing came out of nowhere. So many people are like, what is this, what is this company?

Well, who are, I kind of agree. Like, only a million users, which is like the million, million users is a lot of users, but it's not like, it wasn't worth the billions and billions of dollars. Like, it makes me wonder how much legitimate, like, what was, what do you say they were processing $10 billion a day in transaction? Like, through a million users? That seems a little seems a little far-fetched. And maybe all of our users are just like, you know, not whales. Maybe he had literally a million whales. Only the whales, yeah.

Yeah, only, yeah, we're a whale-only company. I mean, it helps when you yourself are one of the whales with your wash-traded token that you printed out of nothing. Of course they had 10, Jill. Totally. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So I think it's like there's a lot of fishy things that aren't as like, they're not as sexy and not as like eye gouging as like, oh, there's just billions of dollars lost here. But I think we are just starting to pull the thread of what that con artist like started. And yeah, like in the comments you're seeing here like it'll be labeled a Bitcoin's fault. Anyone with a brain is going to be able to see through that. Like this is we're going to be regurgitating this, unfortunately, for a long time. like this is the end of crypto blah da da da this same as the quadriga thing like um you know everyone was was up in arms about how bad bitcoin is blah blah blah blah and it's like nah this is this is the

result of one bad human being and and frankly i think it's a lack of education that allows this to happen i'll add adam i think like the venture capital like carrot to liquidity uh based on a broken system which even allows this to happen. It's not just one bad actor. It's one bad actor who's taking advantage of a bad system with other bad actors behind that. And it all compounds. Yeah.

Well, I mean, what was he like on a on a Zoom call when he raised his round and he was playing like League of Legends or some kind of video game or something? And it's like, oh, and then you have the chat log from the people at Sequoia who are like, I love this kid. he's so cool. He's ignoring us. Let's give him more money. He's playing his video game while he's raising this round. Yeah, this is and this is this is highlighting just, you know, if capital, if like if Sequoia was investing in Bitcoin, they would think long and hard before they parted with their Bitcoin on an investment. And bingo, when when money is cheap,

you don't care because you could just turn around and go back to the spigot source and get some more. So, you know, the, you know, the Bitcoin fixes this thing. Yeah, I mean, bad investments, companies do their due diligence when they part with hard assets. And yeah, this kind of solves that problem. And all the best thing is that FTX didn't even have any Bitcoin on their balance sheet as they got bankrupt. And that's another beautiful piece of truth. How can you steal so much money and not save it in proper money? Like, it's crazy.

Dude, just a lack of time preference through. and through, like, just absolutely no time preference. It's, yeah, it's absolutely traffic. To your point, Carlo, I totally agree. It's like, when the money sucks, it incentivizes all of the wrong things. And I was having this conversation with Julian, like kinetic finance a little while ago. We're talking about like the non-stop, like, how to tech, like, tech employers become so like everyone gets free dinners and, and all these crazy, office perks and la la da da da da. It's because as the money became cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, these tech giants had to figure out ways to spend it. And over time, that became the norm and

the standard. And like the inflation of it all just hits across the board, uh, which, which makes for, for garbage money. And yeah, Bitcoin fixes it because your time preference, like, imagine if all the money spent on free dinners at Twitter was put into Bitcoin. Like, what would that be worth today? $1,700. people, right? Like how many more lines of code does that generate? And we think about it from like an efficiency and a proof of work perspective, it like really hits home when you when you put your money into time preference rather than like just heat of the moment high, high, high, high time preference. Yeah. Yeah. Adam, go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, Carla, you go first because I got something after.

Yeah, I was just going to say there's, you know, there's this magical thing that happens when you're a startup. And, you know, Reid Hoffman has said, you know, I love the way he puts it. It's like, your default status is dead, you know. And then you're jumping off the cliff and building the plane on the way down. And you like entrepreneurs by design, we're like scrappy. Let's piece it together. And the thing you're trying to figure out is how do you make it to tomorrow? And then how do you make it to the next day? And it's all about productivity and value that you bring to your customers. But then something happens along the way. And there's this under, you know, like not really under the hood, but there's this opportunity where, you know, everyone wants to get a piece of what you're building because, you know, you've managed to come through the noise and you're creating some signal and you're actually adding value to the market, you know, scrapping your way through in a productive, valuable way, adding to society.

And then you can get a bunch of money for real cheap because. everyone wants to get on your bandwagon. And what happens next is your focus moves away from productivity. And Jeff Booth talks about this. And now you have to start thinking about growth and growth metrics that are not tied to actual value being produced into the economy, but more like these vanity things, like how many employees you hired, how many sales units regardless of what they cost. And, you know, like how big is your office or whatever? And we have like a system that just like pushes, this is what the funnel looks like.

And unfortunately, you end up having an entire economy based on growth values as opposed to productivity values. And like you were saying and what we were saying before, you know, when when venture capitalism or venture capitalists or investment dollars are not as cheap. people parting with them are going to think long and hard before they do it. And they're going to do their diligence on companies and reward the ones that are productivity focused and not look for vanity metrics to be able to get their multiples on their exits in a short time period. Yeah, man, it's going to be all about time preference. And people that understand time preference are going to look for value. I read an article about this like six, seven months ago about the whole market right now is shifting from this concept of promises into a

construct of production. And we've been in a for 10, 15 years, we've been in a period of, hey, I promise we'll grow. I promise our product will be better. I promise, we'll do this. These growth metrics that, da, da, da, da, that promise, promise. People are getting paid on those promises. And I think very rapidly we're moving into a period in an economy that's going to value production. We are able to produce this right now. And that's all that that will matter, I think. I love that. Again, it

when you base everything on well, you're pulling value from the future. You know, like potential value from the future. The promise of value. Yeah. And then when that doesn't come to fruition, you realize that you're, it was all a mirage. And it goes away and that's where we see all of this shit disappear.

I want to, I want to hop to our next reason. Before we do, I thought, I found this video earlier today. I thought it was friggin hilarious. That basically sums up the FDX debacle. And there's a guy on Twitter, what was this? It's like D.H. Toomey or something like that. Anyways, he had a fantastic video that he made on it.

So we'll just, we'll take a quick look at it right now. Hi, would you like to put money in my crypto exchange? Oh, I don't know, aren't those risks? No, mine is different. How? Well, do you see that crypto, bro? Hi, my name is Captain Laser. I know ice-grisd.

I'll take a look at me. I don't sleep or babe. I don't know. Good enough for us, here you go. Whoa, you're getting funding. Yep. If you put money and you can get some of our currency too. Oh, deal.

Oh, deal. Wow, I'm rich. Wait, but those are just tis. No, no, no, these are face tissue token. Face tissue, FTT. Okay, but no one else is going to buy into that. FTCX is not like other crypto platforms. We actually want regulation.

What? You know, I like this. I was gonna say same thing. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, how to do that sounds good to me. What's going on? Football, football, football, football, football. What I want in?

And I like the sound of this. I owe the Miami week. What is money? Am I wrong? Am I, maybe? Thank you everyone for your support. With this money, I am only I can save crypto. Only you.

Oh, shit. What creed? Whatever. grow bigger and better than you. Oh, shit. Hey, did he just lay his face with you on fire? I want my money. Yeah, same.

What am I going to get? Where is the one second? So does this affect me at all? Like, so good. That's awesome. That was all done. The whole behind the box, the magic box. That's funny. The magic box, man.

man. God. Like what a, what a beautiful. What a beautiful. We can see, though, how like everyone's just fomoing in, right? The money is so useless that we're using. We aren't thinking about next year.

We're not even thinking it. Like, forget next decade. We're barely even thinking about next quarter. It's just like, oh, this guy's hot right now. Let's jump in as soon as possible. It's like, it is literally incentivizing Ponzi. It's incentivizing people to jump in while it's hot in order to exit, you know, well, it's a little bit hotter.

And someone's always left holding the rug. It's, yeah, it's absolutely brutal. Yeah. Well, you know, self-custody. Let's, let's, let's, let's, I'm going to keep it with you, and I'm going to let you head down your rabbit hole of your reason for being bullish, and maybe we continue, because it's, I mean, I think it's obviously kind of same vein, but I'll let you, you take it.

here. Why are you bullish this week, man? Yeah, tough, tough not to happen in the same vein. So for those of you that don't know the history of our organization, we started with Bitcoin ATMs and then have kind of created the second business unit of like an online non-custodial platform. And we're publicly traded company. We went public about 18 months ago. And lots of investment bankers, investors, they don't understand that as a differentiator. They don't understand why being non-custodial matters. And I told them, well, people's funds aren't exposed. you know, we don't obviously want to steal customer money. We literally cannot steal customer money and all the things that we as Bitcoiners all

understand. And the investment bankers all along like, ah, we don't get it. It doesn't make sense. Not a real differentiator. And then this week, it's like inbox is blowing up. Like, holy shit, this is a giant advertisement for Bitcoin well. Like you were right. I can't believe how much being a non-custodial Bitcoin platform matters.

And it's like the investment bankers, it's our customer. It's our new customers. We've had record user signups, record user verifications all on the platform just this last week. My DMs, my Twitter DMs, my email, everything is just like non-custodial matters. I didn't realize how much it mattered until right now. And like we've been around like this is on such a big scale, right? We've been around since 2014, 2013.

Like that's Mount Gawks. That's Quadriga. That's the block five debacle from earlier this year. That's the trucker bullshit from freezing funds. Like I feel like it's all just. been pent up and and now finally FTCS is the blow off top for why self-custody matters so much in this like traditional finance world. And it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's just been nonstop this week of like a little bit of vindication, I guess to feel that's why I'm bullish is people finally

understanding the need for self custody of money. And also like the people that like the people that come into our office, because we've got these Bitcoin branches where people can come in, ask questions, one-on-one consultation, is totally free. And we get a lot of shit-coin questions, and we don't sell shit-coins. So it becomes, like, they don't really, they leave a little bit disheartened

because they can't buy their doggie coin or their whatever at the top. Actually, a funny thing that happened, a little small tangent. One of our Bitcoin specialists, he messaged me on Slack and he says, hey, this is the top for Shiba because a homeless guy just came in looking, like, wondering how he can buy Sheba and literally that afternoon, bubble pop.

It was like this is the most hilarious like timeline of events and signals. And we talk to people, look, this is the Bitcoin ethos. This is why Shiba or Eith or Dogecoin or whatever FTT. This is why it doesn't cut the mustard for us. And it's your money. If you want to spend it in that way, it's not, it can't be through Bitcoin well. But, you know, here's why we believe what we believe. And again, texts, like when this happens, the support for our customer success team and the support for our Bitcoin specialists of like, wow, I would have bought this garbage if it if it wasn't for kind of the Bitcoin ethos, that low time preference ethos.

So yeah, lots of just vindication and praise for the team right now, which feels good. Yeah. That's again, it's when when you go around and you, you stress the importance of like, hey, you know, know, this thing was created specifically to kind of not have to rely on somebody to hold your funds for you. Yeah, promises of someone else. Yeah, and to prevent everything that we've seen thus far, right? Like that was kind of the impetus for Bitcoin to be created was to, you know, censorship

resistance, immutability of the underlying rules, all of these things. And that goes away when you don't hold it. Like the other thing that that blew up was wrapped Bitcoin on Solana, right? And like I think at the time I tweeted out, turns out wrapped Bitcoin is just wrapped in somebody else's private keys. And so like the reality of it is if you don't have Bitcoin in your own wallet, you don't have Bitcoin. And you might have Bitcoin in the future. but you don't currently have Bitcoin and you may never have that Bitcoin. And so you want that certainty of like, there it is.

It's not going anywhere. I have it. I have the keys to unlock it and do with it as I see fit. And I think that's an important message to get out there. And I really push back against the messaging that I'm seeing right now that is seeing a lot of stuff on Twitter, particularly of the people that were like custody is too hard. There was some messaging around that earlier

and I think some of those people seem to be doubling down a little bit. I'm going to push right back against that. I don't think that custody, like having self-custody, like in its most basic form, is any harder than legacy banking. You download an app and you write down 12 words. Dude, I was thinking about this So I I, uh, we did like a Bitcoin for Beginners thing, um, today and I was speaking and someone

asked me about that. And I was like, like, like as a society, we figured out how to like, not shit on the middle of the street. We all like eat when we're hungry, right? Most of us like have some level of semblance of like we can take care of ourselves. Lots of us have children that like don't get lost. We all have cars. Very complicated. I will say. That's a incredibly complicated way more complicated way more complicated things that are that are hard already we have children and pets and like the street is not littered with human feces like we've figured out how to be like pretty basic responsible the fact that you can't keep a steel plate with 12 words on it or that's like the mantra you're just brainwashed you're just like you're just you don't understand what it

means to be responsible for things or you do but you can't apply that to finance but i'll lose it well i mean like yeah don't don't lose it like don't lose your Don't lose your child and like don't lose your. Exactly. Like you figured out how to buy lunch today. How did you do that? It's not because you brain, you just like virtue signaled a subway sandwich into your mouth.

It's because you like had a debit card that you somehow didn't lose and you went and paid for it. You didn't forget your pin, right? It's like it's such an easy concept that we're just like we're taught from such an early age. Be responsible. Be responsible. Don't even think about holding your own money because you can't possibly be trusted with that. And it's got, I mean, it has to be coming from the legacy financial system because where else does that narrative come from? Yeah, it's horseshit.

I know, Carlo, I'm going to go to jump in on this too. Because again, like you've been a big advocate of self-custody and everything. Like, what is it that there's this sticking point of like there's still this pushback of no, it's too hard? So like I normally default to human nature for almost everything. When I think about when I think about why things don't, why things aren't more obvious or happen more seamlessly, things that would otherwise seem obvious if you, you know, kind of like debunk your own assumptions.

And so I think that there's this idea that we're, you know, not necessarily idea, but we're kind of groomed into a system that is, we're giving up a piece of ourselves, almost on every interaction that we have, you know, online, in person. And in exchange, we give up that piece of ourselves for convenience. And it's a condition now that has become part of, of the human sort of like societal function. We're very, very quick to give up are some liberties in exchange for convenience. And this has sort of like this has permeated in every facet of life.

So, you know, you can't even like take a piss anymore without being bombarded by an ad. Like even the most intimate moment of your life, which is like taking a shit. And you have an ad in front of you, right? Like every single touch point of your life is, is bombarded for your attention, and in exchange for that is convenience. And so back to what I was saying earlier, there's a huge unwinding that needs to happen.

And I don't even know if it will ever be to the point where, you know, the vast majority of people will self-custody. I think there's going to be, you know, hybrid systems, you know, better protocol and policy with custodians who are, you know, proven legitimate actors. And those will be the ones that help the portion of the population who just won't do it, right? I mean, you put gold in your mattress, you know, 100 years ago and you lost your gold. It's not gold's fault. It's your fault, right?

It's not gold that's a bad asset. that it's you that's a bad custodian of gold. And so some people will get spooked by the idea of having to be responsible for themselves. And I don't know if that changes on a global scale. What I do know is that the people that are going to take advantage of those people are going to get flushed out because of things like FTX and all these other horrible, like bad actors are getting exposed. And at the end of the day, like this fluff is going to, you know, the shit's going to hit the fan and Bitcoin's going to be left standing.

And that's that's kind of like where I'm at, really. I mean, you know, it's a long game. And I'm bullish on, you know, Bitcoin doesn't give a shit. And it's going to, it's going to be there and it's going to do its thing. And you're either there to be part of it or, or you're not. And I mean, that's the beauty of it. So I'm going to, I'm going to send a question towards Max in regards to this because, I'm so it kind of like a two-part question here one would be would you would you echo that like by default most people are if the option is available the average person will will probably default to like the least responsibility and two do you see tools and technology that is either available today or that's coming down the pipeline

that can act like at least mitigate those risks and prevent prevent future blowups like this like maybe like uh collaborative custody and things like that where where you know there there's not an ability to like siphon off customer funds and things like that yeah it's a really good question i'm i'm not so sure if people actually really want to default to give away their responsibilities. I mean, there's many things here at play. One is that you just want to get things done. You know, you have problems to be solved.

And you don't care about a lot of the nuances of how to solve these problems. Like you don't care about the chemical composition of diesel inside your combustion engine. You just drive your car to work. And we are kind of the weird guys who care about the money. Like everyone else cares about his job in order to earn money, but nobody's working on

the money per se. And so I think most people just have other things to worry about, as none of their business to geek out about the nuances of the different trade-offs, the different risk models, the different technological pros and cons. They just want to receive and send payments. And then I think it's up for, well, the tool makers, the software developers to build protocols and systems and softwares and softwares and that get shit done without being in the way of the user to just solve the problems, the actual real life problems that the users have without, well, overwhelming them with unnecessary burdens. You know, just like saying the 12 words, you know, that, like, that wasn't there at the beginning of Bitcoin. You know, at the beginning of Bitcoin, you had your wallet. Dot file, and after every hundred transactions, you had to make a new backup of that.

Like, and that was just raw binary data, you know, that was like zeros and ones, not at all words. So some genius protocol engineers came up with those 12-word standards. And there was a massive UX improvement. where all of a sudden it is a lot cheaper, a lot easier, a lot more convenient to back up your sensitive key materials. And that didn't come out of nowhere. And it was really hard work, and it's still hard work. And it's something completely novel that sure for us that are somewhat aware for a long time about everything that's going on, yeah, it seems obvious. But for everyone else, not really that much.

So there is for sure a lot that we can improve to reduce the cost of defense while still increasing the cost of attack. And to a large extent, it's just about, well, a secure soft protocol design. The only reason why we hear is because Bitcoin is a secure protocol. All the 12 word, great UX, easy to use things would be completely a waste of time if Bitcoin was not a secure protocol. Thankfully, we have secure protocol in Bitcoin, so now we can focus on next steps like great user experience. And that's a lot of work, but you know, we're getting there. There's more and more great UX designers in the Bitcoin space to really make using Bitcoin much more effortless.

And then people will opt for the secure and private option because it's also the most user-friendly. and it just works and it just solves their problems. That was, I guess, kind of both parts of the question. What was the second? Yeah, it was, again, do you think people default to the easiest option? But then the second one would be, do you see some of the tools that are available now or on the horizon helping with this? So the people that are least motivated to try something new

have an easy way to at least be protected. Yeah. Definitely. You know, same with the whole collaborative, multi-signature custody. Like, that's crazy. That's absolutely insane. That has never existed in the history of humanity,

like ever, non-simulated shared ownership of a scarce asset is fucking mind-blown. And so we've seen our companies like Unchained. or hoddle-hawdle, you know, like glimpsing the first things that is possible with this stuff. And obviously it's not yet pretty. And obviously it still has a bunch of flaws and hiccups.

And the user experience isn't that great. And you can make a lot of mistakes with that still. I just forget your script. And even though you remember your private keys, the money is unspendable. You know, make sure you have proper backups of much more than just your private key material as soon as you're using multisync.

So that adds a lot more complexity in all of this. So we're still extremely early here, but the direction of where we're heading and the tools that already today are working well, as bad as these tools are, we know how to improve them. We know how to make them better. So yeah, definitely. The protocol developers and the UX designers are hard at work to make your money, easier to defend and much more difficult to steal.

And that's a, well, the stone is rolling down the hill and it's just picking up momentum. I love that. And I'll echo your awe of collaborative custody. It's a pretty amazing accomplishment that you can, you know, and something you mentioned Unchained, something like that, where you can have a handful of things that you're supposed to protect, but you could literally lose 75% of all the stuff that you're supposed to protect.

And in a worst case scenario, if you die and your family loses all of those things except for one key, they can go to unchained and be like, hey, here's proof that we're next of kin. We have one key. Can you help us out? And there's that backstop of like,

worst case scenario, there's still a way to access the funds. So to have that kind of fault tolerance is huge. And it will, as you said, like there's still hiccups. There's still things to be worked on. There's still ways to make it easier. But damn, it's come a long way. So, yeah. Yeah.

I was just going to add, like, the max, the analogy you brought before, which was like, you know, people, you know, about the car, right? We're, you know, how long are we into having cars on the road? Like, it's not like more people are mechanics, less people are mechanics. Nobody knows how to operate their vehicle. They just like that it works. And when it doesn't, they send it to someone else to fix. So it's, it's, I guess, like presumptuous to assume that because the tool, let's say

Bitcoin is, you know, out there longer than more people are going to be more comfortable to self-custody. I think it's spot on to what you're talking about, Max, is that there's going to to be these tools to service the important sort of like, you know, aspects of what Bitcoin is and the fundamentals around self-custody. And maybe there's these sort of intermediary measures that allow people to take more ownership without necessarily taking, you know, while having all the convenience that they're comfortable with and maybe like a suite of like degrees of self-custody. Anyways, I just, yeah.

that kind of makes a lot of sense to me. I hope that as a society, though, we understand the difference between self-custody and like if security and convenience are on a scale, the closer you get to one, the further you get from the other. And even with services like unchained, like they could just say no, right?

The government can still censor that. So I think that even if the custodian has all the best intentions in the world. When the state comes knocking, the custodian throws their hand up and obeys the state. Because they have to, right? You can't blame the capitalist for needing to bow down to the regulator. Look at the banks. I don't think the banks wanted to freeze 2,000 bank accounts from single mom in Ottawa for donating to trucker protest. But they had to because the state said, do it or you lose your license. And the banks make a few billion bucks a year and they can't afford to lose that license. And so I think it's important.

to recognize, like, yes, these convenience tools are important. And they probably are a stepping stone towards having comfort. But if we treat this as the end all be all instead of an eventual end goal of self-custody, I think that would be a net detriment to society because the state will come. I mean, look, like, that's the gold act, right? Like, like, gold, it was made illegal to hold gold. And if all of Bitcoin, if it's made illegal to hold Bitcoin and all of Bitcoin is sitting in a multi-sig, then guess what happens to the second half of that key, right? It's going straight into the state's hands. And I will say, I will say that with them, so like with the collaborative custody,

what like, if it's a two of three, so this is how Unchained works is you hold two of the keys and then the backups to those keys. Right. And then Unchained has one. So they never have full access to the funds. The, but the tradeoff, yeah, the tradeoff is, is privacy, right? So unchained, like, somebody could come knocking and say, who has, who has an account with you?

We need an audit of who has those. But at any time, if you retain those two keys, you can move with those two keys that you own, those funds out and unchained cannot say no. But they could, if pressured, if you only had one key, they could say, we're not going to sign the other side of this transaction. So it's definitely a better, a better scenario there. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, I think like I think as far as collaborative custody goes, there's ways to do it properly. I think though that like as an industry and then

conjecturally as a society, it's just something to be aware of. And I think that people will mistake collaborative custody for straight up custody. And if if someone has a service that's like unchained, but they have two keys for your protection. that would end up being problematic. Yeah, Adam, I think your point, sorry, Ben, I think your point is really well, really well said. We should never, you know, the industry, the Bitcoin industry should never deviate from the ultimate message.

Right. But, but like assuming that just because it's true doesn't mean people are going to, people are going to think it is or understand, or understand why it is. And then what are the stepping stones that we're going to, we're taking to get there. You know, besides the hard lessons that people take, these like technological innovations

that bring us closer to that aha moment for more people. I think that that's like a very, like level headed, reasonable approach that gets us gets us closer to our goal sooner. Yeah. Yeah, I think I would tend to agree with most of that.

So yeah, no, totally agree. You know, but there's other benefits to self-custod, sorry, to custodianship other than it's easier, apparently. I think the main reason why people give their base money to someone else is because it's cheaper. That's how it was in the gold case. Moving physical gold around is quite expensive. And to protect it physically is quite expensive.

So you give it to an expert, just like you give your car to a mechanic. And I believe that we have the same troubles in Bitcoin. Moving Bitcoin by yourself on chain self-custodially is going to be ridiculously expensive. I mean, then you showed the Mempool earlier today. It's full. You've got to start paying. And this is totally going to be like 20 sets per V-Vite is still going to be ridiculously cheap. We're going to be in the hundreds, thousands sets per V-bind.

And all of a sudden, you're going to think twice if you're actually going to protect your keys, your coins with your own keys on the chain itself, because that's a luxury. And not everyone can afford that. So people will have to go into custodianship just because it's cheaper. and I don't think it's going to go anywhere. Yeah, or the innovators, like hopefully the innovators figure out a way to make that a viable business, right? And do that without giving up the privacy or the security of custody. I don't know what that looks like, obviously.

But that would be, I think that's my hope for the world as we see it anyways. Yeah, like Lightning, for example, a way to have full control over your own money while drastically reducing the amount of block space that you need for the, that and making it a lot cheaper. It was just negative. Yeah. It's still not the silver bullet, though. Lightning is still crazy expensive, way too expensive for all of us to use it. Yep.

And user prohibitive too. Lightning is like, we've got some lightning notes set up in the office. We play ping pong and foosball games for Sats. And I'd say like, probably around half the invoices fail at this point. Like, even running through our own nodes. It's not, it's definitely not a silver bullet to your point. No. But the foosball and ping pong games,

are damn entertaining. We might start live-streaming them just because there's so much fun. That's awesome. All right, well, gentlemen, I'm conscious of time. I'm going to keep it rolling here. And actually, I'm going to toss it to Carlo here

and stick with you here. Because your, I believe your reason is kind of attacking almost like the opposite end of the spectrum, right? Like going from personal responsibility to trying to also get a favorable outcome on what we have to deal with in the interim as well. So I'll just ask the question, why you're bullish. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, wartime gets a lot of attention.

And we're in a moment now where, you know, the conversation, like if you would have said, you know, 10 years ago or five years ago, long you've been in Bitcoin that, you know, the White House is cooking up, you know, policy or doing drafting bills to help, you know, protect and regulate the industry, then you'd be like, you know, what happened? You know, I woke up and where did this come from? And I think there's never been a better appetite than now on the policymaking and regulatory standpoint to begin to like need to learn and there is such an information gap when when when when I tell you guys that there's uh you know we've all seen you know Congress and uh you know Mark Zuckerberg and you know the guys trying to understand the internet with with Mark and how social networks work

Well, there's like the same on, on, you know, blockchain. What is crypto? What is, you know, Bitcoin? How does it work? Like, you know, there's a lot of 101 conversations that need to happen. But now the pressure because of, one, the impact that it's having on their constituents. People are losing money because they're being misled. So, you know, having an opportunity to get in the.

room. And I think Shake Pay's mission is to, you know, usher in this Bitcoin golden age, right? How do we get Canadians, like every Canadian with some Bitcoin in their back pocket? And regardless of where they get it from, our, you know, mission in the comms and policy team is to help affect change that creates these favorable outcomes for more people to feel comfortable to start, like, exploring and getting into the asset. And, taking, you know, the adversarial route, it kind of does us a little bit of a disservice. And I think, you know, I was talking about calluses before. You know, if we look at, you know, and I don't know when each of you got into Bitcoin,

but it's like the early, early, you know, cypherpunk movement that was Bitcoin. Like, I think that the persona that it took or the, the persona that it took, the culture, the ethos that it took to, you know, survive through those early days. Like an armor was built and like a fuck you mentality. And for survival, right, for survival, like to be able to make it through to where we are today, it took some heart and souls to get there. And what I'm really bullish on is this next wave, right? this next wave, which is not necessarily the fuck you conversation,

but more like we're not trying to be adversarial, but there's a solution out there because clearly the experiment that is monetary policy is not working and it's not serving so many of us. And so how do we now start to have a conversation around what regulation looks like in the space so that consumers could start to feel protected by their government because they still want that. And the government is not just going to bow out of monetary policy. In fact, I'll talk about it in a second.

There's this bill, an act being drafted in the U.S., a very important one, the digital commodity consumer, the DCCPA, the Digital Commodity Consumer Protection Act. And that's the one that Sam Bankman freed. was pushing with with with with Congress and sorry with the the house and so this act essentially allow would allow the regulation of commodities spot market commodities and so that is never for Bitcoin so Bitcoin spot market will be able to be regulated and it's like you don't regulate you know the price of corn right like commodities are not regulated in the same way that that equities are but this this would be

this act would actually do just that. And there was the Gillibrand Loomis bill, for those of you heard it the year before. And that one had a way more favorable, encompassing, encouraging tone to it. But this other one that sang that SBF, I want to say scam bankrupt fraud. So the one that he was pushing alongside a guy

Booseman and another senator. This one was way less favorable for Bitcoin. And this is in the U.S. And so what we're seeing is like the government came out with three responses from the way that this act was drafted, which is the U.S. maintain, there's no interest of not maintaining monetary policy, a control of the monetary policy. They have no interest in not having control of a system that would that would create illicit financial behaviors. And the other one was, yeah, they want to be

able to make sure that it has consumer protection at the forefront. So, you know, you have all these politicians that are trying to come around to regulate a system that they don't really understand. and they're not going to go in there to pick winners and losers. And so the part that I'm excited about is that we're now invited into the room. And it's not going to be like hit a grand slam on the first meeting. But there is a responsibility that these legislators have to their constituents. and there's a responsibility that they have to create policy that they feel protects them. And the fact that there's this like information delta and now industry leaders are being asked to explain how this is what it works, you know, how should, what do we need in order for customers to start feeling like this.

like they could regulate, that they could get involved and start to, you know, dip their toes in safely. That is only going to, like, create an environment where institutional capital feels, feels way more confident and comfortable putting, deploying money into this. And I think, you know, if you map out the game theoretics here, you end up having, like, the end game is, even if, like, all of, crypto is bulked into one and the distinction between Bitcoin and crypto doesn't happen on the first go. What we have is shitty projects, all the alt-coin BS won't make it through to the other

side of that, and Bitcoin will. And so even though it's not like the first inning is not going to be the home run that everyone wants it to be, the fact that it's happening gets us closer to our end goal. and I'm incredibly bullish that these conversations are like really at the forefront. And, you know, it's not at all like a multi-partisan thing. Like, Bitcoin is not multi-partisan. And there's a lot of a fud around energy that has to be debunked. There's a lot of fud around who are, you know, bitcoiners. Are they all just like white dudes that, you know, are aping in their savings into?

to it and hate the, hate the world, you know. So there is an opportunity now to start having a conversation with the system that, hey, look, we don't want to, you know, we're not trying to opt out. We're trying to fix. And let's work together because the thing that you've done so far is obviously not working. Look how many people are not currently served by the monetary system that's in place right now. And so that's that's that's that's that's that's why I'm so I'm going to my I'll keep mine short and sweet. So I'm I'm I'm I would say that I don't have a ton of faith in politicians obviously given the past year. I won't elaborate further. That said there's two things in what you're talking about that I do think are positives.

One is when everybody kind of, when there's at least an opportunity to be in the room, there will be there's going to be bitcoiners in there. There's going to be shit coiners in there. Now, one thing that will be the positive of that is, as you were talking about, kind of longer longer time frames. The Bitcoin narrative is pretty cohesive. It's pretty cut and dry like, hey, this is what Bitcoin is, what it does. The general messaging around it is relatively, like, while there's a lot of different

metaphors and ways of thinking of Bitcoin, it's pretty cohesive like what it is, what it does, and what it's going to continue to do moving forward, at least at a base layer. The shit coin narrative is all over the fucking place. Right. Like it's just, it's a world computer. It's, uh, ultrasound money. It's whatever the hell. And it just,

it changes based on whatever gets the most money in the door for the next scan. Yeah. Um, and so that will become clear. In short order when you have people consistently looking at it in that, in the same room. At least I would hope. Um,

But I think I think it's easy to kind of cut through the bullshit and it's becoming more easy. And my reasoning for thinking that is from what I've seen this past few years is the first time I've seen people come into the space and very, very quickly hone in on Bitcoin only. I haven't really seen that before. It's taken like multiple years. And now some people are like, oh, I got in last year and I kind of dabbled in shitcoins. and then I started doing some reading and I realized that Bitcoin's kind of the only thing that made sense. And I'm like, wow, that's a quick learning curve. It took me a few years to like parse through enough stuff to even start going that way.

And that's just not the case anymore for a lot of people. The other thing that I'll say is I don't have trust in politicians, but I view value especially in the medium term in getting some of them on our side because I kind of view it as a time. buying mechanism. This is how I think of the regulatory approach. Because inevitably, I think there will be a point where there's going to be some shit politician that's just like ban it all. I think that perhaps happens at some time or like there's always the threat of that happening. It would be a better way of putting it. I think if we're able to at least buy time,

where we can build out tools where if that happened, it would have minimum impact. And that would be a hugely positive thing. Like get in the room, have the conversation, say, hey, like, this is how it functions. Like we see this as a tool for human freedom and human flourishing. And we think it's a positive thing. And if we can get people to understand that message and at least make it so it's not impossible to continue to build. then that's an overall positive thing. I'm not as optimistic that we'll get in the door and like get the positive regulations

and then it'll all be rainbows and sunshine forever. No. But I do think that we can gain a little bit of ground and then build like mad and then build out a system that is easily accessible for all. And in that nightmare scenario where some dude kicks in the door, was like, fuck it. It's illegal for everybody. It's kind of like, well.

I mean, kind of tried it. India tried it. I mean, it like, I don't know, I don't know if that has the impact. And I think that ship sailed to maybe rest your stress away from that. Like, there's, there's too many big players in the space now for, like, people who, who have the ears of some of these policy makers that are, you know, we're not, we're not in a place. where it's just a couple of people in their basement doing some shady business

the amount of institutional capital and businesses, the economic incentive to be behind on this goes against unfavorable policy. You know, you're not just talking about like losing control of monetary policy

or the panic that you might, and then you're just going to push the F button on the keyboard. I don't, you know, I think we're past that. And maybe, maybe I'm optimistic. But like,

you know, you were saying before, Ben, there's, there's, you know, there's, there's,

what was the point I was going to make? Damn it, I forgot. Oh, shit. I got, what we'll do is we'll get the, yeah,

yeah, from Adam and Max. then and then maybe that'll jog jog any. But maybe I'll go Adam first. Just any thoughts or like if you wanted to bounce ideas back and forth or just let me know where you're at. Yeah, tend to agree. I think, Carl, you hit it on the top of the show kind of in line with that.

Like the conversation is coming to us at this point. A few years ago, our chief revenue officer and I, Dave, we had dinner with Pierre Poliev, us and a few. a few people. This is before his big Bitcoin like surge. As a politician who understood monetary policy, who didn't really understand Bitcoin after like two and a half hours, you could just see the orange pill like filling up in his eyes. It was like, what about this? This is how Bitcoin works. This is how Bitcoin addresses that. He's like, oh, wow, good. What about this? This is how Bitcoin works. This is how Bitcoin addresses that. Oh, wow, good. And you can see that happening. So I think

you're right to the effect that the good politicians will that understand what sound money is and understand why a Bitcoin like experiment is worth trying in a sovereign nation. I think you're right. I think maybe where I side with Ben more than Carlo is that there are more than like three of those in existence. And so hopefully I am the pessimist here and you are the realist in the sense that the politicians want sound money. I don't think the bureaucrats are incentivized to have liberty amongst the individuals. But it could just be the pessimist in me that's thinking that.

So tend to agree with that. And I think that the ones that get it, they get it and they understand. and it's a really, really quick, quick dive into the Bitcoin ethos and, and, and why Bitcoin works and why the other cryptos or why a CBDC won't work. In my experience, those have been few and far between. Yeah, yeah, a CBDC, so it's like, it's them, you know, playing, like, not learning from the lesson and, you know, totally. Yeah, just like using, like, the same.

bag of tricks that they have yeah like in my opinion would almost make it seem like they like are they learning from their mistakes or are they just reiterating what's worked for them because there's a possibility that we have different motives here right there's a possibility that i want to separate money and state and they want to glue and and continue this conjuncture of money in state which And depending on which, on which narrative you're coming from, the policymaker ultimately has the last laugh. I think so you're absolutely right. And I think the approach that, you know,

that I think is for right now, the one that could get us to like, you know, second base is not saying necessarily, you know, we're going to separate money from state. because that's an adversarial position. Totally. But it's like this is an accountability mechanism for money that you manage. And if you really care about your constituents, then you care about making sure that not one or a handful of bad actors can manipulate and destroy the lives of, you know, however millions of people you're supposed to be served. yeah yeah i'd agree with that um i want to get max's thoughts here and something's telling me that he's

going to be the most antagonistic of all uh but i'll i'll defer to him for that max what do you thoughts on this topic no if it's about narrative crafting then yeah i think carlo has some really good points and there's different ways to make the sales pitch for different people um but uh I think that consumer protection is usually just a euphemism for monopolies. It just means that some entrepreneurs are not allowed to provide a service for people who actually want to buy it, just because some politician says, no, no, but we have to protect these people. They don't know exactly, like, they don't know what's good for them.

Let's prevent them making an a priori mistake. And I don't think that's a good thing. I think entrepreneurs have the benefit of the doubt, especially if they interact voluntarily with their customer base. Of course, there is property rights violations, and then we do need to have protections of people who got stolen from, obviously, like we've seen with FDX now, like this was a scam, this was fraud, this was people getting stolen from,

and yes, there has to be consequences for that. And sure, if politicians are going to be part of bringing those people to justice, then that's great. But the justice has to come after the crime, not before. And I do believe that entrepreneurs and the free market process has a way of finding out how people would like their problems to be solved and where we can experiment with a lot of different ways of how to get things done. And preemptive regulation, especially in terms of consumer protection,

I don't think is a useful thing. I would say it's a net harm. Yeah. Awesome. I know, Carlo, I know that your connection dropped a little bit in there, but it was a very free market response to your thoughts.

But yeah, like I tend to echo some of that. I tend to lean on this side of free market solutions in a way. One of the things that you tapped on Max was I like the idea of, of, you know, consequence after the crime as opposed to prior. Like instead of like, you know, everybody's penalized pre-crime, you know, like, what was that movie with the Tom Cruise movie where they start hauling people in for pre-crime?

because they have like these oracles that can tell them who's going to break the law in the future. Minority report. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. But yeah, I like the idea of the market can come to solutions that. And I mean, part of it again, the collaborative custody is like a kind of like a go between where, oh, shit, people are holding money and then losing all of it. but also people are worried about the personal responsibility of holding all their own keys.

Where can we do this? Okay, well, you know, you can hold enough keys to always move your own money. But if you really screw up, then there's a backstop of a just in case that does not have full access to your money. So like we're seeing some of those things start to pop up. We're seeing the idea of fetaments potentially doing things like that. even like I saw a thread the other day or like a funny tweet from I wonder if I can pull it up here it was and it was regarding while not actual well not actual Bitcoin it was regarding something that maybe makes sense for it was it was something that maybe

made some sense for exchanges that actually did have Bitcoin it was it was from not grubles and he works at there we go I found it okay I'm going to bring it up because it's an interesting tweet I thought it was funny anyways hold on okay so not grubles

hear me out what if custodians all put a key into a giant multi-sig with a contingency timeout that is resilient to a number of custodians imploding and that's effectively what liquid is right Like it's a and and yes, there's counterparty risk. The vast majority of holders of the key to that multi-sig in which, you know, the liquid token is pegged would have to be malicious. But like that's it people are starting.

The point is people are starting to bat around the idea of what if we reduce a lot of this risk with technology versus imposed regulations. And I think we're going to get both. And I think at the end of the day, Bitcoin will continue to do his thing regardless of what happens. It's just the longer path to get there, right? Like when you build something decentralized, it just takes longer because there are less hammers to wave around.

And you need to find consensus and think about secondary. and tertiary, like there is really no COBRA effect possible in Bitcoin because we have so many smart people going through it. We don't have single points of failure that bring in like a COBRA effect kind of mission or problem. Sorry, you did. Yeah, I totally agree. I agree.

Okay, gentlemen, I'm conscious of time, particularly for Max, because it's so fucking late for him and I'm so sorry, man. Where are you, Max? he's well in central europe so it's it's getting close to 2 a.m. but it's all right these conversations keep me going yeah so I mean Max I like we just got your thoughts on this but I'm I'm curious on on what route you're going down in regards to what you're excited about currently what has you bullish in these times so I'm going to let you take it away why

you bullish this week, man. Yeah, no, you're leading me in great with Grubel's tweet because I think I'm massively bullish on technology. The cyberpunks have written the code and they are not stopping. And now we have a plethora of incredible tools and our disposals that are unstoppable. Like we've unleashed Pandora's box to a large extent. And tools like liquid, like hardware wallets, like Fettyment, like Lightning Network, like coin joints.

All of this stuff is here. All of the stuff is not going anywhere. And all of a sudden, we have uninflatable money that is perfectly anonymous and that can be spent at scale. And that's here now. That's a reality. And well, like that makes a lot of the conversation, like a lot of the conversations mute.

It doesn't really matter that much anymore about what the politicians decree. and what they think is necessary for consumer protection, because consumers are just going to use their computers. Done, and they're going to run the free software. Done, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can do about it, other than building a tool that's better, and then maybe people will use that. So ultimately, like, we live in extremely turbulent times, and that includes an attack.

Like, you know, the last couple years, especially in the bear markets, we've been building like crazy. I mean, the Lightning Network is a creature of the bear market. You know, so for example, Wasabi 2.0. Like, that exists because Bitcoiners got wealthy enough to focus their time on really long-term projects, on building a cathedral that will outlast us all. And that motivation, that rigor and that drive to really make an impact and to just keep going is something that is not possible to stop. And even if you could, it's already too late.

Because to a large extent, we've solved a lot of the key problems that needed to be solved in order for the Cypherpump future to be here. And sure, the lightning network is still broken. We've just seen L&D go down twice in a couple weeks. So there's numerous flaws with the protocol. But we know of all these flaws. And there's a lot of unknowns as well, but we know of a lot of ways of making the lightning network better. And the same goes for coin joints, for example.

Like Wasabi 2.0 is it's fucking insane. like we have anonymous money now that's extremely cheap to maintain like that that's crazy that's absolutely crazy like and and it works and people are using it for for thousands and tens of thousands of bitcoin at this point so um but the cool thing is when you zoom in close enough to wasabi lightning or any of these things start to break quite soon you know like they're not as great as they could be. And that might be a bit discouraging because, well, we've put so much effort into it, and it's still not working great. And our invoices keep failing in lightning. You want to pay for the fish kicker, the football, right? However, that means just that we still have ways to improve

and it will get even better in the future. And the number of cypherpunks just keeps growing, especially because of debacles like FTX, these bear markets breed an incredible caliber of humans to build and work on these tools. And there is a tipping point sooner or later, and arguably we've already reached it. And from this point out, we're winning. We're winning so hard.

It's not even funny. So what's going to come in the future, Just by this technologically enabled, well, superpowers that we have now is, well, none of us has any clue, to be honest. But I think we all have a glimpse of the magnitude of how insane this is going to be. And, yeah, buckle up. It's going to be fun. I love it. There is so much.

I mean, you mentioned a few, again, like between. I mean, when I think scaling, privacy, all of the stuff that's here and on the horizon, it's pretty amazing. Like if you go back, I don't know, pre pre-Seguit in 2017, there was effectively, there was, scaling didn't exist. Scaling was custody, right? That's pretty much what it was. Then we got on-chain scaling, and then we paired that later with off-chain.

and scaling via lightning. And now we're starting to see, and along with that, you know, you get some better privacy assurances with lightning, depending on how specifically you're using it. We have these protocols for, again, additional privacy via coin join. You have state chains is an interesting one to play with. I enjoy like what Mercury wallet is doing. And then we have things on the horizon.

or I guess not on the horizon, but actively being worked on like Fetamint, which I'm also very interested to kind of see how that progresses. And there's just all these tools that are helping us towards the end goal of, I mean, personally, my end goal is for everybody to be able to utilize Bitcoin in a secure, easy, self-custodial, in private way is kind of what I would like to ideally see, have that accessible to everybody. And so I think we're getting there. And it's easy to be like, why are we there right now? But it's coming. And I know there's that old quote,

like people overestimate what can happen a year, but they vastly underestimate what can happen in a decade. And so I think we're going to see, lot of vast underestimations of what's going to be going on in 20, 2032, right? So I don't know. Adam, Carlo,

do you want to tag in to what Max is talking about? Yeah, I think, you know, the only thing I would say is that there's, um, the thing that makes, you know,

what we said at the, what I said, I think earlier, um, that, you know, Bitcoin doesn't really give a shame. and like it's coming whether there's you know favorable policy for it or not i think

that there is um there's like we're so still so much at the early stages of this thing and i'm you know by at no means an expert on the technical side of it but i do i am encouraged that there's there's like like it's tactical around how we're trying to expediate the end result and it's not you know it's not like as far as as far as like the way I see it you know I want what you said Ben around those fundamental and it's kind of there already right but more people have to want that and I think what are we doing as an industry as a collective to make more people people want what you said. And it is like an attack, it's a, it's, it comes in an attack and on from many fronts and many angles. And so like, you know, fighting ESG FUD, right? Like maybe it's not,

you know, it's not like the axe, but it could be like, oh, well, you know, proof of work mining is no longer legal in Canada, right? They're just decimating industry here, uh, taking like billions of dollars off the table. would we want to do that even though Bitcoin will be fine and other people are going to be benefactors of it like I'm Canadian and I don't want that outcome so I'm going to work to not to make not that not happen yeah I agree I would very much like to get home plug in my ASIC on the outside of my hand which I'm about to do and and have that not land me with a massive fine or in jail that would be correct that would be a nice thing to be a nice thing to be able to

Adam. Yeah, I think to Max's point, like the protocol lives on. The Cyper Punk started this in the 70s with the HTT protocol, right? In the internet. And then came SMTP and like policymakers do what they need to, what they can. Like, you know, you got to have a list. You got to have someone opt in and send them an email. They, you know, but they're not, they're not throttling the protocol.

They're throttling the businesses that interact with the protocol. The protocol is unthrottable. and it's always at a red line. Even in these like, like, Bitcoin is not a price, right? Bitcoin is a protocol. And there is no bear market for a protocol. It just, it's just there. It just exists, right?

Whether or not you're using it, the protocol is there and anyone can use it at any time. And that's like, that's a really, really cool thing. And in the same way, like, you know, the policymakers will, we'll do some good things and some, like, personally, I think the cookie protocol or the cookie thing that the Canadian government just did is like bullshit. I got to fucking click no cookies for every single website I go to now. That sucks. And that's a good example. Oh, yeah, that's very, very pretty. I mean, that's the cobra effect, right?

That's like, like, how do we stop all these cobras? Let's pay people to kill cobras. And then people start breeding cobras and then release them into the wild. That's like, that's what happens when policymakers only think, like, they had, policymakers have a very high time preference. Like, at most, a policymaker on day one, they have a four-year time preference and that's it. And that's all they think about. And the Bitcoin Protocol will be here in 400. There will be 400 new prime ministers before the Bitcoin Protocol like disappears.

And it's just never going to disappear. And I think that's a super bullish thing in that like we're all thinking about one, two, three years talking about lightning and how it's like it's early. My kids are going to know a super scalable Bitcoin, not because of policy, like regardless of policy. The protocol will just be there and will exist and will thrive because of this group and because of this comment section and because of like our collective users on Wasabi and Shake Pay and Bitcoin well and Ben's audience. And I think that that's a miraculous thing that the protocol is good. And the protocol will live on regardless.

I think I'm going to kind of, I'll go around. we'll get just a quick kind of round of final thoughts before we wrap here. But I want to pull on a couple things that were said here to kind of sum up. Adam, you said that, again, you know, there's going to be 400 new prime ministers and administrations and everything before, you know, like, and Bitcoin will still be here. The network will still exist and will live on into the future. and each one of those politicians whenever they get in they've got whatever they're they've got a time preference that is is perfectly in line with their next election that's that's their only focus and then you contrast that with i think it was max you were talking about building building like a cathedral that won't near completion in our lifetimes and you so you contrast that those two things of somebody's trying to build something in four years and somebody's trying to build

something over generations. And imagine the impact it's going to have on those two kind of different groups of people and how much more will be accomplished by the long-term goals of a cohesive group versus the short-term. I don't care what happens after this. I'm just going to do this for now so I get in for the next election like that and and just that mindset um and so while it may not be immediately evident in in the short term in the you know the term limits of the the next election um it becomes more and more pronounced as time goes on and I think that's just what we're going to see we're going to all of a sudden society is going to be like why is this one group of people that are focused around a common goal

and are using a different money and have this weird way of thinking where they don't care about necessarily tomorrow or this week or this month, but they care more so about next year and next decade and next generation. And that contrast is going to be incredible and undeniable

and it's going to result in more people joining in with a totally different line of thinking than they've ever been brought up with. So, yeah. Adam, I'm going to get final thoughts from you, and then we'll go Max, and then we'll go Carlo, and we'll round it out. Yeah, man. Bitcoin is money with rules and money with rules and not rulers. And I think that's a beautiful thing. We need rules. We've got to have a box to play in, and those should be well-defined.

and kept by math. And that's what Bitcoin offers. And that's super cool. I believe in the free market. And I believe in the entrepreneur's ability to innovate and to make that vision that you described Ben, that's like, chef kiss. It's just so beautiful. How do people interact with the Bitcoin protocol and make it usable, make it safe, make

it private, make it what money is supposed to be? Like, those are not hard things to understand. That's quite a realistic vision. and something that I'm super bullish, that innovators in the space are excited to give customers. So I think that's a wicked thing. I also love that like, I mean, we talk about at the top of the show, but like we didn't really talk price today.

It's kind of fucking irrelevant when you think about it. We've got some of the team in El Salvador right now. And like the guys are texting me. They're like, yeah, no one's talking about price. It's just about building. And that is just like, what a sense. signal. Like, what a signal that as Bitcoiners, like, it just doesn't matter, right? We're talking about protocol. We're talking about decades, generations from now. That's cool. So all shut up now.

Thanks for having me, bro. This was a blast. No worries, man. Max, you're up. Final thoughts? Yeah, definitely. I love bear markets, man. They're so great, so great, because people just focus on getting shit done and don't worry that much about the price. But also, like man this is such a once in a lifetime opportunity to stack a shit ton of sats like so if you are still holding on to some fiat fund coupons get rid of them as soon as fucking possible at an ATM you know at an online exchange it really doesn't matter man bitcoin well shakespay or whatever just get sats as many as fucking possible and obviously protect them on your own keys like don't be the next one that gets rock pulled that's absolutely stupid you know that's that your grandkills are going to be so pissed off if you tell them that that you got mount gawks or fpx like they will be so mad so don't do that you know and and yeah man protect your privacy as well like because if if if you're not private people will steal from you if everyone knows how much money you have and where you spend it they're going to come after you so use wasabi

make sure that the the coins that you've stacked are are nice and private and then protect them on a cold card or whatnot. Like that's that's the full stack. And the tools are here and it's yours for the taking. So again, thanks Ben for the invite. This was a really great conversation. It was a pleasure meeting you, Adam and Carlisle as well. See on the next one.

Awesome. Thanks, Max. Carlo, final thoughts? Yeah. You know, just same sentiments. This has been awesome. You know, that saying, you guys kind of said a different, It was like, you know, people who plant, plant trees don't get to enjoy the shade.

I think that's, that's, you know, that's, that's where I'm at. Where, you know, like, Bitcoin's changed my life. I mean, you'll all say that. This idea of thinking about future you, putting a premium on future you versus current you is, that in itself is a disruption. It is a disruption that has a monumental impact on society. It changes how we think about our health. what we eat, the things that we consume, the people we spend time with, the relationships that we maintain. And I think that is like the potentially like the impact, the sly roundabout way, where there is this, you know, sort of philosophical awakening where Ben, you said it.

You know, we're at a point where there's more and more people who are putting this premium on future them. And that has a cascading effect to the upside where society is a net benefactor of that. And, you know, it doesn't happen overnight. I kind of, you come to terms with the reality that this is an unraveling of monumental change that needs to occur on many levels. And the thing that's the most beautiful to me is how, Adam, you were saying, is that the protocol just is. And it just lives and breathes and gives everyone their own time to catch up. And so however each one of us and everyone out there can use their voice and their passion to, you know, create that sense of awakening and someone that they care about, then. you know, that could be, you know, a North Star for you.

You know, I shake pay, we're doing it in certain ways. You know, everyone here is doing it in their own ways. You know, I'm just really stoked and bullish that I get to be a part of this. And I mean, I get to tell my kids that, you know, I did a little bit for, I did a little bit for humanity to help bring Bitcoin to the Promise line. I love it. Yeah. It's, it'll be interesting decades from now being able to say that, you were here as at all what's happening. What an opportunity, right? Like what a stroke of luck that

we get to be here right now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, gentlemen, again, I thank you all for coming on. This is an awesome conversation. Thank you, Max, for staying up past your bedtime and partaking. Carlo, Adam, always good to see you guys. And all of you are welcome back anytime. So, thanks, guys. Thanks, man. Thanks, guys. Thanks. Nice. See you guys. Thanks. See you guys. Awesome. Everybody watching. Thank you so much for being here.

What a good combo. I love those guys. A lot of fun. All of them, their Twitter handles are linked down below. So, make sure to go give them all a follow. And from there, you can find everything that they're doing, everything that they're working on. As always, please like, subscribe, share all those things, help a ton. getting this content in front of more eyeballs. You can also hit up the previously mentioned sponsors in these show notes. If you really liked what you saw, actually I'll do one other thing here.

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