BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Michael Sullivan, The Coin Dad ep431

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://x.com/SecureMobile2 https://x.com/SullyMichaelvan https://x.com/TheCoinDad BOOK private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted. https://bitcoinmentor.io/ JOIN OUR AFFILIATE PROGRAM, EARN BITCOIN FOR REFERRALS! https://bitcoinmentor.io/affiliate-registration/ 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Use The Bitcoin Well - my favourite self custody bitcoin platform in Canada and USA! They offer KYC free accounts, 1% spread, no on-chain fees and tons of other incredible features. Check them out at: https://bitcoinwell.com/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 HODLHODL is a NON-CUSTODIAL, ANONYMOUS solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION Speedwallet - your one wallet to send, receive, shop & earn. Simple, fast and convenient! Download now, use code this link & get 5,000 SATs on your first transaction. https://www.speed.app/sweepstakes-promocode-btc/ DEBIFI is a non-custodial Bitcoin backed lending platform with institutional grade liquidity providers, loan periods of up to 5 years, and no rehypothecation of your funds. Find them at: https://debifi.com/ #Bitcoin #finance #Crypto #bitcoinnews #bitcoinpodcast #money

Yo, what is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? I'm on the road driving through BC right now. I'm going to go visit some friends. I've got to meet up, a Bitcoin meetup in Vancouver happening on the 11th. Very excited to do it, but we've got to keep doing the show live. Of course, I've got some awesome guests waiting in the wings to come in. So we will see them in just a second.

Now, of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Fuck it. Do it live. I can write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks.

Now, if you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Now, before we bring in our guests, we're going to take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. I'm pulling up timechain calendar.com and simultaneously, I'll pull up that live chat. That'll be over on the right-hand side for all this. see from here on in for better or worse.

And over on timechain calendar.com, we're sitting at $62,135 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will snag you 1,609 sats. Snap them up while you can. In terms of fees, next block, 8 sats per byte and Bitcoin mine at 19.73 million. That is 93.97% of the total supply. We are going to do a quick shout out to our sponsor. and then we will dive right in. We'll be right back.

A mission to enable independence by being one of the easiest and quickest ways to purchase Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. The best part about it, every buy goes directly into your own self-custody. They never hold your coins. You can add a Bitcoin address as part of onboarding. There's a transparent 1% spread, no hidden fees, no withdrawal fees, plus they have KYC free sales and bill payments on their website. They're also a publicly traded company under the ticker BTCW on the TSXV.

Check them out over at Bitcoinwell.com. Check out my full tutorial on how to use them. And you can check out the links in the show notes down below and sign up today. Has some of the best hardware on the market today to secure your Bitcoin. The cold card queue is an absolute powerhouse and is my daily driver. And on top of this, they have plenty of other goodies including the Mark 4, the tap signer, open dimes, the blog clock and much more. If you head over to their website, make sure you use code BTC sessions at checkout to get a nice discount. Links are in the show notes down below.

All right, we are back in and we're going to bring in our guests right now. I want to welcome to the stage, the Coin Dad, and Michael Sullivan. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Appreciate you joining me on a Friday to get bullish. And let's give ourselves some quick, We're going to give ourselves some quick introduction. So Coin Dad, I'll toss it to you, let people know who you are and what you do. All right. Appreciate you having me on. First off, this is my first live stream.

So glad to be on your show doing that. You'll nail it, I promise. My name is the Coin Dad. I'm with the Bitcoin Mining Museum. We're based out of North Carolina. We're mostly mobile, and we just go to conferences and events. that book us, but I've been basically growing the mining museum for the last four years after I found or figured out that there is nobody preserving the history of Bitcoin mining machines.

So I was like, I already have some in my collection. I might as well just be the first one to do so. And here I am with a five-man team and 125 machines in my collection. And it just keeps growing every month. That's awesome. And I've seen the, I saw a portion of what you've got going on in Miami last year, and it was incredible. I really, I need to get down and see the whole thing, I think. Yeah, that was half of it, the one that you've seen.

Yeah. Mining disrupt just about a month ago when we did Mining Disrupt. That's the biggest one I've done so far. That was the whole shebang. I think I might be at that one next year, actually. Have you ever been in the Mining Disrupt conference at all yet? I've not. I've not. I said they reached out, so I might swing down for it next time.

Okay, maybe we can do a get on stage and do a little talk on there, a panel. That'd be pretty awesome. I'd enjoy it. Well, awesome. I'm glad that you're here and I'm excited to hear about why you're bullish this week in a little bit here. But before we do, I'll toss it down to Michael. Michael, welcome to the show. Can you give yourself an introduction as well for anybody who might be unfamiliar? What's up, everybody? Super pumped to be here, a longtime viewer of the show. My name is Michael Sullivan. I'm a software engineer and a novelist. Most people that follow me on Twitter know me as the Bitcoin Fiction Guy. I've been avidly working on a book for the last couple of years. And I'm just so pumped to get it out there for all of you. But yeah, I got about a million things to be bullish today.

And I'm very excited about it. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to hear. And we're going to dive right in. So for anybody watching that may be unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish? Really simple premise to the show. Each one of us has come with a reason for being bullish.

And the flow of the show is really simple. Whatever that reason is, somebody's going to drop their reason, discuss whatever is exciting them in and around Bitcoin. So that's their chance to rent. As soon as they're done that, number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason together, comments, questions, whatever rabbit holes we decide to go down. And then number three, when we put a ball on that topic, we're going to rotate to the next person. So really simple. Reason, riff, rotate all the way through until everybody has had a turn. With that, I'm going to dive in.

I'm going to get started with my reason for being bullish. And this centers around an application that I've been using, just a phone app that I've been using quite a bit the past little while. It's relatively new. And my wife is actually using it as well. But they just dropped an update that I think is really, really cool. So first off, and maybe I'll share it. my screen here because I want to show kind of what the app is if anybody doesn't hasn't heard of it before and then dive into what they add so I'll grab this up here so for phone wallets I really really enjoy

aqua wallet and aqua wallet basically it gives you a couple different things it allows you of course to use regular on-chain bitcoin transactions great you can do that all day long all you like you know, it's self-custodio, you have your seed phrase, all of that. Fantastic. But then it segregates the on-chain from lightning and liquid as kind of like a spending wallet. And both of those are interoperable, meaning that you can send and receive lightning transactions. You can also send and receive liquid Bitcoin transactions. And they're both interoperable. In the background, there's just like there's something called bolts that will automatically swap to and from the liquid network,

regardless of if you're accepting a lightning transaction or not. It just does it all in the background for you. Now, the interesting thing is you can also swap between on-chain Bitcoin and your spending wallet. So you can say, oh, I'd like to, you know, I want this for a day-to-day use, and I want the lower fees and quicker transactions. I'll just swap from my on-chain to my spending wallet. And that'll trigger a, an on chain kind of or a peg in to to the liquid network and so that'll sit in a separate balance

the the one thing that wasn't there is if you were receiving like it say you had bitcoin in cold storage and you wanted it to be spendable in a lightning or liquid wallet like this what you had to do before is you had to send on chain bitcoin to your aqua wallet and then in so that would be one on transaction and then once it was there and confirmed you then had to hit the swap button and that would do another on-chain transaction to swap between on-chain and liquid and so in a high-fee environment that was a little bit of a pain in the butt and it could be expensive and so with the latest update they've added they've added automatic pegins And what that means is if you're here in your Aqua wallet and you go down to settings in the bottom right, there's an advanced setting called direct pegg in. And when you do that, if you hit receive and then under the liquid receive, there's a little button that says direct pegg in. It'll give you a regular Bitcoin address.

And as soon as that regular Bitcoin address receives an on-chain transaction, it will automatically pay. into the liquid network and give you liquid Bitcoin, meaning that if you have money in cold storage and you want it to be spendable for lightning transactions, it's a single transaction to get it to swap. If you're receiving a transaction from somebody and you would prefer that to be in the form of lightning and liquid being able to spend easily, normally, again, you'd have to receive the on-chain Bitcoin and then swap it afterwards. with this, you can just say, send Bitcoin to this address. It will automatically swap into the form that you would like.

And so the reason I'm bullish on this is because we're starting to see a change in how wallets work. There used to be an individual tool for every single job. And now what we're starting to see is kind of these all in one, I have, on chain, I have lightning, I have liquid, and a lot of the complexity is beginning, not fully, but it's beginning to be pushed to the background, to the point where I think eventually what we see is when you create a new wallet, somebody will be asked a couple questions about their habits. Oh, do you, is this mainly for long-term savings? Do you do large transactions typically or do you want like a portion to usually go to long-term savings versus spending with a

few simple like layman questions the wallet will begin to intuit what your habits are and then act in the background the way that would best reflect what you're trying to do without somebody having to know oh i need to move the funds here then i need to use another tool to swap it to this network for cheaper transactions and then I need to do this. I think eventually it's just I've got a wallet and it keeps it as secure or as accessible as I need for what I'm doing without having to think. And I'm really happy to see that because as somebody who teaches people for a living, it can be a little tough when I'm like, oh yeah. So there's a regular Bitcoin transaction. Sometimes those are expensive and maybe use those more for long-term savings. But if you want to spend, then we're

going to go over to the Bolt's website. And then you're going to get a totally different wallet that uses liquid or lightning. And then you're going to do a swap and you've got to grab an address from this one and send like, good luck explaining that to a brand new person. But if you just say, oh, if you're receiving some money and you want to have it easily spendable, just receive it into your spending wallet. That's an easy direction to tell somebody to do. Go to your spending wallet. receive and you're good. I think that's where the flow needs to go and I'm very happy to see these things. And while I recognize this isn't yet that, it's another step in that direction where the back end is getting sorted out to get to that point. So I guess that's kind of in a nutshell,

my reason for being bullish. And so in opening up to you guys, I'm curious in general, you're habits with wallets and you know how are you using bitcoin at the current time and like what kind of tools do you have to use to to accomplish that and are you a day-to-day user of like are you doing those small transactions or are you still like an on-chain kind of purist or where are you guys at whoever wants to dive in first so i'm i'm a mix uh my my first experience with lightning network was really when I went to El Salvador. I've been there twice now. And I've always been on-chain in the U.S.

Because I don't use it that much. Maybe there's a moment where I run into like a couple of years ago, a guy owned a gravel company, and he had two dump truck loads of gravel to bring to my property, and I found out he's into Bitcoin, and he was willing to accept Bitcoin as payment for it. So I did an on-chain transaction, took about 20 minutes while the truck was getting dumped in my property. That was kind of cool, you know.

But then I got to El Salvador and I realized, okay, I paid my taxi. I paid my restaurant. I got some drinks at the beach. Like everything was pretty much, I had like, I think 10 or 12 Lightning Network transactions in the three or four days that I was there. So I ended up going from Hot Wallet to Wallet of Satoshi before the, US problem. And use that there, but then I ran out. And the problem that I had is that my hot wallet was empty and the rest was in cold storage, but my cold storage is back in the US. I don't have access to it. So what you just mentioned with this aqua, are you basically saying that I could connect that to actual cold storage that's locked away that I can use while I'm not at home? So what you could do is, so Aqua Wallet right now, they don't have hardware support. I think that's the next thing I'd love to see out of them is some type of hardware support.

But, you know, so for instance, you know, same thing. I've been down to Elzonte and, you know, I didn't touch Fiat while I was in Elzonte the entire time, which was amazing. But in that instance, what I would probably be using is for travel when I want to bring some Bitcoin with me, but I want an extra layer of security on-chain. I'll typically have it in like a mobile wallet and I'll pair it with a tap signer So tap signer same guys who make the cold card but it's just like it's a I think I've got one like right here I'll show it it looks just like a credit card or a room key or something like that

But it's just you know a regular like card like this and the way it works is when I want to spend out of that like if I want to move it out of cold storage and I I'd say this is kind of like cool storage because it's for me, this card is useful for travel. The security gives me is if somebody gets a hold of my phone, they don't have my money. If somebody steals this card, they don't have my money because they also need a pin to unlock it. But in practice, what it is if I want it out of cold storage, I send it or I say I want to send it, it says, what's your pin? I put that in. and then I tap this card to the back of my phone,

and that gives me the signature to sign the transaction. So in practice, what I would do or what I've done is I take my cold storage with the card, and then if I need to spend some, if I need to move more out of cold storage, I'll say let's send it, well, what I'll do now is I'll say let's send it to that pagan address in Aqua. So I'll do one transaction. I'll say, okay, send it from the card to Aqua, and it'll automatically be spendable as lightning. What I'd love to see is an integration of being able to use the tap signer in Aqua as well. So I can just say like cold storage, you know, straight to spending wallet in the same app.

I think that would be ideal. Anyways, that's kind of where I'm at. Because I was kind of stuck at that moment, couldn't replenish anything. I have to go back to the US dollar. Yeah, yeah. And that's always the tricky bit. It's you got to, I've always tried to have just a little bit more than I think is like the maximum I'm going to use on a trip, which still is like obviously not a huge chunk of my my savings. You never want to do that.

But, you know, having enough through those, you know, with some decent security with, with an NFC card is nice. But yeah, yeah. Michael, I'm curious about your experience and like how you're using Bitcoin these days and has it changed over time. Oh, for sure. So I'm an engineer at heart. So whenever these new tools come out, I'm like very excitable and pumped to use them.

This is one that I will certainly use. Aqua is my personal favorite lighting wallet. Muni is close for me. But those are the two that I've used. most frequently. And I just did a bunch of these where I was using Aqua to consolidate UTXOs, because I think there's an interesting privacy tradeoff there. Rather than just in my wallet, consolidate all the UTXOs into a single one, incrementally sending them to lightning and are not lightning liquid, and then eventually cashing out. So there's always a little bit more an anonymity

there, and it's not such an obvious transaction on chain. But I really really, think it's interesting that these wallets are starting to make a little more bold decisions. So for example, Mutiny is using federations and using this specifically for like initial users so that ramp up period is really fluid for them. And it's going to be so excited that these different wallets are kind of making slightly different tradeoffs that are going to appeal to different user types and being slightly more opinionated. Because I think a little while ago it was a lot easier to see these well it's just trying to be the jack-of-all trades do everything somewhat mediocre in some senses but now we've started to see a little more specialization and that's got you pretty excited because then

you can find something that really melds with your specific practices of using lightning yeah i i totally agree where when when it's trying to be a catch-all it can at least if it tries to do it all at once it can fall short in every area but when there's a focus and there there's a there's a a a commitment to a certain type of back end flow, then I find it's a lot smoother. I really love what Mutiny is doing with the federations. I know there's been some issues here and it's so early with fediments, but you know, I think we're gonna have to start educating people

in the inverse fashionable we're used to. It used to be like, okay, let's learn about out how a seed phrase works and on-chain transactions. And now that you know that, now there's this thing called lightning. And that's probably the thing you're going to use all the time. But then in high-fee environments, it's kind of like, well, are you actually going to like put $500 into a channel as your first experience? Probably not.

So maybe you're going to be using some type of fetament or some type of cashew type system initially. And I honestly think that, you know, the end- goal is to get people to be as self-sovereign as possible, not your keys, not your coins, but you can't introduce them with a ton of friction. And so I think we need to kind of flip education on its head and start at the lowest hanging fruit, which is getting people to do a, you know, getting people to do a transaction in, in the most accessible layer at the time. And then work your way down the sovereignty stack to hopefully get people to on-chain cold

storage when it's economically feasible. It's really hard sell to be like, listen, you got to get yourself a $200 device and you got to run a node and you got to do these transactions that are going to cost you $10, $20 each to get your savings. And since it doesn't make sense to get $50 at a time, you're going to have to, you know, ape in with like a few thousand bucks. Like that's not going to be somebody's first step, but they're more likely to get to the point of having on-chain UTXOs to themselves if their first steps

aren't so scary. Oh, you just download this app, hit receive, there you go. And you can, I love the idea of being able to work your way through that sovereignty stack within the same environment. And that's why I liked mutiny is you had come in with fetaments. And so you don't have to worry about lightning channels or any of that. And then once you build a balance, there was a button that allows you to effectively take self-custody in the form of it will take all of your funds and turn them into your own lightning channel, which is great. And then also further from there, you can pull it into on-chain. So like any app that presents an onboarding experience where it's simple and you can work yourself towards owning your money,

I think that's a huge win and I think it's a great point. I work with a lot of engineering types and this is, I see a lot of it in the Bitcoin space as well where your initial first touch on Bitcoin was so much more complex and you really want to dive into this thing and understand the deep nuances of this. I think the future waves of adoption, just some of the people that are going to be coming are very much likely not those hyper-analytical engineering kinds of people. Yeah. I think it's important to kind of improve our communications with those folks. Yeah, yeah. The days of everyone in Bitcoin either being like a, you know, super,

super techie developer type or, you know, super libertarian. I mean, there's lots of, I mean, I count myself as a pretty libertarian as well. But like there's a lot of people that are coming in kind of from all over and given that Bitcoin will be, I believe will be used by everybody. You know, it just, I think the types of applications being as accessible as possible is a positive thing. And at the same time, there's always going to be the tools that give you every bell and whistle and advanced feature that you want for the people that have been around the block and know exactly how they want to do things. which is great. So yeah. I just asked, there are a few people, suggestions of wallets that people liked here as well. Zeus,

Mutiny, Green. Yep, played with those, absolutely. I also have Phoenix. Yeah, yeah, Phoenix is great. And if I dare ask, how do you have Phoenix in the US? I haven't used it in the US. I actually used it in El Salvador. Oh, there you go, okay. Because of the whole wallet of Satoshi thing shutting down, I switched over to Phoenix after that. And they actually pulled out of U.S. app stores, but you must have been able to download it while you were in El Salvador.

And so once you have it, it'll auto update from then on. So you don't have to worry about it. I think they were being overly cautious as well. Do you think we'll ever see a day where things are kind of set up kind of like credit cards are today, where you literally just tap a machine at the gas station and walk away because the payment is done? That already, it does exist. Your way for Bitcoin. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the tap cards for Bitcoin already exist. It'll just be how does that work on the back end? Like, it'll be, is the gas station accepting Bitcoin or it'll be, is there some sort of a swap working with the Fiat system where you can tap a lightning-enable? card that triggers a lightning transaction to an entity that then swaps to Fiat and pays the gas station. I feel like all of those things will exist until Fiat ceases to exist and then it'll just be the gas station accepts lightning with a tap card. Hopefully we'll still be alive by then. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Before we do a little rotation and jump into our next topic here,

somebody somebody who's asking for hardware what what do we like and also auto compliance mentioned Speedwall I do quite like them they're pretty easy they've got like a browser plug-in so you can just pay direct from from your browser and pair that with your phone and and I know super easy to use but for hardware good question Omar I again I'm a fan I love my cold card queue which is like the bigger one with like the full keyboard and everything. There's so many bells and whistles on that thing. And usually when I'm traveling, I got a tap signer going on is my typical setup.

But I'm curious what the coin dad and Michael are using. What do you guys? Oh, there we go. Is that the new treasurer? No, this is the limited edition where they only made 2013 of them for their anniversary. It only has no shit coins on it. Perfect. That's exactly what I want to hear.

That's fantastic. Yeah, that's the safe three, right? I've been using, yeah, that's not the new five. It's the three, but I still use the one. Yeah. So I'm since 2017, I've been on Trezor 1 and never had no issues. But I was in a meeting with the lieutenant governor two days ago, and in that meeting were some of the people that were in the Bitcoin community in North Carolina.

and one of them is from the Casa Hodel team and from Laps team over there. And he was mentioning when he asked me what I'm using that I'm still on the Treasur 1, he actually said I highly recommend that you switch to a newer model because those are, I didn't really understand what he was saying. So I don't know if you can. Yeah, yeah, I know exactly what he's talking about. So I need to move my stuff over now to newer stuff for what reason again? Yeah, so I wouldn't say that you need to worry about rushing into that, but the safe three is more secure.

And the reason is that the old treasers, like the Treasurer 1 and the Treasor Model T, both of those, they didn't have something called a secure element, which is like this fortified chip, basically where your actual keys to your money reside. and that chip if somebody were to like try and take special hardware and steal your device and get into it and try and extract your seed if it doesn't have a chip like that

then somebody with the right amount of knowledge and the right hardware would be able to extract your seed from the physical device not like remotely via hacking but like if they had access to the physical thing with the state three and the five Now it has that secure element chip that even if somebody pried it open and did everything that they could, they wouldn't get access to the seed phrase. Now, if you have the older treasers, one thing that does mitigate that attack, the physical attack, would be if you added a passphrase, then they'd also need to know the passphrase in order to access it.

But even if you don't have a passphrase on it, if you just got the pin, you're more likely than not the chance of somebody, you know, kicking in your door, finding your treasor, wherever it is locked away, getting access to it. And having the knowledge to do that is a lot slimmer. So I wouldn't be panicked about, you know, the key thing is you don't want to move hastily and screw up in between. but just calmly like setting up a new seed on your new device and then just gradually moving funds over you'll just be that much more secure when you do so yeah okay well the other thing i actually do i don't know if anybody else does this but i decentralized my cold storage it means i have i have more than one more than two more than three spread in different places so if anything ever happens to one you know it's not all yes or whatever reasons yeah risk

mitigation right you can't have all your eggs in one basket you can't have all your sats in one place right right and then multi-stage too yes absolutely absolutely um i did have let's see i i'm before i i jump to um michael and ask about your your um hardware uh somebody here was saying there it is matthew he was saying that he's using cold card jade treasur in the Bitcoin-only firmware, which, again, awesome. No shitcoins. And then I thought I saw somebody else, but there we go. And oh, that's the other thing I wanted to mention.

Outta compliance said too many wallets equals too many seed phrases to maintain. There is a solution to that. Out of compliance, take a look into something called BIP 85. Yeah. Yeah. So out of compliance, take a look into something called BIP 85. When you have a lot of, say, like, hot wallets and stuff like that, you can actually, so what I do is I have a tornado warning.

There's a lot of wind outside of my house. I got to go check them over. Hold on. Yeah, no worries. No worries. Let's not have one of our guests blow away. Yeah. Yeah, so out of compliance, check into BIP 85.

What I'll do is I'll have like a dedicated cold card. And you can generate like, they're called like child. seed phrases from the parent. So you'd basically have one seed phrase and then you would say, I would like account number one or two or three. And each one of those has its own seed phrase, which you can always go back to the master and regenerate. So if I have a cold card at home that has its own seed phrase, I could say, give me a new seed phrase for account one. And it'll spit one out. And I can go to a hot wallet on my phone and say, I want to import a wallet and put in those 12 words and then use that all the time.

And if I accidentally smash my phone or delete the app, I don't need to back up that seed phrase. I just need to have my cold card and I need to go back to the cold card and say, what was account one again? And it'll spit out that seed phrase and I can restore it. And so I only ever have to protect the cold card and the cold card seed phrase. And then all these other hot wallets and all the stuff that I tinker with, that's all just in the sub accounts. and if any of those are compromised,

nobody can work their way backwards to compromise the cold card. So it's a pretty cool system, worth a look. Probably a little bit of a convoluted explanation, but it solves your problem is what I'm getting at. So Michael, I'm curious for you, though. Do you have any favorite hardware, stuff that you've worked with? Yeah, your talk of BIP-85, actually,

is the perfect lead into what I was going to talk about a little bit, too. I've been accused before of being a walking-talking advertisement for Cold Card. I'm a huge fan of it along with Sparrow wallet specifically. But what I like so much about it is that as I've progressed along my Bitcoin journey, and I've wanted to learn about new things, more custody strategies, the cold card has always been right there with like absolutely everything and completely adaptable to what I need. Not only that, but also does a good job at kind of teaching you without teaching you. It has these things there, sort of hints at things.

I've improved my process a lot directly because of it. Like, for example, like I randomly got interested in CDEXOR a little while ago, specifically watching at BTC Sessions video about it. But I was like, I'm curious if my cold card will adapt to this, can induce things like this? Of course, it's got every feature I've ever needed. And yeah, and just, yeah, I'm very frequently talking about its praises. Yeah, you can dive pretty deep when it comes.

to a cold card. On the old one, like the Mark 4, when that came out and I did a video on it, I was like, I want this video to be the most in-depth cold card video that exists. And I went through it and I tried to cover everything, which I couldn't because more features came out afterwards. But that video was two and a half hours long. And it just goes through like the basics, but then it goes through every like extra feature little trick curiosity in the background.

Yeah. So like it's super versatile. You don't need to use it to that extent, but you can if you want to. So it's pretty cool. I think the air gaping mode specifically was incredibly interesting when trying to orange pill relatives. And seeing that the thing literally didn't even have to be plugged into the computer, I think really made some things quick in the.

brain of how unconnected to the traditional computer vulnerabilities it is. Yeah. I find that's always an aha moment for people. Once people see, again, you've got a device and you don't connect it to the internet in any way. And then you say, I just made a Bitcoin wallet. And I'm going to take a little bit of info from this device on an SD card and put it on my computer. and I'm going to just let the computer know about my addresses,

like basically let them know where to deposit. And people are like, hold on, how are you able to approve, like, how are you able to receive to your cold card if it's not plugged in or how are you able to receive and approve a transaction if your cold card never goes on the internet? And you have to kind of like step back and say, well, listen, like the cold card doesn't hold or any hardware wallet doesn't hold any Bitcoin. Like it literally holds no money. All the Bitcoin is on the Bitcoin blockchain.

It's a global ledger. So that's it's kind of everywhere. What your cold card actually holds is keys. So you can kind of think of it like there's a, there's a digital lockbox in the sky that holds. holds your coins and you've just got a key. So like all you need is your key to unlock that box so that you can take out the cash and then you can slide it into anybody else's slot. But like it's the keys that you're holding, not the money.

And that's that moment of oh, like they, it's a mental hurdle for a lot of people, I think. You know when I learned that, my learning moment for that was when I accidentally had my treasor in my, my pajamas and my wife washed everything in the wash and my treasurer was in there went through the whole washing and drying cycle and then i was folding my clothes and i get to my pjs and my treasure fell out my heart thunk i'm like oh my god did i just lose all of my bitcoin this was back 2017 2018 and that's when i figured out that i could buy a new one as long as i got my keys and move everything over the new one yeah it's it's very freeing when you when you clear that mental hurdle like okay I've got it just like your house you've got a key to your house and you've got a spare

key you know it's you start to piece it together okay I've got a got a spare key don't worry I've got my words so yeah it's it's pretty interesting so anyways I'll let's put a bow on our our wallet talk here and we're going to do another rotation so thanks for indulging me in my extended chat about wallets and everything. But we're going to toss it to Coin Dad here. And I'm going to cue you up with the same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish? I was thinking about that a little earlier today for a little while. One thing that got me bullish is actually looking back at all the conferences I've been to. I got a drawer full of freaking lanyards or lanyards here, probably 30 of them. going back to from the first conferences and how over the years the people that you meet,

the booths that you see, the growth in these conferences or the amount of people that show up, like you could just tell physically, not just online or from any numbers, but just physically the vibe and the amount of people showing up and the boosts of all the different ideas people have come up with. You know, like in Nashville, like I told you earlier before we got on live, it's my first time ever seeing these cards. And I'm like, how cool is that that we're here got Bitcoin trading cards now with some of the, this is Michael Saylor's first ever signed card. Like I got them to sign it while I was there.

But I got hooked and I'm people around their booth and everybody's buying cards. And then you look over and you see the artwork and then you go around the corner and then you see bit acts and the little home miners and stuff being sold now and they have literally tens of thousands of them out there on the blockchain now running. This type of growth in the

industry, I've seen it through these conference events has got me pretty bullish and even like in the fiat world, if you wanted to meet a billionaire, you've got to wait six weeks and get and it has to be for a good reason. And in 48 hours in Nashville

I met five billionaires. Only in the Bitcoin world can you do something like that? That shows you the interest of different caliber-level people, even up high that are coming in to the space. And that's got me pretty bullish. That's awesome. I mean, shout out to the Bitcoin trading cards, guys. It's funny because when I first kind of heard about the idea, I was not quite sold on it, but I do really love artwork and I was like as a kid I grew up I was collecting like the Marvel like the superhero

cards and I had all my my my little booklets of those and so as I kind of saw them I was like oh okay these are actually pretty cool and and they've they've done a really good job not only just with the artwork and and the product itself but also just like the way that they've been able to hype it up and build this crazy community of people collecting all these and like you get each other's cards. There was, I was in Miami last year, funny story. And, and I go, I walk into the bathroom and I go up to the urinal. And I like siddle up beside Dylan Leclair.

And I was like, yo, I pulled your card. You got to sign it. He's like, cool, you got to sign yours. And then as we're like talking about it, Gladstein comes in. he's like, ditto. All three of us in a row. But yeah, so they ended up put my stupid hair on a card too, which I nerded out too extensively when they did.

And yeah, I think it's such a fun, fun project. Those bid axes are awesome too. I just did a video on that a couple weeks back. And I have the nerd acts, but the same idea, a fork of the same project. And, uh, shout out to Scott. He's the one that made the first prototype and he lives like a hour for me and I'm friends with him. He's a great guy. He's actually in the chat right now.

Is he? Yeah, there is. He's to say, there he is. Excited about the 22 of the business. What's up, Scott? Yeah. I actually have the, uh, the bit axe prototype in my museum signed by him. That's awesome.

That's so cool. That's so cool. Yeah. again like there's there's so many it's wild how many events are going on and the scale of of where they're at right now like you you you have you can't even go to all of them anymore there's so many a year and so many different places yeah no it's it's it's impossible michael have you been to a bunch of uh you've been out to some events this past year i have not a young baby right yeah you're you're right the most super very anti-social which

which is a little bit against my personality of going on and loving to talk to people. But the Bitcoin trading cards thing, like, it's so inspiring to me how many subcultures are within Bitcoin and specifically creating different sorts of art. I just, there's so many different things. A lot of the Bitcoin fiction that I've been pretty into is just like there's a subculture there. There's a subculture of like music in Bitcoin. It's wild how many of these things there are and just how much support there is across the little community for each of them. Yeah, it's it's it's really cool. I love the I mean it's natural that this happens as as a

interest in a particular thing grows. There's going to be subsets of people that are super in tune with certain parts of it again like it's a case in point we've got mining we've got like you're talked about fiction obviously I'm I'm kind of on the wallet and and device side of things funny enough the mining side of it was quite a blind spot for me for a long time. I just It took me years before I even tried anything, really. And yeah, so like people tend to specialize a little bit, but that's what these events, I think, also are beginning to cater to because now there's so many events that you can't just, unless you're like the Bitcoin conference,

it's really tough to be an all in one when there's so many going on. So I think we're probably going to see a specialization in events as well. You know, like you'll have like more kind of dev hackathon type things. You'll have hardware related. You already have mining related specific events. I think you'll have privacy related events. You'll probably have the lightning. I mean, you already kind of do have lightning only events.

So you're seeing like this specialization of events to attract certain types of Bitcoiners even now. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, so you've been to, you've been to, you. You were at mining disrupt, you said, right? Correct. And how's that one? Like, I've not been to it before.

Right outside of Miami Airport, they were in Miami Convention Center. And I'm guessing it's four to five thousand people miners from around the world. Like, what was wild is that you had even all the way up from Canada, there's a company called Digital Shovel up there that does containers. They build containers. and they have other manufacturers around the country that would throw an entire 20 foot or 40 foot container on an 18-wheeler drive all the way to Miami and then open up double doors in the back and then slowly creep this huge container into the convention center back there and have all the miners set up have immersion cooling like you could just have you can walk through all these big displays of actual containers in the conference it was pretty sick that's really really cool well that's that's awesome. What's on the, so I guess I'll ask Michael, when you're through the gamut of young children, do you have anything in mind that you'd like to get to? Is there, is there anything that's piquing your interest of places you'd like to go and or conferences you'd like to see?

Oh, I'm already for sure going to Vegas for Bitcoin 2025. I talked to my wife. Like we had this year where we stayed in one place, but I'm going to be wrapping up my book here probably in the next six months or so and I'm just like got to get out there show it to people meet some people in the world that I've been friends with for years now. Nice. I just bought this morning this morning. I am very curious different subconferences or smaller ones that you guys would most highly recommend because I'm going to branch out a little bit too. I you know what one of my favorite events to go to and it's not a Bitcoin conference but it's Bitcoin adjacent is the Oslo Freedom Forum.

It's always, and it's an emotionally jarring one to go to because you get human rights activists from around the world that have just been through horrific experiences. And Bitcoin's just kind of there because it's a useful tool in the tool belt of a lot of these people. And so, like, it's all of the programming is in and around, you know, people living under dictators or, you know, tyrannical regimes. trying to navigate that. But then you also have like a financial freedom track that Bitcoin is plugged into that,

you know, Gladstein and the folks at the HRF have pioneered. And it's really cool. I think that we get into a bit of a trap of where we all go to the Bitcoin conference or, or, you know, Bitcoin conferences where everybody is all, about Bitcoin and understands what everything is. And so you kind of, you know, you get into, even though you can appreciate it when you go back home and nobody gives a shit about anything you're talking about. But you get to that conference and you're like, oh, everybody loves this.

Everything's inevitable. But then you get to something like the Oslo Freedom Forum and people are like, okay, cool, I can maybe see how this or there's skepticism or there's maybe I see how this can be useful, but like, okay, what do I do after this point? And it, or I know, I need the app to do this because this is what I need to do. And it's, it's a bit of a check on where we think we are versus where we actually need to need to be. And it allows, you know, I think the HRF is now going out and trying to work specifically with the people that are in areas that are most difficult to use Bitcoin, but also the developer. that can build the tools to help those people.

Because until you actually speak to the people that you're trying to solve the problem to, how can you possibly solve the problem? And so, yeah, that's one of my favorite things to go to is just you get to see Bitcoin in a very different light when it's juxtaposed against this pretty heavy general topic. So, yeah, that's for me. So you're constantly in orange pill mode versus being in an event where everybody's already orange pill. Yeah, yeah. And you actually really have to up your game when it gets to explaining how something might be useful to somebody.

But also you have to ask and address real questions. And you have to concede when something is not a silver bullet, but can be used in tandem with other things to at least help where maybe there would have been a brick wall before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. With the trucker situation? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like the trucker situation, it was, you know, you're trying to get money to people. Obviously, traditional finance would like anything was better than having your bank account shut down. And so it gave a conduit. But at the same time, you're grappling with teaching people to use stuff, getting the money to them. Most of it did get there, but some of it got caught up in a legal battle, unfortunately. It's bad timing and a concentration of keys, but it was the only digital mechanism that actually got to the truckers in mass. And then, you know, there's privacy issues where because of the haste with which it was done, where it was easier to audit, like, where are those Bitcoin right now? It was easier for them to say, like, we're going to try and flag certain addresses if they go to exchanges.

But they also didn't have, they didn't have, the government didn't have the experience of really being able to tackle that. And so they were pretty ill prepared for it as well. So it was pretty much as simple as like if somebody had moved to another address and then deposited to an exchange, it wouldn't have been a problem. problem. And as far as I'm aware of all the money that got handed out directly to truckers, none of that got seized anywhere. And who knows, some of the truckers may not have ever accessed it, but it was given to them. So yeah, but yeah, a fantastic use case. And it gave us a blueprint of how to do it better next time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the other recommendation that I'll toss out there for events, I'm going to a couple through the end of the year.

So I'm going to, I did a lot of traveling this year. I got to cut down a little bit next year. But I'm going to, I'm going to go to unconfiscatable in Vegas in September. That's just a weekend. That's like a fun one that I'm looking forward to. But tone vase does that one, right? Yeah, yeah, tone vase says that one. So I didn't make it out last year, but I'm going to go to that one.

At the end of August, I'm actually going to one that's been around forever. It's called Baltic Honey Badger in Riga. And that one's just amazing. I love it so much. It was so fun last time. And it's very high signal. It's one of the oldest existing conferences that are out there today. Where is it?

It's in Riga, Latvia. on the Baltic Sea. Wow. Yeah. I've never heard of that one. Yeah. It's the town itself is very medieval. Really, really cool place to do it.

But it's awesome. I'm going to Lugano Plan B. I've never been before, but that's in Switzerland. But the one that I've really loved this past year was Prague. BTC Prague was insane. Like the size of it and the focus and the organization. Like it was it was an absolutely amazing conference. I think it's going to be super busy.

I think there were 10,000 people there this year in Frog. I'd be surprised if it wasn't 15. I've never been to that one. I want to go to that one. And I spoke to the founder of the event. Because there were some people asking me if I'm going to bring my museum to that one. And I have never taken my museum out of the U.S. before. And I think the only way that I would ever, because I'm white glove,

hands on with my team, nobody touches my stuff. Cause like right here, I have only one of these and this is the oldest 13 year old minor FPGA before A6 that I own. If this falls and breaks, I can't go on Amazon and order another one. So it's like if I was to ever take anything out of the country, it would be like on Michael Sailor's jet and I pack it in the jet and I'm on the jet with my team. Michael, you heard it here first. We need that jet.

if you could just land it for a weekend. That's the only way I would bring it, because ain't nobody from Luftanzah or anywhere else touching my stuff. Yeah. Well, again, the organizers of Prague, Martin and Mateus, they're amazing. They put together an incredible event,

and I think it's in, I think it's late June next year, but also Prague's a beautiful city. So if you get the chance, you should probably check it out. Yeah. Well, with that, I guess, we can put a bow on this topic as well. We have one more rotation to get through.

But before we do, I got to give a quick shout out to our remaining sponsors. Also, we're going to give away some sats when we get back. So everybody, get your lightning wallets ready. Get them queued up because somebody in the audience is going to try and snag these sats before anybody else does. So if you have a wallet that can do LN URL withdrawals, then just get it ready because there might be a little QR code on the screen to send you some stats ASAP. So we'll be back in one minute.

We'll see you guys soon. Bitcoin Lightning wallet built with simplicity in mind. Spend and receive with ease. Claim your own lightning address, shop your favorite gift cards, and even earn rewards when you spend. Head over to speed. com to download the app on your mobile or desktop today and use the link down below to get 5,000 sats for free and have the chance to win even more.

It allows you to borrow against your Bitcoin in a non-custodial way. Collateral is held in a three of four distributed multi-sig with trusted parties. It provides institutional liquidity providers, loan periods of up to five years with flexible conditions and the best rates. And best of all, no rehypification of your funds. If you want to check them out today, head over to debify.com or hit the link in the show notes down below all right we are back and the coin dad has not yet blown away so so you be careful there let us know I mean I guess we'll see the lights flicker if it gets a little too wild there but be careful I got see Elon Musk satellite dish so I'm pretty surprised

that we're still online in the middle of a heavy storm outside yeah holy crap well I'm I'm crossed my fingers that we make it through me and Michael will hold down the fort if you need to go to the basement though so just be be cautious in this house i got one in the pantry there you go all right so that that can be uh your uh your your bunker slash citadel if if need be i suppose well let's yeah yeah there we go yeah take that down for sure well let's uh let's give away some sats quick before we get to michael's reason for being bullish so uh everybody that is watching right now this is bitcoin well and we are a best of out to throw a coin in the Bitcoin Well, wishing well.

So anybody unfamiliar, Bitcoin Well is in Canada and the U.S. Great place to purchase Bitcoin as well as pay your bills and a whole bunch of other cool things here. But as you use the platform, as you sign up, as you buy Bitcoin, as you refer friends, you earn points. And these points can be used to throw a coin in the wishing well and win sets. And you can win anywhere from 500 to a million. million sats. And we're going to toss a coin in the well right now. So I'm going to bring it up.

We're going to redeem 500 points here. And off it goes. And I'll enlarge this for a second. And 500 sats there. So whoever scans that first is going to steal them away from everybody else. I'll give you a few seconds here before I shrink it back down. And if you do get the free sats, make sure you'll let me know either in the chat or on Twitter or on Noster. And feel free to give Bitcoin well a tag as well to say thanks for the sats. Anyways, guys, we're going to, I'll shrink that back down. And we're going to jump right back in. And Michael, I'm going to toss it to you.

As our final reason for being bullish, I'll cue you up. Same question. Why are you bullish? So I am ever bullish. So it was a little bit challenging to whittle this one down. But the primary thing lately has been bullish on the people in Bitcoin, and specifically Bitcoin making people better. There's a lot of talk, and we mentioned subcultures earlier,

some of people getting in much better shape, people doing carnivore dieting and other things, people taking up martial arts, self-defense, all these sorts of things, and kind of being inspired, inspired from the self-ownership that Bitcoin taught them. But I think it's interesting the other side of that, too. So we're, in my opinion,

attracting a lot of people that have been deep down the self-improvement rabbit hole before coming to Bitcoin. For myself, I was in terrible shape. I had really severe eczema all over my skin. I had Tourette syndrome, still do. So I had pretty out of control, like physical issues for much of my life. And I went on a pretty big journey really questioning a lot of my health and diet habits and whatnot. I'm in much better shape now than I used to be about 60 pounds lighter and much more muscular and everything's good. Skin is great. But in doing that, there was a, I had to consistently question everything about my life. Like my body was wrecked.

I felt terrible. I was depressed. And nothing was working. Tried all sorts of different diets, crazy stuff, long, long fasts, vegan diets, and that constant process of being open-minded questioning, trying this new thing, being open-minded, questioning. Maybe that didn't work. We need to iterate more and more and find more things that work. That mindset and finding people that adopted that mindset was actually what led me to Bitcoin in the first place. So a lot of Bitcoiners like kind of get into Bitcoin and see other

things like carnivore. I kind of came the other way where I was like an extremely early adopter, early adopter of carnivore dieting. And it was one of the tools, one of many, that helped me to get a lot better shape, alleviated some of my health issues that I was having and played with for such a long time. But I'm so bullish because I think that just like Bitcoin makes people better, in my opinion, it also is bringing in these awesome people that have went through the same level of hardships and questioning. One of my all-time favorite quotes is the Miyamoto Musashi.

Once you find the way broadly, you will see it in all things. I really do feel that way about Bitcoin too, where that constant questioning that you have to go through constantly challenging your beliefs to get good at anything. in the world is kind of the same sort of mindset you need to have to learn about Bitcoin. I was wrong many times about Bitcoin. I didn't think it would work. I thought it was a bad. People were speculating and gambling with it.

But I learned over a lot of time that to consistently question all of your belief systems and to never just take something for face value. And that's what made Bitcoin quick so quickly for me. And I'm seeing that happen with new people adopted now. And I'm super bullish for that because I think we're going to get very wealthy over these next handful of years here and makes me really happy that it's the people that are taking such good care of themselves and really trying to be better that are going to be the ones that profit from that. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting.

I think you're right where I mean, you have a bit of an inverse story for Bitcoin, but it's, I guess the mindset, like you said, that kind of led you there to recognize, oh, maybe I should. question my my preconceived notions and and for me it was it was definitely the opposite right like i bitcoin was my first inkling um that my belief system may not be correct um and what i mean by that is you know i came into bitcoin curious and um i learned a little bit about it for a few months you know i I saw it for, for, you know, a handful of times through 2013 as it was going through one of its many parabolic rises. And I kind of ignored it each time or thought, oh, that would have been nice if I hadn't missed the boat. And then as it kind of came through the peak of that year, I was like, oh, my God, this is, again, either a Ponzi scheme or there's something there. So I spent not that long.

I mean, to me, it wasn't that long, a couple months kind of reading up and trying to learn as much as I could before I started getting any big. coin. And then when I did, shortly thereafter, the largest exchange on the planet at the time, Mount Cox imploded. And I wasn't on that exchange, but it was all over the news. And I, for the first time ever, something that I understood, and sorry for the background noise here, if you guys are here in a lawnmower, but something that I spent, in my opinion, a very minimal amount of time understanding, I knew for a fact was being presented completely incorrectly on the news and presented as fact because the messaging was Bitcoin got hacked and it's done now. And I knew that no, that was effectively a Bitcoin bank that was poorly managed and lost people's money. How do they

not know this? Like I'd known next to nothing about Bitcoin, but I know for sure that messaging is totally wrong. And every news station, every article, everything, Bitcoin got hacked. Bitcoin got hacked. It didn't. It was functioning exactly as it should have. Whoever had the keys had the coins. Somebody managed keys poorly. Bitcoin got stolen. Bitcoin was in no way hacked at the time. And so it was very jarring at the time to look and say, oh my God. Like I know next to nothing about this. I know how blatantly incorrect every single news network and newspaper. and everything is reporting this. What about other topics that I'm not as well informed on?

Is it possible that they could also be reporting certain things incorrectly? Like obviously there's going to be some things reported correctly and other things not. But like, why, you know, if I knew that this was incorrect, that it gave me that impetus to be like, I need to, I need to really question if I trust certain stories. uncertain things. Like I if it's important to me, maybe I should dive into certain stories more. And with you as talking about health and everything, that I think that's one of the things that people come to. And and I'm in the midst of reading Fiat food right now, with Matt Lysak or Lysiac. I'm not sure how to say his last name. But oh my God.

our food system is so screwed and he's actually an individual who came who read the fiat standard and there was a short from savadine and there was a short chapter on fiat food in it and he agreed with it safe on everything else and he got to that and he was like this sounds like total BS like I'm going to start fact checking this and he's a and he is a investigative journalist for the past 20 years and so he started And, you know, he specialized in like uncovering government corruption. And he dove into it. And he was like, actually, it was massively understated how corrupt or entire food system is.

And he goes through the entire history. And it's, again, like, you begin to question things. And, you know, I'm now questioning everything I knew about health and food. And I'm tweaking things. And I always knew that I had to change the guy. I'm pretty bad when it comes to eating garbage. But I think the thing that's kind of pushed me over the edge is before it was just like a bad habit. And I had to grapple with that.

But now I'm angry because I feel like they got me. Every time I eat some crap food, it's like it's not just me making bad choices. It's like there's an apparatus that because of the misaligned incentives are serving me up just absolute trash food that is not meant for human consumption. And that makes me angry more than anything. And so it helps me grapple with my cravings for certain bad foods and get around those by saying, no, I can't, I can't let those assholes feed me this sludge. I need to treat myself better than that. And so there's all kind of rabbit holes. You could go down the self-improvement. But I think there's a general tendency to question things when people are working towards that.

I'm curious if the coin dad has any like, is there, you know, in and around Bitcoin, is there other tangential topics where Bitcoin has made you level up or question things elsewhere? Like before Bitcoin, I lived with everybody's telling me the truth unless I catch you in the lie. after Bitcoin, now it's like everybody's lying to me unless I catch you telling the truth. So it's like, like, you know, my wife and I go grocery shopping and we like every other time we buy eggs. And then you see the eggs are just a regular yellow. And then my neighbor has chickens. And then we tried his eggs because he gave us some as a gift.

And they're Bitcoin orange on the inside. I'm like, how come the regular eggs are not like this? And now here we are with 14 chickens in our own backyard. eating our own eggs. And we eat fish. And then we see that there's crap in the fish. And now I built a pond and I got my own bass and my own crappy, 500 of them in there. And I feed them myself. So it's just like even on my own 15 acres, Bitcoin has caused me and my wife to look at things differently in the light of the food side, the health side. Even down to like getting vitamin D from the sun like skin cancer is most likely from the lotions you put on your skin not from the sun so it's

this you know this and i learned a lot of that from being al salvador from the people that are there so but i didn't go to el salvador i would have never went to el salvador but less it was for bitcoin so it's like bitcoin doesn't just change your life financially there's it changes your life almost in every aspect of your life in so many different ways like we could sit here another six hours and go down that rabbit hole. It's great. Again, like, I love, I love seeing people kind of make those, make those leaps. And just the general kind of self-improvement and working towards being better.

And I think it's a function of a couple things, but it's mainly a function of the fact that you can just have anybody um you you have seamless global communication instantly and humanity is still grappling with that quite a bit because obviously we need to learn how to disseminate information and and think critically about things and before it was just no i've got i've got my box at home that tells me what's real and what's not right you everybody just had the evening news and and that's it. And it was very easy to just get society to blanket, believe whatever you want when that's, that's all you have to serve information. And you can't go on or you can't hear, have somebody go viral for proving something to be false. Like that didn't exist before. And so now,

I think we're beginning to see humanity as a whole grapple with the idea of we're not going to get information top down anymore. It's going to be much more bottom up. And it's a lot messier that way, but you get to the truth quicker that way as well. And so, yeah, and we're, you know, obviously all of us at some point or another would be wrong about things. But that comes to the surface quicker when it's actually open discussion instead of shutting things down and preventing people from sharing information. And so I think we're going in the right direction. It's just it'll be a bumpy road kind of getting everybody there.

And there's always going to be pushback. There's always going to be the people that are worried about disinformation. And oh, we need to prevent, we need to prevent everybody from speaking and only have trusted sources of information. I think the total opposite. If somebody is spewing BS out there and it's completely wrong, let them do it. but let better ideas bubble to the top, let people, like force people to actually think for themselves

and sort through the information and figure out what is good information and why is this bad information? You know, like I think if we weren't bubble-wrapped and babysat it our entire lives or for generations prior, maybe we'd be an awful lot better at it today. I don't know. I'm so glad you brought up the internet thing too, because we have this just incredible resource so much data at our fingertips where when I was going down the health rabbit hole,

I really went through that first principle style reasoning. And that was kind of what got me out of it, looking through how humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years first. And initially I was like, okay, well, this was an interesting tool to solve this problem, really thinking through the core things. But then the same thing worked for Bitcoin, thinking about what is money, what problem does this solve rather than just adopt the previous that BS information that the news fed me. And now I'm like, okay, well, maybe we can apply this learning strategy to almost everything. We have this gigantic wealth of information out there. There's a macro skill you can learn in improving your ability to parse that information.

And it's just incredible. There's so much stuff out there. It's very optimistic, in my opinion. Yeah. And are you guys at least a little, I don't know, the scary part to me is this whole AI thing. You know, like my grandmother got a phone call from somebody that has my exact voice because they copied my voice off of a YouTube channel saying, hey, I'm in Dubai at the airport and they took my passport and I need $2,000 to get it back. And my grandmother called my dad. My dad calls my wife.

My wife's like, nope, he's right here next to me. He's not in Dubai. So that's one experience. Another one is through telegram. There's hackers that are taking the coin dad name. We're not hackers, but scammers. and then trying to sell cheap machines in my name, because I also, I'm a broker outside of the mining space,

and one of my clients lost $45,000 in Bitcoin just three, four weeks ago, down in Florida. And then another one, two weeks after that, for $14,000. And then a publicly traded company CEO called my cell phone and says, hey, I've been talking to the Coin Dad for the past week on a half a million dollar deal. Was that you? And I was like, no, I'm sitting here watching a movie at home. That was not me. So it's scary how the internet can be awesome in many ways, but then you have to be very careful in many other ways as well.

Yeah. I think you're going to get to the point where, you know, already you're talking about voice spoofing, right? I actually, for the first time, had somebody do that being me the other day, call somebody that I knew. Not phone call, but like a video call or not video call, but like a voice. note or something because they had started up some fake page saying they were me and then they wanted, you know, somebody to send the money or whatever. Anyways, the person was, you know, was being cautious enough to ask to send me a message and say, hey, is this you?

And, and then they kept, you know, kept stringing the person along for a little bit. And then the person tried to try to get them to, to think it was actually me by sending them just a voice message. It wasn't quite there. It just sounded a little slow. And so something was off about it. But it was still scary. Like it sounded like me. It just was something was weird about it. But you're going to get to the point very quickly where it will be a perfect image of you, like a video call with your voice, with your face, with everything that looks exactly the same in real time and can just have a conversation. That's already, like that is this close to happening.

And at that point, I think the only way that the world can grapple with that is, is a technology that already exists, but far too few people use, which is PGP. Like, you're going to have to have a key pair and a vetted, um, uh, known public, like public key that you can verify. anything online with. And so this is what software developers do all the time. They'll sign a new software release and there'll be an entire history of this software key having signed previous releases.

And so unless somebody has a copy of that key, then they couldn't spoof that. And so, you know, I think we might get into a situation where, and maybe Noster becomes this, right? maybe the idea of having a persona online that is linked to a private key and everything that you post, if it's not signed by you, there's no proof it is you, much like a Bitcoin transaction. You can't send a Bitcoin transaction without your private key. And so if somebody looks at a post by you and it's not signed by your private key, then there's no proof it was you. And the nice thing is even if that key is compromised, somebody could pretend to be you,

but you can also with the same key go and say, hey, this key is compromised. I'm moving to this one. And like, you know, you can at least let people know that it's compromised at the same time that somebody's saying, you know, incorrect things on your profile. So like there's, but at the end of the day, it all comes back to the real world. It all comes back to being in meet space with somebody because you can then get multiple people to vet you because you can speak to them in person and say, yeah, this is my new key. And then that person with their private key can sign a message saying, yes, this is the correct key. And you can get like a web of trust going, but it all comes down to real world connections. Like no matter what we do online, it's going to come

back to the reality, the real physical world. And yeah, but people are going to have to navigate that. Anything you see on a screen, it might not be real from now on. What I like to do is ask, that's my military background, but I ask security questions. Like, where did we first meet ever? Like, where exactly was it? You know, things of that nature that nobody else can answer. Or even in a live, like I tell some of my clients, if you have doubts, before you send any

money to do anything, do a live video call with me and make me hold my driver's license up next to my face. So even with AI technology, that's kind of hard to do because you don't have my updated driver's license. Yeah. Things of that nature. Yeah. 100%.

And again, like it can be worked around, but people really, really need to get used to the idea that anything they see in here, if it's not in the real world. this point you don't know you don't know if it's real or not so and that's uh not not the ideal place to be but um the world will catch up real fast when it becomes a real problem and it's it's about to i think so yeah um so gentlemen um what i want to do uh i know i like the rabbit hole that we really got down there. That's great. So I'm going to, I'm conscious of time.

I'm going to start rounding up the show, but I like to at the very end of every show. Just do a quick round amongst us of any final thoughts, anything that you took away from the episode, but also any recommendation that you might give to people watching. And this could be a recommendation for anything. It could be just a general piece of life advice. It could be, oh, check of this new app or device. or it could be check up this movie or book. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter.

Anything that you think people watching may find useful. And so I'll get us started so that you guys can kind of stew with that for a sec. Takeaway from the show for me is in and around, again, this specialization of Bitcoin and kind of this focus. And I think that this thread kind of pulls through it a lot. So, you know, I was talking about, you know, actual applications and tech. And so those are becoming very specialized. And it's those are going to cater to a certain type of Bitcoin or depending on what your goals are. When we were talking about events, those are starting to segregate into very specific kind of niche types of Bitcoiners.

And even when it comes to outside of Bitcoiners, Bitcoin, people are beginning to kind of focus in on different other aspects of life, you know, getting healthy, you know, becoming self-sufficient in many different ways, like going and having your own fish or like having your own chicken and egg, like people are beginning to specialize in them and become more self-sufficient and question everything around them because of Bitcoin. or because they're in the mindset that led them to Bitcoin. And so I think this is an incredibly positive thing.

I'm very excited about it and we're only going to see more of it. And in terms of recommendations for people, I'm going to say, you know what? If you haven't tried it yet, just because I really like the update, if you haven't tried it yet, go download Aqua Wallet. I think it's great. For me, like a day-to-day wallet, I think it's fantastic. And I really like what they're doing in the back end with this interoperability using liquid as like a spending wallet, but interoperating with lightning. And that kind of push to the background of the complexity of that, I think is really nice.

And I think they're going to continue to listen to user feedback and iterate on that. And it'll become smoother over time as well. So yeah, that's the one I would recommend. I will toss it over to the coin dad here as well. And I'll just ask you, do you have any final thoughts or recommendations? The Aqua wallet, is that Samsung miles? Yeah, it is. It is, yeah.

Yeah, he's signed the shoe, too. There you go. Great guy. Great guy. On the thing that I took away was really on the health side of what Michael was pointing out, Even though I'm kind of already down that rabbit hole with the things that we're doing, building a homestead and stuff, just to hear him speak it in more depth. It's more reassuring that I need to continue what I'm doing. Like just literally, my wife is actually watching this right now, but me and her had a talk just two, three hours ago about doing a 48-hour water fast this weekend and cleansing our body from all the stuff from Nashville and everything prior to that, reminding disrupt.

Because anytime you're on the road and you're busy having to do it. It's always junk food, fast food, and crap. You don't really have time to sit down and make a nice sandwich or make a nice salad and eat healthy. So we're going to focus on that on the recommendations. Recommendations. One thing that I've, and this is really just from my own experience, when I heard Bitcoin for the first time in 2013, I remember it was 30 bucks. I blew it off as internet money for monopoly money for geeks.

That was my first thought. Then in 2015, I heard it again, and I still didn't take it seriously. Then in early 2017, is my third time. And it seems like when people hear things three times, that's when they take things seriously and look into it. So I'm at Walmart, and at the register, there was a single mom with three kids in front of me, and one of them was a teenager, and I made a joke.

When it was time for her to pay, I said, you can probably pay in Bitcoin. You accept Bitcoin? And this is Walmart. I'm just making a joke. I know they don't. And the mother said, oh, that's a scam money. Don't nobody use that.

And her 16-year-old daughter was like, oh, mom, the kids at my school use it. We actually deal with video games and stuff. And her mom's jaw dropped. But I realized, like, when you see. say the word Bitcoin, even if it's not trying to orange pill somebody, just to use the word around somebody, that means it might be their first, second, or third time hearing it. So if you're that third person, maybe that person just jumped in the car, went home, and went on the internet and started taking it seriously because I was the third person in

her life to say it. So I would recommend saying Bitcoin, even if you're not orange pilling anybody, just to use it in your everyday life around you as a joke sometimes even. I love that so much, especially thinking about how you may not orange pill the person, but it could be that first or second time that's going to help them the subsequent time and just getting exposure positive. Yeah, that's exactly right. I love that. Well, Michael, I'll then, I guess, toss it down to you as well.

Final thoughts, recommendations, you can jump right in. I'm going to kind of bounce to a different topic that we alluded to just a little bit earlier, but my recommendation is hidden repression by Alex Gladstein. He mentioned him in the Oslo Freedom Forum earlier. I've been deep into his work. So I mentioned I've been working on a Bitcoin novel for the last couple of years. And one of the characters is deeply inspired by some things I learned in repression. I'm trying to find very physical and emotional ways to convey Bitcoin to people that aren't like me.

I'm very engineering like numbers and data and stuff. But my wife loves fiction. and like really finding visceral ways to explain how powerful 12 words in your head can be for somebody in those situations. And the strategy for doing that is very much inspired by Gladstein's work and alluding to some of that stuff in there. So I've been deep into that book, deep into all of his things and all this talks and whatnot. And my recommendation would be that if you haven't checked that stuff out, I'd highly recommend it. That's fantastic.

Well, I will, am I allowed to float that to him? see him in person tomorrow night do it man i'll let them i'll let them know um no that's awesome uh we'll have the signatures on here too i'm surprised like for the amount of signatures on that you're really ticking a lot of boxes there i still got a long ways to go you're not on here i'll all uh next time i'm down i'll uh i'll definitely chicken scratch my way through it so Michael, how far out did you say you are from getting your book done, do you think? Five or six months, roughly. Yeah, it's about the first one took me a few years, like 1,500 hours or something.

I think this was going to take me closer to 2000. Wow. Yeah, it's close. I'm super bullish on that right now as well. I had my wife, who's like a very good editor read it and definitely conveyed and connected some Bitcoin topics for her. So that was just the most reassuring thing. Like this thing I've been trying to do, it works. So now it's just connecting some of the bits that are a little bit messy and making it as captivating and emotionally driven as possible.

So a person that's not crazy interested in Bitcoin literally can't put it down anyway. That's incredible. That's awesome. And again, that book recommendation, I've got to say it's a very concise, like it's a short, concise, easy read. I've never been more angry when reading a book than a hidden repression. It's just so the IMF and the Bank of International settlements are just so impossibly malicious. Like I just didn't realize the degree to which the amount of misery that they have bestowed upon the world through their systems. So if you haven't read it, yeah, absolutely.

Hidden Repression by Alex Gladstein is a hell of a read. But it does end on a positive note. And it was like a breath of fresh air as I got to kind of near the end of the book. And it's just, oh, yeah, there is hope. So yeah, highly recommend. And I'm glad you brought that one up. But awesome. For those that are not into reading, God bless Bitcoin just came out.

and I recommend anybody to watch that. And I think it's also a perfect orange pill documentary to send people to. Awesome. I love that. I haven't watched it yet. I've got it queued up. I just been a little busy this week. So I'll be getting to it soon.

Well, awesome, gentlemen. We're going to round out here. That was fantastic. Everybody watching, of course, both these gentlemen, their handles are in these show notes down below. So make sure you give them a follow, see what they're up to. keep your eyes out for the next appearance of the Bitcoin Mining Museum and for Michael's book when it does drop. And gents, I will just say, again, thank you so much for joining me on a Friday to get bullish. And of course, you both are welcome back anytime.

I turn my date night down just for you, Ben. This is a hotter date anyways, right? Awesome. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Have a good weekend. All right, see you. All right. And everybody, thank you guys so much for being here as well. I hope you guys enjoyed the show. Again, please do follow these gents.

Their links are in these show notes down below. You can also like, subscribe, share. Those things help a ton. You can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors in the show notes down below. That always helps. And finally, if you are perusing the tutorials on the channel and you need a little bit of extra handholding, you can. can reach out to my team at Bitcoin Mentor.io. I've assembled an incredible team of amazing Bitcoin

educators. They can help you through anything from wallets to hardware to multi-sig, lightning and layer twos, running a node, home mining, all that stuff and more. And you can reach out again, Bitcoin Mentor.com.com.com.com. You can book a free 15-minute session to kind of assess what you need. And then if you feel like it's the right fit, you can move forward with a session or a package. And on the same note, if you know friends and family and you're going to be pointing them that way anyways, then we do have an affiliate program as well. That's at Bitcoin Mentor.io slash affiliate dash registration. And you can sign up to be an affiliate of Bitcoin Mentor. And actually, you earn in Bitcoin and every session that you refer a person to that they end up signing up and paying for, you get $21.

bucks and you get paid out every month in Bitcoin as long as your your balance is above 200 bucks. So yeah, get over there and feel free to earn some sats on the side while people are getting educated as well. But with that, I'm going to round out. Thank you guys so much for being here. Again, I appreciate you guys joining me every week. It's always a blast and give these gents a follow. I'm out.

Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be. See you guys next time. or your daily session. Huddled to Bitcoin.