BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Natalie Smolenski, TC Meditation Man, Nicholas Gregory ep308

Episode Date: December 10, 2022

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What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? And we got a killer panel today. I'm very excited to have all the guests. One is returning for the first time in a year. And very excited to have them back. Another, I got to hang out a bunch with a bunch at the Surfing Bitcoin Conference in

Beirits in August. Great guy. Super happy to have them on the show. And I've actually covered some. something that he works on. So we'll get into that a little bit. And another person that I've seen making the rounds on some of the podcasts, I've seen some great stuff coming out of her, and incredible speaker and great thinker. So very happy to have her on as well. We will do some introductions in a moment. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So of course, I defer

to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things helps time getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Toddled by Bitcoin. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market and in the Bitcoin space at the moment at timechain calendar.com.

new addition to the show. I'm going to give hats off to TC for making this. It's an incredible tool. So at a glance, a single Bitcoin will cost you 17,137 kuck bucks. A single kuk buck will pick you up 5,835 sats. 91.57% of all Bitcoin have been mine. That's 19.23 million of them. And in terms of fees, next block looking like 12 sats per byte,

Anything beyond that, you can kind of get mid to high single digit sats per byte. So you should be all right there. But use that RBF if you need to. Still not bad. Shout out to sponsor the show, coincite.com. If you are taking a look for hardware to secure your Bitcoin, I mean, can you really beat the cold card mark four? I think not. I think it's absolutely epic.

I love the thing. I do workshops on it all over the place. and I've got like a two-hour deep dive tutorial on how to use it. But CoinKite just has the best damn stuff. They have the block clock, the open dimes, the tap signers, the SaaS cards, just about everything. And I've done literally tutorials on all of it. So check it out.

Head over to coincite.com. Use code VTC sessions for 5% off everything there. Also, shout out to new sponsors of the show, Start 9, your sovereign computing solution. You can host every. thing. Your Bitcoin stack, obviously, you can run your node. You can run your lightning node. You can connect externally. You can do all kinds of great stuff, but you can also host your data. You can host files, passwords, all your important stuff. And they do have some pretty robust solutions.

You can, of course, build it yourself. But if you need something plug and play, they have solutions for you both on the, we'll say a little bit on the cheaper end, or you can go really robust and get their pro. And that is like a high end device for hosting your life. I just dropped a tutorial on how to use Start9 to build your Bitcoin stack. So be sure to check that out and check out Start9.com. If you're stacking sats and your concerns include self-custody, peer-to-peer, privacy, non-KYC, all those things, hoddle, hoddle is a solution for you. You can head there.

You can sign up with nothing more than an email address, and you can begin stacking KYC-free sats peer-to-peer. have a full tutorial on how to use it. It's excellent. They do also have their lending program where you can use your Bitcoin to secure loans or offer loans to people. And you can do it in a way in which your assets are not re-hypothicated. So check out hoddlehottle.com. Awesome stuff over there. Bill Fottle, of course, back up your Bitcoin seed phrases in solid steel. You don't want to be dealing with fire damage, water damage, all that crap. They also have Faraday bags if you're a tinfoil hat kind of person like me. And yeah, great way to be storing your backups.

Don't paper sucks. I'll just say it. This is how I back up my important walls. And finally, if you're in Canada, shake pay, easy way to stack sats. Uh, e transfers in and out, no depositor withdrawal fees, including withdrawing Bitcoin. You can shake your phone every single day for free sats. Uh, Satsback visa card, all kinds of great stuff out of them. And if you sign up with the link down below, after your first hundred bucks, they'll give you 10 bucks for free. So shout out shakepay.com. And I'm going to shut up now, because because I need to get my guests in here. We'll bring them all up.

We got Nick, we got Natalie, we got TC, everybody. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I appreciate you all. I think we should do a quick round of intros. So a quick, who are you and what do you do? So I'll toss it to Nick first. Can you give yourself a little intro, man?

Hey, I'm Nick Gregory. I work for a company called Commerce Block, and we build Bitcoin infrastructure, more well known for a privacy wallet called a Mercury wallet. Awesome. And Mercury wallet is awesome. I did a tutorial a while back, and you were kind enough to,

you guys were bringing it up. You went on McCormick's show, and it was in the background. You guys were sorting through the tutorial, which is awesome. So I appreciate that little shout-up that you did when you were there. So thanks, man. We'll toss it to TC as well.

T. T.C., can you give yourself a little intro, man? Hey, yeah, thank you so much for having me. I am TC and I am a web developer. I've been in web development for a very long time, but just working for companies in the Bitcoin space the last year and a half or so. And very recently, I just launched, in fact, it's right about a month ago. I launched the timechain calendar.com, which is my new creation was bouncing around in my head for the last year or so. And I finally, uh, jumped in and made it happen. And I'm so happy to be able to share that resource with you and your show and all the other clubs out there. Glad to be here. Dude, it's an excellent way to start the show. I think perhaps the best way to start the show. So thanks for building it. And again, awesome little tool to be able to at a glance get all the info you need. And we'll toss it to Natalie. Natalie, first time on the show. Thank you for being here. Can you give yourself a little

intro. Yes, hi everyone. So I'm a Dallas-based entrepreneur. I co-founded a company that built the first digital identity wallet using Bitcoin as a secure anchor of trust for digital claims. This was back in 2015, 2016, before anybody was really thinking about identity and Bitcoin. Sold that company in 2020. So I continue to lead business development within the acquiring firm. And I also founded the Texas Bitcoin Foundation, which I currently lead. We are a 501C3 public charity dedicated to research and education about Bitcoin. That's awesome. Well, I'm very excited to have you here.

And we all get to chat about whatever is top of mind for us. We all get to talk about what we're excited about. I'm curious to hear everybody's topics when we get to them. But first, of course, anybody watching that is unfamiliar. This is why are we bullish? Very simple premise to the show. All of us come with a reason why we're bullish, something that we're excited about, something top of mind.

It can really be anything, any topic, anything that kind of tickles our fancy. And so we're going to go by the three R's here, really simple. Somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. You get to rant, you get to chat about it, whatever you want to say. then altogether we're going to riff on that reason everybody gets to ask questions comments whatever they want to do and then finally third we're going to rotate to the next person until we all get a term so reason riff rotate um so are going to without further ado just dive in um and i've got a topic that i'm going to i'm going to draw uh and it kind of has to do with some news of the day but then

taking that news and kind of zooming out as to some of the uh greater implications as we shift to hopefully in the future a Bitcoin standard. So I'm going to first bring up this little tidbit of news that dropped earlier today. Crypto News outlet, the block, was secretly funded by Alameda Research. So the long and the short of it is that Alameda, aka SBF, a ton of money was funneled into the block in various forms. And some of it was used to buy, you know, to buy some real estate in the Bahamas, amongst other things. But just the very fact that that was all kind of hidden from most of the staff and was done by the founder, CEO, kind of calls into question any reporting that may have taken place prior to this or lack of reporting, perhaps.

But I mean, that's not the only place that SBF had been throwing money around, right? You know, you get Kevin O'Leary that's gone to bat nonstop for SBF this entire time. And he was paid $15 million to promote FTX. He said he lost money, but he was also paid $15 million. And so on top of this, SBF was, you know, major donor to a lot of political, both political parties, both sides of the political spectrum. But he also was very much front and center in, potentially could have basically formed the regulatory environment of the entire space, right?

And while also tossing money at people, which is terrifying. And so this results in, even in his downfall, puff pieces, you know, Wall Street Journal, FDX failed because Sam Bangman-Fried supporters lost confidence in him, you know, this, Bruce Fenton commented really quick before this show. I thought this one was satire. It's not the lost gospel of SBF, new revelations illuminating the world changing ambitions, aborted blueprints, utopian projects, and democracy transforming money bombs emanating from SBF, Inc.

Before the crypto billionaires, House of Cards came crashing down. So what I'm getting at here is, is why was he able to do this? while he printed his own money effectively. He was able to create money out of thin air, and then he was able to use that money he created at a thin air to pay people to say nice things about him or to not say bad things about him in many ways, shapes, and forms. And zooming out, this is kind of just a microcosm of the world as it is today.

Those that are the money spigot or are closest to the money spigot, enjoy a lot of the same privileges that SBF did throughout his kind of rise. And so a perfect example of this in Canada. The CBC is like is the news source for everybody. And this is from their own website, their sources of revenue. Now, the CBC made revenue of around $1.7 billion. in the 2018-19. And almost 1.1 billion of that was directly from the government.

And so you have to then question, well, if this is the majority of where all Canadians news come from is a state-funded news arm, then what sway, you know, what kind of influences are had on the reporting there? And yes, they will on occasion scrutinize the government. There is some fair reporting there from time to time. But there's also a lot of leeway that's given in particular. I've seen a ton of it this year. And also, I'd like to take a moment to point out the chart crime that was committed here.

Because let's look at this scale. It goes up by $100 million at a time. And then it gets to $700 million. And we'll just hop a billion up. So it makes it look a lot like the majority of the funding did not come from the government, this in pink here, but it was actually much more than 50% of their revenue was just directly from the government. So anyways, fun. My greater point here is eventually, I mean, eventually in a world where nobody is able to just print money out of nothing, I would

like to and I would hope to think that that it at least alleviates some of this. It's not quite as easy to print money out of nothing and then influence news cycles. There's obviously going to still be people that are paid off to perhaps spin stories that are not truthful. There's always going to be aspects of that. But the grandiose scale on which it happens today, I think, will be impeded at least a little bit. Bitcoin has a way about it where a lot of bullshit has shorter shelf life, I would like to think, in particular around financial stuff, right? We see a lot of implosions this year because, you know, you can't easily re-hypothecate. and stay afloat with a fixed supply asset.

But I think that goes beyond just the financial. I think it has implications down the road with the way that information is created and disseminated. And again, while it isn't perfect, I think some of this shit where you get a CEO that's able to print money and then basically have a ton of news outlets in the palm of his hand,

throughout even as downfall after blatant fraud. I think that stuff at least is minimized. So that's kind of, I'm bullish because I hope that we will see less bullshit as we move more towards a Bitcoin standard. Maybe this is a little hopeful of me, but it was just top of mind for me today. So I'm going to open it up for commentary, either just to add the story at hand or kind of the greater kind of zoom out picture that I was alluding to. I'm curious to hear TC. I'm curious to hear your initial thoughts on this because yeah, I'm just wondering. So TC, what are your thoughts on

on what is what has happened here with the whole SBF, the block, all that kind of stuff? And do you think it has bigger implications as we move potentially to a Bitcoin standard? Yeah, the hits keep coming, huh? This is like a sort of an onion where we just keep peeling back the layers and there's just more and more corruption. It is absolutely, I think, the poster child of sort of this larger phenomenon of the Fiat world that Bitcoiners have really figured out and put their finger on, that incentives are driving everything. So in a world where governments can print their own money at will and,

where now with this crypto phenomenon, these companies can print their own money at will. We have an absolute distortion and manipulation of the whole incentive structure. So, yeah, it's shocking. It's not really surprising. We kind of know it's all that that's what's happening. But to see it kind of laid bare really does, I think, validate a lot of the Bitcoiners' perspective that is continuing to just be told. I think that Bitcoin as a actual fixed supply monetary system

will absolutely put an end to a majority of this activity. You can't afford to pay off people and bribe people if you actually have to do work to acquire that money. So I'm with you. I think that it's, it's disappointing, but not surprising to see how deep the corruption runs. But I'm confident that in a world where we're just careening towards this legacy system unraveling, and Bitcoin just continues to deliver the truth, things will in some way be balanced out.

So I'm with you on that one. All right. Now, I want to go to Nick. I want to ask, is this too pie? in the sky of me. Am I getting ahead of myself? I'm being too optimistic here. What do you think? Maybe. But the first time I heard of Kevin O'Leary, he was bad-mouthing Bitcoin and going on about ESG nonsense and about how we needed more regulation. And it's the irony is I think we need regulation from people like him. You know, he was talking pretty bad about the whole community. And, you know,

it's interesting to see he got paid, you know, what he says, a small amount, 15 million. and he wasn't very open about that up until a few days ago. And yeah, we don't need more regulation. This is just pure theft. And he was complicit in this. Yeah. I mean, the space kind of, again, with a fixed supply asset, the space very quickly regulates itself.

It's just that people have not yet adjusted their behavior to reflect the asset that they now need to deal with. They assume they can do fiat things with a non-fiat. money. Natalie, what do you think here? What are your thoughts in and around, again, the smaller story and kind of the greater implications? Yeah, no, I think what's so remarkable about this cascading market collapse is that all of these Altcoin projects were affinity scams that.

that were whose success was predicated on the actual value provided by Bitcoin. And so all of them trafficked in the value proposition of Bitcoin, but while completely undermining it from an architecture standpoint. And, you know, we were, I would say, socially in a kind of perfect storm because, you know, rates were already at rock bottom, there really is no meaningful savings technology anymore, whether for the ordinary person or for, you know, H&Is or institutional investors. And so everybody's looking for asset classes that will, at the very least, preserve their wealth against devaluing currency, but hopefully also grow it.

And so we didn't see just, you know, all coin bubbles. We saw bubbles everywhere, particularly in technology stocks. And a lot of those have also, you know, dramatically lost value. And so all of this is pointing to how hard it is to create real value, whether it is monetary value, actually creating a monetary system that preserves the integrity of value over time or in the productive economy. I mean, we're seeing a lot of companies who were hyped up to just the heights of the universe now being revealed to be like, uh, mediocre at best and potentially also

engaged in some level of fraud or misrepresentation of what they're actually doing. And so all of this from my point of view is a much needed correction, but it's a very painful correction that's going to implicate a lot of people who are just trying to preserve money over time or wealth over time. So do you think, do you think that it will be anytime soon that there's a a separation, a distinction between Bitcoin and everything else? I mean, as we see right now, the general consensus from the market is that it's all grouped together, right? Like they see FTCS go down and it's like, well, of course, Bitcoin's going to dump too.

Do you think that there becomes a point where it's common knowledge that these things are different? Yes, which doesn't mean that scams go away. it just means that they morph into different form. So the main challenge for Bitcoin, I mean, currently it's demonstrating in the market adoption patterns, its value proposition. And so actually all of this, you know, even though the conventional wisdom says it's carnage for Bitcoin, is actually the playing out of the Bitcoin thesis about the value. value of non-politicized self-sovereign money in an environment where fiat money has in effect

become a system of control. And so we have, you know, countries like Russia moving toward a commodity-based system of transacting value. And obviously, you know, many countries don't like that, but it is, in fact, heralding the beginning of this separation in people's minds between Bitcoin and other kinds of assets. The challenge is going to be that the more adoption takes place, the more nation states will try to shut down or control all of the on-ramps and off-ramps into Bitcoin. And so that's where I see the next real battle being waged. I'd agree there. anybody watching, quick call to action, learn how to get you some non-KYC sets or earn Bitcoin. There's lots of different ways that you can get Bitcoin that isn't a traditional on-ramp or off-ramp.

I mentioned hoddle-hottle-hottle at the beginning of the show. There's other options like BISC and RoboSats. And again, just circular economies in your own neighborhood. go to local Bitcoin meetups and start a part, a portion of the meetup where people can get up and say, hey, this is what I do for a living. I would accept Bitcoin. Or I'm looking for such and such. And I'm willing to pay in Bitcoin.

Creating those things, I think is incredibly valuable. So yeah, we got in a bit of a tangent there. But I love the sentiment around it. So I guess I'll wrap this topic just by simply saying. I think in the absence of easily created fiat money that we may see a society based on information that is at least markedly more truthful at its core is my hope. So with the rounding of that topic, I'm going to do a rotation here. And I'm going to actually jump to Nick for this one. and I'm just going to start with a basic question for you.

I'll just simply ask, why are you bullish? What's on your mind? I'm seeing the circular economy grow literally in front of me. I mean, you know, I'm British and the pub is very important to our culture. I finally have a pub within 30 minutes walk that accepts lightning, which I wouldn't have thought how would happen a year ago. It's thanks to a bunch of guys that you know, the Bridges to Bitcoin people. I think they were on your show.

Those guys are awesome. Yeah, you're seeing this all over. London now you're seeing little establishments support lightning and I think Bitcoin in a way lost its way in the last few years when people just started talking about it as a store of wealth and there wasn't much activity of it being used and I think if there's something that's been really positive in this so-called bear market it's the fact that the circular economy is kind of improving you're seeing more more people using it as payments in the Western world and I think that is key to its growth you know I don't like the way sometimes people want to regulate

it as a commodity. Yeah, it's not commodity. It's a currency. I mean, I got into Bitcoin originally because I could use it to buy stuff with, not to just, you know, hold and hope it goes up by it's in five years time. I think that's key that people are using it. Otherwise, it's, in my view, useless. Yeah, I mean, I 100% agree. I think that what people use Bitcoin most as is very dependent on their situation, right? So, I was very much in that, oh, savings technology camp early on. I still am. I still am, but I'm also now in that circular economy, particularly with, again, everything

that happened in Canada earlier this year. I saw friends bank accounts shut down for a political view. And so it became abundantly clear that, you know, opting out of tradition. financial finance out of traditional banking was something that was very much on my radar. And I've been kind of earning and living on Bitcoin for some time now. But I was using kind of, and I still do use methods in which you kind of jump through some hoops to accomplish things to pay your bills and so and so forth. But now I'm actively out there looking for peer-to-peer solutions to get.

whatever I need. And I was very excited like earlier about a month ago. I met a rancher that's in in southern Alberta and I bought a quarter of a cow with Bitcoin and shocked my freezer, which is awesome. And so more stuff like that. I think it's so important. I love the circular economy stuff. The bridges to Bitcoin guys are incredible. I'm so happy with what they're doing over there in the UK. And I'm kind of on a mission to get more of that happening locally here. within my city in Calgary, but I think everybody watching should take that initiative in their own local meetup and try and get that going. But I'm going to ask Natalie, her thoughts on this circular economy type stuff. Where do you think we're at? Where do you think we need to be?

Yeah. So Bitcoin is interesting in that it is commodity money, which is something we haven't had for a You know, it's been, it's been quite a while since humans have transacted with like actual sterling coins or gold coins. But in fact, this is the earliest form of money. And we've seen again and again in the archaeological record how the purity of that commodity gets debased over time, you know, until it effectively is fiat, meaning the, the, the will. of the sovereign or sovereign violence is the only thing that stands behind the value of the coin. That is not and cannot be the case with Bitcoin. And so I think the mental leap that's happening right now is that for a lot of people who are hesitant about Bitcoin, they see its use as in some way shorting the state or undermining confidence in the state, which depends on confidence for the value of its monetary system.

And so there's a kind of implicit unstated anxiety about adopting DTC that it could end up unraveling things. rather quickly. I suspect that what is going to happen is that BTC is going to act as a kind of parallel neutral currency to the various fiats. And so people will get into the habit of using these different monies for different things, particularly as CBDCs get rolled out, hopefully not in the U.S., but we'll see. Essentially, Fiat money is becoming like a social credit system. It's not truly good for all debts, public and private.

It is a token that you can only use under very limited prescribed circumstances. So BTC is going to be money as such, truly something that spends the same anywhere. And so as the space for using Fiat becomes narrower, the space for using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange will become wider. Yeah, I mean, it's very much looking to be that way. I like that you mentioned how Fiat has become much narrower in its use case. Again, we see we see examples of this everywhere where for one reason or another, somebody's not allowed to transact in a certain way. or with a certain amount for whatever reason.

And it's becoming much more difficult to just do what people used to do and take for granted. And I notice this all the time when I want to do something simple and I'm forced to use traditional banking rails. And I realize, oh, my God, this is going to take so much longer. And I need to ask in some way, shape, or form so many more people's permission to do what I want to do, um, instead of just, just saying, okay, I just need to, I need to send you this money and, and okay, and it's gone. Um, I, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty stark the, the difference. And, and you're right. I think, um, you're going to see, well, you see things like this, especially with, uh, China's CBDC rollout where they're, um, you know, they're, they're, they're tying it

with social credit scores, they're limiting. You know, there's things like, oh, you can't. If you were at a protest, we've, you know, noticed that you were at this location, tracked you there. Okay, well, you can't use, you can't buy train tickets to get to, such and such. And saw it in the Hong Kong protests as well. I think you're going to see more of that.

Even more recently, we saw women in Iran just the other day. there's an article, Iranian women bank accounts getting shut down if they decide not to wear a headscarf. So it's right now, it seems to be, you know, it's one side of the political spectrum or the other, but eventually it gets to everybody. It's just a matter of who happens to be in power at the time. So everybody's going to get a taste of it. And once everybody has had a taste of it, particularly once we have even, more control over the money with

CBDCs, it just becomes obvious that you need an alternative. And I'm curious TCs take on this as well. The necessity dare I say for circular economies to develop sooner rather than later? What do you think, man?

Yeah, I mean, everything that's been said so far I'm resonating with the thing I see is just a collision course happening where the trend as far as the world we live in is governments around the world are all steadily trying to create a full control structure with a key mechanism there being the monetary system, the banking system, and more

and more people are bumping into that. I know several people in the United States where I live, as well as people who live in other parts of the world who have told me personally in the last six months or so, difficulties running into friction with their bank, running into issues with credit card companies. We saw all the shenanigans that went on with PayPal. I ended up shutting down my PayPal account, which I had for so many years. And I think it's just this collision course of the difficulties increasing with using legacy systems. And at the same time, we have more and more incredible tools. Really wonderful products are being developed, software and hardware, to be able to use Bitcoin. And it's proving itself to more and more people every day that it is the

absolute alternative. I know in my own personal life, I've attempted to sort of orange pill a lot of people in my circle. My barber is one person who has been paid now three times to cut my hair and receive sats as payment. And it is starting to really change from just this sort of novelty experience for some new people into them realizing the relief that there is a frictionless alternative to the way things have been done. So I see a lot of this stuff. I'm really excited about some of the new developments.

Feddy is really excited. to me. I've been watching the cashew app get developed and a lot of this stuff around these Chomian e-cash approaches are going to blast open

the whole world of possibilities for people to just bypass the clumsy friction-filled experience that they're accustomed to. It's just, it's happening and I I am really excited about what's coming during this bear market because it's almost as if all the

sort of hopium in the bull market has kind of cleared out. And people who are still around are focused and are building. So I think it's well on its way. I don't think it can be stopped. And I think we're getting a big help from the world around us because whoever's running the show out there in the world, they sure are determined to, you know, make things harder on people, which leaves people with no choice but to seek alternatives. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting seeing these worlds collide. And again, another perfect example, Nigeria limiting withdrawals very, very much for individuals to be able to take out cash, basically trying to push them to digital alternatives.

Meanwhile, Nigeria adoption of Bitcoin just through the roof, you know, comparatively to prior years, you know, they're, they're, they're almost doing our jobs for us, um, in many cases. So, uh, you know, if anyone, if anyone ever says Bitcoin doesn't have a marketing department, you just point them to the central bank in whatever country you're in. They're, they're really doing the job of Bitcoin's marketing department. Yes, I, I fully, fully agree. Um, awesome. Well, uh, yeah, Nick, I'm really glad that you brought up, the circular economy topic. I want to see much more of it.

I got to, before we shift topics, I want to bring attention to a website here. I'm going to bring it up. So if you're an individual, a business that is accepting Bitcoin, please go to BTCMap.org. and add yourself there. There's an app for this as well, which is awesome. But I just, we need even more people on here. If you have a Bitcoin business or a business that accepts Bitcoin, please add it to the map. Or if you previously were, or you can even just

go on here and start reaching out to some of the businesses there because we still need to, it still needs to be cross-reference. They basically took as much information as as they could from prior tools and put it all into this map, but it needs to be verified. So individual users can go and verify, yes, this business still accepts Bitcoin or no, it's since changed. And then we can get that map as accurate as possible. So call to action again.

Go to BTCmap.org if you have a business that accepts Bitcoin, or if you just want to help make the map even better, you can do some calling around, visit some locations, and verify if they do indeed accept Bitcoin or get them to accept Bitcoin again if they stopped for some reason. Anyways, I'm going to finish out this topic here. We're going to do another rotation.

And T.C., I'm going to jump to you. I know you just had the mic. I'm going to give it to you once more, and I'm just going to ask, why are you bullish? Well, for my reason why I'm bullish, I'm going to point to a tweet. Sorry, I'm not sharing my screen. I'll read it.

It's from Carl B. Menger. He says, not safe for work. The most Bitcoin ever has left exchanges, the great Exodus. And he puts up a chart where you can very clearly see the trend of Bitcoin coming off of exchanges at the greatest extreme in the history of the chart. Now, I know, hey, there it is. Look at you. Nice. I know that some of this on-chain analytics stuff can be a little bit of, witch doctor-ish kind of things. You can't always like really read into it. But I just know from anecdotal experience with people in my own sphere who five months ago when the whole Luna collapse was happening, I got a spike in contacts from people in my circle who were basically all of a sudden very incentivized and motivated to get their Bitcoin off whatever platforms they had it on. just had that experience again just in this last week or two contacted by three different

groups of people who all said, hey, I know you mentioned this to me six months ago and a year ago and multiple years ago. I'm ready now. Can you can you help me? I need to get my Bitcoin off of X platform. So I am bullish because the army of plebs who are embracing self-custody is growing and this is a trend that is increasingly important in the context that everything that's been said on the show so far you know we're basically living in a world of promises and ios and leverage and rehypothecation and the antidote to all that is simple you just create your own wallet you hold your keys you move your sats off of wherever they are onto your wallet that you hold the keys to.

And it's that simple. And now you can sit on the sideline and rest easy as the rest of this insane crypto industry implodes. There's no reason to leave yourself on the train tracks and keep your sats on any platform. So I am bullish because I see it in my own world. And it looks like it's not just my own world. It's also the greater world out there, as we see in this chart. people are taking their Bitcoin off exchanges. I'd echo that.

I've had the emails. I've had the calls. I've had the one-on-one sessions with people saying, okay, now's the time. How do I do this? How do I set up my hardware? How do I withdraw my sats? And how do I do this safely?

And so, you know, this past month has been busy for that kind of stuff, which is incredibly encouraging while, you know, while it's super shitty that SBF was a total fraud. It's also a learning experience. It's the price of tuition. Everybody pays it in one way or another, either through time or through monetary losses, which are hard lessons.

But again, that familiarity with self-custody is growing, and it's a positive thing to see. and it was alluded to earlier with things like fete, while not full self-custody, for those that may never take that dive, at least you can get a better flavor of it where it's not a giant honeypot. And perhaps you have a small community

or you have a family on a fetament or something like that, that could be interesting in the future. hopefully, but again, the more people self-custying, the less honeypots that we create, the less people trust others with their own money, the better. And I'll toss it to Natalie for your thoughts on kind of where we are with self-custody at the moment. Yeah, self-custody continues to be intimidating to the vast majority of people. And in fact, when I've tried to orange pill friends and family often, it's that that is just absolutely the deal breaker. And so what we're talking about here is not just technology change, but culture change.

People have really become accustomed to relying on third parties to custody their wealth and to mediate transactions for them. and they actually feel safer doing that than self-custody. And so there's going to have to be a sea change in the mentality behind that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've gone generations and generations of, you know, take my money in whatever form it exists in. But, you know, we're especially through our, our lifetimes, it's always been, you know, you be responsible with certain things. You've got to be

responsible with all these different things, but money is not one of them. You put it with somebody else because it's too dangerous to deal with yourself. You couldn't, you can't, you don't have that level of responsibility. You need to defer to somebody else who knows what they're doing. And it's created you know again generations upon generations of people that have never put in the thought

of how to secure their own money you you've put in thought into securing a lot of other stuff we have plenty of important things we have our passports we have family heirlooms we have precious metals like some people

have physical gold you have your laptop you have all all of these different. Your phone is an expensive piece of machinery that you carry around with you every single day. And yeah, you do lose things from time to time. But people in general don't mistrust themselves in caring for all of these other expensive important items that we hold on to. It's just money. And that's strange to me. And I very much look forward to a shift in that. But I don't know, Nick. Like, where do you think what do you think needs to change what do you think like can we get there where at least a larger proportion of the population sees self-custody as a good and doable thing yeah i think so and i think yeah in the early days we did have arguably a strong community around there there were like wallets really designed for that i don't you remember armory

they were one of the early wallets that was kind of like a hard wallet for self-custody. And I think a lot of the investment in that space kind of went away because there wasn't much demand for it. So I hope the events of the last few months will allow people in that area to raise money again, to potentially get investment. I also think one of the good and dark advantages of self-custody, it really messes up things for futures traders. Because if you remember, a guy Trace May said if a lot of people self-custy, custody it's going to wreck it's going to wreck the derivatives market on bitcoin so when wall street start doing funny business with bitcoin like shorting it longing it you know people are

yeah this is the first ever asset where you can actually take physical delivery unlike oil unlike gold where that's bit problematic here we can instantly and that could really you know mess up the manipulators which i i think would be really great to see to be honest i think that's i agree yeah it would be incredible to see i think i think it'd be a lot of fun I mean, this is an example of one of those things where, like I was talking about at the beginning of the show, there's a lot of things where you have a fix supply money that no longer work with the traditional system. There's a lot of behaviors that are no longer rewarded when your money cannot just be printed out of nothing and you can't patch over mistakes through money printing. And I think this is one of the examples where we're going to see financial institutions and we're going to see individual traders quickly realize like, oh, this is much different

than the system I'm used to and I've got to change my behavior accordingly. I don't think we're anywhere near that moment in time. Do you? Just imagine one day, you know, we find out that a fund is shorting big. and gets caught up, we could literally create a short squeeze by physical delivery, you know, and that could be a lot worse than what happened to GameStop. And that's something that I think Wall Street don't understand yet, because obviously a lot of the things they trade, there's no, it's not a bearer asset.

It's, you know, no one's going to, you know, do that to oil because you don't want oil tanker showing up at the end of your road. It's a very difficult, different products. And I think that's, I think someone's going to get wrecked doing that. And if the SEC keeps on approving futures-only ETS and not doing physical delivery, physical ETS, I think that could happen. That'd be really funny to watch. That would be better than the SBF would blow up. Do you think that the behavior that we've seen with all these firms that have imploded this year,

do you think that this simply repeats itself but like a level up? So like banks are beginning to offer Bitcoin products. Do you think this just it just repeats where we get to a new love? Because like we currently were at a stage where everybody was like, FTX is is the first good like well regular. Or they were saying like, you know, all these. Okay, we've got our coin base and our FTX and our Gemini or whatever. And these institutions, these are responsible.

This is the new era versus the old crap. where the Mount Goxes and the Quadrigas were past that. And then, lo and behold, oh, shit, everything imploded. Do you think that just repeats again, but with banks? Yes, because I think banks will offer Bitcoin as a product, but they won't give you real Bitcoin. It will essentially be a CFD, a contract for difference. And I think they're going to get stuck with it.

They're going to run into an issue where they won't have enough. There'll be a panic. all of us are going to, you know, there'll be a big push for physical, you know, self-storage, and there'll be a shortage. And I really don't think thanks are ready for that. And I think that would be, I mean, I really do think that's going to happen. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. All right, well, I'm going to round out this, this self-custody topic. Again, I always love throwing in the calls to action. If you're watching this and you're not self-custody, custody, which if you're here, guys, come on.

But if you're not self-custying, start now. Like the simplest call to action would be if you have your Bitcoin exclusively with somebody else, just download a simple wallet and just test taking it into your own custody. Download blue wallet, add a wallet, pick a regular Bitcoin wallet. Or download Moon Wallet, M-U-U-N, hit Receive. and use that address to take out like 50 bucks just into your own custody, just so you see you can do it. And then start there.

And that's your first step out the door to being a good little bitcoiner with your own self-custit. So we'll round out this topic. We're going to do one final rotation. Before we do, I just want to give a shout out to everybody in the chat. Thanks for being here. I got to give a shout out to yellow, obviously, always in here. I don't even know what time it is for him, but he's always here.

and it's super late and I appreciate him joining every time. And East Side Tony and Russ and Narwhal, they're all in here. So good to see you guys all the time. But we're going to do a rotation. And Natalie, I'm going to toss it to you. And again, same question directed at you. Why are you bullish? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I think, you know, what we're seeing in the world is,

is actually the Bitcoin thesis playing out. And so even though it's excruciatingly painful, for a lot of people likely will become more painful. It is the logical evolution of a debt super cycle and fiat-based system that has reached the extent of its power, in effect. I would suggest that, you know, at this point, central banks are out of tools to achieve the types of economic outcomes that they say they intend to achieve. And so what we're seeing is this kind of grab bag of incoherent and contradictory policies that ultimately cannot paper over the just extraordinary levels. of sovereign debt that are everywhere and not just sovereign debt but corporate debt. In fact,

it's corporate bonds that may end up being the thing to implode first. And so what does all of this mean? I mean, it means that we're collectively going through a re-education in what value is. and a self-sovereign commodity value is already and will continue to become a refuge, but refuge from some really bad things. And so I'm bullish on Bitcoin, but I'm also deeply concerned for the human suffering that is coming. I'm wondering if you can elaborate on the corporate bonds thing there. I mean, for those watching, can you kind of describe, like, one, anybody who doesn't know what a corporate bond is, but particularly why that might be one of the first dominoes to implode, to fall? Yeah, so this is me keying off something that Tomas Molinen said on Twitter.

He's far smarter than I am when it comes to financial macroeconomic analysis. But in effect, he was making the argument that sovereign bond yields no longer offer price signal because the practices of quantitative easing and quantitative tightening are used for yield curve control and so in effect bond yields are manipulated at this point and so what what does actually offer signal corporate bonds and there's there are so many companies that have survived the pandemic and before that the GFC through just like unlimited borrowing and we've actually we've seen the companies in the crypto space crash, companies in the crypto space crash first because they're

the least likely to be bailed out. They're the, you know, they're sort of the canaries in the coal mine. In a sense, you know, there's a limited pool of funders for these companies. And so once that pool dries up, they're kind of SOL. For more mainstream companies who have access to debt instruments that are more conventional, that process can be elongated, but it can't go on forever. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the strength of the productive economy. It's just really hard to make money. Like, it's hard to generate real value. And particularly in a inflationary macro environment with like,

supply chain disruptions, rising cost of labor. Like, it's just a lot of companies are not sustainable. Yeah, that's interesting. Like, again, how, how there's, again, there's no proper price signal in, in government bonds. And so, you know, you're right. Like the the the companies are not going to get most most companies will not get that that bail out. They no longer have easy money to borrow. And so they're they're the first that are shit out of luck.

You know, and so that talk that you did at the Texas blockchain summit where you were saying how the crypto implosion is is kind of the precursor to like the greater actual, you know, wider economy implosion that is at hand and how this is kind of how it will, you know, if it plays out, it'll likely play out very similar where it's just held together with twigs and glue. And there's, there's nothing truly there. These companies, again, we're just surviving on debt and speculation. and then when it comes to the wire, what's holding it up? There's nothing. They can be blown over. And even if some of them are,

I'd imagine some of the ones that are creating value will be a little bit caught up in this as well, right? Everything is going to be impacted in some way, shape, or form. And only the ones that are creating the most value, maybe can survive and weather the storm. Yeah, it's wild to think. I want to get some thoughts from the other guys as well. Maybe I'll toss it to Nick first.

I don't know if you have any thoughts or questions regarding what was just said by my Natalie here. Yeah, I mean, I think we're in a changing environment for sure. I mean, one of the noises that's been out in the last few weeks, you probably saw all that's talk about the open AI release at chat hard VG. I mean, I did get myself and my whole team played with it. It blew us away in terms of how that thing can code, how that thing can automate tasks that were, you know, stuff that we would pay for, like, you know, press releases. And that's going to be a lot of pain and disruption for a lot of people. It's going to put people out of jobs.

And that's very clear. With companies struggling, you know, maybe low wage, low income, you know, be affected by what's coming with AI, we're definitely in a period of change. And I don't know what's the end state here. but I think that all kind of relates in a different environment that we're facing. Yeah, I mean, not only do you have all of these companies that maybe didn't deserve to grow to the size that they did, but then you have an entire workforce that is going to be replaced with a program, right? Yeah. And I mean, it's interesting because, of course, every burst forward, every huge change in technology obviously destroys a lot of jobs, but also allows for humanity to create even more with less effort.

I wonder, you know, what that looks like around the bend, right? Like, do we just have different types of jobs, different. ways to keep people productive. I think part of the problem that we've witnessed over the past number of decades is kind of in the way we valued our time, right? We valued our time in a way where we said an hour worth of my time is worth a set amount of units in a currency that can be debased. And so that inherently puts the blue collar worker at a disadvantage because the contract upon which you began your employment is immediately redneged upon the moment the moment your money loses purchasing power. Because your understanding of what you can accomplish with your wages is whittled away very, very quickly.

And so after five years, 10 years in a position, of course, you know, you work your way up the corporate ladder perhaps. And, you know, if you're in a position long enough, then your wage increases and your, your, your raises because you're getting higher positions within a company, kind of mask what's happening. But you're not exactly keeping up. And this is why we see things like, you know, are parents able to afford homes much earlier in their careers and be able to easily have and care for children? And then you have an entire generation now where, you know, a report just came out in Canada the other day. The average Canadian to afford a down payment on a home in Canada would be 17 years of work and saving. If you want to live in one of the larger metropolitan areas like Toronto or Vancouver, 24 years of saving for the average Canadian to afford the down payment to begin payments on the purchase of your new home.

And that simply obviously was not the case beforehand. So now only the upper echelons of society will ever own their own home. And it's because our money stores wealth so poorly that people have been forced to save via their home and save via other mechanisms. you get pumped up valuations for companies and stocks that that really have no business being valued as high. I think a lot of that changes in a world where you have a fixed supply money that actually stores the fruits of your labor properly.

So I want to toss it to TC before I get chatting too much. Thoughts on Natalie's topic and kind of the rabbit holes we've gone down since. Yeah, pretty vast. I think that it's kind of an incredible thing to watch what we're seeing unfold here economically in the last couple of years. It's truly historic by any measure, and it seems like just an insurmountable debt crisis and currency crises and all kinds of geopolitical stuff at the same time. So to bring it back to Natalie talking about the corporate debt, I mean, I don't know how so many of these companies remain zombies for so long. It was something that was talked about a lot in the last couple years. The percentage of major stock indexes that the companies are not operational, they're not even able to pay the interest on their debt.

So I don't see how this carries on. I think that's the key takeaway is that these are not things that can structurally survive on an ongoing basis. So that's the amazing thing to watch. Bitcoin is absolutely here for a reason at this time. And it's just being sort of magnified in its properties as a solution in this environment. It's just bonkers. I don't really have too much more to add. I think you guys pretty well covered it.

Awesome. Yeah, I mean, it's unique times to be living in right now. I think I hope that the transition is manageable for most, you know, for at least, you know, my own family for people that I know, for people watching. All you can really say is try to create value for others, spend less than you earn, and save in a money that can be debased. I think that would be my key takeaways. So what I want to do here to round out the show is I was like going around just for a round of final thoughts. But also I'm going to give you guys a challenge here just to recommend. really anything that might have helped you on your Bitcoin journey in some way,

shape, or form. So this could be a book or a podcast or a video that you've taken in. It could be a life lesson you learned. It could be an application that you've used, a device you've used, a website that you really enjoy, really anything that you think could give somebody value if they were to check it out. So again, my final thoughts for today is, well, I think it's going to be a bumpy ride. Staying the course and doing kind of what I described before, again, trying to provide value, trying to save, trying to spend less than you earn.

And just kind of keeping your head down and staying the course is the best way to kind of deal with this. small savings right now can be much more in the future and just don't get wiped out while everybody else does. And in terms of recommendations, I would say if you haven't already, go and check out some of the footage from the Africa Bitcoin conference that took place this past week. Lots of good talks there. I'm not going to zero in on one, but there's a lot of good. content there and you can find it on youtube again the africa bitcoin conference there's all kinds

of great stuff there uh and with that i'll uh i'll toss it over to nick if you have any final thoughts that you want to uh get out and uh if you have a recommendation toss it out there yeah i mean the the building communities it's it's it's better than ever to be honest and there's real collaboration for example you know there's been a lot of work a lot of lightning and and privacy wallets are struggling with the tour issues. But there's been a lot of work there. We basically decided to make our wallet switch from tour to I2P. Some of the other guys have done things to where they run their own tour exit notes.

But the community is still small enough where different wallet providers talk to each other and bounce ideas, which may not be the case in five years time. But, you know, that's a quiet. And, you know, I've been working with other guys in the lightning space to integrate. lightings and state chains again other wallet providers you know maybe not talking about it public but shows us a lot of community a lot of fun fun enough i've been speaking to some guys we've been we watching the bitcoin uncensored podcasts from like six years ago now a lot of that stuff's not absolutely correct probably wouldn't probably be

cancelled in today's world but it's it does go into you get to learn a bit of the history of bitcoin and what it was like around 2014 and it's really funny to be honest and I'd recommend if, yeah, I'd recommend if some people just pick a random subject, listen to them, you know, don't be offended by what they say, but it talks, you know, you get to understand about some of the history of what was going on before the poor quaws and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of fun. If anybody's not going to be offended, it's, it's Bitcoiners.

Like, I think, I think Bitcoiners are are advocating for, for less canceling and more than more. Well, I guess it depends who you talk to. But, yeah, last week or something. So for some reason, someone mentioned it in the group. I am Bitcoin Uncended and sent a website with all the old shows. And we were in tears afterwards laughing about what happened here. And I think that's a classic one with Bruce Fenton being interviewed, which was quite funny in a bathroom somewhere.

That's awesome. Yeah, I did enjoy those. Those are some of the early ones that I was listening to. And I enjoyed the ones that I heard for sure. T.C., I'm going to toss it to you. Final thoughts, recommendation. let them fly yeah i i think that it's uh it's tough times it's challenging times for everyone and it's just not to do with bitcoin just the world in general so i think it's a it's a wonderful time to just dive

into a study and when it comes to bitcoin you you've got to just attempt to shed light on the parts that are not clear to you and there is no shortage of those those never end actually so you just keep learning. And I know that that's been an important part of my own path. It led me to make my time chain calendar app. While I was making that, I was super inspired by a lot of other great resources similar to that, you know, Mempool.d space and bitfeed. Live and my buddy made timechain stats.com. And these are all websites that are just free resources for you. And you can get great information from them, but you can also learn about Bitcoin. I remember the first time I looked at Mempool.Space, and I didn't really understand everything that was being shown to me there.

And over time, you learn and you understand the entire system better. So, you know, that's what I would recommend is people spend this time cracking into any books they might have stacked up, jumping on a computer and try out doing something with it, jumping in and taking a tutorial or learn how to how to build something, make it happen. It's that time. So I'm extra bullish about building in the bear market. That's what I would say.

I love that. Yeah. Again, all those tools that you mentioned to early on, whether it be time chain calendar that you built or Mempool lot space or TimeCham stats, you know, if you're looking at those, just, you know, if you're unsure what something is, just go to one of those websites, zero in on a piece of information that you don't understand and just ask the question, what is that?

And just go learn. What is that one stat? What does that thing mean? And there you go. You've leveled up a little bit. Final rotation. We'll toss it in Natalie. Final thoughts, recommendations, take it away.

Yeah. So I've always approach. I approached Bitcoin from a social scientific background rather than a technical background. And so one of the things that I've been doing recently that's been really cool is just rereading some of the early cypherpunk manifestos and mailing lists and reading up a little bit on the history of cryptography and the political battles around cryptography, particularly in the United States. So that's been very interesting to me from a historical standpoint, but also like, I mean, it's all happening now. Like the CBDC, the CBDC dystopia, the full surveillance, you know, the control through controlling economic transactions. I mean, that was all anticipated by the cypherpunks and crypto anarchists in like the 80s. And so we've actually been very fortunate in that we had this small contingent of far-sighted technologists who laid the groundwork for Bitcoin and other privacy technologies that are now gaining critical momentum precisely when they are needed.

So that's been really interesting. Yeah, I would echo that. It seems a society doesn't really migrate to a tool until it's necessary, until shit hits the fan, and then people discover, oh, I need this now. But thankfully, the tools are there, and while not perfect, they're being worked upon, as Nick was saying as well. So, yeah, yeah, absolutely fantastic. I want to thank all of you for taking the time for being here.

this is a really fun chat. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Everybody watching, of course, all of their Twitter handles are linked down below. So if you're not following anybody on the screen right now, head to the description down below and make sure you do give them a follow. And other than that, thank you all so much for being here. You're welcome back anytime. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ben.

Thanks a lot. All right. I'll see you guys later. Awesome. And everybody watching, thank you so much for being here. I hope you had a good time. Again, all those guys, super awesome. Give them all a follow. Again, happy to have TC back, happy to finally have Nick on the show. And again, having Natalie here was fantastic. She seems to be, have a solid head on our shoulders and has a lot of interesting things to say. So if you haven't seen her talk, actually, go check out some of the videos that are, circulating around and she did do a good interview on Peter McCormick's podcast as well.

So check that out. To round it out, of course, as always, please do like, subscribe, share all those things, help a ton. They get this in front of more people. You can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below, Coin Kite, Start 9, Hoddle, Hottle, Bill Fottle, and Shake Pay. Furthermore, if you've been checking out some of the tutorials and you're like, crap, I need additional help, I do one-on-ones. So if you ever need, again, the free tutorials aren't enough and you need that like back and forth.

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