BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Nathan Fast, Obi Nwosu, John Stefanopolous ep287

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/nathanfast https://twitter.com/obi https://twitter.com/JStefanop1 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $30 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $10 free with a savings balance of $75 or more for 15 consecutive days! https://start.ledn.io/btcsessions Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards, earn sats back while you shop. https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 BITCOIN tips: https://strike.me/btcsessions

everybody welcome to the show another friday another episode of why are we bullish uh we got a killer panel today super stoked to have all these gentlemen on um i hope you've been having a good week uh i decided to cap off the week here having a sip of few uh straight bourbon whiskey it's uh my little end of the week gift to myself been eating healthy and everything so why not ruin it with some high time preference i suppose uh but We're going to dive into all of the goings on. All of the, I'll introduce you to the panel shortly. Of course, this is live.

So anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks.

Now, if you have not already, like, subscribe, share. All those things really do help get 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 panel, let's just take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. This is bitbo.io dashboard. We're sitting at $21,267 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up.

4,700 sats. Little pump going on today, but don't get too excited. You know, still mid-bear market. you know, just stay humble. Stack those sats while you can. 91.17% of all Bitcoin have been mine. In terms of fees, next block, 15 sats per byte, but if you're willing to wait any amount of time

between one and three sats per byte should do you. Quick shout out to sponsors of the show, coincite.com. These guys just have the best Bitcoin hardware out there. I love it. I love my Mark 4 and the plethora of other cold cards I've got sitting around the house and being used in multisputed.

say quorums and so on and so forth. You've been seeing me dropping open dimes in little scavenger hunts around different cities I've been visiting. But also more recently, they've got their sats card and tap signer for on-the-go signing or more versatile open-dime experiences. And, you know, the block clock is a must for a Bitcoiners bookshelf. So check them out, coincite.com. In the store, you can use code BTC sessions to get 5% off everything.

If you're in Canada, shake pay, easy way to be stacking sats. Each transfers in and out, no deposit or withdrawal fees, thin spread. If you sign up with the link down below, buy your first hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin. You get 30 bucks for free. Same deal if you refer friends and family with your link. You can shake your phone every single day for free sats. They have a satsback visa card, all kinds of awesome stuff happening over there. Check them out.

Link is down below. Lend.aO, you can use your Bitcoin for a ton of different services. These guys have been super useful for me whenever I'm in a pinch and I need to get my hands on dollars, but I don't want to sell my Bitcoin. I can deposit here, get a loan of Bitcoin to my bank account within 24 hours. Pay back that Bitcoin. You get this back the same amount of SATs. They do have savings accounts for Bitcoin and USDC, but they do have their quarterly third-party

audits, which you can cryptographically verify that your holdings were involved in those audits, so you're not jerked around Celsius style. They have their B2X offering, Bitcoin-backed mortgages, cross Canada, and soon in some select to US states, tons of awesome stuff. Check them out. Start.ledan.com slash BTC sessions. Bit refill helps me a ton living on Bitcoin. I can get pretty much any gift card that I can imagine here. And I can pay it with Bitcoin on chain and via the Lightning Network.

I earn stats back as I shop. You can earn additional stats back through the referral program. You can top up lightning channels, phones. And if you're in the US, you can pay bills so you can get on that Bitcoin standard. So check them out. Bitrefill.com link is below. And finally, if you're back, up any important Bitcoin wallet, getting solid steel.

Paper flitting around the office isn't always the best option. You have to worry about fire damage, water damage, all that stuff. So this is I'm backing up my important Bitcoin stuff, and you can grab them. Again, privacypros.com. Slash BTC sessions. With that, enough of my rambling. Let's get in everybody who you are here to see. So we're going to bring in John, Nathan, and Obie.

Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you all for being here. Let's do a quick round of intros. And for those unfamiliar, you can let people know who you are and what you do. So I'll jump to John first. Please, a little introduction. Hey, I'm John. I'm the founder of FutureBits.

We specialize in building consumer-oriented Bitcoin miners that enable blockchain and Bitcoin mining for everybody in their home. That's awesome. I saw you speak at Bitcoin 2020 on one of the mining panels on the mining stage. And I got super interested. So I've been peeking around what you guys are doing. You guys have shipped a bunch of your latest batch, I believe, right? Yeah, yeah.

We've been busy shipping batch for now. So I've been super busy with that and almost finished with it. We're excited to get thousands of new nodes and Bitcoin miners out there. It's awesome. Awesome, man. I'm I'm I'm I'm just diving it's a long time coming I'm just diving into mining now I've got I've got a what's minor on the way with a black box but then after I get through that learn what I'm doing maybe it all have to try out a future bit as well and and do a little tutorial on that too so

we'll see uh two weeks trademark uh obie welcome to the show good to see you man can you give people a little introduction. Who are you? What do you do? Thank you very much. So great to be here. My name is Obie and I am one of the co-felder's for Feddy, which is going to be a very simple to use lightning app that's powered by the Feddy Mint protocol, which is this community custody protocol. But beyond that, I'm a board member for B-Trust, which is not-for-profit, aimed at fostering the creation of developer talent in the global self to add more and strengthen the open-source Bitcoin ecosystem. And I have been in Bitcoin for quite a long time. I ran a Bitcoin exchange in the UK for eight years. Awesome, man. Well, I'm glad to have you,

the Feddy stuff is is super interesting. I wasn't really familiar with it until I went to see, I was driving in Vancouver this past summer, and I stopped in to see Jeff Booth, and we were talking about privacy and scaling and all that stuff. And he said, look into Fedomites. And so I did. And I did a little bit of diving. I watched one of your talks, which was super helpful in understanding it. So, so yeah, man, super excited to see that develop as time goes on. Let's jump to Nathan, dude, first time on the show as well as John. So little introduction. Who are you? What do you do? Cool. Yeah. So I have a background in corporate finance. Did that for a while before I did a complete 180 and did radio shows around the country for about

15 years and then pivoted again and dove into Bitcoin full-time. So I'm now with Swan, Bitcoin, doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work to bring the inaugural Genesis block of Pacific Bitcoin Conference to life, as well as doing some behind-the-scenes work on their podcasts, as well as hard money with Natalie Brunel. That's awesome, man. Yeah, you're pumping out tons of stuff there at Swan. I have to, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask a question. You're also a quote unquote film star, aren't you? Oh, my claim to fame. Sure. It's not even Shark Nato 2. My voice was in Sharknato 2 for about 15 seconds. That's fantastic. I mean, that's the real story of the day. It's all down hell from here.

Yeah. That's awesome. Well, gentlemen, I'm so glad to have you all here. Of course, everybody watching, welcome. If you're unfamiliar, this is Why Are We Bullish? And really simple format, we go by the three R's. First, somebody's going to drop a reason why they are bullish. Second, altogether we're going to riff on that reason.

And then third, we're going to rotate to the next person until we've all had a turn. Reason, riff, rotate. Simple. So I'm going to get us started off on what I'm bullish about this week, what I'm excited about. So I'm going to pull something up. I had a little conversation throughout the week, but today with a guy from Texas. And I am interested in the Beef Initiative and what Slim is doing. down there in Texas. He is aggregating

producers and ranchers that are basically bringing beef to market and then he's marrying that over time with Bitcoin and allowing people to basically go peer to peer

with cattle and ranchers that can provide beef and allow people to purchase it with Bitcoin. And the reason I'm excited about this is, you know, I've been living primarily on Bitcoin for quite some time. But in doing so, there's a lot of kind of, you know, jumping through hoops, using temporary stopgap measures, lots of like gap bridging technologies where you're,

you know, you pay with Bitcoin, but like you're not really, you know, you're kind of using different mechanisms to, you know, use Bitcoin to pay with Fiat. But I really love the idea that is developing where people are accepting Bitcoin for a couple of different reasons. And I want to step back in history maybe to 2014, 2015, and around then. There's a lot of hype around quote unquote merchant adoption back then. And I would say a lot of people kind of jump the gun of trying to get merchant adoption through any means. And what that typically meant was the merchants not giving a shit about Bitcoin itself and seeing it as a marketing gimmick to potentially get some more customers and then just using

an off ramp like BitPay to just dump to Fiat immediately so that they don't even notice. But I'm seeing more and more people wanting to accept Bitcoin. And it's still obviously very niche. We all know how early this is right now, but people wanting to accept Bitcoin for their goods or services. And this gets me particularly excited. I, the reason this conversation happened is because, again, I was, I was buying meat through the grocery store and then I was trying to find cheaper ways to do it. And then I was trying to find locals. And then I was a familiar with the beef initiative, but there weren't any, any locals. I'm up in Alberta, Canada. And, and And so I tweeted out.

I tagged these guys. And then I said, if anybody knows Alberta ranchers that are interested in in selling beef directly for Bitcoin, just let me know. Like three minutes later, I had somebody tweeting me, hey, man, I'm pretty close to you. I'm pretty local. So if you're interested, I'm super down to sell you like a quarter cow or a half a cow in October here. So I'm literally, I'm splitting with my friend. we're buying like a quarter cow to start and just getting our cuts of beef directly from an Alberta rancher in exchange for Bitcoin, which he intends on keeping.

So I love this kind of build out of people that are creating these circular economies that actually value Bitcoin and aren't just doing it as a marketing schick, but rather because they've liked to actually be accepting Bitcoin, either for the fact that it kind of tears down borders or for the fact that they see it as a long-term savings mechanism. You know, up until now, you know, I still appreciate the things that allow me to live on Bitcoin. Things like, you know, I fly a lot. So cheap air does Bitcoin. The Bitcoin company, these guys just launched, but you can get all kinds of gift cards and stuff.

Obviously, bit refill that I was talking about before here in Canada and the, US coin cards is another awesome option. But I get really excited about this direct kind of peer to peer. You have a good or service and I'm going to give you Bitcoin directly for it. And I can't wait to see more of that. I love to find if anybody's watching right now and maybe you're a poultry farmer or you've got really any good or service that you're willing to offer for Bitcoin directly, shout me out, tweet me on Twitter, you know, comment down below, whatever it is.

I'm interested. And even if it's something that I myself don't necessarily need, I think it's important that Bitcoiners know that they can actually get these things directly from people that are producing. So that is my reason why I'm bullish. I'm curious to hear some of your guys' thoughts on the state of things, the slow and gradual development of circular economies, you know, where are we at? What's what things are good? What's missing? What needs to be developed? So I'll open it up. Anybody who wants to dive in,

let me know. I think the interesting thing. Let's go. Let's go Nathan and then Obey. I mean, you mentioned a little, you've mentioned a couple times, you know, you have people that work for you and you pay them in Bitcoin, you know, whether they're designing thumbnails or doing video editing and it's it's instant settlement you know it's not waiting days like i was just having a conversation at uh swan salon in in l a couple days ago with a business owner who uh does a lot of b-to-be transactions especially it's a huge pain point over labor day weekend that just adds another debt you know the settlement the a c h is just it's just hugely frustrating so to be whether whether it's beef or chicken or a freelancer or anything,

just the instant settlement, I think people are starting to wake up to it. It's huge opportunity. Yeah, it's hugely helpful. Anytime, even just in dealing with, I had a flight recently. I was going to a conference. And because I'm Canadian and the way that they,

you know, some of the apps like Delta or American Air or whatever it may be, the way that they accept credit cards. Sometimes Canadian cards just don't work. They'll be like, oh, add in your zip code. I'm like, we don't have zip codes in Canada. It's their postal codes and they have letters in them. And so like just as simple as making a credit card payment, you're like,

I'm banked and this is still a massive pain in the ass. And there's certain places in the U.S. too where you swipe a card. I was just in New York. and if you use your card, your pin, chip in pin, the pin is your zip code. But again, we don't have, like we have pins that we set here in Canada,

but they're not accepted because they want a five, like a five character pin. And it's just tailored so locally that it doesn't work with this kind of international commerce that we're used to, whereas like Bitcoin payments, nobody gives a shit. Like it's just, is, did you send the money?

fantastic, here's your good and or service. That's it. Ovi, you had some thoughts there. Yeah, I mean, the company we set up, our reason for existing is to help hyper-piconize the world. And so we actually

have that on our homepage and we just made a call out at the beginning of last week, looking for leaders of communities around the world to help them hyper-bitconize. So I've got a big affinity to the idea of circular economies. That's why I'm in actually in El Salvador right now, because you've got a company Ibex, Mercado and the premier Bitcoin working to try and carry on where Buckele started and team started to try and get more levels of usage and circular economies in El Salvador. And I'm coming here as a student

to just sort of see what they're doing, learn research, so that we can then take that. But I'm really bullish. So obviously I'm really bullish about this. My view is that we're going to see clear examples of hyper-bitconized communities in 2023. And we're going to be responsible for some, I'm sure others will as well.

But it's definitely going to happen because we're going to be responsible, at least for some of them. And I think, Once there's a sort of this mental fence that people have to jump over. But once they actually come over to the other side and you can get a community where merchants and consumers and people are receiving salaries all used all powered by Bitcoin, the experience we know is going to be incredibly an incredible experience and much better than anything that you have to have to have to. day. So it's just really exciting. I'm also seeing it in, I've just came from Brussels, where we are talking to members of the European Parliament. And some of the stories, I went along with members of civil society, so that's human rights defenders, activists, and NGOs, etc. And

they were talking about stories to these MEPs explaining to them that in many scenarios, Bitcoin is literally the only option. It is the bank when you have no other banking options or where you can't trust your own bank, which is the case for much of the, for any part of the world where they live under authoritarian regime or a dictatorship. they don't want money to come into their bank account from a certain person overseas because that could put their life

or their family's life in danger. And in those scenarios, adoption of Bitcoin is literally a must is the bank of last resort and people are using it in that way. They are using it to save lives. They're using it to begin with. They're using it to be able to live.

But very quickly, you're starting to seeing it being used as a circular economy in those environments. So in the global self, adoption levels are literally increasing an incredible rate. And as I said, we're going to see a number of examples of circular economies next year. That's super interesting. I mean, it's always the people that have the least to lose that will gravitate towards new

technologies first, right? And so we see that playing out. Now, just a side note, I'm confused because you said that you're there looking at the El Salvador adopt. of Bitcoin, but according to the news, I'm scrolling here and it says that it failed. I'm a little, you know, it says it looks like it failed, El Salvador's Silver's Bitcoin plans fail, El Salvador's leader Buceli, you know, Bitcoin experiment is a failure. So, yeah, weird.

I guess, I guess, I don't know. Well, we're, we're all failing here, you know. These guys, the guys here are just, um, um, are amazing. Um, they're, this diploma program that they're working on that I'm trying to just, just be a part of and learn. Um, I think is, is really exciting. Um, people, I, I, I, I just went to a, I don't know. I mean, clearly it's failed because I just went to a corner shop and, and, and bought some, I bought some water and, and I, and I, I didn't use Bitcoin. I just must have been imagining it.

I just, you know, there's obviously, there's a process and we had an incredible start. And we need to keep working on it with more, and generally it's more education and more tools. But there is a huge amount of human capital here, Bitcoin human capital, working to get it from a really good start to a fully realized solution. Absolutely. I'll jump to John here and ask if you've got any thoughts around circular economies where we're at, where we're headed. Yeah, I mean, being a merchant myself, I get what you mentioned in the beginning where, you know, in the beginning, a lot of the push to Bitcoin adoption was merchant adoption, right, which was the wrong course to go in the beginning. You know, once when we started, when we launched our first product in 2015, you know, we accepted Bitcoin as well, but less than one percent of,

our sales came from Bitcoin. You know, not enough people had Bitcoin in their hands. Not enough people knew about Bitcoin for the merchant side of things to accelerate. And that's what I think the next phase of Bitcoin adoption will look like. It will look like things like this Bitcoin's Beef Initiative, which is really cool, because it will create these real use cases for people to spend Bitcoin. Because, again, it's not just about buying a product. It's about buying an idea behind the product that, in the,

involves Bitcoin. The fact that you can expand the decentralized aspect into real world economies is one of the coolest aspects of Bitcoin going forward. And I think that's what it really will push Bitcoin adoption in the next couple of years. You know, it's these type of things that you weren't necessarily associated with Bitcoin and economies that you wouldn't necessarily think would involve Bitcoin will start, you know, taking out middlemen, things like, like, you know, buying stuff directly from the farmer, right? It takes out the middleman. It takes out all these, all these things that shouldn't even be there in the,

in the beginning, right? So it's kind of the same, the core principles of Bitcoin where it takes out the banks and all the mailmen and you're the one being in charge of your own finances. It's kind of, it's going to push different types of businesses to go into that decentralized aspect as well. And Bitcoin will be the catalyst to that, which is what I'm. I'm looking forward to the most. Absolutely.

And again, I, I, I, me personally, I think it's, it's on my, the top of my list of things to do now is to, to seek out the local community that has goods and services to offer that is willing to accept Bitcoin for them. And I think, you know, to everybody watching the same thing, go to your local meetups, find out what people do for a living and see if you might be able to do business with them via Bitcoin. I think that's a lofty goal for anybody. So with that, I'm going to I'm going to kind wrap up this segment, but I'll do a call to action for everybody that's watching.

If, yeah, again, if you're a Bitcoin merchant, if you're selling goods or services for Bitcoin, let me know. Tweet on, send me something on Twitter. and even if it doesn't directly apply to me, then I'm sure somebody will be interested in what you have to offer. With that, we're going to do a little rotation here. So actually, John, I'm going to jump to you next, and I'm going to give you the mic here. And simple question for you, man.

What are you bullish? What has you excited at the moment in Bitcoin? Well, I mean, big news in the mining world. the past week has been this White House news article that came out about Bitcoin mining. Kind of a two-edged sword. At least, you know, they're taking a look at it in a serious way. But obviously, the back edge of that is the fact that, you know, they're putting a band on the table. And obviously, this is what I've been concerned with for the past five to six years, is how do we, we keep Bitcoin from being in a state where a government can shut it down,

and especially through the mining aspect of it. And I'm super bullish on the fact that people are waking up to this, especially in the past year. I've seen it a lot, especially with what we're doing at FutureBit. And just in general, just Bitcoiners realizing how important mining is. And it's opening up the fact of the importance of why people need to be running the full stack of Bitcoin, not just buying Bitcoin on exchange, right? That's not that's the first step, but that's the least important step. Most important step is running your own node and then participating in the mining network.

And we're seeing a lot of that adoption occurring right now and it's encouraging. Just in the past week, I think we just crossed 5% of all nodes on the Bitcoin network is being run by future bit nodes right now, which is awesome. We've gone from people not even knowing what I know what it is to tens of thousands of people running nodes in their houses and keeping Bitcoin monetary force that can't be shut down by anyone government. And, you know, obviously we have a long way to go. terms of institutional side of things and what they think of Bitcoin and especially the governments

and understanding the core principles of what Bitcoin is and how we mesh that into our society. But the fact that we're getting to a stage where even if, let's say, the White House wants to ban Bitcoin mining, they won't be able to do so. That's a step in the right direction. And that's where we need to be. We need to be at a point where not a single institution not a single public mining company, not a single government can control a big portion of the Bitcoin hash rate and dictate what they can do with that hash rate. That's a very important aspect of what it means to run Bitcoin.

And every single person that owns Bitcoin needs to be aware of that fact. It needs to be aware of that, you know, you can mine at home. It's, you know, just like you said, you bought a what's that, what's minor with the black box. You know, you can run a big, you know, 3,000-watt machine in your house if you really want to. And there's companies like FutureBit that builds 300-watt miners that you can just place on your desk and start mining today. So we need to get that out there and get millions involved in Bitcoin mining and running nodes and not just tens of thousands that we are at right now. That's awesome. What do you think is kind of the biggest hurdle to getting people?

to dip their toes in, test the waters, and maybe start mining. I think the biggest hurdle is kind of the fiat entanglement of mining right now, especially on the consumer side of things. When most people think of Bitcoin mining, especially when they don't understand what mining is itself, they think of, oh, okay, I'm going to earn some sort of dollar, value by buying this machine. We've got to get away from that mentality and have people understand that you're not

just you're mining Bitcoin, but you're also protecting the Bitcoin that you're mining by doing so. That's what a lot of people don't understand. They don't understand the core principles that is behind Bitcoin mining and the fact that it's not about what the ROI is in dollars value. It's about how much, how many. Satoshi's your mining. And how many Satoshi's you can mine and keep over time and hold. And that's the real important aspect of what you're doing when you're mining Bitcoin. And that's kind of like

the educational value of what our device offers and what we're trying to teach people. It's, listen, you're protecting your own Bitcoin by mining Bitcoin. And everybody should be doing it. And everybody needs to understand that by mining Bitcoin, you're verifying those transactions that you're issuing yourself on the blockchain. You know, a big institutional miner could come out or the government could come out in a couple weeks and say, we're banning certain transactions on the network. And the big institutional miners are going to have to comply with that or otherwise are going to be shut down, right?

Because there's such public entities that they can easily be targeted. So that's why we need millions of individuals mining and mining these transactions, where not a single entity can come across and shut down your transaction, let's say. And I think that's the biggest hurdle in understanding that most people need to understand of what Bitcoin mining is. You're protecting your own asset. And everybody needs to be participating in order to make sure that the monetary network is safe and protected. And that goes back to running Bitcoin on how Satoshi originally envisioned it. You know, it's a single device that does everything.

You know, you're running your node, you're mining, and you have your wallet. And you need to go back to that original vision and make sure everybody is running the whole ecosystem, not just small parts of it. I love that. I'm curious if Ovi or Nathan have any experience in mining or what's holding you back from diving into that aspect. or interpersonal mining or into mining? Yeah, into mining at all. Have you mined? Yeah, this is going to be my what's British.

Why I'm British, I'm going to now have to think of a different question. Well, we can kind of mesh them, right? If you want to, if you want to segue a little bit into your, maybe I'll get, what I'll do is... I'll ask a question and now I'll talk about my mindy thing in a different way. But the question that I was, interested in as what's your view on the fabrication of mining because I'm I'm quite bullish about that in terms of like intel has come on board of its own his new mining chip so

we're seeing decentralization at that level and I just wanted to know your your view on yeah I mean that's that's another important aspect of it and you know we've had a lot of companies haven't sprung up like a future, but because of what you just mentioned. There's only been three major, one foundry really involved in making all the ASIC chips and about three major vendors producing these ASICs in the past five years. And we haven't had an Intel of the space producing chips. Like what made Intel really successful in the beginning of the PC era was the fact that they built a chip and they were like, here's a question. cool chip, do what you want with it, right? Build products around it. Bitmain isn't doing that.

They're protecting their chip. They only care about their bottom line. Bidmain, I wouldn't even call a Bitcoin company. As far as I'm concerned, they don't care about Bitcoin. They just care about pushing as many miners out as they can and making as much fee money as possible. So we need more companies, especially on the FAB side, the chip level side, to produce an Intel type ASIC where here's a, you know, five, three nanometer latest gen ASIC. We're selling it to everybody. Everybody can start building devices like FutureBit and bringing this out to millions of people. And we're getting to that point right now.

I mean, I wish I could talk more about it. But in the next year, you're going to see a lot of different companies spring up, and there's going to be a lot of new gen stuff. coming out that enables more mining for everybody. So it's exciting for sure. Do you think that was that kind of demand for that type of thing was accelerated by the shortages over the past couple of years where just chip manufacturers basically were shut down and it was a lot harder to get your hands on an ASIC?

Oh, yeah. I mean, the reason why we hadn't scaled to the point we should have scaled by now, is because, you know, little five-cent ICs in our devices we can get a hold of. And people were hoarding them for, you know, a hundred times the cost of what the IC was. And, you know, it's been, I don't want to get into, you know, the logistics nightmare of what I've been dealing with in the past year, which is pretty much 100% of swapping out ICs and redesigning boards and making sure production goes smoothly because of all these crazy, you know, supply shortages. And we're finally getting over the hurdle.

And in Q4 of 2022 this year is, I think, when we're finally going to get over the hump. And by next year, we should be in the clear in terms of the huge IC shortages that have been happening around the world. Amazing. Awesome. Nathan, I'm going to toss it to you here. Do you have any thoughts or questions around this area of thought? Yeah, well, going back to maybe what's holding me back. And John and I actually had this conversation recently. I'm tantalizingly close to pulling the trigger on a future bit because they make it so easy,

even a dim wit like me can figure it out. But I think it's the lack of a hardcore computer science background that maybe over the past couple of years kept me from dip my toes in it. But there's great companies out there. Brilliant people building awesome solutions that even knuckleheads can figure out. what what kind of like have you have you looked into um like educational material like when when you've been curious have you tried to look up like how the hell do I do this or I yeah you know I have and then it just came down to time like I said before I got into Bitcoin full time um I was I just didn't have the bandwidth for it but now I do and there are great great solutions out there

um which can make it possible kind of going back to to to John's point, you know, with the White House and everything. The one thing that that made me think of is people are waking up to the fact that not everything the White House says is maybe necessarily accurate, you know, like when they tried to redefine the word recession, you know, just everything that they put out. I think people are thinking more critically now and, you know, not just believing everything that's put out there just because the government says that. That's how it really is.

I don't know what you're talking about. Here's a tweet from the president. My first two years in office spurred the strongest economic recovery in recent history. This from today. U.S. household wealth fell by a record 6.1 trillion in Q2, 2022. Huh. I don't know. I don't know what you mean by everything the White House says isn't quite true.

But yeah. I I I'm very excited on the mining front just to get my toes wet and and to dive in again like getting I want to go through the typical setup that has been present for quite some time now you know getting getting an ASIC figuring out power to it figuring out mining pool all that kind of stuff figure that out and then I'd like to afterwards. dive into and see what the difference is like with a future bit and like the, you know, how you've gone about trying to streamline things and making it a little bit less scary for the average person to dive in and kind of contrast and compare. I think that's, but again, the more we can do to get more people involved in every aspect of Bitcoin, the better, right? I think it's a noble goal to obviously not every single person is going to be mining Bitcoin, you know, right away, dare I say.

But, you know, it's not everybody will interact with Bitcoin in the same way. But the more people we can get involved, more parts of the stack, the better, in my opinion. So any final thoughts on this part of the mining aspect? or are we ready for a rotation? Yeah, I mean, just a quick point to what you just said. And I think it's important. It's like you said, not sure not everybody's going to be involved with every single aspect of Bitcoin, especially on the more technical sides of running a node and, you know,

broadcasting your own transactions off your node and things like that. But what the power in numbers is what really needs to be struck home here. That's what makes big. Bitcoin powerful. It's the fact that there's millions of people that own Bitcoin and are behind the force of this monetary network. And we really need to strike home that, yeah, you don't need to have a 100-terahash 3,000-wile machine to make a difference in your home. All we need is a million people running similar devices like FutureBit. If you have a million people running 10-terash, let's say devices, you have 23% of the Bitcoin hash power right there. And that is a force to be

reckoned with. And that's what we need to get there. And that's the really important aspect. It's the power in numbers. And that's where the real power of Bitcoin comes. And we need to make sure people understand that. And it doesn't matter how you do it. It doesn't matter if you do all these cool things that we talked about on the mining panel where you're retrofitting your old house to to run a Bitcoin miner or you know, you're just submitting your hash rate with a small device, as long as you're participating somehow. It's important. I love how nimble miners can be in various aspects when certain market pressures come down to it.

And I don't want to dive too deep into that line of thinking because I want to see where Obie's going with his topic first. So I'm going to do a rotation here. I'll toss it to Obie. I'll let you drop your thoughts. And if my thought doesn't relate, I'll save it till any final thoughts near the end of the episode. But, Obie. Yeah, so, I mean, obviously I'm bullish on Fettie Mint and Fedi and other technologies,

I think, that are coming out at sort of layer two and layer three, not just Feddy, 30 minutes. I think whole punch is super interesting. Tarot potentially could be super interesting. Liquid continues to be interesting. But I thought I would, because I've talked a lot about that over the last couple of months, I thought I would talk about something else

that I'm just to switch things up that I'm really interesting, which is to do with mining. So the end of last year, I sold my previous business, which was the Bitcoin Exchange in the UK. And I decided I wanted to focus on the global self. So I said that it's going to be all Bitcoin, all empowering the global self, all with global impact all the time. And it was B-Trust and Fedi.

But another thing which I did was invest in a Bitcoin mining company in East Africa. And I was specifically looking for an Africa-based Bitcoin mining company, just to mix it up a bit. And this one, what was really interesting about it is that it's focused on rural East Africa, and they're accelerating the electrification of rural East Africa by accelerating the creation of the creation of renewable power plants, energy development power plants in rural East Africa. And these power plants are only possible because of Bitcoin. And that's what's really cool about this, because Bitcoin, as we all know, is the energy buyer when you have no other energy buyers. It's the energy buyer of last resort.

And, you know, I was tired of us talking about it. And I just thought, well, let's just show it. And so what happens in this case, the company's called Gridless. And it's a really great team who've been building technology companies in East Africa for 25 years. But the idea is you've got this energy developer who's a local business person. They want to help their local community, say a village. And right now, that local community is using paraffin or kerosene to heat their houses and provide them light, which is very expensive, really bad for the environment.

And it's really bad for the health of the local, you know, the children. So I'm breathing in these things in these things. in these not necessarily well-erated buildings. And so you have this abundant source of, say, hydro power that's abundant throughout these rainforests and rural East Africa. And so a local entrepreneur decides to set up a power plant and then goes to their local bank to get a loan for this power plant, and the local bank says no.

And the reason they say no is even though they like, the idea. The power developers, customers are an unknown quantity. They have no credit history and so on. So it makes it a high risk to invest in so they can't invest in it. But just like in small town America or small town Europe, you have shopping malls and a Walmart or a Macy's or a UCI cinema comes in and they're like the anchor tenant for that shopping mall, making it investable because they cover 20, 30% of the cost. A Bitcoin miner can come in, like gridless, and become the anchor tenant for this operation. So instead of saying they need 50 kilowatts, so these are not huge operations, there's some in the middle, 50 kilowatts to power a village to provide a grid-like experience.

Instead, they make it a 70 kilowatt or 75-kilowl operation. and the extra 30% or 35% is powered provided by or provided to a Bitcoin mining company who enters into a long-term contract. And because of their experience and track record from, say, the US or mining in Europe for a number of years, it goes from an uninvestable 50-kilow operation to an investable 75-watt operation. The bank does want to help, but now it's. now makes economic sense, so it gets green lit. It goes ahead and months later, that village is now running off grid-like electricity,

healthier for them as well for their kids at lower cost. And then six to 12 months later, the entrepreneur goes, and it's also educating and providing skills into the local economy and money into the local economy, but six to 12 months later, they go back to the bank and say there's four other villages. We want to do formal projects. And they've got a track record. That gets approved.

Twelve months later, it's 12 other projects. And it continues to spread. Now, this is not just theory. This is practice. I could show you a video right now of one of these plants, but you won't be able to see it here. But it's really, really bullish because just, as I said, a few days ago, I was in Brussels,

talking to some of the MPs who have been talking about how Bitcoin is bad for the environment and so on, I explain this, show the video and then watch their brains melt because their well-being literally just changes. And also, I invite them

to come over to Kenya and see for itself, don't believe me, just see it. See the energy developers who say if it wasn't for Bitcoin mining, I couldn't get this hydro power plant and therefore I can't help these people. And so it really is interesting and I'm really

bullish to be able to to see how this progresses and and there are, and by the way, this is not just, that's just one project. There's guys in Spain who, I mean, you've seen the guys who are based in Ireland who are using the waste

product from farming to provide power and we're looking at them going again to the European Parliament and just melt people's brains with, hey, we are actually we don't, it's not that Bitcoin uses energy, it pays for energy, pays money where no one else is willing to pay money. And I think I'm really bullish for that realization.

And what's really fun about it is this realization is going to come up with the next six to 12 months. Just as Ethereum has shot itself into the head, heart and foot and both feet, like going from proof of work to proof of stake. And now you're going to see this greater realization that actually being the energy buyer of last result is an incredibly valuable thing. Well, the dichotomy between what

Ethereum's positioning itself to be and what Bitcoin is is so much more evident as that shifts because in, you know, Ethereum moving to proof of stake effectively a system where you know, the rich get richer, right? You know, those with the most money

and the most capital that they can, you know, know, can stand to expend, can lock it up and earn more of the monetary base at the expense of those who cannot afford to stake that are actually using it as money. Whereas Bitcoin, it doesn't matter how much. I always like to say one is a proof of wealth and the other one is a proof of worth. Yes. And that's the difference in the two.

Absolutely. Yeah. Bitcoin doesn't care how much Bitcoin you have. It doesn't guarantee you more Bitcoin. It's what you do with the Bitcoin that you have that determines whether you'll have less or more in the future. What value are you providing to people that they deem it worthy of parting with their sats? And that's what I love about Bitcoin. And I think this is unique in that as you're talking about with the global self, this is a mechanism that can begin to embrace. empower them slowly, but surely, where communities that were basically snuffed and snubbed by the

global banking cartel as we know it and, you know, central banks around the world, effectively extracting resources from the area and giving them nothing in return, well, now they can actually use those resources to create wealth for themselves in an incorruptible base layer money. And I think that's an incredible thing. I think the and again in and around the mining bit

this is a mechanism that it may not be immediately evident but it's going to shift the tides globally as to where the power structures lie. And I like what you said. What was the quote? It's a proof of wealth versus

proof of worth. I love that. And those with those the most ingenuity wins out. Yeah, I'm really excited but I think that I'm a massive fan of of what's being done to centralize mining and this is sort of at the mid-level. It's not the mega white plants. It's that it's many many, many dozens or eventually hundreds of kilowatt size operations and then I I'd love to see millions of personal home mining operations as well. But it's also providing education, providing revenue, a source of revenue in Bitcoin within the community.

And so that, again, helps to kick off circular economies. Because if you're generating revenue in Bitcoin, it makes sense to sort of tack on an economy around that. Because instead of having a gold mine, you have a Bitcoin mine. and then to have then merchants will sort of form around these industries naturally to service service them. Amazing. I mean, John, you're obviously involved in this realm of expertise. What are your thoughts on what Obie is saying about working within Africa and utilizing mining down there as a way to kind of empower the people?

Yeah, this is a stance I've recently changed personally as well in terms of Bitcoin mining and the types of operations that we'll be talking about. I used to be, let's call it a maximalist around any sort of Bitcoin mine. I thought that was something that should not be part of Bitcoin at all at any scale. I thought that would always be a centralized point of failure for Bitcoin mining and transaction processing in general for Bitcoin. But the operations that are springing up in the past couple of years around, you know, secondary sources of energy generation with methane and things like springing up new power plants for these communities is, you know, I think that more than outweighs the bad of having

slightly centralized operations going on in Bitcoin mining. obviously there's always going to be these sort of operations going on that you know bitcoin mega bitcoin mines will never disappear um but as long as the hash rate is decentralized as much as possible um whether it be on the individual level or on these you know multi small projects small business you know we have thousands tens of thousands of these kind of projects spring up, I think that will help Bitcoin as a whole, no matter how you look at it, especially if it's doing good to the community and creating power sources that never existed. You know, this topic has been talked about nonstop, but we shouldn't be vilifying energy

creation. The point of society is to create as much energy as possible, energy sources as possible. and obviously doing it in a renewable fashion is the best way to go forward. But there should be no society on Earth and no government on Earth ever vilifying projects that create more energy for human beings on planet Earth. And Bitcoin is one of the number one sources of this energy creation. You know, if you look back in thousands of years, you know, society has progressed because more energy has been created.

and society has been able to utilize that energy to do great things. And Bitcoin is accelerating that and doing even greater things on a monetary level and on a energy level for the world. So we've got to get on board to making sure more people understand this and understand that more energy for the world is a good thing, not a bad thing. Awesome. Nathan, I am. So I think that having the view to try to maintain the absolute best standard, the Bitcoin standard,

when it comes to anything from self-custody and in the case of self-custody versus federated custody, and also when it comes to Bitcoin mining, personal mining versus small-scale mining versus large money. I think it's really important to remember what the ideal is and keep striving towards that and communicating very clearly what the ideal is. So the ideal would be getting to a place where we have as many people mining as as as essential as possible. And so what you're doing in that space is absolutely to be commended. And we should all keep trying towards that. So yeah, but I'm happy that you recognize that there are,

areas in the middle that we can still also add value. Some of these mining operations are as small as, some of these that can be as small as three or four miners, which is sort of not that much more than home mining level, in terms of, because people can have three or four miners in their garage as well. So that's how small it starts. And I specifically, because I'm like you, I have much more interested in maximum, being,

close to max only decentralized. So the idea here is to get to hundreds and hundreds of small to medium-sized energy producers effectively adding Bitcoin mining to their offering as opposed to one or two very, very large mining operations, which again are part of the ecosystem.

But I'd prefer it to be like an Amazon future where then even though there are, you've got the couple of the Harry Potter books, bestsellers, which everybody knows, when you take the revenue of Amazon, the vast majority is from the long tail of books that sell to three or four or five or a hundred people. And that's a healthier ecosystem than if it's, you know, we have five or six blockbusters and, and that's supporting 90%. So I'm bullish that's where we're going to head, head towards more and more of the time.

Awesome. I want to toss to Nathan here to let you toss in any of your thoughts or questions for either these guys, given that they're kind of the individuals most involved in mining. I just wanted to double check. We had a concerned comment. They were worried that the state got to you, Nathan. You're okay there. Your cameras are right. Oh, I think your sound. Double check. That's all right. I've got a question for the, I've got a question regarding. Mining. There we go. Oh, there we go. Okay, I'll talk to you first and then I'll ask my question after. Yeah, man.

No, quick, just to add on, and you touched on it to the ingenuity. I mean, the space is just filled with the tidal wave of brilliant people, finding innovative, whether it's, you know, stranded, flared gas or methane or tires or whatever it is. It's just, I feel like that, again, what the White House is putting out, it's, you know, the message. needs to get out more effectively, everything that's being built in the space. And even in Africa, Obie, I would love to be able to, you know, promote that message and share that story of everything that's being built over there. And I'd be interested in knowing kind of the plans for if they're planning to, was it gridless, you said? Gridless. Gridless. Yeah. Yeah, I would, I would love to know their plans kind of over the next year or two, if they're going to scale or

expand to other regions. Yeah. So already we're getting a lot of interest from other parts of Africa. I was in Riga and there was a very large solar energy producer from West Africa that was there. And they were introduced and I've connected them. There is demand from Rwanda. So these are some of the, normally some of the forest parts of the,

the world and they're the ones who are sort of like advancing this. I guess the issue is that they don't want to, they want to take a low time preference and make sure they do every step correctly. But there is this very, very large demand for people to take resources which currently, especially with renewables, you often curtail and they have an excess of energy that you just throw away. Instead, you can get paid for that because you've got a buyer who's always willing to buy. And so, yeah, so there's interest.

Beyond Africa, I mean, they're just launching. So I can imagine an expanding further field as well. But whatever happens, it still will be a very decentralized structure because you're empowering each one of these energy developers wherever they are. And we're focusing, as the name suggests, on the ones who cannot connect to the grid. Because if they could connect to the grid, then the grid would wire up. But if in the middle of rural, wherever that may be, Internet's hard, but Starlink sold that.

And being able to access power, that's grid-like power is hard. And that's what, and that's where these systems shine. That's fantastic. I love that. Any other questions, Nathan? I have one going, but I'll let you if you have anything else to toss out there. No, I think people in North America were just so in the bubble. I mean, most people have no idea what's going on around the globe

and, you know, all the things being built and really the situation anywhere else in the world. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's, I love hearing about what is happening elsewhere. Because, again, like, you're at home here. The typical interaction with a Bitcoiner that's, you know, just kind of getting their feet wet for the first time is it's speculative. But when you go outside of that bubble, you see the real needs of individuals and where this actually plugs in and improves lives. And I think that's the important aspect of it, right? Yeah.

More than half the people on the planet do not live in a democracy. and for them Bitcoin is can potentially be even a lifesaver or an opportunity maker from zero opportunity to opportunity from not being able to live or interact in a reasonable level

to being able to and so there it's much easier to understand how this is an incredibly valuable thing and the internet and because of various reasons, that voice is just going to get louder and louder and louder until it can't be ignored. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, and it's interesting to say, and I'll kind of wrap the topic here a little bit, but it's on the human rights front, it's interesting to see the different aspects in how, and in how it helps. And the realization that it can,

help in more than one way. And I'm going to use a specific example at the Human Rights Foundation, Aalzal Freedom Forum this year. I did a little, like a little education session on how to set up a Bitcoin wallet, how to use Moon Wallet for on-chain and off-chain transactions. And so I went, I did that. There's a bunch of Bitcoiners in the room to help. And then there were also a handful of of different human rights activists from around the world that we're looking at this as a mechanism to, you know, fund their causes. And so I got speaking to a woman after the education session. And she was from Nicaragua.

And she was talking about some of the corruption there. And she was trying to troubleshoot some of the, okay, great. I understand that, you know, Bitcoin has value. It can be volatile, but it's a way to move value borderlessly around the world in an instant with no permission needed. And she got that 100%. She's like, yes, I totally understand. Now I get, and I'm very excited to use this.

And so we were talking, I probably talked to her for about 45 minutes, but in passing at one point in the conversation, she's coming at this from a censorship-resistant perspective. And in passing, I mentioned, oh, and there's the 21 million. cap. And she's like, what's that? I was like, oh, well, the fact that you can't print more Bitcoin. Like, it's limited in supply, so you can't purposely inflate it. And her eyes lit up. She was like, oh, my God, are you serious? This explosion of like, oh, I was coming for Bitcoin for this one specific censorship-resistant property. And then you're just telling me that this also solves the

issue of debasement, of currency debasement. And her mind was blown. She wasn't even familiar with it. And so to see those, and it's not like, it's not like you talk to somebody from a Western nation. Oh, you can't print more of it. And they're like, maybe a bit more now. This is like they've lived under, you know, I always say when I was born in Nigeria,

even in my first few years, one Naira, Nigerian Nair, the currency. was worth more than one US dollar. Now it's like 600 naira to the dollar. And that's one of the best performing currencies in Africa. And it's the biggest economy in Africa. So that's, you know, that's your goal. And how much the US dollar be valued on top of that over the past few decades?

It's like insane. So people get it immediately when you say, wait, well, okay. No, debate, conversation over. Let's make this happen. yeah yeah it's unbelievable it's so and and this is why i still you know everybody kind of the the meme oh you're still early it but we are still very early um because even the people that have gravitated towards bitcoin for one reason have yet to realize it's useful for another you know we

i saw the inverse here in canada this year because everybody's after it for the oh yeah we get we you know the people, yes, there's people speculating, but it tended to be, you know, gold bugs, sound money advocates that were kind of gravitating towards Bitcoin for that reason. All of a sudden, there's a large protest in Canada and they decide to shut down people's bank accounts. And then the censorship resistant properties become very, very important. And so it hits people at different moments. And it doesn't matter kind of what side of the political spectrum you're on. At some point or another, each of Bitcoin's properties are going to be important to you. It'll just depend when.

And I think that's important. So, yeah, let's, I guess let's round out the Obie's topic here. And I want to give Nathan his fair shake for his topic. So I'm going to toss it to you, man. And I'm going to just simply ask, why are you bullish? Yeah, it perfectly dovetails onto what you guys were just talking about. I'm bullish because slowly but surely people are waking up. I should say normies are waking up.

You know, the past, what is it, two or three years, they thought, oh, and I'm speaking, you know, a mere stimulus check normies. You know, cool, free money. Awesome. But I think the past couple years, as it's played out, they've realized that comes with a price. now they're learning whether it's going to the gas pump or to the store, trying to buy a house or a car. I'm really bullish because my 11-year-old daughter brought home her sixth grade homework, and it was on the counter. And I was just being nosy checking it out. And she was learning about inflation.

I didn't learn about inflation when I was in sixth grade. But I'm bullish that at that age, at least in my daughter's school, they're being exposed to that reality. now. You know, I know, I think it was James and Lop on Twitter the other day, shared something about that. What's that? How old is she? She's in sixth grade. So she's 11. Oh, sixth grade. I thought she was six. Okay. Sorry, I don't know. Maybe my six year old is learning too. I don't. They're still, they're still singing songs. Sorry, sorry. What was Jameson Lopp, the five-dollar foot long at subway, right? Remember when there's a $5 foot long? Now you'd be lucky to get, you know, anything for $5. I remember Arby's. Do they have Arby's in Canada? They do, yeah.

Five for five back when I was growing up. Oh, yeah. Holy shit. Holy fuck. That was a, I, we had that too. And it was five for five in Canadian dollars, which is basically a nickel. I really like Arby. So I'm really disappointed. And now it's four for ten. But that's just, that's just how it goes, man. So, but I think people, again, you know, going back to the tweets that you shared, stuff that the White House or whatever government says, I think people are thinking more critically. For example, we were just, you know, like I said, doing some Pacific Bitcoin conference planning yesterday. We were at lunch with the production team that's kind of helping us bring it to life. And we're trying to orange pill them.

You know, we had him smash by some Bitcoin on Swan. And he was asking questions. And he actually mentioned, you know, the truckers in Canada, the censorship resistant aspect of it. So just like, I mean, like I said, dovetailing on what you were saying, it hits people in different ways at different times. But I think people are gradually waking up, you know, that something is something is not as they thought it was. Yeah. It's, it's, I'm glad that you brought this, this topic in particular up. it's it's going to be harder to escape that as a topic because you know people people brought it up prior

and it you know if you brought it up people just their eyes are glaze over and then they know that in general things get more expensive in over time and i'm talking again western nations other like other places oh they know all too well how how terrible it can be but in western nations we've been lucky enough not to have dealt with that, especially in a lot of people's lifetimes, right? Like most people, you know, my age weren't alive during like the inflation of the 70s, right? And that was like bad on a Western standard from a Western standard. But like, you know, that's to other nations. So like, oh, what?

Double digit inflation. Whoopty do. So. But it's it's it's top of my. mind for a lot of people right now. They recognize and like you said, your kids are learning about it in school. And there's going to be just a little seed planted in the back of their minds of,

I remember, you know, and depending on who knows what happens moving forward, because I feel like it accelerates. And I want to touch on that in a sec, but at least there's there's a seed planted of something is broken. things are getting more expensive, things are getting more difficult.

It's not as easy to do all of the things and have all of the things that we used to have as it used to be what's going on. And the acceleration thing is where I think it's interesting because we see the bailouts that happened in 2008 and the scale of that, hundreds of billions,

and then you get to the first bailout this time around and there's a T. You're like, holy crap, that's that that escalated quite quickly. But again, still not for some people. They didn't realize. And you had all the pundits saying there's not going to be inflation. None of the major

economists, none of the expert economists called inflation, as if printing 40% of U.S. dollars in like a calendar year wasn't going to cause inflation. And now you see the gas lighting, the, oh, it's this, it's that, it's this. But, you know,

the war started well after inflation began. And I think not all, but more than previously, a larger number than previously are beginning to recognize

the narratives don't quite line up that we're being fed. this caused that. Why did the thing you said is the symptom happen first? And so I think that the seed has been planted for a lot of people. A lot of people are starting to wake up and realize that we could have something better in a monetary system. And on top of that, like I said, we're talking from a monetary, monetary policy side of things,

but the censorship-resistant aspect of things, like somebody bringing up the trucker protests, and on the opposite side of the polar, the political spectrum, I don't say opposite, but like, based on my Bitcoin Twitter feed, the opposite side of the political spectrum,

you know, you have like the trucker protests, and then you have somebody that's helping get protective equipment into Ukraine, that looked at the Crocker protest and said, oh, Bitcoin worked here. I wonder if it'll work getting protective equipment in. I can only do it in a few weeks with Fiat on ramps. Day two, they got helmets and protective vests into Ukraine with Bitcoin. The last time there was, I still remember being very young and still having quite high levels of inflation because it's born in the mid-70s. And at that time, you had no internet.

You had, you didn't have these systems. I mean, we, I think we, I remember when we had like BBC, Channel 4 came out and, you know, ITV launched and stuff. There was those are the second, the third and fourth channels, you know. So you just didn't have that way of communicating. And so at that time, when there was high inflation, the mainstream media, which was newspapers, and government-sponsored TV was basically saying, all white people, nothing to see, it move on,

and everybody would just move on, basically. But now, in a sort of globally connected world, where everybody, you know, everybody is on YouTube, has incredible hairstyles, for example. but we've managed to make these subjects which weren't interesting no one wanted to be in to look at they're now exciting they're sexy

they're interesting and so people know what's happening in inflation they're listening to the fed's reports it's being converted into multiple languages it's being communicated in multiple tons of voice things that are going to make sense to kids all the way through to people who are

pensioners and so this is really interesting because the government will want people to sort of ignore it and sort of move along and the masters to ignore it but no one is everybody's watching the whole thing play out this time

and so again I'm really bullish to see how you know when our eyes are open you know, the panopticon where we're actually all surrounding and looking at the people in power. It's like there's surveillance

where the people in power look at everybody. But what we now have for the first time is Seuss Valence, which is the opposite, where the masses have the ability to look and inspect everything that the current people in power. Not sure how long that's going to last, but the current people in power are doing.

And we're watching. And we know what's liking what they're seeing. I want to toss at a question. I'll direct it towards Nathan. I'm wondering if, have you read the sovereign individual? No, I haven't. It is on my list, though. I'm wondering, has anybody on the panel read it before?

I've read it. I've read it at a high level, but I've read it high level. It's, it's, it's, it's interesting because they discuss things in a way regarding like decentralization of, of, of speech, of communication and all of that. And then they allude to the decentralization of money as well, although they don't cite. It was written in like 1996. So it was, it was very early. It was ahead of its time. But I think we're kind of seeing this play out.

right, you know, Obie, you're talking about in the 70s, you had centralization of speech and messaging and centralization of power with money. Then we hit a point where we had decentralization of speech and messaging. We have the internet. And for a good chunk of that, you had a way to bitch about the monetary system, but nothing you could do about it. Now we've got an opt out in both. we've got decentralization of speech decentralization of monetary system and we can now talk about and discuss the bullshit that is afoot and then opt out of that bullshit and I think that's a beautiful thing it's going to be powerful yeah it is powerful absolutely I want to get John's take on this too John how how do you feel in terms of

of Normies waking up, people kind of starting to see the cracks? Yeah, we're an interesting inflection point of Bitcoin's history. Obviously, Bitcoin sprung out of the 2008 financial crisis, and that was the catalyst and an important catalyst that I'm sure many people have even forgotten about at this point. But it's been in a period of great financial and economic growth that has existed since 2008. It's gone nothing, you know, the economy has gotten nothing but up since 2008. And we're reaching the first time in Bitcoin's history where the real values of Bitcoin are becoming important. And it's the first time it's happened since 2008.

So obviously, Bitcoin as a technology and the technology layer of Bitcoin has been tested in the past 13, 14 years. But Bitcoin, as the general economic power and what it means is being tested for the first time now. And like everybody has mentioned, people are starting to wake up to what inflation is. And obviously, inflation hedge has been one of the biggest. aspects of what Bitcoin means. And obviously, it has been an amazing hedge over the past 10 years and it will continue to be so. But now the masses are understanding that fact. They're seeing what a fiat system and a inflationary fiat system does to individuals, especially one that's corrupted and printed away as it has been done in the past couple of years.

And it's a great time to be a Bitcoiner. It's a great time to see, to have Bitcoin being tested in a real world application, in a real world setting where it was originally supposed to be sprung up from. But we haven't seen that environment since then. So we're seeing that environment now in the next couple of years is definitely going to be interesting because here's the tool that hedges again. against all this. And it's here. We have it. It's been developed. The technology is here. People are building on it and it's ready to be used in a real world mass a manner. So it's, it's definitely exciting times. Awesome. I want to finish up this topic by, I'm going to send it back to Nathan here. And I'm going to ask you a question in around kind of Normie's waking. I'm going

to assume you still have some Normie friends. I know, I know it's difficult as a Bitcoiner, but I think we all have at least a few of them. But my question is in and around those Normie friends and what you've seen in terms of them kind of witnessing what's happening around the world, maybe them having questions around Bitcoin. I'm assuming some of them may know that you're kind of like the Bitcoin guy in that group of friends. What have you noticed in terms of things that have peaked people's interest, things that they've noticed about the current state of what I'll refer to as clown world, but the current state of the world of what's happening with our monetary system,

what has been in your experience thus far and made you feel bullish on this front? Well, I'll just say, like, for my wife, for example, I mean, all I talk about is inflation. She's like, oh, here we go again. But, you know, we were one night, I was just scrolling on Twitter. And I don't know what it was. Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg. somebody put out an article said, don't quote me on this figure, but I believe it was, you know, the average American family will need to earn $5,000 more, basically life is going to be $5,000 more

expensive this year. And I showed it to her. And you know what? Maybe that answers your question, why I haven't pulled the trigger on a future bit yet, because I'm trying to work through my medical bills first. But bottom line, when it comes down to it, I think Robert Breedlove says, inflation is theft. And that's a really, once, you know, I process that, it's true. And I don't like being stolen from, you know, and I don't like having to work harder just to maintain the exact same standard of living. And, you know, my wife, my friends understand that. And like I said, slowly, but surely, I think the message is getting out there. Yeah. I love that messaging. And I love, Jeff Booth hits on this a lot in his book too,

that when you get down to it, technology allows us to do more with less effort and less time. And by all accounts, we should be able to enjoy an easier, happier life with less effort. And that is not the lived experience by everybody on the planet.

So if you extrapolate out and you start to reason, you realize that something has to be broken there. And in a system where technology is compounding and is moving in exponential fashion, and a system that's based on debt and money printing will have to accelerate equally, if not faster,

than that rate of technological evolution. And so the endgame is always going to be hyperinflation. It just depends locally at how quickly that comes. And so we need an opt out. And it's just a matter of how many people can we get on Bitcoin before that happens. And he often says, we've got to get a billion people on Bitcoin minimum as quickly as possible before this happens.

I hope we can do it. I hope we can. Yeah. That was confidence there, Oby. I like it. 2020. Damn. I love it.

Gentlemen, I'm going to start rounding out. What I like to do at the end of the show is I'd like to do a quick round of final thoughts. Where can people find you, obviously? contact, whatever, Twitter. But then I also like to offer a little challenge to you guys and that is to recommend

something that you find useful, a piece of content that could be an article, a book, a video, a movie, or perhaps it's an app, or it's a website, or it's a piece of hardware,

something that's been useful to you, in your Bitcoin journey. So you can mull that over while I get my final thoughts out, whatever recommendation you feel like giving. So my final thoughts actually came from comments in the chat while we were talking about some of the mining stuff. And there's a guy named Dan Helios, I believe, in the chat. And he was talking about

small miners. And so he was saying that small miners that are under 100 tarahash are getting killed by mining pool fees. And he would love to see payouts for small slash microminers that are paid out in lightning, you know, batch to single channels and then batch lightning payouts or however it needs to be. but he would love if micro miners that are running small, you know, running small machines and don't have a lot of hash rate could be paid out in that fashion. I know that's,

you know, maybe not directly can be addressed by you guys, but I just wanted to throw that out there on this show. I think the idea of lightning payouts for small miners could encourage more small miners to partake in Bitcoin when they know they're not going to lose a chunk of this on pool fees and transaction fees, and you can get paid a little bit more regularly. So it's something I wouldn't mind seeing coming to fruition.

In terms of recommendations, I'm going to toss out. I mentioned it the other day, but Tomer Strolyte dropped an article this week, just a couple, a few days ago, called the legendary treasure of Satoshi Nakamoto. I thought it was a great article, and it's on his medium page.

So you can check it out there. Again, Tomer Strolight. He's got an awesome Bitcoin book. He's done a whole bunch of writing on Bitcoin, but his coffee table book is beautiful. Highly recommend. But check out his latest article, The legendary treasure of Satoshi Nakamoto.

You can Google that. All right. So I'm going to give a rotation. I'm going to go to John first. Any final thoughts you may have? Let people know where they can find you. And if you've got a recommendation, toss it out there. Yeah.

I mean, major final thought for me is just educate. Educate yourself. You know, a lot of people, like I mentioned before, understand Bitcoin at a very surface level. And Bitcoin is a much deeper topic. And sure, it can be intimidating at times. But basic concepts are pretty simple. to understand for anybody.

You don't have to be a developer. You're not to be a crazy computer science guide to understand it. And everybody should, you know, you empower yourself by educating yourself. You empower yourself by running the full tool set of Bitcoin. And everybody needs to, you know, spend whatever amount of time you have to just learn a little more about it.

Just learn about mining, learn about how a node operates. You know, learn more. what the philosophy behind what a tuition created was. And, you know, education obviously is a powerful tool and, you know, no one can get enough of it. So that's my last take on that. And kind of going off on a good topic in terms of educating yourself, I think a good source of material is another fellow Greek,

Andreas Andonopoulos, you know, if you, if anybody has any, And if you haven't read his stuff or you want any basic stuff to know about Bitcoin, that's definitely the go to. I would go to. You know, there's a lot of basic stuff that he covers and covers it in layman terms for everybody. That's awesome. I didn't realize you were Greek. What part of Greece are you from?

I'm from the Gulf of Corinth. It's a town called Pata. So that's where I was born. I went bungee jumping in the Corinth Canal. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah, I was such a baby about it and my wife forced me. Yeah, I'm like an hour away from there.

But I did it, though. Awesome. Ovi, we'll rotate to you. Final thoughts and any recommendations you may have. Well, first of all, fun fact. I used to go to school with Andreas and Tonopoulos. He was one year above me, both studying computer sites. so it's quite funny

and that's where he learned to start public speaking as a way to earn more money as a class steward and the best speaker of the month would get extra money so then he learned and then he became addicted to be incredibly good at speaking but I think that the final thoughts

I want to leave. I had actually a really good point of thought. Yes. I just remember various and numerous, strength in numbers. And saying that one of the latest members of our team, Pete Wynn, it's a really cool guy who's looking at our education initiative, was that to travel fast, you travel alone, but to travel far, you travel together.

And I think there's this incredible power. We all need to learn, we need to teach ourselves. But learning with other people around at the same time is fun. It's also sometimes powerful because you get to riff off each other, learn from each other. Learning within your communities also gets different perspectives and so on. So I think that education is going to be a massive part of getting us from where we are to hypervictonization. and I think that we have a big opportunity to bring the community along in that journey, learn together, set up study groups ranging from one or two people in your friends,

all the way up to communities. And that's also how we can accelerate the learning process. We bring everybody along while we're still all learning the skills ourselves. And I think that there's stuff that we're doing here, the guys at me Prima Bitcoin the guys at looking glass as well doing incredible stuff there's the guys at Consensus Network

translating these materials into multiple languages and Andre Loja as well so we just so those are my final thoughts education is key and there are many initiatives and we should all keep working together to bring

everybody along on that journey and then in terms of recent there's many things but there's a recent read Lynn Alden I'm you know very interested in the Lightning Network and obviously layer freeze above the Lightning Network but Lin Alden did a really nice article in the Lightning Network

that was very accessible for people recently and so it was a really good read like with all of her articles it's it's a, you know, a big, a big region. You need some time, but you learn a lot from it. And I recommend people to take a look at that. Awesome.

Lynn is awesome. I actually got to meet her first time in the Oslo Freedom Forum. And she subsequently came on the show. But she's a legend. I love all her stuff. So good recommendation. Great. Let's toss it to Nathan.

Final thoughts and recommendation. Yeah, talking about education, man. I learned a lot with you, fellas, today. John, I wanted you to hit me with that stat one more time. If a million people run their own, if a million people run future bits, what percent of the hash rate would that be? I don't have exact numbers off the thought of my head, but it would definitely be in a double digits percentage-wise.

Yeah, that's awesome. 10 to 15 percent or around a million, I believe. we need to make it happen well in terms of resources dude i don't want to you know blow blow like sessions the stuff that you put out is um awesome i mean i've learned how to use just about every wall everything i have from watching your your videos i mean they're they're easy to digest and you don't have to be very smart to watch them so keep cranking out the great content um you know swam bitcoin education is very important they're a huge priority brand new app is beautiful just dropped it makes it way too too easy to smash by it's on that

both google play apple um final thought would love to to see everybody at pacific bitcoin it's going to be a blast it is two months from today i'll be there man i'm i'm helping with the swan dome so i'll be down there well huge huge announcement on tuesday mind mind blowing very stoked I will look forward to that. This Tuesday coming. This Tuesday, yes. Oh, wow. All right.

Well, I'm excited for that. Yeah. Gentlemen, thank you very much for being here. That was great. Nathan, I am going to be down, obviously, at Pacific Bitcoin. Also, on your point of education, I will try to help you once again, once I get my brain around mining. I will, I'll drop some videos that you can watch on that and then you'll get set. I'll do one with my, my what's minor and I'll do a future bit after that.

So yeah. And yeah, Pacific should be exciting. I think I'm going to be doing a, I'm looking for a venue. I think I found one, but I'm going to be doing a deep dive on the cold card wallet down there as well, like a satellite event. So, yeah, I'm going to try and time that. for like either probably like just after Pacific Bitcoin. So yeah, anyways, I'll be around. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here.

I really appreciate all of your time. And yeah, that's all I have to say. You guys are all welcome back anytime. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks, guys. I will see you soon.

Have a good night. All right. And everybody watching, Thank you so much for being here. I hope you had a good time. Let me know what you thought in the comments down below. Everybody that's been in the chat, I really do appreciate it. And of course, if you want to help out the show, you can like, subscribe, share, all that good stuff.

That really helps get, again, this content in front of more eyeballs. If you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors in the show notes. Those were coin kites, shake, pay, leaden, bit refill, Bill Fottle. they're all down below, along with the Twitter handles of all of the guests that were on the show, follow them, keep up with what they're doing. They're all doing awesome work. And finally, if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a tip at my strike page. You get there, you go to strike.me slash BTC sessions, type in any amount you want.

Hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice. Or if you prefer tap to the right, you'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be. And I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.