BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Rafael Cordon, Peter Dunworth, Portland Hodl - BITCOIN Chat ep372

Episode Date: October 28, 2023

Join Rafael Cordon, Peter Dunworth, and Portland Hodl for an enlightening discussion about Bitcoin! Our show explores the latest innovations, groundbreaking developments, price trends, institutional interest, cutting-edge technology, and more, all within the realm of Bitcoin. Whether you're a seasoned Bitcoin enthusiast or just beginning your journey, our panel of experts will provide insights and perspectives that cater to all levels of expertise. Stay informed and stay bullish on Bitcoin with the wisdom shared by Rafael Cordon, Peter Dunworth, and Portland Hodl. Don't miss out on the forefront of BTC knowledge! FOLLOW TODAY'S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/Rafa_Cordon https://twitter.com/PeterBTCAdviser https://twitter.com/PortlandHODL 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted mutisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ SEEDOR is one of the most robust metal backups on the market today. Get your SEEDOR starter set today! Use this link for 5% off. https://www.seedor.io/discount/BTCSESSIONS?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fprodukte For US based customers: https://a.co/d/1DkbfV2 Canadian customers: https://link.thecryptoboutique.ca/BTCSessionsSeedor Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab Server Lite,One or Pro today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/ Been watching the show for a while? Like what you see? Help me cover my video costs by sending some sats over on my Geyser Fund page! https://geyser.fund/project/btcsessions

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. We have an awesome panel tonight. All first timers to the show, which I'm very excited about. We also were discussing backstage. And apparently, I've chosen a theme to the show this week. See if you can pick it out.

We'll let us know in the comments if you know the running theme. between all the guests. Nonetheless, very excited to have you all. We'll be bringing up the live chat and everything. So once it comes up on the screen, get those messages flying, and I will highlight any relevant ones that we see pop up. Of course, this is live.

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

If you have not already, please do hit like, subscribe, share all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. In fact, that little like button is just down there. Slap it. Give it a smack. Anyways, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now.

I'm bringing up timechain calendar.com and simultaneously. I'm going to bring up the chat, so we will see those messages start to slide in now. But time-chained calendar.com. We're sitting at $33,866 dollars per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 2,953 sats. In terms of fees, next block, a little bump there, 25 stats per byte, anytime four sats per byte. Mempool is currently purging anything below 1.7 sats per V-byte.

And in terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.53 million of them, that's 92.98. percent of the entire supply. Shout out to sponsors the show hoddlehottle.com. If you're stacking sats and you've got priorities in mind that include peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custody, no K-YC. This is an easy place to go. You can sign up with nothing more than an email address once you're in. Choose your currency payment method and amount and start browsing offers immediately.

Links are down below. Be sure to check them out. Now when you do stack some non-KyC sats, you're going to want to store it in some of the best hardware on the market. I love coin kite, everything they're doing. A cold card, Mark 4 is bad. and is my go-to daily driver. I have other other goodies like Taps on or Sats cards. Cold, uh, sorry, what am I saying here?

Block clocks, open dives, all that stuff. And I'm very excited. Rodolfo's been teasing me with tweets about cold card Q1 and the Sats link coming out soon. If you want to reserve any of those or pick up anything that I mentioned, head over to coin kite.com. You can use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything. Backups, of course, are important if you want to protect your C phrases from the elements. C door has you cover.

with the disc-en-c capsule seed backup. It's great. I did a video on it. It's awesome. And one of the cool things about it, if you need to replace a new seed, you don't have to replace the entire item, you just pick up some cheap new discs to get inside of it. And then you're off to the races. So check them out.

Links are down below based on your shipping preferences. A couple last ones, Nunchuk, killing it with assisted multi-sig. You can sign up for their Honey Badger program in which they will hold one key in a multi-sig quorum and you hold the rest. The mobile app walks you through it. You can use things like Tapsiner, Cold Card, and others. And it has baked inheritance planning. So your stats get to your next-of-kin.

And beyond that, the whole thing is no K-YC. So you don't need to give up private info to have it set up and working for you. And finally, start nine, sovereign computing solution, plug-and-play solutions to run your entire Bitcoin stack and more. Basically, you can run Bitcoin Core, Lightning, join market, mempool. dot space, your data, files, passwords, photos, nostrilays, and clients, all that stuff. They've got everything from entry level up to what I'm running, which is the server pure,

which they just discounted by a couple hundred bucks, and you can use code BTC sessions with a little plus sign at the end and get an additional 18% off. So be sure to check them out. Links for everything I just said down below. But enough of my rambling, guys. Let's get in our guests. I want to welcome to the stage, Peter and Portland Hoddle. and Rafa, once I get up, there we go. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you so much for being here. And I think, first off, before we do anything,

we should do a quick round of intros so that anybody unfamiliar with you can get acquainted. So I'll shoot it over to Peter first, and I'm just going to ask, who are you, and what do you do? My name is Peter Dunworth. Excuse me. I work at the Bitcoin Advice. helped start that up and what we do is collaborative custody we help clients get

Bitcoin off the exchanges and into a safe inheritance protocol that ensures that if they get hit by a bus they are they're gonna recover their Bitcoin and their family's not gonna lose it so that's what I do it could be a bus or a boat it might be a boat and there's many many of those styles of accidents so yeah just just an idea for your marketing you can yeah no that one's for free glad to have you man and it was really good i got you down in l.a so i'm glad to have you on the show um i'll toss it over to portland dude i also if i'm not mistaken we did we meet uh in l.a a year ago are you talking to me or peter no portland uh no i so i have stayed away from the l a area for a

little bit um so but yeah with that said um i've been to one conference total that was tabconf 2023 That was absolutely fantastic. Anybody that's into Bitcoin development, that would be my, I'm pretty sure it's the go-to. I haven't experienced others, but a lot of really high signal coming out of that conference specifically. That's actually a reason to bullish. Instead of going there, you'll see how many developments are happening on the base layer. And then the lightning developments that are coming out are just up into the right, parabolic. But yeah, with that said, I'm Portland Hoddle.

I'm known primarily for Bitcoin education on Twitter spaces. and doing a slide decks. So I will post a primary title slide with a bunch of little things below it. And then the second thing also, I'm a Bitcoin Core contributor. I wouldn't say like, is prominent of a developer such as like Andrew Chow,

merch, etc. But still, I do contribute my time for free to Bitcoin Core to help make it a solid consumable experience for everybody that doesn't break. So that's very important. If you ask any Hodler, what the most important thing is?

It won't break Bitcoin from the devs. So I love it. That's kind of, yeah, that's where I would go. So also I got to give you props. The other, the other night, you know, everybody was excited. There was a whole bunch of spaces and it was all just like price talk and everything. And then you're there just absolute legend just teaching people about sparrow wallet on a spaces. And the space started small and then just started growing because, you know, there's value in education.

And you know, it's fun to get. excited if your purchasing power goes up, but you got to learn the tools and for you to be up there in the midst of all of the excitement and perhaps irrational exuberance and be up there and just spending the time through the noise still educating people, my hat is off to you, sir. Thank you very much. I appreciate the thanks. But one note, that space was already planned ahead of time by a week. So it's part of the schedule. It just happened to be during that time. I'm pretty price and sensitive at this point, like the technology, and basically the ability to be sovereign is much more important than the temporary fiat price. It does its thing up and down.

I'm very bullish on Bitcoin as a technology mainly. But yeah, with that said, there was a little bit of contrast that was pretty interesting in that space is that a lot of people want the ETF to pump their bags, right? Like, bring me the USD exchange rate higher. But Sparrow wallet is the best self-custy tool on Earth, in my opinion, combined with a great hard. hardware wallet. And so you have people that are getting very excited about somebody else casting their Bitcoin to pump the price. Meanwhile, you have these people that are very interested in like, how do I actually get the real benefits from Bitcoin? Like the good stuff, you know? So yeah, that was a really nice night. And I appreciate everybody that participated at the evening.

That was great. That's awesome, man. Well, I'm glad to have you. And we'll toss it down the line once more to Rafa. Welcome, man. I'm glad to have you. Can you let people know who you are and what you do. Sure. Can you guys hear me? Yep, we got you. Yeah. So I'm Rafa Cordone.

I am CEO at Simple Proof. Simple Proof is a company that we help safeguard public documents for institutions. Part of our solution includes time stamping documents on the Bitcoin blockchain. I've been involved in Bitcoin for several years. I was a CTO at a Lightning Payments company as well. Awesome, Matt. And well, I'm very glad to have you. You're doing some interesting stuff, and perhaps we'll get to chat about it a bit more,

depending on your reason for being bullish. But nonetheless, I'm very glad to have you here. And gentlemen, awesome. Let's dive into it. So everybody in the chat, first off, welcome. So I see a whole bunch of people I see here's Simmer and Matt and Nick and DAZ and everybody in there. Thank you guys for being here, of course. keep those messages coming, but this is Why Are We Bullish?

And anybody unfamiliar with the show, pretty simple premise. Each one of us comes with a reason for being bullish. It can be anything, it can be a personal experience, it could be a new app or a device or an item of news, really whatever we decide. And the flow of the show is as follows. Number one, somebody's going to drop a reason why they are bullish. That's their chance to rant and get whatever is off their chest, whatever. top of mind. Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, comments, questions, whatever it may be, whatever rabbit holes we decide to go down. And then finally,

number three, we're going to rotate to the next person until we've all had a turn. So reason, riff, rotate. That is it. And I'm going to get us started this week with my reason for being bullish. And I'll just dive right in. So the reason I'm bullish this week is actually a combination of a couple things. I guess the foundation of why I'm bullish is something called BIP 85.

And so BIP 85, what this allows one to do is you can have a seed phrase that has been created. And for instance, on something like a cold card or maybe a seed signer, and I think some

other hardware devices allow you to do this natively as well, you can effectively turn that into like a parent seed or a master seed in which you can spit off a bunch of child seed phrases as well. And what happens with these child seed phrases is that each individual child seed that is spit off is in a way segregated from the parent. And what I mean by that is if one of these child seed phrases that was spit off gets compromised, there's no way to work backwards to compromise the parent. And so what you can have and what I've begun to do is you can have perhaps a parent cold card or whatever device you decide.

And you can spit off all of these child seeds and you can use them for various purposes. In my case, I like to use them quite a bit for hot wallets that I'm using. I experiment with a ton of different wallets. And it's honestly, it's kind of a pain in the ass to keep track of a whole bunch of seed phrases all over the place. And every time that I'm looking through notebooks or whatever, and I find a seed phrase, I'm like, I can't remember what this is for or maybe it was not labeled or maybe I'm like, what if I get rid of this seed phrase? and I find out that an address is somewhere out there and somebody ends up sending Bitcoin to it and I have the horrible realization

that there's Bitcoin I can no longer access. Well, that starts to go away when every time you want a new wallet for a random purpose, especially hot wallets, things like that, you generate it through BIP 85 with kind of a master seed that you keep very careful control and keep it very safe. So what I did this week is, and again, I've done this for other use cases,

is I was experimenting with Mutiny Wallet. And so Mutiny Wallet is a mobile application. In fact, a progressive web app, which means you don't have to use the App Store to get it. And you can go through a browser, and then you can install it as an app just from the browser onto your device. and it can generate a seed for you, but instead what I did is I generated a seed from my cold card, took those 12 words, plunked it into mutiny, it will be exclusively used for mutiny,

and then I just have a little spreadsheet of, hey, what index number or what quote-unquote account number was this from my cold card or from that master seed? And so why do this? What the hell is the point of doing that? Well, now for Mutiny Wallet, I no longer need to have an additional seed phrase sitting around and kept safe. And so what can happen is if I delete the app off my phone or I break my phone or whatever happens, I go, oh, God, my wallet, what am I going to do? I don't have the seed phrase. No, now I go back to my cold card and I say, all right, what was index number six or whatever it was? and it spits out 12 words and then I pull up Mutiny

and I hit recover wallet and I put in those 12 words and boom, there it is. So this is kind of a portion of what I'm bullish about but then this is just part of my experimentation this week

so I'm going to break down what I did. This was my experience playing with Mutiny this week. So first I did the BIP 85 thing that I'm talking about. I spit out a seed phrase from my cold card of which

again if I delete mutiny, I can go back to my cold card and regenerate it. In fact, even if I lose my cold card and I've got the seed backup of that, I can just use the seed and put it back into a cold card or a seed sign or whatever and then regenerate my mutiny wallet later. So I've got like layers of redundancy there, which is amazing. But nonetheless, I did that. I imported it to Mutiny wallet. I then, because Mutiny wallet is basically everything is automated in the background lightning wise, more or less. I was able to just... instantly send a lightning transaction to it and have a lightning channel automatically established

with it. Of course, there's a lightning service provider involved. There's a fee to do that, but I didn't have to think. I just sent and it arrived. Then I was able to take my NPUB, which is kind of like your public key or your identifier on Noster. And I was able to plunk that into Muti Wallet. And what did it do? It imports all of my Noster contacts as potential payees, as potential contacts that I could send lightning payments to. Just natively in the app, I can scroll through my contacts and send the payments if I want. Then I was able to use another amazing tool called Noster Wallet Connect. So I jumped onto my Noster client on my phone and I said, hey, I'd like to integrate my mutiny wallet with this. And what that does is every time I hit the ZAP button, which

Anybody not on Noster, basically instead of liking things, it's actually monetized. You can zap somebody with whatever you want, 10 sats, something like that, 21 sats, a thousand sats, doesn't matter. You can set a budget. And now when I tap that button, it automatically pulls the payment from Mutiny Wallet and it goes to the intended recipient. So I set that up and linked it all together. And then I literally had just an integrated social media network, you know, decentralized social media platform on my phone, integrated with a native lightning wallet that I didn't have to go through an app store to get that was backed up by my cold card. And the play together of all these pieces, and granted, not everybody's going to do this.

I know that's a whole lot of steps. I know that's a whole lot of crap that I just threw out there into the ether here. I'm doing it as we speak. Yes. Yes. I love it. I love it. Awesome.

But, I mean, the fact that I could kind of do all of that stuff and have it integrated and just have it work is amazing. Like, I remember getting my first lightning wall in 2018. And, I mean, the experience to, is entirely, entirely different. And in 2017, it didn't exist, right? Noster, I just started using it in January. And the experience then, I mean, you look at the interfaces now

and all of the integrations and what you can do. And if you look at my January Noster tutorial, it's laughable how out of date it is. And so all of these things, combined. It just collectively blew my mind on how far we've come with all of this stuff, but also how far we have yet to go because I feel like all of the stuff I just described soon will be done with a few clicks. And that will be incredible. So that's kind of where I'm at. And I'm curious your guys' thoughts on, again, where we're at, where we've been and where we're

going and around any of this stuff. So whoever wants to dive in, I'm all yours, man. I'll dive in real quick. Yeah, so in terms of the actual progression, I apologize real quick, is my mic volume better? That was an issue in the beginning. I think you sounded pretty good. I'll chat let us know, but it's sounding good. Yeah, please, yeah.

I apologize, Linux computers and USB devices, bad. But yeah, in terms of just watching the progression of even self-custy solutions, what we used to do with wallet. dot files and put them on CDs and all sorts of these weird things that are completely not okay with what we got today to basically having cold cards and jades and all these devices are very deeply integrated to your experience when you're literally using your private key to generate chadwin private keys that you then use for lightning nodes to connect to noster the really only thing that is kind of missing is UI and cohesion between all these different pieces right? Because you have, your setup is bad, like, language? What kind of words are okay on this, like bad ass? Is that okay?

Okay. Yeah, so your setup's badass, but at the same time, the amount of steps you had to do, it was quite a few, like, little pieces. And as we go forward, that's kind of what I see on kind of the lowest hanging fruit for Bitcoin to really make this cohesive is basically connecting these things and making this process a little bit simpler in terms of basically getting, to point A to point B and linking it all together without having to find multiple tutorials, etc. But yeah, I'm definitely excited for what the future holds in terms of that. And then in terms of what you were talking about, the actual BIP-85 derivation, I found out something really cool I'm bullish about. And I'll go over that later. But the seed vaults that came out in Cold Card version 5.2.0. You can combine that with the BIP-85 to do some interesting things.

So, but yeah. I'm very excited about that. now because that's something I haven't yet dove into. So I'm thoroughly anticipating the dive into your topic here then. Awesome. Sweet. Well, I'm curious, maybe I'll toss it to Peter and then Rafa. I'm just curious if you guys have thoughts in and around any of the stuff, really, that we dove down here. I'm excited to hear more about the BIP 85 when it comes to sort of family planning all of a sudden you know we can start giving you know child seeds to children to you know operate bitcoin and know that we've got a safe recovery for them um every set is precious and i'm just

conscious of that that we don't want to lose any of them but having that ability to back it up it also probably has connotations and permutations into the multi-sig realm which is where i spend a lot of time so um for me this is a new rabbit hole for me to go down and think you know how can we implement from a day-to-day perspective with that sort of thing because, you know, all of the things that are coming and that are here now, I think, is just a progression. It's just, you know, it is getting infinitely better than what it was. And, you know, I laugh when I heard you talk about your experience in 2018 with the Lightning Network. I tried that back then, too.

It's been a while. It scared me off for a couple of years to get back there. But as these things iterate and get faster and quicker and better and easier and the user experience improves, all of a sudden, it's a step-function. and change in technology that, you know, that was five years ago. And, you know, fast forward five years where, you know, we're doing things that we didn't really think was possible. So, yeah, it's hard not to be bullish on that. I think I think you're super right on the idea, especially around like family members that, you know, you want them to try. You want them to take some personal

responsibility and have that feeling. But also, you know, the family members that aren't fully orange pilled but are just enough to okay i got some bitcoin and i'm going to try and store it myself but like i'm i'm not really putting in the work yet um you know this is and and when i first covered bibb 85 as a bit of a tutorial i did it in the context of like an uncle jim kind of set up where you're like all right mom you got your you got your hardware wallet and you got your words and and you have two things to take care of, do not lose either of them, but if you lose or wreck the device, you've always got the words backed up. And then, you know, you could even have it. So unbeknownst to her, the words are actually a derived BIP 85 index. And so, you know, you go to mom and say, oh,

you know, like Bitcoin is now a global standard. Let's go buy you a home, all that kind of And she goes, oh, I don't have my device or my words. You can say, okay, well, lucky for you. I'm a great son. And I've got a derivation of your seed here that we can now use, that we can recover with, and never, ever do that again. And so, like, you can have your families back in that way and set them up in a way where you're kind of like that last line of defense.

I think that's incredibly useful. And also to your 2018 point, I think part of the lack of enjoyment of my first 4A into Lightning was I had no idea what it was and what it was supposed to be. And I thought it was just going to be, well, just download this wallet and send Bitcoin to it, and it will just be faster. And the funny thing is, while that wasn't the case then,

it actually is becoming the case now. It's becoming the case where you can download a wallet and then send a regular Bitcoin transaction to it. And then it is just faster and cheaper because it auto swaps to lightning. So my expectation on my first four end of lightning being completely shattered is actually coming to fruition today, which is really cool to see. So, yeah, Ratha, I want to toss it to you. I want to get your thoughts as well. on why I'm bullish Bitcoin. I want to get your thoughts on anything that we've mentioned here just in terms of

you know, kind of where we've previously been with Bitcoin versus, you know, where we are now with some of the crazy stuff that we've been describing and talking about and, you know, how much better it can get from here, I suppose. Yeah, I had the opportunity to be deeply involved in the launch of the Chivo wallet, the government wallet in El Salvador on the lightning side. I'm bullish Bitcoin on, you know, lightning. It's so easy to use now.

And I think lightning adoption, at least in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Central America, it reduces remittance fees by like an order of magnitude. So definitely there's an opportunity. There's a huge opportunity there. There are startups like Osmo Wallet in Guatemala who are gaining speed and also sort of using the infrastructure that already exists for paying out remittances through traditional channels such as MoneyGram and Western Union leveraging that existing infrastructure to provide cash out points for lightning payments. So that is going to be an incredible thing and it's just growing in this region. Yeah, and I mean Guatemala, by the way. Yeah, yeah.

And none of this would have been possible, again, like jumping back to even just a couple years ago with lightning, like this kind of stuff, you know, and not very far back in our history was just a pipe dream. And now you're starting to see all these rails be established and you're starting to see this infrastructure actually work for people. And again, there's work to be done, obviously. not everything is perfect. I don't know how many times I download a wallet and try it and I run into issues, but far more seldom than any time before. And there's answers to many of the problems that we're seeing.

And so I, you know, I just think so much is being done. And the world is just starting to see that this stuff can and is working. And I can only imagine. And the world's always so slow to realize how much stuff is working. And so, you know, we'll get to the point where we're like, wow, almost everything is working perfectly. And then like two years later, the rest of the world will be like, where did this come from?

It's amazing. And we'll be saying we've been screaming it from the rooftops for years. Yeah. One thing that happened, it's interesting, like our simple proof, the startup that we founded with couple friends. What we are doing is we are time stamping the elections documents. So Guatemala had elections recently. And we, we basically the government of Guatemala hired us to plug in to the system where the scanned images of vote tally sheets are going in. And so we are taking those scanned images and storing the hash on the Bitcoin blockchain. And we are

I'm very happy with this because we see people, people that I didn't even know like the Bitcoin community in Guatemala is not that big. People who are coming out and saying, hey, like results cannot be altered. Like documents cannot be altered anymore because they're stored on the Bitcoin blockchain. We're using the open timestamps protocol. I was developed by Peter Todd back in 2016. And so it's an open source protocol. Anybody can use it.

And so I'm very happy because I'm seeing adoption. Of course, here I'm on a specific area of open timestamps. That's like the world that I'm that I'm in right now for the last six months. But people are opening their eyes to the power of Bitcoin even more, you know, beyond a currency, right? Just as this sort of immutable database. And so, you know, that's another thing that I'm bullish about. That's, again, the, this topic is super interesting. I want to dive into it in detail more.

I might, depending on, depending on where we go when we get over to you, I want to get down to some of the nitty gritty. I'm hoping that we go down this rabbit hole because it's super interesting. And I want to kind of dive into exactly what's happening there. But before we do, I'm going to, I'm going to do a rotation. here. And actually, you know what? So I'm going to put a bow on this kind of my Bip 85 and all of the other. I kind of just threw everything in the kitchen sink at this reason this week. But nonetheless, I was very excited about it. But I think Rafa, maybe this is a good segue

to go directly into, and I don't know if your reason for being bullish is in and around the Guatemalan election stuff or if it was something that you wanted another rabbit hole you wanted to go down I'm bullish bitcoin because bitcoin is freedom and anything that enables freedom you know it's got to be people are going to use it I love I love it okay well let's is it cool with you if we dive into like dive into your topic and and go down so I'll let I'll let you kind of give a little preamble of whatever you're going to say but I'm I'm going to uh you know so this is my basically me queuing you up for why are you bullish. But I would love to dive into some of the election and timestamp stuff as well,

if that's not your reason. Then so anyways, I'll toss it to you. Why are you bullish? As I said, because Bitcoin has freedom and anything that enables freedom gets adopted by people. You know, freedom of speech, the internet was a way to share information freely. Bitcoin is a way to share value freely. But on the Guamaranan, you want me to dive on that?

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about that. First of all, can you, maybe I'll, because I did watch something on kind of what you guys were able to do. So is it cool if I kind of, you know, start with some questions in and around it and kind of like do you? Because, you know, it took a while for me to understand it.

So maybe can you start with before you guys started doing what you're doing now, how did the elections in Guatemala work? And what were the problems that you saw and where were they manifesting? So Guatemala, just for people who don't know where it is, Guatemala is between Mexico and El Salvador. Guatemala City, the capital of Guatemala, is a four-hour drive from San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.

So we're super close neighbors with El Salvador. So Guatemala, in Guatemala, as well as a very relatively new democracy. The Constitution is from 1983. Prior to that, there were 30 years of military dictatorships. So it's a relatively new country. Wakamole sounds good for a much different. Just looking at the comments. Guatemala.

Solid effort. So Guatemala's election process is all paper-based. You have, and it's all run by volunteer citizens. It's decentralized in a physical manner. So 125 volunteer citizens run these tables. There are 25,000 tables in the country where they receive boats. People fill out a ballot by hand. They deposit it in a bag.

And then at the end of the day, those ballots are closed and somebody starts counting the people, the five people that run the table, they start counting the votes and they generate this tally sheet, which they sign. They do the counting in front of auditors from different political parties. So observers from parties or, you know, international or local elections of observers, they all see when the votes are counted. And so these these tally sheets are, you know, the votes are. tallyed up and then they're fed into a scanner and then in this scanner goes in feeds the document into a preliminary results transmission system they call it trep in Spanish and this preliminary results transmission system or trep is where people can see in real time how the votes are being counted it's what's being shown on you know on tv and media you know these these are the how the votes are coming in and so

And that's the digital part. And then the paper part also, you know, takes its own path where votes are going to be certified manually by, you know, doing this manual account. But on the digital side, what happens is that there are, you know, an army of people that are just, you know, doing the data entry. They see the document on their screen and they do the data entry and that feeds the results, the TRIP system. And back in 2019, what happened is that, A group of activist citizens were downloading the tally sheet images from the official elections website. And they realized that tally sheet images would come in, then they would be deleted, and new tally sheet images would come in. It was a weird behavior.

They don't know if it was like, you know, on purpose, somebody doing something wrong or just the system had problems. you know, the IT director for the Elections Tribunal back in the day, back in the 2019 elections, he's in jail now because of issues that happened. And so there was like sketchy behavior going on. And so these guys that did this was just a citizen effort, they were also time stamping the documents using open timestamps. And they realized, okay, there's something going on. And they started making a lot of noise after the elections about this.

And so the new authorities that have the... that run the elections board, this time they were more open to listening, okay, how can we build solutions to sort of help, you know, bring more certainty into the process. And we were able to pitch to them, hey, why don't we time stamp the documents as soon as they get scanned in order to have this immutable, you know, certainty of a document that was used to feed the vote, you know, the data entry system. And so that's what we did. And in this time, everything worked perfectly, both for the first election and for the runoff election. This is, this is super interesting because, again, like you were saying, there, there were, you know, these documents, effectively you've got,

you've got, as the votes are being tallied in a room around a table, you've got representatives from every political party present, basically saying, like, yes, we can clearly see the votes here. And that's kind of like their one proof of work and their validation, like all the nodes in the network are the people in those rooms looking and verifying what's happening. But as soon as that data is collected and then uploaded, there's a disconnect between what can be presented to the public and what actually happened in those rooms. And it can be retracted and changed and everything. But the second that you have, and the interesting thing that I found about it when I was watching this mini documentary about it was it's done in a way that doesn't take a whole lot of data in and around the Bitcoin blockchain because it's like it's a hash of the actual document.

So it keeps it very, very light. And so you're basically taking this digital document, this image, and hashing it, and then putting that as part of the timestamp. And so then somebody can then take the original digital document. And if anything has been altered on it and then they check the hash, it won't equate. Like you're basically asking, is this document the one that was time stamped at that moment in time? And you can very quickly find out yes or no. And if you've screwed with it since that point in time,

then there's irrefutable evidence that it is not the same as whatever was entered at that time. And so basically it's a proof of, it's a proof of sequence of events is what it is. Because you've got the nodes in the network verifying what is true in the room. You've got the people saying this document is the real one. this document is the one being scanned, and this document is the one I'm seeing that is represented in the timestamp in front of us. And then if anything different happens afterwards, then you know there's a problem. And it's very interesting to me that as soon as you introduce that mechanism, all the sudden,

the fraud disappears. It's amazing. Like, how does that? Now, it's not to say that, now this attacks like a C. This prevents an attack in the form of a sequence of events, right? You know, there's a possibility if you had people in a room that were coerced to upload incorrect data. It doesn't fix that. It just fixed the sequencing of events that has happened.

So as long as you've got groups of people in rooms around the country that are saying, this is the data that we then we approve of and that gets timestamped and upload and everything, then you're good. If you have men with guns in every single one of those rooms, it doesn't, it obviously doesn't stop that. But it stops easy. Oh, we'll just change the document. It raises the bar to influencing an election in an incorrect way, I think, is the day. Especially with all the new AI tools and deep fakes and all the tools where you can pretty much very easily do a batch update and change a bunch of documents.

And so the way we presented it to the elections authorities is like what's going to happen when after the election a week later, someone's going to come with an image of an altered tally sheet and say, hey, you have you used the wrong one. this is the real one, right? How can you prove which tally sheet you used and when that tally sheet was generated and then to the system? And so I think it's a way to protect, you know, the people who are involved in the election's process for them to prove, hey, this is the information that we used. It was not altered afterwards. And I think that's the value there.

You in the chat here you shared a link, but anybody that wants to see what's happening here, there's a short like 16, 17 minute documentary about this called Immutable Democracy. And it's from the simple proof YouTube channel. And so honestly, it's given given kind of the scale of which you were able to stop election fraud using this simple tool. it's criminally underviewed. It's got, you know, it's getting close to around 2,000 views. So if you guys are curious and you want to learn more about kind of what they're doing, in a non, in my opinion, non-d detrimental way to the Bitcoin blockchain, like you guys aren't loading the chain with like tons of data.

It's literally just like it's a hash and it's very lightweight. It's just kind of like a truer false mechanism. And so if you guys want to go check it out, again, immutable democracy on YouTube. And it's from Simple Proof. And yeah, watch it. If you find it compelling, share it. Because I think it's really cool. I think it's super interesting.

So, yeah, is there anything else that you want to point people to? Because I want to get thoughts from Portland and from Peter as well after. No, just maybe share the open timestaps.org website that. There you can see the protocol that Peter Todd developed. And what's cool about it is that you're not storing each individual hash in a Bitcoin transaction for each hash of a document. The protocol generates a Merkel tree. And so you're just storing the root hash.

So you can store a bunch of documents on a single Bitcoin transaction. The protocol provides a way for finding a specific hash of a document within a Bitcoin block. Yep, that's the website. That's super cool. Awesome. Well, maybe I'll toss it over to, I don't know, whoever wants to attack it first. I mean, maybe we'll go Peter and then we'll go Portland. So I don't know. Peter, like, do you have thoughts on kind of what you've been hearing here? I do. I think, you know, anything that can improve election integrity is a really important thing. And that goes for all countries. I used to think it was a third world thing, but, you know, maybe I'm a little more skeptical now becoming a bit, kind of that I think that fraud and

disingenuous voting is apparent across all countries. It doesn't matter where you are. So I think some sort of timestamping that helps to seek out fraud and misinformation on that is a really important tool. because, you know, what we're seeing, I guess, across the globe is a degradation of trust. And, you know, these open timestamps is a way of reinforcing, you know, much like Bitcoin, trust in the system and actually, you know, believing in things that, you know, we're actually told. Whereas at the moment, there's a lot of reasons not to believe what we're told. And so anything that can reinforce or build a trustless society where there is actually proof behind it that we can, you know, verify on a personal level, I think, you know, adds to the cohesion of society on a broad

level. So I'd love to say this implemented, not just in Guatemala, but across the board globally. I think you've hit on something very important and very broad here in that, you're right, there's this total lack of trust everywhere. And I think that it, you know, and this is the type of thing where I say it. And all of us, to a degree, would probably not an agreement, but the average person would go, you're a crazy person. But it does whittle down to, in essence, the money because at a base level, yes, there's, there are lies and mistruths and stuff communicate in other ways. But when you've got a society and you've got, you know, this mechanism in which you used to communicate everyone's value and their blood, sweat, and tears are poured into this

mechanism where they communicate what they value and what they want out of life through this. If that thing is broken and is based on a lie and you can siphon away somebody's values with the flick of a button, then that breaks this social cohesion and this understanding and this communication amongst everyone. And it, you know, it's no wonder that everybody currently doesn't trust anything because they hear one thing and they experience the opposite. And so it's kind of interesting that in this instance, we've first fixed the money and quite literally using the money, you're starting to see the first implications of fixing the world as the old trope goes. literally fix the money, fix the world, and the money is fixing the world. So, super cool. But Portland, I want to toss it to you, and I'm curious your thoughts on what you're hearing here.

I think that is an absolutely excellent use of the Bitcoin time chain to immutably cement a hash or a fingerprint of a document at a moment in time. There are some notable kind of little issues that come up that could potentially be a problem. that is still an Oracle problem. Is that document that got hashed, even the correct version of the document? But one nice part that he mentioned about open timestamps, it seems like you can create a Merkel tree. So you can have like the master hash,

and you could have a hash of all the documents inside. So technically, you could actually hash the individual votes themselves. So you could tally up the inputs to get to that master tally sheet. So that was kind of my original thought as you were speaking. is like, okay, they do a tally sheet, but is the tally sheet accurate? And technically, you could go to the level of, like, hey, we will just have each individual vote also hashed along with it. You can put it all together.

So, yeah, that's a really excellent way of using the Bitcoin time chain. And at its heart, the Bitcoin time chain is actually a signed messages protocol. When you sign off a Bitcoin transaction, you're actually just signing a script or a message. But when you send Bitcoin, you're attaching a value or in a message. out to it. So Bitcoin at its heart is just a messaging protocol. It just has money attached to it. So that's an absolutely excellent use. In the open time stamps, I believe uses an op return. Is that correct? Yeah. So as such, the total broadcastable kind of weight you can put on the time chain at one moment is 80 bytes. That's basically nothing. An inscription, a stamp, or somebody

using paint a multi-sig to just kind of encode a bunch of data. into these addresses, it's far worse than what that is doing. So to kind of put a check and balance on an election in terms of just we know something existed at this moment in time that represents this for 80 bytes, save the world, yeah, take it. Easy win, I suppose. Yeah, but you got to pay a fee, right? Somebody's got to pay a little Bitcoin to get it on chain.

Okay, actually, that's my second question. Okay, let's say I was a malicious actor. Okay, I am the party that is going to be losing this election for sure. Like it's undoubtedly to the populace's mind in the votes that actually happen I'm losing. What if I submit a fake tally sheet in the same block? Like I know that this tally sheet hash of this stuff is coming out at block high, $830,000 for this election, for example. Why don't I just kind of, hey, have my secretary, make me one of these.

I'm going to make a hash of this. I'm going to fraudulently upload mine as well. How do you settle a dispute in terms of who is right? Do you sign these things? Does that make sense? Yeah, that is the next. That's one of the issues right now. The next step is incorporating digital signatures like PGP onto the document.

So, you know, our first version of simple proof doesn't incorporate that. but the next person version would be something like a docu sign and the docusine time stamp or you know uses open time stamps yeah so yeah that would work excellent you could you can actually just GPG sign it with a known key from a trusted entity as well or multiple right true yeah absolutely and then you could catch people on a lie right if they're if they're that's going to be the best Bitcoin prevents election fraud provably. That's super interesting. It's a cool way because we're putting Bitcoin into government,

but in a not in our financial way, we're like, oh, you know, all the things that happen, but, you know, Bitcoin starts going into government and government people don't even realize. It's the same with cloud computing, because the issue when you talk about cloud with governments is like, where's my data? My data has to be here. And then you ask him, where's your email? Oh, I use Gmail. I use or, you know, Microsoft 365. So your email is already on the cloud, right? And so

that's sort of an argument. And we start doing this for other governments. It's like, hey, I don't want to touch Bitcoin, but you're already using Bitcoin to safeguard all your most important public documents. Right. So that's what I would like. I can imagine just like, this is odd. the fringe and the edge. But election fraud is being checked, right? And so they go back to this open timestamp. There's going to be some guy who doesn't understand Bitcoin in the room. How do we undo 585 blocks to get back to this timestamp and rewrite it in the time chain? And some guys are going to go, you'll need a lot of miners and a lot of energy. And you'll have to spend a lot of time to do this. It's not possible.

Don't worry. We'll just have to hijack the entire United States electricity grid for a period of time. It's game theory, right? It doesn't make any sense. There's no reason to do it at that point. So Satoshi wins again. I love that. I think that should be every time that Bitcoin screws somebody who's been trying to screw society, that should be the quote. Satoshi wins again. I love it. Awesome. All right. Well, gentlemen, okay, so I thoroughly enjoy this topic. Again, anybody who wants to check it out, head over to YouTube, search Immutable Democracy from the Simple Proof YouTube channel. Watch it. Again, 16, 17 minutes long. It's awesome. I love to get your thoughts and give it a share if you find it interesting. Also, open timestamps.org is where you can find out about the technology actually being used. So with that, we're going to do a rotation and we're going to dive into our next reason for being bullish. Everybody in the chat, thank you so much for all the messages and everything coming through. There's a fun one.

Hopefully that is not going to docks Portland, but I'm going to put it up anyways because it's guess the car Portland Hodel is in. You won't guess it. But I do have a name for my vehicle. It is called the StackMobile and my fiance calls it Humblebee because I literally bought it for a very cheap price and I have literally stacked Bitcoin instead of making car payments and insurance payments. And guess what? Now I don't even want a nice car. But yeah, it's a great studio hosting environment for me. I do a lot of spaces out of here.

Humblebee. I love it. Yeah, that needs to be a meme, I think. That's great. All right. So gentlemen, we're going to do a rotation. Peter, I'm going to queue you up next and I'm going to toss it to you. And I'm again, same simple question.

Why are you bullish? Take it away. You know what? It's hard not to be bullish at the moment. I think Bitcoin offers hope for humanity. And I spend a lot of my time and background has been in the finance sector. And I feel like in the next six to 12, 24 months, we're going to see Bitcoin absolutely hit prime time in that field.

And just going down a list. of things that I think will happen over the next, say, five years with Bitcoin. You know, dare I say it, we could see the super cycle starting, or this could be the start of a super cycle. I understand how contentious that is, but if I sort of go down the list of things that we've got in the next 12 months, we've got the ETF, we've got the halving, we've got the very real possibility that interest rates are going to drop, we're going to have quantitative easing, where cash coming back into the market on behalf of the governments.

I think there's going to be a major oil producers start accepting Bitcoin for the oil or energy that they produce, and that's going to be a huge amount of demand. And then we're going to see potentially bonds back by Bitcoin, or we'll see a flow out of bonds into Bitcoin. And to give you an idea of how big these markets are relative to what Bitcoin is right now, and I'll just start with the ETF. So, you know, we've been giving advice on Bitcoin from a financial. perspective for the last seven years. And when we first started, we were only able to talk about Bitcoin being a one to two percent allocation of your total investable assets because it represented

an existential threat to your career as a financial or investment advisor. Having in the last week, Larry Fink, the head of the biggest asset management company in the world, come out and say that he thinks it's a flight to quality. All of a sudden, that allows, you know, any investment advisor worth their salt to have an allocation of somewhere, between 5, 10 or maybe even 20% of a client's portfolio. That may seem pretty bullish, but that represents a huge amount of capital that's going to flow into this space. The halving, obviously, I think in contextual terms, will be less of a big deal in relative

to previous harbings, but it's still a big event in the Bitcoin community. And then we've got interest rates coming down, and that's going to inject liquidity of some sort, and you're going to have governments having to print money to put money in. And where does money flow when money's easy? flows to what's perceived as the highest risk assets. Although Larry Fink doesn't think it's a high risk asset, the rest of the world does. And we're going to see, I think the mother of all short

squeezes on Bitcoin, and we're going to see demand just totally outstrip supply. And you couple those demand drivers with the fact that Bitcoin's running off exchange, like at rates we've never seen before. You know, we've had 1.2 million coins run off exchange in the last three of four. four years, this sets up a demand supply curve like I've never seen before. There's nothing that exists like it. And when you couple absolute digital scarcity into the supply side, I think we're

going to see things that no one believe possible in the next few years. And to put this in a context of, you know, what we're sort of seeing or what I think could happen, if you denominated daily daily oil trade in in Bitcoin terms, that's roughly $10 billion a demand daily for Bitcoin or two and a half Michael Saylor's entering the market every single day. That's a lot of Bitcoin. You know, that dude's got 150,000 Bitcoin in his control. It's like all of a sudden, these demand supply curves just get totally put out of whack. And then you look at the bond market, $60 trillion worth of bonds gets rolled over every year. refinanced or issued. If we had 5% of that going into the market, that's $3 trillion.

Now, that's seven and a half Michael sailors or 14 Michael sailors a week, two Michael sailors a day coming in every single day. Like the numbers, I've got a meme just how many Michael sailors for each market entering the market. And this is where at the same time, we've got supply just running off exchanges. And the problem is I don't think any of us really understand what this is. And one of the things that I saw this week, which I was really happy to see sort of brought to fruition or rediscussed on Twitter was the multiplier.

Initially, I think Luke Mickich did a great job talking about it. And Rip von Winkle did a really good thread recently this week, where all of a sudden, $1 into this, into Bitcoin has an outsized return of increasing market cap by 20, 30, 40, 50, or maybe even 100x. And as Bitcoin's come off exchange and the demand goes up, the multiplier effect actually goes up in value, not down in value. So at the moment, we might have $1 go into Bitcoin

and it increases the market cap by 20x. But, you know, fast forward to those situations that I explain, $1 could have 100 or 200x multiplier effect on the total market cap of Bitcoin. And this is where I don't think, of us are bullish enough that you know none of us have enough bitcoin and when this thing really starts to rip it's it's going to be a lot of fun but um the interesting thing about that is i don't know when it's going to happen it's just a waiting game and this is i guess part of what's so important about what we all do is try to educate people on what this thing can do i spend a lot

of time looking at the finance demand supply side of things and and amher with the fact that there's nothing on earth that that looks like this setup it's a complete asymmetrical bet to the upside with, I think, a flaw in the price now that I don't think we'll see 15 and a half thousand. So for me, I think this is going to be fun because nothing brings more adoption to Bitcoin than the number go up. So in the next couple of years, we could see some crazy adoption. So I've got some questions for you then. Number one. Okay. Where do I want to go first? I think what's your impression of the last, the last bull run? Because obviously there's a lot of factors there.

Do you think that the paper Bitcoin that effectively was FTX? Do you think that materially affected the price of Bitcoin through 2021? without a shadow of a doubt and i've got a theory on this which i'll share with you the what ftx did that was probably the conservatively i think would be fair to say it was the second largest exchange in the world at the time in 2021 and it came from nowhere but it probably accounted for somewhere between 10 to 20 percent of global daily trade in bitcoin and old coins and what came to like in the last two weeks was something that I thought was happening, but it was confirmed in the courtroom. And in effect, what was happening was FTX was selling Bitcoin to customers.

They would hold that on their exchange. They would then loan that Bitcoin to Alameda, their trading arm. Alameda would then put that Bitcoin back on the exchange, immediately sell it, and then buy Alkcoins with it. So what that tells me happened in the last market is that we kind of got ripped off. What happened with the price of Bitcoin, is that when you sell 10 to 15% or 20% of daily supply of Bitcoin, that suppresses the price dramatically. So in light of what came out in the courtroom, I'm absolutely shocked we're able to see a price of close to $70,000 US dollars of Bitcoin. Like that to me with that much sell pressure was completely unbelievable. And the really crazy thing about this is, and this is what's going to get really interesting for the markets moving forward is,

I think altcoins massively outperformed in the last bull market. So what's happened up until the last, last cycle, is that you've had altcoins outperforming an upmarket and you've had Bitcoin underperform, but in a down market, Bitcoin outperforms the down market, and so it ends up higher long term. If in light of what happened in the last sort of year or two with FTX, I don't know if we're going to see an altcoin rally and outperform Bitcoin moving forward because we've got institutional money that's going to come into Bitcoin in the form of ETFs. and it's not going to flow on to any other coin.

And so the institutional flows are going to flow into Bitcoin and they're going to stop at Bitcoin. Whereas previously the flows would come in from retail into Bitcoin and then they'd spill over into Ethereum and all the other shit coins down the track. But I'm not sure if we're going to see that this cycle. And this is where if your trading strategy is to try and get more Bitcoin by buying opcoins, I'm thinking that is a crazy strategy to pursue when, you know, you've got a, somewhere between the five and a 10 bag or in front of you just by holding Bitcoin. I think, you know, probably need to check yourself into Gamblers Anonymous if you think it's a good idea to to take that risk.

I just don't see on a risk-adjusted basis how you could ever justify it. Okay, so I've got a follow-up question for you then. I would agree that, you know, that that typical kind of like wick to the absolute insanity that we saw in 2017 wasn't replicated in part because you go to FTCS and say, I'd like one Bitcoin and they'd say, sure, and they would write one Bitcoin in your accounts without actually acquiring a single thing and instead buy some Bahamas real estate. But nonetheless, do you think that to an extent that behavior gets replicated maybe not initially, but down the line in Tradfai and ETS and all that stuff.

And two, got my two-year-old son running into the room right now. Nonetheless, that's okay. We'll roll with the punches here. He's bullish, too. He came in. He's super bullish. But anyways, does that behavior get replicated in the traditional finance world? secondly

if it does does the how do I phrase this does the inevitable fuck around and find out that happened to FDX and quadriga before it and I don't know every other

exchange that has done this same behavior does that happen at a scale that we've not yet seen before if people go that right out? The short answer is yes, although I actually don't think it's going to happen in the ETF space. I don't think the ETFs hold an existential threat where they're going to blow up.

I think the way the trust structures are set up and to be regulated on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ will prohibit a lot of that fuck around and find out, so to speak. Where I do think we are going to get an institutional style blow up, which will probably have a like a blowout effect on those ETFs is when the banks start lending money on Bitcoin. Now I think that we're within say six or seven years of the banks lending money on Bitcoin and within that seven year period they'll probably be taking or borrowing coins from the ETFs. That's when we'll have the the quadriga style blow up where the banks will blow up and this is where you know your globally systemic important banks like Credit Suisse

and Deutsche and a lot of the majors in the US are going to come under, I think, severe scrutiny because you just, from a banking perspective, they've never had a hard stop with an asset that they can't reproduce out of thin air. So I think we are going to have that moment, but it's going to occur a little bit later than we think when everyone's comfortable and doesn't think there's going to be a blowup. That's when we'll have it and it'll probably be caused by the banking sector, not the ETF, but it will still hit the ETF sector. Interesting. So what you're telling me is that there's there's a possibility that we may see people from Wall Street recreating this. No doubt. No doubt.

I mean, I wouldn't be upset to see that image. If you're listening to this audio only on the pod, I just pulled up an image of like the Mount Gawks. people wearing outside with their signs, Mount Cox, where is our money, except for it'll be Black Rock, where is our money? So, you know, like not outside the realm of plausibility,

but, you know, if, I guess if you're a Bitcoiner and you've got good, I mean, if you've got something where you are able to self-custody, and you learn

the tools and you actually take self-guards. You're not subject to this kind of BS, right? Like you get to take the ride. It's a roller coaster, but you get to sit back and you get to watch all of it happen. Yeah, I mean, your purchasing power is going to swing back and forth if that comes to fruition. But at the same time, also, I just realized one of these guys is wearing Google Glass in that picture. So great.

Anyways, nonetheless. you get to watch that play out and you also get to realize that in no way does it affect the way that Bitcoin functions. And you get to ride that and know that it doesn't matter because Bitcoin is just as useful as it ever was. And you'll still be there to be able to use it as you see fit. So I'm, I kind of want to get thoughts of the other gentleman here. Maybe I'll if that's okay, I'll toss it to Portland first for your thoughts. I know Portland, you don't you don't talk price a lot. I know you talk like how these things work.

But I am curious to hear like how adverse are you to these trad-fi things coming into Bitcoin? Are you just you don't care? Like you don't pay attention to it or like where are you at? Yeah. So I don't really focus on those kind of sides. like finance and the implications socially of Bitcoin on like institutional use, right? But at the same time, it is a thing that you inherently follow as a Bitcoin. You see these things on your Twitter feed and people get excited about the price.

But the most concerning thing to me about institutional scale adoption of Bitcoin is just like you said, BTC sessions, when you self-custody, if there is an issue with the social consensus of Bitcoin where we are determining a soft fork or worse, potentially a hard fork, like a B-cash situation. You, if you self-custy, don't care either way because you get both sides when it splits, right? And usually historically, the best thing to do is sell the hard fork of Bitcoin that does not follow Satoshi's rules financially. But nonetheless, you are afforded both coins. You could just literally hold them if you don't know what's going to happen, whatnot. Now you get institutions like BlackRock involved.

They have massive stashes of Bitcoin and whatever self-custody solution they have. But you don't have the right as an individual to vote or do anything with the coins you have. And in the event of a split, what rights do you have to both sides? And for example, BlackRock's prospectus for their ETF says that, hey, if we split, we're allowed to sell whichever fork of Bitcoin we deem not to be Bitcoin. and they can take the cash profits from that and do whatever with that. But the fact is, you as the individual aren't afforded the ability to get both sides. That also has influence socially as well. If BlackRock, with their big hoard of Bitcoin that everybody has invested their real-world time

into trading energy for shares of something they don't actually custody, says we support, for example, something that most Bitcoiners don't support at the actual transactional level, well, they're going to have some sway in the social consensus of what is Bitcoin. If they support bigger blocks, some people will follow on that side. They will upgrade their nodes. They will attempt to fork Bitcoin. They may persuade miners.

But at the end of the day, it's just kind of the social consensus and the weight that that entity represents by kind of custing such a large amount of Bitcoin versus kind of having a nice distribution that is custody amongst individuals. But the main thing is the individuals buying shares of ETS or any other paper Bitcoin. have no privilege or guarantee they will get both sides of any fork in the event of one. And so that's why self-custody is so beautiful, is you get these benefits that don't apply to an ETF, which is purely exposure to price. I mean, technically there could be redemption. One nice thing about in Bitcoin ETF compared to a gold ETF, in my own opinion,

is theoretically they could prove ownership of the coins that they claim. right so they could sign a message from an address they have that is not possible with like any traditional gold et cetera so that's very nice and bitcoin would shine in that regard but yeah in terms of price if bitcoin will do its thing whether or not regulatory approval happens i just i feel this is horrible of me to say it's inevitable because um like you guys were kind of talking about earlier the the blowups that happen of these institutions they all kind of stem from one thing re-hypothecation or creation of paper Bitcoin that doesn't actually exist. I think that's actually one of humanity's greatest temptations is always to create

some sort of money to steal time from others or basically get an edge up. And just as governments print money from thin air, private institutions also attempt to create it. But Bitcoin is literally the mathematical anchor that you can't defy gravity. Like at the end of the day, you can always face check because it's a public ledger. So yeah, I think there was going to be absolutely some ETF is going to have an issue at some point, I believe. Whether that be because somebody actually rugs the funds or there's a technical issue in the style of prime trust, for example, like, hey, we sent 80 million of Bitcoin to this address and our tech guy didn't actually program it right. We don't have a private key for that. So I think there will be little kind of mishaps like that that propagate and compound into much larger problems.

I like that's a lot. I apologize. No, no, no, that's good. So the thing I honed in on that, I like what you said in around the fork. If, if first of all, if you're watching this right now, you're probably a somebody who's more inclined to self-custy. And so, Portland, what you said in and around, what if Bitcoin forks and what if, you know, what if, you know, BlackRock, for instance, says this, this is the real Bitcoin and this is. not Bitcoin, and we're going to sell the other fork and prop up our existing fork. And the beautiful thing about that is we have a history lesson to learn from in that instance, right?

We have the Bitcoin Cash fork and what happened there. And so what a lot of people thought would happen is that all the sudden, like, as these things split, there would be whatever one was worth, the other would be like, you know, say there was original Bitcoin and then the split, and then whatever that was worth would be subtracted from the price of the original. But markets are not immediately efficient, right? And so that's not what happened in practice. You had you had kind of manipulation of prices and you had things like Bitcoin didn't really drop all that much in price at the time. and then all of a sudden had this other asset that was just suddenly apparently worth money because people were trading for it. And so, you know, for those that weren't around in 2017, what happens when there's a fork is you have private keys and those private keys now govern both chains.

They now govern your assets on both subsequent chains. So, you know, when Bitcoin existed and then B-Cash split off, it wasn't that you had to make a choice. It was that you had your Bitcoin, and then all of a sudden you had Bitcoin cash. And if you had no idea what was going on, you could have just sat on your thumb and you had both. But what some people did is they made a call and they decided, okay, the Bitcoin that I've always had is Bitcoin. and the new thing that exists is not. And so I'm going to sell that thing and then purchase more Bitcoin with that.

And other people had the opposite opinion and said, hey, B-cash, this is the real Bitcoin. And we're going to keep all that. And then we're going to sell our Bitcoin, which technically right now is worth more than B-cash. But we see the opportunity and we're going to sell all our Bitcoin. We're going to buy a whole bunch of B-cash

because the world at large doesn't know this is the real Bitcoin. Well, we all know how that turned out. Well, Bitcoin cash is worth less than 1% of a Bitcoin now. And at its peak, you could have grabbed about 30% of a Bitcoin with a single B cash, which is insane to me. But in an instance where, you know, BlackRock decides, you know what, we're going to have top down Bitcoin and, you know, we get to govern the chain. we're going to install our own developers, much like was proposed with Bcash or not BCash, but Segwit 2X, that whole other debacle. I won't go deep into that.

But nonetheless, we want our own developers. We want to basically take control the protocol and we're going to split it. Okay. So you have that instance. If you're sitting in the BlackRock ETF, that's what you fucking get. You get that thing. Okay? So wonderful.

If you're sitting in self-custody, you get both. And if you don't know how things are going to play out, you sit on your thumb and you have both. If you think if you've got a long time horizon and you can ride out BlackRock to the bitter end, you sell your BlackRock Bitcoin and you buy more actual Bitcoin. If you think that legacy finance is going to win and it's, you know, Bitcoin's going to be washed out, you do the opposite. I wouldn't bank on that, but nonetheless. You know, you make your call. But worst case scenario, if you take the responsibility and you take self-custody, you get to choose.

You get to do one or the other or nothing. And you're not losing something in the process if you sit on your thumb because you have both. Okay. The nightmare scenario happens. Black Rock continues to rule the world. we get black rock sanctioned bitcoin and that's it uh well i mean you got that i guess and then you've got your freedom money off to the side it has less purchasing power but you can still make your own little circular economy uh but at the end of the day if you sit and wait it out black rock

wins but you still say fuck black rock well your black rock bitcoin is worth more sell it go buy your freedom money there you go so again self-custicity is the key here would you would you agree Portland. Absolutely. You get none of the properties of Bitcoin without self-custing Bitcoin because you don't actually own Bitcoin if you don't self-custy it. We're talking about some of the advances in Bitcoin and how we have moved forward and making things easier, faster, and just overall better for Bitcoiners. But that is the one thing deep down, I don't think you can avoid as a Bitcoin or at the bottom, like you draw it all the way down. The one thing you can't take away. There is an element of personal responsibility for the solution to your private key to sign the

message. That can be securely stored in about 12 words. There will be no way of ever removing that wholly from Bitcoin and having pure self-guesty. You can do trade-offs with other things, multi-sig, et cetera, but to actually just like hold your keys, you have to be responsible as a human being for 128 bits of information at minimum or 12 words to securely store wealth. And yeah, if you don't have that personal responsibility, you don't hold the keys to your Bitcoin. You don't have Bitcoin. You have a SQL database entry on some server that says somebody else owes you, the Bitcoin that they have the keys for. And that's, you get nothing when you do that.

You get, sorry, trust maximize solutions for Bitcoin. You have to trust the exchange is doing everything right. It's not trustless at that point. If Bitcoin forks, you have to trust the exchange. is going to give you both halves. Like the whole thing is trust, but by just taking self-custy and taking that personal responsibility

for those bits of information that is the secret solution to your little math problem to spend your money. The whole thing, you get what Satoshi wanted you to have. And I think Satoshi even mentions that a lot of the properties of Bitcoin are lost if you don't apply this model.

So, yeah, at the end of the day, self-custy is Bitcoin. you have keys to spend money or even, sorry to say, send messages. You could literally use your Bitcoin. If you stash up a whole Bitcoin and you wanted to put your novel on the blockchain, you could give the miners all the fees and just write messages on the time chain. Like that is, it's just beautiful. So yeah.

I want to get Rava's thoughts on this. Really quick, though, Portland, there's some concern in the chat. Are you boiling? Portland needs AC in there. Are you doing okay? No, I'm not boring. I'm fine. I always sweat. Okay. Okay. They didn't want you to, you know, you see a pet in a, in a, in a car with a windows mobile. You don't want. You know what? Yeah. No, I'm doing good. Yeah, okay. No, you bride. Just making sure. Awesome. Rafa, I want to toss it to you.

Thoughts on on everything we're talking about here. I think the institutional adoption is going to be huge, of course. But I agree with Portland. There is a lesson to be learned on self-custody that a lot of people are going to have to learn. And the way to learn it is something going to blow up at some point, like Peter said, maybe six years. I don't know how long, but it's. It will, it's inevitable, I feel.

I'm happy, like, anything that brings more adoption to Bitcoin, like, adoption starts through interest, right? The first time I saw Bitcoin, I didn't just get Bitcoin. I was like, what is this? I want to learn about it. I want some Bitcoin. Getting Bitcoin was like the third step in my sort of process. And so, you know, the first thing is getting people interest in Bitcoin.

And through the ETF, I think that's going to happen. And part of the learning curve for Bitcoin, one of the elements of it is that Bitcoin is a cruel but effective teacher. And through mistakes, you learn what not to do with your Bitcoin. So how many times have you made a stupid little mistake and put Bitcoin in a wallet not backed it up? Or, you know, over the past number of years, you go and you've speculated on something before you realize that Bitcoin is kind of the true store of value. value or, or, you know, you go out and in seek of yield and turns out that the yield, you were the yields, you know, like all of those little lessons along the way, as unfortunate and as, as painful as they are, they mold you into a better bitcoins and it better informs you of how to actually

gauge risk, right? This is kind of the thing that we were not taught financially growing up is how to gauge risk because we're babysat the whole way. We're told, you know, be responsible for this, that, and the other thing, but not your money. You can't possibly have the cognitive capacity to take care of your own wealth. You got to put that off to somebody else. And when you do, there's a trade-off.

And I'm talking specifically in the traditional finance system because that when you do that, it comes with, it comes with the trade-off of debasement and re-hypothication and all these other things that dilute the money that you're trying to save and the purchasing power you're trying to preserve. And so, you know, in a worst case scenario, like we've kind of discussed, that's also good for Bitcoin in a way, because people look at that. And at the end of the day, yeah, there'll be a lot of noise at the time if it happens. But at the end of the day, you look at that situation and you go, who wasn't hurt the people that took self-custody? And so I think there's a lesson to be learned in that, and that will help a lot of people, even if it hurts a lot of people in the interim. Ben, you face a really good point there that I think Tradfire's got the perfect foil to avoid people adopting Bitcoin.

And that is probably one of the first financial lessons we're given is. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. So a lot of people pass over Bitcoin thinking, ah, can't possibly be all that that these crazy people think about. And so they just bypass it all together. And then, you know, that's, that's probably a good thing for Bitcoiners too in that it takes a lot of time and effort, energy to actually go down the rabbit hole and actually have a deep understanding of it to really understand the benefits that it can bring. And that it actually is all that it's cracked up to be. And it's not too good to be true. It's, you know, there's no such thing as a free lunch. But, you know, you self-custody, your Bitcoin, to your point and everyone on here, you avoid all of the calamity that happens in the traditional.

financial sector and sort of sharing an experience we've had, you know, helping client self-custody for the last, say, four or five years. A lot of clients would be like, oh, you know, there's so much time and effort goes into doing all of this. Why do I, you know, do I really need this? And then FTX happens in last November and it's, you know, a complete game changer for, oh, thanks very much for helping us with our self-custody. We're really happy we don't have to be exposed to that that show that's going on over there. A lot of lessons were learned in that bit when that happened. Yeah.

It's again, it's every time a new lesson is taught. And I mean, there's been plenty. But, you know, you had Mount Gawks, you had Quadriga. You had, you know, the speculation in all coins and the washouts. And that's kind of like a cyclical thing because as new people come in, they're always looking for the new, you know, what will give me what Bitcoin has given others. And the answer is nothing. But you need to kind of experience the up and down of that to kind of understand it. Or at least that was the case prior.

Maybe not as much anymore. There's more people that are going to Bitcoin very shortly after kind of entering the space, which is great to see. But all of these lessons get learned. And even the people that end up settling on Bitcoin only, there's still lessons to learn. And in the last cycle, the lesson was in and around leverage. And what do you seek yield on your Bitcoin? Like, you've understood what the best asset is and why it's different from everything else. And then you, again, you've been conditioned to think this way, but you think to yourself,

I've got the scarcest, soundest money known to mankind, but I need an extra X percent. And so it's like, it's just this natural kind of fiat tendencies and baked into us. It's in our bones. and you've got to try and rid yourself of that. So there's always new lessons to be learned. And I'm not convinced that Bitcoiners are done learning lessons yet. And I'm curious to see what the next set of lessons is through the next market is. And my inclination is that we're not done with the lesson of self-custody,

but I think we're also just beginning the lesson of privacy. and I think for the most part I don't think many people are ready for that one, myself included, unfortunately. So, I mean,

I've got a streak in my hair. I'm on the internet. So I pretty much fucked in that department. But nonetheless, you know, I do my best. But anyways, so gentlemen,

I'm going to do a rotation here. I actually, I enjoyed the rabbit hole that we went down with this one. I thought it was quite interesting. But nonetheless, I can ask one more question. Yes. You got a question for Peter. Gary Gensler walks up to you. You're his decision maker for today. He gives you a forced dichotomy. You can choose between the ETF tomorrow being approved or you can choose the ETF being approved exactly

one year from today. Which one would you choose? Good question. Portland Hodel out. Ah. Are you trying to line him up to admit to want to execute on insider trading? No, no, no. I'm just trying to, Gary asked me to ask him this. So, yeah, I'm just trying to get his thoughts on this. And I have a quick theory on this. I want to bring up. And you can tell me how wrong I am. And by the way, my battery is at 20%.

So I'm going to be fine. But I'll just let you know. But yeah, so that is my question to you. Gary's come to you. Will you approve the ETF tomorrow or exactly 365 days from? Personally, 365 because it gives me time to stack cheap sets. I know the second that's approved, it's a floodgate for tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars and we're never going back. And the other thing that a lot of people don't really understand about that ETF money is it's really sticky money.

It's inconsequential money in people's portfolios. So, you know, a 5 to 10% allocation into Bitcoin is sticky. It's going to stay there and it's not really going to get cycled out of there because it's going to be part of a one to five year, well, a two to 10 year strategy for most financial advisors. So I'd like the next 12 months to stack some more cheap sets. Sweet. So somebody says, fix my sound. Is everything okay still?

You're good. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. So, awesome. So my, this is the most few outminded thing you'll hear. from me. But the reason why I like the one year time frame instead of tomorrow is I believe Bitcoin is inevitably going to pump as it does with every cycle. And I would rather have

the ETF come when Bitcoin is some very crazy number and push the hype into some stupid, stupid number than get, for example, like you choose Gary's option of tomorrow and we go to 30 to 45K overnight and then there's some other like little run to 50, you know, I just, If I could, I would just, I'm okay waiting, you know. Like, my time horizon is so deep. Like, just let this thing happen. And then also it gives more people a chance to build better tools for Bitcoin. So to get to that point.

On that huddle, the only thing I'd say, if that question was slightly differently defined, would you take hyper-bitconization tomorrow as opposed to 12 months' time? I'd take hyper-bitconization tomorrow. I do not think the Bitcoin protocol or network is ready. to handle that. And I think it would cause some pretty substantial issues with individuals not basically being able to custody their Bitcoin properly and causing just as much pain as rugs would be. I just think that we are still so early into people understanding what Bitcoin is at a technological level. Like most people in traditional finance get into Bitcoin,

the structure of even blocks is just a completely foreign conversation. concept. And I would hate to see we rush hyper-Bitquinization and figure out that a lot of institutions weren't ready to be custody people's time and value. And these tools that keep getting built all the time, we even have stuff like silent payments coming up that are going to be incredibly cool and allow people to preserve, like you said, BTC sessions, privacy. Bitcoin, I think it's going to be slower the most expect in terms of the hyper-exempt. In terms of the hyper-bitquinization. I would love to see it. I just don't think we technologically are ready for hyper-bitconization, hyper-bitquinization in terms of just people's fundamental understanding

of how Bitcoin works, and there are the consequences it presents. In computer science, most things don't actually really matter too much. Like if you're building rockets and cars, safety, yes, that's why people are very well-educated. There are very good practices for this. But usually most mistakes like it matter or Facebook, the worst. you can do is you can crash the service and cost them a bunch of revenue. With Bitcoin, if, for example, you send F2 pool a $500,000 fee, which happened because if your code being messed up, you're kind of at the mercy of them being the good guy or potentially giving it back to you. It might be a bad action to do that. But yeah, overall, I just think that Bitcoin developers and people that develop on Bitcoin need just more time to build very robust industrial-grade tools

before we start kind of. Hey, World, we're 100% ready for 8 billion people to call on Bitcoin. And then the last kind of note on that is there is a blocks-based demand, right? And we don't have right now the tool to on-chain everybody tomorrow. Like, we can do quite a few people, but 8 billion is not happening. I don't believe long-term it even needs to. We will get there. But as of tomorrow, no, there's no hyper-Bitcoinization that will happen tomorrow.

purely on the basis that we're not ready technologically in terms of the protocol. And second, there's the block space demand. It's not there. The demands there, just the supply of block space. And you can't waver on that block space because once you get rid of the property of decentralization, you've killed off what makes Bitcoin work. Like what is what Bitcoin is. So those are kind of my thoughts.

Interesting. Well, Portland, I'm going to keep it with you because I want to put a bow on this topic and you're up you're up last you've got your reason for being bullish i know that your your battery is wasting away in uh to quote the to quote the chat apparently you're you're not in a car it's a green screen you're actually in a microwave uh yes you got it but nonetheless i'm going to throw it to you up again same question as the other gentleman why are you bullish take it away. Why am I bullish on Bitcoin? Right now, in terms of the development space, this is the first time I haven't been able to actively keep up with a number of projects happening on Bitcoin.

Like it used to be there are a couple of wallets you got to keep track of and stuff like that, but now you have self-custy solutions coming from Block coming out, which looks very interesting. You have BitVM, which just came out as well as that looks incredible in terms of. of an ability to prove something happened on shit. Prove that the output is correct. So something happened. There are still flaws with it. It's not perfect.

But yeah, visiting TabConf and seeing all the stuff happening on top of Lightning, Doppler, which is a way to test all the Lightning clients to make sure they integrate well together. It's just absolutely amazing. Even the developments on Bitcoin Core that we've been getting recently. We just got a assume UTXO,

which allows somebody, instead of having to sync the entire time chain, they can just download the UTXO set and download the blocks past that to start using their client in a trustless manner, and then they can fill in the gaps all the way up to the UTXO set as they download those first blocks. But you can basically jump to block 800,000 by downloading just the UTXO set at that point, and then sync up the next 10,000 blocks, and you have potentially a lightning node that works, because that's what really matters is the UTXO set. Everything that's been spent isn't really as useful.

like it's good for historically validating that the Bitcoin you use is Bitcoin, but at the same time, you don't usually reference that. When you spend Bitcoin, you're referencing that UTXO set. So with all of that, yeah, that's one thing I'm very excited about is the fact that there are so many developments on Bitcoin. And one of those developments that I thought was really cool was the seed vault. And that was created by Cold Card. And in version 5.2.0, which I think 2.0, which I think 2.4,

weeks ago roughly came out, they added the ability to store multiple seed phrases or ex-prives inside of your cold cards main storage. It doesn't actually secure it in the secure element. It's encrypted by your private key. But at the same time, now you can, for example, what I did was I was able to take my Noster public or Noster Private key and convert it into a seed phrase. And then I backed it up on my gold card. So my Noster private keys there. I took all of these little paper wallets I've been handing out that haven't been cached in as well. I put them all in my little seed vault so I can now keep track of them. I don't have to have these little pieces of paper with seed phrases written down anymore on them. And then I also did the last thing. I was able to take

a BIP 85 derived child, put it into the seed vault. So I export the XPRIV, the private key of the child, and then I into the seed vault, and then I use that as a new master private key where I can now BIP 85 more private keys from it. So you could do this like cascading chain of private keys from Bip 85. So yeah, it's the seed vault is a very interesting little thing that is available as an experimental feature in the cold card. So yeah, I think those are the kind of the two things mainly is just the pace of development on Bitcoin has finally gotten to be so fast that even I can't keep up with all of the things

that are coming out now. I'm going to echo you there in terms of not being able to keep up again as a person that's coming from the realm of trying to make tutorials on stuff. I remember distinctly starting the channel and people being like, are you going to run out of stuff to do? No. No, not at all. You should see my list of tutorials that I would love to do. It would take me into mid-next year. It's like there's, they'll never be done.

They will never, ever be done because there's always going to, so it becomes like, what, what can I get to and what are people pestering me the most about? You know, it's a mix of like, what do I really want to cover and what won't people shut up about, which turns into what do I really want to cover? And sometimes I drag my heels on things, but other times I'm just like, I'm going to do this. Um, but there's, there's so much. And you know, you mentioned, you mentioned a couple things there that I, I haven't even had time to look at what, what they are, let alone the implications of what they could potentially do down the line, because I'm so busy just trying to cover what currently exists. So I feel like I've now fallen out of the realm of being able to understand. what's coming down the pipeline and what these new innovations will enable in the future.

And I'm barely able to catch up with the stuff that anybody could currently access. And that's wild. Because, like, you know, we're going, we're coming kind of from different realms here, right? Like, you're in and around the like, wow, this new development, this new, uh, yeah, this new, this new software. And like there's no, there's no like client side, like easy access for some of these things that you're talking about. There's no like, oh, I just have an app that I can download. And that's typically my entry point of how do you now use this? And so like you're saying you can't keep up.

And I'm saying I can't even start to look at the stuff that you're looking at right now. And that's kind of as much as to me, it's frustrating and probably to you as well where you're like, I want to know all this stuff. It's also kind of a great place to be in because you realize how much is going on and and how much is happening and and what it will be like in, you know, in a few years from now, a decade from now. I can't even imagine. And so, yeah, I, you know, I think you're absolutely right.

I'm going to have to dive into Seed Vault. I have not yet. that's on the list that goes into next year oh there goes Portland that's okay he'll sneak back in when he gets a chance nonetheless he got his reason out um but yeah i seed vault he was talking about that's maybe one of the next things on the docket that i'm going to try and cover but um yeah what a great reason to be bullish not being able to keep up that's the best best reason i could imagine so a gentleman um maybe i'll go to rafa first and then i'll go to peter but uh raffa like how are you doing with keeping up with everything that's going on on Bitcoin.

I gave up a long time ago. You have to specialize. So I was CTO at a Lightning Payments company before doing this. And I was in the Lightning world. And I think I learned enough. But now I stopped paying attention to the developments in Lightning. I just don't have enough time. and you know you there is so much stuff going on i went to tabcon this year as well and it's just

this is ridiculous this is just too much and you have to you know pick pick what you're interested in and explore it i mean you're never going to know everything um but like and listen to people just like you were saying mutiny wallet i just you know downloaded the p wad my phone right now I'm going to start playing with it. You know, listen to others. I think that's the lesson that I learned when I first look at the Bitcoin white paper back in 2011. Listen to other people. Yeah. Yeah, 100%.

Like, it's there's a lot of people in and around Bitcoin doing a lot of different things. But I think as things become usable and as things become more and more important. you're going to hear the, especially like if you're in Bitcoin now and you're kind of honing in on the signal, you're going to be alerted to when something is important. And then you'll be able to focus some time on that. I think that's that's kind of been my guiding light through a lot of this is I start to see, you know, the people that have previously pointed out some of the important developments and they're pointing at something new. and that that peaks my interest for sure. So I think Portland has managed to, to, there we go. We were worried, we were worried that the car lighter didn't quite have the juice to keep you going. No, it does not support a MacBook 2015 edition.

No, I can use my phone for a little bit. The audio isn't as great, and I apologize for the production quality being degraded just slightly. Yeah, no, it's good. We're just starting to kind of round out. I was getting Rava's thoughts. I'm going to get Peter's thoughts here as well as to what you were talking about. Peter, do you want to chime in? Yeah, I've got to say, I don't envy you, Ben, having to sort out and, you know,

sort what sort of developments you want to keep track of. For me, it's a little bit simpler we play in the collaborative custody space. So, you know, at the moment, I can keep up with the developments in that space and, you know, the work with Nunchuk and Swan, the rest of it, everyone's coming to market with, you know, great options in that capacity. And, you know, I can keep up with it for, you know, at this point in time. But there's developments coming with miniscript and Anchor Watch and, you know, Wizard Sardine and all those guys are literally coming into this space that makes it harder and harder to keep up. And I'm sure within six months I'll have trouble keeping up with all of it too.

So, you know, I think it's a really positive thing that these developments are coming because it only improves user experience and you know from a personal point of view not coming from the technical side of it it's it's really hard work to keep up with but it's it's so good from a user experience perspective to get people onboarded you know I look at some of the innovations that are happening you know look at you know what Nunchuk does with the tap signer and a multi-sig like that stuff's just wild like as far as an improvement and user experience improvement goes relative to what else is out there and

And I just think, you know, just portioning off a period of time each week to make sure I'm up to date and current so that clients have the best is the best I can hope for. But, you know, as these things get built out, the niche and the specialty gets more and more focus. So I guess I've just got to give up on the broader network and focus on what I'm doing. There's value in being specialized, though, right? Like that that's kind of what allows you to carve out a niche, right? Like I think as to what you're talking about collaborative custody, holy crap, has there ever been leaped in strides in just that? And again, it's the answer to I'm worried about my personal responsibility. And prior to this, I would have just given up custody to a full custodian.

that that collaborative custody option is something where you get kind of that insurance policy without without giving up like actual custody of your stuff right like you you have a single key obviously in some in some of these instances there's there's privacy to to contend with depending on the tool that you're using but at the end of the day the custody the ability to move coins lies with you. And at worst case, it lies, like if you lose almost everything you're supposed to hold and you have just one key left, then it lies as an agreement between you and the company to at least sign the other part of that transaction, which would be like if they didn't agree to that could be quite detrimental to the business. So like you've got these these

these options out there. But like in terms of just multi-sick, right? You've got the full do-it-yourself, right? You've got, do it in Sparrow or do it in Nunchuk or do it in Spector or do it in all of these other options. You've got the collaborative custody space where you've got, I mean, Nunchuk is absolutely killing it. Unchained does a great job.

You've got options like Cassin. Then you've got other ones that are new, like Keeper app is another one. You've got Kesa, I think, is the other key. No, Thea. Thaya, that's the one I'm thinking of. That's a pretty new one that I haven't been able to play with yet.

But like, you're starting to see these options. And then what Nunchuk is doing with the idea of Byzantine, where you can have their suite of tools, like they've got these tools that are available, but then you can have an individual, like, effectively an advisor where that advisor becomes the person that actually holds the extra key. and they have clients and you're just using the software set but like Nunchuk doesn't even how is the extra key the advisor does

and then the client keeps the other keys and Nunchuk basically doesn't have a hand in that situation like you've got all of these things happening and Unchained has rolled out a similar thing but for institutions where you have an advisor holding a key and if I'm not mistaken Unchained isn't in that equation

but you're using their software There's so much happening there just there, just in your space. Like specialization, I think, is going to be key moving for it. And even like for myself, coming into Bitcoin early, yeah, I started with, I started with tutorials. I started doing, you know, shows like this and everything. But like at the end of the day, I recognize that my wheelhouse is I'm going to make tutorials. And that's going to be that, like, that's my thing. I mean, I don't want to like at all diminish like having these awesome conversations because I love them.

And I get to rant about all the cool shit that I get to do all week when I'm not doing them. But like, you know, how many podcasts are there? There's a million. There's a million podcasts. There's a million Bitcoin podcasts out there. And so I recognize that I need to specialize somewhere in order to hold a candle to anybody else doing anything else. And so, you know, tutorials are the realm. But like, Portland, you're so right.

There's so much going on. It's impossible to keep up. And so there is a specialization of labor happening here. And it will continue. and it will become very distinct in the years to come, is my takeaway here. Yeah, I absolutely agree. One example that leads into specialization is in the animal kingdom, how does the species survive? It has to have a niche, right?

You can't just be a jack of all trades. You have to be a master of one or have one unique thing to allow you to survive. BTC sessions like that's your way of kind of surviving the Bitcoin ecosystem in different differentiating yourself from these other podcasts is you have educational content tutorials and you present them in a very palatable manner for a lot of people and that's very appreciated and so same thing even with me as well um i do bitcoin education on twitter and i kind of do like my specialization is just slideshows but also on the development side aside from that i kind of like this might sound bad but i realize i'm not going to ever be able to master lightning because lightning as a protocol and an implementation is pretty flexible, right? So it's always going to be evolving. I'm going to be always behind somebody by one step. But I realized the base layer offered some unique advantages to work on like Bitcoin Core,

because it's so slow moving. You can, once you understand kind of how the parts of it work, you can cement that in your mind forever and you'll always technically be useful. And so that's why I really like working on the base layer. It's not as rewarding as lightning because everything moves so slow. Getting a PR merge can take months. for a simple error message. But nonetheless, it forces you to learn about Bitcoin.

And once you understand these things, they don't go away because that is the base layer. That is the set of rules, Satoshi created and set out for all of us to follow as consensus. And so, yeah, specialization is, in my own opinion, very key. There will always be a place for people to be general, but to survive. You've got to have something very unique and very cool about what you do compared to everybody else. 100%. Gentlemen, I think we've reached the point in the show. We're going to start to round things out.

And the way I like to end every show is, of course, we'll do a quick round. If you have any final thoughts, anything you didn't get to get off your chest that you want to throw out there at the end or just, you know, any sort of closing, we'll do that. But I also like to challenge my guests to throw out a recommendation. And that recommendation can come in any form that you see fit. So examples is, you know, maybe it is an app or device that you really enjoy. Maybe it is a book or a podcast or an article that you saw that you really enjoyed. Or maybe it's just a personal experience and a bit of life advice that you think would be valuable for somebody watching or listening. So whatever you see fit, I'll start us off so you have a moment to stew with that.

But in terms of my final thoughts on this, I love where we've ended up. And that is that things are moving very quickly and that all of us are going to have trouble keeping up. And so I think for those in the room now and those that are watching and listening, you're going to have to start to whittle down to why are you here what is most important to you and what do you want to be most on top of as things move forward. I would argue that self-custy best practices should be somewhere near the top of that list, if not the very top of that list, and then everything else should be, you know, subsequent afterwards. Maybe you want to be a lightning aficionado.

Maybe you want to be on top of the latest things with privacy. Maybe you want to be on top of just what's in the news and how legacy finance is dealing with the reality of Bitcoin existing. Whatever that may be. But I think definitely prioritizing being able to secure your Bitcoin against seizure and theft and all those things should be a very important thing to you. In terms of recommendations, I guess to jump back to my prior original topic that I started with, I would love for you guys that are watching to check out the idea of starting to utilize BIP-85.

If you've got a cold card or a seed signer, and I can't recall what other devices allow you to utilize this feature. but if you've got one of those devices for sure, look into using BIP-85. I do have a tutorial on how to do with cold card. But if you've got a device like that and you're going, God, how in the hell do I keep track of all of these other seed phrases for all these hot wallets and all this crap that I've got going? I've gradually over the past few months here been migrating and taking old wallace that I used to use regularly. and switching out the ones that I used to use to new seed phrases generated through BIP-85. And that just gives me that peace of mind of like, hey, I've got all of these wallets that I use, and sometimes I stop using them for whatever reason.

But at any point in the future, if I delete those apps, I can go back, I can go to my cold card and pair it with a little, you know, just a little spreadsheet where I say which path leads to what wallet that I used to have. And I can check those seed phrases, be like, are there, are there? Because what is 5, 10, 20 bucks today may be far greater than that in the future. And you don't want to be looking through old wallet balances that you may not have access

to anymore. And realizing that the 50 bucks sitting in a wallet 10 years ago is now, you know, five grand. So like don't don't let that be you and maybe take a peek at BIP 85 and it will streamline a lot of things for you moving forward. I think it's a pretty cool tool to be used. And you can find that. I think it's called Uncle. I did a video called Uncle Jim Mode Bip 85.

You should be able to find it somewhere. But nonetheless, we're going to get final thoughts from everybody else here. Peter, I'm going to go to you first. Any final thoughts and any recommendation you may have? have. Go ahead. Final thought, I can't wait to look into that BIP 85 for what we do. I'm sure there's going to be connotations and permutations that we can implement from the business perspective. So thanks for bringing that up. As far as any recommendations go, I think in light of what we talked about, probably it's quite prescient to think about mastery and making sure if you

are focused on something you get really good at it and continue to carve out that niche. So one of my all-time favorite books is a book called Mastery by George Leonard. And it's a fabulous book. It's an easy read. And if someone's got time, have a read of it. It's a lot of life lessons in there that I think are really well practical and you can implement very easily. Awesome. I just looked it up so I could add it to my reading list. Awesome. Great. Rafa, I'm going to go to you. Any final thoughts, recommendations? Go ahead. So anybody who works in government or knows people that work in government, I would recommend checking out open timestamps and time stamping official public documents.

I think that's an easy way to certify the time that a document was created. So I would recommend people go to open timestamps.org and checking that out. That's what we use. Awesome. I love it. Yeah, and check out that documentary. Again, immutable democracy that's on the Simple Proof YouTube channel. It's a good watch and that's only like 16 or 17 minutes. Portland, last to you. Final thoughts, recommendations. Go ahead, man. First of all, I want to say thank you for hosting this podcast. It was extremely excellent, especially seeing how open timestamps is being used to validate or at least improve election integrity. Some of the, price talk as well on like kind of the volume of money that exists out that needs bitcoin to harbor it like it has to come in and um that was really nice to hear as well um yeah so at the end of the

day i i have a kind of my recommendation and this isn't something i would suggest anybody take action on because it could potentially be dangerous but i think everybody should be asking themselves the question, if my hardware wallet broke today, would I be able to recover my Bitcoin successfully? How does your seed phrase backup or multi-sig solution play into you being able to recover that? Because I feel that everybody needs to have that moment because cold cards can fail. Jades can fail. All these devices are millions of little tiny transistors that you plug into a five-bolt USB port. They all have to like perform this orchestra. to bring up a screen to be able to sign your checks or your transactions.

I like that. Yeah. I mean, you got to practice every moment of that, right? I don't know if Portland just dropped his connection or not. I think so. No. Mid-rent. I felt like it ended a little premature there.

Is he still there? No, I don't think so. That's too bad. It was a good rant. Yeah. It was very passionate. I kind of, I was like, oh, that ended very quickly. I guess I should comment on it. Nonetheless, I get what he's going at is you need to be resilient to not relying on just the piece of hardware that you've used as I think where he was going with this. And so, you know, at the end of the day, you've got BIP 85, you've got a seed phrase, you've got all of that.

What do you do if your cold card stops working? Do you know how to just get from your 24 words to recover everything, everything that you have? And if the answer is no, then you need to practice that. But I think it's a good point. I think, again, if you've set up your, I think a good practice for everyone, if you have set up a hardware device and that is your life savings and you didn't go through the process of wiping that device and then re-importing the seed phrase to make sure it works, then it's in your best interest to buy a second hardware device and then try importing that seed phrase to the new hardware device. and see if it still works. Why do I say buy a second one? Because you don't want to wipe the existing one

and try the import process and realize that your import is no good. All right? And you also don't want to import your savings to a hotkey on like a phone or a computer, right? You want to keep that wallet cold. So what you need to do, if you've not gone through in that process,

is look at getting a secondary device. It could be a cheap one, whatever, like blocks from jades are pretty affordable. Go get a, you know, take your seed phrase, import it to jade, and then see if you can recover your wallet and its entirety and the value held therein with your seed phrase. And if the answer is no, then what you need to do immediately is create a new seed phrase on a new device, perhaps the one you were testing on,

and take the money that you had and move it from the previous device to the new one because you clearly did not properly take down that seed phrase and you don't want to only rely on a single piece of hardware for recovery. And a perfect example of that, we were doing a workshop in L.A. After Pacific Bitcoin, I was doing a cold card workshop. We were doing exactly that.

I sent $10 to each person in the workshop. and had them test a transaction just like a self-transfer. And then I said, okay, we're all going to wipe our cold cards. And then when we got to that point, we did the recovery. Somebody put in their recovery didn't work. Luckily, post workshop, there's a dude named Travis, and he took the seed phrase and he was experimenting around seeing what could have been wrong. and one of the words that was very similar to another word in the BIP-39 seed word list

ended up being the solution on one of the words. And so it's just a case and point when you're going and you're checking and it says, what was word number, whatever? And it gives you three options. Oftentimes your eye will just go to the first letter and not notice if you've actually noted the whole word correctly. And then when you go to recover it, you put in the word and it starts with the same letter that you noted, but it may not be the correct word. So it's very important that you take note of those things. You've got to be, you've got to be careful.

But nonetheless, I'm on a rant here at the end of the show. I'm going to wrap it out, gentlemen. Again, Peter, Raffa, and our dearly departed, Portland. I appreciate all your guys' time. This was an absolute awesome show. What a good time. And everybody watching all their X handles, I can't believe I just said that, their Twitter handles are in the show notes.

You can go follow them there. And then from there, you'll be able to find other information. Also check out the Immutable Democracy video over on YouTube. But guys, thank you so much for your time on a Friday evening. I very much appreciate it. Great to spend it with you guys. Really appreciate what you do. Thanks so much.

Thanks a lot, Peter. Thank you, guys. Thanks a lot, guys. Have a good night. Cheers. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. And again, thank you guys for the guests.

Go follow them all on Twitter. And again, with what Ralph is working on, again, immutable democracy on YouTube. And it's a good 16-minute watch. And it's from Simple Proof. If anything else pops up, that's the one. you're looking for. So super awesome to watch. And again, Portland, what a legend. What an awesome dude. And super glad to have him as well. Doing the whole pot from either the back of a car or a green screen, depending on who you believe in the chat. But this is a lot of fun. Thank you guys so much for being

here. Of course, if you want to help out the show, you can do a few things. You can hit that like button just below the screen, smash that like button. That helps a ton. You can also share this episode out on whatever social media platforms you happen to be on. And of course, if you're not already, please do subscribe. That is massive. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm one day, much like the elusive 100K Bitcoin, I will hit that elusive 100K subscribers. I'm at, I'm in the low 80s right now. So, so help me get there. Also, if you want to help the show, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors, hottle, holl to hoon kite, uh, nunchuk. Cdoor, star 9, all those guys, they're listed down below.

And if you really liked what you saw, and if you're having trouble, maybe you need some help, some handholding, maybe the tutorials that I've got listed on YouTube are not quite enough, and you just need some extra assurance. You can always reach out. There's a QR code on the screen right now that'll take you to my website, BTCSessions.ca. And there you can book me for one-on-ones. So if you need some help setting up hardware or mastering multi-sig or trying out lightning or whatever it may be, you can contact me there. Anyways, guys, I am out. Thank you so much for being here.

I really do appreciate it. Have a wonderful evening, a wonderful weekend, and I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.