BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Rob Johnson, Samson Mow, Andrew Howard ep388

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

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What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. In fact, first episode of the New Year. So thank you for joining us on the first one back. Glad to see you all. We have an awesome panel. Very excited for this one today. And I'm feeling as reinvigorated as I can feel because I did get a bit of a break,

but I also have children. So take that for what it is. still equally tired, just less tired of work. So anyways, we're back at it. But 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 can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things. help a ton in getting this show in front of more eyeballs, hit that little like button below the screen there, share this on whatever socials you may be on, hide to all my nostrils where this is

streaming live as well. And of course, subscribe. Help me on my quest to 100,000 subscribers by the end of 2024. If we keep up at the same pace, I will definitely easily hit that. So help me get there. But with that, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. One second, I am pulling up time chain calendar.com. There we go.

And simultaneously, actually, I am pulling up the live chat, which will be in the right hand side of the screen. So starting now, everything from here on in, all of your comments will be live for the world to see for better or worse. But over on timechain calendar.com, we're sitting at $44,288 per coin.

A single US dollar will grab you, 2258 sats in terms of fees. 58 sats per byte for NextBlock, not bad. Consolidate those UTXOs while you can. If you were on X earlier, then you would have seen a little story that I had about somebody who was $50 DCA for a couple of years and then went to move the funds to a different wallet.

And it costs $1,300. So time to be cognizant. Anyways, besides that, yeah, 60 stats per byte next block, Manpool purging anything south of 24 stats per byte. And in terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.59 million of them, that's 93.29% of the total supply. Shout out to sponsor the show, hoddle, hoddle.com. If you're stacking stats and you have a few priorities in mind like peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custy and no KYC, this is a place to go.

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Once you do stack some stats, you're going to want to secure it with some of the best hardware on the market. I love my cold card mark four. I have all their other goodies, tap signers, sats cards, block clocks. and I've pre-ordered the hell out of the cold card queue. So if you want to reserve that or pick up anything else, head over to coin kite.com. Use code BTC sessions at checkout for a hefty discount. Backups are important. Seed ore has one of the most robust and one of my favorite seed backup steel backup systems that I've used.

This can capsule design. You can swap out seeds if you need, but it will keep your seed secure from the elements like fire, water, corrosion, all of that. They have full starter sets to get you started with one or two seed phrases. And yeah, check them out. Links are down below. Last couple here, shout it to Nunchuk for their assisted Honey Badger multi-sig setup. You can basically set it up on your mobile device with things like TapSign or Cold Card and a ton of other hardware options. Once you're set up, you hold three keys.

They hold one. And you have baked in inheritance planning so your stats can get to your next up kin if anything should happen to you. I've done a full tutorial, but you can check them out at nunchuk.io. And last shout out to Start9, your sovereign computing solution for plug-and-play devices, hosting your Bitcoin and data stack. So things like Bitcoin Core, Lightning, mempool. Space, files, passwords, photos, nosterclines, and relays, as well as some AI stuff, too, and plenty of other options.

They've got entry-level devices all the way up to what I'm running, which is the Start9 server Pure. So check them out, start9.com. With that, and not my rambling. Let's get these guys in here. Very excited for the topics at hand, but let's get them in and do some intros first. So welcome to the stage, Samson, Andrew, and Rob. Gentlemen, happy Friday evening.

Good to see you. How are you guys doing? Good. Very good. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you guys for some people watching.

There may be some familiar faces up here, but if not, We're going to go around anyways, and we'll do a quick round of intros before we get going here. So I'll just pass it down the line for who are you and what do you do? We'll start with Samson. Can you give yourself an intro, man? Sure. I'm Samson Mo. I'm the CEO of Jan 3, and I'm known for nation state Bitcoin adoption as well as Jan 3, the entire group.

We work with governments, politicians to implement Bitcoin strategies. We've helped El Salvador in the past with the Bitcoin law, digital securities law. and we've been working with Madeira, Prospera, Honduras, and a number of other places that are trying to implement some Bitcoin strategy. So that's who we are in a nutshell. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you back on the show, man. You've been busy since we chatted last.

So good to see you. And are you going to be in Madeira, by the way? Yes, I will. I will see you there. Looking forward to it. Awesome. Andrew, good to have you as well. Can you give yourself an intro?

Yeah, for sure. So, name is Andrew Howard. I've been, well, Bitcoin class of 2017. I'm currently chief business officer of Jan 3. So working on Aqua Wallet, working on Jan 3 Financial, helping out with some things in regards to the nation-state adoption.

So we've got a lot of a lot of very exciting, interesting activities at Jan 3. So some people may know me for talking about my experience of getting orange-pilled when I was active duty in the Marine Corps and how that changed my perspective a lot on a lot of things. But that's who I am and what I'm doing. That's awesome, man. I'm glad to have you on. And Rob, good to see you as well. For those unfamiliar, can you give yourself an intro? Yeah, thanks, Ben, for having me on. My name's Rob. I go by Bitcoinsers movie on Twitter. I'm a filmmaker, and I just made a documentary called Bitcoins. Maybe you've seen the trailer.

I do film and TV, shooting and editing by day, and went deep down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole in 2020 and then had this idea in 2021 to make this film. And so I really wanted to focus it on a lot of Bitcoin Twitter play that I've met along the way and just kind of, you know, make a film a little bit about the culture of Bitcoin, even though there is no culture of Bitcoin. Awesome. And I do, I think the first time we met would have been Miami 21.

Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I saw you. You were, we were both kind of, you know, interviewing Alex Svetsky. And that's when I introduced myself. and I think we exchanged some footage or some audio files at that point.

Yes, I do recall that. Awesome. Well, dude, it's, again, good to have you on. And we'll talk more about the film in a bit, I'm sure. I got a little sneak peek. So, yeah, we'll dive down that rabbit hole momentarily. But with that, with the intros out of the way, we're going to get the show rolling. So anybody that's watching that may be unfamiliar, this is why we're.

We Bullish, very simple premise to the show. Each one of us, each guest, has come with a reason for being bullish. And this can take any form. It could be a personal experience, a new application, a device, a news item, really anything that is currently exciting in and around Bitcoin. The flow of the show basically goes, somebody is, number one, going to drop a reason why they're bullish. This is their chance to rant on it and explain why they're so excited.

Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, comments, questions, whatever rabbit holes we care to go down and then number three we're going to rotate to the next person until we've all had to turn so really simple reason riff rotate and we're going to get it rolling today there's a reason why i'm going to get us started um there's a reason why i asked uh samson and andrew on today um and that's because uh just the other day aqua wallet um dropped and so i got to test it out. And I'm very excited for certain aspects of kind of how things are forming in and around how wallets function. And so those unfamiliar aqua wallet basically you have it. And you guys can correct me if I'm wrong in and around any of these aspects. But from what I've looked at, you've

got, you know, ability to deal with on-chain. And then you've got kind of like a, and that's designated as like a savings mechanism. Then you've got the ability to act through various types of layers of Bitcoin, namely liquid and lightning. And that's kind of designated as your spending wallet. And then you've also got options for like, you know, if you're someone that needs to deal with like a stable dollar peg, you can deal with tether as well. And so, you've kind of got these different aspects. The reason I think the way this wallet is functioning is useful is I've actually been relying on liquid a lot more as kind of my, I guess kind of like my middle ground, my starting point.

Are you sure you want to say that, Ben? You can take it back still. I've got so much shit. But I'm going to say it right now. if anybody's telling me how I should use Bitcoin, you can go fuck yourself. I live on Bitcoin entirely. Okay. I earn Bitcoin.

I spend Bitcoin. I pay my bills in Bitcoin. I transact in Bitcoin all the time. I do multiple transactions per day. 99% of the Bitcoin that I own. So I should say 99% of all of my liquid wealth, like liquid as in like movable, not like a house, is in Bitcoin. So like at any one point, what's sitting in dollars is effectively nothing. Of that 99% of my wealth that's sitting in Bitcoin, 99% of that is in cold storage,

probably in multi-sig or some variation there. So, you know, on-chain, self-custody. But I do need to do a lot of transactions on a regular basis. When I've approached that in different ways, you've got options. I've done the whole lightning route and I've died to use it regularly. I love what Phoenix is doing and I love that you can like establish a big inbound channel for a limited fee that will cover you for the next year. So I've got like a 10 million sat channel and I don't have to really worry about that. That's fantastic.

However, not everybody has, you know, the, depending on what the on-chain fee is, not everybody has like $100 to drop on an inbound channel if you're regularly receiving a ton of transactions. And that's what I have to deal with. And so that's a bit of a hurdle for many and was for me until they got the option to get a big inbound channel. And then the other part of it is if you're regularly receiving on-chain transactions that I would say are, you know, sub a million sats, UTXO management is a big deal, meaning that every time you receive a transaction to your Bitcoin wallet, it sits as that amount as a piece of Bitcoin in your wallet. And the way that transaction fees are calculated, it's like it would be like if spending physical cash, there was a small fee attached to. to each bill that you used.

And so it becomes more prudent to spend a $20 bill than a bunch of ones. And so people can get into instances like the gentleman that I spoke with today where he's been dollar cost averaging $50 a day for ages. And he went to move it all to cold storage today, even with fees much lower than they've been, it costs them $1,300 for the on-chain fee. And so what I've been doing is I've been defaulting to Liquid as my like initial foray. And then I've been delegating out, okay, I'm going to move. I'm going to swap some to Lightning so that I can do spending transactions.

And then I'm going to peg out to on chain when I have enough of a buildup of a balance that doesn't need to be spent so that I can put it into long term storage on chain secured with my own hardware. And Liquid has given me that in between. And now some people will say, well, why not just go to Lightning for the things I mentioned, channel management, things like that? And if you're receiving a lot, but I need to do on-chain and Lightning. The other thing that I'll say, where people are like, Liquid is trusted. One, yes. You know, there's no way around that. That it's not, you're not on-chain Bitcoin.

you're not lightning, which is also on-chain Bitcoin locked into multi-sig. It is pegged to Bitcoin. So where I would say it fits is, you know, everybody knows, don't sit on an exchange. That's not an advisable thing to do for any period of time, for any meaningful amount of Bitcoin. Number two, people always say, well, don't use a custodial lightning wallet because you don't have control of that and they could rug pull you. also a valid thing to be cognizant of. So exchanges or custodial lightning wallets. Well, to me, liquid is like way better than either of those options, but also mitigates

the fees that I would experience by sending small amounts on chain and trying to aggregate those and consolidate them later. So for me, it's like minimizing my custodial risk in a form that is also, you know, relatively censorship resistant. And I think that this is kind of what makes sense most for me. And again, like 1% of my Bitcoin at any given time is going to be sitting in liquid. Now, why am I excited about Aqua? The main thing about it was what I was doing previously was I'd get an on-chain transaction.

I'd go, okay, well, this is, I don't want this to sit here. I need to be nimble with it. So I would peg into liquid. Then once it got there, I would use something like bolts to swap into lightning to send it over to Phoenix. And then I would sometimes peg back out via side swap to get it into cold storage. Everything I just said, a lot of people are going to be listening saying, what in the hell do any of those things even mean? It's just me moving between lightning liquid and on chain through multiple applications and websites and plugins and everything. All that shit is in one screen for me now.

So I can just say like, oh, I have an app. There's my on chain Bitcoin. There's liquid. It defaults to liquid, but I have functionality to effectively send and receive lightning transactions, which end in me having a liquid balance. And so I can send out to Phoenix, if that's what I want to do for really low value lightning transactions, or I can stick in liquid, or I can move to on-chain via the swap function. It's all in front of me is what I'm getting at. And I think where we're headed is that the average person is not going to necessarily see all of these different things that are happening in the background, but they're more so going to be asked about their,

behaviors and preferences, and then the wallet will into it what the best layer or what the best network for them to be utilizing is. And it'll just kind of be automated and officicated away with perhaps an advanced section for those that want to tinker and specify. I'm curious about your guys' thoughts in and around this, because obviously fees have been a huge, huge burden for a lot of people over the past number of months with the JPEG bros. But such is life and we have to adapt and survive. So yeah, comments.

Well, it's like you're a part of the team, Ben. You kind of understand the design principles behind Aqua and what we're trying to achieve. So we went into this with a very clear focus of who is the target market. It is people that need to use Bitcoin but may not want to deal with complexity. So as you said, we do obfuscate and abstract away a lot of that complexity with the goal of providing them a seamless experience that they don't have to worry about things like channel balancing and management. And we also want to focus on people in Latam, and that's why Tether is there. So in Latam, like, I don't know if you saw when the Twitter sphere or X sphere blew up about Peter McCormack tweeting that he used Tron Tether when he was in Argentina. Yeah.

That's just the fact. I mean, if you're a maxi and you're living in the West, maybe you don't understand it. But a lot of people in Latam are using shitcoins like Tron and buying Tron to pay for gas fees or Ethereum to pay for gas fees. They're using things like shit coin wallets. And a lot of them are actually just using Binance as a wallet. And they don't even care that it is completely custodial. And it's an exchange. So we have to move and we have to do something.

to reach this big piece of the market. So you can say lightning is good, Bitcoin is good, and of course I'm as maximum as anyone can get. But the reality is there are maybe tens, hundreds of millions of people that want stable coins. And if we don't interact with that marketplace, then we just give that market to Tron and Ethereum and all the other things. And yes, probably a subset of people using stable coins are just gambling on defy. But a large chunk of it, I don't know, let's say, it's 50, 50 percent are just using dollars, digital dollars to protect themselves against inflation, against the peso inflating and their currency is going to zero.

So there is a use case there, whether you like it or not and acknowledge it or not. And that is really what we want to go after with Aqua. So we think that we can bring them into liquid tether by offering that interoperability with Tron and Ethereum Tether. And I think having your funds in liquid is actually far better because you have the benefit of confidential transactions. You have the ability to still interact with the other chains. But more importantly, is you can swap to Bitcoin.

And at the top of the wallet, we have a big thing there saying savings account, Bitcoin. And we have the Bitcoin price. Some people said, like, why do you have the Bitcoin price there? It should be the balance. It's because we want those guys in Latam to use this. And they might be using it for Tether, but they're always going to see, oh, Bitcoin price, Bitcoin savings. And it'll reinforce that concept.

Bitcoin is a savings vehicle because they're coming to, they're already in Tether, but they're not into Bitcoin. They might be, but they also may not be. And we have to reach them and teach them. Like, yes, the dollar is a Bitcoin of sorts compared to the Argentinian peso or the Bolivar or whatever. But there is another dollar to that dollar, and that's Bitcoin, and that's even better. So there's a process there. These people are dealing with, like, the king of King Fiat shitcoins, and they're moving to, like, what's...

I like the analogy, you know, the dollar is Bitcoin compared to some of these other shitty currencies. But I guess through that, I think I saw somebody in the comments say that it's a gateway drug where... where they move from their shit coin currency to what seems like a much better currency. But then it's juxtaposed against actual Bitcoin. And they'll realize that in the end, the dollar was the real shit coin. So I think that's a positive. Now the other is because I see comments coming through. So like one person, why should anyone trust a separate chain?

How is that any different than wrap Bitcoin on ETH? And so number one, ETH, but I digress. I want to give a bit of an answer here and then maybe you guys could chime in. Number one, your exposure to something like liquid should reflect kind of, you know, I suppose like in any arrangement like this, there's a degree of risk. Okay, so with liquid, there's, you know, it's an 11 of 15 multi-sig. So you'd require 11 different entities that are globally distributed with different jurisdictions to collude to rugpole you. Whereas, you know, the other option, and keep in mind that a lot of people utilizing this,

there are other options may be beyond an exchange or use a custodial lightning wallet because on chain is not economically viable for them. So it's like a one of one or an 11 of 15 are the choices, kind of. And so there's that aspect to it. The other thing I would say about wrapped Bitcoin, and maybe I'm incorrect, but that's BitGo, right? That's Bitcoin. Yeah, so it's BitGo. So you've got a single entity, although they may do multi-sig with it, but it's still a single

entity with a single jurisdictional risk in which that can be clamped down upon and that it could be broken at any time. So it's a little bit different than, again, an 11 of 15 totally different entities dealing with it. I'm not saying that a liquid rug is impossible. But just to talk about my thinking in terms of risk, let's say we were in a position where fees basically were where they were like over the past number of months. You know, it's been very often that fees have been $10.

It's been times where they've been 20 or 30 or more. I've seen 50, 60 when it really went high to like 600 stats per byte. And sometimes it's been less. but if we use $10 as a benchmark, I do at least, I'd say on average three transaction a day. If I was only doing on-chain, that's $30 a day, times 10 days, that's $300 bucks, times a month. So 30 days, that's $900 in fees in a month. I never typically have more than $4,000 or $5,000 sitting in that to deal with the month of paying people, moving things around. That's typically what my exposure liquid is.

So $900 a month in on-chain fees, if I go at six months, that's $5,400 worth of fees. If I got rug pulled for the maximum amount I ever hold in liquid, I still saved $400 on fees. It's a great point. So like, you know, think about it. Think about your risk and like how likely that is versus how hard it would hit you. So if you're dealing with a couple hundred bucks, and for you, that makes sense just for the, the nimbleness of using it. Great. But don't like, also, I'm probably not going to have my life savings sitting in liquid either.

I think still the best option for that is on-chain secured by your own hardware, perhaps in a multi-sig. But there's a lot of, a lot of moving parts there. Anyway, so I'm getting on a rant here, but I'm very interested in this at the moment. Can I maybe, to either Andrew or Samson, can I maybe just ask a couple quick things? People wanted to know about open source. Yeah. You want to touch on that? Sure.

So the plan is to open source aqua. I think we're just doing final checks and cleaning up a bit more code. But I would say a week, two tops. And yeah, we just wanted to launch a lot. on Jan 3rd and we weren't able to clean everything up in time, but it is planned to be open source. The original Aqua wallet under Blockstream was open source. And the underlying framework, I guess, of Aqua is GDK. So it's heavily GDK and then the rest is Flutter. So if people want to check it in a week or two tops time, then they can do that. Nice. That's awesome. On that point,

though, I wanted to say, like, it's kind of weird seeing so many people saying, is it open source? But I'm curious how many of the people asking about that or complaining about that actually would read the code or understand the code. Or are they just going to say it's a checkbox, open source check? And that's the extent of it. Because I have a feeling a lot of it is like that. And that's not good. Yeah. Well, I think that's a lot of the case.

For me, that's what it is. It's a checkbox. But it's also in the back of my mind, it's a little bit. I guess it's the thought that surely somebody's looked at this, which may or may not be the case. That's not always the case. Yeah, it's not always the case, right? Like if you're that paranoid, you need to go look at the repo and see how active it is and so on and so forth. I don't know.

Andrew, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, open source does not always mean everybody's reviewed the code. So absolutely. That's why a lot of people go with hardware wallets like Trezer because it's been around for such a long time. and it's open source and they've had a lot of review of the code. So I can tell you, I saw some people saying, you know, the Aqua has been ready for months and they just waited until it released it on January 3rd. I'm telling you from an internal point of view, January 3rd was a very critical date for us to release this for obvious reasons, right?

Kind of poetic Jan 3, releasing it on January 3rd. So I have a lot of respect for our developers. they are much smarter men than I am and they're working very hard. And so it's, of course, it's going to be open source. As annoying as it is to hear some of the preteens, I actually appreciate a lot. I think that's very important in the Bitcoin space to have criticism of things and to kill your heroes. So, yeah, it's good. I'm looking forward for us to publicly show the code.

And right now we're just cleaning some things up. So that time will come. I want to ask, I'm getting a big echo to somebody, but I don't know who. Let me double check. I wanted to ask Rob a quick question here. In and around, I guess in and around your usage of Bitcoin, number one, like, are you using it and enough in a way that it actually has impacted you over the last number of months with fees. And what are your kind of activities like in and around that?

And have you had to kind of make adjustments to how you utilize Bitcoin in these high fee environments? Has that been a consideration for you yet or not yet? Well, I would say not yet. And I want to go back and say, I don't know anything about liquid. I mean, I've seen a couple of tweets about it. I know you've been talking about it, Ben, and I was listening earlier, and I just don't know anything about liquid. So, I mean, I have used lightning.

When I was shooting the film, I did raise some funds in Bitcoin. I used something called Tallycoin, which was a website. It's not a shit coin. It was a website. And most of those donations came on chain. And, you know, I was using strike also with lightning. And I used lightning. And I used lightning, like kind of when I was out and about mostly in Austin shooting this because, you know, the people I was interacting with and the businesses we were going to, a lot of them were using, were accepting Bitcoin and there were some different apps that we were using. One of them was called Oshy and Michael Atwood is the guy that invented that.

And so I mean, you know, I did pay people in Bitcoin. I paid crew, you know, sound people, graphics people, editors. Not all the time. But, you know, like the guys that were out. out in the field with me when they were at the interviews and they were seeing, you know, kind of how bullish everybody was, they were willing to accept Bitcoin as payment. And I mean, for that, I was really just doing on-chain. Yeah. It was affordable to do it then, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, now I haven't really been moving any funds around.

You know, I mean, I try to go straight to cold storage. I don't have anything sitting on any exchanges. You know, I have a couple of different wallets for when I do need to like pay people. But yeah, I mean, I haven't done it in a while, but I have been aware of fees going up and down. So, you know, I mean, when, unless I'm like somewhere where I'm trying to like, you know, buy a stake with Bitcoin, like at this place, three forks in Austin where they accept Bitcoin. I haven't really been like, you know, moving a lot around recently.

Yeah, fair enough. And again, I think it depends on each individual and how they're interacting with Bitcoin. What the one thing I'll say in terms of, Andrew, I liked what you said about being grateful for the scrutiny. I think that's as aggravating as it can be. I also think that every person that, you know, maybe I kind of argued some of the finer points with over the course of the past couple days. I also do very much value that because at the end of the day, the people that are most purist about it must be on chain secured by yourself full self-custody, while I may not agree for the like couple percent where I need to be spending every single day and, you know, nobody can really tell

an individual how they use Bitcoin. What I do like is that it pushes the Overton window to make get less acceptable by default. There's a stigma attached to just leaving your shit fully with a custodian. So like just put it on Coinbase and just let it rot. You know, like that is kind of the behavior that we hope to get away from and discourage and allow people to take more personal responsibility. I think that's a positive thing. But I what I'll say in general in terms of like the scrutiny in and around that is,

I think if you are fully in Bitcoin and you're fully self-custody and you're not making any compromises and you're doing all of it yourself, you're managing your enlightening channels or like everything that you have is self-custody, then I think that you, you know, that's a fair stance to take and you've decided to go that route. But I think if you are living on a fiat standard and you're saving in Bitcoin and you have a meaningful percentage of your wealth in dollars sitting in a bank account, then I feel like the argument kind of is lost there because you've got more custodial risk with a single entity in the bank account holding your dollars than I have with my entire wealth with the 1% that I'm used. using for quick transactions. So at the end of the day, like people, I think, need to step back and say, you know, what is practical with the tools that we have in this very moment. And right now, this is very much bridging a gap for me. And I can admit that things aren't totally perfect. But I think that where we're headed, it gives a great option while also preserving all of my

savings on chain, but giving me minimal exposure to risk and still enabling me to transact regularly. Yeah, I think I've been saying this for a long time, but you have to use the right tool for the right job. So if liquid exists, you should use it for what it's good for. If lightning exists, you should use that for what it's good for, and on-chain, obviously, for long-term cold storage. So you have to use the right tool in the right manner, otherwise you'll complain it doesn't work well. And the way I see it is liquid is just a tool. If there's a better tool, I'm happy to integrate and add that and support that in Aqua. But at this time, based on our analysis, this current setup that we have is pretty good. And I think a lot of people are like, let's go back and taking a step

back on the criticism and the haters. I think it's really good to have haters. It brings a lot of attention to the project and it gives us a lot more buzz. Like people are talking about it because people are hitting on it. And I almost say you need haters to make a project successful, right? So maybe that's because we're building on liquid. I don't know, but definitely Aqua has its share of haters in this last three days, two days we've been live and it's pretty impressive. Like nobody hates relay, nobody hates peach, right?

So you guys got up your game and get some haters. But it's good. Criticism is good. And I think I want to go back to your original question about liquid, actually. What's the difference between LBTC and RAPBTC? And you already specified that BITCO is the custodian of RAPDC. And just for people that know back in the block size wars, Bitco was also the company that was trying to attack Bitcoin and force change in the consensus layer.

But that's a long time ago. But Liquid is different. It is a multi-sig held by the Federation. And you have to compromise that you'd have to get 11 of 15 keys of the functionaries. And these are the guys that generate the blocks. But in daily usage, the functionaries don't really do anything. They're in this server and they're protected by the HSM. And all that the functionaries can do is shut off their box.

But the incentives are not to do so because the members of the Federation, they are using Liquid as well. So by doing so, they'd be attacking their own users. And the members of the Federation include companies like BitFenex, Bitmex, big exchanges, Bitsy, full Bitcoin is a member. We are a member of Gen 3. Then there's Peach, Hoddle, Hoddle. There's a lot of Bitcoin companies that are part of this federation.

So it kind of doesn't make sense. Like if you think liquid is going to rug you, then you're probably using the services and products of most of these companies already. So you have to really step back and analyze your life. And sadly, liquid derangement syndrome is a thing. So people do have this kind of animosity and anger towards liquid when it's simply a federation of companies. And you can, I think another critique is,

you can't peg out. So there is a security mechanism where anybody can peg in, but typically pegging in is still done by the Federation members. But to peg out, you get a authorization key if you're a member of the Federation. And then you can exit. So an ordinary end user won't be able to peg out directly, but they can use swap services like on sideswap and others to exit the system. But that authorization key, it's called a peg-out authorization key.

It's a security mechanism so that some random attacker can't just drain the Federation. And it is a prudent precaution, I think, because you do see all these defy projects where these get drained regularly. So it's a balance between security and convenience. I think we've got the right balance and liquid between that. So you would just go through one of the Federation members to peg out. And if you are running a business, you can simply join the Federation, get a key, and let your end users exit the ecosystem that way.

So I think it's a overall very elegant system that allows us to scale Bitcoin with a second layer. Interesting. Well, I guess I have plenty more to talk about, but I think I can't take up the entire show with this topic. So I am going to do a rotation. I'm going to put a bow on this topic. I will be, of course, doing a video over, you know, and I might wait a little bit. for any updates or anything that happened over the next little bit and then do like a walkthrough of how it functions.

But that'll be happening at some point soon. Either way, thank you guys for, again, answering all the questions and everything. But we're going to rotate through everybody in the chat. Again, thank you for being part of the show. As we're rotating, don't forget to smash that like button, give this a share, all those good things. But with that,

I'm going to, I kind of want to, I want to toss it down to Rob first so that we can kind of get into his reason for being bullish first. Yeah. And so I'll toss it over to you and I'll just let you take it away. What are you excited about, man? Yeah, thanks, Ben. I am bullish on Bitcoiners. And yes, I'm talking about this film that I just made, which is premiering January 26th. in Austin. But I mean, I'm really talking about the plebs and I'm talking about Bitcoin Twitter.

The people that I've met while making, I mean, before I started shooting this, I think I knew like one bitcoiner in real life. You know, most of the people that I was interacting with were really just on Twitter. So, I mean, seeing, seeing, Seeing what's been happening over the past couple of years, I mean, it's continuing to grow at a grassroots level. And that's, I mean, the thing that's kind of interesting about it is, is like when you meet other bitcoinsers and, you know, like you feel like you already know them. I mean, that's, I'm kind of like quoting what Justin Moon said at Miami last year, but I have a clip of him in the film saying it, I think, that we're going to show later. But, I mean, that's really kind of what I'm bullish on right now is the people.

I love it. I love it. Well, do you want maybe as to tag on to your reason for being bullish here, should we show some of the people that you're bullish? about then yes yeah let's in the federal reserve and show this clip awesome all right uh let me just grab it up here we'll do a little watch party all right here we go so uh the little clip from bitcoinsers oh far Texas rain is gonna wash away everything and the rivers will rise You know.

It feels like everything around us is still crashing. The whole Fiat system feels like it's falling apart. That's obvious. But if you're a Bitcoin error, I don't know that things have ever felt better in Austin. There's a hard Texas rain slapping the tin roof on this shack tonight. Oh, a hard Texas rain. There ain't a clear sky inside. Well, you know.

It's a snowball effect and that people with a value set built around Bitcoin and that when they see Bitcoin, they oftentimes want to work on Bitcoin. The best place to be is around other people building on Bitcoin. Bitcoin Mecca of the world is Austin because of, you know, the people that are here, but also the regulatory environment. We're in a place where we have largely a deregulated energy market, for example. BitDev's is the once monthly meeting that they hold it Unchained Capital, and it is powerful. And that Justin Moon, who's a Bitcoinser here, a developer, and he was hosting that meetup, and I suggest that we hosted it Unchained.

And we've been hosting that meetup for the last three and a half years. From the first month that I joined Unchained, it has been the home of Austin BitDev. I've never cared for community in my life until a couple years ago. I generally stay away from, I don't like communities generally, but I got involved in Bitcoin and you'd come to a room. Every person you met was interesting and different, and you felt you knew them your whole life sometimes, and I'd never had that feeling before.

If all you have is like high-level thinkers building this like computer thing, but you don't have people that are gathering and thinking about what the implications of that thing are, and they're not working on ways to like spread it out into their neighborhoods, into their family, and to their friends, then like, what's the point? And if all you have is the people doing this cultural side of things,

and nobody's working on the development side of things. Again, what's the point? So the idea for Austin Bitcoin Club, it didn't start as Austin Bitcoin Club. It didn't even start as an idea to like found a club. I reached out to a guy online, his name is Kar Gonzalez, and I reached out to him.

We started chatting, we started having a conversation, he helped answer some of my questions, and we just got into Bitcoin a little bit. I personally needed a place to just hang out with other Bitcoiners, and no one else was making it. So I made it myself. All right, let's jump into.

We got a lot to talk about. We'll start with Clark's dashboard. As we always do, like I mentioned, we've been hovering in the mid-50s range at $56,309. One cuck buck's going to get you 1,773 stats. We're still over a trillion dollar market cap at 1.07 trillion. We're currently at Lockheight, 712,267. The Bitcoin rabbit hole is deep. I think that if you want to understand Bitcoin, you are inevitably going to have to go down a number

of rabbit holes, at least for those brave early adopters. And there's a podcast called The Rabbit Hole Recap, Marty Bent, Matt O'Dell. Matt, you stop texting. Will you join us in this conversation, please? What's going on? What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Cript at your boy, Marty Bent here. A rabbit hole recap, rip.

What's going on? Awesome. I love it. I love it, man. This is great. Yeah, thank you. I got to watch it in full earlier. today. Spoiler alert, I had a sneak peek and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was like hanging out

with friends. It was like the the Bitcoin or conversation that you get to have whenever you're at a meet up with people, it's like being being a part of the group with, you know, people that you're familiar with. And that's kind of my takeaway from it was coming out of it being like, I feel like I've just been hanging out with a group of Bitcoiners. And that was my money. So I don't know. Tell people about kind of where they'll be able to kind of find and see this and all that. Yeah.

So right now the premiere screening is in Austin on January 26th. It's going to be at Bitcoin Commons. And I really wanted to premiere it there because so much of the film takes place. in Austin, not the whole film, but a lot of it was shot in Texas. And then there are some scenes in other places as well in Miami and some other places. But so after Austin, I'm lining up a screening in Boston and NYC and also in Nashville. And so at some point, I don't know if it's going to be before or after that. it's going to be online on bitcoinsmovie.com, which is my website where people can watch it.

So I'm trying to do some in-person screenings first, and then it's going to be online for everybody to watch. Pretty soon, I would say, like within a couple of weeks from now. That's awesome. So you heard it here first. Everybody go to bitcoinsmovie.com and bookmark that because that's where you're, you get to actually see the trailer there too, like not just a direct close. it, but everything that it kind of covers. And yeah, you'll be able to go and take it all in. But I had a blast.

I think we need more, I mean, I can never get enough of these types of films and like different ways of kind of covering what's happening in Bitcoin because it's like you get to be a part of it. You kind of are living it. But then when you see it in this context of it's like reliving it and realizing, you're you know, the impact it has on people all over the place, right? Yeah, I mean, I think this kind of thing is happening in a lot of places around the country and around the world. I mean, there's tons of meetups all over the place now.

And initially when I started shooting, I wasn't sure that it was going to be set in Austin. But that was just kind of where I went. I mean, I knew stuff was happening there. I knew BitDefts was there. But, like, this was the beginning of the Austin. Bitcoin Club and Pleb Lab. And Kyle, who you saw in the film, Kyle Murphy and Carr Gonzalez, started Pleb Lab and Austin Bitcoin Club kind of at the same time.

And so that was really also tapping into the BitDevs community that was already established there. And so that's kind of why I wanted to anchor the film there because that's where the stories were happening. But I mean, I also went to Nashville while shooting this. And, you know, I mean, I've been to meetups in Boston as well. And so, yeah, it's, I mean, it's happening everywhere. So that's why I'm bullish on Bitcoiners.

I love it. I'm curious to hear any comments, questions, anything from Samson or Andrew, if you guys want to chime in. Okay. Well, I'll go. I'm looking forward to watching this. I think it's interesting because unfortunately we are in a temporary time period right now because being a bitcoiner is in a way, its own culture.

We're not all the same person, but not everybody is a bitconer right now. And so in 20 years from now, maybe everybody will be a bitcoiner, and we may not have that as much. So it's a very interesting thing to capture on camera. I'm looking forward to saying that. I think Bitcoin does have a culture. not everybody in Bitcoin is the same, obviously, but there is kind of a common trend of disagreeability. And it makes perfect sense that America is one of the most orange-goed countries,

because there is that American grit attitude of, F-U, I'm not doing what you tell me. You know, that is similar to the Bitcoin ethos of I'm going to own my money. I'm not going to let you tell me what I can and can't do with my own money that I work hard for. So I'm pumped to work. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's kind of like a documentary like this is really a snapshot of a time and place. And so that's another reason that I wanted to do this. I mean, things are already different in Austin now, I'm told.

You know, some of the people in the film, everybody in the film are Bitcoin only and are still Bitcoiners. I was very careful throughout the filming and editing process to, you know, thanks to Bitcoin Twitter, only include people who, you know, who are really, really in it. And I mean, some of the people in the film have already kind of like moved on to other things. So, yeah, I mean, I thought it was important as like from our historical perspective to make this just to show what was happening, you know, kind of in this era. Yeah. It's interesting to get that, again, as you said, that snapshot of, and I felt it too, because there's parts that were like just compared to the sentiment right now, but there were parts from, you know, like 2022. And that was a 22 was a rough one after 2021. And, you know, a lot of people weren't expecting a lot of the crazy stuff that happened. And so there was like, you could feel the different vibes. like, because you covered this over, you filmed over a couple of years.

And so you kind of got all of these different sentiments happening at different times. And you could definitely feel the vibes of like the quasi euphoria as well as the quasi, like, heads down. Holy shit, it's time to work. Those vibes as well. And so it was funny, well, not funny, but like it was, it was odd in a way because we're, we're, we're getting back into that that you know excitement you know we're seeing more green than red and uh and i think that what like looking and and seeing this sentiment even just from like a year ago it was it was odd it was it was like oh wow that was not that long ago and i felt

how it was there but then i you know to juxtapose that to today it was interesting yeah yeah three greens and a red that's you know we were uh when i started shooting i mean it was i think everybody was really riding high you know it was like sort of beginning of the bull market a lot was happening people were were very uh eventually euphoric i think um And, you know, I try not to focus on like the price action in the film. I didn't want to peg anything to, you know, specific like news stories about stuff that was happening with the price going up and down. But yeah, I mean, I finished shooting it in the bare market, which is an important time, you know, when when Bitcoin plebs are really forged, you know, hodlers are really discover themselves, I think, if they're willing to kind of stick around and, you know,

ride the wave back down. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm glad that things are looking up now for sure. So, you know, I've been, yeah. Yeah, I love it. I love it. I love it.

I think it's coming out. When? Yeah, so January 26th is going to be the first premiere in-person screening in Austin. and then I'm lining up a couple of screenings, like shortly after that, like a week later I'm trying to do. And it's going to be online, like within a couple weeks. I'll definitely tweet about it to everybody multiple times when it's officially online.

Yeah. The handle is in the show notes for anybody that's watching and wants to follow and make sure that they see when it drops. Yeah, now is a good time for it to come up because the U.S. is an important battleground with the elections coming up and initiatives being undertaken to try to crush Bitcoin. At the same time, you can have more people becoming aware, understanding what Bitcoin is about and learning more about the rabbit hole ahead of this big battle coming. Yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean, you know, I wanted the film to come out like a while ago. but I just couldn't get it finished yet. And so I didn't really time it this way, you know, with like all this ETF talk and like right before the having.

But it's it's kind of perfect. I've got to say having watched it, I think it'll be a good reminder for people, like in a way, just like seeing the sentiment in parts of it to actually. stay humble and stack sats through the bull run, right? Because like you get that vibe of like, oh shit, I do remember how that feels as opposed to how things feel right now. And maybe I should bring myself back to that a little bit so that I keep my head on straight. Yeah. Yeah.

I know I know I think what you're talking about in the film because you've seen it. There's definitely a cautionary tale element to it that does involve staying humble and stacking sats yeah it's going to be really hard to stay humble at one million bitcoin yeah that's true that's true i we we all say humble stack sats but we all have those moments in the bull run where it's like for me very specifically i was having uh another all-time high rye with my buddy and i was like you know half lit and i'm just on a rant and i think i think i recall the exact moment where i should have known that it was close to the top because it was,

was I think I yelled out, it's like a cheat code for life or something like that. And then later after that was like done. So, so yeah. It is like a cheat code for life. It is. It still is.

When you're really feeling it at a moment, your grandma is touching you about it, then maybe it's, maybe it's around the top. Yeah, exactly. Like it's when you're most certain about everything that, you know,

some of your assumptions will be turned on their head. So as long as you kind of keep your wits about you and just like, you know, be good at something, earn an income, spend less than you earn, and have your savings in Bitcoin, you're good. You're good. If you get away from that, then you can get burned. Yeah, words to live by. Yeah. Awesome.

Well, again, everybody watching, Bitcoin ismovie.com. And the Twitter handle is in the show notes. So if you want to follow there and make sure that you're privy to when it drops online, then check it out. But with that, we're going to do a rotation again. I'm going to take it to Samson next. And I'll cue you up with the same question. Why are you bullish? Oh, man, so many reasons.

But I'll go with the ETFs coming. And the reason is because this is going to unlock a torrent of capital to access Bitcoin. So for the average guy, the plebs, you can stack SaaS, you can hold the underlying. But for a lot of institutions, pension funds, like lots of financial funds, they can't touch Bitcoin. So they have to touch the ETF. And this is what is going to bring us billions of dollars of capital. I think just today someone said they overheard a BlackRock guy saying they have $2 billion lined up on day one for their fund. And this is one of the ETFs, one of the one dozen ETFs.

And I think when this torrent of capital hits Bitcoin, we'll see a massive spike because of many reasons, one being recursive demand shock. So this is just too much demand all at once, very little Bitcoin on exchanges available for selling. And the fact that most people are not going to sell Bitcoin because what are you selling it for, fee it? to do what, watch it evaporate? I don't know. But this is just going to keep on repeating itself, recursive demand shock, demand shock over and over again. There's also the fact that there are already buyers that we have today, like Micro Strategy, Tether, and other companies that are just stacking nonstop. I think Tether the other day added 8,888888.88, a very auspicious number of Bitcoin to their reserves. So this is going to keep on going, even if the ETFs didn't get approved, which is not

possible at this point. They will be. So you have a baseline demand regardless of price. You have plebs also that are going to stack no matter the price. What else? We have the halving coming. So the supply of Bitcoin is going to be cut in half in April this year, unless hash rate skyrockets, but it should be April, right? So what else? There's just so many reasons. I can't think of them all right now. Andrew, give me a few more.

I mean, I don't know if I can top that because that's that's pretty bullish. So I would say I was just going to say one other thing that you got to add to your list is we're moving from an environment where the last bull run was in the midst of, you know, we got or this whole bear market has been also crushing raising. interest rates and that's turning a corner as well. So you're going to have like money printer go burr. There's probably going to be a whole bunch of other things pumping alongside it, but like having ETFs, you know, election cycle and and QE is going to be crazy all in tandem. 100%. I think a lot of people, I hear myself. Okay, I think we're good. I think a lot of people have a

have a big and almost eerie feeling about 2024. It feels like something big will happen this year. And that's why I'm bullish, but one interesting note that a lot of people aren't aware of is every halving occurs every election year, which is kind of fascinating. So you have a lot of change in the legacy system and then with Bitcoin as well. So, okay, so I'm bullish, I talk with people every day who are very intelligent and very successful, high networked individuals, family offices, and they are buying Bitcoin.

And these are not people that you're going to read about on Bitcoin magazine or on Forbes or anything like that. I've said before on Twitter, but a lot of people are buying Bitcoin right now, maybe not at micro strategy levels, but right now who are very wealthy. And I put out a tweet a few weeks ago saying that I helped a billionaire buy Bitcoin through Jan 3 Financial. And so it is very fascinating talking to people like this, people that you would never hear about buying Bitcoin and you will never hear about because they have zero incentive to shout to the world and tell everybody what they own, right? But it's very fascinating interacting with people at this level on a daily basis. And again, are they buying Michael Saylor levels of Bitcoin?

No, not yet. But they're interested in it. They're buying a pretty good amount of it. And as they learn more about it, they buy more. So oftentimes you'll see a high net worth individual who has a very sizable net worth. And they learn about Bitcoin, and they buy maybe $50,000 worth. And then a year later, after they have some stand-in-the-game and they learn more about it

and they read a few more books about it, they buy a lot more. So it's just fascinating to see that process of as somebody becomes more educated, they have some Bitcoin that they own, even if it's not a lot, their conviction grows in this thing. So, yeah, not just the PLEBs constantly. easy aim. Yeah. Yeah.

I think you broke Ben's format. No, that's okay. I like it because the ties in together. So I want to touch on something Samson said before. You said one of the funds said that they've got $2 billion to deploy. Is that correct? Yeah, this is overheard by a Vannick analyst. And he talked about it on a spaces this morning, I think.

But Vanek is also one of the funds too. So I don't think these funds are filing without existing demand. So a lot of people are like, yeah, well, how do you know what people are going to buy? Like BlackRock doesn't spend all this effort and energy in filing and dealing with SEC for no reason. There is already customer demand that is pushing them to file. They're not going to open a building and say, okay, well, we're trying to try to sell a couple of units now. They're going to, they're going to build the building because people are giving them money to build that building and it's already there. And I think it's the same for all the other ETSs as well.

They're not also doing this in the hopes that some of their clients might want some Bitcoin. Yeah. It's how much is micro strategy hold now? What is it like? 150, 160,000 coins? And what is that in Fiat terms? Is that above the couple billion range? Yeah, it's billion.

Yeah. So it's basically like another micro strategy coming in in a day. Probably like 10 micro strategies coming in in one day. This is why I'm talking about the Omega candle, which is, so let's go back to this terminology here. We've been talking about a God candle, which is 10. green on the daily. We haven't seen that yet, but the omega candle is something I coined. It's a 100K candle on the daily green. And I think it's possible. We could see an omega candle come and

maybe several omega candles. So the reason why I like the term omega is you can talk about it, like orders of like the Richter scale, right? So it's like a five on the Richter scale. This would be like a three omega day. We had a $300,000 green candle on the daily. So I think it's possible simply due to the massive demand shock that we're going to see. There's probably a million plus, a million in change coins available for sale on exchanges. As Andrew is saying, these family offices and billionaires are already buying. That's what's pushed us up to 44K right now over the past few months. And that has been growing steadily throughout the last couple of months.

But yeah, you're going to see this torrent of capital hit a very small supply. So, yeah, I can see an Omega candle happening. What about you guys? I'm so used to, again, like, it's a new paradigm. And so, like, the, I always like the idea of under promise and over-deliver. But so, like, in my mind is, like, conditioned to be like, oh, expect diminishing return. kind of thing. But at the same time,

I realize, like, the vast majority of the entire globe does not have any meaningful exposure to Bitcoin. And we're just

beginning to see the trickling of that leading into this. And so part of me also is, like, things could get pretty crazy pretty quickly. And so I don't know

how to gauge it because I don't want to say, yes, it's going to happen. I tend to think that, you know, whatever the general sentiment is, the opposite. Like Bitcoin likes to jerk people around, right?

Like it's like, whatever you expect to happen, just expect, at least for a period of time, the opposite to happen. And so I'm at a point where I'm so conflicted by that because you get into the, well, now I expect this, but then obviously the opposite and you go back and forth. Yeah, I don't know where I sit right now because I want, in a way I wanted to happen, but I also want to stack more sets. And it's like, I'm so conflicted. I don't know. What about you guys? Yeah, I mean, I like the Omega candle idea.

Samson, I like where your head's at on that. I mean, I just can't even like fathom like what what I would do. Like I think my head would explode if that happened. So I mean, I don't know. I think I kind of agree with what Ben said about, under promise what was it under promise and over deliver yeah yeah yeah because i mean i think you know people's sentiment and and how bitcoin reacts is kind of the other way around you know where there's this expectation it's going to over promise and under deliver so uh i don't know

i don't know what i'll do i feel like we got kind of fucked in the last bull run like everything was working yeah spf like there's like billions of dollars where the demand that just went unmet, but thought that they was met. And then on top of that, like, the China ban, like, pulled things back for a while, too. Like, there's a number of things that really screwed with stuff. I think, in my opinion, SBF was a bigger deal than the China ban, but maybe not because miners did have to expend capital to relocate rigs and stuff. So I don't know.

How screwed do you think we got in that last run? And barring what happened, where do you think we would have gone? I just want to chime in you really quick. So the thing is Bitcoin doesn't make any promises, so it can't under-deliver. So it's going to over-deliver. That's true. I guess what I met was like people's expectations, you know, people making price

predictions on Twitter and then other people kind of believing that, you know, I don't know what it's going to do. But yes, you are right on that. So does anybody want to, like, do people echo that? Like, do you guys think that those couple of factors really played into what I would consider to be a disappointing bull run in 2021, that things were stunted it because, like, demand just met, was not met whatsoever? Well, I'll chime in then.

So I think the biggest. thing was FTX selling Bitcoin that they didn't have. And it's possible other exchanges did the same. We just don't know. That's why you shouldn't leave your funds on exchanges. But I think that probably combined with the enormous amount of fraud perpetrated by FTCS was what stole that bull run from us. I think we would have gone to 100K without that happening.

And it's kind of funny. I bet you if that whole FTC's debacle didn't get exposed. FDX probably would have been a custodian for one of the ETS right now. That's how weird things would have been, I think. And that's how that could have blown up later. So better we got it out of the way. Just like I said before, it was better. We got the block size wars out of the way when Bitcoin is like a couple hundred dollars to a thousand dollars.

Yeah. Just get it all out of the way. And then now we can just sail smoothly into the sunset with the mega candles. Oh my God. Can you imagine the ETF with an FDX custodian? And like I. Well, he was so cozy with the regulators.

I could totally see that happening. He was the golden boy. And people forget this. He was so loved by everyone and all the politicians that it's highly likely he could have done it. Yeah. Had it not just imploded on itself because of pure hubris, all of the bought-off politicians, of which there's not going to be a trial for that part of it anymore. Because, well, we can't possibly implicate, you know, that.

that everything is corrupt. Yeah, you know, like how much of a pass? Like they were, they were basically giving them a handy under the table every time you testified. They may as well have been.

Yeah. I don't know. Andrew, what do you think? Are you, are you team Omega this route? How should I not be Team Omega? I mean,

I'm just not Team Omega right now because I want more stats, obviously. But so this will be my third bull market and 2020, 2021, that's, you know, very disappointing bull market, obviously. But this is why we DCA, right? Because none of us have any idea at all. And everybody I know who's tried to trade Bitcoin has gotten absolutely wrecked. I don't know anybody who successfully traded Bitcoin for a long time compared to people who just huddle it for a long time. So anybody who says that they don't care about prices lying, but on the short

term, we shouldn't care about price. On the long term, it really matters. That's very important because that's the first step of Bitcoin being monetized is becoming a store of value. And then once everybody assigns value to this thing, then you have a reason to use it as a medium of exchange. This is what Bitcoin cash people or betash people, rather, get wrong is they want to step to step number two without going to step number one. So it's going to be interesting. I mean, the role of power will definitely change a lot if we do have the Omega candles. And we're going to see a lot of change in the 21st century with the Internet of money being adopted. Yeah.

I've got an echo. Oh, there we go. I think we're good. Yeah, I really do wonder, like in an instance like that where we saw such an insane change in price so quickly, I think a lot of people would be blindsided. I think a lot of people aren't prepared for anything like that to happen. I would say I'm borderline not prepared for that to happen. And mostly from a perspective of like, number one, if you're a public bitcoiner, like you all the sudden, like your personal security becomes very, very important.

Especially you've been around for a while. Like I kind of feel like I'm not prepared for that. Like not that anybody would get sats because I feel like that part is secure. but like the threat of somebody some idiot with a ranch coming to my house and hoping to get something that's very real um i think there's that aspect i think there's the fee aspect that we talked about where you know a bunch of people have maybe like stacked sats in a way where they've got tiny utxos sitting in their wallet and you know they all the sudden with an insane increase in price, there's going to be increased demand on the ability to send money on the base chain,

and the high value transactions will crowd out, well, I mean, they'll crowd out the ordnals, so that'll be positive, but it'll also crowd out anybody who wants to do small value transactions, which is kind of the way it was always going to lean eventually. But the economic reality of that, I don't think a lot of people are prepared for either. They're not getting themselves situated so that they can still be nimble. I think a lot can change very quickly. And I will say my first bull market, which was 2017, that was insane because we went from $1,000 to $20,000 in a single calendar year.

And I'll say now that I was like I had never really had disposable income. And I was mentally not okay at the end of that year. I like I didn't really know how to handle that that change in life position that that change in an economic position and did you did you buy a lambo I did not I did not I did not which was which was great I'm very glad about that I actually didn't I didn't spend too much money not that I had much disposable income to have stacked sats with an advance of that but it was still a meaningful change in my quality of life in terms of like just not worrying about like bills day to day for the first time ever and like things like that and bitcoin instills like a saving mentality in you which has like you know permeated the rest of my life now so I'm much better you know like again be good at something earn earn earn money spend less than you earn saving in Bitcoin. Like those kind of key tenants have been instilled in me. But like back then,

it was just like, holy crap. And so it was overwhelming with that degree of change in Bitcoin price in such a short period of time. And then because of that, I also wasn't prepared for the bear market because to a degree, yes, I changed some of my habits and I was spending more money. and then the bear market hits and you have to realize like, hey, like, I was feeling good about maybe being a little more, you know, frivolous with my money for a while. And now, like, it's coming back the other way. And you have to go step back and go, oh, crap, like that standard of living, even though it went up that much that quickly, I need to reassess and actually be realistic and like live as if it was a perpetual bear market. But,

enjoy the additional savings as if it were, you know, when the bull market comes, I think. If that 20x and then, sorry, that 20, 20, 20, 10, didn't really have any reason behind it, right? Yeah. So that's why I think the ETFs can give us that 20x this time. And we're at 44 now. What's 20X of 50K? Oh, Jesus, dude. That's like 800.

It's a lot. 880. Well, if we get to 50, then it's 20x to a million, right? So it's not that far away when you think about what Bitcoin has done in the past. And we did that 20x over about nine months. But again, nothing was really happening then. It was just people stacking and speculating. But now you have a few billion dollars.

And I remember a few more reasons for being bullish now. So there is nation state adoption, which I should remember, but I'm a bit off on cold medication right now. So more countries adopting Bitcoin, implementing Bitcoin laws, Bitcoin strategies, mining Bitcoin. It's already happening, maybe at a bigger scale. And that's what we're doing at Jan 3. I lost the other one. FASB, the new accounting that would allow corporations to better hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets without marking down and taking losses. So that is going to be a very big game changer.

Yeah. So there's a couple more reasons there to be bullish. The best part about the nation states is the jurisdictional arbitrage, too, because the brain drain will be real when you have some states treating it in a very draconian way. And you have others that just open it up and say, hey, come here and effectively advertise to potential constituents instead of top down treating constituents as their subjects. And that must bend to their will. you're going to see a lot more of that sovereign individual thesis play out where people like shop their jurisdiction and bitcoiners will be uniquely positioned to do so in ways that many others won't be. Just as I was coming to get ready for your show, I was just getting ready and thinking about what I'm going to talk about and the Omega candle and all this stuff. And I did feel a little bit of nervousness.

like, hmm, am I really ready? Just a little bit. I'm okay, but a little bit of nervousness about seeing the omega candles come. I don't know how it would handle. I mean, I'd have like all productive work would come to an absolute end for like an extended period of time. Like it would be exciting, but it would also be like no productivity anywhere in Bitcoin would be happening.

Like everybody would just be like. like have a chart up the whole time and and like yeah don't don't expect any sort of customer support don't expect anything because everybody's just going to be drooling over a chart because we are all human Andrew I cut you off what were you going to say no you're good just really fueling my soul with a bullishness there so thank you so two things Ben you talked about a really interesting point that I think about a lot, which is the security of Bitcorners, because in many ways, your digital security is oftentimes dependent on your physical security, and it shouldn't be completely dependent on that, but it is in many ways. And so that's, that's,

I don't think we, we really plan for this enough as Bitcoinsers. You think about a bank, when banks, back when banks actually had money in the vault and not just digits on a screen, right? People would rob the bank. And so now everybody is their own bank, right? So you'll see these stories of, okay, crypto millionaire, whatever, you see somebody's body on the beach and there are some Bitcoin millionaire or something like that. You'll see stories like that here and there. And so that is a very important consideration we need to have. And so it makes me think of two things.

American bitcoins are in a good situation because the best security against a $5 wrench attack is the Second Amendment. So I'll say that. That's point number one. Okay. And point number two is Bitcoin consultants will be crucially important, in my opinion. So I used to work right when I got out of the Marine Corps, I used to lease commercial data center space.

And I would work with a lot of IT consultants. I would partner up with them and, you know, there were just people that I would I would work with in that industry. And a lot of these guys were just smart, nerdy guys that learned about the Internet in the 90s before everybody else did. They learned about a new technology that was just starting to get mass adoption before everybody started adopting it. And they would just charge people for teaching them how to use it, implementing it in their business and in their home. And I see a very similar correlation with IT consultants from the 90s and Bitcoin consultants today. A lot of people, they want to work at a Bitcoin company, which makes a lot of sense because you can do something you believe in. You can work with like-minded people.

There are so many advantages to that. And you wake up in the morning you actually want to work. But I think this is a very underrated thing that people don't consider is you can just your own business as Bitcoin consultants. And if you don't think that the average person will need help adopting this, self-custody for this, you know, you're out of your mind. There are a lot of people that are going to need help. So I think that's something to consider.

I love that. Andrew, you literally marketing for me because I literally, there we go, right there there. You can put me 101 for a session, the QR code on this screen. Say that again. I said you better send me some sats for this. Yeah. Now, I worked with a lot of Bitcoin consultants because that, you know,

at JAN3 Financial, I can orange pill every single customer we have because orange pilling takes years and I just can't do it. And so I have a lot of Bitcoin consultants that I partner with who just send us customers when they want to buy large amounts of Bitcoin. And so I've seen this from a firsthand experience. Yeah. Absolutely a thing.

I think education is going to be kind of a pretty lucrative area in the coming years. I mean, again, I'm lucky enough that I get to make my living doing exactly that effectively. Like, yes, paired with, like, creating free content for people to learn. but some people just want to be able to one-on-one walk through things with an individual and not get to one stumbling block and then be frozen, but just say, oh, what is this? And then have it immediately answered and be able to move on. I think that's kind of the draw for a lot of people to do that is to be able to actually sit.

And so I didn't mean to make this like a – I was a have joking there. I do do it, but it didn't mean to advertise. Now I see people in the chat saying like, hey, can you elaborate on your. Yeah, tell us more. But nonetheless, yeah, so like, I, again, anybody that's looking at that,

just watch to the end of the show. I'll put up a QR code or something to scan. But it's that Ben is really good. He's literally played with every single wallet, software wallet, hardware wallet, hardware wallet. Every device, you name it. he has a very good understanding of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. He didn't pay me to say that.

Yeah, I can also attest to that. I was able to pick Ben's brain about how to integrate some payments into the website for the streams. And Ben, you suggested ZapRite, which I should have thought about because I filmed with them. I filmed with John and Parker. before park of work there but um yeah those those are great guys and uh i mean with with the education you know another thing that i was kind of considering with the film is uh like each person in the film if somebody that doesn't know who they are doesn't know much about bitcoin is trying to learn

about bitcoin treating them kind of as their own source material you know a lot of those people in the film have written books uh katy the russian who i got this hat from Plan B passport. She does jurisdictional arbitrage. She did not pay me to say that, but I did get this cool hat. You know, like Safedine is in there, the Bitcoin Standard, that that was a huge book for me. And I'm sure all of you guys, but, you know, I want people to be able to watch the film. And anybody who resonates with them, they can go follow them on Twitter.

They can look up their book. Yeah. Yeah. It's, there's so many good people. I'm glad you brought up ZapRite. and Parker Lewis because again, a perfect, perfect example of like people that built during the, you know, continue to build during bear markets and everything, Zappright is just such an incredible tool being able to plug in your own wallets to it and just have a page where people can get

directed to to make payments and have it come directly to your own self-custody. And they literally, they have support for on chain your own, like I linked up my sparrow wallet, which goes directly into a cold card. They have lightning and you can link in either your own lightning node, which takes like a few seconds or if you're using something like strike or, you know, wallet of Satoshi or Albi or whatever. It's anything that has a lightning address, you can literally just like plug that in and it'll just go automatically to that wallet. So upright also supports liquid and they are a liquid federation member. I was going to say they do have liquid. Now the one thing, okay, good, because I have a request,

concepts and we need i need to be able to export xpubs for my liquid wallet because right now they only have static address and to i i didn't realize this but not no i don't i don't think there's an existing liquid wallet where you can just simply export the xbub as soon as you build that in zapright will add that to their options for accepting right now i can only do it on individual invoices so if you build that i will be using it the next day okay john if you you're listening, top priority now. I like it. Awesome. Okay, well, gentlemen, what I want to do,

I'm going to start rounding out, but I want to do one final thing, and I do this every show, is I like to do a quick round of any final thoughts that you want to toss out there, and also a recommendation for people. And when I say recommendation, this can come in any form. It could be like, you know, just a simple piece of life advice that you wish you had had as you were kind of coming into Bitcoin, it could be check out this book or podcast or article. It could be try this app or try this

hardware device or whatever. It can really be anything, just something that you think people watching will get value from. So in general, final thoughts here, I think my takeaway from this episode is we could be in for a crazy very near future. Things, things, things can move a lot faster than people expect and this can be in two realms number one it can be price but number two it can also be fees and the need to be nimble on chain and and minimize your footprint so that you don't get screwed just for for lack of good i don't know keeping your house in order in terms of utxos and so if you're unfamiliar please and i'll do a video on utx management consolidation probably next week.

But start to learn how to consolidate UTXOs and what those even are. Start to learn if you've never used lightning for the love of God, start to learn a little bit about lightning and how that works and how to use it. Check your wallets to see the state of things and like, do you have a bunch of tiny pieces of Bitcoin? Because that can screw you and take advantage of what I would say are relatively low fees right now before ordinal bros or massive amounts of incoming new, new people start utilizing Bitcoin and the fees go through the roof.

And then honestly, I would say give liquid a look. It may not be for everybody, but it's sure as hell is helpful for me. Understand tradeoffs, gauge your risk and utilize it as the tool for what it is if you see fit, but it's worth at least being familiar with it. So you have another tool in your tool belt, because I know it's useful as hell for me. So that's kind of my main takeaway. And I guess my recommendation is to dive into those things, UTXO management, lightning and liquid, and understand how you can use them to your advantage. So with that, I'll rotate over to Samson and just any final thoughts that you may have and recommendation if you have one to toss out. Sure. I would say

final thought is you're not bullish enough but we'll see um recommendations i think liquid all the stuff you talked about is good utxo management is especially important i think people often miss that they just think i'm i'll buy and i'll dca and they don't consider that aspect of it but for my my official recommendation i would say check out keat from hole punch it's a peer-to-peer chat app video app it's really important because it is really peer to peer Most things we're using today, whether it's Zoom, telegram, signal, etc., they all have servers. And I think an important lesson that we should take is the centralized systems have failure points, and they can be leveraged to attack you.

So it's really good that we have peer-to-peer money, peer-to-peer cash is in Bitcoin now. But if you have no way to talk to people, then you can't really transact. So you do need some fallback system. And Keith works really well. And I think it's an important piece of Bitcoin adjacent infrastructure that people definitely need to study up and try out. Yeah. That's awesome. I've played around with it a little bit.

And I've done a few calls on it. Very good quality. Works great, in my opinion. Yeah, definitely worth checking into. And if you care about, again, self-sovereignty, privacy, you know, private communications, all that kind of stuff. you know definitely worth diving into um awesome with that all rotate down to andrew and same thing final thoughts recommendations go ahead uh yeah so i'll just say what i said before uh consider becoming a bitcoin consultant and just learning a bunch about all of all of these things uh how to use

bitcoin how to properly store it because uh it it seems that uh we are soon going to be heading and into the time where that cousin you haven't talked to in a year and a half is going to send you a text and asked if it's a good time to buy Bitcoin or that friend from high school just, you know, reaches out. And so obviously made sure you are not in danger or in jeopardy because you are the Bitcoin guy, but there's a lot of advantage in being, for lack of a better term, the Bitcoin guy in your network. You can help a lot of people out. You can save a lot of people from getting wrecked by helping them avoid, quote, diversifying into other cryptocurrencies. And so, yeah, I think adding value to people that way is only going to turn into more

of a legitimate business and consulting. So you may as well start now. Someone just commented, learn MMA. As a good guy, you should appreciate that, right? Yeah, that's solid. I actually really do appreciate that, yeah. But, I mean, compared to other forms of technology for defense, I, like, I'm not going to arm bar somebody who has other superior forms of technology for self-defense. So I'll say exercise in the Second Amendment.

That should be your priority. There's a great saying that there's an artist named Madex. And he always says, he says, keys protect Bitcoin, guns protect keys. That's good thing. I absolutely love that. Yeah, that's very good. I like it. Anyways, with that, we'll rotate to Rob finally.

Dude, any final thoughts, recommendations? Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. I mean, first off, all second at that on 2A, what Andrew said there. And I mean, I think my main takeaway right now is that we're kind of coming to the end of the gradually phase, and the suddenly phase is going to start. happening in a big way. And so I mean, my recommendations, I would say read the Bitcoin standard if you haven't already. Read Jeff Booth's book, Price of Tomorrow. Parker Lewis has a new one

coming out. Gradually than some, yeah, graduated on Sunday. And I mean, my biggest recommendation is to watch this movie that I made and to follow me on Twitter. January 26th in Austin is the premiere. and then Boston, NYC, and Nashville, hopefully soon after that, and it'll be online soon and on Bitcoinersmovie.com. Awesome.

I really enjoyed it. I highly recommend people check on the website, give you a follow and watch for when it drops, for sure. Awesome. Well, gentlemen,

with that, we are going to round out the show. Again, thank you all so much for being here. It was a blast. It's been a while since I got as price bullish as Samson describing what an Omega candle is.

So that's much appreciated. But with that, I'm going to round it out. And I'll just end by saying, you guys are all welcome back anytime. When we hit the Omega candle, we'll do another one. Yeah, so the first Omega, Samson, you have, you know, I'll bump anybody that's in line so that you can glow about your Omega. Sounds good. Thanks, man. Thanks, guys.

I'll see you soon. Thanks, man. Bye. See you. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. Of course, smash that like button. If you have not already, everybody in the chat, thank you for joining me.

And I see Yellow. He's been rooting around in my fridge, Ben. Your fridge is out of Red Bulls. Dude, come on, man. What are you doing? I was wondering why it was empty. Anyways, nonetheless, thank you guys so much for being here. There were questions earlier about, and thanks, Andrew, for being my,

maybe I'll hire him as my marketing manager, but thanks for leading me into a segue. Yes, I do do 101's, so you're welcome to hit me up for that. So easiest way to do it is through my website right here, BTCSessions.ca, but I'll throw up a QR code on the screen as well. if you scan that QR code, it'll take you directly to the website where you can book me through the booking option right there. But anyways, I did just redo my website, by the way. So I just wanted to let you guys know that there's a whole learning section.

I think it's very important that people have free resources as well. I have limited amount of time that I can actually do one-on-ones. But I did put together this learn section. And so if you click on it, it'll take you to, hey, here's some books to get reading so that you have the why of Bitcoin. But then if you continue to scroll down, there's going to be where can you get Bitcoin? So in Canada, I view that full Bitcoin is kind of the option,

the best one suited for people. But then internationally and in the U.S., there's a bunch of options I've listed here, along with tutorial videos. I've got recommendations for first wallets to try out that are self-custody. I've got recommendations for hardware that might be of interest. Again, all of these with full tutorials. multi-sig options, how to run a node, and some additional skills in and around mitigating fees and

adding privacy. So I put this kind of all together in a single track and you can kind of just step by step, start sorting through these and just kind of picking out what you want to touch on and learn about and just kind of go from top to bottom of the screen. If you can get through all those videos, then holy hell, you'll be sitting in a pretty good spot and you'll have a fair amount of knowledge. So that stuff is all free that you can check out. But Again, if you go back to the main screen of the website, there's a ton of stuff. You can book me. You can check out where I'm going to be visiting in terms of events.

And then you can also see recommendations for different tools and wallets and things that I currently use. And then, of course, if you do want to get updated, scroll to the bottom, you can subscribe. And then I'm going to start sending out weekly newsletters that cover what tutorial I dropped that week, what we covered in the news, and who the guests on why are we bullish were with all of the links to the episodes. so that you can just get it all in one shot there. So feel free to do that as well. Anyways, guys, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you all.

Again, please do smash that like button. Give this a share on whatever socials you may be on. And of course, subscribe. I'm on a quest to 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year. We're sitting in around the 85 to 86 range. So we're getting closer. And based on the amount of subscribers each month that I'm seeing, I'm hoping that we hit it by the end of 2024.

So help me get there, and I much appreciate it. Anyways, with that, enough of my rambling. I've kept you guys here long enough. I'll just finish off by saying, have a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. I will see you guys next time for your daily session.