BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Seed Signer, BJ Dichter, Surfer Jim ep383

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Dive into the world of Bitcoin with our dynamic panel discussion featuring notable figures BJ Dichter, a key player in the Canadian trucker protest and Bitcoin fundraising, Surfer Jim from The BTC Advisor, and the innovators behind Seed Signer's self-sovereign DIY Bitcoin signing devices. Explore the synergy of activism, financial independence, and technological innovation in the Bitcoin space, gaining unique insights into how Bitcoin is shaping and empowering communities and individuals globally. Join us for this enlightening session that connects the dots between real-world events and Bitcoin's transformative impact. #BitcoinDiscussion #BitcoinTechnology #FinancialFreedom FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/BJdichter https://twitter.com/surferjimw https://twitter.com/SeedSigner 💪 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://www.seedor.io/btcsessions 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

Yo, what is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. Very happy to have you all here. Thank you for joining us. I've got a beverage going. If you care to join me, then please do. We'll be pulling up the live chat in a moment. We've got an awesome panel today. We do have some technical difficulties. We'll see if we can sort them and get everybody in here. But if not, then we will default and have one of our guests join us next week. But we'll play it by here and see what happens. Nonetheless, this is live, as I stated. And, of course, anything can happen.

So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. 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 super important.

That little like button just below the screen. Give that a smash. and please those algorithmic guts. Give this a share on whatever socials that you may be on. And of course, subscribe. I'm on the warpath to hopefully 100K before the end of 2024. That's the goal. It's tough out here as an educator.

I don't spend every day telling people how rich they're going to be. So subs are hard to come by. So help me on my path. But nonetheless, thank you guys so much for being here. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily sales. session. Before we dive in, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now.

This is TimeChaneCallender.com. And simultaneously, I am now pulling up the side chat over to the right. For better or worse, all of your comments will now be visible for all to see. But back to TimeChanecaller.com. And we're sitting at $38,756 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will set you or will grab you, $2,580. Sats. In terms of fees, next block, 51 sats per byte, anytime 22 sats, Mempool is purging anything sub 11 sats per V-byte. And in terms of Bitcoin mined,

19.5, 6 million of them, that's 93.14% of the entire supply. Shout out to sponsors the show. Hodel.Hoddle.com if you're stacking stats and you have some priorities in mind, including peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custasy, 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 a currency, a payment method, and an amount, and you can start viewing offers immediately. They also have peer-to-peer lending with no re-hyp authentication. Links are down below, and you can check out my tutorials as well. Of course, you want to be securing your Bitcoin with some awesome, reliable stuff.

Of course, I love my cold card. I love my tap signers and all the goodies that CoinCipe brings. And, of course, my block clock on the shelf behind me is a staple. I pre-ordered the hell out of the cold card queue. So if you want to check them out, links are in the show notes. CoinKite.com you can use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store. Backups are also important. Seedore has an awesome and robust steel option called, of course, seed or they've got a disc and capsule design.

This will protect your seed from the elements, fire, water, corrosion, all that stuff. And the cool thing about this one is if you do need to swap out the seed, you don't need to swap out the entire. thing. You can swap out the discs and it's still robust enough to, you know, withstand a hydraulic press or, you know, the fires of hell. So it's all there for you. So you can check it out. They have starter sets for one or two seeds and there's links below, but depending on the best shipping for you. Nunchuk has you covered with your assisted multi-sig needs. I've covered their Honeybadger program, which is basically setting up a multi-sig on your mobile device. You can use things like tap sign or cold cards, seed sign, or all these different options.

And once you get set up, you've got baked in inheritance planning. So your stats get to your next of kin, if anything should happen to you. And the cool part is also no KYC. You don't need to give up your private information to have this set up and working for you. And finally, shout it to start nine, your sovereign computing solution. These guys give you plug and play options to set up your whole Bitcoin stack and your personal data as well. So you can run Bitcoin Core, Lightning, Mempool, files, passwords, photos,

Noster Relays and clients and some AI stuff too. Lots of options out there, but they've got everything from entry level all the way up to what I'm running, which is the Start 9 server here. So be sure to check them out. Links are down below. And with that, I'm going to quit my rambling. And I'm going to bring in hopefully, oh, I think I see all of them there. Oh, my goodness.

I'm going to welcome to the stage. Seed Siner. I'm going to welcome to the stage, BJ Dictor, and I'm going to welcome to the stage. Surfer, Jim, who we weren't sure. We were going to have you, but he's in the building. Jim, how you doing, man? Can you hear me? That's the question. Yes, I got me.

I was hoping to hear that beautiful voice here. All right. So just to be clear here, I have to use a laptop, which I believe one of my cooling fans is off, not working, and this thing could just die. But I have a little desk fan blowing at the computer. This is like my backup. While you were doing the intro, this is me setting up the backup. All right, so go.

This is awesome. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. And everybody in the chat, thank you for being in. the chat as well. I have a challenge for all of you in the chat, and that's to hit that little like button below the screen so that we please YouTube's algorithms and get even more eyeballs in the room and also give this a share out so that we can have everybody join in the conversation. But before we get going here, let's do a quick round of who are you and what do you do so we can acquaint you guys with the audience and them with you. So, Seed, I'll toss it to you. Can you

give yourself a little intro, please? Yeah, real simply, I am the pseudonymous and eponymous, a creator leader of a software project called Seed Siner. It lets people build basically a hardware wallet from off the shelf electronic parts that are, you know, easily acquireable over the internet. And I'm a bit coiner. That's, that's the important stuff. I love it. Well, I'm super glad for you to be here. And side note, if we don't get into it later, I want to say that I grabbed the aluminum encasing for a seat signer. And this is one of the most beautiful things I own. I'm super stoked about it.

It's so cool. So, I mean, this is, I've got my other cool Nintendo-looking one, too. But this is pretty slick, I've got to say. And it's got a lower profile and everything. So if you haven't grabbed yourself one of these aluminum encasings, then it came out of nowhere and it kind of took seats under the realm of feeling almost like an Apple product. It's just a transformative experience. It's, they're nice.

Yeah, it's cool because you can kind of do it as you see fit, right? You can go just with like run in the mill, like just like plastic and like no, no cover on it kind of thing. or you can go kind of like, you know, the 3D printed, fun looking, or you can go something that feel, like you said, that feels like an Apple product. So, you know, you got that versatility there, which is awesome. Awesome. Well, I'm going to toss it to BJ now. BJ, can you please give yourself an intro as well? And side note, really glad to see you, Matt.

It's been a little while, but it's always good to reunite with you, whether it be in person or on the screen. So let people know who you are. Yeah, totally brother. It's good to see you. My name is Benjamin Dictor or BJ Dictor. I am, I don't know, just a regular dude. And I also happen to be a trucker and I wrote this book about the Canadian trucker convoy or Freedom Convoy that I was the spokesperson and media strategist for and did a bunch of other things. Some of you may have heard about it. And I often like to start with reading the endorsement on the back. of this book because it is the Christmas time. And if you want to reach out to people across the political spectrum and give them all the good and positive stories of what we went through and how Canada unified, this was it. And the endorsement reads, the Canadian trucker protest in Ottawa attracted tremendous national and international attention and was simultaneously demonized by then Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau and his cronies in the

legacy media, the minions at the CBC First and Foreign. foremost among them. What really happened, Benjamin J. Dictor integrally involved from the beginning, lets his readers in on the story, one that all Canadians should know, Jordan B. Peterson, which is somebody who I was speaking to regularly during the convoy. So that's me in a nutshell. And I was the only person there who was a bick-coiner, as Ben knows. And just a little side thing. I've said this to you privately, Ben. It really is an honor for me anytime I come on your show.

We had done this once before because you were a big, a big influence on me adopting Bitcoin and getting into it. Like I struggled in the beginning. And it was your videos that really helped get me into the space, get comfortable and led me to orange peeling, hopefully many people around the world. So thank you for everything that you do, man. Dude, well, thank you. And again, it was awesome, you know, being able to work together from afar. And also, I like when you initially, when we started interacting, I almost didn't believe you.

And then you were like, no, no, not. I was watching those videos where you were like walking on the beach. And I was like, oh, when I first started the channel, I was traveling. And so like this is literally like circa 2016. You were watching tutorials almost eight years ago. So, yeah, man. So, again, it's really cool how life brings people together in interesting ways. So glad to have you back.

Totally. Thanks, brother. Awesome. And Jim, I'm tossing it to you now. I saw you recently in L.A. You came out to a workshop and also were integral in helping explain things to other workshop attendees, which was amazing. And since then, I believe you've now, this is a kind of a full-time thing for you, helping explain Bitcoin to people. So can give yourself a little intro?

Well, thanks. It's very generous of you to say. So I've been building custom homes for 35 years on Fire Island, which is on the south shore of Long Island in New York. I'm not, everybody knows that about me already. so I'm not worried about repeating stuff like that. But to your comment, I recently was invited to join the team with the Bitcoin advisor out of Australia to help people secure their Bitcoin in collaborative custody, multisig. And if for those people who are plugged into the Bitcoin ecosystem, they understand what that means. Simply, there's going to be a lot of people that don't either don't know what it is or certainly don't know how to do it and are afraid to do it.

And then there's the issue of who's going to hold the keys in the collaborative custody set up. And so that's why the Bitcoin Advisor was established. And we're basically out there trying to help people understand. And if they need help, then they need somebody to hold a key. That's what they're there. We're there for. So I'm excited for that because I do enjoy explaining Bitcoin to people. And this gives me a straight up opportunity to help educate people that are looking for solutions similar to what you do, Ben.

And, you know, your seminar, you know, BJ said it best. You got, what, hundreds of videos. You've taught, got to be tens of thousands of people at this point, including me. And I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get better at using my cold card. So I may have known some things in that workshop that some other people may not have known since I have used it in the past, but very infrequently. And I just wanted to get caught up. And I said, you know what? This is the easiest way.

Plus, I bought a brand new one. You know, might as well go with the news. stuff and it was great anybody who has a chance to take ben's um ben's uh any of his tutorial courses anything they're all good and then check out his video so yeah i'm just like bj i'm just a regular dude uh been living my life and found bitcoin like almost seven years ago now and it's been an amazing ride and uh i don't know here i am this is my second time on this show and i really appreciate you having me well dude i'm i'm glad you're here and uh glad all of you're here and uh to what you're talking about about the workshops maybe uh maybe uh maybe

Seed Signer Workshop soon. Ooh, do it. That'd be a fun one, yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, Jens, we're going to dive into it. So everybody watching, first off again, thanks for being here. Hit that light, give us a share, but we're going to dive into it. If you're unfamiliar, if you're new here, this is why are we bullish? Very simple premise to the show.

Each one of us has come with a reason why we are bullish currently. This could be anything. It could come in the form of a personal experience. It could be come in the form of a news item. we saw on or are excited about. Maybe it's a new app, a new device, a new, whatever it may be, but everybody here has a reason for being bullish. The flow of the show is as follows. Number one, somebody is going to drop their reason for being bullish. This is their chance to rant and get off their chest. Whatever is exciting them currently. Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on

that reason, comments, questions, whatever rabbit holes we decided 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 simple, reason, riff rotate and I am going to start us off today and actually I was a little undecided on what I was going to do today up until today I started I started playing around with something I hadn't played around with before and and and funny enough like the connections here I had seen this thing a couple of times but just was unfamiliar and I I kind of thought it was something that it wasn't and that thing is is ZapRite. Now, this is kind of, it's like a payments portal in the realm of BTC pay server type thing. But I, the impression that I got that it was basically like a custodial payments window

where you could like use Bitcoin. That's not like at all what it is. I mean, to a degree, I guess it could be, but like you can also do it in a fully kind of like you instantly get custody of everything. And so I got I got playing around with it. And it's pretty good, I've got to say. It's pretty damn good. And so I just, I kind of just want to show really quick what I was looking at. So I set it up really quick. It took me like a few minutes. But basically I was able to to link like an expub from a wallet, which I control and I can view in Sparrow wallet. So like that's my on chain. so I can get on-chain payments just from a page. ZapRite never custody is it.

Then I was like, well, what about lightning? Is it going to be either a custodial lightning or like a hosted lightning node or something? But I quickly found out that no, I could just get even through Tor, because I'm running a start nine, I was able to just get like a couple copy and paste things and plunk them in and tested it out. and I'm getting lightning payments directly to my Start 9 lightning node that I've set up myself in the background. And it took like those two quick copy paste and save and I could see it interacting with my node immediately. On top of that, you do have right now they, you do have the option for, for liquid if you're sending an invoice.

But it would be like a right now it's a pasted address. but they're going to have the option for Liquid Network Xpubs soon, which means it'll generate a new address every time you receive a payment, which I'm actually using more of as kind of like a mid-level. I understand the trade-off, but to minimize my on-chain footprint and then let things build up and then move to on-chain afterwards, then I might do that. And then number four, pretty soon they're going to have a dedicated lightning address

that you can point to your lightning note of choice, which would be my own. And so all of a sudden, I could just have like a tip page that is, you know, BTC sessions at zapright.me, but it goes to my start nine lightning note, which is incredible. That's kind of what I'm looking for because the more I can self-custy, the better. And then on top of that, they also integrate Fiat payments, which I don't like Fiat payments, but also I deal with a lot of brand new people to Bitcoin that are literally hiring me one-on-one so that I can teach them how to exit the Fiat system. And so they want to pay in dollars because they have no other method.

So I can integrate that too. And the kicker is that you can add a premium to Fiat payments. So you can set like the price is this, but if you pay on Fiat, it's 10% more, it's 20% more. So I've now done that so that people are encouraged to pay in Bitcoin as soon as they're able. And so basically, I'll show you really quick. These are all the integrations that they currently have. Number one, you can see any Bitcoin wallet that you have, you just link in. LNBits, L&D, Liquid, Strike, IBEX, Zebidi, Stripe, ACH, CEPA payments, Interacchi Transfer in Canada,

unchanged directly to your multi-sig vault, Albi wallet. And soon, Cash App Swan, Voltage, Blank, Open Node, BTC Pay, QuickBooks, Zero. So, like, all of these, like, Bitcoin and Fiat and just kind of everything. And then you can incentivize people to migrate to Bitcoin. So if you have a regular store where you're like, I still need Fiat payments because all of my customers are normies, you can expose them to the idea of why is this person giving me a discount if I pay in Bitcoin. Or rather, why is this person charging me a premium if I'm paying in dollars? And so it gives those normies an exposure to, oh, well, maybe I should just

learn about Bitcoin and maybe that's a way that I could start paying and everything. And so I did this test page. And basically, the way it works is you can request whatever information you need on behalf of a customer, like if you're shipping stuff. Or in this instance, this would be like a tip page. And you can make it so that the person can set their own amount if you're accepting tips or if you just have like a singular product or, you know, a cart or whatever it is. But anyways, in this instance, I've just done, please just put in an email because that's all they need when somebody books me.

So I know who it was. But I put in an email address. And then it presents me with, okay, Bitcoin or Lightning or Interacteatheed Transfer or Pay By card. If I hit this, the lightning, it literally generates an invoice directly from my start nine node behind me on my shelf. It takes a second because it's going through Tor, but nonetheless, it ends up working. And then once I get that invoice on the screen, any lightning wallet, I can just create a simple payment and then it'll go directly through to my own custody. And the same thing is true. Like if I hit Bitcoin, it'll basically just

generate a new Bitcoin address with the amount set and then like my little inlaid logo and everything. And then if I want to go like card or something, then it's your typical like, oh yeah, put in your card payment information here. So it's kind of all baked into one. And for me, it makes a hell of it a lot of sense in the aspect of I didn't want to give up custody. I didn't want to be sitting in custody. And also there's been a lot of pinch on anybody that is custody, even if it's like lightning for small amounts. I just saw a wallet of Satoshi rug, well, not rug, but like basically exit the US being like, we don't, we don't want to deal with the consequences of what could be coming down the pipe for us.

So the long and the short of it is I like that there's these solutions that are kind of all in one that don't, don't put at risk my funds because they go directly to me. And I'm still remaining pretty self-sovereign through all of this because any Bitcoin payment is directly into my own custody. But I have the option to lightly nudge Normies into paying with Bitcoin as they see fit. And you can customize it however you want. But the cool thing about this is the two people that I know that are involved with this, number one is Parker Lewis. And he's an absolute legend. I love Parker Lewis. But number two, a guy named John, I actually worked with him a little bit at Bull Bitcoin because he was doing some design

work for us. And he's a great guy. And so like when I saw that those two were involved in this as well, you know, is that much more of a, you know, an inclination to go and check it out. So anyways, I'm sure I'll put a video together for it. But yeah, that's that's that's that's coming soon and and really quick hi me in the in the in the chat asked no wallet of Satoshi or blink yet blink is coming soon wallet of Satoshi will see because I think um again if it's custodial I think you'll be able to just put in any lightning address that you want maybe eventually but we'll see but yeah either way I think it's cool so I'm going to open it up to you guys like with seeing this what what's your initial reaction like what are the things you like

maybe the things you don't like like like where are you out with this i can go first you know the first thing that popped into my mind man was you know i remember many many years ago living in my still living in my parents house there was a new restaurant that opened up a japanese restaurant before they were all the trend we went there and it was the first time i've ever seen a restaurant say, hey, if you pay us in cash, you'll get 20% off. Or you could just pay the invoice. And I'm sure every transaction at that restaurant was reported to the government. But the point is, it very quickly became one of the most successful

restaurants, family restaurants in the neighborhood. It was always packed as a result. And that is the big story in that, the fact that you can now run your business and incentivize people to. to pay you in Bitcoin, that is massive. So please do a tutorial on that as quickly as possible. Yeah. And you're right in the incentivized people to pay in Bitcoin,

but also like the implication to the person coming in the door is that that paying in Fiat to the merchant for them, it is somehow lesser than. It is inferior enough that they are willing to say, we will give you 10 or 20% off the price if you simply pay in this better money. And that plays on people, I think, after a while. They go, huh, this guy's ready to take a 10 or 20% pay cut,

which to us, we know it's like the value is in the money that we're receiving. But like to them, they're like, but why? And that starts a whole line of questioning. Which is great. Yeah. It's, I think it's a huge part of just normalizing Bitcoin as a payment mechanism when people walk into a store or they walk into a restaurant. And there's been a lot made, you know, even year or two years ago of, you know, Stripe is going to enable Bitcoin or,

you know, whatever payment processing hardware maker is going to incorporate it into there. But I have yet really to walk into, you know, an average store and see a pay with Bitcoin option on a payment terminal or unless it's a place that I personally sought out to pay with Bitcoin. So What I love about this is just like normalize people seeing Bitcoin in their everyday life when they're in a store and they're buying something or checking out. Seeing Bitcoin as an option, I think goes a long way towards legitimization of Bitcoin for Normies and just normalizing it as a part of their lives. At this point, it's something that they've heard about. It's something maybe that they have heard a relative or anecdotally somebody talk about, but they really haven't had. a meat space interaction where even Bitcoin was an option.

So that's part of what I love about this. But as you two are alluding, I've also seen where I live, stores that I've gone into. And the thing I see the most of is 5% off if you pay with Venmo or with PayPal or something. There's a farmer's market, buyer house that I go to. And I see a lot of the people that run the stalls there, soliciting alternate payment mechanisms. And it's actually a funny story when I was in Amsterdam in October for the conference.

I was in a little Italian place. And of course it's an Italian place run by someone who's not Italian in Amsterdam. So it's this whole awesome collision of cultures. But there's a lunch rush going on. And this restaurant is probably slow for most of the day. But there's eight tables finishing out. And as it came time for these, you know, half dozen tables or whatever it was to pay their bill, legitimately the manager of the restaurant pretended that his payment terminal went down and started asking everyone to pay in cash. And, you know, I've been shy to admit like I used to be a cop.

So I'm naturally suspicious by nature. So I started like asking, oh, have you restarted the router? And it, the more I asked him about it, the more obvious. it became that he was just saying this, trying to get people to take cash out of their wallets instead of paying with cards. Kind of like an ingenious little hustle for a small businessman, but that's sadly like where we've arrived at with the payment networks. But no, and one more thing I love about Zeper.

I think Bitcoin are called Will Cole is also involved with that with Parker Lewis, another unchained guy. And I've had a couple of conversations with him at different events. and you know great a first class big winner so to see him involved with that that company too is definitely a plus for me yeah yeah jim what are your thoughts on this well i heard about this but hadn't dug into it and i i also heard that uh parker was involved and uh i when i heard he's involved in this i also heard at the same time he's not with unchained anymore and i went what you know stuff just keeps happening in in the ecosystem and that was a little surprising to me and i thought well

it's got to be pretty serious for Parker to, you know, jump ship from a company he helped get going to something new. And I can imagine there's some serious upside in terms of adoption over time once enough people see how good it is. And as you just demonstrated, it's pretty slick. Apparently, so again, you know, not knowing much about it, it looks like an interface for businesses, which you did say. I don't see a need for it for people, but, you know, there's a huge market of businesses out there. I don't you know for me I wonder it's kind of funny being a boomer I still take paper checks from a lot of customers because that's how they pay I got a few of them pay me electronically over like Zell and stuff but nobody wants to pay me in Bitcoin it's just so foreign I got a lot of I'm a boomer and all my customers are basically older than me for the most part so I don't know how I can implement that simply because I don't even take electronic like I don't take credit cards you know it's either a bank transfer or a check so But I love it. I just think it's amazing.

The innovation that's taking place, the ability to merge the old and the new systems, which is this is another version of that. Because we do need that. We will be in a transition period for quite some time as people have to figure out where they want to be and be able to swap back and forth to whatever extent, you know, whether you're on one side of that trade or the other, as long as it can be facilitated from the fiat realm to the bitcoin realm you know there's people like these guys building stuff i think it's absolutely fantastic and i appreciate you uh just educating me on it tonight so now i'm way more bullish about what they're doing jim you should uh what you should do

you bump your prices a little bit and then you give a 10% discount if somebody's exactly and and you're going to get a few like i mean you're you're you're building like the the stuff that you do it's not going to be cheap right like so like when when you offer like a five or 10 percent discount for bitcoin you know and you got you know you you bump your price just like marginally just beforehand then people are it's going to seem super attractive for people to pay in bitcoin so it's tricky you know like i'm doing i'm doing a half a million dollar project right now it's really weird you'll see it on twitter when i get it around to posting pictures but we picked up a house 20 feet in the air and we're building a first floor under it she showed me that yeah so it's it's

you know it's hard for me to knock 10% off that price at the big hit at at my end but you know if i can if i could work it out you're right i should because it would you know i've i've sold things for bitcoin i've had people pay me in that which is nice to get you know uh non-k ycc bitcoin you know so um it i want to i want to retire and shut that business off anyway so i don't I don't know I'll ever get to implementing Bitcoin payments in my business before I'm just done with that. But I still love it and I'll definitely promote it and tell other people like, I got a good friend of mine who runs a business. He owns a cleaning supply business. And he's a bitcorner.

You know, I should tell him. Actually, I'm going to now. I talk to him all the time. So this is great. Great news. This is great. The only thing that I think is missing here or not missing, but like that I would love to see next is this exact same thing with all. of these integrations just built into an app that becomes a simple point of sale terminal.

So all the same stuff available on like a simple like Android device that maybe has NFC enabled. And so and actually funny enough, I just got, now I can't remember the name of the device, but they used it at Volta Coney Badger this year. It's a point of sale terminal, but it's run off like an Android device with an NFC thing. It can print receipts and everything. and you can link it to your lightning node or whatever. And I tested it out and I linked it to LN bits on my lightning node. And it works.

And so like I can just like as long as I get a Wi-Fi signal, I can type in any amount. It brings up a lightning invoice and somebody can pay me direct on the spot either via scanning a QR code or if they've got one of those lightning payment cards that's literally linked or like there's that bolt, bolt card ring. where you can tap your ring and it'll make a payment out of a lightning wallet or like, any NFC would work. And then I imagine it has NFC, then it would also work as a regular payment if you're linked into a payments network. So like a card network. So yes, Bitcoin Eyes, that mark in the in the comments that Bitcoin Eyes, I'm pretty sure

that's what it's called or Bitcoin Eyes, I can't recall. But anyways, I'm going to have it at a market that we're doing here in Calgary in a couple weeks here and I'm going to test it out, which should be fun. But if you could take all of the features that are here and dig that into a point of sale terminal and be able to like, especially for a store that has, um, has actual inventory and stuff like this, like, Ali from Tahini's, uh, in, and on, in Eastern Canada, he just opened a new location, a new Tahini's location in, in South Calgary. And so I went over and I, I met him and, And he let me pay in Lightning because he was there.

But he's like, I, he's like, I want to accept Bitcoin at all my locations. But like, I can't. And it's because the product doesn't exist for him. He's like, I have to, number one, I need all of the features of my current point of sale. And then I just need like a Bitcoin plugin that will work. I can't be training. He has 40 locations now, which is awesome. But he has 40 locations.

he's like, I can't train 40 locations of people to have a secondary tablet off to the side that goes to like, God knows what. And like, it's not linked into our inventory. And like maybe they're like sending it to their own wallet or like, like, I need to have this all perfectly integrated. So when that exists, totally, we'll do it. But when it doesn't, I can't, I can't change the entire thing. But this is an instance where I see it's getting there. and it could be possible soon.

So this isn't all the way there to that point you don't think. No, no. Like, first of all, like when I look at this, this is great for me because I'm an online business and I can just send people to a payment portal and everything. That's great. But like if you're a brick and mortar merchant, then you've got to have this accessible on a device that works in tandem with Bitcoin and Fiat payments for the next little while. And then like, yeah, so there's a lot to contend with.

And like, you've got to be able to work that into if it's a brick and mortar business. When you accept a Bitcoin payment in whatever form, it also has to link to we have X number of this product here in the store. And when it sells in Bitcoin, it still takes that off of our inventory. Like all of those things need to be accounted for. So like it works great for like a farmer's market where you're not dealing with that kind of stuff as much. maybe, but like for for like a franchise business, it can be tricky. And there's there's groundwork to do. Somebody asked in the chat as well, they were like, is this a self-hosted payment portal or is it hosted by ZAPRite? So ZappRite hosts the page. That's what they do is they integrate

all of these things. They never custody your Bitcoin for you. So that goes straight to you. But they also have plugins for all of these different like, oh, I have stripes, so I want to be able to accept card payments or in Canada, at least it'll load like the Interac E Transfer option. And so like all of these different things are plugged in here in a nice interface where you can simply set up a store. So yeah, they're hosting the page. I suppose you could, if you wanted to host it yourself, you're looking at BTC Pay server and manually doing all of that and getting it on the internet. And that can sometimes be beyond certain people's abilities. And like the medium might say between ZapRite and like a fully self-hosted BTC pay is like voltage, where voltage hosts

the lightning node and the BTC pay server for you, but they don't have access to it. It's encrypted by your credentials. And so that's kind of like the in-between. But there's a degree of like, you know, if voltage shuts down, you have all your on-chain payments. but your lightning node is sitting on their server. And if it turns off, they can't steal your money, but you don't have access to it either. So, like, there's these in-between solutions. So, yeah, I don't know.

It's not fully there, but holy crap, like this, I was very happy to see this. And I should also say one of the integrations with Zapprite is just plugging into a self-hosted BTC pay server, which is cool. So you've got options. Options are getting better. Options are getting easier.

and me as a person that lives on Bitcoin and earns Bitcoin, I'm so fucking stoked about it. So, yeah, that's my Matt. Do you know if they have any plan to, you know, improve that interface so that all businesses can integrate it? It's super easy. Do you have any idea what their roadmap is, essentially? That's a good question, but I'm jumping on a call with Parker Lewis on Tuesday,

so I'll let you know. All right. Fill us in, yes. Thank you. I'm learning. But, yeah, I'm glad that I started chatting to him. because I never would have known. I would have, there's too many things happening.

It would have completely not crossed my radar. So, but yeah, Jens, I don't want to take too much time on this topic. Either way, I'll just say in general to everybody, I don't know, take a peek at Zapparay. It's kind of cool. I think it's cool. And if you're building stuff like Zapprite, build even more and try and do the things that I described, please.

But with that, we're going to do a rotation. And I'm going to toss it. I'm going to toss it to seed first, and I'm going to cue you up with the same question everybody will get, but why are you bullish? So I'm going to chain the Parker Lewis connection here. So I was listening to, it's not that old of an interview, but it's an interview that Parker Lewis did on with Preston Pish. And I think it came out three weeks ago, ish. But one part of that interview jumped out at me in particular, and it was some details that he provided about Marathon, which is a publicly traded mining company, is doing a collaboration with the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund to basically do a Bitcoin mining installation in the UAE. And I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on this.

Hopefully I don't embarrass myself by messing up any details. But I was reading through some new stories to get a little bit more context and a little bit more detailed today. And it's a multi-billion dollar multi-year project where one of the things I learned was that the UAE has, because they're in the desert, they have this crazy fluctuating load on their power grid that is very well suited to Bitcoin as as a peak to trough kind of leveling mechanism. So it incentivizes them to overbuild the capacity of their power grid and include renewables in the mix for that. And they're financially incentivized to do it so that, you know,

when it's the peak of summer there and the temperature really high and everybody has air conditioning on, they can meet the demand of their power grid and the people that live there. But what excites me even more about this is considering the UAE as one of the top, they're in the top 10, they might be six or seven oil producing countries in the world. So because they are so rich in this natural resource that everyone in the world needs, they operate their net producers. So they receive payments for oil that they're shipping out to the rest of the world.

and because they produce more than they consume, they need some sort of value storage tool to be able to, as they say, transfer the value of their money over time. So them as a sovereign nation, a sovereign wealth fund, I don't know what the connection is. They're like, we keep talking about nation state adopting. And to me, it seems like a sovereign wealth fund that represents the royal family of a given country dipping their toe into Bitcoin mining. That feels a little bit like nation-state adoption. But given their position in the world market, their position to potentially accept Bitcoin as a payment mechanism for oil, and then to use Bitcoin as a savings tool instead of,

you know, U.S. Treasury bonds or, you know, hoarding whatever other currencies that governments around the world produce, using Bitcoin as a way to preserve some of the value that they're receiving for their oil exports. That's why I'm bullish tonight. I'm sure there's more that I can learn about this, but I was very intrigued when I heard Parker talking about it with Preston. That's cool. I mean, the marriage of Bitcoin and energy is a no-brainer, right?

Like, it's, it's, Bitcoin is designed to seek out waste energy. right like it's it's designed to find those instances and like the the very nature of how our grids are structured like you you in order to avoid brownouts and blackouts you need to be running at 100 percent like maximum capacity at all times and we don't have the technology to store excess in batteries like there is so i'm in alberta and um our our premier daniel smith she was at some event that was very like you know focused on like green energy and everything and and so she was talking about the reality because somebody was like well why can't you you know you guys should be doing more wind and solar and she's like that's that's literally impossible and and and the guy was

like well no you could use you could use because she said it was an intermittent and uh and you know we need to we need to power all the time we have cold winters and then the guy was like well you could use batteries. She's like, here's the economics of the battery situation for, for Alberta. She's like, for one hour of storage, like one hour of storage for all of Alberta, in the case of intermittent energy, you would need to build a facility with batteries that would cost around $12 billion for two hours, 24, for three hours, 36. And then she was like, there are periods in the winter where we don't see consistent sunlight for two weeks. So she's like, I would love to hear where you think the trillions of dollars are going to come

forth to build these battery facilities that technically we don't even have the technology to create right now, but that would be the general cost of it. And so, like, the reality is that you need to have alternatives. and like wind and solar don't quite get us there. You know, hydro is, we don't really have hydro here, but like in place that you do, that's more reliable. Nuclear is great. You know, oil and gas is dense energy.

I know some people don't like that, but like it's dense and you can store it forever kind of thing. But nonetheless, when you're running a grid at 100% all the time, most of the time you have waste and we don't have the facilities to store that in batteries to use later so all of that mostly just gets wasted and so bitcoin miners can sit there and soak up that extra energy as a buyer of last resort and then they can use that money that they've earned by securing the world's most decentralized and immutable ledger and take those proceeds and if they want, pump them into the grid to bulk for it further, or give those profits back to the

people that are paying for power and reduce energy costs for everyone using that grid. And so, like, the reality is Bitcoin miners are going to seek that out, and it's getting more and more competitive to the point where they have to seek it out. Of course, they're going to go places like the Middle East where they may be using a bunch of solar, but also they need to be operating. at 100% capacity. There's large cities being built. There's like a lot of these cities are very, very modern and have a lot of electricity

demands. And there's a lot of money there. And it also makes sense that people are transacting in more or less instantly settleable base money to exchange for energy as well. Like this marriage of energy and Bitcoin, we haven't even begun to see the startings of. I'm super excited. One of the more interesting energy demands that they have is not just like the climate conditioning, you know, they're in the desert, it's hot, I get that.

But actually, because freshwater supply is such a big challenge there, they have to desalinate ocean water to be able to have drinking water and, you know, potable water for the people that live there. And that is apparently, I'm still learning all this stuff, but that's apparently a pretty energy intensive process to desalinate water. So it's yet another reason, as you say, why they need to overbuild their grid to be able to, you know, accommodate all of these energy needs. The bad news is that Bitcoin, a single transaction, burns an entire swimming pool worth of water. So I guess we're out of luck in that department.

Is that saltwater pool? Yeah. Oh, man. What an absolute joke that that latest fud was. but hey, gentlemen, BJ, Surfer, Jim, I'm curious, your thoughts on this, too, whoever wants to jump in. Jim, why don't you go first this time? Yeah, sure. I just think it's cool that I hesitate to call them a nation state like, you know, the United States or some other very large nation state.

But you do have people in positions of power and positions of control over large amounts of resources. recognizing this Bitcoin thing, you know, finally. And I almost, I'm going to assume that the monarchy aspect to the way that country operates is probably what allows them to make choices like this, a lot less bureaucrats to have to pass things by and get everybody's okay on, you know? And in the end, Bitcoin is, you know, each individual has to decide what it is and what they can do with it and whether or not it's valuable to them and whether or not you're in control of your own own personal fortune or the fortune of a country, it still matters.

And I just love the idea that a giant nation state like them is recognizing the marriage of Bitcoin and energy, as Ben, as you've alluded to, you know, this is so huge. Only people in Bitcoin see the giant iceberg, you know, that other people don't even know, they can't even see the tip yet because it's over the horizon for them. And yet we can see the whole iceberg because we're underwater looking at it going, holy shit, look what's coming. So it's amazing. You know, the narrative that I've heard many people discuss is that one day energy companies,

the people that are like directly tied to the source of energy are going to be the bulk of the Bitcoin miners. And, you know, since we're talking mining, I'm just going to throw it up there real quick. We've all, everybody here has heard of ocean mining that just launched this week. And they're literally at the source of electricity using hydropower. And so they have a net negative cost other than their. operating costs, their infrastructure costs, but they're not paying for electricity. The water is giving it to them. And I see a day when, you know, like Jeff Buth always says, everything reduces down to the marginal cost of production or something like that, right? So like the freest energy is going

to be where you're going to find Bitcoin mining out into the future. And free energy is in every single electrical production facility that has to ramp up and down during different peak and non-peak hours and whatnot. And so literally, literally every single electrical production facility on the planet can benefit by having some Bitcoin miner literally it's like the entire world could use some Bitcoin minor so it's absolutely freaking awesome cool shit I don't know what else I could say love it BJ what do you think um I mean I agree listen we're all talking about what my point is going to be which is about culture but um I think when you see any sort of nation state

whether it's the UAE or it's a Western state or whatever. That is the type of impact on a culture and a society there that you can only imagine, right? Especially, I mean, irrespective of differences in political views, when you have those sorts of governments that decide we're going to implement something here, it's done. There's no questions about it sort of thing. and it goes full force. And what I see is happening there is they are going to be the world leaders on Bitcoin.

And the rest of the world needs to wake up. We got to stop playing this, you know, fiat trickster game on ourselves and thinking, oh, this is all going to work out well, we'll be fine. Japan hasn't collapsed, so we're not going to collapse. But at least, you know, I tip my hat off to the UAE for BIA for BATS, being early adopters and understanding the importance of what this is. And I don't know, that's, it's amazing. It's something you never would have imagined years ago, right?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's, we're going to get Bitcoin adoption in, in all different capacities. Like, because there's, and I've said this in shows before, There's kind of like the people at the far ends of the spectrum are the ones that that most recognize it quickest. So you're going to have the people that are most disenfranchised with the current system, either just through monetary debasement or like censorship and being cut off from the financial system. Those people get it because they're like, I have no other method to transact. And so, you know, I'm going to go and use this because either I have no way to digitally interact or my. my money is worthless the second I receive it as payment. But then you also have the other side of

the spectrum where the people that have whose job it is to protect the purchasing power of their assets. And so like incredibly high net worth individuals, nation states, companies, all those people as well are very directly incentivized to recognize that they're bleeding purchasing power by using anything else and that holding a sound money that's immutable and censorship resistant and like difficult to confiscate is is in their best interest and then I think it works its way in towards kind of the central normies and we're I think all of us are in a unique position where we were just weird enough that we caught on to it early on those fringes but but for the most of society it's going to be like that that middle

class is going to be kind of the last to realize it because they're the comfiest. Or not the comfiest, but like, you know, shit's broken, inflation sucks and everything, but I'm just going to vote harder to fix it is the general mentality. So I think a lot of those people will be kind of the last to adopt it. But the beautiful thing is even the very last person on Earth that decides to adopt Bitcoin will still benefit from it. they still the second they switch over and say all right i'm i'm going to use bitcoin now and i'm going to save in it and i'm going to use it they at from that point forward

they get censorship resistant immutable um uh you know non you can't debase the money like they get all of those features from that point forward so it's like sucks for that person because they could have benefited even more, but they still, like, the second they make that decision, they're still way better off. And that's great. Couldn't agree with you more. Yeah.

All right. So why am I bullish? Because my crystal ball is telling me that's what you're going to ask me. And, you know, I've been thinking about this all week. And I really converged on something that, unfortunately, is a little more general than you would like. and it might be a little bit more philosophical. But I think it's important.

And we've touched on that a little bit in this conversation. And that is stability and momentum. And I mean from the cultural perspective, think back to when you first got into Bitcoin. Like in 2015, when I was first really getting into the space and learning about it, just before I discovered BTC sessions, right?

I was involved in politics. And I was running, you know, I was running, an election. And Bitcoin was for criminal activity. That's what everybody believed. They thought it was some nefarious sort of, you know, a video game money or online money. They didn't take it seriously. Nobody did. And it was to the point in my scenario, my predicament, I couldn't even tell anybody that I was in the Bitcoin because I automatically would have been disqualified as a candidate, because, well, you're doing something that's nefarious. That's where we were. And back to that, back

it's like, you know what reminds me of, reminds me of being a kid and logging on the internet and going on to bulletin board servers, right? Or downloading, remember, MP3s came out and bootlegging MP3s. And it was kind of like, all your friends in school had no idea how you're getting all these free, this free music.

And then they started asking, oh, download stuff for me. Like, that's where we were in 2015. It was, you know, a lot of people say, oh, I wish I would have bought in Bitcoin earlier in 2010. Well, good luck. You wouldn't have been able to unless you knew how to program a wallet. It was just too complex at that point. And here we are now, where we have political leaders all over the world

that are in some cases tripping over themselves to chase the Bitcoin voting block. We have credible people in the finance world, people like LaParte. and FOSS and fully in that whole group that are big proponents. We have all the ETFs, the largest finance companies in the world. Whether you like them or not is not the point. The point is they now understand the importance of what Bitcoin is and the example that we just discussed before, which is UAE in other countries in El Salvador.

We don't know what's going to happen with Argentina. There's a lot of chatter in Mexico, a lot of people that are very, that are, pushing for it within the political structure there for it to be, to be adopted in some capacity. That stability and momentum, that for me, I've never been so bullish about the space now. And then you come into this program and you start telling you about, well, I just discovered just today a solution that if I had my old business, I used to have a business on a university campus, that if I had a business there, I would already be thinking about,

oh, this might be a good solution to integrate to my customer base, right? Like I'm thinking back, what would I have done today if I was still running that business? Well, don't worry, because in another day or two, somebody's going to come up with another innovation that's going to help adopt. So it's no longer a joke space. It's no longer a bulletin board. it's no longer downloading illegal music. No, this is a very serious asset

that the biggest power leaders in the world now understand it's a very serious asset. And that's why you're seeing a little bit of pushback from some people. But I think overall you're seeing the majority of people are just kind of open to it. And you know, you say Bitcoin now, people don't joke about it anymore, right?

People like, oh, you know, remember dismissive they were? Remember you're like, Ben? When you started doing your Bitcoin videos, I want to know from you, how much ridicule did you get from people for doing Bitcoin videos? You must have gotten that time. Yeah, well, because there were no, like it would be like a tutorial. How do you use this? And then inevitably, just like some asset in the comment like, oh, this is a Ponzi scheme. Or like this is like so uses.

This is monopoly money. Like there's inevitably that would just be like riddled through the comments here and there. it was just crap or just nobody watched right yeah exactly the two people i had watching one was telling me i'm an idiot so like and now and now where are we now you've built a business you're supporting your family you're traveling all over the world you're trying very hard to educate more people who need this asset that have needed this and haven't understood that they've needed it for so long i mean all of that it's the the stability and momentum in our culture culture, the acceptance that I didn't think we would necessarily get to this level so quickly.

But it's just like somebody turned on a switch and maybe it was all the COVID stuff. Maybe it was that great story with this little protest where people were just fed up and Bitcoin is fed up money. And the other thing is, you know, by the way, Christmas 2024, good reason to reach people. And there are two chapters in here that tell the Bitcoin story that you were a part of. And my hat always tips to Caribu. If people only understood how much he sacrificed and what he went through during that time. And I tell the story there. But this allowed me to orange pill so many boomers, man.

Like I'm talking Surfer Jim's customer type boomers have now started at least they don't really understand it entirely. just know that when the government became fully authoritarian and started freezing people's bank accounts, people who had not been charged with anything, that Bitcoin worked. And for those who are watching who don't know, I mean, you obviously know the story. Of the one point something million dollars, 1.1, 1.2 million dollars in Bitcoin, we managed to get 800 and change $1,000 directly to the truckers. And it was of the $23 million we raised, It was the only money that got to the truckers. Everything else was either subject to injunction by the government or it was part of this legal case that we're dealing with.

It was blocked in some way. But the Bitcoin couldn't be stopped. And I had so many people after this event, because I was going into Bitcoin spaces more and more, coming in. Who knew nothing about Bitcoin? Wanted to talk to me. And they heard me and DJ Satoshi talking about Bitcoin. talking about Bitcoin and they're like, well, how do I buy it? I know what you're saying?

Well, there's this guy called BTC sessions. You start watching his tutorial videos and that'll help you get on there, man. Yeah. Again, it was, it was an important moment. I think it is cool seeing there's a lot of people that are not dismissive of it anymore. It's now either it's not, it's no longer is somebody dispassive. of it. There's a few left, but not many. It's either for or against. And so there's there's a pushback. And so like, it's funny when you were making the torrent and like the Napster

analogy, I was thinking, is Elizabeth Warren the new Dr. Gray and Metallica? Like, is she the one? Because like back in the day for Napster, basically Metallica and Dr. Dre sued Napster. You can't, like, even though you're not like explicitly hosting our stuff you're allowing people to link to do these things which is hilarious because like torrents just Napster was able to be clamped down upon but torrents exist to this day if you want to get the latest episode of literally anything you can just go torrented and you can't you can't shut that down pirate bay gets shut down pirate bay two three four through 79 are all up like within minutes and so at the end of the day, Bitcoin is kind of the same thing. Like you can, you can try and stamp it out, but there's

like a million other gophers in that field just pop up the second you try to do it. Yeah. And also to add to my point, you know, I just saw in the comments that Gary Cardone is here. Gary is a real estate guy. He's a finance guy. You know, six years ago, he would have thought we would lost our minds. But here we are. The landscape of our society has changed so much that. that him and his brother and people who they work with now understand that, okay, there is a place for this asset, this new type of asset, and they're fully on board. And because they've gotten involved, they're also helping indirectly orange pill other people around them. So I think, I think we're at that point where Bitcoin, it really is inevitable. It may take time to work

through all the legal and political structures. In fact, I know it will. But it is at the very least inevitable in some way, shape, or form. And if that is, if there's, that's not a reason to be bullish, I don't know what it is. Yeah. Gary, good to see in the chat. Hope you're doing well. I saw your latest clip on Twitter. Don't, don't be afraid. Don't wait for 33K.

Pile in. Grab your stats where you can get them cheap. Don't worry. The, the, the, the best time to buy Bitcoin was yesterday. the next best time to buy Bitcoin is today. Yeah, so anyways, yeah, good to see you, man. Hope you're doing well. But gentlemen, I'm curious, Seed and Jim,

maybe I'll go to Jim first and then I'll go to Seed. Just any thoughts on what BJ's talking about here. Jim, do you want to chime in anything here? Yeah, absolutely. It's going to tie into what I'm bullish about this week, But I'll just say it. I've often considered Bitcoin to be something for individuals and not groups. I debated with some people regarding whether or not the citizens of a country benefit by a group of people called government owning Bitcoin, supposedly on their behalf.

But ultimately, anybody who is in control of any Bitcoin is a person that has decided, I want this thing. and it's inevitable that more and more people are going to hear about it. Of that percentage of people, some will investigate closely. And of that percentage, some will get, you know, completely orange-pilled like us. And they'll become advocates like us. And like Gary, good to see in the chat there, Gary. I'm looking forward to seeing you at Uncomplicatable next week. So, yeah, I think it's fantastic that more and more and more people are waking up.

I mean, you know, Ben, when I started learning about Bitcoin back in late 2016, just about seven years ago. There was very little content, very little places to go to interact. And that's why I started going to conferences. I needed to meet some real people. It was all just stuff on the internet. I couldn't shake someone's hand.

It was like, whoa. And then it changed for me as soon as I started meeting people. And I started to see, you know, when you get involved in Bitcoin, you hear about projects before the world. Like, so you're kind of like the, I hate to be weird about this, but we're kind of like the in crowd. in the sense that you hear about stuff like ZapRite,

how many people even in Bitcoin know what they're doing? Like only a small percentage. Forget about outside of Bitcoin. They don't even know this is coming yet. And we know about it. We know how it works. You've just taught us. It's just amazing to be in this position.

And then being in this position, watching more and more and more people join is just blow in my mind. You know, as hard as it is for some of the people we interact with that don't see it right away, especially our friends and family that think we're nuts, it's still encouraging because even some of them finally are coming around. They're starting to see the roller coaster that Bitcoin is. And wait a minute, it didn't go to zero.

Maybe Jim wasn't so crazy. So I'm totally bullish on the whole narrative as well. Thanks for bringing it up, BJ. Yeah. Seed, I'll toss it to you. First off, I want to say, I don't know, maybe I'll probably be dating myself here, but I got your BBS reference and your, you're, you're, I remember being an awkward teenager using a clicky and, you know, noisy modem to call other.

The clicky mousees were the best, man. Click, click. It was louder than it's than a keyboard. Yeah, it was awesome. Yeah. Well, now, now this is my mouse now. Bro, bro. Just so you don't worry about dating yourself, my first computer was a pet emulator.

Yeah. I had to think about that one first. yeah pre 64 pre vick 20 we're tape deck pet emulator when i was like four but yeah go on oh wow yeah i it was people in our age group had this kind of unique sort of vantage point of having seen the world before the internet computers much less the internet existed and having seen it afterwards um but anyhow i digress um what what what what what what strike me about what you're saying is for me this idea of touch points and people with something that is different and new and revolutionary as bitcoin people often need multiple touch points before they fully

appreciate the magnitude and the importance of it and not all touch points are also created equal sometimes when you're crazy cousin eddie talked about bitcoin in you know 2014 it maybe wasn't as meaningful but when you see someone that you respect talk about it or you hear it discussed in a corporate setting or in some sort of other environment that carries more weight you tend to take it more seriously and i think part of what we're seeing is the quality of touchpoints that people are having with bitcoin are starting to significantly improve in terms of the context that it's brought up in and the people that we're hearing talk about it and the more convincing, more compelling arguments that people are able to make for it. So that is what I love, an aspect of what I

love about your saying. It's an idea whose, you know, time is close to being here. And we're all super blessed and fortunate to have gotten a peak early and to be getting to see it. come to fruition. By the way, everybody, if you look in the chat, people are now naming all these ancient computers from the 80s. We got the Tandy right now. I'm going to post a few of them right now. So we're all old.

You know, more than one person put in their TRS 80 from Radio Shack. That was my first with a tape drive. There was no internet yet, folks. That's how long ago this was. Okay. I've got a question, though. maybe this is making me too young here but uh poohed in the cereal said he was i don't know if this is a real thing the vax 9000 is that a real computer or is he making a covid reference i think that's a

COVID. I don't know. It's trying to get your shadow band. The Vax 9,000 mini via dial-up. That's awesome. I mean, if that's a real, if that's a real computer, then. Well, back then, there were so many. Like, you open Consumers Reports magazine.

Every week, there was some new crappy computer that was in the magazine and out the next week, right? So it could have been. It actually could be. Somebody saying that it's real. It's awesome. I hope that the government mandated that everybody had one. Look at the comments. Everybody's going crazy.

We got Atari 400 now. Everybody's listening all their own children. This is great. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, gents,

I think it's time for a final rotation here. Jim, I am going to toss it to you. I'll cue you up with the same question everybody gets. why are you bullish? So as the rest of you did, I had to spend some time thinking about this. What could I bring up that somebody else might not have? And BJ almost got me with what he said.

I'm going to broaden the perspective. And because I've been paying attention, and for me, I spent six months studying Bitcoin before I even could convince myself to buy any. And I didn't know a single person. So it was difficult learning. And as I got more involved personally and then I met more people, I started to see what I said a few minutes ago about, you know, how how more and more people are seeing it. And I heard something a long time ago that somebody was just so confident that Bitcoin would not fail because any problems that come up, smart people are going to fix them. And then, you know, six months a year later, somebody points out a problem and a lot of people don't want to.

acknowledge it and it's a real problem. You know, there's some stuff. And, you know, like the ocean mining pool announcement this week is meant to address a pretty significant mining in the centralization. I'm sorry, significant problem in the centralization in mining pools. I'm not going to get into describing that now, but what took place was that rumor that smart people will step up to fix it. And that has pretty much been the case in my journey. And I see. And I see. more and more people working at all different levels. Seed signer was not around a bunch of years ago. Now they are. Ben, you didn't have your channel. Vij didn't have his book. We all didn't touch the people we used to touch that we are touching now through the different things that we all do. A huge amount

in the educational space because there's a lot of spaces like we're all on all the time where a lot of it is real good education for people who are trying to learn about Bitcoin and the surrounding ecosystem, let's say. And so I, I'm just, I'm super bullish in the fact that we still are in an environment where there are people that are smart enough to step up and to defend this network against the, the attacks that come from every direction, including people who may mean well and just aren't educated and they're saying dumb things or doing dumb things. And so so far we do have an ecosystem, what I see, and a growing one at that of smart, strong people stepping up, defending this network, making sure it doesn't break, making sure it. last for a thousand years. So everybody benefits by it because anybody that's at that level sees it as much more than just this thing for me, for me to get wealthy or whatever, they see it as a humanity fixing discovery. Like Bitcoin, I'll say it this way. I believe that money, a construct

that humans created in order to trade and move away from barter is one of the most important discoveries in all of human history, if not the most important, that the idea. The idea, of money because without it we wouldn't have division of labor and we wouldn't have the trillions of individual items that benefit every human being on this planet but in order to have trade you needed money you needed the most saleable good in between every single trade and everybody had to agree on it and the world has seen lots of different kinds of money and unfortunately most of the other monies were able to be broken in many different ways and even gold which can be inflated its supply can be increased faster if enough people decide they need to get more gold because that is money.

Unfortunately, we all know the story of gold being replaced by Fiat money and how broken that is. And so we now have Bitcoin, the best form of money ever seen. So now humanity has the ability to go back to the very first principle that allowed us to expand throughout history, a unit in between every trade that can't be corrupted, that can't be broken. And it just changes the game. It's beyond just adopting it now, having it go up in value, and you reaping the rewards of that into the future. Because when you're gone, everything you left behind stays. And if you leave your Bitcoin to somebody else, it's then going to benefit them.

And people beyond that, because the Bitcoin network itself is for everybody. And if the world were to adopt it, everybody wins. And so I'm on a mission personally. I probably won't see worldwide adoption in my, in my lifetime, although it's maybe not impossible. But for people that are young, my daughter and her future kids, you know, damn, I want the world to have a Bitcoin standard because I just think it fixes a lot of problems. And I see an ecosystem that is still really strong. People working really hard. The world doesn't see it yet, but they're slowly seeing it through the adoption, BJ discussed.

the normies out there, the regular tradfai people who probably don't even get Bitcoin. And they're not on this for the humanitarian reason just yet, although I believe many of them will start to see it over time. That is all starting to permeate. And I'm just hopeful that there will always be some smart people that will defend this network and prevent it from being broken by a bunch of dumbdums. So I'm pretty bullish, just in general. Can I just add another reason to be bullish?

Because I think we've discovered that, for Jim is the Bitcoin dad. He's the dad of the community who's going to lay it out for all of us who are trying to figure out life. He's the dad who's going to philosophize to all of us and get us all on board.

No, that's great, man. And that's why you're so popular in all the spaces and people love to hear from you, by the way. And I got listen, I got 60 plus years of crap stuck up in this head. Some of it's valuable. And if I don't spew it back out, it's going to go to the grave with me. So I'm happy to just keep talking Bitcoin. And if I'm wrong, call me out on it.

But, you know, I try my hardest to be accurate. And so that what I say to people benefits them. You know, I'm here for free tonight. This is to help educate the world. That's why I'm doing this. I'm bullish on Bitcoin and everybody involved. So let's do it. I was just going to say, I like what you said in terms of there's kind of two parts to it. Number one, you're like, you know, you're basically saying that because Bitcoin is open, anybody can kind of build what they like, that when people see problems, they can step up and they can fix them. But they can also do it in a relatively transparent way if they see fit.

And you also get people that are going to push back about every single little, you know, finicky thing about it to say like, this could be better, this could be better. I don't like this because of this. And I know that can be obviously super annoying all the time, but also is a positive in that it shifts the Overton window where like you're going to get, you know, the absolute purists that are going to say like it has to be this, this, this and this. And any sort of tradeoff in there is is absolute bullshit. it. And while for me, I may make certain tradeoffs in certain instances, I also recognize that the people that push to that extreme are shifting the Overton window to make that center line more one of, you know what, I should get this into self-custody. You know what? I should secure with hardware.

You know what? I should, you know, basically aspire to be like on-chain and secure myself. And so that's what these things do. And I think that what we saw in and around the ocean mining thing was, number one, a lot of their aspirations are fantastic. Number one, I think that stratum v2 is a good thing, because what that allows somebody to do is before you have, a situation where the mining pool decides what transactions are in the block that gets mined. With stratum v2, it's whatever actual minor, whatever actual physical minor, their hash rate,

they get to select what goes into the block. They get to see like, hey, here's the block template, this is what's going in. So what you get is a government can't go to that mining pool and say, We have this list of OFAC censored addresses. If anything happens with any of these, then make sure that that doesn't get mined. And not that would prevent those transactions from being mined, but it would basically make it so that those people would have to pay higher fees and you'd have to have some sort of like a mining pool that is kind of off the grid that nobody really knows where they're set up and like they'd still be subject to that.

But when you have a stratum v2 mining pool, it's, well, whatever the hash says is what's going to have. Whoever mine that block within the pool gets to choose. Now, stratum v2 is not live on ocean yet, but that is a stated intent. Some people had gripes with various things. The pool itself isn't open source. I think that's the only way that they have a viable business model is that it's not currently open source, but somebody's going to be able to rebuild this type of thing. So, like, we'll see what competitors come of it.

You have other mining pools. I can't remember the name of the other one that just came up that is also now actually has stratum v2. And then you've got, you know, there's some pushback in and around there, you know, we're non-custodial type thing. but what if you're mining tiny, tiny amounts of sats? Their solution down the road is payouts via lightning, which is amazing. That should absolutely be a thing. But in the interim, until that's active, if you're mining tiny amounts of sats, then it's going to be like, it's going to be quasi custodial until you reach a threshold that you can withdraw. So, like, there's, in the end, I think that what they're trying to do is a step.

in the right direction and should be applauded. But I'm also glad there's people that said like, well, it's not yet what you said it's going to be. And some people maybe said it in a more abrasive way than that.

Maybe. Have you never met Bitcoiners before? But nonetheless, it shifts the Overton window to say like, we all need to aspire to this. and like, let's move towards this end of the spectrum. So I think that's, I think that in general, that's a good thing.

And that's, you know, you're having people step in the right direction. And then you're having other people that are saying, you're not doing enough. Let's do more. And that's a great thing. Like, that's a positive thing. The more we can push people in that direction, the better. And people are going to have different points on that spectrum where they say, this is good for me. And that's okay.

Yeah. Go ahead. Two important points on that. One, ocean, love it, don't love it, whatever. It's software. And software is, you know, it's not always easy, but software can be improved and upgraded. And different choices or preferences that people have can be incorporated in.

First thing, software, it can be changed. Second thing, Bitcoin mining is a market. So if people love what ocean is doing and they, you know, think that they have it right in terms of the values of the pool and what they're doing, they can point their hash there. And if they don't, it's really simple to point your hash somewhere else. So what that makes me think of is I'm a little bit of a history buff. And in the early stages of America, what some historians argue was the strength of America

was the governmental diversity among all of the colonies. So you have these 13 colonies, all of which have to have a certain amount of people to have a minimum viable sort of settlement. And in the colonies, there was this jurisdictional arbitrage to where different jurisdictions would compete with one another, trying to draw settlers to their place because they had better farmland,

treated people better or they had better policies on this or you know religious freedom whatever but because there was this this sort of pull between which jurisdiction can have the best rules that you know kind of guide people's lives that encouraged all of them to be better and to have better rules that would attract better people and I think it's oddly enough the exact same dynamic among the mining pools. So different mining pools are going to have to adopt different features to appeal to you know, different bitcoins that are managing different amounts of hash. And ultimately it's a market and people get to decide where they want to mine. I think that's an absolutely beautiful aspect of it. Yeah. Though the cool thing about the way that that ocean was set up was I was used to,

so I've got like I've got behind me. I've got a space heater that I use in the office. that is an S-9. And so I've got that thing, I plug it in during the winter and I just, I'm not making any meaningful amount of sass, but I'm still mining. And so I was curious, I was like, well, okay, let's just see what,

how ocean does, like the setup and everything. And the thing that I liked was, when I went on to like brains mining pool, like most other mining pools, it's like you actually have a degree of sign up. And like right now we're seeing some KYC'd mining pools, which, fuck that. But then also we're seeing, you know, your average mining pool,

you're going to have like a login with an email address or something to that effect. With Ocean, it's literally you go there and they're like, take a Bitcoin address and paste it here. And then if you want to like label the machine, you take your Bitcoin address, you put a dot after the address and you put like minor one or whatever it is. with no login whatsoever and then they say take this piece of information copy it from our website and then go over to your interface

on your browser for your miner and paste it in to your settings and hit save and that's it is to copy and paste and then if you want to look up what your miner is doing and what it's mined

and what your rewards are you literally go and you search the Bitcoin address that it's allocated to the payout address and you just go and look and that's how you check your mind. There's no login whatsoever.

There's no accounts. There's nothing. And they're putting pressure on now on all the other pools who have more conventional sign-up process. I'm not deep into mining, but what you're describing sounds a whole lot more compelling to me so that now they're pushing innovation in the mining space. Absolutely.

Yeah, I think it's great. And the best part is that even though that some have like the sign up with an email address, the process of changing which pool you're a part of is what I just described, copy and paste. Inside of 30 seconds, you can switch mining pools by simply copy and pasting a link and putting it into the interface on your browser. And then all of a sudden, your miners are like, oh, you're mining with this mining pool now. So the beautiful part about it is when people point at Bitcoin mining pools and they say

things like Bitcoin mining is is centralized. And all you would need to do is send subpoenas to these two or three mining pools and you'd be able to 51% attack Bitcoin. That analogy is kind of horseshit because that hash is not theirs. They're the pool. And as soon as anybody get the whiff of the U.S. government subpoenaing those mining pools, they're going to be like, oh, shit. no, oh no, copy, pay, and never mind, bye.

Yeah. And then the hash just drains. And so you saw F2Pool, they actually filtered some transactions. They went on the OFAC list of filtered or sanctioned addresses, and they actually filtered out some of those transactions for a little bit. They had some sort of filter going. And somebody noticed, and they were like, yeah. Yo, are you guys censoring transactions when you mine blocks?

Because we see these on all our block templates. Why aren't you mining them? And I think one of the heads of F2 pool was like, well, I'm allowed to mine whatever I want. Who says I can't filter out criminals and stuff like that? You know what happened? They, in 24 hours, they went from the number four mining pool. They bled hash and they dropped two spots in a day. and then they turned around and said, oh, we're not, we're not filtering those transactions anymore.

So mining pools are incentivized to not do this. And if they're forced to, people will still move to ones that don't. Just if I could add on to that, going back to the, you know, the reason I said for being bullish, the mining pools, although I agree with you in terms of incentives, if they get caught messing around, people are going to jump ship. Absolutely. There's still only a handful of choices and they have other ways of obfuscating what they're doing. You know, Bitcoin mechanic has said a lot about this. So I'm not going to repeat it all here. I probably won't do it justice anyway, but essentially going back to my point is the reason that this mining pool was relaunched, because this was a mining pool that was active back in from, I think, 2011 when Luke started it, was the idea that Bitcoin isn't as decentralized as everybody would like to believe.

And not that the network isn't. There's nodes all over the world, but the mining has become centralized in a certain way. Let's just put it that way. And so you're right, Ben, people can pull their, their hashes away from any given pool on any day, any minute of any day. But without noticing, miners can still get away with certain types of, you know, censorship, let's say, of transactions and whatnot. And because the miners, so, you know, the concept of mining was meant that, you know, one, one CP, one vote, right? Or something like that. And the idea was that each miner is autonomous. and making decisions.

In this case, like let's say in today's environment, picking what transactions you want in that block for ideological reasons or simply for monetary reasons. But they're not getting that benefit anymore. Anybody who's running a miner that's part of a pool isn't choosing that. And this is why that stratum v2 is so important. It's just one step in the re-decentralizing

of the mining industry within the Bitcoin ecosystem. So I just love the fact that there are still smart people trying to make sure Bitcoin doesn't break. So, yeah, it's all good stuff. As soon as Bitcoiners perceive a problem, people start building solutions and options in this kind of free market. And so we're seeing into mining.

I think we're also seeing in a privacy too. I mean, Cid, you're a perfect example where you saw a pinch point of, what if a government said you're not allowed to, you know, buy and own hardware devices? And two, you know, the the danger of if you order a hardware device from a manufacturer and their database of customers gets leaked, you know, that puts you at risk too. Somebody knows that you bought a hardware device

in 2014. They might be going, huh, that's worth a plane ticket. So like you're, you're kind of on the forefront of that as well, right? Yeah, two things. I do want to circle back on Jim's, I'll call it the Bitcoin Brain Trust. That is one of the things that Hardens, me about Bitcoin whenever I might start feeling a little bearish is like the amount of people who are massively smarter than me who are involved and advocates for Bitcoin and who are believers in that. That is from the earliest interactions I've had with Bitcoin, that is something that has impressed me, the intellectual capital of people who understand the power of Bitcoin or are willing to work on it and advocate for it. And I obviously agree with what you're saying.

I'll also throw in hard wallet makers that may be legally domiciled in unfriendly parts of the world and may experience pressure from governments to, you know, I'm not going to say fully backdoor their products, but maybe implement some sort of guided KYC into the setups. I think what we've seen, ledger is always kind of an easy target. but with Ledger's recover system, I believe at the Miami conference from the comments that the CEO made when he was interviewed on what Bitcoin did,

such that he kind of downplayed the fact that the company, if they received some sort of legal service, requiring that a private key from an individual device be produced, you know, he kind of pooed that and said, well, this is only if we receive some sort of word from a government, would we be able to? Well, that's, those are the keys to the kingdom right there. Like, we, we, we don't want that to be even possible.

I've been through that. I know what that's like. That literally would happen here, right? Like, that situation could have been us. That could have been the, the demo run of that. And can you imagine a situation if we're like, yeah, we, we secured the, the trucker funds with a ledger, uh,

with this backup situation in the cloud. And the Canadian government was like, well, here's a subpoena. Uh, here's, here's an order. And ledger was like, well, we got to comply. And like,

it's like, then what is the point of Bitcoin at that point? If you have a, if, everything that you've done to become self-sovereign is undone when the government said you're not allowed to be sovereign. Yeah. that's that's it's ridiculous so yeah i mean there's times where i'm you know i think like well

you know are we being too hard on ledger but when you when you really get down to it like kind of fucking not well because because the problem is whether their intent is to or not they are now a pressure point and nobody thinks they're a pressure point until the government decides it actually wants to utilize that pressure. And then you don't have a choice. So they'll say, no, no, no, you're fine. And then all of a sudden there's a subpoena or go to jail. And it's like, oh, sorry, you know, we don't have a choice.

And I think most of us in this space are our understanding of that. And that's why there's criticism against Ledger, not because we think they're bad people, at least in my perspective. It's just they're not philosophically playing this out in their heads. and understanding the types of pressure that they'll be under. And look, Ben, you know, I and many other people felt the wrath of the boot of government on our throat. And I was astounding how quickly some people and institutions just turned immediately, immediately like that, you know? Yeah.

Like a lot of them will volunteer to do it, Pram. I mean, we're seeing this in the States right now, too, with, you know, like, We saw the alarms raised from Swan recently. And I know there's a ton of people that are like super, you know, just no KYC only and everything. But like the end of the day, Swan was like, yo, banks are basically preemptively complying with this FinTrack thing that isn't even, it's not even law. And they're saying like if anybody does any sort of privacy measure coin join whatever within one hop of your search. service, then we would like you to notify us of this and maybe shut down their account or whatever. And if you don't do this, then we shut down your accounts and your business is gone.

And so it's kind of like people need to realize that this is the world we're living in, not where you just need to see if it's going to be law, but you also need to hedge against, you're still dealing with banks and oftentimes banks fucking suck. Well, because banks philosophically engage in the presumption of guilt and not the presumption of innocence. That's why this whole thing is upside down, right? And I'm a firm believer of we all individuals have the presumption of innocence, but the government has the presumption of guilt. We should always assume the government is guilty because they're the other side of all of these trades. That's why we have all these regulations.

But the world is upside down right now, and it doesn't make sense. And I think financial institutions, they just don't know what to do. So they're hyper, hyper risk averse now at this point, which is sacrificing all our freedoms, which is why I had all my accounts frozen and bank and credit cards and everything else, right? Yeah, yeah. And Ben, I want to give you a shout up for your joint market jam video. I think it's about a year since it's been amazed, but I was actually watching that all the way through yesterday, you know, just kind of acquainting myself with with that aspect of Bitcoin and, you know, kind of indulging my curiosity. Nice. I like their analogy. My favorite part about Jam, those unfamiliar, there's like there's different types of coin join protocols. There's, you know, like the in Sparrow you've got baked in, the samurai whirlpool. You got wasabi, which.

which checks on chain if you're allowed to coin join beforehand. So take that for what it is. But then you've also got Joinmark in which there's no like it's a protocol. And so there's no central art coordinator to like go and hone in on. But their analogy, the way that they explain coin join is kind of funny where they're like, imagine that you have a basket of fruit and you have like strawberries and blueberries and, you know, like different types of fruits. And when you go and you coin join them, like before coin join, you can decipher like there's a grape, there's a blueberry, there's a

strawberry, there's a raspberry. But what we're going to do is we're going to mash them all up and we're going to make a nice bar, a nice jar of jam. And you won't be able to decipher one from the other and who owns what and what it came from, where it came from, what fruit it was. It's just jam. And it tastes good. And so I like that analogy and you can move it from jar to jar and you label, oh, this is the blueberry jam. This is the strawberry jam. Like I think it was pretty fun. So, yeah, it's a cool thing that they got going.

I hope to see even more interfaces for that to make it even more accessible to your average person. So, yeah. Awesome. Well, jents, here's what I want to do. And this is what I typically do as I'm starting to wrap up a show is I like to quote. I like to quickly go around to everybody and basically get any final thoughts on any of the things that we discussed or something that maybe you didn't get off get to get off your chest today. And then also ask a recommendation that you could throw out for everybody watching. And the recommendation can come in any form.

It could be, hey, I listen to a podcast. It was awesome. Hey, I watched this video. It was awesome. Or try out this device or this app or read this book or whatever it may be. you know, if you think somebody will find it useful, toss it out there. Okay? So I'll start off with my final thoughts and recommendations to give you guys a second to

stew in the background and then I'll toss down the line. So, I mean, final thoughts here, and I think this is kind of the sentiment of the day is that with the culture and the ethos of Bitcoin, when people see a problem, they tend to act on it and try to write that wrong, that perceived wrong. They try to produce things that will fix those problems. And this whole aspect of Bitcoin, again, it shifts that overton window of, oh, is this, is this currently too hard? Do we not have solutions for this? Well, now we do. And you should use that thing, but that just, it shifts it to, well, if you weren't using the current best and then all of a sudden a better, more self-sovereign solution comes along, it shifts people

to at least using the old best and then the people that are on the bleeding edge move up to the new standard. And I love seeing that and this continues to proliferate and the things that were the old best and then you have the new best. All of those things are becoming easier. So the thing that is currently the most self-sovereign, but also probably most difficult to enact, is going to become even better when the next best thing comes along. And I think we're going to continue down this path

because this is the very ethos of the people that are in this room, the people that are in this chat, and the people that are building all of the things that we currently use and the things that we will use tomorrow. So I'm excited about that. And in that vein,

I'm going to say, number one, I mean, we got seat on right now. So if you haven't played with Seed-Signer, it's fucking cool. You got to go try it out. It's super awesome. So like you can build it, like you were saying, you can build this from run-of-the-mill parts, easily accessible. You don't have to order it directly from like the Seed-Signer website.

You can do whatever you want. I will say this enclosure is super awesome. And there's all kinds of, again, I've got like one that looks kind of like a game boy, like an old NES or something like that. And that one's pretty cool too. But you can basically like build this from parts. And the interface is such that this device is stateless, meaning that it doesn't actually retain the seed to your money.

It's simply used to like you've got a private key as a QR code. You scan it. That key is on the device. And then it allows you to like create a transaction and send it and sign it and do all of that stuff. And then you unplug it and the device holds nothing. And so if somebody gets this, they have nothing. It's just, well, I mean, they don't have nothing. They have a really sweet signing device.

But they effectively have nothing. They don't have your money. So, like, it's a really cool idea. I think it's super awesome. I think it's definitely worth people making themselves aware of. And it helps inform your picture of what Bitcoin even is. It's a really cool learning tool especially. So, like, if you decide that this is not your daily drive,

or whatever, but I think it's still worth it to explore because it will bolster your understanding of what Bitcoin is. So that's my, that's my recommendation of the day. And then my secondary recommendation is check out the Zap, right? I'm going to dive in more. I'll probably do a video, but it looks like it might be a cool solution for myself and maybe for you if you have an online business. So that's, that's that. With that, I'll, I'll pause it down the line. Seed'll go to you next and then we'll do BJ and then Surfer. I appreciate your comments about Seed Siner. It's been a wonderful adventure in my life,

and I want to make it clear to anybody who may have heard of Seed Siner or is more or less familiar with the project that is not just me. There are a team of amazing Bitcoiners that have brought our project to where it is really almost too many to mention. There's my, our lead developer, Keith Hicay,

our lead maintainer guy named Nick, and there's a host of other bitcointers that have contributed skills in various ways. It is a Bitcoin cold storage tool built for Bitcoiners, by bitcoinsers, out of the love that we have for, you know, our fellow people and the passion and enthusiasm we have for this idea, this particular cold storage approach. And, yeah, that's all I have to say about that.

So something else that I want to highlight is a recent episode of the Thank God for Bitcoin podcast that I had listened to. I was really blessed to get to interact with Jordan Bush and some other people that work closely with that organization. And they recently did an episode with the Bitcoin Mechanic, someone who I was less familiar with, but it was super interesting to hear a story, hear about his involvement in the earlier days of Bitcoin, which I could kind of identify with. his account of the fork wars in that period during Bitcoin's time was entertaining and interesting

to hear about his collision with Christianity was also just super interesting even not I'm a believer but even for someone who's not I think it's just it's a great story and so yeah I'll throw out a recommendation for that podcast and that particular episode of that Yeah, that's awesome. And mechanic is awesome too. Again, everything that he's kind of been had his hands in, I think have been fantastic projects. And he's a smart guy. And yeah, I love that he continues to be involved in things that, you know,

ruffle feathers and push Bitcoin in what I perceive to be a good direction. Yeah, I don't know. Personally, I've never met him. but he seems like a solid dick corner. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, BJ, I'll toss down to you. Final thoughts, recommendations. Take it away, man.

Okay, two things. First, recommendations, and I'm going to need your help with this, Ben. I need you hold up your seed signer that you had in your hand. So we have two excellent Christmas gifts to recommend to people. Seed signer and the book, right? This tells a little bit of the story of Bitcoin. And you want to onboard people, you want to teach them. And the other thing, the other recommendation I have is get a miner.

Don't worry about how much money you're going to make or not make. Boy, it really gets you to understand. Once you first see non-KYC Bitcoin arrive in your wallet, it's a completely different philosophical experience. Yeah. It's like you've arrived to freedom. And then just final thoughts on that theme is related to why I'm so bullish. I think we're almost at the promised land. We're on that journey.

I think we're at the point where we're at the point of no return already. Yeah. That it's now just a matter of time. And I think it's also very important, especially around this time of year, around the Christmas season, when we reflect with our family and all that sort of stuff. Like, Ben, you, you don't, I don't know if you realize it. You told me once that I've touched so many people. So have you, man. And all of this right now, life is a journey.

This is you're going to look back when you're the same age as surfer Jim's clients. And you're going to think this was the most exciting period of your life. And I think we're all going to have that feeling in the future. So irrespective of we see what's going on in the world. We see a lot of chaos. I think we're going to arrive at the Enlightenment 2.0 eventually. And there is going to be bumps in the road. No question.

But I think if we enjoy the journey and we understand that Bitcoin is a big part of that Enlightenment 2.0, we won't all suffer that anxiety and we'll be able to appreciate our family and our friends and everything we're going through right now. And my hat's off to all of you. You know, Surfer Jim, I know you reach a lot of people when you come in and you talk with people and onboard them and, you know, just kind of your philosophical insight. And Seed-Syner, the fact that you're trying to, you know, knowing your background, you understand the importance of privacy. Because privacy is a prerequisite for what I fought for, which is freedom.

So the two go hand in hand. So I don't know, man. I've never been so relaxed and happy and so calm, irrespective all the noise in the world that we've come this far in the Bitcoin space and we've all found each other. And let's just share that with as many people as possible. I love it. Yeah, that's great, man. And yeah, I think you're right. I think that I don't know when we get over the hump, but we're on that path.

Exactly. There's bumps in the road. There's definite bumps on the road. There might be a mountain in front of us. That's right. But we started climbing. That's for damn sure. That's right.

So we will come down the other side eventually. And I think most of us will be around. to like actually see it because I don't think it's I don't think it's that far off it'll seem like a long time as we're experiencing it because like it everything is relative yeah but after the fact it'll be like wow we went through all of that and and here we are on the other side of things and the world is a better place and I think that's where we're headed and again it's largely in part to everything we've discussed here and and Jim I aspire to one day although you might you might you

might be retired by the time I can enlist your services, but I aspire to one day have the acquired sats necessary to have you lift my house and then build a level underneath it. So we'll see if that happens, man. I'd be happy to help. That's for sure if I can. I do want to retire from the construction industry. It's been decades. And I'm so passionate. about Bitcoin. So passionate that I think about my life in right now a couple 30 year chunks, right? I've already lived two of those. And I could easily live another one. I've got some some very close relatives that made it almost to 100. So maybe I got some good genes. And I honestly feel more optimistic in my 60s than I ever have been in my life. And I would have to

say it's because of most of my life, I was just going through the motions, trying my best, you know, working, partying, raising a family, building a house, not paying attention to the larger world, not realizing my money was getting devalued, just because it was just outside of my wheelhouse. I didn't live in the finance world or anything like that. And then I find this thing, Bitcoin. And I'm going to tell you right now, in my orange pill story, it was the third time I heard it. And it wasn't about number go up technology, although that was part of the narrative that I understood, oh, this thing could go up in value. But I heard a woman describe Bitcoin as a network that you can trust without trusting any of the people

that are involved in it. And I was just like, whoa, how the hell is that possible? And my business literally wouldn't even exist without a level of trust that I, that's worth a lot to me because it took a long time to gain that trust from repeated customers over decades. And I realized immediately that trust was just critical to my life. And I thought, wow, I got to investigate. What is this thing you can trust without trusting the people involved?

How's that even possible? And it took me quite a while to see it. And it opened my eyes to everything else. The rest of the world is so broken because money has been broken. And just learning about this one technology just opened up a myriad of other things that now made so much sense. Incentives, the incentives for news media and politicians to lie to us. It's all rooted in money. so much of the way the world works.

And listen, we're all selfish. We're all looking out for ourselves first. And that's actually a good thing. It's when people cheat to try to get ahead, that that's a problem. And when you can control money and you can pay your friends to, you know, for your narrative, you get the advantage. You get to cheat and you get away with it. You can pay judges to keep you out of jail.

I mean, it's just corruption everywhere. And all of a sudden, I saw the world in a way I never saw before. I was kind of blown away that all the way into. my 50s. Like, can you imagine living all those years not really seeing around you what's going on? Holy crap. And I've always been a suspicious person. And I've always questioned authority since I was a little kid. I was always like, but why? What does that rule for? So Bitcoin has totally changed my life. And so I am just like going back to why I'm bullish. And Ben, you touched on it. You know, the people that are doing things.

And as soon as something is created that's really good, somebody else comes along and tops it, you know? And it's, you know, not to shill the Bitcoin advisor that I work with now, but collaborative custody multi-sig is a really critical thing. Everybody in Bitcoin that's got any level of intelligence recognizes this is one of the safest ways to hold your Bitcoin. And as the value keeps going up, even people with small amounts of Bitcoin are now at much larger risk of messing something up and losing their Bitcoin.

And everybody thinks, oh, what's a big deal? Single sick? I know what I'm doing? Yeah, well, what about your family? If you mess up and you, you know, unfortunately don't make it to your old age and they don't know what to do with your Bitcoin. So this whole concept is becoming an industry standard. And I can't believe I'm sitting here able to help literally launch a type of, you know,

a custody model that every, all the experts in the industry agree is. the best way to go and I get to help educate people on this. I'm kind of blown away that I'm in this position. I feel so blessed that I can help people secure the most important asset that almost anybody's ever going to own in this world going forward since 2009 when this network was launched. So I'm just blown away. Anybody that wants to talk to me about, you know, Cloud of Custody Multisig, reach out. You can DM me on Twitter. My email is Surfer Jim at the Bitcoin advisor. So love to talk to you about it. I want to help as many people as possible until I take my last breath. So thanks for having me on, Ben. And you guys are awesome. Love hanging out with

all Bitcoiners. Seed Sonner. It's a pleasure to meet you. BJ, we've known each other for a while now. Looking forward to the next time we get to shake hands and have a steak together. Next week, right? Oh, yeah. Well, I'll be there. I wasn't sure that you were going. Yeah, I'm going to be there, man. Excellent. All right, man. Well, this steak dinner is happening. So I hope you're going to be at that. That's going to be awesome. All right, guy. Thank you. so much, Ben. This has been great. Love to hear it. Well, gents, again, all of you, thank you so much for being

here. Everybody in the chat, thank you for joining us as well. Of course, for all of these gentlemen, please smash that like button as a big thumbs up to everything that they have shared with you, the wealth of knowledge that they've provided. All of their Twitter handles are

in the show notes as well, so give them a follow. And from there, you can find everything else that they're doing. Jim, I got to ask, because I I put out a note on Noster. Are you on Noster yet? I didn't tag you because I weren't sure if you were. I think I, this sounds silly.

I think I have a Noster address, but I don't know how to use it yet. Because, you know, Liz from Las Vegas. We're going to teach you in Las Vegas. Good, good, because it's on my phone. I was up at when I met you in Boston, DJ, Liz, helped hook me up. She was all trying to embarrass me because I wasn't on Noster yet. And essentially, I really am still not on Noster yet.

But I do have a Noster. client on my phone and I would love to learn how to use it and and start working in that direction because even though I'm a boomer and I'm slow on this technical stuff, I see the value in it and I would like to try to keep up with everybody. So I'm going to try. So PJ, you could teach me in Vegas. That'll be awesome. Thank you. Anytime, brother. It be my pleasure. Awesome. Well, yeah, absolutely. So anyways, what I was saying is all of their Twitter profiles are down below. Follow them there. From there, you can find them on Noster. Well, you'll find Jim soon on Noster. then everything else that they're involved in you'll find from there.

But gentlemen, thank you all so much for being part of the show. I really appreciate the time that you took to be here. And I can't wait to see you all in person, but also you're all welcome back anytime. And thank you for everything you've done, Ben, and your dedication and sticking with us, man. You've helped a lot of us.

You really have. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right, jents. Have a good evening. Good night. All right. Everybody, thank you for being here.

Thank you for being a part of the show. Again, really do follow all these gentlemen. They're all doing great things, and you can keep up with them on all different social media, but they're linked down below, so find what they're doing. Of course, smash that like button. If you have not already, I appreciate all of you guys in the chat. I love it when you guys come along and you're part of the conversation. We see everything you're saying.

We can interact with you. We had a few good moments tonight. So thank you for being a part of that. Of course, share this on your socials. subscribe. I'm on the war path to 100,000 subscribers, hopefully by the end of 2024. That's the goal. If I can reach it before we hit before we get into another bull run, then I'm going to be

feeling pretty good about that before we get into previous all-time highs. We'll see. We'll see what happens first, but I'd love to get there. Either way, I appreciate you guys being here. A couple of things before I go. Normally I do this just on the news show, but I wanted to bring it up. coming up next in like two weeks time i've got the sat market coming up what i'm trying to do i'm building a bitcoin circular economy here in my home city of calgary we have 30 merchants on board that are all uh coming and they all like this is not they're not even bitcoin-specific businesses in the most part it's like farmers that have beef and eggs there's like barbers there's there's people

that that write children's books there's this is all these different things. They're all coming together because they love Bitcoin. They want to accept Bitcoin and we're building a circular economy. We're calling it the Saturday Sat Market. It's happening December 16th in Calgary, Alberta in the morning. It's going to be massive. If you are not from Calgary, if you can't make it into Calgary, I don't care. I still want you to amplify it. Why? Because I want to build a blueprint that can be replicated in any city anywhere. We need this. People are worried about censorship. People are worried that You're going to you're off ramps and on ramps aren't going to be available anymore.

But you know what happens when you create relationships with people, when you interact with people, when you know the guy that you get your beef from and you pay in Bitcoin, people can't fuck with you. And if you build a peer-to-peer circular economy, they could come. They could kick in the door of this market at some point. Say you're not allowed to do this anymore. But we all know each other. And that's the goal. We want to know each other. What are you going to do?

Pretend that I don't know these people anymore? Tough. We already do. So that's the goal. Help me build it. Help me replicate it. This is what I want. I think this is what you guys want to.

So let's build it. Find it on Orange Pill app, Saturday Satmarket. It's also over on meetup.com. We're going to be making a website for it. And the hope with the website as well is that every instance of a Saturday sat market happening in any city can be listed there as well. So help me build it. Let's make this first one success, and let's build plenty more.

And the last thing I'll say is I got the Christmas show coming up December 22nd. Guest list looks insane. It's going to be a lot of fun. So don't miss that. That's coming down the pipeline in a few weeks here, December 22nd. So it should be a lot of fun. Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap up here. First off, I want to say thank you guys for being here.

I really do appreciate it. Like, sub-share, all those normal things that help in plenty of different ways. If you want to help in another way, you can head up the previously mentioned sponsors down below, hallo, haul, hold of coin kite, C-door, Nunchuck, and Start 9. And if you really liked what you saw, if you watched the tutorials on the regular, and you need a little bit of additional help. Number one, actually, before shilling myself, I'm going to shill Surfer Jim and the Bitcoin Advisor. Those guys are awesome.

I love Peter. I love what he's building. and those guys are incredible. So you can absolutely go to them. If you do want to deal with me, if you want to add a sequel to the tutorial that you just watch, you can always book me for one-on-ones well. As well, there's a QR code on the screen.

You can scan right now to get to my website. And if you're listening on the pod afterwards, it's just btc sessions.ca. Anyways, guys, with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your. daily session.