BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Tomer Strolight, Brad Mills, Nik Bhatia ep270

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/bradmillscan https://twitter.com/coryklippsten https://twitter.com/timevalueofbtc 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $30 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $10 free with a savings balance of $75 or more for 15 consecutive days! https://start.ledn.io/btcsessions Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards, earn sats back while you shop. https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 BITCOIN tips: https://strike.me/btcsessions

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to this show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? We got a killer panel today. Three gentlemen, I'm very excited to have. We're going to be running the gamut. Lots of stuff to talk about this week. As always, this is live. Anything can happen, so I defer to my friend Bill here.

We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Fuck it. Do it live. I'll write it. do it live. The fucking thing sucks.

If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share. All those things are super important. Hit that boost button if you are streaming this via podcasting 2.0. And I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now.

This is the Bitbo.io dashboard. We're sitting at $19,366. per coin in a single U.S. dollar will pick you up 5,165 sats. That's a lot of sats for a single dollar. You might want to stack a few of them. 90.87% of all Bitcoin have been mined. In terms of fees, not too bad right now. Four sats per byte for the next block if you're willing to wait an hour or more.

One sat per bite should do you. So not too bad today. Shout out to sponsors of the show. ShakePay.com if you're in Canada. Easy way to stack sats. E transfers in and out. No deposit or withdrawal fees. thin spread. If you use a link down below, sign up and purchase your first hundred bucks with a

Bitcoin, they'll give you 30 bucks for free. You get the same deal every time you get a friend or family member to sign up with your link. And you can then shake your phone every single day for free Sats. They have a Satsback Visa card and tons of other programs to earn you additional Sats. So check them out down below. Up next, we have Lendon.io, awesome guys out of Toronto. and I guess they, I saw a news story today where they made a bid to, to it, and I didn't see the exact details, but they made a bid to like purchase, uh, blockfi. I don't think they got it, but, but they did try to scoop it up. Um, or something was going on there to that effect. Anyways, uh, these guys, um, I've used them a ton and, uh, they've been super helpful in instances where I have a cash flow issue. I just simply want some dollars and I don't want to sell my Bitcoin. So I'm able to deposit, get dollars to my bank account when I pay back those dollars. I get back the same amount of Bitcoin.

They've got their savings accounts. They've got their B2X. They've got Bitcoin back mortgages rolling out across Canada and soon as some select U.S. states. And they have their regular audits. And so you can go in and check all of their regular audits to make sure that everything's in order, which we've learned is important. So anyways, check them out. Start.ledden.com slash BTC sessions.

Bit refill helps me a ton living on Bitcoin. You can purchase any gift card you can imagine in a ton of different countries with Bitcoin both on-chain and via the Lightning Network. You earn stats back as you shop. You can earn additional stats back with the referral program. And in the U.S., they just started rolling out bill payments so they can help you get further onto that Bitcoin standard. Up next, Keystone.

one of my regularly used hardware wallets. It is 100% air-gapped. You never plug it into anything internet connected. It's all done via QR code. And that just kind of keeps the keys to your money safe and away from the internet. Highly recommend you upgrade to the Bitcoin-only firmware. Works beautifully with Blue Wallet. Sparrow, Specter.

Awesome. And a Bitcoin multi-sig. Yeah, check them out. I have a full tutorial on them as well. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, get in solid steel. Pieces of paper, don't cut it. So Bill Fottle at PrivacyPros.com has you covered. It just kind of gives you that peace of mind from fire damage, water damage, things like that.

So yeah, check them out. With that, I'm going to stop my rambling. I'm going to get my friends in here. I've got Tomer. I've got Nick and I've got Brad. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Very happy to have you. Let's do a quick round of intros for people who may not know you.

Who are you and what do you do? Let's go to Tomer first. A little intro, man. I'm Tomer. and I create Bitcoin content. I'm the editor-in-chief at Swan Bitcoin, and I write a bunch of stuff on my own as well, and I've made a short film on Bitcoin called Bitcoin's Generation Wealth,

and I continue to just try to philosophize as much as I can about the impact that Bitcoin's going to have on humanity through my writing and some of my speaking. I really enjoyed that film, by the way. It's a fantastic piece. If you haven't watched it, go and watch it for sure. Brad, how you doing, man? Can you give yourself a little intro?

Yeah, Brad Mills. I've been in Bitcoin since 2011 when I came in from excitement about being able to make money running my gaming computer and printing magic internet money. And I got super pumped about Bitcoin back then, started making businesses and just got down the rabbit. hole and then you know suffered the historic crash from $30 to $2 and realized like I shouldn't be putting my entire life into this thing it's a little bit early so I went back to being a serial entrepreneur sold half my Bitcoin at 30 bucks I thought I was so smart I'm like I timed that market perfectly um so I make a lot of mistakes so that nubes don't have to make the mistakes and I'm completely open and honest but all the mistakes I made during my

10 years of being in Bitcoin. And what I do now is more just, you know, magic internet money podcast. I'm, I'm an angel investor in like 20 different Bitcoin companies. And I'm just trying to do my best to support Bitcoin culture and kind of like, stay, stay solvent.

I love it. Well, dude, while doing that. Yes, I'm very glad to have you back. And that leads us to Nick. first time on the show, man. I'm very happy to have you. But do you want to give yourself a little intro? Sure. Thanks for having me, Ben. It's really great to be here. My name is Nick. I'm the author

of Layered Money. And there it is. Thank you so much. I wrote that book in 2020, published it in January of 2021. And late last year, I started the Bitcoin layer, which is a research publication that I write on Substack. And we just launched the YouTube channel version of the Bitcoin layer a couple weeks ago. So now the Bitcoin layer is a research publication and a YouTube channel focused on research, analysis and education focused on Bitcoin and Global Macro. That's awesome. I've got to dive a little bit deeper into that because I've seen little bits of it,

but I haven't done a deep dive on on. your other content yet. So very excited about that. Before we get rolling on the show today, I just want to wish everybody, including two of the guys of my panel, I very happy Canada day. I already see the comments coming through Bitcoin Xavier. P-Man, he's out there. We've got Sail Dogg. He's drinking Molson and doing shots of Canadian Club. Good to see you up there. And actually, big shout out to Bitcoin Magazine. This was a very important one for me.

And I was talking about it on the show yesterday, but I was super happy to get a stack of these. The censorship-resistant issue, and it details a lot of what went on in Canada here earlier in the year and the Bitcoin fundraiser that I had a hand in. And yeah, great issue. I'm just working my way through it right now. And yeah, so happy Canada Day.

But those watching, if you're unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish. And really simple concept to the show. We go by the three are number one, somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. Number two, we're all going to riff on that reason together. And number three, we're going to rotate to the next person until we all get a turn. So with that stated, I'm going to get us started. And I've got a reason. for being bullish that is based on an article that dropped earlier this week.

I talked a little bit about it yesterday, but I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into it. This is an article put together by Gigi. And he's just such a wordsmith with the way he puts things together. And I love his writing. And yeah, the piece is called the words we use in Bitcoin, words, language, terminology, and linguistic attacks. And the reason why I'm bullish here is that he discusses kind of how some of the metaphors and analogies in Bitcoin are imperfect. But he also mentions that we already have a bit of a historical precedent for replacing some of those imperfect metaphors with new and better terminology. And so in doing so, it helps prevent linguistic attacks.

So I just want to kind of go through a couple of the things here. And he talks about some of the terms that we all know. So wallet, a very imperfect term because we, you know, if you're in Bitcoin long enough, you realize the Bitcoin is not in your wallet. Your wallet actually holds the private keys to unlock certain UTXOs. And he goes on to say that we've started to already shift some of that language in and around the backups. You can say things like metal wallets or metal keys. And now instead we're typically talking about seed storage or metal seeds or seed plates.

And that's a pretty regular thing. If somebody said a wallet plate or somebody set a metal wallet, most Bitcoiners would be like, what the hell are you talking about? Like it would be, you'd be confused by that terminology. Multi-Siggy talks about vaults and that makes a pretty clear distinction or at least pictures somebody in their head,

they realize it's kind of a long-term savings mechanism or it's going to be difficult to move out of there. And then the most recent shift is from hardware wallet to now we're starting to regularly see, or at least we're starting to see the first inklings of the term signing device, which is a bit more accurate in what you're using when you have something, like whether it be a cold card or a seed signer or a treasurer or ledger. Yes, it holds your keys, but at the end of the day,

you're signing and approving transactions or messages with it. So he goes through a lot of this. And then he gets to one of the, what he calls quote unquote, linguistic attacks near the end. And he's talking about the idea of unhosted wallets. And I think this term is more or less universally hated by all Bitcoiners out there. And so he starts to talk about how we can shift. Basically, we should disavow that term right out of the gate. Like we shouldn't even entertain that term because there's no such thing as an unhosted wallet.

It's it it's always a wallet that that has somebody's keys. It's just a matter of whether you have your keys or whether somebody else has keys at which point you don't have that Bitcoin. Somebody has more or less offered you an IOU potentially to redeem for Bitcoin in the future. Now, one of the things that I liked when he was talking about this, he mentioned the term, he said, if anything, a wallet should be self-hosted and self-hosting is not a crime. However, we shouldn't think of hosts in the first place. A wallet does not need to be hosted because a wallet, as we've seen previously, is nothing but a key.

Private information combined with hardware or software that allows you to do something with said key. And so the terms that he used, he really likes the idea of independent wallet, which then would evoke the question, what's the opposite of an independent wallet, like a dependent wallet, or the way he refers to it here is a slave wallet. And so he's, he is basically getting to the point where we need to shift the language to denote the lack of sovereignty that comes from the term hosted wallet and not have. the term hosted wallet but refer to it as it is. I like the term independent wallet. I like the term permissioned wallet or or you know if you want to get uh down Gigi's rabbit hole the their

slave wallet or just something that denotes the lack of control that you have in those situations. So I guess in opening it up to you guys, I'm wondering if there's one terminology that UCS still using that you'd like to move away from. And two, if there's certain terminology that you'd like to move toward or any other comments in and around those concepts. So I'll open it up to whoever wants to dive in. Anybody have initial thoughts here? Sure. I'll jump in.

I'm not particularly driven by any one specific change to make, but I keep realizing, and Gigi's article is a good example, that Bitcoin is such a radical invention and everything about it is so different and unique from anything that came before, that almost any words we use are new definitions of those words. I actually, I woke up this morning. I think it was probably subconsciously inspired by this same article, and I tweeted Did some people say you can't own Bitcoin? Others say it's the first thing you can truly own.

The problem isn't with Bitcoin. The problem is the technology is so advanced that it obsoletes our words. And I think that that is a big part. And I linked actually to a different article that Gigi had in there. I wrote a short article about what ownership means. But Gigi wrote an article called Inalienable Property Rights, where he talks about the ownership concept in Bitcoin. He says owning is knowing.

And that's really different because someone else could know the same thing as you do, but you're trying to know something that nobody else knows. And so I think a big part of what is important is, and like you do a lot of this through the tutorials and training that you do, is just understanding how Bitcoin works because it doesn't work. Cars when they first came out were called horseless carriages, right? And that sounds a little bit, a little bit like unhosted carriage, right? It sounds a lot like on house.

Yeah, right? And eventually now we call them cars, which is actually short for carriage because that's where the word comes from. And so the language evolves. And we, of course, understand what a car is. We don't look at a car and go, oh, my God, this is so bizarre. There's no horse in the front. And there's some strange thing under the hood that internally combusts because we've become accustomed to it. And I think that's really the key thing that we're going through.

Like Bitcoin is so new. It's so revolutionary. Most people have never seen it before. and they don't understand how it works, but give a time, do a lot of education. And, you know, I think all of us here are like big on education in one way or another and get products going in the market. And then people won't need stuff explained to them quite as much. But it's, you know, I guess that's where I'd say it's like we've got a lot of learning

to do because it's such a radically different invention than anything else. Absolutely. Anybody else want to dive in? I like that a lot. You know, the education is my, you know, my biggest mission here about Bitcoin. And so when I'm thinking about people that are my readers are more, you know, average investors that have gotten into Bitcoin. That's, I think, the people that are generally reading my material. And when they think about, should I keep it on an exchange or should I withdraw it, they actually,

understand that that is a thing and that it's a battle inside for do I want to take that responsibility and make that decision to withdraw to my own wallet and be sovereign in the ownership of my keys. And so just that decision itself is something that we have to educate about because that's the first because people are. buying Bitcoin on an exchange. That's how they acquire it. Then they have to make that additional step.

So I really think about just setting up that dynamic that, hey, once you buy it, you have to decide, are you trusting the exchange because that's a liability? It's a second layer of Bitcoin that has full counterparty risk and full default risk. Or are you going to remove both of those things? And there is no 50-50 unless you actually split your funds 50-50. And so what I recommend is, hey, try it with $5 to $10. Try it. And don't get involved in Bitcoin if you're not going to at least try to do it yourself and withdraw. And let them.

And then my point here is that once they download their own wallet, And you tell them five times, write down your words, write down your words, write down your words. And you drill that in, once they have to write down their words, and once they actually send it from themselves to themselves and remove the counterparty risk, it is a magical experience. That's what this whole thing is about. And so get them to do that first experience and you are unleashing the potential of Bitcoin on them and everybody that they know. And so kudos to everybody that's involved in the education when it comes to that process because, and it's not my expertise. I mean, in terms of, you know, teaching software wallets and, you know, hardware wallets. I love the metal seed terminology because that is a great way to think about the gravity of what you're dealing with here.

It's words that represent ownership. And we have to take that whole thing seriously. So my education effort is more targeted at the investor that's thinking of getting involved in this new asset class. and I'm thankful that we have all kind of segments of the education force at work here. Yeah, absolutely. Brad, what do you think? What are your thoughts around the words and the terminology that we use? I like Bitcoin Zays, no keys, no cheese as an upgrade to not your keys, not your coins.

I love that. That's why I have my Twitter handle, brackets, key, comma, cheese. cheese, no peas, no cheese. I love that. It's, you know, it's to the point, it's funny. It's an upgrade. People can kind of get it. Or if they don't get it, they're like, oh, what does that mean?

And then it's easier to explain then. Not your keys, not your coins. That's the modern upgrade for that. I also think that in terms of the way that we talk about the Federal Reserve printing money, that's kind of related. I've been kind of struggling with that a little bit lately because on Clubhouse, we always kind of go back and forth about,

are we hurting the conversation by not being completely accurate? Bitcoin Tina is a stickler for being accurate with things. And he gets mad when we say the Federal Reserve prints money or money printer go burr. But I mean, it's hard to get away from that. meme because that's such a powerful meme even though it's not 100% accurate that inflation is caused by quantitative easing um CPI inflation at least like but like getting into all that stuff it's you know

if most people don't want to have like don't even understand what you're talking about they don't even understand the difference between asset inflation and CPI inflation so if you start trying to say like Well, the Federal Reserve does quantitative easing, which provides liquidity and shores up bank reserves. And it's actually the Congress that authorizes spending of money, but it's it's kind of a mixture of the Federal Reserve easy money policies and the Congress. I mean, Money Printer Go Burr is just such a better meme. And even though it's not accurate to say they're printing money and it's freaking causing problems. Yeah. You know, maybe some macro people would think we're a little bit dumb and naive if we just say money printer go Burr or the Fed.

Prince money or whatever, but I think it's extremely like it's a good way to open the door for average people. Well, and it just kind of people get the general message of it, which is that the numbers, the money itself no longer have meaning because they can, they can effectively like the ruler is broken. The measurement, the unit of measurement is broken. and you can no longer make accurate economic calculation with the unit that is the dollar, at least for any meaningful length of time looking forward. So, you know, you're right. It's that type of language in and around it, while not nuanced and accurate and detailed, it still gets the point across.

Well, and actually the money vacuum is on right now. It's not even the money printer that's on. It's actually the reverse that is occurring at, you know, which kind of the shift in monetary policy has happened over the last several months as the Fed has stopped printing money and started to destroy. Yeah, it's not going Burr anymore. It's not. And it's the opposite.

Money printer is broken. It's not going Burr. It's and it, but it is the whole idea that the Fed creates, an infinite amount of money when we're in financial crisis, because the dollar denomination is broken, does underpin the thesis for a lot of investors to buy Bitcoin. Because they understand they need a hedge against their own government currency. And a lot of people, then when they hear that, they think that we live in absolutes where we're all of a sudden going to get rid of the Federal Reserve.

government currencies and have only Bitcoin, but it's pretty clear that the dollar and Bitcoin are going to coexist for decades to come. And it just is an alternative and a hedge. Some people will take the entire alternative route and go 100% if they're in the right jurisdictions. And over time, we will get jurisdictions that will allow that sort of activity and full denomination, but for the most part, people are going to hedge some most of their savings long term in this alternative, and that's how it's going to grow over time. It's just that gradual hedge against everything that currently exists. And it can include the printer meme, because over a long time horizon, it's completely accurate, right? It just so happens that

no, technically the Fed doesn't isn't printing the money. They create liquidity. The liquidity short up drives asset price inflation, which can drive CPI over a long time. We don't have to get into that when we're meming these things across. But if you want to get into the nuance, you know, subscribe to the Bitcoin layer. We do dive into the Fed and all these things because all of that is important, too, to think about the business cycle, people that are out. allocating to Bitcoin, they should be aware of where we are in Bitcoin's price cycles,

where we are in the business cycle before just deciding to DCA or to go all in or to wait. Awesome. Well, I'm going to round out this topic. I just want to, the last thing I wanted to touch on here is just part of Gigi's conclusion here, which I found to be a nice little cap on the end of the article. all. He said, he said, Bitcoin is a return to sanity, one that is desperately needed in the insane world of QE infinity and negative interest rates. The tragic comedy of our current financial system reads like the introduction to a game show, whose deficit is it anyway, an economy where everything is made up and the points don't matter. And he went on to say, the points in Bitcoin do matter, as do the words that we use to describe it.

Bitcoin is truthful and precise in its speech, and we should strive to be too. So I like that. Again, he's pointing to the total lack of clarity on anything related to, you know, the, the, the, the alchemy that is the current financial system versus the kind of cut and dry, this is how Bitcoin works. And so I like that. I love that we can be or can strive to be precise in our speech and around Bitcoin. And yeah, I find the idea of examining our language and around Bitcoin to be interesting and seeing how it evolves over time. So I'll leave that there. I will say everybody go to daregigi.com. D-E-R-G-I-G-I-com. And this is his latest article and it's definitely worth a read.

But with that, I will give us a rotation. We're going to rotate to our next route for being bullish. I'll give a shout out, obviously, everybody in the chat, by the way. Thanks for all of your comments and everything. And I'll try and pull more of them up on the screen since we're moving on. So we're going to jump to Tomer now. And I'm going to let you give a little rant on whatever's on your mind, ever had the excited. What has you go? What I'm kind of happy about. It's not necessarily something

that everyone is happy about, especially if they're on one particular side of it. But I saw one of the comments talked about this great cleanse. And the way that I'd frame it is Bitcoiners say stay humble. And I think the lesson has been stay humble or get humbled, right? Experience ego death or have your ego slain and experience like lean into it. Go with the flow. align yourself with Bitcoin or suffer the consequences and then align yourself with Bitcoin. It's too irresistible, right? I don't know if it was you, Brad, or someone else was recently saying it's like the Borg. Resistance is futile.

And I just like, you know, it's a nicer word to say it's irresistible because it's kind of cute as well. But you cannot resist, you cannot resist the forces of sanity, as you just read from Gigi, that are finally taking over. And I think that there's lots of people who come to this with this Masters of the Universe vision. They're venture capitalists. They're deploying capital. They're creating things. And they're not grounded in what they're doing.

Like I think what's so beautiful about Bitcoin is it grounds the financial system in reality and freedom. I just see another comment there. And self-sovereignty. And there are no masters. there are no rulers in it. And you don't get to be a master or a ruler in it. So when you show up with arrogance and hubris, you get slapped down by Bitcoin. And that's, I think, what we've seen in all of these instances of these exchanges and funds

that borrowed and lent and got themselves in all kinds of trouble. They were just detached from the reality of Bitcoin. And part of this is education. But part of it is also there's this transition, just like there was from horse full carriages, horseless carriages and we could drop the word horseless because it didn't make any sense after a little bit of time. And, you know, and so we won't need to say permissionless money. People say, what the hell were they talking about? Permissionless money. Of course, money is permissionless. How on earth could you imagine that you would need to ask permission, that you

would give permission to some 70-year-old lunatic over everybody's money, right? And that's what we're migrating towards. And there's a lot of people who have to learn a lot of lessons. And I, like, I certainly don't want to pretend, oh, I know all the lessons and I'm, I'm here to teach it. Like, this is humbling to all of us. And it teaches us all that we are not in charge of this thing. And what we have to appreciate is that's a great thing. I'm glad I'm not in charge of Bitcoin. I'm glad nobody's in charge of Bitcoin. That's the beauty of the whole thing. And we're learning that lesson aggressively now. So I'm super bullish about that. It does indeed, humble you. I think,

all of us have made mistakes along the way. And the Bitcoiners that stick it out are the ones that, you know, they learn from those mistakes. They realize that, you know, maybe you don't know everything at all times. And, you know, Bitcoin never ceases to be a harsh but effective instructor. That price of tuition with Bitcoin is, it can be. be a steep one, but well worth it. So yeah, I definitely value that.

I'll let Brad or Nick jump in there if you want. Yeah, I've tweeted this morning. It's not the central banks that are the final boss for Bitcoin. It's our own ego because it is something that has taken so many strong Bitcoin advocates away. You know, they've, they just, they became big. They became important. they actually mattered to Bitcoin. And then they thought they mattered so much that they should have more power over consensus or governance or they should get more respect or they feel like they're untouchable from criticism or maybe they can use the reputation they gain to go and monetize through some other method and they just take the exit path.

And it really is like it comes down to are we making money or are we fixing money? and some people choose to make money and fix money and that's fine but like if you ego if the ego is is too big then not even too big but like if you cannot if you can't analyze what we're doing fixing money and how important that is and the struggles that are going to happen when this thing is like a religion in a way this is this is going to attract just not even saying like I endorse a religion for Bitcoin like or whatever just acknowledging the reality that it's going to attract people who will like make this their whole life and it it has like memetic like power you know like the Renee Gerard I think it has wrote the book about memetic theory

and how how like religions were used through history to control people and the psychological things that happen once when you get a strong like like memetic desire in a religion or in a whatever. Bitcoin is like decentralized mimetic need. You know, it's just the strangest thing. But it exists. It's a reality.

And because we're fixing money and because this is so important, I mean, if you're going to hold on to your ego so strongly that you, you are going to like choose to give up on the mission of, like fixing the money, then, you know, like, I guess so be it. But there's going to be plenty more people coming in behind you to pick that torch up and keep carrying it forward. So, and it is, Matt's.

Yeah. This challenge, when you put your ego ahead of Bitcoin and you're talking to the people, right, we get called being toxic maximalists who say, hold on, check your ego. Nobody's taking charge of this. and this conflict ends up arising. And Bitcoiners get accused of being toxic when in fact they're just upholding the integrity of the system. I think that this is a recurring theme.

And I really hope for all the people who put their ego ahead and in the short term haven't been able to check it, that they do find a way to check their ego and that they do find a way to come back. It seems harder and harder the further and further they get away. I don't think Nassim Telib's coming back anytime soon or Roger Bair. but I'm more hopeful about people who maybe only recently had a skirmish. On that point, though, I do think that it does make a lot of sense to reject toxicity. I think we should embrace maximalism and reject toxicity because toxic people don't actually

contribute that much to Bitcoin and Bitcoin culture. And it's unfortunately become this kind of disease in Bitcoin culture over the last couple years that the meme of toxicity was started, just like Bitcoin maximalism was embraced by early bitcoins as like, fine, you're going to try to disparage me and call me a Bitcoin maximalist. Well, I'm going to embrace that and I'm going to become a Bitcoin maximalist. And it turned into something that you could be proud of. Well, people were calling us toxic that who weren't actually toxic. We were defending from this government or this corporate usurping of Bitcoin with Segwa 2x and

the block size wars. they were calling us toxic for fighting in the battle. And people like Giacomo Zuko and Rodolfo and folks like that, like embrace the toxic meme just as a kind of troll. But then all these people came in and saw that and thought, well, I guess we're supposed to be toxic. And then this culture of toxicity has kind of grown in Bitcoin. So there is a point to be said that like we should reject toxicity embrace rational maximalism. And I hope we can continue that. I have one of the one of I think my most important pieces that I've written not as important

as Bitcoin is called Bitcoiners are not toxic. They have integrity. And I really try to distinguish between what is actually toxic out there and what is integrity. And it is the danger is that people, people say you're being toxic when in fact you're just upholding the integrity of Bitcoin. And they say, you're not being kind to me. You're not listening to me.

well, you're not compromising. You want 10 minute block times. I want one minute block times. Why don't we compromise on five and a half minute block times? And we're like so uncompromising that we get accused of being toxic in that regard. And I'm trying to point out the distinction between maintaining the integrity of a system that actually is sustainable versus being called toxic. I certainly don't advocate being cruel. Yeah.

I mean, there's a there's a difference between, you know, somebody has an idea that would effectively change Bitcoin and change the entirety of how it works and slapping down that idea early on being like, that's just not going to happen. Or here's why this is a bad idea. You can be concise in the way that you say things. You can fight like hell to protect the protocol and ensure that it is. is not compromised by, you know, whether it be 80% of the hash or the top 50 Bitcoin companies or, you know, some idiot doing hashtag change the code or whatever it may be.

You know, there's a difference between defending ideas and then just in general being a dickhead, right? like just for no reason, just, you know, making fun of somebody because you don't like their picture or something, you know, things like that I find kind of useless. The, I want to bring up one thing in this vein. And it was, okay, so I'm going to delicately touch on the Nick Carter stuff as of late. And so what I'll say is I think it's not it's not a problem for people to look at that portfolio and say, you know, I don't, you know, I don't find value and this and that and this. And especially stuff that has to do with chain analysis and normalizing that and incur and basically saying that, oh, you're going to, you're going to have to use this. Like sentiment like that, of course, I don't have any problem with people. pushing back against that. One of the things I really did like was the way that I saw Ben the Carmen interacting with Nick because one of the one of the investments that he had listed on his website was

was for that whatever the hell the wallet was. But basically it had like these, the idea was like wallet logins with your keys that also integrated chain alysis and all of this other stuff. It was like, oh, you know, this is going to be great. You're going to be able to use your wallets and then you'll be able to turn on these analysis things and make sure it's tracked and sanctioned or whatever the hell it may be. And Ben the Carmen was like, hey, Nick, have you heard of LN URL off, like using a lightning wallet to log in? And Nick thought it was a pitch. He was like, oh, you know, I'm always open to other pitches.

and Ben the Carmen just like genuinely replied, hey, I, this, that's not a pitch. This is, it exists. You can do it right now. And like, we were just talking about Gigi, but he spun up just like a proof of concept website where you could with whatever lightning wallet you're using. In this case, it was Breeze for me when I used it.

But it was just, you go to the website, you scan a QR code and it uses your lightning wallet, which you can start with nobody's permission, and it uses that specific key associated with that wallet to log you in anonymously, without having any sort of chain analysis, anything like that, without having to give ID, no KYC.

It's just you can use it as a login mechanism without all of the stuff that Bitcoiners are pushing back against. So I love seeing that type of information being brought forth, And that's what Bitcoiners tend to point to is you don't need this and that and this. This is possible without the additional draconian measures tacked onto it. So I don't know, in the, I guess in the realm of what we're talking about Bitcoin, checking your ego and everything, Bitcoiners assist with that and some do it in different ways. But I appreciated Ben the Carmen's approach there when he was talking about it.

He also was asked. I saw an interaction and they were talking about chain analysis. And it was too, I'm pretty sure Ben the Carmen that Nick said, like, you know, you're going to have to use this with your company. And Ben the Carmen basically said that he would quit if they came down to that. So, you know, in that line of integrity, I appreciate that. So, I mean, there's a lot there. We should probably move on to the next one.

But yeah, egos are getting put aside. And that's a positive thing. And Bitcoin continues to move forward without being compromised by anybody else's ego. And it's sad when we have to pay a price of someone who has been a big contributor, finding themselves at odds with Bitcoin itself and those in the Bitcoin community who are holding fast to its ideals. And people say, oh, it's a price we have to pay. We have to slay our heroes. It's, it's, you can understand, it's not just this unnecessary sacrifice. It's simply this reality check that you can't, that Bitcoin does not exist if it is in anybody

else's control, whether that's a government or a highly influential individual or some corporation. And every one of these conflicts that we've had over the years going back like through the block wars, block size wars and things. like that. It's always been people with big egos trying to say, we know what's good for Bitcoin and Bitcoin saying, leave me alone. Yeah, absolutely. Nick, is there anything else you want to tag in here before we rotate? Sure. Well, you know, there are separate missions here. And, you know, someone like Nick is someone I know, he's a friend, he helped me with layered money. There are people that are working on this decentralized open monetary network and focused on that mission alone.

So the context is I wrote a piece called Bitcoin and Crypto aren't the same. That's my way of trying to explain to readers that Bitcoin is one thing. Crypto is another because it's all companies trying to do things. Bitcoin is not a company. It's not trying to do anything. It just is. and those are separate things. And Nick has been a great advocate for Bitcoin. He also engages in crypto activities. I think that's what he was trying to say. And, you know, he's welcome to do those things.

He's also been a great advocate for Bitcoin. I point people to his energy pieces and have for a long time. I think he's incredibly eloquent. So Bitcoin and crypto are not the same thing. people that are focused on 100% Bitcoin sometimes take it personally that people are not focused 100% on Bitcoin. I am, I'm one of those people. There are people that I'm friends with that are not 100% Bitcoin.

They are still my friends. And that's, that would be my two cents on it, my two stats. Fair enough. Yeah. And I mean, I guess you could differentiate as well between. somebody that is doing, you know, dealing with private equity on the side as opposed to like shilling the coins of the week or something on a podcast or whatever it may be. But, you know, I think people are more than welcome to scrutinize, but you know, whatever.

And listen, people that invest in companies that are trying to do things that are ancillary Bitcoin technologies or, use Bitcoin and other things. It's not, I don't think that that's the villain, right? You know, shit-coining and trying to confuse people and drive them into non-Bitcoin things. That's wrong, right? I've never seen that from Nick. And so I give him the benefit of the doubt in that that that's his professional life. That's what he's doing.

He's investing in companies. So, you know, I got his back. I think Nick's a good guy and I think that he's, you know, he has a professional life and he's passionate about Bitcoin and loves Bitcoin and wants to see Bitcoin be a big part of our world and our society. Yeah. It is what it is. I'm mostly sat this one out and just kind of, it's like I don't need to dive further into. too much drama. But my,

my Bitcoin Twitter feed has, has been very much like a TMZ or something the past few weeks. Yeah, it's like we're at the despair slash depression phase of the, the cougler beef cycle or whatever. Like, it is, whether it's based on like price capitulation or just this,

I think we've been in a bear market for a year now. It's just been an odd bear market. And I think we've kind of capitulated through price and, probably going to continue capitulating through time capitulation. And that just causes people to like start arguing with each other and get testy. And like you see Bitcoiners just going after each other before the Nick Carter thing. It was like freaking out at Peter for using BlockFi as a sponsor. And like people were even going after Preston Pish and Lynn Alden for like contemplating writing about BlockFi.

Like everybody's just sort of turning on each other. And I saw this happen in January in the NFT and crypto circles because I'm like a sentiment radar. I like to like I've got my tentacles everywhere and I'm always trying to gauge where we are in the cycle. And I saw this happening in the NFT space and in the defy circles because a lot of those prices had gotten wrecked even a while back. And it was all wag me. We're all going to make it like GM, GM, GM for like a year from those guys. And then when the shit started to hit the fan, it was like, wait, are we getting scammed?

Like, who's, who's responsible? Like, let's go after they start doxing people. They start, like, like, these wag me folks started really getting crazy at each other, going after each other. So it's just, you're going to see it all over the place. It's people just frustrated. Like, everybody's getting wrecked. It's like, just, you know, unfortunately, Nick, Nick's reacting back now, like, pissed off and, like, going after Samson Mao out of, out of the, out of care. for him so like hopefully all this just blows over we can get back that nick went back into his pitch

decks and and i saw that i saw i was like man nick was going toxic maxi there for a minute he went back into his pitch decks and pulled one thing out to call samson out so you're right it is it is a sign of the cycle when people start in fighting i mean i mean really it's like and all those no coiners peter shifts are like, yes, fight. Go to zero. Yeah. We're just entertaining the no-coiners. We've got to smarten up here, folks.

Yeah. We're still here. We'll make it. But anyways, let's do a rotation. Tomer, I know you're going to have to drop here momentarily, but I did appreciate your, your... Thanks for having me. I'll probably drop now.

I think it makes sense, I won't really be able to sink my teeth into the next person's idea. So thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. Thanks for the great conversation, guys. Good to see you, Tomer. Yeah. Likewise, likewise.

I'll see you around soon. Take care as well. Awesome. All right. So I guess Brad, I'm going to keep it with you. Actually, you know what? With the way that things rotate in my screen, I'm going to go to Nick now. So sorry if I'm surprised a new bit here.

But Nick, I'm going to go to you. I'm going to let you chat a little bit. What are you, what's on your mind? What's currently on your radar? What has you excited right now? Yeah. So I do price study. That's my skill set.

When I come in, I'm a former bond trader for people that don't know me. That's the world I come from the asset management world. And as a trader, you come in, you look at the prices, you make recommendations to the portfolio managers, what to buy and what to sell. And so I'm a student of price. I'm always looking at that. And what makes me excited is that a lot of the overbought conditions that we had when Bitcoin went up above $60,000 are gone and gone completely. So I'm seeing that from, I'm really seeing it from two to three different angles. And I'll say before I get into those angles that the reason I do price study is not because,

I'm religious about this indicator, that indicator, and this system. That's not what I'm about. I do price study because it represents behavior of buyers and sellers. That's what overbought conditions are. It's that buyers are weak buyers at the end of a bull market. And then when it bottoms is when the final weak hands have capitulated. And so it's a behavioral study. And so from the behavioral side, it matches up with the technical side, which is that all the, it's that we're in oversold territory now.

And that makes me bullish. So it doesn't mean that Bitcoin can't go lower. I don't personally think that Bitcoin's going lower than the current range that it's in, call it 15 to 20 if we're, you know, striking a range. So I'm bullish because I believe that we've bottomed here this year, you know, this summer, sometime before the end of this year. And the two to three metrics that I'm looking at there. Number one is the good old 200 week moving average. This is call it a four-year moving average price of Bitcoin. It's one that has never declined, meaning that over any four-year time horizon that we look at each week that average is increasing in price. And that represents

this long-term buyer behavior setting a floor for Bitcoin. Right now, we're actually lower than the 200-week-moving average on the spot price. That happens sometimes in Bitcoin, and it doesn't last for that long. Bitcoin usually trades at a premium to its long-term average. But because it's So cyclical, it does trade at a discount at sometime. And it's trading there now. It's also trading at a discount to its realized price, which is an on-chain metric that looks at basically when Bitcoin is going to and leaving exchanges, not the market price, which is the price on the screen.

So when Bitcoin leaves and leaves the exchange after someone's purchased it and stuffed it away, that's the realized value of that transaction. We look at all of that across the network and we get a realized price that's in the low 20s. So we're actually below realized price on Bitcoin. That also does happen, but rarely and doesn't last that long. And then one more technical indicator is just these price derivatives. So one is RSI 20 and a reading of 20 is oversold and a reading of 80 is overbought. We actually were at a 94 on the weekly RSI of Bitcoin when we spiked up to 60 the first time.

So bubble conditions on a relative basis. And all of that is unwound. And it's hard to scream sell Bitcoin because why would you sell Bitcoin? All you have to do is wait a few years for it to crash and then come back up again. So it's not great investment advice to scream sell Bitcoin when it's overvalued. But we should be aware of when it's overvalued and when it might be over. So that's why I'm bullish. I think that we've hit all these oversold metrics and we're bottoming sometime this year and around this level.

Yeah. The beautiful thing about, again, about Bitcoin in general is if you sit out, if you sit through, if you just sit tight for enough time, then all of this noise in between, it just, it doesn't really matter,

right? Like, like, the first time I ever bought Bitcoin, it was like at the start of a bear market. So like all I knew were red candles for like a solid year. And then nothing but sideways chop for like another 10 months after that. And so that was,

it was, I mean, I still had conviction then, but it was, there was a little bit of that question in the back of your mind of, will this, will this return? Will this come back? And then you sit through another cycle and you're like, okay, well, there you go. And then, you know, as soon as you've been through a couple of these cycles and you've kind of seen the highs and the lows and the sentiment shift and the euphoria and then the infighting that happens at the bottom and the craziness all around. and you get to watch, you know, these shitcoins come in and out and and basically never reattain previous all-time highs in Bitcoin terms. You kind of get used to it and you can just sit back and relax and calmly build your Bitcoin position over time or in my case, just live on Bitcoin. So it's just, it becomes easier the longer you're in and around Bitcoin. It's just, but it is, it is, I will say, as much as it doesn't really matter, it is nice to get a

handle on sentiment. It is nice to get a handle on, on, oh, okay, well, you know, we're kind of getting through the roughest of the rough patches now, not saying again that it couldn't go lower, but, you know, in 12 months time or a year and a half or two years from now, we're, we're, I find it. highly unlikely that we'd be still flitting around 20,000 per coin. And who knows? I could be totally wrong. But at the same time, it would be pretty unprecedented in the history of Bitcoin

that we would just sit here forever. So again, it's just Bitcoiners have to be patient. And if you, the more you understand Bitcoin, the less you worry about these fluxions. I find anyways. And it's really difficult to, I find it very difficult to try to express to people that you have to think in a five to 10 year time horizon, it is, it's almost impossible to get people to do that. So you do have to, I will say from my side, I used to be an incredibly vocal advocate for

people that were very near to me about Bitcoin and just preach, preach, preach, preach. But I realized that actually it's only the people that are open to it that will come to you for. And so that's that's my method now. And I sit back and I produce written in video content so that people that are interested will find it because I, it just the outward, getting people to stretch that time horizon, it's actually, I found it impossible. So, you and me both, actually. It's interesting to hear you say that,

that you've gone from a tactic of like preach to every person, you know, to more of a passive. Everybody knows that you're into Bitcoin and that you're building resources and educational content. And same with my friends and family and people that I chat with. It's never a secret that that's what I'm doing. But I kind of look for those people that are curious, that are asking questions. And then I focus my effort on that individual or that group of people so that I can best allocate my time and resources for the people that need it and actually want it.

And then, you know, that orange-pilled person will be off on their own. And they'll be able, they can do the preaching for a while until they have their own method. I find that that's been the most effective for me is, you know, you get that question. You're like, okay, well, I'll sit with you. I'll chat with you, walk you through this, give you some resources. And I don't know, Brad, what about you? Like, are you still a bit of a preacher, aren't you? Well, I'm definitely an evangelist still.

I like, I do my best to try to convince people to buy a ticket to the lifeboat. and recently actually like after we dropped below 20,000, I was so convicted that this is the only opportunity that people have in my life to kind of avoid a lot of pain over the next decade that they should just buy 0.137 Bitcoin and sit on it until 2030 that I offered everybody on my Facebook like a price guarantee that if they buy now and hold, I'll guarantee that it'll be above 20,000 in a couple of years. And if it's not, I'll pay you your money back. I'm just so, I'm like extremely confident that that's going to happen,

that I'm willing to like put up 6.15 BTC to a, for 50 friends, 47 friends to take me up on that offer. You remind me of that guy from the first season of billions where he's like, I am not uncertain. Yeah, I am not uncertain. Well, look, I changed my thing there to the rainbow chart. Like the rainbow chart has to hold. The rainbow chart is all, right, Nick?

Absolutely, man. We can't go below the blue line of the rainbow chart. It's just impossible. It would literally be impossible. It's just math, guys. I just pack it in. And if it goes below the rainbow chart, just we're done. Might as well, 51% attack it and get it over with.

no i am still i but i don't have the energy to one on one with people anymore that's the thing like it's just so much time consuming like so that so thankfully there's like you all your content that i'm i've been sending people a lot of your videos lately because uh not lately over the last couple years just because people are like hey how do i use a hardware wallet i'm like oh i don't have the energy anymore to be doing this but i i really want to stress to people how important it is that they get Bitcoin and sit on it as a retirement account for the next eight years. So willing to take that bet and make people whole because at this point like 0.137 Bitcoin is not a lot of money.

I mean, every every average person can afford what's at like $2,000 or something like that or whatever. It's 1700, whatever it is or 2300, something like that. that's that's a rational reasonable amount that i think if bitcoin does what we all think is going to do that's a that's going to 50x by 2030 so that's going to be significant money for an average person that's going to be basically bankrupt or like the pensions are probably going to be there's just like i can't even think about how 10 years from now things are going to be it's there's so many possibilities of how money could break how the pension system could break, how the treasury market could fall apart, the dollar could hyperinflate.

I mean, they're going to try their damnedest not to have all that happen, but it does seem like the only thing they can do is try to kick the can down the road. And that's going to, it's going to cause problems with, with people that don't have Bitcoin. So anyways, yeah, I'm still, still super bullish on on evangelizing. And also, I'm, I'm a seed investor in hexal wallet, which, I love building these tools for Bitcoiners. So I wanted to build this tool where you could send people Bitcoin, because I'm sure you guys have done this before.

Everybody's done this where you give people five bucks a Bitcoin. They're like, what's Bitcoin? You're like, here, I'll just send you some. Like you want $5 a Bitcoin? Download this Bitcoin wallet. And like countless times this has happened to me over the years where people come back and that $5 of Bitcoin is now worth $200. And they're like, how do I get that Bitcoin?

like upgraded my phone. I downloaded the app again, but it's not there. Like constantly. So there's this, there's this feature that I've been longing for in Bitcoin to be able to be like the Bitcoin Sherpa that onboards people that does it in a way that I'm not wasting stats. So I can send out five bucks of Bitcoin to people.

And if they don't claim it, it comes back to me because it's like a, it's like a permission time thing, right? If they don't sweep the phone, it's basically like sending them a Bitcoin wallet. Yeah. And if they don't claim it, it comes back to me. So then in a year, whatever, this person doesn't care about this Bitcoin,

it's back to my wallet. And I can use it to send to somebody else, and they would have lost it anyway. And there's another feature using BIP 85 that we were coming out with, where you can, we have a, like you as a Bitcoin, the Bitcoin guy in your circle can have the master seed phrase.

Yes. And then you, we have it so that you can create, wallets for all your friends and family and they have a seed phrase but they don't get access to your bitcoin but you can restore their bitcoin for them when they frigg up and when they lose their food they lose their keys bif 85 is so powerful i love i i did my like in-depth cold card tutorial a couple weeks back and i dove into the bip 85 stuff and it's like yeah you basically have like a parent seed and then you can derive all these

child up to like 10,000 child seeds from your one parent seed and yeah they can't reverse engineer with their own seed phrase and and back up to get the the parent one but you can always regenerate as long as you know the numbered account of which one it was you can regenerate that seed no problem um and that's massive like the use case that that wallet it's called keeper and it's coming out soon it's going to be separate from hexa wallet because we had a bunch of drama with hexa wallet where there was like an insecure sort of process at the beginning people could choose a password and it was easy to guess if you had your if you had your iCloud leaked or whatever someone could easily brute for so you could lose your savings in that rare scenario but so we

redesigned it so that doesn't have that vulnerability anymore it's more like a security tradeoff but we decided to separate this out because i think the social bitcoin onboarding thing is extremely important to get the next like billion people onto bitcoin we are the bitcoin people you know like in our circle we're known as the bitcoin person and i already know like i'm already holding a bunch of seed phrases for friends that have like 200 bucks a bitcoin or a thousand bucks of bitcoin or whatever so this is just going to make it so much easier now as as people that do that we can just have one master seed phrase and not have to worry about all that and then you can be like the sherpa for all your friends and family that are trying to

to own like a little bit of Bitcoin. I love that. Nick, have you played with anything BIP-85 related? No, and that sounds awesome. And I'm super guilty of being behind on my BIPs as I'm trying to build my research stuff. But I will say that I've designed my own wallets. And I think wallet design, like designing your whole wallet infrastructure

how you generate seeds, how you store seeds. It is so interesting and important to understanding the power of Bitcoin, the power of what we can do with the technology. So I am going to, you know, the Bitcoin Sherpa idea, I love that. I'm going to think about how I can be a Sherpa for my friends and family. We all, we got to do it, man. Like we got to, we got to, this, this price drop, like you said, Nick, it's bullish because not only has it flushed out a lot of the toxic leverage and over leveraged

bubble nonsense it also is like a shuttle stop for a bunch more people to get on the bitcoin life like the bitcoin shuttle that's taken us to satoshi's arc you know like every price drop that we get like this is another shuttle stop to put more people on that shuttle and thankfully we can see that like with glass node doing their uh identity like uh, uh, uh, on chain identity clustering and stuff like that, you can see that the people that hold 0.1 Bitcoin, it's continuing to increase. Every time there's a price drop,

the people that own 0.1 to 1 Bitcoin, the numbers keep going up and up and up. So that's another thing that makes me bullish. It's not only has the leverage come out, but also people recognize that. They recognize that like, this is a good opportunity for me to finally, I'm going to get some Bitcoin.

Well, actually, If you, you know, somebody asked me about what I think about Bitcoin. I gave them this long answer about price and all that. And they're like, wait, so your whole analysis is technical. What about the fundamentals? I'm like, there's 200 million people that are exposed to Bitcoin today. That number was probably 100 million a couple years ago and is increasing every single day in an exponential fashion. that number never decreases

the price goes up and down but the actual number of people using and getting onboarded to Bitcoin never decreases on a net basis so how can you not be bullish that's super bullish an adoption curve like that

that's the only they're like what's the fundamental do you need another fundamental other than 200 million people increasing every day I also just want to comment that another reason why hexa wallet hasn't been super popular, I think, is because it's been confused with hex coin. The chat was asked about hex coin, not a wallet for the hex coin.

So we're changing the name. It's going to be deeper. And also, it's going to be two separate wallets. And one of them will be like the vault, the Sherpa wallet that you can help onboard your friends a family to help that 200 million go to a billion. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's super awesome.

I'm excited. And there's so many cool things that are happening in Bitcoin right now, even just from like a back end kind of technological perspective and being able to play around with everything. It's amazing. But we'll wrap this topic here. We're going to do another quick rotation. I think, Brad, it's your turn.

So I'll keep it with you. What are you excited about? What are you bullish on? What's up on your mind, man? Yeah, let me actually share my screen. I do a little, uh, if you share it, it'll, it'll give me a pop-up and I'll approve it. Okay.

Does that work? Um, looking for it. I don't see anything yet. Let's see. Oh, never mind. Lost permission. Okay, never mind. I'll just, uh, I'll just talk about it.

Or you can, you can, if you put in the private chat, the link, then I can, uh, I can, uh, I can pull it up. Oh, I have like a whole thing of like links. Oh, shit. Okay. Well, if you want anything up there, just drop the link and I'll pull it up. But yeah. Yeah, no problem.

So I, it's kind of actually going off of the Nick Carter space that that we did like a couple nights ago. And, you know. Thanks, yellow. One of the things that Nick said, which, which kind of I don't really agree with, was that there's going to be a lot more multi-chain stuff that Bitcoin companies are going to capitulate to. Like, look, to be honest, like, there's significant network effects that these crypto guys have built over the last couple of years, especially over the last in 2021 with A16 Z and all these high net worths, like being shepherded in by Rao Paul and Mike Novogratz and all these Asian funds building Ponzi's. games and stuff. Like, they've put hundreds of billions of dollars into propping up the network effects of defy. And they've built multiple layer one chain. So in a way, like, it's actually been good for Bitcoin in that it's prevented Ethereum's network effects from being too strong

because all these guys are VCs and they start understanding, well, if the Ethereum did it, I can do it. And I'm going to launch Solana and I'm going to like do it but faster and like, you know, do my own pre-mine. And then they'd launch avalanche, like Emin Gunsur, who used to flood Bitcoin, like, has launched his own chain, Avalanche. And like, Three Arrow's Capital is one of the big cedars of Avalanche. And that contributed to weakening network effects of Ethereum. Pause. Pause. Hold on. Yep. Because you were just talking about Three Arrows Capital is literally just dropped, uh, not long ago. Anyways, they allegedly filed for bankruptcy in New York. Oh, yeah. Makes sense. Just, just today. So. Yeah. Anyways, continue. Yeah. So like if we had it just had it be Bitcoin versus Ethereum and all that hundreds of billions of dollars of money and infrastructure went into just building up Ethereum,

then man, it would have been tough. We would still probably be like in in the zone where we'd have to worry about a flipping. Like we'd have to worry about it because they could have actually pumped Ethereum over Bitcoin's market cap at some point. but now it's like I'm not worried about that at all it's the bear market like the bubble nonsense is gone it's going to continually bleeding against going to be continually bleeding against bitcoin it's nothing but pain for the flipping narrative and defy in a bear market in a bull market when it's a bubble when the fed is keeping interest rates low and we got quantitative easing and everybody's making

money everywhere and risk assets are like going up like nonstop up only mode well Then we have a risk of Bitcoin losing number one spot in market cap to a stable coin or Ethereum because of these VCs and this like these traditional money guys. And that's why I do think that this is still a war. Like a lot of people think the block size war is done and, you know, like we're not in a war anymore. I think we're still in a war. Like the war is with not just central banks, but it's with the VC. It's Silicon Valley VCs and Wall Street because they're all kind of like in bed together. The central banks, Wall Street, Silicon Valley VCs, kind of all trying to amplify the network effects of other things.

And thankfully, we had all this fragmentation and balkanization in the multi-chain world. Because if we didn't have Solana and Avalanche and Phantom and Harmony and Cosmos and all these other layer one blockchings, that do defy stuff and NFTs, we didn't have that, all that energy would have went towards Ethereum. But thankfully, we had the, the, like,

success of Binance Smart Chain and Solana. And because we had that, it actually showed, like, there was a flippening all right, but the flippinging was, there was more users on Binance Smart Chain than Ethereum. There was more transactions on PancakeSwap than Uniswap. It's cheaper to use Solentine.

like there there's so many more things that got flippant in this 2021 cycle that really hurt the eth maxi narrative and stock the flow ratio getting destroyed actually helped in institutional investors that got sold the stock to flow ratio that that actually helped them realize that the eth narrative is even more bullshit than the stock to flow ratio narrative they were fed because the stock to flow ratio was being sold heavy to hind net worths and institutional investors in the last cycle. And then the Ethereum crowd decided they wanted to weaponize the stock to flow ratio by changing the monetary properties of Ethereum with EIP-1559 to burn fees and make the stock to flow ratio of Ethereum go lower than Bitcoin so that

you could say it's ultrassound money and it's a better store of value and it's better than Bitcoin. Well, what happened was the stock to flow ratio got invalidated because most of us were saying at the like Bitcoiners were saying like that's just a meme. Like it's not what makes Bitcoin valuable. Like don't trade on that. Don't believe that. Some of us were obviously like drinking the stock to flow Kool-Aid. But a lot of us were like, look, that's not what makes Bitcoin valuable. It's not a valid model.

And the Ethereum people started to parrot it and say like, well, this is why Ethereum is better. because our stock to flow ratio is low. So what they ended up doing was sacrificing monetary policy. They no longer have long-term credible monetary policy because they tried to make their monetary policy better than Bitcoin's. So they did a centralized intervention in the monetary policy to create a lower stock to flow ratio than Bitcoin had. The stock to flow ratio got wrecked on both Bitcoin and ETH.

And now they're just left with weaker monetary policy. So it's almost the best way that this could have. came out was institutional investors that got sold that narrative now realize that that was bullshit and they're selling eth and like eth has got more pressure on the downside as a competitor to bitcoin because now you can kind of in a bare market you can think rationally like why is bitcoin valuable and then why is ethereum valuable the eth coin well it's no longer about all these bubble logic nonsense narratives of defy utility and nft utility it's really about the monetary properties of Bitcoin versus these.

It's because Bitcoin wasn't able to come back and be like, well, we're going to be ultra- ultrasound money and we're going to start burning even more. There was no possibility of even trying that. So we're seeing like the one of the things that makes me super bullish is unlike what Nick Carter was saying

which I agree that I'm going to say like I'm trying to be a nuanced guy. I'm trying to be less toxic. I'm trying to be less like everything is a shit coin scam. I'm trying to acknowledge where there may be some good good people trying to build like cypherpunk things on other blockchains or whatever and there are definitely but like i don't agree with the way they're choosing to do it i think it's better to do it on bitcoin but he's his thesis is that like

look at what's going on obviously there's lots of money and network effects now like metamask has 20 million downloads and and that's across blockchains like um axi infinity had three million people download you know play that game on finance smart chain that's not a network effect for ethereum but it's it's like another like three million downloads of the metamask wallet and and um safe moon had like three million people hex coin has like 300 000 people so all these different ponzi schemes and and incentivized utility things and games that, you know, some of them aren't Ponzi's. They're just like daps and apps and whatever. They got a lot of network effects. Like they got a lot of people thinking about building

on the EVM. They got a lot of people downloading the Metamask wallet and getting a private public key pair over there. So to give them their credit, like yeah, they've got some network effects that, but thankfully it's not competing with Bitcoin the asset. It's not, and that's what Nick was trying to say and that sort of nuanced message gets lost by a lot of us because we just are viscerally react to him promoting an alt coin chain. But what he's saying is like where I agree with him is where he's saying, look, there's network effects over there. There's millions of people that have downloaded these wallets. People are building over there. I'm going to put some money over there. So, okay, sure, you can go put some money over there. What I disagree with him is where he's saying that we're not doing that on Bitcoin. And that Bitcoin, and that companies are going to have to start to capitulate to the multi-chain world and going to start adding support for Solana and Avalanche and Ethereum. I don't agree with that because I think that there's a lot of crypto guys, just like us Bitcoiners, do not pay enough attention and think critically and deeply about what's going on in crypto. We only really tend to focus on all

the scams because 99.9% of it is Ponzi scams and Ponziomics and a lot of crap. there's there's like there's a pool of people that are building interesting things over there and hopefully we can pull that to bitcoin and integrate on bitcoin and people are doing that so a lot of those crypto guys just look at bitcoin and they just look at like oh max kaiser's being toxic on twitter that's what a bitcoin maxi is and like you know that's bitcoin maxies don't know anything about anything that's going on in crypto and that means that all the bitcoins are going to just be sleeping on what's going on in this multi-chain sort of space and they're going to miss it. And actually, I think it's the opposite because all my crypto friends are completely sleeping on

what's going on with Bitcoin. So I just like, you know, the bear market, every bear market we have creates the like wreckage that's left behind in the wake of the altcoin Armagedons creates more hardened Bitcoiners. So last cycle, we had Sailor and Corey Clip. And like, breed love. Like we had, we had Lynn Alden, all these like strong now currently really smart and powerful network effects for Bitcoin, good thinkers and writers or whatever. All of these people that kind of came in and dabbled with altcoins in the last cycle that came in either through crypto funds or institutional crypto trading or whatever. And through the bear market realized, wait, this is all nonsense.

Bitcoin is where it's at. that's going to happen all over again. That's going to happen right now. And we're going to have so many more strong principled Bitcoiners come from the crypto bubble. Because they literally did have like 10, maybe even 20, 30 million people came in through the top of the funnel this time through crypto, not through Bitcoin. So I try to look at it like that from that lens that this bear market is actually like a conversion mechanism to accelerate people to become principled Bitcoin rationalism. or Bitcoin capitalists or whatever you want to call it. And yes, of course, some of them are going to get so butt hurt by all the scams they got

scammed on. They're going to turn toxic and they're going to join like the the pleb, uh, toxic pleb movement or whatever. Like, but like I think we're going to get a lot of strong network effects from this. And I'm already seeing like the one thing that's different this time that I think Nick and a lot of crypto VCs are missing is that and Nick, Nick invests in Bitcoin companies. So he's doing his part. I'm not trying to like bag on Nick here.

I'm just saying that this is a common thing I hear from all my crypto friends that like Bitcoiners are not doing any of this stuff. None of the stuff's getting built on Bitcoin. And it's not true because you got a spiral, you know, cash app, square TBD. That whole group is is like hundreds of developers building out decentralized web on Bitcoin stuff. They've got millions of active users like doing legitimate. real stuff. Defi has millions of active users, but they're doing Ponzi schemes. And that's it's a bear market now. And the active user numbers are just eviscerating or being eviscerated right now

because the tokens are going down in price and the Ponzi's are blowing up. So it's like if you're getting paid to step like with that step in coin or if you're getting paid to click buttons to play Axi Infinity or if you're getting paid to take loans like you were with anger protocol with Tara Luna, you're going to do it. So of course, you're going to get millions of people doing that. But in the bear market, actually, people start realizing, like, I'm not making any money doing this anymore. I'm going to stop doing it. So they stop. Yeah, it's a cleanse. It is a way for, we're going to see what the real usage is of all this defy stuff. And I think it's a lot lower than the, the TVL numbers and the, and like the, even crypto people like to say it is.

I think it's way lower. But what we have and with people building on Bitcoin now is like, Cash app and Square, they've got millions of active users, millions of merchants. They're going to, like, money is the biggest use case in the world. It is the biggest use case. And Bitcoin is solving that. We don't have to change our narrative every cycle. We don't have to go from money to blah like NFTs or defier or DAPs or it's always been money through every cycle.

Bitcoin is money. It's a savings technology. Whether you want to argue about whether it's peer to peer cash or store of value, depending on the cycle or when you came in or whatever, I've been in since 2011. It's always been both. It's always been peer-to-peer cash and store of value. And it's never changed.

It's been arguing about whose ego is bigger about what they want it to be. But it's always been that for the last 11 years. So Square is actually, like, they're going to integrate Lightning Network and decentralized identities. And they've got distribution. So that makes me extremely bullish that TBD is working on. And they just announced today that it's. officially the the the uh the the uh the the uh the three c council officially made their

a decentralized identity standard like the one that's going to be accepted and and net scape or uh chrome and apple i don't think it was apple i think it was chrome and and mozilla google and mozilla i think there was multiple people on the uh w3c that were trying to stop the kind of Bitcoin-focused DID standard. And Tim Berners-Lee came in with his veto power

and said, no, it's going to go forward. Like, this is, this is good. Let's let this happen. So that just happened. And like Fuji money is another thing. I don't know if you've seen that, but this is like the Liquid Network. There's teams building decentralized lending

protocols on the Liquid Network now. synthetic bonds and stocks and like, you know, putting tether on to be able to use your Bitcoin and borrow some tether and things like that. Like some of these interesting base layer things that did get built out on Ethan multi-coin, multi-chain defy. It is coming now. It's coming on Bitcoin layers. And TB Dex is doing it.

Fuji money is doing it. We got taro coming out, which will enable asset issues. probably not to be able to have things like a m contract style things on there but on other layers of bitcoin we can we'll get that and we've got like stillmark ventures which uh alice has been on fire people should follow her for sure she's investing in at least clean yeah she she's investing in all these layer three things like jeff booth's new fund ego death capital they're investing in all these layer two and three things um you got 10.30s 31. Like, there's key management stuff. Like, there's this thing that Nick invested in is on, like you said, the LNURL off. And then Revolt is another one that I've invested in and FTX actually invested in it to a Bitcoin company, like a Bitcoin only company. Village is a really awesome app that's like Bitcoin for kids, get village.com. And actually, these guys were going to take money from Coinbase.

That's, um, sat, sat sentives, right? Yeah. Yeah. So like the idea that Bitcoiners, Bitcoiners are going to capitulate and start integrating with all this stuff, I think it's the other way around. I, like, I'm having conversations with entrepreneurs and like level LvL.co, like they were Bitcoin and Eath. And I had multiple conversations with them. Like, dude, like this is money. You don't need ETH and all this like coin and all this stuff.

Like let's just do Bitcoin because I'm a seed investor and level. And, you know, there's a couple of crypto investors that were also. invested in level and they were like kind of wanted it to be like you know bitcoin and other stuff but he made the right choice and he went bitcoin only and village did the same thing they were going to be they were going to have money from coin base ventures and these other crypto funds because they want to be able to sell tokens wherever they can sell them and like I had the conversation with the founders like come on like we're going to be teaching kids to like pull slot machines here like do you want to do that and the conversation

was it was like hours multiple calls with them and they were they didn't want to do it but they were like yeah but everybody else is doing it you know like that it was kind of that same thing like what nick and other crypto vcs they do push that message that like oh it's a multi chain world we're going to have to do this but if you have enough bitconers like people like myself that are investing in bitcoin companies and i like to talk to crypto companies too because you can convert these crypto companies to thinking properly about bitcoin with the examples of things like TB decks and square and cash app, when you see other principled Bitcoin companies staying Bitcoin only, then it's a better example for these entrepreneurs to stay Bitcoin only. So I mean, like, I've got, I've literally got like 20 of these examples of all these different things that are being built.

The decentralized web is being built on Bitcoin. We've got to compete better. It's a little bit like further behind than the crypto guys because they had literally hundreds of billions of dollars funnel. towards them from the fomo of the last bubble and even the residual fomo from the 2017 ICO bubble. But we kind of have all this data now. We see what works, what doesn't work, what's legitimate, and what's a bunch of nonsense. And there's a lot of people building Bitcoin only.

And so that makes me super bullish that even though there's been significant network effects over there, people are building Bitcoin only and it's like crowdfunding and digital game assets like like infinite fleet on liquid network and scarcity is an auction platform to be able to buy and sell art with a lightning network there's tons of stuff man impervious AI like let's not forget that like Bitcoin only companies are are relatively like since altcoins have existed Bitcoin only companies are a relatively new phenomenon like Like when I joined and worked for Bull Bitcoin in Canada and they announced like, hey, we're coming out and we're going to be like a Canadian exchange. And we're literally only doing Bitcoin. Like in the midst of like altcoin mania coming out of the 2017 bubble, people were like, are you insane?

Only Bitcoin. Only Bitcoin. And it was like this unprecedented move to go and do that. And now you hear like, oh, there's a Bitcoin only company that you're like, okay, yeah, makes sense. Cool. Awesome. It's, it's, I totally agree with you where it's moving that direction. Like we had that time.

And don't get me wrong. All coins aren't going to be going anywhere for a while. It's just going to be kind of a revolving door of the new flavor of the week. It'll be just the flavor of the cycle is basically how it's going to go. But yeah, I think, I think. there will be moves, there will be lots of awesome stuff built on top of Bitcoin. And I think that whatever the the preeminent narrative of a particular cycle is, that's what gets the attention, if it's even needed for the next time around. So like scaling FUD leading up to 2017,

look now. Like I use Lightning Network literally every day. It's not perfect. It's, you know, it takes more learning than, you know, Bitcoin on chain. But you can use it relatively simply now, comparatively to, I mean, 2017, it didn't exist. So that leap over this single cycle was pretty profound. Right now, a lot of concerns around privacy. So that's one of them. And then, you know, as much as a lot of bit corners may not find use in them, having some type of stable coin, there are people around the world that, you know, need that functionality. in some way, shape, or form and maybe don't want the volatility for their day-to-day, you know,

storing their money so that they can pay their bills later on. So having some access to like a U.S. dollar on a permissionless network, you know, something like TARO can be useful for a lot of people. And when the point comes where people might prefer to hold their wealth than Bitcoin, they're already using it. So it's just a simple. And even like Liquid Network for something like USDT, like, you know, you don't need absolute permissionlessness and decentralization to hold a stable coin because it's just dollars in somebody else's bank account anyways.

Yeah. So something like the Liquid Network just gives you the ability to have like a Bitcoin native coin like dollar until SATs become a stable coin, which is like, you know, maybe 2030 or something. Then people do need to have these types of things. And like if we're going digital, like a lot of Bitcoiners kind of resist some of these concepts like digital game items and like NFT art or whatever. It's just like collectibles. It's just if we're going digital, if everything is going digital, it does make sense that you would want to have your Starbucks points in your Bitcoin wallet or your stocks, you know, in your Bitcoin wallet. And it doesn't have to be as permissionless and decentralized as the base layer of Bitcoin. So you can have like a wallet with multiple Bitcoin layers on it like liquid tokens and Tari assets and whatever.

That can be a that is being built, which is exciting to see lots of teams starting to build out there and funding go towards that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, gentlemen, I'm going to start rounding this out here. What I want to do before we before we wrap this up is I'm just going to get any final thoughts from either of you. And also maybe if you have a recommendation

of a piece of content, something to look at, something to read, something to watch that has maybe helped you through your Bitcoin journey. I'll grab that from you as well. So maybe Nick, I'll go to you first.

Any final thoughts? Anything you want to tag on to what Brad has been talking about here? And then any recommendation? they have. Brad, that was a great rant, man. Really, because you, there's so much to take away from the behavior, like we talked about behavior, the behavior of investors, both the ones that are going to stick around and the ones that are going to leave during the bare market phase. And you, you broke it down really well. So I'm going to definitely be stealing a couple of those things that you

said for for articles but it really is because it's it's all about seeing the people give up that were confused about what they were here for in the first place is part of bitcoin cycles i mean it's it's absolutely it's a fixture of it so um yeah i appreciated that a lot so uh yeah and to wrap on my side um i i i really offer you know appreciate the opportunity to be here with you guys and to speak to your audience because I think there are a lot of narratives out there in Bitcoin. We talked about maximalism. We talked about money printer go burr.

There's so many narratives, but there's a ton of nuance to each narrative. So my goal is to break down some of that stuff. And that's what I'm doing over at the Bitcoin layer. I'm going to plug my own content. It's going to be the Bitcoin Layer YouTube channel. That's what I'm focused on right now is helping people build out a framework for investing. So my latest video, I talk about the world economy as a global economic watch with these 200 moving parts in it. And what my goal with the channel is to break down each one of these moving parts as far as I've learned.

I haven't understood how all 200 work together. but I'm working my way through each component of global macro and I want to break it down for viewers and show this whole flow chart of my framework. It includes the rates market. Bitcoin is a fixture of it now. Wow, that's cool. And it's not just the rates market and it's not just Bitcoin. It's the economy, what I've taken away from price study.

And we're going to put it all together in this great flow chart over time to, two videos a week. Go subscribe. And I'm really excited about this launch. It's going to dovetail nicely with my newsletter, which is more research and analysis. And the YouTube is focused on education. Awesome.

I love that, man. So, yeah, if you haven't already on YouTube, go subscribe to the Bitcoin layer. I already just did. And I'm going to be diving into some of the content. I'm looking forward to actually watching a bunch of this stuff. It looks awesome. So let's toss it over to Brad as well. Any final thoughts, man, anywhere that.

Oh, and actually before I do, also check out next book, Laird Money. It's awesome. Pick it up. But Brad, final thoughts and any recommendations of something you think people should check out. Three things. Like one, I just threw up thing. If you could put that up. So one is,

I've went through reminiscences of a stock operator again recently. And if anybody's interested, like, in historical cycles of how markets work, like, go through that book, listen to it. It's great. This is, like, my sixth or seventh time going through that book. I go through it every, like, different cycle, like, just to kind of pick up new nuggets. And there's in that one, in this recent round of, of, of, of, that I picked up that even in macro bear markets like what we're seeing right now where things can look really bad in recessions and potentially war. You can have bullish things happen.

So bullishness can come at any point. You know, it can come from stimulus. It can come from sentiment shift. It can come from war spending, whatever. And so things may look dire, but the market can just kind of shift on you. So yeah, like Nick said earlier, just what's the point? If you think Bitcoin's going lower, it's like, what's the point of selling it? Because you don't know.

And at any point, it could go higher. So like, I'm not selling any Bitcoin. I'm just going to buy more as it goes down. And I, like, we're all convicted on Bitcoin for long term.

So I would say, like, it's stressful right now to be, to be holding Bitcoin, especially if it's a majority of your net worth. But the other thing is, um, let's,

like come hang out with us on clubhouse like we're on clubhouse 24 seven literally like there's a hardcore group of bitcoins that have been on clubhouse for like the last two years and we talk about macro we shoot the shit we talk about random crap we talk about bitcoin obviously but it's almost it's almost like therapy like in a bear market it's like a way to commiserate with your friends so if anybody wants to join us on clubhouse we're literally like always there chatting and having fun joking around sometimes we bust each other's balls and stuff but um great great place to kind of hang out if if you want to join us just cafe bitcoin or mastering bitcoin today are the rooms but that and then this lastly is geyser grants it's this project that i'm working

with geyser they're going to they're doing a bitcoin lightning network powered fundraising this guy mick and cellios they're building um they're building out like bitcoin fundraising and this is like where i want to kind of put some energy towards it being like this the kind of like social layer for Bitcoin during the bear market. So if anybody has any interest in funding people that are doing stuff for Bitcoin culture, like artists and podcasts and books and people like BTC sessions, hopefully you can throw up a Geys are there. And like, you know, you're creating content, you're contributing to Bitcoin culture. We don't do enough of a good job as Bitcoiners to like group together and support each other. Like even though there's tons of

people supporting each other in Bitcoin, the crypto people have put way more energy into like, weaponizing that energy. And so like we're trying to weaponize that energy now of Bitcoin culture and contributing to Bitcoin culture. And while we don't have a pre-mine like, like Ethereum Foundation has with Gitcoin to be able to just give free money out to pay people to show Eith on Twitter, we do attract some funding from anonymous bitcoinsers, just like Bitcoin Beach. There was an anonymous bitconer that donated.

There is an, same with like H. Human Rights Foundation and open sats. We got three Bitcoin already in this thing. So we got three grants open right now. So if you, if you're somebody doing Bitcoin education or if you're building a Bitcoin business or doing anything for Bitcoin culture like art or music, if you got like a rap song or like a heavy metal band or whatever and try to build some Bitcoin tunes, just submit to this and, you know, come and come and check out Geiser and keep, keep watching Geyser because I think it's going to be a super important place for for us to make bitcoin uh you know socially you know more more uh coalesced awesome i love it man i'll uh i'll i'll be sharing that around i i uh anything to help fund

and uh the creation of more bitcoin related education content you know resources all that kind of stuff i love to see it so um with that i will round it out guys I thank you so much for spending time with me Friday evening and thanks to Tomor as well but yeah I really appreciate both your time and you're welcome back anytime as well thanks Ben good to see Brad as well thanks guys yeah thanks Nick thanks Brad Nick thanks Ben cheers guys happy Canada day eh you too man talk to you soon awesome all right and everybody watching thank you so much for being here if you're in Canada of course happy Canada Day.

Hope you having a good one. I will be seeing you again. I'm heading to BC soon. I'm going to be in Vancouver and I'm running my workshop on July 16th. So I've got a beginner workshop first thing in the morning from 9 to 12 that day, all about self-custody.

And then in the afternoon, I'm doing a deep dive on this bad boy, the cold cart. So I have closed ticket sales. but if you're still looking, you can always shoot me a DM and I can see what I can do. I doubt that I'd be able to get a cold card delivered to myself to bring to the event. But if you have one already or if you want to order one yourself and then come to the workshop, then that might be possible.

So with that, I'm going to round it out. Thank you so much for watching. Please do like, subscribe, share, all those things. Super helpful. They really do help the show. and get it in front of more eyeballs. If you want to help this show in another way, you can hit the sponsors down below.

Shake Pay, Lead, Bit refill, Keystone, Bill Fottle. They're all down here. If you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. Strike.Me slash BTC sessions. You get there, type in any amount you like. Hit the tip button. You'll see a lightning invoice,

or if you prefer, tap the arrow to the right. And see your regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. See you guys next time for your daily session. session. Total the Bitcoin.