BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Tone Vays, Jaime Garcia, Trent Dudenhoeffer, KC Hodl ep225

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

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Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. It is Thursday. Typically, we do this on Friday, but hey, a day early because tomorrow is New Year's Eve. So we're back for another episode of Why Are We Bullish? We've got a killer panel. Excited to have everybody this week.

So we're going to dive into it. Plenty to chat about lots of interesting things. And some of the reasons that we give today, may be, it may encapsulate the entire year. That's definitely going to be on the docket for me. I'm going to chat a little bit about what has me excited this year. As always, this is live. Anything can happen.

So I defer to my good friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. Of course, if you haven't already hit live,

like, subscribe, share all those good things. It really does help this get in front of more eyeballs. And without further ado, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we bring in our panel, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. This is the bitbo.com. We're sitting at $47,060-odd dollars per coin. Single U.S. dollar will pick you up $2,125.

Sats over 90% of all Bitcoin, 90.07% of all Bitcoin have been mined at this point. And fees are up a little bit today. 16 stats per byte to get into the next block. Even if you're willing to wait an hour, nine sats per bite. I haven't seen it like that in a few weeks, a couple months. I can't recall. But it's been a while. It's been a low fee environment for a while here.

So yeah, I don't know to tell you whether to wait or not for doing things like opening. lightning channels moving around funds. Yeah. You know, maybe set them low and throw some replaced by fee in there just in case. I think that's all I have to cover with Bitbo, but let's do a quick run of the sponsors and we'll bring everybody in.

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uh with that i will stop rambling uh let's get our panel in here i'm going to bring in uh jamie trent dawn tone uh gentlemen welcome to show thank you for being here let's do a quick round of intros uh and and uh i'll just go down the line here just let people just let people know who you are what you do uh let's let's start with uh jamie can you do a little intro for yourself yeah for sure thanks ben for inviting me uh hyma garcia you can always also call me jammy it's okay terrible pronunciation my name is like one of the hardest to like for people to get right because uh like it just the jes in spanish confuse everybody um i'm hey i'm i'm just a pleb um salvadorian i'm part of the diaspora that uh sends remittances down to

El Salvador. And I'll have to admit, I'm super new to Bitcoin. And so when we knew that El Salvador was going to have Bitcoin as a little tender, my family and I, we all just quickly got up to speed. And, you know, I'm not going to lie, like, just did a bunch of BTC sessions to get up to speed. And here I am. And so now my main focus is teaching Salvadorans how to use Bitcoin. And so I host Twitter spaces every week in Spanish and I get people to ask simple questions and I you know teach them and walk them through what it is what it is Bitcoin how to use a wallet and so on I also host a monthly spaces on emerging communities in Bitcoin so the first one I did is Bitcoin jungle Costa Rica and they're modeling a lot of

of what they're doing after Bitcoin Beach. And so I'm going to be hosting Bitcoin Lake in Guatemala in January. And then we got Bitcoin Beach, Brazil for March. And in April, we have Bitcoin Ecuador coming up. So I think those are all super exciting projects. And yeah, I mean, other than that, I'm like I'm the new president of Real Bedford FC supporters club in my city. So that's like a brand new title.

But yeah, super excited to be here. Thanks, Brent. Awesome. I'm glad to have you. And I'm going to have to ask you about some of those events and everything. I'm curious, particularly about Costa Rica, because I'm taking a peek at that. But we'll chat a little bit more about that. Let's go down the line.

Trent, can you give yourself a little intro who you are, what you do? Yeah. My name is Trent Dudenhofer. I am a certified financial planner at Watchdog Capital. Watchdog Capital, we are an SEC and FINRA registered broker dealer. And we believe in Bitcoin is money. We believe in a Bitcoin future. So I do what every other financial advisor does in terms of advising on your investments,

your tax planning, your state planning, all that fun stuff. But I actually understand Bitcoin. And I understand why our clients hold it. I want you to hold it as well. So we incorporate our clients, Bitcoin holdings in their financial plans. We are also licensed to do investment banking, secondary transactions, all kinds of different stuff. So really exciting developments going on at Watchdog and really excited for this conversation. And thank you for having us all on, Ben.

Awesome. Glad to have you, man. Let's jump to Tone. Tone, give yourself a little intro for anybody that's watching that may not be familiar. Hey, guys. My name is Tom Vase. Come from the traditional Wall Street environment. Started on shows just like this, back on the World of Crypto Network around 2015. Eventually it led to my own YouTube channel in 2016.

That channel was focusing a lot doing news shows and law shows and educational shows, along with Bitcoin Price Analysis Shows. Lately, it's mostly price analysis shows. and then going around the country, educating about Bitcoin. I focused more on the why people should get into Bitcoin. And that's why I love your channel when you started then, because you focused more on the how versus the why. So it's very, very complimentary.

I've been recommending you for quite a while now for people to subscribe. It's a little amazing job. Dude, thank you. I appreciate that. And I'm sure more than a few people that have been commented. and viewing have been funneled your way. So thank you for that. Let's jump lastly to Don.

Dude, a little intro, who you are, what you do. Yeah, thanks, Ben. So I'm Don, Bitcoiner, class of 2016. I'm the co-host and co-founder of the Kansas City Bitcoin Meetup group here in Kansas City. So that's been really fun. We started that earlier this year, kind of right before the Bitcoin conference, and found out that like three of us there, the first meetup, we're all going to Miami.

and Trent was actually one of them. So we got to hang out, get to know each other in Miami, which is just kind of a crazy thing to happen about three weeks before the conference. So that's been really fun to grow. I'm a former technologist, and now I just got rid of my old company, sold that earlier this year, focus on Bitcoin full time now. So in addition to the meetup, I do some angel investing in Bitcoin companies and contribute to Bitcoin magazine every now and then.

Awesome. I love it. I love to hear the Bitcoin brain drain, all of the stories of, I used to do this, but now I'm just doing Bitcoin. which is fantastic. So gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Everybody watching,

thank you for being here. If you're unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish and pretty simple premise to the show. We go by three R's. Number one, I guess is going to give a reason why they are 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're all the way through the panel. So I'm going to get us started this week with my reason for being bullish. And I'm going to say that this is kind of more of a given that tomorrow's New Year's Eve.

It's more of a reason for being bullish, which encapsulates the whole year. And it's a bit of kind of like a personal experience, I guess, in relation to the channel. So first up, I'm going to, I'm just going to, I've got a little accompaniment here that I'm going to bring up on my screen here. So over the course of over the course of 2021, 1.85 million views on the channel, which is great in itself, given that I'm doing mostly tutorials. But what made me more excited about this is what people are watching. So I did a video on how to set up a node. And there's like 73,000 people that have watched that. which for a pretty niche thing, that's a lot of people watching a tutorial on how to run a Bitcoin node.

And to me, that's very exciting. Also, how to run in Lightning Note, again, 55,000 people diving into running Lightning Nodes just on this particular tutorial, which, again, people kind of taking that self-sovereignty or taking the sovereignty into their own hands and running a Bitcoin node, running a Lightning Node, That's pretty damn exciting to me. Another one that stood out of some of the top viewed ones for the year was BISC, decentralized exchange, peer to peer, no KYC. Again, like 46,000 people watching that one. And so what I'm noticing from kind of viewership on tutorials is people diving into things that I would have thought would be pretty niche and tech. technical for a lot of people, but there seems to be a thirst for that kind of knowledge and that type of content, which I wouldn't have guessed. I would have thought that and and it's true that yes, a lot of people are watching like basic wallet videos, but the node stuff, the the, the BISC videos, the coin join stuff. And, and you know, the self-custody hardware, multi-sig, all that kind of stuff,

there seems to be a lot of interest in that kind of content. And that gives me hope that while yes, a lot of people will defer to custody solutions and, you know, that's totally their decision.

There is a pretty hard core group of Bitcoiners that seems to be growing in diving into these more desensual, decentralized self-sovereign options. And while I don't think everybody has to do this, it's important that they can. And there's a large number of people that are discovering they can.

And it's not as technically difficult as they may have imagined. And so that's kind of why I'm bullish, not just this week, but this year, looking back at 2021 and seeing the kind of viewership on those types of videos. Yeah, it makes me pretty excited and happy to see people diving into Bitcoin in this way. So I'm going to open it up to the panel and maybe just ask in general for whoever wants to dive in. What kinds of questions and what kinds of, I guess, technical questions around Bitcoin have you guys encountered, given that you're in and around the Bitcoin space? what are people asking you? What are people trying to learn about? So whoever wants to dive in, feel free. Yeah, I think for me, the most, usually the first question I get asked is how do I get my, you know,

Bitcoin in my own custody? So how do I own my own, how do I hold my own private keys is usually kind of step one. Once they've been down the rabbit hole a little bit, they start to realize I definitely don't want to leave my Bitcoin on in exchange. How do I, what's the best way to, you know, hold my own private keys. And so then they typically figure that out. And then kind of the next progression seems to be, well, now how do I run a node? Well, now how do I run a lightning node? And it kind of just goes from there.

But I think, you know, multi-sig is definitely something that I think has grown a lot in popularity. And people are starting to use more and more. We talk about that a lot, you know, with with early new bit corners kind of trying to drive them in that direction kind of from the beginning for the most part. What's been your experience with the people that have? have dove into multi-sig. Are they looking to do it as a kind of like to do it themselves or are they looking for

collaborative custody to kind of idiot proof it for their family? Like what's the approach here? Yeah. I'm going to interrupt because this is why I'm bullish. So let's save the multi-sig topic for like. Okay. All right. All right. We'll dive into multi-sick momentarily. So, Don, I will ask you, though, on the topic of custody, the initial like holding my own keys, do you get questions

about like, you know, what kind of wallet am I going to use things like that? Like, what are you seeing there? Definitely. Yeah. Usually the first thing is, you know, which kind of mobile wallet should I use first for a small amount? And now there's so many great options over the last year, especially with the lightning wallets coming out, blue wallet, moon, so many great options. Usually people like to play around there, kind of get their comfortability up, and then go to an actual hardware wallet of some kind. So, yeah, it's always fun to talk about, you know, the benefits and disadvantages of each wallet, whether it be a treasurer, a ledger, a cold card, so many different ones.

And I think a lot of times people just order kind of whatever's cheapest usually has been my kind of what I've noticed and try it out and then kind of figure out what they like, don't like about it. And then when they get ready to go to the next step, they kind of have a little bit of familiarity with the different options. So I've got a question regarding El Salvador. I'm wondering what, so there's, there's Shivo. Chivo is the government wallet.

It's, if I'm not mistaken, on chain, there's not, it's not lightning enabled. correct? So yeah, Chivo is a funny animal because I think, and I wouldn't really refer to it as a wallet at all. I think it's an app. It's basically like a government bank, which facilitates transactions within the Chivo ecosystem. And in that sense, it works very well. It does have, have the capability of lightning and they have recently upgraded their app so that it functions a little bit better. One of the things that people experienced when they went down to the conferences was a bit of a pain point between the traditional lightning wallets and Chevo.

A lot of transactions will get stuck. And so it seemed like the on-chain transactions were a little bit better. But of course, with on-chain transactions, we know that there's a bit of a weight. And, you know, it just sort of defeats the purpose of having lightning fast transactions, right? And so, yeah, it's a bit of a different animal. And, you know, I have been encouraging folks down in El Salvador to, sure, use Chivo for some things. but definitely not store a whole lot of their savings on it. And, you know, I've been looking back at some of your tutorials

and some of the referencing a lot of what you've done in order to get people to use some alternative wallets, right? But yeah, definitely it's when it comes to Chivo, it's a different animal. I think, like, you know, we could talk about this the whole time we're here, So I won't monopolize any more of it. But, you know, and just throw in that some of the things that I have been on and that Normie's asked me usually is like things like, like, what does it mean to mine? And like, how do you get Bitcoin?

Things like that. But then after, and a lot of them just get hung up on that. But after that, it's like, how do I get a wallet? Which wallet should I use? And then I've been working with some, actually in the audience, there's Dax Sosa from El Salvador who said, who I, I think he's maybe not, if it's not the first node in El Salvador, it's like one of the first. And we use your video on how to set up a node for him to set up a node in El Salvador. That's actually so exciting for me to hear. And like he just said like, hey, greetings from El Salvador.

during the comments so you know shout out and one of the things that he's doing he's actually because we know that the Chivo point of sale system was having a lot of issues even more than the personal wallet he's working with

folks like usually small merchants to set up BTBTC pay server solutions using his note as kind of like the point And he's encouraging, well, he's not also learning, but he's encouraging other people to set up their own nodes, their own lightning channels in order to set their own POS systems so that they don't have to depend on these centralized options that, you know, I guess they were necessary evil, you know, to have like that opening mass adoption. But I think that we can all agree that it's, you know, something that is almost the antithesis. of a Bitcoin, right?

So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely. And it kind of sounds, it almost sounds like the Chivo wallet was having like liquidity issues with with the connectivity of their, their lightning, the lightning portion of it. Like if they were having trouble getting, getting lightning transactions to go through, I imagine it's, it's difficult to onboard, you know, millions of people and have a reliable set of inbound liquidity for millions of people right out the gate. But regardless, yeah, I highly advocate that people go to non-governmental wallets, if possible, have self-custody. To know, I was going to ask you, when I saw you in Dubai back in October, we did a little lightning, workshop at understanding Bitcoin, which again, thank you for having me out for that. That was

great. I'm really glad you came. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I really appreciated the invite, and I'm really glad that I made it out. Funny enough, when we were about to do the lightning tutorial, I was going to use Moon Wallet, M-U-U-N, and it was like the only time that for some reason, the back end of moon just wasn't working literally just for the entirety of that session. And then it immediately was back to normal. So unfortunately, I didn't get to use that as the demo. But we did get to play around with lightning. You had dove into lightning like quite a couple, like a couple of years prior and had like

not the greatest experience, obviously because liquidity was low and it was a little bit more difficult and fees were high and it wasn't super clear. Have you touched on on Like played with any lightning wallets since or are you still kind of like sideline it until it gets a little bit easier? I'm also kind of Sidelining it actually I've I've used some of the custodial solutions like Blue wallet and that's very smooth But I've also tried using some of the non-custodial solutions like Phoenix And I was not happy about that at all Every time I went to open a lightning channel it was charging me three thousand

Sats, which I thought was a little bit high considering the fees have been almost nothing. And then there was one time it charged me 9,000 SaaS to open a channel. And I'm like, no, nope, I'm not doing this. I'm going to wait. And I'll get back to the near future. I'm not using my Bitcoin to buy $5 transactions anyway. So it's fine. I don't really need it at the moment.

Unchained fees are pretty damn small. it's good for the transactions that I deal with. And, but I won't get back into it. It's not my to do list early next year. Yeah. I think, I think you'll find, and again, it depends on the types of transactions you're trying to do. Like if you're sending, you know, hundreds or thousands of dollars, lightning is not really

like the initial, like an on-chain transaction is, is still completely affordable enough for that type of stuff and the liquidity depending on on the wallet that you're using you may end up incurring some on-chain transaction fees anyways as channels get established so um you know and there's definitely been some issues in and around that um i really do enjoy moon but some of the stuff that i found with moon is if i receive it it's so easy to receive payments like immediately with zero setup on Moon. But then later on down the line, if you go to send a larger transaction, even if you're going to send like a hundred bucks out and you've received a lot of payments on Moon,

just the way that they work it in the back end, they're doing, I believe, submarine swaps. It ends up that it ends up requiring an on-chain transaction. And there's so many UTXOs involved in it that ends up being a pretty substantial fee if you come across that like in comparatively. We're talking about the same more right. It's pay with moon is they're also doing that's a that's a separate one. So so yeah so pay with moon is a different

company and then moon wallet spelled M-U-U-N is a totally different there seems to be a lot of that happening in Bitcoin. Yeah. Like lightning labs has the the at lightning Twitter handle and like there's a little bit of conference is called Bitcoin. Yeah. It's a confusing space.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, Trent, I want to get a little bit of your input on this as well. Like without diving into where we'll be talking about multisign a little bit. What have you encountered this year in terms of people trying to learn various things, whether it be wallets, lightning, hardware? What are some of the things that you've found with people learning about Bitcoin this year? Yeah, well, in general, general, just a lot more curiosity, you know, a lot more people wanting to plug into the network.

And then, you know, I feel like mining gets so much attention in the media, probably because of its energy output. And, you know, people will think, okay, well, if I'm buying Bitcoin, I might as well mine it, right? Like, that sounds like the best way to go about it. And at that point, I'm like, all right, pump the brakes a little bit. Like, all you really have to do is download Swan, you know, get a recurring buy. going every single day or every week at the very least. And then download this blue wallet here. And then when you feel comfortable, like write down your seed fray, send it over to blue

wallet. And then you'll be holding your own keys. So yeah, a lot of people go for that mining right off the bat. But it really doesn't take much to be sovereign with Bitcoin. And that's like the beautiful thing about it. So it's just those baby steps. But I think that getting them on the right exchange is arguably the most important. you know, I used to send everybody to Coinbase.

Like, that's how I started to. And now Coinbase is the Jetcoin Casino, as a lot of people would say. You know, I can only talk so bad about them because that's how I started buying Bitcoin in the first place. But with other options like Swan or River that only have Bitcoin, I think that that's a great way to kind of mold a new coiner and to only buying Bitcoin and staying away from unregulated securities. Yeah, two things about what you said there that really stood out to me. Number one is the baby steps, right? You can throw everything in the kitchen to sink at somebody when they first walk in the door,

but they're going to turn right back around and leave. And so getting those small attainable goals that they can just reach out and grab and then move on to the next, I think is very, very important. something as simple as, you know, get off zero and like you say, a set of recurring buy. And then the next step is just some self-custody, like learn how to use a wallet. And then you can hit the ground running. But the exchange is an important piece of it. And you're right.

If you throw somebody into a situation where the first thing they're greeted with is a hundred other coins that are treated with the same amount of what's the word I'm looking for with that that they're at equally as viable as Bitcoin it's you know it's setting somebody up for failure promoted as equally viable they're not but they're promoted as such and yeah the main base is one of the big promoters of everything basically yeah yeah they have all the courses Until the SEC goes after it is for security and that ripple gets removed, you know, like it's from Coinbase. Like it's the pool is over there. Yeah.

Yeah. It's absolutely. And it's, it's, I'm wondering when that's going to, I mean, obviously regulators are slow to act. And I'm not like a huge. I air on the side of people making their own mistakes, but at the same time, like, regulators are going to regulate. It's going to. it's going to happen yeah it puts us it puts us in a tough space i mean i was one of the first to drive that bus on youtube warning people that these are all unlicensed on registered securities

starting with ethereum uh back in like 2016 17 days and uh it puts us in a tough place because on the one hand we are pretty libertarian and uh we don't want the cc to exist but on the other hand uh they weren't created for a reason with a job to do they're not very good at their job. But I don't understand how people think that a world of a billion tokens, the better world. Like, I don't get it, but that's just me. Yeah. So Ben and Trenton, this is like one of the biggest pain points that I hear from Salvadorans is like, where, which exchange can I go to? And actually, the Salvadoran diaspora, they, a lot of, a lot of the time. they asked me. I got all my funds stuck in

Binance or Coinbase. How do I get it off? And it's like, oh, and I had a lady, she's just a local lady. And she went on on Coinbase. She bought Bitcoin Cash, I think, or Bitcoin SV. I can't remember which one it was. Thinking it's like, well, I'm going to buy this kind of Bitcoin because it's a lot cheaper than the other one. And so then I can, you know, and, you know, like, and those are the sad stories because like you know the people run into

they're not like scams but they don't have enough knowledge to discern the difference and then they get themselves in trouble and so then what I do recommend to people just like Trent you know if they are in the US stay with Swan or strike if they're in Canada I recommend bull Bitcoin or Shake Pay I know Shake Pay has Ethereum but it's

very different to like there's almost like okay no i i i'm not going to mistake ethereum for bitcoin as v right so um and so the simpler it is the better and um and because this is like number one pain point with a lot of salvadorans in the diaspora and um yeah i feel you're Trent for sure well while you're speaking let's let's turn a negative into a positive end and uh i'm going to actually use this opportunity to segue into your reason for being bullish because you're you're I think you had floated to me that you wanted to talk a little bit about El Salvador in and around that and since we're on that topic do you do you want to just segue right into your reason for being bullish yeah definitely so you know obviously I'm bullish on El Salvador

I think lots of things will happen this year I think that the honeymoon period with Bitcoin is over. I think that a lot of people are kind of questioning the government. But at the same time, I think that, you know, achievable and not functioning the way that it was intended is also forcing people to really learn about Bitcoin, and it's forcing them on to other things. And so I think that that's a blessing in disguise, almost,

because it's making people think about it differently, right? And so I think, you know, I'm really excited about, you know, Salvi's learning about this and getting proficient in this. But I'm also bullish on, like, you know, hopefully Bitcoin companies and developers go down and stay down and set up shop there because it's like it's a live experiment. And, you know, if you are a Bitcoin company, if you are a developer, even if you're not a Bitcoin company, but a FinTech company. knowing what's coming next in Bitcoin, you probably want to be on the ground looking at this, you know, live research project about this ecosystem and how in testing. I'm also bullish about the U.X improvements that are going to come through. But the number one thing that I'm really bullish, and it just just dropped like a few days ago.

It's when I believe Jack Mullers and HRF, the Human Rights Foundation, Gladstein also. announced this bounty to create a wallet that can print a QR code that is privately, where people can privately receive tips and where you can choose to transact just like cash, where it's private, it's an e-cash-based kind of a transaction where nobody needs to be involved, K-Y-C-free. and it's also pegged to the USDA or a fiat. And why that's necessary, it's because, I mean, as much as we like to think that, you know, we're going to be on a Bitcoin standard, I think that for a lot of emerging economies,

for a lot of economies where their money is debased and inflation is runaway, they still need to be able to peg it to a point of reference that is relatively known by and accepted by everybody else. And I think that this bounty is there because it's not an easy problem to solve. But I think that the problem has been put forth for developers to look at, for people to maybe think about new ways to do it. I can think of some established wallets that may be on track to do it. I think in some ways, strike kind of does that in El Salvador in the U.S.,

But I think that, you know, it's it's the KYC free bit that needs to be resolved and the privacy aspect. And so I'm super bullish about it. I don't know if we're going to find a solution in 2022, but I'm really excited. I can't wait until somebody finds a solution for that. That's excellent. I love seeing people put up bounties for everything Bitcoin, because if anything, we've learned, whenever there's an obstacle, Bitcoin's kind of like water. It just goes the path of least resistance and kind of finds a way, right?

There's so many great minds focusing on this stuff. And it's really encouraging. I'm curious, have between Trent, Don and Tone, have any of you guys been down yet? No, it's on my list for next year. Yeah, unfortunately not. I really feel bad about missing it in November. I was at a different conference in Malta had committed to that. It was right after

our event in Dubai. And it was my second event in Dubai, not the one you came to Ben. And yeah, I feel bad by not going there, but next time there's an event there, I'll absolutely go considering it for January, but I'll be in other Latin American countries by the way of help come through Al Salvador.

But I definitely want to come. And that really is probably the most bullies. thing that happened to Bitcoin this year with El Salvador. I'll comment on it real quick. Though when the news broke, I was not as enthusiastic as I am now and as I was after like a week or two after thinking about it some more after, you know, watching other people comment on it. My initial reaction was this is not the best thing that could have happened.

I really wanted to see El Salvador the announcement. I thought it would have been better if they took the Michael Saylor route. Like, hey, we're just not going to criminalize Bitcoin. We're not going to do anything. You want to spend it. You can spend it. We're not going to make it legal tender. But we are going to start putting government treasuries into Bitcoin.

That's what I thought would have been the best round for El Salvador, you know, not pissing off the IMF, not pissing off the United States. Not creating this, you know, backlash, like how you're going to make everyone in El Salvador use Bitcoin because it is a developing nation. In hindsight, after giving it a lot more thought, it was, you know what, this was the best thing. I know all of those things are going to be kind of rough. But now it's easier for me to stand on stage in a developing country speaking about Bitcoin, feeling comfortable that I can say, Well, I know you may not like it, but I'm speaking about a currency, which is legal, tender, an actual nation. So it's like me speaking about the South African Zah, right?

I like any other currency. So it did create this thing where now it's really hard to accuse Bitcoin of being like for only criminals and only used for bad stuff. it becomes a very silly argument because the counter argument is why you it's it's a reserve currency of a legitimate nation. You can't say that. That's not true. I can't be true anymore. So I think that part of it is incredibly bullish into the future.

And part two as to why I really now like what El Salvador did is that other Latin American countries are looking and probably seriously considering. I don't think this spreads to other parts of the world. Like we all thought it might be like a country like Liechtenstein or like a Hong Kong or like one of these countries to adopt it. But now it's going to be other Latin American countries because it will make it easier to trade with El Salvador. They already speak the same language, which is another important element in the equation. They're neighboring nations. And all the other Latin American countries are watching and pretty soon there'll be a follow. I'm wondering how this, uh, the whole bond thing is going to, uh, how that will

gradually play out because, I mean, one, the, the, as they start to, to make payment. So, so what it's, it's basically 50% goes into Bitcoin. the other 50% is going into like mining infrastructure and various other things. And after, so there's a six point something percent coupon on it. And after five years, you also start getting paid out 50% of the appreciation of the Bitcoin quarterly, I believe. I mean, especially as that appreciation payout starts to, to loom and and begins to actually be paid out, that's going to be a pretty wild thing to watch when, you know, government bonds around the world are paying an absolute pittance.

So I'm just wondering, like, how long do we think it is before somebody looks at that? Or like, at what point does, do external nations look at the bond issuance and what has to happen for them to look at that and say, oh, that was actually in our eyes successful and maybe we should mirror it. You know, what do you guys think about that? Like, what has to happen for it to be considered successful? And anybody can jump in here. It doesn't matter.

Yeah, I think if they get a good subscription on the initial float of the bond, I think just right, you know, that right there will have a bunch of other countries at least kicking the tires and potentially looking at some of the modeling that I think block stream and, some other companies did about if Bitcoin does, you know, X percent appreciation. They did some various percentages to model out the returns. And I mean, really, it's not that crazy to think that they could potentially wipe away a good portion of their national debt just, you know, from one bond offering on Bitcoin. So I think, I think countries are probably already paying attention. And if the subscription for the first

offering goes well, it's probably just a matter of time. There was a question from Canadian Bitcoiners. What does the general population in El Salvador think about Bitcoin? Like what are people on the ground actually saying what's the general sentiment? So, you know, and this is where, you know, we have to kind of temper expectations a little bit because, you know, we have to remember that, you know, El Salvador is a country with needs beyond Bitcoin. And the vast, vast, but like 99% of the people before Bitcoin was announced had not even heard of Bitcoin. So, you know, and they have some real needs.

Like they have a huge infrastructure and social deficit from years and years of neglect and civil war and corruption. And so while Buckele, who is, a populist and knows media quite well and knows how to use media to his advantage and to push his own agenda, you know, will say the right things so that the Bitcoin, the international Bitcoin community kind of applauds those efforts. He also has to run a country. That whose number one problem is crime and unemployment. And And while perhaps the political corruption is not as bad as it was before, there's institutional corruption.

And I don't know if you guys know the difference, but basically like, okay, like people who, let's just assume that everybody who got elected is good people, right? They can only do so much before they go down to like, you know, the, you know, social services and health care and all of that. and policing where there is some institutional corruptions by bureaucrats. And so they have such a huge agenda to tackle. And one of the biggest criticism was that there was no education given to the population about Bitcoin. And in retrospective, I had to think about what this is all about,

is that El Salvador is has a huge financial debt to the World Bank, to the IMF, to the US. It was it was unsustainable what they were doing and to actually pay those debts and extend debts and get more money to run the country. There were some things that were going to be asked for in exchange of a country who essentially has nothing else to give. And so, and I don't know all the reasons I'm not privy to anybody in the government, but I think that this is probably like, you know, kind of like a bold move by somebody who knew that in some way the Salvadorans had nothing else to lose and why not make that,

right? Why not? And he, I think he is an innovator. I mean, he started tweeting about, using Bitcoin back in 2017, right? And so, you know, so for a lot of people, this was not surprised. For the average Salvadorian, my mom and dad are there right now on vacation. My sister's living there.

You know, we're all based in Canada, but, you know, my sister has chose to live there for the time being. And she's lucky enough. She can work remotely. And so, but, you know, the reality is that she, she, she, she, She has said this to me, and I speak to them every day. Nobody's using Bitcoin. Nobody wants to, unless you go to places where, you know, that's the shtick, nobody's

using Bitcoin. So this is going to take some time. It's going to take some time. People are very skeptical because of Chivo and then the misgivings that Chivo has. And I think that, you know, it's going to take some time. I mean, that's kind of why I said earlier. I think that companies going out there, setting up shop, setting up opportunities for Salvadorans to take part in the Bitcoinization of the country

is probably one of the biggest things that can ensure the success of Bitcoin, right? But, I mean, truth be told, the vast majority of people are not using Chivo or, or Bitcoin in general, unless you're going to those places where it is used like El Sonte and just, you know, some other communities. And I think it, in some ways, it's good because I think the need has to come from the bottom, right? Yeah, I agree. I think a bottom up approach, kind of a grassroots, again, like in Alzante and Bitcoin Beach. I think that's the important part. That's where it actually grows organically.

And people that are exposed to it that way are more likely to be interested and benefit from it. So, you know, if these new laws help some people along the way and draw some eyeballs and some people benefit from it and are doing reminences that way, than fantastic. But it, you know, I've always been on the side of not mandating things, but allowing people to do as they please. And I hope they continue to. So, Ben, one last thing on that, though, that you mentioned remittances.

Now, that was a huge paintmoor using the traditional routes like Money Graham and Western Union. And nothing against those companies. It's just that, you know, I think that, you know, with the dawn of lightning, I mean, you know, I've sent money to mom, mom and dad through lightning. And, you know, it's pretty slick. I mean, and they can go and cash it out. And then they got some Fiat to use down there, right?

But or in the supermarket, they actually take, take Bitcoin. But like that is like that play alone is worth it. It's just that it's going to take some time for people to adopt that. Yeah, yeah. And I think, and again, it not only draw some eyeballs within El Salvador for those that it positively affects, but it's going to draw some attention around the world. And even without government intervention and, you know, legal tender laws and everything like that, it still points to the fact that people can use Bitcoin around the world without anybody telling them otherwise.

which is fantastic. So I guess we'll see. We'll see how this plays out in the coming year, number of years. And, you know, I think in general, it'll,

it'll have the feeling like, things like Lightning or Segwit did, where people overestimate what's going to happen in a short amount of time, but underestimate what's going to happen over a lengthier period of time. And, yeah, I guess we'll leave that there. Thank you for that topic.

I'm glad we got to chat a little bit about that. And we're going to jump to our next now. Everybody watching, thank you for being here, of course. Like, share, sub, all that good stuff. But we're going to jump to Trent. Dude, what's on your mind? What are you excited about? You sounded like you had some multi-sig stuff in your mind.

Yeah, yeah. So that's what I want to talk about. I'm bullish on multisig. For those that are watching or listening that don't really know what multisig is, which most of them probably do, especially if they watch any of your videos been. but a multi-sig wallet really requires you to approve or sign a transaction from more than one device before you can spend that Bitcoin. So it's basically the idea of needing two separate keys to open or to access a vault. So the concept has been around for thousands of years and it's playing a role in Bitcoin as well.

And I was talking to Nick Newman, CEO of Casa Hoddle just a couple weeks ago. And I just asked him out of the blue, like, Nick, if Bitcoin is going to be as valuable as we all think it is, what is the argument against Multisig? Like, why wouldn't everyone have a multi-sig setup? And he largely agreed with my thinking there. And so I'm bullish on Multisig for every participant on the Bitcoin network holding any sort of substantial value. not only does multi-sig prevent against like a brute force attack like if someone you know try to rob your house and steal your hardware wallet or something like that jameson lopp who's also from casa he does a great job of documenting some of those stories you know it's it's unfortunate to read about them but it's really good to learn about them um you can but going along with that you can also prevent your own stupidity as well um and so when you're talking about bitcoin which is you know the most scarce asset in the world, most scarce asset that humankind has ever come across, you're going to want to cover as many fail points as possible. And so when we break it down, like CASA, like I mentioned,

they are a multi-sig provider. There's unchained capital. There's probably others as well that I just don't really know or can't think of. I am a financial advisor. Like that's what I do for my fiat mining, my day job. I'm passionate about my clients owning and understanding Bitcoin. The clients that I work with are pretty Bitcoin savvy, like some of them are even more Bitcoin savvy than I am. But I think that the potential for other financial advisors, for regular advisors to onboard their normie clients using multi-sig for one of these providers, I think is like a huge, huge potential. A lot of first-time users are hesitant about controlling their own keys. and I'm even like hesitant to tell them to take custody of their own keys right away.

And I think that using a provider can alleviate a lot of that stress. I think it can be a really, really great way to onboard newbies and to control their own keys, you know, in a sovereign way. And I think that financial advisors can and should be the ones that are introducing these, this concept to their clients. You know, financial advisors are the most trusted, um, person. that most people have in their corner in regards to their money. And so I think that financial advisor should be the one introducing this concept.

Now, there's a lot of regulatory hurdles to jump over before that happens. Like, I'm probably getting a little head on myself here. So there's some work to be done, but I really do think that the potential is there. And then I'm also, you know, along with CASA and unchained in those, I'm also bullish on the DIY multi-sig, like through Specter and Sparrow. So I'm in the process of creating my own multi-sig wallet on Specter. Thanks to your videos, Ben. I'm just waiting on my last freaking hardware wallet.

It's taking forever to get here with the international shipping, but I'm almost there. Creating my own multi-sig wallet using three different signing devices, three different hardware wallets, using my full node to verify the transaction. That's easily the most cypherpunk thing I've ever. done in my life. I'm feeling like pretty good about myself here and I I got to slow down because like I haven't actually done it yet, but it's it's badass. It's really, really cool. So like to wrap it all up, I'm just bullish on the impact of multisig. I think it can be a great way to onboard new people through financial advisors whenever we can get over that regulatory hurdle and to do so

in a sovereign way. And then obviously I am bullish on the reduction of potential attacks. and even from your own stupidity. And I think it's appropriate for nearly every user on the network. And I'm just really excited to hopefully watch multi-sig addresses and wallets explode over the next coming years. It's, I got to say, like, multi-sig is fun to play with. And there's so many different ways to do it. But like the, so I utilize, I've utilized some multi-sig stuff in various different capacities. You know, DIY, I played around with CASA and Unchained.

I've done a lot of different stuff. The draw with something like Casor unchanged is like how fault tolerant it is, right? You can screw up so monumentally bad and still have access to your funds. Like even just thinking of, say, a two of three with Unchained. So you have like, say a couple of treasers, you have a backup of each treasurer, and you have each one of those pieces of information in a different location. So maybe you have a treasure at your home, a treasurer in a safety deposit box and like a backup with a backup of each device with a family member in a different location. And then Unchained has a key. And so what can happen is out of those four items,

you could literally lose 75% of everything you have and you'd still be able to go to unchained and be like, holy shit, guys, I need to move my money. I just need to be the other part of this sign. And you'd still be okay. And like that's, that's a pretty big deal,

especially when you're talking about something, a situation where you're like, I want my family to be able to access this if I'm dead. and you know in something like that they could bring you know the the the your your will or or prove that they're next of kin and like a death certificate and the company would be able to be like okay this this checks out we can help you here um and that might not be the case unless you've got uh some technically savvy family members uh in like a DIY although I still really do enjoy DIYs on the DIY front there's so many like you said specter sparrow blue wallet like the mobile

multi-sig is crazy doing like the air gap stuff with like keystone or or foundation um that stuff is awesome uh air gaping with cold card is crazy and then um one that i'm about to dive into i don't know if you would have heard of have you heard a nun chuck i want to say i've heard the name. So they're kind of same idea as like a specter or a sparrow where you like import keys, well, like public keys from various devices. And then you create a multi-sig. But this one has a messaging feature.

And the way the idea behind it would be maybe you're like a business and you have a multi-sig in order to sign and release funds into hot wallets or something like that. Getting a partially signed Bitcoin transaction to various people to sign in different geographically diverse locations can be a bit of a pain in the ass, like trying to get that file over to somebody, get them to import it and sign it and then add a signature and then send it down the line to the next person. in Nunchuk the way it works is each person just has the app on their phone with one key or like with an air-gapped option to sign and they sign their part of the transaction

and then through the messaging feature with a group send the partially signed Bitcoin transaction to the next person down the line to add their signature so it's all encapsulated in a single app so there's none of this here's like a TXT file that you got to figure out what to do with, it's just all kind of done, which is super cool. So there's a ton of stuff happening with multisig that is super interesting. I'm curious if any of the rest of the panel has tinkered with multisig, what's everybody's experience so far? Man, I'm still old school.

I haven't really. I think it would have once Jimmy's song ended up in a, one Bitcoin bet that had to do with the election. And I needed to be the third key in case there was a disagreement, basically. So I was the trusted third key holder. It was we did use on-chain to set up the two of three multisig. It was not easy. It was because all three were using like different hardware solutions.

Yeah. So it's exactly what you said, dealing with like TXD files. So it was like a nightmare like setting that up. And then I'm like, Jimmy, I really hope I don't have to be involved in like getting that out. So I hope you guys could work it out and when the bed ends like two months later. So that was my only experience dealing with it. It's still not as user friendly as I'd like. But it sounds like LNCHAR could be something. As long as, you know, smart technology people, review it right so that the app itself doesn't actually get to see what you do and who's signing and that's the problem like i have a degree in financial engineering i used to code but like i'm totally foolish in uh validating this stuff from a technological perspective uh so i rely on guys like peter pod and james a lot and uh you know my friends of block stream uh for this kind of stuff so it's uh Again, this weird concept of Bitcoin is trustless trust. You trust the fact that it's trustless.

But at the same time, you've got to trust the more psychologically inclined developers. And now you run into a problem, which developers do you trust? And these were debates with people like Roger Veer that I've had for years, where it's like, well, you can't trust the developers of blockchain because to have an agenda or some of the others. But here, trust my two guys. Okay. So this was, these are some of the issues.

But I just want to join the last two reasons for why Bitcoin is bullish together and answer to quite also comment on the question about the bonds. I think a lot of it, a lot of it is going to depend on Al Salvador's ability to protect the Bitcoin. I mean, like, this is big. I mean, protecting your Bitcoin is as challenging as like protecting your nuclear reactor that runs the power in your country. It's about the same. I mean, the screwing up one will just will obviously kill a lot of people. So it has a very different social bet.

But, you know, screwing up and like one hacker takes the wealth of your country is also pretty much potentially the death of your country going back. to how El Salvador ended up owning so much money to the World Bank and probably the IMF. I mean, there was a whole book on this called Confessions of an Economic Hitman that explains the entire process really, really well. So bonds, the wallet, the government-funded wallet, bonds, it's like, how is Bricklecki protecting the Bitcoin? Because recently people started looking into, how was Michael Saylor protecting his Bitcoin? It's like, oh, he's not protecting his Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, Coinbase is holding it for him, right? Which is a whole other risk factor, right? Besides the fact that it's coinbase and somehow magically avoided getting hacked, which I'm really, really surprised up to this point considering their competence in actually understanding the whole crypto space. But yeah, so something like that, it's really scary and really challenging. So the multi-sing solutions really need to apply to at the national level like El Salvador and securing, you know, the Bitcoin in the bonds. And I think that's going to be the main driver, whether other countries are going to do something and what is their solution for security going to be. So a lot of these, these are the questions that really need to be answered. Yeah. Yeah. I like that you,

you combine the last, the last two topics. It is a very good. point that again to to transplant about multi-sig this the security behind it is is pretty resilient although you know takes a little technical know-how unless you're using like a collaborative custody model but yeah for for an entire nation state to have especially over time substantial amounts of money sitting in Bitcoin you've got to be so careful with how that is handled and how many potential points of failure there could be there. And it seems to me like a multi-sig in a situation like that, like a robust one with making sure there's no potential conflicts of interest of those who have access to keys is a no-brainer.

Like that that's something that needs to be there. So I don't know. I'm curious. That's a really interesting thought to have. Like to make it easy, like in the United States, what would that look like if this was happening in the United States? Like Joe Biden would have a key and Nancy Pelosi. Yeah, well. Kamala.

To broadly speak. Yeah. And then like, I don't know, the Department of Defense or something. like that would be really interesting to see how that would play out. Right. Well, you got to figure the treasury. I mean, it's kind of their job, right? Like the treasury is going to have a key.

The Federal Reserve will probably have a key. The president is supposed to have a key. And there might be a few more, you know, like president, vice president. It's going to be a pretty serious multisig. It will probably be something like. like a seven of nine, something like that. That's around what I was thinking too. It would have to be like a seven of nine.

And they would have to be that at that point, no three of them can be on the same plane. Exactly. And. Or in the same party. Also, I would say that in that three of nine, and it's a really good exercise to go through with somebody to write up. Out of that seven of nine, I bet you one or two of them,

are going to be people that know, should know who they are except the other people with a key right because that that takes away a whole other potential risk element and also some of those might be like corporations you know like a professional storage solution like like a bitco for example well what about this i was this sounds like a dog sorry ben i was getting going to say like this sounds like it needs a proper paper like like a thesis like you know right like if you're going to do this right yeah right what's write something up and then what happens if by some crazy thing like three of those keys disappear yeah well and and you I think we're also kind of thinking

inside the box here in that it's all all keys are people that are in positions of power within the U.S. government, but it could be that one or two of the keys are potentially allocated to heads of state in other nations that are allies. So you could have like an allied, allied nation that has like a single key to your multi-sig. And if shit starts to hit the fan, you can reach out and say, hey, like, listen, we got to protect the treasury. And also each key would be with like a time lock, right? I mean, this is one of the things that jade, the wallet that you helped do a tutorial on over in Dubai.

I mean, it's a two-of-two multi-sysit, but if you lose one of the two keys, your funds do turn into a single key a year later. So you screwed up. It's not the end of the world. It's the end of the world for a year, right? But then you still get it back. So there would have to be like those kinds of controls on many of those keys. Maybe not all of them, many of them. And there's so many angles you could take it.

Especially like, yeah, the amount of responsibility in protecting a nation's wealth that could potentially be, you know, with if you don't protect it well enough, it could literally just be swept away into another nation's wallet is or just some dude's wallet. could be, you know, maybe there's a double your Bitcoin giveaway that an overzealous member of Congress. And this is why people got upset when people discovered that like Blockstream as an ultimate backup to their liquid product, the liquid side chain, they had the ultimate backup. I was like, hey, if people are not going to be responsible with their keys, then Blockstream kind of gets the ultimate possession of it. But and everyone ended up getting really, really upset at that feature. And they're like, well, what's the other solution? Just like, like destroy it. At least in this case, you have a trusted company that built the product that you can then get it from them.

I mean, it was more complicated than that. But I mean, people need to be more responsible and actually check their keys after like X amount of time. Otherwise, there is the ultimate default. Yeah, absolutely. Huh. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing kind of the evolution of multi-sig in the context of nations diving down this route. And I really hope that it doesn't just end up with, you know, a Michael Saylor strategy on a nation-state level. Because, like, imagine the amount of power that a single company would have over an entire nation.

I mean Federal Reserve. There you go. Never mind. Imagine if a single entity had all of, yeah, no. Okay. I guess I don't know. Did you want to add anything else, Don, in regards to Maltesig? I wanted to get your thoughts in there too.

Yeah, the only other thing I wanted to add was just in regards to Taproot and how the taproot upgrade enables multisig transactions not to stand out so much from. single-sig transaction. So that should go a long way for adoption and privacy as well on the main chain, which is awesome to see. Yeah, absolutely. It also helps with lightning, too, given that you can't tell if it's a lightning channel open and close with taproot and snore signatures down the line.

That'll be hugely helpful. So, yeah, awesome. Well, let's keep it rolling. We're going to toss it over to tone now. Dude, what's on your mind? What's your reason for being bullish? What are you excited about? Man, I've really been thinking about this, but I figure I'm the trader, the technical analyst.

My first time on you show, maybe second, it's first. I think first time for this, for why are we bullish, yeah. And, you know, I'm going to stick with the technical picture of Bitcoin. The fundamentals are there, obviously with El Salvador. I can't wait for like next year. Hopefully Bitcoin is consistently. above 100,000 and I think that would be the barrier before many companies start switching to SaaS. I think a lot of people are hesitant on switching to SaaS before Bitcoin is consistently

above 100K. And that's going to change a lot, right? You're not going to get that call from a friend asking you about ripple anymore or about those fake bitcoins that are significantly cheaper. Now, this could also have a huge, like, rip, like, like, like, like, like, like, I'm not used that work. It will be a huge effect of the whole industry and where all these other tokens are also going to go into their smallest unit if they can because there are tokens that launch as their smallest unit. So but once Bitcoin goes just starts denominating everything in SATs, I think that's going to be a huge bullish catalyst. But that's for next year's show. For this year's show, I'm going to go with a technical picture.

The fact that so many of us analysts were wrong at how high Bitcoin is going to get this year, I was one of the low-end ones. I was just thinking 100 to 150K, and I was on the low end versus some of the other guys, like my friends, Willie Wu, Plan B. And a lot of us analysts were a little over-bullish based on how fast Bitcoin was rising very early. in the year and late last year, so how high it would get. And that kind of demoralized a lot of people. A lot of people were expecting it to be that high. And Bitcoin's been consolidating now for a year in a pretty bullish fundamental environment. And I still think we're in a bullish cycle

from a technological, from a TA perspective on trading. It just needs, if it has another month or two of consolidation, and people are going to get pretty frustrated. that Bitcoin isn't going anywhere. It's at almost the same price. It was in late January. So it hasn't done anything in a year. So that breakout is going to be sweet. And some people are going to miss out because they're going to just get frustrated that Bitcoin isn't doing anything.

So from a technical perspective, I am still very bullish on Bitcoin going into next year. And I do think that $100,000 target just got pushed back by a quarter. Like it's okay. I like, we'll get there. Do you, so a question for you, do you give any credence to to kind of the, the general idea of like the four-year kind of cycle? Do you think that plays out at all? Like, I mean, in general, like, obviously there's some effect, but it's, I imagine diminishing. Like, what are your thoughts there?

There is a slightly diminishing effect. Also, I mean, the halving cycle is obviously very important. Bitcoin's halving cycle. I debated this actually with another name Dr. Peter Todd, where we were just talking about from economic perspective, where it would have been a lot smoother for Bitcoin not to have these having cycles. I can imagine if every single difficulty adjustment, there was a small change. in the Bitcoin mining reward. There would not be this shock every four years on losing half your revenue coming in.

But at the same time, that shock gets counteracted by the height that the having brings, which potentially is more beneficial to the entire system and the price of Bitcoin. That event is absolutely epic. It comes around once every four years. So, you know, it's probably better that it's done this way for that shock factor than if it was smoothed out. Now, the four-year cycle in price, it's hard to measure.

I mean, Bitcoin does a lot of things within a four-year cycle. It usually has a peak. It usually has a bear market, but they're not consistent. And they are going to be lengthening. So you always find a four-year cycle. Like, when do you start the four-year cycle? Do you started from the day Bitcoin top in 2017? Do you start it from the day Bitcoin bottom in December 2018?

Or do you start it from COVID, which was a huge catastrophic event? Also, I believe that's when I became coach. I was very skeptical on Bitcoin's price rise in the first half of 2019. Looked a little silly there for a while from when Bitcoin went up from like $3,000, although it was $14,000, but it's less than six months. in about four months. And I couldn't explain it. Like it didn't make any sense why it's rising so much.

In hindsight, it was plus token out of China that had like a ridiculous number of Bitcoin. So the reasons, you find out the reasons later. So it's really hard to time these four-year cycles because they're not consistent. We have a halving approximately every four years, but Bitcoin is going to do different things. With every halving, people have different expectations. At which point do you start pre-running the halving? Do you pre-run it a year in advance? That's too early.

It's going to top out. It's going to correct. Do you pre-run it a month in advance? Maybe that's too late. So things are going to act very, very differently around each having. I mean, history is going to rhyme. It's not going to repeat. So looking at a four-year cycle from a halving to halving, yes, we're going to have a high

and yes, we're going to have a low, but you might have that high within a few months after the having, or you may have a low within a few months after the having, right? Swing low, and then the high comes in way later. So there will be these four-year cycles with a top of the bottom, but they're not going to be consistent. Yeah, it's, who was I talking to? His Twitter handle is fair free digital on Twitter. he was talking about like you're saying kind of the the lengthening um kind of he his thesis is lengthening bull markets where it's it becomes frustratingly long uh for when people expect a top to

happen like everybody was expecting it within this calendar year there was going to be some big blow off top near the end of the year but that's not exactly how it has played out and and so he was kind of looking at based on blocks after the halving. And he kind of was looking at, well, the 2013 one happened X amount of blocks after the having. The 2017 one was quite a bit more blocks after the having. And he was kind of saying, well, you know, if that trend continues, then it wouldn't be, you know, it would be a quarter or two into, into 2022 that we would see something like

that. So, but then he also believes that even with that, you're still going to get equally violent bear markets. They'll just be shorter. So again, I don't know if that's going to play out. But an interesting idea of, I think it's, it makes more sense to look at Bitcoin in terms of if we believe there's a four year cycle at all. it's better to look at it in block time rather than than human time because it's the supply schedule doesn't actually adhere to human years. It adheres to Bitcoin blocks.

So I don't know. And if anybody else wants to comment on, again, this is Tone Vays playhouse here, but I don't know. What were your expectations for the year versus what was expectation versus reality? Yeah, I would just say like, Tone, I, I'm a financial advisor. I have zero TA expertise whatsoever. I didn't pay attention in those classes. But I just look at like the current landscape of financial assets.

Like you have stock market, you have the bond market, you have real estate that are all at all time highs. And looking traditional, like by traditional metrics looking very, very expensive. And then you have Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is like one of, if not the only assets that I can find right now that look either fairly or undervalued. And so I like equate Bitcoin as as like a puddle next to lakes and oceans of different asset classes that are just waiting to spill over. So kind of like you said, the fundamentals are looking very bullish.

And yeah, I couldn't I couldn't agree more just from looking at how overpriced. everything else looks. John, just a quick question. Do you think that we're due for like a traditional market correction? Like, you know, I'm thinking about, especially here in Canada, the housing bubble. And like, I mean, we're overheated. A lot of people think we're not. But, I mean, housing is is not sustainable the way that it is right now.

And so, you know, like, and so if there is that correction, you know, where does Bitcoin fit in and all of that? Yeah, that's a question. I'm actually not looking for a stock market correction. I wasn't looking for a stock market correction in 2020 until COVID came around. COVID was the correction because the government just shut down the economy. I've been bullish on the stock market for a decade. And I remain bullish on the stock market for a decade.

Even more so now, bullish on the stock market because, again, due to these shutdowns, they favor corporations that have stock versus, you know, mom and pop shops versus, you know, the regular business. All of this favors it. Like, if people aren't going out shopping because they're scared of COVID, they're ordering from Amazon. That boosts Amazon stock. That doesn't help your little bodega next door. So so much is favoring that the stock market also inflation. Inflation also rises the stock market because if there's inflation, businesses charge more money for their goods, hence the stock will rise. They have to pay higher salaries and the stock will rise because they're charging more money for the product. Now, when a government

starts to implement price controls, the stocks will fall, right? Because if Apple can't raise the price to their cell phone, because the government told them that they can't, meanwhile, there's inflation, what do they do? Right. So, the company can't make as much money. So I remain very bullish on the stock market into the next couple of years, even with this whole situation, because again, it's the companies whose stock are being favored by these shutdowns. Granted, there was, of course, a crash because people panic.

No one knows what's going on. And also they did shut down even pretty much many of those companies. So that's what I'm bullish on in the general stock market. Sorry, go ahead. There's another question. Ton, I was just going to say you mentioned price controls. Did everybody see this article from The Guardian? We have a powerful weapon to fight inflation.

Price controls. It's time we consider it. Like, this is not the onion, friends. Yeah. It's really out of control. It's becoming very hard to tell what's satire and what's real. Like I'm almost going to the Babylon D now to get real news because it's, It's kind of giving you, anyway, it's really, really bad right now.

I don't even know how we're going to turn around. Yeah, yeah. But it's good for the stock prices. It's good for the stock prices. It's true. At what point does it get to like Weimar levels, though? Like, how bad does that have to get before? I mean, it kind of, shit like NFTs is like, is already like the first kind of.

Yeah, well, stability, right? No, but that's pretty stupidity, right? The Waymore level, the Zimbabwe level, the Venezuela level, that's a loss of confidence in government. So that's not money printing. No amount of money printing will do that. It's a loss of confidence in government. So if the U.S. government implements price controls, that can happen.

Yeah. My personal biggest catalyst for the U.S. dollar going to hyperinflation, is a breakup of the country into like some states either merge together or a single big state becomes its own country. I know people think that's crazy and impossible, but the timeline is, you know, another decade and anything can happen. But these are the kinds of events that create hyperinflation, right? Like, for example, Joe Biden being elected for the third term because the country is in

trouble and it needs it. Right. Like these are the kinds of things that create hyperinflation. It's when people lose faith in the money and no one wants to hold the money because they don't have faith in the government in charge of that money. Printing a bunch of money does not cause that level of inflation. It'll cause, you know, 3%, 5%. I know people are freaking out of a 5% inflation. It's not that different than 3%.

I'm sorry. It's not the end of the world. But if you're talking 25 to 30% inflation, like what happened when Russia and Ukraine kind of started shooting each other over in the border back in 2014 when then Russia took Crimea, both currencies devalued 50%. Now, why would that happen? Now, in Ukraine, sure, people in Ukraine are probably afraid that Russia can just take them over. But why is the Russian currency devaluing 50%? They obviously have a much stronger military. But Russian currency devalered 30% as well.

And that's because of loss of confidence. Well, if Russia goes to war with Ukraine, what happens? How is it going to reflect on the U.S. and Europe? So the world is just, well, you know what, let's hold off on this and see where it goes. So it's these kinds of events that need to take place in order for a currency to really go into serious information. Wow. All of this talk reminds me of a really good, I want to say fiction book, but you never know. If you guys haven't read it, it's called the Mandibles. And it's set in the U.S. from the year 2029 to the year 2047.

And it follows a previously rich family during the time when the U.S. formally actually fully defaults on its debt and just says, we're not paying this. And then it follows like the hyperinflation of the currency and all of the shit that happens thereafter and basically follows it through like a, a Wimar like collapse. And how like external nations handle that and the creation of like a global currency kind of thing. They do mention Bitcoin, but like in a in a passive. Yeah. It was written

It's got to be recent, right? He's saying they mentioned Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah. It's like within the past couple of years here, I think. Okay, so no movie yet. All right. Yeah, no movie yet. Unfortunately, the way that they mentioned,

they're like dismissive of Bitcoin in it. It was 20, it was actually, no, it was 2016. But the author was like a passive like, oh, and we all remember what happened with Bitcoin as if it didn't work out. But regardless, the book, was actually I really enjoyed it

it was like a it would be a cool movie I got to check out though the one thing on that is from economic perspective the US defaulting on their debt I don't think matters much it'll cause a little bit of confidence but from a financial perspective the US kind of like no one is coming to the US

with tanks and guns to collect them that debt but and it's the that's the 30 trillion it's the 150 trillion that the U.S. owns to its own people in unfunded liabilities, that's the debt. If that is defaulted upon, that's five times larger debt than their external national debt. No one should care about national debt. But if all of a sudden every government employee doesn't get a paycheck or gets a paycheck in very devalued money, that's a problem. Yeah. And that's part of like in the book, that's that's very much an aspect of it where like all

of these unpaid, you know, unpaid liabilities are just reneged upon social security as a joke. Yeah, no one, yeah, no one talks about the $150 trillion and unfunded liability. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's, it's pretty interesting that as you're reading through, like, all of the shit that falls through and the way that the people deal with it and like the just kind of blatant, um, disre, like, basically like self-preservation. that's happening and just like neighbors turning on each other and just like stealing each other's shit and even like going so far as to like force them out of their own homes with at gunpoint

to like take the people's homes. It's it's a crazy read. But it's it's a fun one. So yeah, anyways, it's called the mandibles and it's by Lionel Shriver. So it's worth a read. I would check it out. But cool. Well, let's I'm, I'm going to keep us rolling here and we're going to get into our last reason for being bullish. Again, everybody that's watching right now, thank you for being here. Hope you're having a good time. We're going to jump to Dawn

for a final reason for being bullish this week or this year, depending on the topic. What's on your mind, man? So I'm super bullish on Bitcoin-only companies, and more specifically, finally, some venture capital funding that's being dedicated solely

to supporting Bitcoin-only companies. I've been so tired of seeing the likes of A-16 10-Z consensus, all these large capital allocators just wanting nothing to do with Bitcoin-only companies and funding every shit-coin, every shit-coin company out there, and just having a vast misunderstanding of what Bitcoin is, what it will do, the probability of hyper-bitcoinization, they just don't understand any of it. So this year and, you know, specifically the last few months, you're starting to see more and more dedicated venture funds pop-up,

dedicated to Bitcoin-only companies, the likes of Tramble Venture Partners, 1031, Fulger Ventures, you know, the list kind of goes on and on. And I think that in conjunction with a lot of individual Bitcoiners who have seen their, you know, purchasing power go up the longer they've been in Bitcoin and are also starting to, you know, support Bitcoin-only companies is just really great to see. And I think that's only something that's going to continue as Bitcoin keeps doing what it does and more and more hoddlers keep, you know, supporting the network and their wealth goes up and the flywheel kind of just keeps working. So just super excited about that.

And I'm glad it shouldn't have taken this long, but I'm glad the tides are finally starting to shift, it seems like. I've got a question for you. What, what Bitcoin-only companies are currently on your radar that you're really happy to see doing well? Yeah. Oh, man, so many. So strike comes to mind, compass mining. Of course, you have like smaller startups like OSHA just getting off the ground and all kinds of, you know, the different wallet providers and of course all the lightning development that's happening to. So it's just awesome to see that these founders who used to be kind of on their own as far as trying to bootstrap their business.

Now we're getting some more formalized support. Yeah. And for like my conferences, like Uncompa Scableness coming up, we only accept Bitcoin only sponsors. So it's not a large list. It's pretty challenging, actually. Yeah. Most of them need a few more years before they, you know, kind of have runway to be able to do things like that.

But I think that's where the path is leading for sure. Yeah. The block coming onto the space, I think, is going to be interesting to watch. Like, you know, I think, you know, on Twitter spaces, sometimes you hear some. Some OGs really worry about the brain drain of developers that has taken place over the last few years. And, you know, like, you know, I can't speak intelligently about it, but I just, you know, had a few conversations about, you know, their concerns are real. And I think that with a lot more Bitcoin companies coming on board and, you know, dedicating some, you know, some beef into the whole.

space and then and keep it developing a living network. I think it, you know, that's a huge reason to be bullish for sure. But, you know, I'm going to be paying attention to block for sure. But, you know, some of these smaller companies, Don, that you were talking about, I think that, yeah, we should keep our eyes out on for them. For sure. The other cool thing, a lot of these venture funds are starting to do, too, is use portions of their management fees to support, you know, Bitcoin developers and kind of giving that back to the ecosystem, which you definitely don't see the shitcoin VC's doing that. I can tell you that.

By the way, I think at the next cycle, I think if there's one more runoff, let's say, I don't want to say Bitcoin above 100K, but Bitcoin above quarter mill, you're going to see individual early Bitcoin adopters sponsoring core developers, right? Because now it becomes in their financial interest. Hey, I'm now worth $30 to $50 million or more. What's the best way I can protect that? Well, you know what? Maybe I should give Luke Das Jew or a million dollars a year to make sure that the rest of my money stays safe and the price of Bitcoin rises.

So I think right now that brunt is being taken up by companies. But I think that could switch to individuals. It would just not there yet. That would be really interesting. The other thing that I liked in so much as Bitcoin-only companies is seeing some companies pivot that were previously multi-coin and that went Bitcoin. So like one that comes to mind, I believe this year or perhaps last year, but coin floor in the UK, they dropped any all-coin. I think they had Ethereum and something else, but they dropped them all and just went Bitcoin. coin only, which was really cool to see.

You know, here in Canada, I would, you know, poke, prod, shake pay. You know, I'm, I would love to see that as well. And, you know, there's, there's opinions on that of, of people that, that work there as well. But regardless of that, I think it's a cool thing to see because there are, there are people that are realizing,

kind of the long-term promise and are kind of giving themselves a lens through which they're looking at everything with low time preference. And you've got to start planning for that Bitcoin future. And sure, you can probably make bank, you know, shilling shit coins and being a casino in the short term. But that's not going to be sustainable long term in a Bitcoin world. So I look forward to seeing more of that, people seeing the writing on the wall and seeing how kind of ridiculous everything else floating around is. Yeah, I can't wait. The other cool thing is since all of these people are so clueless as to what Bitcoin will do and what it is, it gives us Bitcoiners an opportunity to, you know, jump in front of a lot of these larger capital allocators and get pieces of these Bitcoin companies that, you know, if hyper-bitcoinization happens,

the way we all think it will will be worth orders of magnitude more than any any crypto company will be in the future. So their ignorance is a benefit for us. Yeah, absolutely. Some witty, witty username 30 in the comments. So saying level is another one that they believe they're dropping all coins and they're kind of like a neo bank. It would be very hard for wallets to do it. But once a wallet chosen to go the path of protecting your ship coins, it's hard. Like you can't do it. You can't like release new firmware that now deactivates the shit coin. Because then you're going to, people are going to lose their money. So that's one of the challenges.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. If you're, if you're a wallet, a wallet creator, that can be difficult. You can have a separate. I mean, there's a couple companies that have gone the road of having Bitcoin only firmware as an option, which, you know, if anybody has a hardware wallet and that's an option, then definitely move to the Bitcoin. Bitcoin-only firmware to reduce attack vectors.

But, you know, Bitcoin-only native is excellent. Yeah. And then in terms of, since we're on Bitcoin-only topic, any Bitcoin-only wallets, whether it be hardware, software that you guys are currently fans of, what's? I just paid my barber in Blue Wallet today. for the first time ever. I should say it was just a tip, but I paid him in cash for the actual haircut,

but tipped him in Blue Wallet. It's just so easy to use, and it's pretty. So, yeah, Blue Wallet is like what everyone's wallet is, but it's the one that I'm bragging about today. Nice. I think HXO Wallet is kind of a new entrant. That's pretty cool. Integrated directly with Swan,

so you can stack directly to your wallet, and they released a gifting feature here recently, too, that makes it super easy to send Bitcoin to people. And if they don't use it within a certain amount of time, I believe it gets swept back to your wallet. So they have some cool unique features. I need to play around with it more. But sounds pretty cool.

Yeah, I think I guess. Samson just tweeted out. Someone literally just bought their entire inventory. Someone just like, yep, I'll take old 1,500 of these. And, yeah, I can't wait for them to release the new features. It's just like the cool things in a little wallet, I guess, an internal battery. So you don't have to have it plugged in.

They can connect with Bluetooth to your device. It has a built-in camera. It's not functioning yet, but it's there. And it's really, really cool. Yeah. And affordable, hey? They're like 30 or 40 bucks or something, price point for hardware wallet. That's pretty solid.

That's like the cheapest on the market, I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's cool to see stuff like that. Also, they support, like, so you can use Bitcoin and you can use liquid network on it as well. So you can kind of go between the two with, blocks from green. Speaking of which, I'm really bullish for a liquid network. I think that is going to potentially shine starting next year. People are going to realize they can build on top of Bitcoin,

whether it's an FTs, whether it's whatever. And I think the, I think liquid network will start to take off like lightning started to take off last year. I think liquid will start to take off like that next year with, you know, the year going into the halving. where transaction fees are probably going to start getting more expensive on chain. And people are going to be using lightning more, but they're also going to be looking at liquid for many reasons we're not going to get into it now. But maybe not in the pocket. Yeah, yeah.

No, liquid is definitely cool. I've been playing around with it. And it's it's very, the user interface and the user experience is effectively the same as you would get with a regular Bitcoin transaction, just with a few extra bells. and whistles and, you know, tradeoffs, of course, with liquid. But, you know, for smaller amounts, depending on what your comfort is, it's definitely a viable option, too.

So I think we're going to round this out. Guys, I want to say thank you very much for joining me. I really appreciate this conversation. This is a good one and a good way to cap off the year with all you guys. maybe really quick let's just go down the line and tone i know you're you're tight on time so just any final thought you may have and just also where can people find you sure no i'm looking forward to an amazing 2022 when it comes to bitcoin hopefully you know people will start traveling again uh that's uh that's really my only thought i'm really liking uh where bitcoin is

it's uh not amazingly well and uh working will find me. Well, just tone-based pretty much everywhere, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. Be careful with fake tones. They're everywhere. I'm sure, Ben, you're dealing with the same thing. I still try to travel and speak, but I'm focusing more on my own conferences. The next one coming up is going to be in Las Vegas, March 3rd to 6th, one month before Bitcoin 2022 down in Miami. Ben would love to have you speak there as well. He spoke at my last one understanding Bitcoin, not sure when the next one is going to be, and also have a financially related one called the Financial Summit. Awesome. Well, thanks for being here, man. Let's get

a few other people's uh, uh, uh, uh, outro's here. Don, um, again, any final thoughts and where can people find you? Yeah, thanks for having me, Ben. This has been fun. Uh, bullish on Bitcoin in 2022. I don't know how it's going to top 21, but, uh, Bitcoin tends to surprise us. So I'll be watching. For people that want to connect with three connect with me. I'm KC underscore Hoddle on Twitter. And if anybody ever comes through Kansas City and wants to check out our meetup, all of our details are on KCbitcoins.com. So check that out.

And thanks again for having me. Yeah, no worries, man. Trent, you're up. Yeah. Just for our final thoughts, I'd say one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. I couldn't care less that we're sitting at sub 50K at the end of the year when I myself was, you know, thinking we'd be at 200K. plus. But I think it's a blessing in disguise, especially if we want this money to be a money that's

for the people, just giving us more time to stack cheap sets. I really do think that it's a blessing. So be patient with friends and family that you're trying to onboard. This is a really radical concept. So take your time with them, give them the education that it requires and just try to hammer in the point that one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. So you find me on Twitter. I'm at underscore T. Dudenhofer. I'm not going to spell it, but you can sound it out. And also want to give a shout out to the KC. Bitcoiners. That's a great group. I've met some fantastic friends at the KC Bitcoin meetup in the last year. We're up to like, like Don said, we started with like three or four people and now we get like 40 plus regularly. And that's in large part, thanks to

Don and also Mitch and, you know, the other supporters there. So thank you so much for having me It was a blast. And no worries. Glad to have you. And just so I don't butcher it again. Hi, me. Hi, me. Okay.

Nice. Up for you now. All right. Yeah. So, you know, I host weekly spaces on Twitter for Salvi's in El Salvador and in Diaspora. It's a Spanish show. So if you know Spanish, feel free to hang out with us. and I teach people how to use Bitcoin.

Besides that, I also host a monthly show with Global Bitcoin Fest with Lucas Dutsko, which Ben, you should definitely have on this show because he's one of the creators of Global Bitcoin Fest. And for the El Salvador Law Day, we actually had like a 24-hour non-stop space. with people from all over the world. We've done Costa Rica. We've done Japan. On January 1st, we're doing 10 p.m. Eastern. We're doing Indonesia.

I'm not hosting that one, but the next one that I'm hosting is Bitcoin Lake, Guatemala. And that'll be on January 9th at 8 p.m. In February, we're hosting Brazil and March, Ecuador, and we're working on Puerto Rico and some others. So, you know, just follow me on Twitter at high Miami W. Garcia and, you know, you can, I'll post all the info there. So we didn't get to talk about Costa Rica. So maybe we'll chat about that some other days.

Definitely. Awesome. Well, guys, thank you so much for being here again. I'm going to kill your audio and video here, but you are all welcome back anytime. So thanks a lot. Thanks, guys. I need to go visit like the meetup. I was so close to Kansas City.

Oh, let's go. Oh, we're Missouri. And I got to make the Kansas City, Missouri watching face. We'll get some barbecue and a couple beers. I'm out of the time. Awesome. Thanks,

thanks, guys. Thanks, thanks, everybody. Awesome. All right, everybody watching. Thank you so much for joining us.

A great way to not only end off a week, but end off a year. It's been a crazy year for Bitcoin. And I'm sure that there'll be many more surprises in store for 2020. So we'll keep bumping out the shows. We're always bullish here.

Always. It doesn't matter what the price is because we're bullish on Bitcoin in its entirety and what is achieving and how it's helping people globally in very different ways, depending on how you decide to use it. So again, guys, it's been a hell of a year. And I also have to say thank you very much for everybody. everybody's support. I was talking earlier about how many people have been watching the show, watching the tutorials, you know, just nice comments sharing the show around. I've been so

flattered whenever anybody recommends a video tutorial of mine and hearing that people use them. And it's, it's, again, a very heartfelt thank you for making it possible that this could be my livelihood to be able to do this is insane to me. It still hasn't set in and I've been doing it full time with no outside job for a year and a half now. And I've been running the channel for going on in, I believe in June, it'll be six years. So five and a half years of the show. So again, thank you guys very much, another amazing year.

And as always, of course, Of course, like, sub, share, all those things. Keep growing it. I really do appreciate whenever anybody does that. All of the guys that were on the show today, their Twitter handles are in the show notes so you can follow them there. Of course, if you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below, Shake, Pay, Lead, Bit Refill, Keystone, and Bill Fottle. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my or on Twitter. Actually, I do have the tipping thing turned on on Twitter as well, but strike page is strike. dot me slash BTC sessions. You go there. You type in any amount you want, hit the tip button. You will be greeted with a lightning invoice or if you tap to the right, just a regular

Bitcoin QR code. With that, I'm out, you guys. Thank you again for a wonderful year. Have a great night, a great New Year's Eve. And I'll see you guys next time next year for your daily. session.