BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Troy Cross, GoodGuy Biker, Jesse Berger ep241

Episode Date: March 5, 2022

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What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? I'm obviously in a different location right now, not in Canada, which is nice for a change. But I've got an awesome panel. Very excited to have everybody. What is going on here? Pool hair.

Anyways, I'm very excited to have three gentlemen with me tonight to talk about why we're bullish. Hope you're all having a very good week. And yeah, it's been a wild one, but I am some more warm and I'm happy about it. As always, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live.

Okay. We'll do it live. Fuck it. Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. Fibing thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share. All those things really, really do help a lot and help this get in front of more people.

And with that, I am Ben with the BTC Sessions. This is your daily session. All right. Before we bring in our panel, quick show up. First, actually, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. Sorry, I'm on a single screen tonight. It's a little bit harder for me to navigate, but we'll make it work. So we're sitting at $38,964 per coin.

Look out below. hitting prices not seen since Monday. So we're going to be okay. We're going to make it to you guys. Don't worry, 39. There we go. Anyways, in terms of everything else going on, 90.36% of all Bitcoin have been mined.

How are we doing for fees here? We're sitting at five sats per byte next block. Anything beyond 30 minutes. One sat per byte will do you. So yeah, not bad at all. and a single U.S. dollar will pick you up 2,567 sats. Not bad. Stack them all you can.

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And it's awesome in a multi-sig, but you do need that Bitcoin-only firmware for that. So check that out. Links are down below. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin hardware wallet or software wallet, for that matter, if there's enough funds in them, get those backup secure. You don't want it sitting on paper, fire damage, water damage, stuff like that, accidentally discarding it. Solid steel is the way to go.

I use the bill funnel so you can check them out over at privacypros.com. Those guys are awesome. With that, I'm going to stop my ranting here, and we're going to start bringing in some guests. We got Good Guy Biker, aka Alex, we've got Jesse Berger, we've got Troy Cross. Welcome, gentlemen. I'm very happy to have you. Let's do a little round of intros and let you guys introduce yourself. So I'll go to Alex first.

Who are you? What do you do? Hey, I am 100% me right here, right now at this moment. I got my first Bitcoin at $3. Made the mistake of selling a whole bunch of them after it crashed from 770 to 440. So learn that lesson. And then I guess I saw the value it was creating in a lot of people around me, the sovereign aspects, the wealth creation and the way it was allowing these people to have free time.

So in 2017, Spencer and I, we started a company and we have 11 revenue streams in the blockchain space now. And we just try to support people as much as we can. And we're all thriving. I love it. So all about the mining, all about the security on-chain heuristics. And like just kind of white glove, you know, orange-pilling people in general. That's what it's about for me. So yeah.

I'm glad to have you here. We've chatted on spaces and stuff like that. and clubhouse and all that. So good to actually have you on the show, long overdue, I think. But glad to have it. I've been watching you for years, brother. So it's great to be on it as well. You know, a fellow Canadian.

It's always exciting. Yeah, cheers, man. Well, thanks for being here. Let's jump down the line. Troy, also, first-time guest. How you doing, man? Let people know who you are and what you do. Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, my name's Troy Cross. I teach philosophy at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Not in Canada, but I'm not too far away. It's just a few hours. I'm in my office. I just taught two classes today. I've been advising senior thesis students right over there. You can see my fancy chalkboard.

Philosophers, like, the joke is that mathematicians need only, like, paper and pencil and wastebaskets. And philosophers, like, don't even need wastebaskets, just paper and pencil. This is where the magic happens. I'm also a fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. and I'm working on issues about energy, environment, and mining generally. So really happy to be on the show. I've been following you for a long time. It's fun to be here.

Awesome, man. I am very excited to have you on and very excited to get some philosophical takes on things. So welcome, welcome. And we'll jump one more time down the line to a man that is no stranger to the show. Mr. Jesse Berger, welcome. Let people know who you are, what you do. Hello, sir. Well, good to be back. My name is Jesse Berger. I wrote this beauty, magic internet money, a book about Bitcoin. As you can see, I now reside in a beautiful office with many letterbound books.

No, this is not my office. All of rich mahogany over there. Yeah, exactly. Basically, these days, trying to be a professional orange pillar, living in Canada, living in Toronto. I've been spending a lot of time getting to know some of the freedom fighters in this country and trying to get them onboarded, understanding, interested in Bitcoin, given that they're going to need it most. So that's me. I've been doing some writing about freedom as well as Bitcoin. And yeah, just want to get people interested, understanding what's going on, how they can benefit, why it's beneficial to them and to everyone around them.

Awesome, man. I'm very glad to have you. And I will take a moment to shill your book as well. I read it and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And can you read the full title of it just for a second so people know what it is? Yeah. So let me get it in focus here for you. I'll get it off my name.

So magic internet money, a book about Bitcoin. And the format, as Benwell knows, it's a very straightforward, friendly, approachable, relatable book. the entire purpose was, you know, recognizing that Bitcoin is a very intimidating topic for people that are not familiar with it who've never even thought about, you know, what is money? If you've never even thought about that question, how do I, you know, how do we get people to relate to this and connect many of the dots? And so the whole book is just, you know, every page is one idea, one argument, and you just slowly build one on top of the other.

So it's just, you know, meant for noobs and even intermediaries who want to refine some of their arguments. Yeah. Yeah. If you've been in Bitcoin for a while, it's still a solid read because what you managed to do a few times through the book, and I've said this every time you've been on, but there's a few concepts that it would take me an extended period of time to explain. And then I would read it and you've condensed it into a paragraph very well.

And I'm like, oh, why don't I just say that? Come on. So it's worth it. I go back to it too. It's a great reminder for me when I'm talking to people. Oh, yeah, how do I explain this real quick? Yeah. Awesome.

Well, yeah, I am very glad to have you guys here. And also, everybody in the chat, welcome. Normal Taco says money is what I used to buy Bitcoin. That is a very good explanation of what money is. And good to see Yellow down there and Ramel and everybody. Thanks for being in the chat, guys. Glad to see you. And of course, I can't get this show started without giving a shout out to the legend.

He was in this chat, again, multiple hours before airing Mr. David Wong, number one fan of the show, not a fan of Bitcoin, but here every Friday. Loves it, loves it, loves to be here. He already wanted to let us know that Bitcoin is below 40K every week. So just so you know, and before anybody was here, he did want everybody to know that BTC will never. Never hit back to 69K again. You all dreaming big. You'll get through to him one of these days, Ben. You'll get through to him.

You know, and we'll welcome them with open arms when that moment comes. But I'm just glad he's here. He's, you know, through osmosis, he'll be taking some stuff in. So, David, welcome. Glad to see you. And, yeah, let's get this thing rolling. For those watching that are unfamiliar, this is, why are we bullish? Very simple concept.

except each one of us has a reason why we're feeling bullish or excited this week. So we go by the three R's. Somebody's going to give a reason. We're all going to riff on that reason. And then we're going to rotate to the next person. Very simple. So typically I'll get us started here on my reason for being bullish. And there will be some accompaniment here.

In the vein of current events, my reason for being bullish is that, is that the world is showing us so many examples of why Bitcoin is necessary, not even from a perspective of like wealth accumulation and and like number go up kind of sense, but more so around property ownership. And so what I wanted to show here is just a few examples that come to mind. So obviously with everything happening, Russia and Ukraine right now, you know, the EU bars seven Russian banks from Swift. Obviously, they want to keep their energy intact there.

But regardless, the European Union said on Wednesday was excluding seven Russian banks from the Swift messaging system, but stop short up including those handling energy payments and the latest sanctions imposed on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. Now, individual people are impacted by moves like these as well. We see Switzerland, again, typically, like, they're known for Swiss banking and being insulated from the rest of the world. You know, not as much anymore. Again, Switzerland, a bastion of neutrality through two world wars has decided to adopt wholesale swinging EU sanctions against Russia, potentially freezing billions of dollars in assets and further increasing the pressure on the Russian economy. Swiss National Bank data showed that Russian companies and individuals, assets worth more than 11 billion in Swiss banks in 2020.

And then outside of that, on the other side of this, Patreon early on, they took down an account, froze money moving into Ukraine. I think at the time was about a quarter million dollars. And then more recently, in my home, Canada eventually ended a freeze on hundreds of bank accounts tied to people that were protesting in Ottawa. And so the reason that this makes me bullish is that the world is seeing firsthand that they don't necessarily own what they think they own. And so if you have money in a bank account, if you have assets in some form and there's some sort of custodian, which in most cases there will be for a lot of

your assets, you know, you don't necessarily own that. And so depending on your views on certain political issues around the world and depending on your jurisdiction, it's a very real possibility that at some point you could find assets frozen. You could find bank accounts inaccessible. There's a lot of things that could happen. And so a lot of people are witnessing that firsthand, some for the very first time. And Bitcoin, and I've said this in previous shows, Bitcoin is just simply a tool. And anyone can use it. People you like, people you don't like, causes you agree with, causes you don't agree with. But in the end, Bitcoin is a tool accessible to all. And that tool can obviously be used in the sense of number go up over the long term, you know, wealth

preservation, things like that. But it also is a tool to, um, to, to insulate yourself from wealth confiscation for whatever reason. And, you know, there's never been more examples than as of late. And even if you go back a year or two ago, things like the Wall Street bet stuff, where there's shady stuff happening on Robin Hood and they're, oh, you can only, you can only sell, you can't buy, things like that, where you think that you own something and you should be able to do with it as you see fit. And that doesn't turn out to be the case.

Whereas with Bitcoin, if properly stored, you know, it very much can insulate you against that. But even still, you have to be careful. You know, without getting into details, you can run into trouble if you don't take time to properly care for and store your Bitcoin even. And so I think what I want to piggyback my reason for being bullish with is a bit of a warning.

And that warning is if a person could kick in your door right now and put you under duress and be able to access all of your Bitcoin, if you can give somebody all of your Bitcoin, If somebody kicks open your door right now, it's probably not secure enough, especially with the world and the state that it is right now. So just, you know, start looking into ways that you can properly store and kind of insulate yourselves from those extreme possibilities that are becoming less extreme from day to day. So I'll leave it at that, but I'll leave it open to you guys. what do you think about the state of things around the globe and kind of these examples that we see popping up, regardless of political affiliation, regarding people not actually owning what they think they own, and how does Bitcoin fit into all of this? So I'll open it up.

Yeah, if I could start, I'll just, I'll make a quick point, right? We live in free societies and we really appreciate having choices and options. And when we're stuck inside of one financial system, we're stuck with one internet provider, when we're stuck with one utility, we find ourselves taking advantage of time and time again. So choices are really important to free societies. And what we've seen is a lot of choices being taking away from people all around the world. You know, even if you're just working at a factory now in Russia, all of a sudden, you don't have a job next week because they can't get the parts necessary to make those electronics.

And so it just all of this stuff compounds. So I'll just use one personal example outside of all of this, which is why I'm believe. on Bitcoin, you know, even corruption, all those other things being investigated, given the charities war, let's just say that your government is incompetent. And here in Canada, our government can be incompetent on occasion. I filed my PST, January, February, March. I paid all, I mailed all three in early all at once. And they had filed my January and March, but on a Friday evening, without any notice to me or my wife, they locked up both my business accounts and my personal accounts.

And they attempted to make a withdrawal from those accounts that I had put a special block in place to not allow. So they actually tried to withdraw a huge sums of money. I called them back on Monday because, you know, government services take weekends, having no access to my traditional finances for that entire week. weekend. And on that phone call, they actually went ahead and found February's filing, and they wrote me a check for $47 because I had overpaid. So even sure can lead to the need for optionality, right? It's not always about all these other hyperbolic things, the financial

collapses, corruptions. It's not that you're like in a relationship. Maybe you're like a woman being abused and you're trying to accumulate enough wealth to leave that relationship with your children, right? And you're being forced to unlock through the threat of violence, all your bank accounts and you're being forcefully searched, or maybe you're a foster kid and you're sharing a bedroom with 12 other people, right? This isn't just bombs and fleeing areas of crisis, although it's a super tool for that stuff too. It affects, and it's a solution for people all around us if we understand all the ways it's being used or not, right? So yeah, shearing confidence. Choices are important. Don't take our choices away or we'll find our own, right? So that's where

I'll leave that one. It's good. Maybe I'll grab it. I'll actually riff off something that Ben said. You mentioned Bitcoin being a tool, right? It doesn't care who uses it. One of the points I made in my book, and I'll draw from that example. You know, if a bank robber, robs a bank and they go getaway with a getaway car while wearing a balaclava are we going to outlaw balaclava's and vehicles because a bank robber used it that's that's not what a tool is that's not how it works right this money is something for everyone everyone's going to use it you know whether they should or not and who's deciding what should is right who's deciding what right and wrong is in this instant. It's it's maddening to see places like Switzerland, which, you know, I grew up

with knowing Switzerland, this is this bastion of neutrality, right? That was their ammo. That was everything they were known for. To see them turn heel and Bella Clavis, to see them turn heel. Yellow with a with a black clawing. It was a big eye opener. man like i never thought we would see that i never thought we'd see somewhere like switzerland with that reputation turn now so it's funny because i think obama got it right when he said it's like having a swiss bank account in your pocket but i don't think he realized that it was replacing the swiss bank account exactly yeah yeah try i'll let you uh take if you have any comments to yeah just very quickly i mean i think this week has been dramatic in showing

us what money is. I mean, I don't mean like the nature, the deep nature of money. I mean what money is in our world, which is a tool of control. And it's like all of the institutions that are in power have this tool. And whether you think that what's going on is good or bad, it's revealed now that there's this tool that whoever's in charge gets to use. Someone's going to make the determination of how it should be used. And then money is going to do that. And it's just like, thank God for Bitcoin because that power is not absolute. And what's kind of interesting is there are limits to the power of the dollar because people can opt out.

People can opt out with Bitcoin. They can also opt out by creating their own monetary networks. You know, Russia and China can create their own monetary networks. China's been in a way creating their own network for years and putting themselves at the center of it. They've been preparing for sanctions for 15 years by building out the BRI, right? They've been building up an insurance plan for getting sanction themselves. Russia doesn't have such a great sanction plan. But you realize that kind of like the more we lever up on the ability to use the dollar as a tool of war and a tool of control, the weaker we make the dollar potentially.

I don't mean weakness in the economic sense. I just mean the more we force people to find ways around it, whether that's a Chinese currency or whether that's some other means of exchange or whether it's Bitcoin, right? It's like we have this tendency to find something that is secure and stable and then lever up on it in America, right? We did this with mortgages famously pre-2008. It's like, well, mortgages will never go down.

So guess what? we're going to go 30x and lever up on them because it says our risk model say it's safe to do. So we're just going to make incredible money by borrowing 30 times as much as we have and betting on the housing market, which is ultra safe. Guess what? It works perfectly. It works perfectly. So this is the same thing. I see us levering up geopolitically on the status of the dollar as global reserve currency.

What we're doing by using it as a means of control. control in such an extreme way, we've never had sanctions this severe or widespread. We're like levering up on not just the dollar status as World Reserve currency because the euro is involved too, but like the Swift network, our methods of settlement. We've seen these things as like fixed points. And we're going to put this, we're going to use them like an Archimedean point and get this really long lever and then punish Russia, which you know, I'm down with, but we're going to punish Russia with like this unstoppable.

we're going to use this lever, this unstoppable, unmovable point, which is the status of these monetary institutions. Whereas from a Bitcoin perspective, it's like that point is not quite archimedean. And if you wanted to stay there, you'd better not lever up on it. Because if you lever up on it, too much it's going to go down just like the housing market did.

And this thing is going to be like a quote unquote, black swan fat tail event. No, it wasn't a fat tail event. You made it happen by levering up on that control. Don't abuse your. control. And so I see things as going, you know, one of two ways, like Bitcoin could either collapse this thing and bring it down or Bitcoin could be like a heads up to decision makers like, oh, there's only so much we can push this. We have to respect people's rights or they're

going to opt out, right? And the ball is in their court. It's up to policymakers, which of those choices they want. Do they want to lever up and gamble on this black swan? Or do they want to rein in their power and and really seek, you know, the consent to the govern before they do that. I think the lever. Powerful. Yeah. I mean, I really enjoyed that little rant there. I don't know.

Jesse or Alex, do you have anything to add there? Anything that you? Jesse, you want to go first? As you were saying all that, Troy, all I was thinking was like, you know, you're making me bullish on Bitcoin as a. tool for peace is what you're saying. You know, if the Fiat system, the SWIFT, you know, the networks that you're naming off, if they are being leveraged for what amounts to war and is literally, in this case, also war, Bitcoin is restraining that for the sake of peace, providing for both Russians and

Ukrainians on the ground individuals who are not responsible for the actions of their leaders, just innocent people, helping them, providing them with a reason. where otherwise their resources were being strangled, allowing them to live more peaceful lives that otherwise was going to be taken away from them by that leverage you were discussing. So you made me bullish on peace with that rant. Thank you. And just, you know, if you haven't read it, man, there's just an amazing essay that just dropped by Alex Gladstein. I mean, it is like an afternoon to read it. But it's totally worth it in Bitcoin magazine on Bitcoin and I can't remember the title of it. But if you just look up Gladstein,

I mean, if you don't want to do that, watch is what Bitcoin did episode. I quoted Alex Gladstein in a presentation I did yesterday or two days ago, pardon me, which I'll discuss when it's when it's my topic. But yeah, no, he does some fantastic work. Yeah. And so as you guys can probably tell here, I'm taking a lot of deep breaths. If you guys know me, I have to, ooh, because I get so excited when I talk about these things. And I just want to scream about 14 things all at once.

but I'm going to choose two in relation to what Troy had just said, and that might lead us into the next topic, hopefully. But, you know, the topic is up next, by the way. So if you want to take way, then you can. The opposite of what Troy was suggesting is the other side of the Bitcoin, right? So as they start to over leverage these current systems and these mechanisms and these controls and you try to control the rates of different things and incentivize different behaviors, the more you try to block or regulate something like Bitcoin,

the more it becomes anti-fragile, the more it hardens. And a lot of people don't really understand that particular aspect of Bitcoin. They forget that this is a cypherpunk thing. They forget that this came from the open source peer-to-peer space, where the only thing that was really worthy of sharing in a decentralized manner was things that you had already taking all the securities or licenses, or taking all the cost of off of, right? So distribution networks are really good at one thing,

allowing people to keep things up that other people don't want up. And money is something that people really want to screw with. But I'll make an NFT joke here. Nobody cares about pictures of your kids or a picture of an age. You know there's no need for decentralization there. The only picture on an NFT that would need to be decentralized is like horse porn. because that's illegal and they would arrest you. And so you would have to go to decentralized networks in order to,

otherwise you can go mint and NFT on Twitter for free right now. So, geez, I'm making me mad. So the anti-fragility aspect of Bitcoin is so powerful. And we've seen it time and time again. In 2016, when Bitmain was rumored to control the three largest pools, we saw everyone break apart. When we go back to like rocket pool and some of the earlier pools, we saw like 34% hash rate.

And again, sir, go ahead. I was just going to say, what about G-Hash? They were over 50 briefly. Right. And the whole community comes to arms. Everybody starts moving their machines around in this kind of like anti-fragile way, right? So, call to action. And that's one of the really important things that Bitcoin has that most of these people in politics and all these other spaces haven't understood yet.

It's that if they try to overregulate and we see this in places where they ban Bitcoin, what happens? you create a thriving gray and black market. And guys like, sir, go ahead, sessions. No, so dude, because we're on this topic and it's recent and relevant, you're talking about 51% attacks. I'm wondering if you could maybe take the floor for a moment. You know, Timcast, are you familiar with him? So he recently had a quote talking about how if you get 51% of the network, you can effectively like take over everything. Do you want to maybe just take a second for those that are unfamiliar because we do get people obviously watching this that don't understand how a 51% attack works and what it can do.

Do you want to take a second maybe explain a 51% attack and what it can do? I'll do it really quickly. Yeah. So the 51% attack allows you to do is try to have the best chances of unlocking the next block. And if you want to manipulate these chains for long periods of time, you need to actually continually hit those. blocks. So not only do we see people, when they had the opportunity to do 51% attacks, due to the game theory of Bitcoin, they would lose value by doing that. They would be devaluing the thing they were attacking in which they were making. So the thing they were stealing,

they'd be killing at the same time. So it's a beautiful that the incentive model prevents that. So the 51% attack theoretically, if you're able to get the majority of the hash rate on the network, the idea is you can start to deviate the consensus in the network. So you can start to do things like double spends, collect the new coins that are mined. And if you're able to maintain that, you can even do different things where you start to try and spend things in the past, change the way the protocol works. But what's really cool is Bitcoin has this backwards compatibility aspect to it where you can always operate Bitcoin in any version of Bitcoin essentially up to a point where all the bugs were fixed. So the 51% attack, you would try to basically spend something and then get that money back and spend it again or start to change other people's spending. But you would need in reality, if you actually try.

So we have Bitcoin farms. And in reality, if you tried to do this, you would need something like 70% of the hash rate to consistently hit 10 blocks in a row. And you would need to hit at least 10 blocks before you were able to do a lot of these different nefarious things at scale due to people always were. certain amounts of confirmations when you deposit to exchanges, when you transfer to friends, and, you know, ATMs use small amounts. So it's a big misnomer. It's been a big fud in Bitcoin for a lot of years. You would need to be some kind of evil genius with all the computers and you wouldn't have to care about money at all. So you would have to have no financial self-interest. So maybe like an evil genius pops up one time with a quantum computer eventually, but even,

then due to the anti-fragility of the network, all the node operators can start flagging those blocks as ignore. And if things get really bad, we can roll a blockchain back to a point. Let's say we lose electricity and for substantial parts of time, solar flare. We can spin that network back up with consensus, a particular block before those compromises happen. And we can all move forward. Bitcoin is forked to perform. We can fork it if things get really bad. So, David.

David, our regular Bitcoin fundster, and I'll pass this off on this. Quantum computers definitely can't do it.

There's a trillion dollar bounty. If someone could do it, they would go get those trillion dollars

right now. Likely, if we have quantum computing, it won't be good for breaking Shaw 52. But if it does,

Trinity missile systems, traditional finance systems, corporate information, and who you're cheating on your wife with literally that and everything else is is available so like they don't

care about a trillion dollars when they can get to the banking system at that point um so likely it'll just be used to harden the network and again there's three implementations of solutions for quantum a hardening of bitcoin already on gethubs that you can go experiment with but they're too weighted to bother to to implement until that boogeyman actually arrives so until it's been shown until we see that someone's been able to sweep these keys in a sense, likely the 12 words is what we will see get sweeped first. Until we start to see that happen, there's absolutely no reason to be afraid about it. So, yeah, screw that fud.

More fud. 51% fud. We got the, we got the NFT fud. We got the, they can stop it fud. And we got the, what was that last one? Oh, the quantum computer fud. Yeah, we're knocking them all off here. I got my bingo card ready.

I love it. There's so many. And it's, it gets recycled, right? Like you, you give it a four year kind of like basically having to having. You'll see it all. And then you'll see it start to repeat. And you're like, oh, I saw this one before. It's like, it's like back to the future where it's like, oh, I've seen this on a rerun.

And people are like, what? Rerun. What's a rerun? It's like, wait four years. You'll find out. How long till they start giving us the, is it going to be American? Bitcoin is centralized in America, Fudd? Is that the next one?

we got about 10% of mining in Canada right now, which is exciting. But I think like if something like France, what was it like 28 nuclear facilities online there, if they just like take interest at 0.003 operational costs per kilowatt hour, like come on, fam. Like America's didn't have to admit that that nuclear energy. Yeah, it's going to take some time. You know, there's a lot of incentive, man. And the halfings don't stop. right they do the halvings are never going to stop right up into the end 2140 so do it okay so i'm

going to open it up to troy and jessie to add any other final thoughts in and around uh this this segue that we've taken uh any anything else that you want guys want to add here i'll i'll throw on just a quick two points i'll be very brief i guess Alex's rant you're talking about the free market when you're talking about bitcoin being able to adjust based on the different forces that are thrown at it, it's efficiently and effectively allocating resources with no one holding a gun to its head. So Bitcoin free is, you know, you're just advertising for the benefits of the free market when you made that talk. And yeah, I'll leave it there.

One sec. I do want, because we have Nancy in the chat. Now, I think Nancy was in spaces earlier, if I'm not mistaken. And she asked, so if I understand this correctly, it can double spend, it can choose not to validate transactions learning here. So, Alex, do you want to maybe take this one? So, yeah, so there's a variety of different things you can do if you're able to maintain attack ongoingly. But one of the most simple things that people try to do is double spending.

And so a realistic example of how we saw that accomplished here in Canada, we saw people in literally every other province but British Columbia get arrested for this particular exploit. And a whole group of nefarious individuals went up to Bitcoin ATMs that were allowing transactions with zero confirmations. So they were allowing you to take out funds up to $500 in some cases $2,000. And what they did is they targeted all those machines. They all withdrew those transactions, and then they sent that transaction information to a miner. And the miner actually front-run those transactions. So they were able to double mine it before the Mempool, before the network itself chose to mine it,

because they had put low transaction fees on that. They had put a low time priority. So this convenience was something that was able to get them. Now, the more confirmations you have, the more difficult it is to do the, double spend attack. Ultimately, it's you're trying to reuse the money through, generally speaking, through mining before the other person gets that verification. So another example would be, let's say Sessions and I decided I wanted to buy his Lamborghini and I wanted to give him some Bitcoin from it. So, and then I took that transaction that I manually created on my full

note and then I remind that transaction very intentionally with a large network of mining equipment. I could drive away with that Lamborghini and have that Bitcoin. The way that Sessions would fix that is he'd have me probably around for a beer. We'd hang out for half an hour and we'd see enough of those three, four, five confirmations to be confident that trying to do that double spend becomes almost impossible. So it's a time preference and convenience preference that actually allows people to take advantage of this. If there was ever a sustained attack, the whole network would just pivot and move forward. word from that. And I mean that in the most literal way. Yeah. I mean, if you're if you're giving me

Bitcoin for a Lambo, uh, the least I could do is have you for a beer for sure. Yeah. Maybe stay the night. You know he's got a big farm. Yeah, I got a couch. You can probably stick on that. Yeah. Um, and just to clarify, Nancy, just so you know, it doesn't necessarily, like, it doesn't allow you to, um, spend somebody else's money that you do not have the keys to. So like you could you could feasibly probably like re-spend your own money. So like you have a million dollars. You buy something for a million dollars. And then whoops.

Oh, then that transaction that I spent a million dollars on never actually happened because I actually spent it somewhere else. But if you don't have the keys to certain Bitcoin, it's not like if you have 51% or more, you can be like, oh, that Bitcoin's now mine. It doesn't give you the ability to do that. It gives you the ability to double spend. And that's the peer to peer aspect of it, right?

So from the technical perspective, and then you've got that consensus perspective. So people running their nodes, people on Twitter and live spaces, people on the live streams, they would all come to a consensus. And we see, like I guess what I'll close this conversation on my side here with is the consensus stuff is Bitcoin Cash. We saw people try to change the way Bitcoin operated. And there was a hash war in relation to that. Now, either one of those Bitcoins or Bitcoin black or diamond or any of these other things, all could have been the quote unquote real Bitcoin.

Whatever protocol is most widely used, or rather, which you choose to use, this is the protocol that is Bitcoin to you. And I would encourage everybody to use the most sophisticated, most secure, most skilled, most accepted version. And that tends to be Bitcoin right now that we all operate on. And we saw Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi's vision and all these other ridiculous projects with ridiculous, you know, people behind them all fall apart and lose value against what we would consider the real Bitcoin. So if things ever did get bad, consensus would make a new Bitcoin and that Bitcoin would become the Bitcoin. And it's it's hard to conceptualize because I don't want to make people think the Bitcoin cash thing is ever going to happen again.

We've updated now. It's not going to happen. Never going to happen again. Well, I don't know. Maybe one of you guys want to talk about the way we update Bitcoin now, whereas like Segwit and stuff was adversarial and tamper and all these things went on through signaling. So I don't know. Does anyone want to touch on that?

I mean, I think maybe I'll leave that one for now because we might be getting more technical than some people would like at the moment. But I think that's a valuable conversation to have. But we'll bring that back. But I think valuable lessons have been bestowed upon. And I got to say thanks to Nancy for asking that question because, you know, it's very relevant now. So Nancy, if this is the same Nancy from Spaces, I very much appreciate you coming in and listening. But I'm going to, I'm going to, I'll round this topic out. I'm going to rotate.

And Alex, you're next on my screen, but given that we just had a bunch of chat, I'm going to maybe defer to Troy first, if that's cool with you. And Troy, I'm going to toss it to you. I'm going to let you start us up on a new topic. What is top of your mind right now? What has got you excited? What are you thinking about with Bitcoin right now? Yeah, thanks.

Well, I'm not really bullish per se on Bitcoin's price because I try not to have any opinion at all on Bitcoin's price. I've been here so long that I've just tried to make. an attitude that is completely neutral because I've found that the most mentally healthy place to be. But I am really bullish on Bitcoin long term. And that's also been the most healthy place to be is in the long term. I'm bullish. And I guess my reason for that today is that I'm bullish on truth. I'm bullish on the truth about Bitcoin. We've already mentioned like the FUD cycle or the FUD bingo card, right?

I think of it in terms of the FUD dice. And I think it's one of those like 20-sided die because there's a lot of versions of it. But what's amazing to me is that there's almost like a law of FUD, which is something like, it's like a conservation law. Like FUD can neither be created nor destroyed, right? It can only change form like energy. And like the way I think about it is like in a kind of paradox, a Zen, colon or something, it's like

if one side of the fud dice is put down, another side is up. No? It's like you were talking about how it recycles, it's true, but it also is never extinguished. There's nothing you can ever say that will extinguish fud. It just, hey there.

You know, it's just like It's Mario, by the way. Can you say have fun staying poor? Just like daddy. Those eyes. Can you wave? Say hi.

Hello. She's like, I don't want to talk right now. I now understand people can hear me. But she's having a blast here. Anyways, I'll let you continue. Thank you. What a cutie. What a cutie.

Anyway, just wanted to shout out some new, newish organizations that are out there trying to get truth out about Bitcoin, educational organizations that are spinning up in a, in a, financed and focused and organized way, rather than just us like batting stuff down on Twitter. So some of these organizations sat center, Texas blockchain council, brand newly formed, Bitcoin Today Coalition, which recently came out with that book about Bitcoin. And the institute, I'm a part of Bitcoin Policy Institute.

I just wanted to shout out some of the people who I'm working with at some of the fellows at this institute. There's a couple of other philosophers like me, or a few other, I should say, Andrew Bailey, who's my co-author, who works at Yale, NUS in Singapore. Bradley Rettler is at the University of Wyoming. Yeah, there you go. Craig Wormke is a professor at Northern Illinois University, but also economist William. William Luther, senior advisors on our team, Natalie Smolanski, who's also at Texas Blockchain Council, who's awesome. My co-author, Margo Paezu, who's a climate scientist, engineer. There's Margo. Margo actually built a robot that is now on Mars and helped get it there. She's an engineer. And yeah, I mean, she was like,

well, I'm part of a team that I was like, no, you put a robot on Mars. You put a robot on Mars. That's what you say. She was on a team that put a robot on Mars. But now I was working on climate issues, finishing up her PhD, switched from engineering to physics and climate science. And Ovec, Roy, who's a terrific sort of public intellectual. And we've got some great coordinators. I don't know if you guys know David Zell, young guy, just like full of energy and super smart.

I think I met him. I met him in, in, in, in, in Miami for the, uh, Alex Gladstein's, uh, who is there at the Human Rights Foundation. Yes. Oslo Freedom Forum. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Oslo Freedom Forum in Miami, right? He was there. Uh, he's got tremendous energy and Grant McCarthy, right? So it's, um, we're trying to do research, basic research. And we're trying to, uh, educate lawmakers and media people. And basically our goal is to be, no, not Bitcoin cheerleaders at all, but just tell the truth. And tell the truth whether or not it's good for Bitcoin, because it's way better than what's out there. What's out there is not truth-based at all. And actually lawmakers need the truth and the public needs the truth. And this Fundice thing is out of control. The people we're up against are not

anti-Bitcoin people, they're anti-truth people. And my enemy number one is this guy named Alex DeVries, who is otherwise known as Digit Economist. He works for the Dutch Central Bank. But he's always, he's behind like, I'm not exaggerating, like 95 to 99% of all energy, FUD, environmental FUD stories cite this one dude. So when you look into him, look on his LinkedIn profile, he's a he's a graduate student in economics at a university i look when he started his graduate program it looks like two months ago so he's been like he's had his site up for however many years like six seven years he's only just started his phd program he's never listed as a phd candidate or student he's always listed as a researcher or an economist right he's actually just started his phd he

He wrote a master's thesis. He has a master's degree, Masters of Science. He wrote it on the predictive value of tweets in the stock market, right? Like basic kind of what I would consider like undergraduate work, like connecting up tweets and stock prices. And his basic schick, this site, is filled with misinformation. And in a way, this is part of why I'm bullish on truth. Because this site and this guy are out of control in ways that are easy. to debunk. So it's like there are smart critics of Bitcoin. There are good criticisms of Bitcoin.

This is not it. He's massively overreached. He's massively overplayed his hand. And then he's gotten the ear of the New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, like every single major media outlet. And he's gotten some things published in peer review journals as well because there's nobody to peer review because nobody knows about Bitcoin because Bitcoin is kind of like icky. So there's a great story to be told here about how the media has been hoodwinked by lies and even to some extent the peer review system has been captured by a propagandist who works for a bank who is not even identified as a central bank employee. And we're going to tell this story. And it's all going to come crashing down because the story on the other side is just

too juicy. It's just too juicy that like one guy. who doesn't even have a PhD in economics, is the expert cited worldwide in almost the entirety of the case against Bitcoin rests on this one dude. That's a story that we're going to tell. I'll just give a couple examples and then I'll pass it on. Just give a couple examples of the kind of stuff this guy does. He's behind the per transaction stat. I'm sure you've heard it.

Two months of household use per Bitcoin transaction. All of us here, probably anybody even David Wong in the chat, knows that stat is bullshit because the amount of energy used does not correlate with transactions apart from the fees, which are less than 1% of minor income right now. And instead, that mining is actually the security budget for the whole network. It also completely ignores layer two. It ignores lightning and other ways of transferring value, right? We all know that.

I barely even need to say it. But again and again and again in major publications around the world, including, you know, including Elizabeth Warren repeating it, right? In the Senate, chamber, including the letter to Congress that sets up congressional hearings, two months of household use per transaction. Then the e-waste thing, it's the same thing. It's done per transaction. Two iPhones, binning two iPhones with every transaction in Bitcoin is his claim.

He's massively overestimating the amount of e-waste associated with Bitcoin. he estimates the lifespan of a miner as 1.5 years, which is a surprise to all the people running S-9s, which have been around for over six years, right? They should have been, we should have been through whatever, three cycles of mining. More than that, if miners only lasted 1.5 years, you can just go on eBay and look up the latest sales or Amazon or any kind of marketplace for S-9s and see that you. You can't get one for less than 300 bucks used. And yet supposedly they've been unusable for 4.5 years, according to Dig Economist.

And that's the stat that he's using to convince the world that we're filling the oceans with e-waste. He, you know, in the various articles, they compared it to like how many pianos worth of e-waste is Bitcoin, you know, I'm creating whatever. In fact, Bitcoin is less than 0.05% of all e-waste, even given his numbers, it's probably more like 0.01% of e-waste. And miners are in principle recyclable, right? I'll just say a couple more things and then shut up. He ignores entirely Bitcoin's role in incentivizing the buildout of renewable energy. Never says a word about it.

When it comes to methane, the piece that he just dropped this week in Jewel, which was then blasted everywhere from CNN to, you know, Gizmodo to everything. where his headline was Bitcoin mining dirtier than ever, right? He talks about, yeah, he talks about methane in the actual article, which is behind a paywall and very difficult to get to. And he says, well, methane is already required to be flared at 98% efficiency. So burning an internal combustion engine burns no additional methane. That's it.

He just moves on. And then he says, moreover, that incentivizes oil drilling. because now they've got a separate revenue stream. Okay. He ignores entirely an article that he cites by corn shares, their own study, on the effect of wind on methane burning efficiency in flared gas, right? These flares just shoot up into the air. If you've ever been around like Houston, you see tons of them or in North Dakota.

Okay. If there's no wind, then they're 98% efficient. If there's a lot of wind, they can be less than four. 40% efficient. The average efficiency given wind is 68%. And methane is extremely potent as a greenhouse gas, right? It's 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20 year period. So burning that additional methane is keeping a lot of warming gases out of the atmosphere. And that's what Bitcoin miners are doing. He entirely ignores that by ignoring the existence of wind. I mean, this is basic stuff. This is basic stuff, right?

And simple Google search would show that efficiency of methane burn is less than 98% in wind. A simple Google search would show that you can buy it. You can't buy an S9 for less than 300 bucks and they've been out for six years. This is not hard stuff to figure out. This doesn't take, you know, I'm a professor. This doesn't take a professor to figure out. This is stuff that any Pleb can figure out with the simple Google search, right? or I mean anybody using lightning like literally anybody one last thing on digit economists he says

he says the lightning network is not decentralized and it's not bitcoin blah blah blah and dismisses it that way and that's why he's not going to include it but then when it comes to energy use he's like we know the energy is being used by the lightning network we know it's also polluting right so he's inconsistent and then we had you know the china ban 50% drop and hash rate more than a 50% drop in hash rate. He's got his little pollution index, like how much pollution is Bitcoin causing? Does his index move at all when we drop 50%? No. It does not move at all. It does not reflect a single bit of drop when we lose half the hash rate. He's got a little footnote explaining why. Well, we don't know actually which machines were turned off, and there's

no way of telling which machines were turned off. And without being able to tell which kind of of machines like new or old, we can't actually calculate how much the pollution has gone down, and therefore we're not going to try it all, right? So this is this basic, easy, easy to do to bunk stuff. The reason I'm bullish, I'm bullish on truth. I'll shut up. Also, my battery might run out. The reason I was, the reason I'm bullish is because he's like a cartoon villain. He's so bad. He's paid by the banks. And we've got like a team now. We've got a team of researchers and we've got multiple teams of researchers. We don't have to spin the truth.

We just need to tell the truth. And we're going to do it. And that makes me bullish. Troy, before I know Jesse wants to say something right now, I'm going to let him. I just want to say that you, my friend, are the embodiment of, of what I think Bitcoiners expected to come to fruition via the existence of Bitcoin. it incentivizes truth telling. It incentivizes people working to, and like, you know, the incentives that you have, you see a network that can create value for people and you are trying

to bring the truth there. And you said, I don't care if it's good for Bitcoin or bad for Bitcoin. I just want the truth out there. I think that's an excellent way to do things because if it's bad for Bitcoin, maybe we can improve upon that. If it's good for Bitcoin, fantastic, we're on the right path. But and I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't want to like cause any riffs here. But like, you know, you, you tend to refer to yourself as more of a like progressive Bitcoiner. Is that correct? Well, I don't particularly like the label progressive because what passes for progressive right now can sometimes just be insane. And I don't want to be a so. I don't really, I like a lot of the folks on Bitcoin Twitter who call themselves progressives.

I like a lot of those people. And yeah, I've voted more on the left side of the scale than the right side of the scale. But I just think kind of like politics has gone off the rails. And I mean, I'm a bit coiner. But I also, yeah, I also hold a lot of views that left-leaning people hold. So I mean, what I'm getting at here is you're a man after the truth. And I think that's important because Bitcoin does incentivize people to go after the truth. And I think this kind of political spectrum left or right kind of goes out the window when you just want people that are in pursuit of truth, which Bitcoin directly incentivizes.

And so that spectrum, it really kind of loses value in trying to identify as one side or the other when you, you are in search of truth. And I think this could be almost like a mecca that that starts to pull people in towards it as a search for some sort of truth. And I'm sure that we'll have people on the far left end of the spectrum and the far right end of the political spectrum that kind of find a different, you know, leaning as traditional, you know, political spectrums go. as they discover the truth through the mechanism that is Bitcoin. And so, you know, I'm, that's why I'm very happy to have you on because while like initially looking at certain issues, we may not agree on everything, I very much value somebody that goes after the truth and wants to find it and is actually expending their time, which effectively is the only thing more scarce than Bitcoin to find it. So I appreciate that rant.

I really appreciate everything you had to say here, man. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. And I feel the same way about the Bitcoin community. Generally, I can connect with bitcoins across the political spectrum. The only people I can't connect with are authoritarian. If you want to spy on transactions, then sorry, I don't, I can't, we just can't play together. We can't work together.

And if you want to, if you don't think people have the right to store value, but you always have the right to take it from them, then okay, we're done here. And likewise, if you don't think anybody should, you think everybody should check in with you first before being able to transfer value, we're done. But if you're with me on those three issues, then we can work together because we have a common interest in Bitcoin. And so, yeah, I agree. And Bitcoin's a truth machine itself, right?

It's its own kind of, that's part of the appeals. Like that chain, it's not. a truth about everything, but it's a truth about what's on chain. It's about as good as we got. I love that. Jesse, I'll toss it to you while I get some ice. Well, after hearing all that, I mean, there's not a whole lot I can add to that, but what I did want to say was brutal, savage, you know, wrecked, Alex DeVries, you have been absolutely taken down. Listen, man, when I got started, I got started, I got started, I think, a little later than most of you or all you guys here. I sort of first really

started getting into Bitcoin around 2017. You know, I fell for some of Dig Economist Fudd. I didn't know any better. I was trying to sit through and find the truth. But he, as you said, had made a name for himself, right? He had made headlines, made ripples. And sure enough, as I, you know, as I was doing research for my book there, I think I may have even quoted him as in the book for some, in one of my like the drawback section where I tried to address some of the fun, not to give them credence, but it's thank you for that. First of all, like that was incredible. And then just coming back to your point about truth, I mean, a lot of us are on the ground. Like I do sort of hand-to-hand combat trying to orange pill people and get people to see what this is and introduce them to the topic.

and you know thank you for for putting these in your institution together or being a part of it and alerting me to it because like i didn't even know about it before this call um and so this is now another tool in the toolbox to combat the fud and convert that negative energy into positive energy and channel it the right way so i'll i'll leave that there i love it Alex do you got anything to add here yeah Troy i appreciate the fud busting but man i want to get more philosophical before this conversation. And I got a couple things I want to talk about. But first I'll say,

anyone who's writing articles judging the power use of other people is wildly ignorant and needs to look inward and not outward. Because when you look at power consumption, it is directly related in all cases. It is directly related to quality of life. And I've been all over the world where power is, is a luxury compared to the way we have it here. And to try and judge those people on burning tires at night in their jungle hut so that

their kids can study and get an education at night and get the like these little old ladies crying talking to me about just wanting their kids to be able to study at night. And you want to try and be, you know, Bitcoin solves the kid were the kid that's using Bitcoin to solve his store of wealth after he comes home and there's a crater where his house used to be or that woman in that abusive relationship or all those people in Venezuela, people being unbanked around the world, all these people involved with this protest, it's literally the solution to all these problems. And so to try and project some unthoughtful, I would even say distasteful viewpoints like

that on others and their usage of power is lacking both insight externally and lacking understanding of what the technical protocol is actually accomplishing. So if you read anything about that power consumption stuff, or I would argue power consumption in general, this is, this is noise being produced by certain groups to hold suit in narratives. And in most cases, it's related to tax credits and different types of subsidies. It's related to political platforms. It's very often not directly related to personal benefit, right? It doesn't necessarily always work towards you having a clean. environment around you.

So don't forget that. They allow these companies to pill for the water and poison the streams and take it all at exuberant rates because of their own self-interest. And that's what Bitcoin fixes. So you screw the power fudsters. Those guys have black hearts as far as I'm concerned. They haven't been to enough villages in India and the Amazon jungle seeing people desperate for power and the ways that it fixes the world.

So yeah, that's what I'll close there. And we're going to talk about how literally, not right now, we'll circle back, but we're going to talk about how literally human beings have been, in my opinion, aspiring to a public ledger like Bitcoin for literally writing, dating back 4,000 years, pre-Hindu cultures, the writings there. We saw certain things like the Akashik side of the Buddhist philosophies and Hindu stuff relating to that record of vibrations and intentions that people could be judged on coming to the gate. Sometimes I refer to it as the Santa Claus effect, that forward-facing anti-corruption tool of that public ledger,

something always watching, always judging us, you know, and that omnipotent being able to, you know, make those decisions based on our behaviors on chain. I think we've been writing about this indefinitely. Have when we run, brother? I don't know. I think we should segue into this now, man. It seems to have shifted that way. I think continue down your thought pattern.

We'll let Troy dive in after. As long as human beings have written, as long as human beings have shared stories. And time and time again as I travel the world, I see some aspect of this public ledger, of some kind of all-knowing deity judging us based on some kind of karmic effect. It wasn't until the 1890s.

hundreds that we heard the Akashik records kind of modernized in the sense of this immutable ledger. But certainly the descriptions of it going back as far as 4,000 years talk about all the vibrations, all the intentions of every plant, every person, every action they made, every dream, every thought, the wind. It was all, all those vibes, those vibrations were put into a record. And upon death you were judged. And I think Bitcoin represents the sum of all that.

And we had all the different gods. We talk about Santa Claus, all these different things. So Troy, from a, from a, a studied, right, for philosopher, someone who thinks about this full time. What do you make of that ridiculous suggestion I just made? It was Bitcoin inevitable? Is this something we used to bang on the sides of the caves about? Well, I wish I were an historical anthropologist rather than a philosopher, but I'm not. So I don't want to make some grand cross-cultural claim, but I will say that the search for truth of a kind of immutable, unalterable kind and the ability to know that truth definitely as as as the origins of Greek philosophy.

And that's what Plato's heaven is. And that's what Aristotle's works are about too. And, you know, kind of culturally right now, we're in a moment. moment of, I would call it, I would call it for lack of a better term, you know, postmodern confusion. And we don't know how to make meaning out of events. We're in a crisis of meaning making. And that's where this weird spin is taken over. It's like it's all spin all the way down. And reality never seems to push back. It's always spun, no matter how wacky it is, right? You have some experience and you're like, wow, this is how things are. And then you get

talking heads telling you it's the opposite, but they're really good at spin. And Bitcoin is one of those places where reality pushes back, like death, you know, where it's like, okay, this is real. And there's nothing you can do about it. There's nothing you can do about it. So Bitcoin is one of these like hard places. People compare Bitcoin to religion in a lot of ways. But I think it's more like nature. How we relate to it might be religious, but it's more like nature. It's like a force of nature because it's based in thermodynamics, right? And it's like you're out on the ocean alone. And here you are with just sort of floating with this great forces around you. You could be eaten by a shark. You could drown. You could be crushed by the waves. And I remember having this feeling

like, you know, being out surfing and having this feeling of being like alone and very powerful nature. That's what it's like when you make a transaction on the, like when you hold your own keys and when you make a transaction on chain with your own wallet, right? It's like, it's real. It's you and this, there's a fact of the matter about whether you know your key or don't. There's a fact of the matter about whether you're on the chain or not. And that that is awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome in a way that death is awesome. I don't mean good. I mean, it's just one of these things that is this hard wall against which we live our lives. It's the end of spin. Nobody can spin that. Nobody can save you from it. Nobody can punish you in that way. It's like nature. So I want to pull on something that that Alex is getting at here. Have we seen this kind of like ask of here? humanity to find this public ledger.

I think we saw this early on. And I think we're seeing the reintroduction of a similar system. And so I want to call back to Savadin talks about this in the Bitcoin standard, the Yapstones. And there were like, let's let's imagine that these stones and the aisle of Yap were UTXOs. Each one a UTXO for a different amount, large, small, all kinds of, and those watching that don't understand what a UTXO is. It's literally like a chunk of Bitcoin. Imagine they could be any size.

It doesn't matter. It's kind of like a bill in your wallet. You could have a $20 bill, a $5 bill, $10 bill. But imagine you could have an any dollar bill of whatever size. And it's just sitting there. Now, eventually the problem will be that, you know, know, it's difficult, like, especially in the concept of Yap, there is an island where there are these giant stones. And you can't, you're not going to cut the stone in half.

They're, they're too giant and onerous. And so the solution that they had is just everybody knew who owned what portion of that particular stone. And so there were just all these stones around. I own 1% of that stone. Cool. Great. And everybody just knew that. So we're starting to see that exact thing

happened in Bitcoin with something called coin pool and there's what this is is it's a white paper for the ability of an individual to own or to own irrefutably a portion of a UTXO

a portion a portion a percentage of an individual UTXO, which only gives them the ability to spend the portion of that UTXO that they actually own. They can also transfer portions or the entirety of the UTXO that they own between people that are in the same UTXO as them. And so this is called coin pool. its early phases. It would take one or multiple softworks to implement everything needed.

But eventually, we could see an instance where people can transact off-chain between an individual UTXO with ever causing an on-chain transaction and to Troy's earlier points

about energy FUD and every single transaction costs this amount of energy it further dispels that like Bart like don't worry about the lightning network this is on chain you own a fraction of a

UTXO provably you can spend it peer to peer of between anybody in that particular UTXO off chain with no energy expenditure explicitly linked to those transactions.

And it's it's hearkening back to this idea of the Yapstones where people owned a portion of that particular stone. And when a transaction happened, the community as a whole looked and said, okay, we're now aware that this individual does not own what they used to say they own. Now that is actually somebody else is holding that. And it was like a, it was a consensus amongst the community.

But now you have this like programmatic way of proving that you own a portion of that Yapstone, aka you own a portion of that UTXO. And this is the incredible thing about Bitcoin. It's it's taking these things from the past that people implemented just in their tiny, tiny island communities. It's like how do we make sure that we have scarcity here? and we have this irrefutable, incredible store of value that cannot be debased, but it's, you know, we can still transact easily.

And it was, well, we all know each other. We'll create a public ledger in our minds. We've now created a public ledger for 8 billion people on the globe, and we have a way to split up those digital yapstones. And that's fucking amazing. So I'm, that's like, I was so excited. when you started talking about this. I'll let you guys rant on it.

But anyways, that was... I just have like a one-liner, basically, which is that, you know, we pissed off the economists really bad when we went from Fiat to gold, right? And they're like, digital gold. And then we're like, no, actually, we're going to go farther back. It's digital, yep, stones. You know what I mean?

You're going to lose their shit. Yeah, and I think the one thing that I want to get, the point that I'm trying to distill here is the value of information. and the weighting of that information, and the way that individuals, for the first time, have access to that information, right? So previously, Google and the NSA and your Internet service provider, they had these data sets,

and they were able to understand large swaths of information. But with the public ledger, it's forward-facing. You can use heuristics to look at wallets, look at service providers, look at individuals on chain, and you can evaluate who they've worked with, who they're connected to. You can look at where those funds have moved from in the past and where they moved to.

You can understand a whole lot of things. I've got a Bitcoin wallet that's favored it on my browser here, and it was up like 8,800% last year, just buying at the bottom and selling at the top. And that's what the wallet did all year. And, you know, I didn't chase it down the whole time, but I really wish I did because whoever's running that thing is real clever. And trading day training is not my vibe. Same with the NFT stuff.

It's easy to see all this collusion on these other chains. You see that two guys, two people, two individuals make up like 86% of the money in NFTs. And they're like early Ethereum Genesis blockholders. So like when you actually go on chain and start looking at these things or like Quadriga here in Canada. or nice hash, some of these other things. We're screaming about how these exchanges and services are like dumping their Bitcoin out of cold storage for like six months before it goes on.

Like, no, they don't have any Bitcoin in their wallets anymore. You can see it, right? It's all going to other exchanges right now. What? This is, so guess what? Get your money out. And you can only tell that because you have access to this information. So the on-chain heuristics, the ability for that public ledger,

Previously, we said we had the shamans, the churches. It was religion. And then it was the government, right? And it was the militaries. It was the corporations. Now it's the tech corps that are the arbiters of all this information. And Santa Claus doesn't have to be real now because if you're screwing around, we can see it on chain. But we need to encourage all of us to both understand that every time we look up wallets,

we're exposing ourselves to those types of on-chain and Alex. So we need to do things like run our full nodes if we want privacy. But we also should learn about how to look at the blockchains. If you haven't, go ahead and explore some Bitcoin in your own wallet. And look at the way it moves around where that Bitcoin came from, how it's split up, how it groups together with the different segwits and things along, multiple transactions, batched, right? You can see the fees coming off.

Exchanges are different than when you send your friends from your own hardware wallet. All of those things are really cool. So I encourage everyone to, It's there waiting for you. It's like the library, but it's just so much better because it's on your phone. It's on your computer. You can download it on a full node and explore it offline. You don't need a card.

You don't need a membership. You don't need to sign up. There's no fees. It's all readily available. So empower yourselves with that. And I'll pivot this away from that. One of our clients recently, one of our friends had been mining with us. in the space for five years, recently sent about $2 million to what they thought was a legitimate

service and they had lost older Bitcoin. So with self-sovereignty, it's very powerful. And I want to speak to pay for Bitcoin the differences, but you also have to appreciate it. Right. Like you shouldn't, there's lots of services like CASA on chain and these different things that can help you through some of these difficulties. if you're at risk, you're not confident in your ability to do the stuff we're about to talk about. But if you have the ability to be sovereign and you're confident, like sessions talked about

earlier, putting it on steel, multiple locations, all that stuff, that can make you, you know, have redundancy and being pervious to some of those mistakes that most people make. But yeah, so Bitcoin, paper Bitcoin. Paper Bitcoin sucks. I hate paper Bitcoin. I'm going to stop. I'm not breathing anymore. It's all going to come out. Paper Bitcoin is what, It's going to affect first world countries and Canadians and Americans the most. We are all going to have to buy our Bitcoin twice and people don't realize it. Things like wealth simple, things like Robin Hood, things like ETFs. These are not real Bitcoin.

If you don't have the ability to withdraw that Bitcoin into a self-solvering cold storage wallet, of which BT Sessions has lots of great videos showing you how to do, if you haven't done that, it is not real Bitcoin. And in time of crisis, imagining that some guy's going to show up at the bank and open the door for you, but just you, and then they're going to open the safe, and then they're going to open the gate, and the manager is going to be there with the key so you can access your safety deposit box, but just you, right, because they don't care about their kids or the city burning or the flood or the bombs dropping or the riots in the streets. They're going to certainly cater to you and your banking services, or they won't, right? So you don't want to rely on these centralized entities in a time of crisis. So get these things off of exchanges. The only people that had their Bitcoin seized were people that had paid for Bitcoin.

They had left their Bitcoin on exchanges. And the government subpoenaed and literally compelled licensed money service providers, people who are by law required to cooperate with government. So if you're concerned about your sovereignty, do not leave your Bitcoin on these different services. Do not put ETFs in your investment. portfolio, don't invest into these derivatives of this stuff. Because if things get bad, if liquidity shortages happen, if prices run exponentially, you will very likely not be able to get a hold of that Bitcoin. And I mean that in the most literal way, because I've seen it happen through multiple

cycles. These services, these exchanges, these yielding, these staking providers, these, these tumblers, and all these other things that people think are benefiting them, they all go away very quickly when the price hits an all-time high. And, you know, it's just about people's greed and them having, you know, enough of other people's money to decide that they're going to do something really nefarious. And it happens with these services time and time again or enough value is in those services

that now a whole lot of invested interest is spent trying to take that money from those services. And there's indefinite ways to attack things when they're not in your possession. It's infinite, the attack surface. When it's in your own possession, to Ben's point earlier, they got to go buy that $5 ranch, which is, what, 15 now because of inflation. But you can protect yourself from that stuff as well by following best practices.

So everyone write this down. It's the 10x Bitcoin Security Guide. This is the tinfoil hat version of Bitcoin. It talks about multi-sig and all the other crazy shit. So if you want to learn about that, move very slow. slowly with self-sovereignty, move a small amount of money into your hardware wallet, make sure you have access to it, make sure you can reset the stick and get access to it again. And if you're able to, if you want to start to move forward with self-sovereignty,

so you're not victimized by these government or corruptions or by these banking holidays or these other things, this is like the rabbit hole that takes you to the bottom. And 99% of this stuff is not for most people. 24 words on a steel plate, you know, in the drywall, probably a pretty good way to approach that for most people. Leave an extra copy at Nana's house in the garage. Perfect. But if you're in an at-risk situation,

if you're falling victim to corruption, right? Or as we spoke earlier, just incompetence, right? They literally just didn't file my February and locked all my bank accounts. They had it the whole time. If you're worried about that stuff, pay for Bitcoin is bad. And thank Trudeau for taking people's Bitcoin because I've heard more comedians, more personalities, more newscasters. I've heard more podcasters.

Talk about the threat of having their livelihood taken from them for the first time. And I've heard every single one of these people outside of Bitcoin talking about Bitcoin and the way it can't be taken for the very first time. So every time they push, Bitcoin's anti-fragility pushes back. People in Ukraine are learning about it. People in Canada are learning about it. People all over the world by proxy are learning about it right now too. So sell sovereignty is sexy, but it needs to be taken serious. So, oh, paper Bitcoin.

Do not mess with paper of Bitcoin. That will screw you every time. I love that. I mean, and paper Bitcoin takes many forms, right? We've seen them before. Mount Cox. Leverage? Right.

If you use leverage, yeah, Mount Gox, yeah. Yeah, so many, there's so many ways that they will try to sell you something. You know, custodial solutions can be paper Bitcoin because you can't necessarily audit if they have that. Right. So it's just, we don't know that Well Simple is carrying that balance. We don't know that that Robin Hill will ever let us withdraw or that, you know, that they're actually subsidizing or finalizing those transactions on chain. You know, companies like backed, want to copy the Bitcoin blockchain and rank. completely offline for their clients and just have their own internal Bitcoin blockchain ledger.

Like how screwy is that? We're going backwards here. What makes it different is the decentralized ledger. So, you know, I think paper Bitcoin is the biggest threat to first world countries. People who find Bitcoin out of a necessity don't do that. They understand sovereignty. It's the people that find Bitcoin out of like the investment practices. I think they're the ones that are going to get screwed.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to leave it open because I know Jesse, I want to let you chat and Troy if you want to tag in. But Jesse, do you have any thoughts here? Well, yeah. I mean, in a sense, that sort of segues into the topic that I was going to talk about today. Let's do it. Which is, yeah, which is orange pilling people, just orange pills in general, right?

They're being thrown out left, right, and center. We're talking about Trudeau. We're talking about Russia sanctions. We're talking about sending money to Ukraine. We're talking about paper, fake Bitcoin, not being in your control. Orange pills are coming at us, left, right and center, and people are noticing, and they are taking an interest. They are getting curious. They are asking questions.

I mean, today, listening to the two of you guys, well, three of you guys. But give me a deep dive and just, you know, I feel like I'm being orange-pilled all over again. in a certain sense. So there is, you know, combating the FUD, like everything. What, you know, what is money? What it really is? How do you control it? There is so much to take in.

People are turning. That want that you mentioned in the first world is very, you know, it's becoming a need now. It's clearly becoming a need. The importance of something like Bitcoin that, truth machine, it's all shining through. It's all coming together. It just vindicates, I guess, a lot of what all of us have been doing now for a few, for years. And so just I am, I'm bullish on orange pills on getting them out there. I personally, I wanted to tell a couple personal anecdotes that happened with me recently. So as soon as the Trudeau news hit, or sorry, let me backtrack for one

second. I've been, you know, sort of going to protests and things in Canada. I've been, I've been putting myself out there a little bit, maybe a little too far, um, trying to wake people up to, hey, there's, there's something else going on. There's something extra happening here. And, you know, maybe you should be more in control. Maybe you need that self-sovereignty and that's, and that's, and that freedom in that, and that goes for multiple facets of your life. Um, and money being a very, very, very important one. Um, so right after the Trudeau news hit, I got word from someone I had met in one of these protests. She represents, I won't name the group, but just let's call it a freedom activist group in Canada.

And I jumped on a Zoom call with 50 people to give them the crash course, to give them the orange pill. What is Bitcoin? How does it work? How do you take possession on your own? Sorry about the phone there. Like I said, I'm in the office. That's not my house. I can't turn off the phone.

subsequent to that, you know, so people are asking me, email me questions. Subsequent to that, I organized, I befriended a local restaurant tour in my area, been, you know, telling him about Bitcoin for a bunch of months now. Finally, you know, get him to start buying and, you know, he's, you know, of a different vintage. It's a little easier for him to use an exchange. And so afterwards, he said, you know, like, dude, how do I, I need to take control. I get why. I can't leave it on this exchange anymore, right? I can't just buy here. It's not good enough there. Like, how do I do this? So, okay, so I do the hand-to-hand combat thing. Here's how you know, download. Let's start with something. So let's get Blue Wallet. It'll walk you through your private key. Make sure you store that. Let's secure that properly. Great. Now you're a holder. You own and control your own Bitcoin. If they come after it, they can't have it unless you let them have it. I even, we organized just this past Wednesday night, myself and Tomer Stroll. I don't know if you guys are familiar with them.

Another Canadian bitcoiner, awesome dude. We gave a presentation to this restaurant. We invited a bunch of his clients, our friends, people we have met. It's acquaintances, hey, crash course on Bitcoin, come and get it, stealing out the orange pills. And so there's so many reasons for people to be interested right now. We're doing a meetup. I guess this is a little bit of an older orange pill story.

I had a guy on Twitter reach out to me. Not long after I published my book, maybe early 2021. I forget the exact date. And he said, hey, man, listen, I'm going through a little bit of a tough time right now. You know, I don't know what I can really pay for the book, but like, would you be willing to send me the PDF? And I said, you know, okay, sure. Like, you know, you're going through this, whatever. And I, you know, I learned actually from safety, get the book out there.

Get the PDF out there. When I first published it, I was very guarded with it. But like, get it out there. So sent it to this guy. he comes back six months later and he says hey man things are going better now i'd love to i want to pay you back for the book let me send you a few sats so great lightning invoice send me the sats boom that guy has since just become one of the most toxic people i've ever seen on twitter for for bitcoin and he tweeted out it this was like a month or two ago he's like i'm so sick of not knowing any

bitcoins in real life i want to meet people i want to be with people and a meetup came out of this tomorrow So in Hamilton at the Tahini's restaurant in Hamilton, if anyone's around 1 o'clock, we got a Bitcoin meetup going on. I'm sure there will be many more orange pills going out there too. So yeah, that's what's got me bullish right now. Okay, hold on. Tahini's in Hamilton. In Hamilton. I've got to get out there.

I've never been to one yet. Oh, really? I'm pumped. I'm pumped to have some of the goods. I really so like I grew up just like super close within a two hour drive of Hamilton so I grew up like on the St. Lawrence River is so close to there I would love to make it it also I've never been to tahini's I met Ali and like in Miami so it's super far from anywhere that I could get some tahitis but that's oh that's super awesome um is this

The dude that you're talking about, is he able to get down to Miami at all? Like, what do you mean, when? For, uh, in April? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if he's going. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what he can do.

I'll find out, I can ask him tomorrow. I'm going to meet him for the first time in person. Ask him. Ask him if, if he would be able to get a flight there. Okay. I'll see what I can do for him. Okay. Cool.

I will follow up for sure. I'll leave it there. Anyways. Are we not going to mention money remittance? Like, I just want to throw this in here. Bitcoin is coming for all the things, the same way that FaceTime and Skype destroyed long distance calling cards.

Yeah? All you middlemen, all you money service providers, all you money remittance guys charging those prohibitively expensive, all you black market bros making money, helping people send money to each other. Guess what? All of you are about,

to be out of a job for the benefit of the people who are using those services. Bitcoin is better for all of that and so many more aspects of the marketplaces. The utility of this thing is just so far reaching and it's going to destroy these centralized crop agencies one after another, after another. Because do you think someone should have to go to a store, pay 40 bucks, pay six bucks a minute to call their family in India? Fuck no. I don't think they should have to do that to send of money either. Speaking of that, actually, I saw an announcement. Do you guys know that impervious company?

I don't know a lot about it, but right? I saw that at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami, I'm looking at the little announcement here right now, they're going to release their product. And the ad, basically, it says, Zoom without Zoom, Google Docs without Google, medium without Medium, without WhatsApp, payments without banks, identity without the all about centralized intermediaries and built into the impervious browser, which is being built with lightning.

I've seen that. Pretty cool. Yeah. So I want to address a couple things here because I've seen, I think it was Breeze, which I fucking love Breeze Wallet. It's so good. Breeze Wallet, if anybody is watching

and you haven't used it, super easy onboarding for Lightning and it's non-custodial. So you own your own Bitcoin. You can receive via a regular Bitcoin address and then it's converted into a lightning balance. You can send to lightning invoices and to regular Bitcoin addresses. And it's all kind of handled in the background for you without giving up custodial control. But they did publish a blog talking about how impervious is trying to cram too much shit.

shit onto the lightning network. And they were worried about like, oh, it's going to overload the network. However, I want to give a little pushback to that because that's been every step of the internet so far. As soon as people were like, we're going to put pictures. They were like, oh, shit, we can handle it. We're going to do YouTube. We're going to do YouTube 1080P.

We're going to do YouTube 4K. We're going to start doing VR. Like every step of the way, holy shit, we can't handle. There's no way we can handle this. And then it does. And so I think that the initial push of like, holy shit, lightning network is not meant for this. Maybe it's not. But I think through layers on top of Bitcoin, it could be.

And that's what, you know, I'm not reading that to, you know, pump impervious. I was more tailing off Alex's point about the idea that these things. might very well be possible on Bitcoin, and someone's actively working on them to, oh, nicely done, to make sure that it's possible or to bring it to life, rather. And just the fact that that might happen and that people are working to make it happen

is something that will push us forward. And it's a beautiful thing. And just to tag on people that aren't familiar with what impervious does. Effectively, like, so they had a hackathon, and you can do things like make a phone call through impervious, which is via the Lightning Network. And unlike making a regular phone call through whatever means,

there is literally no record that that phone call ever took place. And it's all like onion routed and everything. So it's very difficult. to even see that anybody even talked to anybody. They also did things like sending a file via the Lightning Network, and they use atomic multipath payments, which means you're not just doing a single route through the Lightning Network. You're taking a file, splitting it into however many pieces,

and then boom, through the network, and then they reconvene on a single endpoint and reconstruct the file so that you've just sent a file through the Lightning Network. network. So there's a lot of interesting things happening there, whether or not this ends up residing on the lightning network itself or perhaps a layer atop lightning or something else, it still remains the fact that people are creating a way with really no gatekeepers to say, no, no, no, you're not doing that. Or we want to know exactly what you're doing. that aspect of it is being removed.

And if it doesn't end up being on the lightning network, you can be sure as hell that somebody's going to build it atop lightning or another layer of Bitcoin. I think that's the important point to notice. So I'm super bullish and I'm really glad that you brought up this topic. I think the first rule of Bitcoin privacy is we don't talk about Bitcoin privacy. We're getting a whole lot more of that. But we know, in my opinion, they're coming for,

they're coming for the privacy tokens, or probably they're coming for the stable coins, then the privacy coins, and then then regulated securities. And that's, I think, the order of these regulators are going to work forward in over the next five to ten years. And so I think the privacy aspects of these extra layers and the benefits of this stuff, there's a lot more going on than people are necessarily talking about. And you can use Bitcoin in very secure, decentralized ways or centralized ways, depending on your benefit, very anonymously. So lightning and taproot and the roll-ups and all these other really cool things that are coming, ZK Snarks and this stuff.

Man, Bitcoin has come. People think Bitcoin is the same. Bitcoin has gotten like armor and swords and shields. It's got a flail now. It's got a privacy shield. Like an invisibility cape, I mean. Like there's so many cool things that have been added to the network. I don't even think we have enough time.

in an entire day to go over it. So I'll just say, yeah, privacy on Bitcoin is cool. And if you want to be private on Bitcoin, Sessions has a lot of cool videos on how to do it too. You know, and since you're on the topic, I'm going to, and I've talked about this in previous shows, I'm going to concede that I did not go by my own advice very recently. and again, I've kind of not fully said this, but I'd like to apologize to everybody on part of myself

and those affected in the haste of what has transpired here in Canada in the past few weeks to a month. The initial impetus to what was happening in Ottawa, I thought, well, you know, this will be a small, thing and I will I will just do it in the easiest way possible very quickly because we'll maybe just get a few donations and we'll just send things out. But it was a very tough lesson to learn that you should always, always use best practices right from the get-go regardless of how small you think something is going to be. and I deeply apologize for that because I didn't go by that advice early on. And that is my fault and my fault alone because people were asking, well, how can we do this

quickly and easily? And the impetus was on the immediacy of it. And I probably should have spent the time and learned the things that I was not privy to early on. even well before I was aware of, you know, the current situation. And I should have put the effort into to making things more robust. And I didn't. And that was a failure on my part. And so, you know, I'd like to apologize to everybody out there that maybe watch the handling of what happened over the past few weeks and was not fully satisfied.

You're right. You're 100% right. And I hope that people look at that and they say that is a lesson learned. And regardless of how little, how inconsequential, I think everything that I'm doing is, it could have greater implications later. And so you should take those considerations regardless of where on the political spectrum you think you are, regardless of what, you know, what cause your backing and how much support you think it has, it doesn't matter.

You still need to step back and go, what are best practices? What should I be doing now? What do I know? What don't I know? Is there a handful of things that I, me being an educator, did not know. I am I am a hundred percent able to make mistakes more than clear the past few weeks. And you should step back. And if you don't know, ask, ask for help because those little mistakes can turn into bigger ones later.

And so consider that and weigh those. Don't even weigh those. Just always go the way of best practices because there are tools. And I'll just leave it at that. I want to say here, I appreciate everything you said, but I just want to make my perspective clear. I don't think you did anything wrong sessions. I think that that was a choice that came through consensus.

I think that what you did was you provided some suggestions, right? And different people, a part of that decided to go, you are not a centralized actor in that by any means. And I think if I can speak blatantly, I think that Chubacca-looking goofball is a bad actor and was suggesting some really bad practices and it's gotten people in trouble in similar ways in the past. And I would even go as far as saying that perhaps your consensus

had been co-opted by some individuals that had nefarious intent. And that's unfortunate. And that's where we can all, you know, the ex-wives or ex-husband stealing money or kids or, you know, things, we can all be surprised by the people around us. And I think more than anything else that we've all kind of learned a lesson about how careful we want to be when we include people in our consensus or include people as part of our keyholders. And I think if, if, I know, I know sessions that if you had the time, you would have provided the full amount of information that you normally provide people on

places like YouTube. And if everything had its chance, I think it would have been a different structure entirely than perhaps the one that landed. So I just appreciate you being there for people and putting yourself out there.

While Ben was doing this, I was literally preaching not to give money to charity. I was telling people that they were going to get arrested and get busted up. I was saying that you should stay home with your family and go for bike rides and focus on things inside your control. you know, I very often say things like if you must give your money to something, give your money the problems you can see around you, and if you must give your time, give time to those in need that are in your local area.

And if you must involve yourself with politics, do so on municipal levels where you have the ability to affect it. You know, and I didn't suspect it was going to get as bad as at this time, but I lost some nights asleep for you and everybody else involved, truly, because, you know, because. because I suspected it could. And then it was really unfortunate to see that the Trudeau government or any government was as overbearing and overstepping as they did. So I don't fault you. And I imagine most of the community doesn't by any means. And also JWW is a cop.

I will say that, yeah, I appreciate the kind words. I really do appreciate that. And, and again, like, I appreciate. I appreciate everything you said, but at the same time, I think that, you know, I firmly believe that there are things that should have been observed that were not in the haste of everything that was going on. That's okay. I accept that there's, there were fuckups there. That's okay. I will, I do hope, and in my mind, not that I will ever partake in anything.

like this ever again, but I will but I will say in my mind there's a clear roadmap there now of like how things should have been done, but shit happens. And despite it all, I will say I still enjoy

Star Wars. So I'll leave it there. I just want to pipe up too. I didn't follow every back and forth in that incident. It was actually kind of painful to follow. But I just want to say, you stepping up in the first place means something. And, you know, you're an honorable person and you took a risk. And the critics sitting on the sidelines who didn't get into the arena and put themselves at risk and put themselves through that danger of stress, you know, they just have no right to judge.

because what you did was step up for a community and need. You saw a moment. Whenever you do that, you risk making mistakes. And actually, you know, me coming off the sideline and getting back into Bitcoin, like I'm a lurker. You know, I've been a lurker for like a decade, over a decade in Bitcoin. And I had this idea, this idea, which I'm not going to get into, but it's the idea I've talked about on other shows.

And I was like, I got to get in there and fight for it, right? And it's a risk. put you you you step into the public you open yourself for criticism and i don't even mean criticism by that j w guy like i blocked him long ago when i i saw him harassing somebody in his spaces and you know it was like it was like just clear to me he wasn't a good actor he wasn't giving that person the benefit of the doubt at all assuming that they were a spook and they were just like ah and uh yeah so that guy's one thing but just uh appreciate you actually i mean what you did today again shows your your heart and your character

a critical analysis of your own performance under pressure, both taking responsibility for mistakes that were made and owning that, oh my God, you know, most people never do that. And in this space, almost no one does that in this space. You know what I mean? Like the critics of crypto and Bitcoin are right, that this space actually attracts a lot of bad actors. because irreversible payments and pseudonymity is just a really great place for bad actors to hang out. You know, earlier Alex was talking about paper, Bitcoin doesn't mean shit. And I wrote in the chat, you know, like I had accounts at like BTCE and Mount Cox.

And actually, I went to my password manager after not paying attention to Bitcoin for a long time. Like in 2017 during that run, I went to my password manager and I was like, oh, what sites did I have a accounts on. They were all gone. They were all gone because they all rugged and just took off. You know what I mean? And like whatever change I had in them and I, I mean, I always tried to take self custody, but you know, there's always a little bit of change. And it was like, well, it's gone. I mean, it's in the ether. But you know, I just appreciate your, you're stepping up to help actual Well, people who needed your help, needed Bitcoin used as a tool. And inevitably, you're going to risk not doing things ideally correctly.

But, you know, there are tradeoffs that you were making, too, not just in terms of speed, but in terms of transparency. And, you know, there's this privacy transparency thing. And so you had a lot of considerations and you had a lot of people in your ear and working with you, right? And you're just like, in that moment, there's one way that's the safe way. And it's just to step down to let somebody else do it. And then there's the stand-up way, which is you, you, you, you,

enter the arena and you do your best and you did. And I appreciate that as a bitcoiner and I think that's a model of how we should be and what you're doing right now is very courageous and it's another model of how we should be. Troy, I really appreciate that. Especially, again, as we were kind of alluding to earlier, like we may not always agree on every single issue, but I hope people watch this from the perspective of, hey, people that don't agree on everything can at least like kind of appreciate each other and like the integrity like of you going after the truth. I very much appreciate that. I don't give a shit what your your beliefs currently align with.

I give a shit that you have integrity and you are trying to obtain the truth. truth. And I hope that comes through with most people and they start to glean that from from Bitcoin itself. And one other thing I wanted to add in through everything. And I don't want to get on too much of a tangent of this, but I want to say that or do. Yeah. What we do in life right now? More sessions, tangents is doctor prescribed. I'm a doctor. I'm uh that's Harvard with two ours uh so yeah doctor prescribed btcc seconds around right now go no i'm i'm gonna this will be a short one i just want to say that that nick aka nobody caribou on twitter has bigger balls than i think anybody i have met in the bigger in the bitcoin space

um he i didn't i wasn't privy to who he was prior to anything over the past month. And all of a sudden I'm introduced to this guy who's like, I believe in a certain thing. I'm going to go out there and I'm going to do this to the best of my ability. I don't go to fuck. Like there were plenty of times where I heard him say like he was worried about certain things. But then in the end he's like, but I believe this is right.

So I'm going to do it. And so he was, you know, like he had. had a moral compass and he followed it and he knew that it could hurt him in doing so. And he did. And so, you know, hats off to Nick. Hats off to AKA Nobody, Nobody Caribou. Because even those that are looking, and again, we all get the luxury of looking at this through hindsight. And hindsight is always 2020 saying, oh, shit, that would have been way better.

Oh, of course, it should have been that way. It should have been that way. This is much better. And there's many different versions of that. But in the end, under pressure, when shit was hitting the fan, when a lot of stuff was going on, and there were so many people screaming about how to do things when, how, why. And exactly all of the little details in there, all of this being screamed at an individual. And he went for the best he knew how.

you know, I got to give him credit. And Nick is an absolute legend in my books, regardless of political affiliation, regardless of whether you agree with his stances on issues or not. This is a person who believed in a certain set of values, and he was willing to take the brunt of whatever the hell came down the pipe at him for backing those particular things. And Nick, if you watch this at any point, I know we get to chat from time to time,

but good for you, man. I don't think I could have done the same thing in your position. So thanks. And I absolutely never would have. So you're braver than me, brother, because you know, you're taking it's for everyone. That's really impressive. But let's be serious.

There was a, the U.S. ran a coup. in the Ukraine back in 2014 in February. They literally destabilized the Ukraine government there. They put American Patsies and placators in power. And they couldn't even manage the Ukraine for the next eight years without it falling into war. So how the hell is a couple Canadians supposed to manage some fucking Bitcoin donations? Like they can't even manage countries after they take them over. How are we supposed to like, it's all a mess, man.

You did nothing wrong. The world is volatile and it's not a machine. That's why I love you. I love you. Jesse. No, all I was going to say, I, yeah. Did we get to your reason yet? Yeah, yeah, no, no, the orange, the orange pills.

We're good. We're good. We covered it all. Just, thank you. Thank you. Ben. Thank you. Or BTC sessions, pardon me.

Thank you, Nick as well. Thank you to everyone involved with that. Like, you know, I encouraged people to donate, not necessarily knowing how it was going to shake out, knowing you were involved, knowing that you were a man integrity. It takes courage to do it. It takes know how. You know, you stepped up. I have a lot of regard and respect for that. So just thank you is all I want to say. It's, uh, and you know what? I've got to say in the context of how things are shaking out

globally out of 21, 22 Bitcoin, 14 or 15 got directly to individuals. It beats the 0% of stuff sitting in bank accounts. So,

whether, you know, who knows what happens this point forward, there are tools. We'll see. But I will say that given the track record of legacy finance, Bitcoin still poised, like way out in the lead if this was a track race.

And on its way up, still moving forward, still getting better, harder, faster, stronger, right? Yeah. So. 100%. Well, Jens, I think this is a good place to start wrapping final thoughts. This has been a banger. We've been going for two hours here. usually my two-hour runs are like a five-guest show.

Clearly, we had a good conversation here because we got going for a while. So I'm just going to do a quick round. I'm going to challenge you guys. I know there's a little off-the-cuff, but I'm going to ask just any final thoughts that you may have, anything that you want to leave us with. But I'm also going to ask if you could recommend for people watching right now, a piece of content, a video, a book, whatever it may be, Jesse, don't cheat.

I already shield your book. I will say something that you want to suggest to people to check out. And so what I will suggest, my final thoughts, I will just say that, again, given geopolitical stuff that going around the globe right now, if you're watching, this and you're not, you're just kind of getting, dipping your toes into the Bitcoin pool. Just ask yourself what you truly own. If shit had the fan and somebody kicked in your door tomorrow and said, we own all this, everything that's in this house right now, we're just taking it all, get the hell out. This is ours.

What do you actually own? in terms of reading material, I want to point people towards what we were talking about before. I'm going to bring it up again about coin pools. And so there's an article on TFTC. I'm going to bring it up really quick here. Hold on one sec. So just give a read.

to this article from tfTC.io, issue number 1167, he talks about coin pool. And so if you've read the Bitcoin standard, you'll be familiar with the idea of Yapstones and how they utilize those as ways of delegating who owned what through consensus on the aisle. And this is, in my mind, a way of bringing that concept forward into the age of Bitcoin in a technologically verifiable way, which is really cool. So yeah, check that out. Just go to tfTC.io slash Marty's Bent and then just look for issue 1167. It's a reason one is from February 21st. So worth a look, fun little article.

So I'll pass it down the line. I'm going to pass to Alex. The final thoughts, and do you have any suggestions for people to check out? Okay, so quick thoughts. We're all about to find out how much Superbucks. If you guys haven't heard of the Superbucks, read about the Superbucks. As much as 50% of the American dollars in the Russian banking system is thought to be undetectable counterfeits that are made by groups like Iran and North Korea

and probably the NSA. other black market governments and industrial complex stuff. So super bucks, very interesting. Learn about the super bucks. They don't want to talk about it because it really, as much as 50% of the European currency could be American dollars could be fake. Okay, got that out. That's important.

Do not, micro liquidity pools, I want you to think of the future of Bitcoin like lots of little islands of micro liquidity. The decentralization aspect is going to basically cause people to leave the main island, the main chain, go to small, trusted islands where the rules are different, allowing them to party and do whatever they want with people that they trust, people that they love. And then they're going to get back on their main boat and drive back to that main chain. So we're all going to take our cruise ships to party islands and we're going to live the best Bitcoin in life on top of those layers. So that's

really cool too. Charity, if you must give to charity. Instead, stack sats yourself so you can force your will on the world around you as your platform grows, as your platform grows, you can bring more people onto your platform, you can support more individuals, you can make more change in the world around you. So any value you can get by giving money away now, instead stack SATs, accumulate that wealth, and watch how much will that allows you to force on the world later as you watch that value increase. Lastly, all this stuff in the world's got us all fucked up. I hate it. I don't think we should care about things that are outside out of our control.

I just wish we would all go for more bike rides and more walks. We should focus on our mental health. We should turn off the news. We should not involve. It's making me cry, seeing families literally have to hide their kids and subway trains in the Ukraine and shit. It's just, it's horrible. And it's not, it's, there's not something I can do to affect that.

So instead, I'm going to focus on my family. I'm going to focus on myself. I'm going to focus on empowering the people around me. And at some point, I hope that I have a large enough platform that I can, change all the things that upset me in the world. And I will work forward towards that. And that's why I stack Bitcoin is so that I can fix the things that I think is wrong.

LOP.net, LOPP.net, great resource. Lots of great information. Everything from wallet recoveries to the whole security stuff, different reviews. I love it. The 10x Bitcoin security guards, Ben was nice enough to pull up for everybody. I think that's the rabbit hole,

the tinfoil body armor approach. You know, it takes the tinfoil hat to a whole new degree. And of course, if you're going to look for technical information related to these services, these products, lightning exchanges, all of this stuff, Sessions has an entire catalog on his YouTube channel. If you want to learn about Bitcoin, just like click one of his videos on that playlist and just let it rip. And I think you'll get a lot more perspectives. You'll see he's been here for so long. How many bear markets now, Ben?

We have so much to learn from his perspective, you know, having seen the ups and downs and seeing the ups and downs and seeing the. people come and go in these services. So really good technical information on his channel. Feel free to follow me everywhere. Good guy, biker, YouTube, Twitter, everything else. Yeah, self-sovereignty is sexy. Thank you, Ben. Cheers, man.

I appreciate that. That was very concise. I like that you took notes. It's clear that you knew what the fuck you were going to say. That's good for you. Challenge Troy. You are up next. Get your notes ready because Alex is

coming for you. Final thoughts and do you have any suggestions for you? Well, let's start with suggestions. I mentioned that piece by Alex Gladstein. I do have, let's see, get up here. It's called the invisible cost of war in the age of quantitative easing in Bitcoin magazine. screen. Okay. And that's an awesome piece. I think that'll take you like a day. I feel like I can't recommend anything else because it's so timely. And just to summarize his discussion very briefly, it's that we used to finance wars in the 20th century with bonds, war bonds, remember those from World War II and stuff? And we also financed it with taxes. So taxes and war bonds. Well, that's That's just not how we finance war anymore.

We haven't financed war that way for quite a while because people lost their appetite for war bonds when wars became unpopular. Like nobody wanted to lend money to fight the Vietnam War. Nobody wants to lend money to fight in Iraq or whatever. And we don't tax for war either. We don't levy taxes in order to pay for war. We just like put money in the account of the military. for the purpose of war, just from the general account with no special vote required. And this has led to hiding the cost of war from the public.

And of course, we don't have a draft anymore, and we don't have mandatory service anymore. So what's wild is that we've got a culture of war, ongoing forever wars. You know, he makes the point in the article that Obama, when he was elected, said, you know, he wasn't looking for trouble. But when he exited, we were more involved in wars than when he came in. And this is just like a self-perpetuating system that, you know, Eisenhower warned us about on his way out. And his take on Bitcoin and war is really subtle. And I think anybody who's a fan of Jason Lowry, who's talked a lot about how Bitcoin will end war,

or we're going to take war from this realm, the physical kinetic force into the realm of the digital. I think the Gladstein take is like a level deeper than that. It's that we are going to have to be honest about war in a way we weren't. It's not going to end war. Kinetic war is going to keep happening, but we're going to have to fucking pay for it. And we have to be honest about when we pay for it.

And to be honest about what we pay for, we can't pay for it out of quantitative easy. And so the public will lose their stomach for war. And some wars were financed with, of course, like World War II was financed with war bonds and with taxes and inflation, actually. But they sold it to the public. And that's the future of war. So anyway, that's the Gladstein pump. I thought that was just awesome. He did a what Bitcoin did interview as well.

that's freaking amazing. And then as for other stuff, just a privilege to be on today and to talk to you all. I thought this was real. This turned very real sessions. And actually more bullish than anything anybody said today was just what happened here for me.

Just encourage, you know, it's the human thing. Just like Alex said, like get out and go on your bike ride or whatever. Also, real people always make me more bullish about Bitcoin than anything else. Just real people, Bitcoiners. going to bat. Yeah, a friend of mine said, tend your garden. That's his thing, right? Tend your garden at home. Like, do that first, your family, your health, you know, your loved ones, your community, and then worry about the other shit. And although I have to say, and I'll finish with this, my son, who's eight years old, but who reads proficiently and reads the news, has been reading about Ukraine,

He sent me to work today with this thing. It's to Mr. Zelenskyy in Kiev, Ukraine. And inside he put like $18. And he wrote a letter to the Ukrainian president. I have funds for your military enclosed for ammunition, right? And I was like, anyway, yeah, this is in his own hand. I did not tell him to do any of this shit. But, eight-year-old shouldn't be worrying about that stuff.

But this is a good opportunity. You can teach him how to send that 18 bucks to him with Bitcoin, right? Yes, of course. But he wanted me to mail it. So I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to tell him it's mail because he really wants a letter back from Liz Zelensky. Right. But I can't keep him out of the news. He's been reading proficiently since he was three.

And yeah, yeah, anyway, it was just kind of adorable. I had to tell, he wanted to first of all just nuke Putin. And I was like, no, no, you can't do that. Like there's just children in Russia. They've got Russian fathers who love them just like I love you. They're suffering too. And many of them are getting sent off to war, you know? And he was like, yeah, but dad, they're shelling a reactor.

They're shelling a nuclear reactor, dad. And I was like, well, that's true. Let's get him some ammunition. Yeah, this is this is the, uh, the, what, what, you know, the, the new cycle does, does to individuals. I mean, I, I, I imagine, uh, you know, watching a lot of this stuff, especially younger. You want, you want to latch onto something and a, and a cause and everything. And, you know, obviously his heart, he wants, he sees people hurting, wants to help, which which is, I think it's part of the human condition, right?

And I think that's a beautiful thing of itself. And I definitely, I'm glad that you're imparting on. But there's individuals that are there too. And they are, they're affected by this. And so, like, do you agree? Did you agree with everything this president is doing, the last president is doing what the next president might do? and do you agree with people penalizing you for the decisions of those individuals?

And I think that's all part of growing up and understanding that the individuals can be separated from those that are in control. And yeah, so anyways, I'll leave that there. But Jesse, I'm going to toss it to you last. Final thoughts, anything to suggest for people watching. Yeah, for sure. So, Troy, you've got hell of an eight-year-old on your. hands, man, first of all, to be reading the news, wanting to send money to Ukraine, literally wanting to mail dollars. That's, you have an ambitious kid, help him, you know, see the light.

Obviously, I know you will. And he's going to do great things. No question. There was a couple comments from me. I'll just quickly address those that popped up. Jerome mentioned the audiobook, and I went, yeah. And then I realized, oh, I thought I saw e-book and audiobook. and the audiobook has been coming soon for like a year,

and that's totally my fault. I'm leaving that there. I'm going to leave it again. Are you going to be read the audiobook? Is the audiobook going to be read by you? Guy, Guy Swan. But, yeah, yeah, yeah. Outstanding.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but the reason it's not out is 100% on me. So anyway, it's coming soon. Hopefully, maybe we'll check in next year and find out. There was another comment from Bonn Hoddle, who I had mentioned earlier in the call that I had done this Zoom call last Friday with this Canadian activist group. Bon, if I'm not mistaken by the handle, was one of the other guys on the call advocating for Bitcoin to this group. So, Bon, good to see you, my friend. Thank you for picking up the book.

I appreciate that. Enjoy. Okay. So in the interest of time, I do need to run. So I'm going to say this. I'm going to wrap it up pretty quickly for me. lessons, just stay the course, keep learning, you know, teach others, teach yourself, take the initiative to learn new things.

I've learned a lot of new things today thanks to Troy and Alex and BTC sessions. So thank all three of you for that today. There's lots of layers to go down, security, tons of rabbit holes to explore, tons of resources out there, Alex named a bunch of them. So keep digging, keep learning, keep getting better. And then in terms of resources, I'm going to show, oh, no, no, I'm not going to do There was a That's called magic internet money

That's really wild I don't know if you guys It wasn't me It was totally available right now I hear there's an audio book coming I hear Bryce one might be involved as well So if you guys get a chance Definitely check that out

You know Christmas is coming Like it always is eventually Just like Bitcoin So you might as well stack up on a couple of those now Early for Christmas I'm saving up the audio book for Christmas Yeah back up Start stacking up on the audiobooks.

Get a folder with like 16 of them in there. So you got gifts for everybody this Christmas. And then maybe in terms of something, a Bitcoin piece of material to check out, I'll recommend, thank you very much for that. I'll recommend the Bitcoin is generational wealth video. If you guys haven't seen that, written and narrated by Tomor Strolight. That thing, when that came out, like literally brought a tear to my eye. We talked a lot today about violence and peace.

And that video, as well as any short film about Bitcoin can do, demonstrates and encapsulates why Bitcoin can be a tool for peace. So I'll recommend that to everyone. If you go search for Bitcoin is generational wealth on YouTube, it's on YouTube. So that'll be my piece of material. That's something a little lighter compared to Alex's material and Alex Blatstein's material. this one you can just sit back and enjoy you don't have to do too much work you just got to listen then you get your hands dirty and do the work after that so cheers boys that's i got to wrap it up but thank you very much again ben for having me thank you very much Alex and Troy so good to meet

you guys really appreciate this this was super fascinating for me too learned a ton awesome awesome thank you this was a banger two hours and 15 minutes with only four people good for you guys this is if you have it usually i try to handle I'm going to be mad. There's like 70. How many likes? There's like 75. We can definitely break 100 here, guys.

What are we doing? Come on. I just got the knock on the door. I really got to run. I'll see you guys later. Jesse, thank you. Alex, Troy, I really appreciate all of you guys being here. Again, thank you guys so much.

I'll wrap it here. But cheers Troy and Alex. And of course, Jesse, who's now departed. You guys are always welcome back on the show. I would love to talk to you guys some more. So thank you both very much. All right. Thank you.

Cheers, guys. Cool. So for everybody watching, thank you guys so much for joining me as I am gallivanting about the globe with my family and everything. I appreciate you guys being here. As always, like, subscribe, share, all those things. Super important. They really do help the show.

They help get this in front of more. people. If you want to help the show in another way, you can always hit the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Shake pay, leaden, bit refill, keystone, bill flottle. They're all in the show notes. If you want to help it to the show in another way, you can hit up my strike page and drop a Bitcoin tip that is strike.me slash BTC sessions. When you get there, you can type in any amount you like. Hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice or if you tap to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I am out. Have yourselves. a wonderful evening or day, wherever you may be, and I will see you guys next time for your

daily session.