BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Troy Cross, Tuur Demeester, James Lavish ep339

Episode Date: April 22, 2023

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/thetrocro https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester https://twitter.com/jameslavish 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted mutisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Pass on your savings to your loved ones with ease in a simple claiming process with full customer support. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab an Embassy today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/   Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions  HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, you can check out their Lend platform for p2p loans that are never rehypothecated. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION   The Miami Bitcoin Conference is the largest Bitcoin event in the world! Come check it out in Miami Beach Florida on May 18-20th. Use code BTCSESSIONS for 10% off your tickets! https://bm.b.tc/btcsessions Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/ BITCOIN tips: https://www.btcsessions.ca/tips

What is up, everyone? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. We've got a monster panel tonight. Very excited for this one. A lot of my favorite people in the space. And yeah, very excited for this one. We'll do intros momentarily. I hope you've all had a good week. Plenty to chat about. And of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. Yeah.

If you have not already, like, subscribe, share all those things. Help a ton in getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is, if I can get it up here, this is timechain calendar.com. We're sitting at $27,307 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 3,662 sats. 92.16 of all Bitcoin have been mine. That's 19.35 million of them. And in terms of fees, geez, did we just get a

huge flow into the mempool? I could have sworn it was much lower. Just a a moment ago. Let's check the Mempool. That can't possibly be, it is. I guess somebody just massively overpaid on fees. Anyways, you're probably fine with like four or five sats per bite right now, but somebody just opted to, you know, 10x that. So, yeah, Mempool is not particularly busy. It's been actually kind of quiet lately. So yeah, don't worry too much. But still, Lightning, RBF, all that good stuff in case we get an influx. Shout out to sponsors of the show, hoddlehottle.com. If you're stacking stats and you've got a few priorities in mind, things like peer-to-peer

transactions, instant self-custody, no KYC, then Hottle-Hoddle is the place to go. You can sign up in minutes with nothing more than an email address. Pretty simple. Choose a currency, a payment method, an amount, and start viewing offers and trading KYC-free. Yeah, check them out. They also have a lending platform in which nothing is ever re-hypothicated, so you can check that out down below. Also, once you stack those non-KyC sats,

you might want to put it and secure it in the best damn hardware on the market. And I love my cold card, Mark 4. In fact, I was just doing some tutorials with some people. Anyways, Coin Kite knocks it out of the park all the time. I love the Mark 4. It's a beast. But other great things out of Coinkight, tap signer, sats card, block clock, open dime, all that stuff.

And coming soon the cold card Q1 this year, it looks insane. So be sure to check them out, coin kite.com. You can use code BTC sessions for 5% off, everything in the store. Now, if you're looking to go beyond single-sig, you can check out multi-sig solutions. And I love what Nunchuk.com.io is doing with their hunting badger program. It's a collaborative or assisted multi-sig setup that you can run from your mobile phone. and it has baked in inheritance planning. So the app walks you through literally everything.

You can use things from CoinCite like TapSigner, Cold Card, and a ton of other hardware options. It does have that baked in, again, planning for inheritance so you know that your sats are going to get where they need to get if anything should happen to you. And one of my favorite things about it is no KYC. Also, you don't need to give up personal information in order to use this thing.

It's really clever how they don't. done it. So yeah, check them out. I've going to done a full tutorial on it. And yeah, kudos to the nunchuk team. And last shout out here is start nine, your sovereign computing solution. You can build your whole Bitcoin stack on this thing. Bitcoin core, lightning node, mempool. Space, uh, join market, all that stuff. You can host your own data, uh, whether it be password managers, files, uh, photos, all of that. And you can also host Noster relays and Nostre clients, all kinds of great stuff. So check them out, uh, start9.com. The Embassy One is kind of your entry level device.

And then the Embassy Pro is when you just want to host your whole damn life on the thing. You can't go wrong. So anyways, check them out. And with that, I'm going to stop my rambling. I've got to get these gents in here. So a huge welcome to Mr. Tour de Meester, Mr. James Lavish and Mr. Troy Cross. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for being a part of the show tonight. I'm very excited to have all of you in a series.

single virtual room at a single time. And so let's, for those in the audience that may be unfamiliar, let's just do a quick round of who are you and what do you do. I'll toss it to tour first. Who are you? What do you do? I am a Bitcoin analyst, Bitcoin investor. I research and write, mainly. And you've written some fantastic pieces. I've really enjoyed your work over the years. And yeah, I just first, first opportunity to have you on the show. So thank you for being here. Well, toss it down to Troy, also not known as Jason. He was in the chat one time.

And I don't know what it is with me mixing up progressive bitcoinsers, but I did so. And I was calling them Jason because Jason Meyer, I've also been kind of hanging out and chatting to recently. Anyways, Troy, sorry about that. Do you want to give yourself a little intro for anybody unfamiliar? Yeah, no worries, Ben. And I'm honored and happy to be back on the show. I do like to hang out sometimes and watch the show. And YouTube, you know, the comments are the best.

I'm not following the comments right now because I have this screen. But that's the real reason to hang out and watch the show is the comments action. Yeah, I, what do I do? I'm a philosophy professor. I'm here at my office at Reed College, still teaching philosophy. I also have been a bitcoiner for a long time and had a longstanding interest in kind of Bitcoin's impact on the energy world. That got me involved in Twitter about two years ago and started kind of took over my life.

My wife calls me a Twitter influencer. If you ask people what her husband does, she's like, oh, he's a Twitter influencer now. And then other people know me. as the chief ESG officer of the Bitcoin Corporation reporting directly to the Bitcoin CEO. I mean, that's a high title. I feel like he peaked there, really. Totally. Awesome.

And we'll jump to James. Dude, good to have you back. Can you give yourself an intro? Yeah, great to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me. And always good to be with people who are smarter than me. I'm the show. I love that.

So, you know, I'm like tour. I'm an institutional investor. in hedge funds and private equity for almost 30 years. And that's better, Tara. And there you go. But I call myself a reformed hedge fund manager. And that means I am dedicating the rest of my career to this space in Bitcoin. As you, as you know, I'm, I'm teaming up with a number of people like Greg Foss, Larry

Lepard, Larry's partner, David. and Corey Clipson at Swan that we're launching a Bitcoin-focused hedge fund. But all that going on, if you ask my wife what I do, she'll tell you I shit post on Twitter all day. Is that inaccurate in any way, though? You know, I can't blame her. I can't blame her. Awesome. I'm glad to have all of you.

Again, thank you for your time. And we're going to dive in. So again, shout out to everybody in the chat right now. Keep those messages coming. I'll start trying not to distract these guys too much with them, but I'll still be pulling them up regularly if it has relevance to the conversation. But if you're new here, this is Why Are We Bullish, very simple premise to the show.

Each of us has come with a reason why we're bullish or something that is top of mind, something we're currently interested in. So the flow of the show is basically three pronged. Somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. Up next, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, discuss. And then third, we're going to rotate to the next person until each one of us has a turn. So very simple. We go over the three hours, reason, riff, rotate.

I'm going to get us started this evening. And this is, the reason I'm bullish this week is something that I've been kind of working on tutorial-wise the last couple of days here, last few days here. And it has to do with Noster. So are any of you guys on Noster currently? Yeah. I don't know why I was trying to tag. Maybe I'm like the biggest jackass in the room here.

Maybe I'm not following you guys on Noster. I'm having trouble like, you know, gradually following everybody that I need to follow on there. But anyway, it's a little bit. funky yet, but it's awesome. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so, um, my bullishness is in and around Noste and, and it has to do with the, the integration and that kind of the native integration of lightning. And, um, and so those people that are using Noste, a lot of people, um, to be able to send lightning tips to and from on different posts, uh, they'll just really simply download a, a, a custodial lightning wallet and then get a lightning address, which looks like an email address from

that and put it in your profile. And then you can instantly receive sats from anywhere at any time instantly. And that's totally fine. That's a totally fine first interaction, especially with something like Noster, especially if you're just dealing with a few bucks at a time. But my reason in and around being bullish with Nostr and Zaps in particular, right now, now is the seemingly, the trajectory that we're on of having non-custodial zaps become easier to attain. And so what I did this week is I managed to set up a lightning node and have my own lightning address that goes directly to that node and can send and receive zaps non-custodially. And so I kind of used an in-between solution.

I used something called voltage. And I'm going to why not have some visual accompaniment here? But I used voltage. And so what they do is they'll host infrastructure for you. But they don't have any access to your funds. It's all basically locked up with the credentials that you create, which they don't have any access to. So you can set up your own. lightning node in a few minutes.

You can establish some lightning channels. And then you can, it basically, they give you the option to create your own, not only your own lightning address, but it also doubles as your NIP-05 identifier, which anybody watching that doesn't know what the hell that is. Basically, it's an easy way to be able to search you up on Noster. So mine would be BTC sessions at vLT.g or at voltage. And so anybody can search me up. buy that handle, but you can also send lightning transactions, not just on Noster, but from anywhere

to that address. And so the integration with voltage was super simple. They basically have a little connect section over on the side of their website when you're in your lightning node, which I'll do right now. But over on the left-hand side there, they have a little connect section. And in that section, it says, okay, well, what are you trying to connect? What wallet are you trying to connect? And it's just some copy and paste. You copy and paste a bit of information, paste it into your wallet that you're dealing with.

And now this lightning node that I'm running is connected in a couple different places. So here's Noster. This is snort.com. And I've got a plugin here called Albi. And a lot of people think of Albi as being a custodial service, which it can be. you can get a custodial lightning address through Albi,

and they'll manage everything for you. And that's totally fine. But you can also link up your own L&D node. And so that's what I've done. And so now I've got this lightning node and all of my zaps. And you can see like zaps that I've been sending out. You can also see zaps that have been incoming all linked here in my browser. I've also been able to link this on mobile,

link my voltage node on mobile to a mobile wallet called. Zeus and it's totally seamless. And whenever you go to zap somebody on Noster on your phone, it'll say, what wallet do you want to use? Well, you just use your own lightning node and you can zap back and forth and you can see all of all of your transactions. So like just again, as a quick example here, let's say, okay, cosmic dimension posted something. I want to zap them. I'm just going to tap that. I'm going to send them a thousand sats. And it's just going to give me that notification. hey, do you want, and this is my own lightning node that I'm dealing with. I'm just going to hit pay and off goes a thousand sats to cosmic dimension right there.

And again, it's all non-custodial, which is fantastic. So I'm very excited that it's getting easier to be self-sovereign in using a lot of these solutions. And it's not to say that everybody has to go that route, but the setup for this was not too difficult and it's going to get easier with things like breeze dropping their SDK, things like green light put together by Blockstream where you know, you're going to hit a couple of buttons and it's going to spin up a lightning node on your phone and your liquidity will be automatic and you don't have to think about lightning channels. It's all pushed to the background. The amount of innovation that I've seen in Lightning since

first playing around in 2018 with the first mobile client where I had no clue what I was doing and it honestly being clunky as hell to now where any person can download an app and either custodially or completely non-custodially be interacting with lightning in minutes is unbelievable. So I'm going to kind of leave it there and just open it up to comments and conversations around this topic. But what have you guys been seeing in and around lightning? Where are you out with it? I just had a quick question, I guess.

You also, like, when you get zapped, do you, like, have that, like, impossible to ignore notion that one Satoshi is going to be a dollar? So it's, you know, I get, like, a thousand bucks in the future. Like, that's amazing. Cosmic dimension just got a thousand. for a meme I didn't even read. Sorry, see again. I said,

Cosmic Dimension just got a thousand dollars for a meme I didn't even fully read. We will, for sure. Years from now, we'll be chatting to grandchildren or great-grandchildren saying one time in a live stream, you know, I watched somebody nonchalantly send a thousand sats for a shit post on Noster. I think it's hilarious.

Do you usually use the desktop client for it? So I use, yeah, I use snorts on desktop, although I use Iris a little bit as well. Those are kind of the two that I've been ping pong in between. And then on mobile, because I'm on Android, so I don't have, I don't have Damos. But I've kind of been using Amethyst. And then there's another one called Plebster, which is actually super. smooth. So I use, I hop between, and that's kind of the beauty of Noster too is, you know, if something is quicker to get better features, just hop over. You don't need to, you know,

transition your following and followers and all, you know, yeah, it's incredible. It's amazing. It's absolutely incredible. That's the, that's the most important part, right? Being completely decentralized. You don't have to worry about, you know, you not, you not having your, your, your, I guess your network, you know, your community that you've built up. Yes. Because if you leave Twitter, that community is gone, right? So that's what's awesome about this. And that's what I think people don't really understand yet.

That's the, that's the part that it gets me excited the most about, you know, Noster. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's unique in that, again, like the censorship-resistant nature of it, of course, Of course, like individual clients could technically, you know, filter out types of content. But the ability to seamlessly shift from client to client negates that, right? And it's amazing. Yeah.

Exactly. It's pretty awesome. I've loved it. I haven't been on there enough. I've been pretty busy, but I love it. It's one of those things that you know, like I was talking to Jeff Booth the other day about it. And it's a technology that is at the absolute beginning. You know, so if you remember Twitter, for those of you who are old enough to remember when that came out, it was pretty clunky in the beginning.

And so it's just what it is. But when you're there in the beginning, the network effects are just massive, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. When did you guys start dabbling and not like when did you start startup a profile? Like right after Christmas, I think, somewhere around early January. right when that was a big jump right yeah yeah i was one of the bandwaggons i was one of the twitter bandwagoners

yeah yeah troy what about you when did when did you hop in i was a few weeks later than that i think i was i was a late comer um and i haven't used it a ton in in a way i love it i think it's um i think it's the future um but here's where you see the power of network effects you know twitter just right now has just a vastly better network effect. As flawed as it is, as ridiculous as it, it's kind of like the dollar. Like Twitter is like the dollar relative to the bit, you know, up and coming Bitcoin, which is like a better basic technology, but worse network effects. And those networks effects are powerful.

And for me especially, like the reason I'm on Twitter is not to talk to Bitcoiners. It's to talk to no-coiners, pre-coiners, right? And they're not on, they're, you know, they're still on Twitter if, if they're even there. So it's sort of like, depends on your mission too and what you're doing there. If it's like hanging up with friends. Yeah, Noster, awesome. If you're developing lightning, awesome. Yeah, I did come before Damos was integrated with Zaps.

And then like just being able to zap through, I guess I use Wallet of Satoshi over there. that it's just so fast and convenient. It's like, holy crap. This is what we dreamed about back in the day, a long, long time ago, right? Remember the first tip bots came on Reddit, and everybody had these moments of tipping each other, like crazy. And it didn't really happen when it happened to Twitter. Like, we didn't really get the tipping because it wasn't really integrated with posting. But now it is a Noster.

So that was hugely exciting, like a major, like, You're talking about these kind of regrets that we might have of zapping somebody a thousand sats. I have those regrets from the early tipbot days. Reddit already because it already happened. We already did that. But to do it in a way that's, you know, my next thought was immediately like, wow, wallet of Satoshi is working a lot better for this than, you know, using my node and blue wallet. it's going to actually push people to to wallet of Satoshi or or other sorts of similarly easy

and fast custodial wallets right so you're you're a little bit at the beginning which I didn't know about I didn't know about voltage I haven't see this is what you don't get when you're not hanging out over there like I've actually missed what's going on over there and I'm super encouraged but also just like curious and I want to set it up for myself now yeah it's it's pretty awesome. Did you guys see when what's his name, Matt Tabby, the Twitter files guy.

He jumped on Noster now. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I did see that actually. The network effect will come. It will come if the technology's there. Well, and the best part is his migration was specifically from a mindset of free speech. It wasn't at all to do with Bitcoin.

And then he got there and everybody's like, Oh, you got to enable Zaps. And he's like, what the hell are Zaps? And so like that was, this was his foray into experiencing Bitcoin through a free speech lens, which is a very unique kind of thing, especially in the West, to see. That's interesting. Yeah. Hey, Edgar. What's up, bud?

Edgar's given shoutouts. Also, tour, I'll have you know that our resident yellow puppet, yellow, is choosing, is choosing violence in the chat. here. He said, you know what? Double the U and double the E. We're its parents. You know, let's just double it. It was like that, what was her name again? That woman who was pumping BitConnect, like she was saying like, we're going to double the mining. Yeah. Is that meant anything? Double it. Yeah, but I remember as a teenager, I was upset that my name was hard to understand internationally or to pronounce.

But I've had some time to get over it. Yeah, that's okay. If people can't get it, then they're lost, I suppose. They'll have to learn at some point. All right, gentlemen, any final thoughts in and around Noster's, things that you like to see, you know, kind of where we're at right now? And just to wrap the combo here. Yeah, I mean, I got started with Nostr like last December.

and yeah, I agree. It's very, very, very early. But still, like, there's so many implementations already. Like, that's exciting. And I feel like in terms of network effect, like the only thing they really need to do, they don't really need to create their own network effect. It's more about just being ready for when Twitter inevitably

is going to get censored and just more and more people are going to go into Noster. And I have noticed with the zapping, it almost like it almost kind of like it innately makes fun of traditional social media because like when you have like a what is it a note on Noster if you post something yet you have like a note on Noster and you get a few likes you're kind of like yeah you guys like unless you zap me

like I don't think you really like this like you're kind of like attending and I feel like that's going to that's going to bleed into traditional social media is like Who cares about Facebook likes or give me some Noster Zaps? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Domus just added an option for Zaps only. Yeah.

And so basically it removes the option for you to even like something. And so you have to put some economic power behind an approval of something. And if you enable Zaps only, you get a special badge beside your name when you're on the site. So, I mean, again, like, you're right. The idea of a like, it's like this, we kind of have this culture of virtue signaling now in social media. But that, when you actually have, you know, a direct economic communication layer on top of that, it becomes less virtue signaling and more, oh, I really value what you've said. and I'm willing to send a thousand dollars for a meme, a thousand sats for a meme. Yeah, again, it totally changed the dynamic.

And a lot of, you know, a lot of people offering up a small economic, you know, economically relayed message of approval becomes very meaningful for the person that created the content. Like when I think of even just the value for value doing podcasts, like I always upload this as audio only to, again, the podcasting 2.0. If I had a thousand listeners on an episode and everybody, you know, like zapped or streamed a dollar worth of sets, that's a meaningful chunk of change for a single piece of content and not super. meaningful amount of, you know, expenditure for an individual listening. And so, yeah, I mean, I think this is where it takes off where you get value in numbers and we get this. What are you doing with likes?

Nobody cares about those anymore. Yeah. And can I just add one more thing? I think it's imperative that this take off quickly and it's imperative that it be done in a self-custidied way for two reasons. I mean, one is that once we get people using it in this way, then when regulators try to do what they are inevitably going to do, which is,

they're going to try to filter which transactions are allowed, there will be a base of people who will say, that's ridiculous. This is like paying somebody, you know, 20 bucks to mow my lawn. And zapping people on Noster is now like, it'll be part of daily life. And then that regulation will be an attack on ordinary people and ordinary practices rather than some, you know, rather than some exotic thing they don't understand, which is like, you know, we've got money transmitters and they're not obeying regulations.

It'll be an attack on what is ordinary life. And yeah, and the other, the, yeah, I think the crackdown is coming. It's just a matter of time. So build up political resistance against it, but also using self-custody tools so that there isn't a throat to choke, so to speak, because you could see any custody service getting a notification and they're going to have to comply with it. And it's only by building these kind of tools that we can escape that. But these tools are always clunkier. They're always harder to use. This is the very game from the very beginning of Bitcoin.

This is what Bitcoin itself is all about. How do you get people to use a freedom technology, which is clunky and doesn't have a team like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, behind it, making that user experience perfect. But it's nevertheless resistant to centralized authority. It's the very same thing that we are now facing on Noster. How do you get people to use it? Satoshi's, you know, genius was. you know, with NGU technology, money will motivate people in ways that other kinds of technology

are, it's hard to get people to adopt them. And then people will build tools around it on other layers, you know. So, yeah, it's weird that we're still having exactly the same conversation as at the very birth of Bitcoin. But it is the same conversation. And I think we're at kind of a pivotal moment right now because the sentiment in Washington is pretty intense. among among some lawmakers and some agency heads, I think.

And so it's like, you know, the clock is ticking on us. Yeah, I agree. I'm waiting for a, I think you'll see at some point, probably after a significant price increase, you'll see a lightening, a custodial lightning service, you know, get served notice of, oh, hey, you know, you got to, you got to rein it in. We got to find out who all your clients are, all that kind of stuff. I think that potentially happens.

What I'd like to see before then is I'd love to see those custodial lightning services implement cashew, which is anybody that doesn't know what that is. It's effectively, if you're already using a custodial service, it just adds privacy. It adds like near perfect privacy. So it's ChaoMe on eCash based on lightning. And so when you send in, you effectively have eCash tokens that represent the stats that you own, which is as good or better than having an account with, you know, wallet of Satoshi. Instead, you have actual tokens in an ecosystem that they kind of oversee.

But then that means wallet of Satoshi cannot know what you own. And furthermore, when you go to withdraw, you are hiding in the crowd of every other wallet of Satoshi user. There's no indication that it came from a particular account. It's just eCash tokens being redeemed for SATs on the Lightning Network. It's just completely opaque. Nobody can tell what the hell is happening. So I would love to see these custodial wallets implement this as a protection for the inevitable crackdown that will come.

Yeah, yeah, yep, yep, yep. So gentlemen, I'm going to wrap this topic here because I want to get to yours. Everybody in the chat, thank you for popping all of the questions in here. Also, Yellow is now focusing his sights on James. James not only looks like Daniel Craig, but he dances like him too. I don't think I've ever seen them dance. I'm going to have to go YouTube that after that. Yeah, you're going to have to.

There are as many memes about. with that. So you'll see what he's talking about. All right. So we're going to do a rotation. And I'm going to toss it to tour first. And I'm just going to cue you up. Simple question. Why are you bullish? Why am I bullish? Yeah. I mean, so many reasons, of course. But if I had to pick one and especially like in this time, you know, time, time era, in this era, if you will, in these last few years.

I would say the global macro situation, things have just gotten really bad. If you, you know, just kind of look at the basics, like even just the U.S. monetary supply, which is supposedly one of the most strongest, most resilient in the world, increased by 25% since the pandemic, 7 trillion dollar re-dues that were printed. And then, of course, after the recent bailout of the customers of sorts of, Silicon Valley Bank, there's an implied, who knows, seven trillion, it's probably more. I think it's over $10 trillion that is kind of like a symbolic bailout. Like all these small banks, people expect that those are going to be rescued too. You know, other things, the minimum reserve

requirement was dropped to 0% in 2020. Like, you can just look that up, that stuff. So people wonder, like, so what went wrong with Silicon Valley Bank or what went wrong with that? bank. It's kind of like, no, no, no, no, no, you don't get it. It's like, it's systemic. Like, all the banks are on the verge of our teetering. And it's just a matter of time before one of them would face a bank run. You know, right after there was a paper that came out that estimated that the unrealized losses of kind of the banks that are in the worst shape in the U.S. is between $1.7 to $2 trillion right now. So that's 186 banks that are really, really in trouble. that have that maturity mismatch in a very serious way and that are just underwater even,

like even mark to market underwater against the deposits that they owe. And then it's like, oh, but all these accounts are insured by the FDIC. It's like, all right, well, let's look at the balance sheet of the FDIC. It's an insurance entity. It must have assets on their balance sheet and you can see it, you know. And what you see is that there's about. $10 trillion in outstanding U.S. deposits, if there was a bank run, they have to see only has enough reserves to cover 1.26% of that. So, you know, this is just a lipstick on a pig. I mean,

it's just kind of for show. And so to me, the bigger picture of like, okay, what is the bullish picture for Bitcoin is that all the so-called safe havens, all the places that people put their money ever since slowly since the Federal Reserve was created and faster since after Nixon closed the gold window in 71, all these places are seriously under threat, especially the past two, three years. So you're talking about, you know, U.S. Treasury inflation protected bonds, $1.7 trillion market cap. Like that's massively under threat. Just all the paper money in the world.

Like we're not even talking to the U.S. or if we talk any any fee. currency is pretty much worse than the dollars. So if you count that all together, it's about $8 trillion worth of just physical paper money in the world. All that is massively under threat. And at least, you know, that has some advantages of privacy. You know, there's a level of mobility. Like, it's kind of justifiable that people would flee to that. If you look at Argentina alone, at some point there was $50 billion in U.S. dollar notes circulating in the economy just to, you know, allow people to do real estate transactions and all that stuff. You know, above-brown physical gold, for example, I don't want to poo-poo gold too much.

I think it is going to go up. But clearly, it doesn't have all the advantages that Bitcoin has, especially, you know, low auditability and lower mobility. If you want to move it across borders, it's very expensive. So that's $9 trillion. Central Bank Reserve, like that's a joke. Like, what does central banks really have on their balance sheet other than some physical gold, which fair enough? But most of it is just government bonds and just, you know, paper like that. And that's $27 trillion.

You know, so. And then finally, you know, of course there's the electronic deposits, which is $62 trillion worldwide. And then you also have residential real estate worldwide, which is $258 trillion. Because if you look at, you know, why mention real estate as a potential, for Bitcoin to go after is because people have been storing value there to protect against inflation. There was a recent report that reported, let's see, for the average US household, real estate represents over 35% of total savings, 28% of which is equity in the family's domiciled home. So, you know, one third of people's savings is in real estate. Like that is

historically, completely anomalous. That is only because the money is losing value. and people are fleeing into hard assets. And, you know, a house I don't think is very hard, but yeah, it's a little bit more than a piece of paper that's not even printed on paper, like digital dollars and things like that. So to me, that's the bullish case. There's trillions and trillions of dollars of assets

that are under threat, that are actively in decline, and that people are going to use as a launch point to jump into Bitcoin. Do you do you, so my question to you then would be, do you see this playing out as a gradual realization of, oh, all of this stuff isn't safe? And then people trying to hone in on on what's real. And thus you get, you know, the YMAR gold chart that kind of thing happening at some point in the future. Do you think that's our inevitable future here or? You mean like a melt-up? For, yeah, for gold, for Bitcoin, for anything that is verifiably hard that actually has scarcity and value and not just all this paper crap.

Do you think that we see these periods of uncertainty where it's super volatile and there's a ton of noise and it's impossible to tell what's going on? but if you zoom out on a long enough trajectory, the general slope for things like Bitcoin is up into the right. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think what you're saying is spot on because the volatility will be there. We've seen a bunch of it. 2021 was a year of madness.

I mean, like, I don't think it's a coincidence that we saw Wall Street bets, you know, these like crazy bets on AMC and whatnot on these like YOLO stocks. and the NFT craze and the mortgage bubble and a bunch of other like just completely lunatic things that happened. And yeah, if we zoom out, that'll just be one blip. Like that was the system starting to melt down. And part of that, you know, impetus was people are afraid of inflation and they're trying to, you know, in their mind, they're like, it's more fun to think about making profit than it is

to think that you're running for your life. And so people kind of, I think they sell it to themselves as like, oh, yeah, this is fun. Or like, you know, where, or I'm saving for my family or something, whereas at some point they're going to start realizing that they're running away from inflation. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's the literally economic physics, right? I mean, if certain assets is going to melt down, certain other assets is going to have to melt up,

like the value has to go somewhere. And I think Bitcoin is going to be a huge recipient. the end of that. Yeah, I agree. I want to open it up to Troy or James, if either you want to dive in, comment, question, whatever. Yeah, no, I agree fully with what Tour is saying, you know, that we're on the, we're on the precipice of having, I think we're going to have a, personally, we're going to have a pretty hard recession that's, that's coming at us, you know. we're seeing signals of it and they're conflicting signals in the in the economic data but if you look at just how quickly the Fed raised rates I mean there's no way we're seeing all those

lagging effects yet and with the sheer just the amount of leverage that's in the system where it's pointing to something that's going to break and you know what does that mean well we're looking at either another credit event or like a watershed moment of massive, massive layoffs and, you know, profitability margins squeezed and the market's selling off. And then just like TUR said, you know, the value's got to go somewhere. If they're taking it out of the market, if they're taking it out of their houses, it's got to go somewhere because people need to store that value as the dollar continues and all currencies, all Fiat currencies continue to debase. It's just reality.

So I agree. It's almost like we don't have a clear picture of our purchasing power with anything, really, currently. Because you can look in a bank account and say I have this many dollars. And my understanding is that if I went to spend these dollars right now, they would purchase me the following things. But when when a lot of people go to do that simultaneously, it affects the price of the things that you want to buy. And furthermore, when more dollars are created, of course, it affects the purchasing power of those dollars you're holding. And so we just have no clue as to, even in Bitcoin terms, what that kind of resting place will be when we come to. a place where we have a measuring stick that can't be manipulated.

Like when the dust settles and most of the bogus crap implodes, what does a sat buy you? What is that purchasing power? How much of the supposed productivity that is out there that we think that our dollars can buy it currently? How much of that is fictitious? Yeah, it's not the price going up. it's just the it's the flip of that.

It's the inverse. It's just the dollar debasing or the euro debasing or the yen debasing. That's all it is. Is there a scenario where I mean, I guess I'm kind of answering my question here, but I picture a scenario where we, the entire world realizes that we have much less resources than we initially thought. And, you know, when you look at your bank account and think, one day, oh, I've got, you know, I've got X number of dollars and this is going to buy me something.

The reality is, is that's, that's kind of like a promise to be able to redeem for something that might not be there. Yeah. And even worse, though, Ben, is people look at their bank account. They have this number in their head of what they need for the future, right? They need a certain amount of money to either retire. or work a lot less in the future. And that number just keeps growing and growing and growing.

And you can't keep up and you can't get to it. And that's the problem that people are starting to wake up to. They're seriously starting to wake up to it. You know what to fix all of this is if, and I've said this on shows before, but if your bank account didn't show the number of dollars, but it showed the percent of the world economy, which you had. If it was a percentage, even though it would be a small percentage, you would watch those numbers tick down and down and down forever because you are not on the receiving

end of the Cantillon effect. That's right. And that would wake up a lot of people. But that's not how our bank accounts work right now, unfortunately. Ben, what you're talking about relates to the Austrians have written a lot about this, the stages of production and the structure of production in an economy. And because it's, you know, people have that idea like, oh, yeah, we've been living above our means. And so, you know, something's got to give.

But if you think about it, like how, what actually happens when you allow an economy to live above its means for decades, sometimes it's easiest to just imagine a family. Like imagine just a regular middle class family. And all of a sudden they've been told you can borrow infinite amounts as much as you want. And your interest rate is half a percent per year. And you can do as much as you want. And so they go to town. So what do we do?

They build a pool in their backyard and they start, you know, some kind of business idea and it goes bust, but that's okay because they can borrow more. And they build a McMansion and they buy, you know, a car for grandma and all that stuff. And then all of a sudden, at some point you go back and say like, oh, yeah, sorry, guys, that half percent, now it's 5%. And also, you know, mom, you get to keep your halftime job, but dad, you're going to lose your job. And so then look at the economic activity in that family. How is it going to change? What percentage of the budget is all of a sudden going to go to food and just fuel for the car and just very, very basic things? And then how much of that consumer economy is going to shrink?

And that's what the Austrians talk about when they say that cheap money, the boom part of the business cycle, eventually there's a bust. But in the beginning, there's a boom that artificially low interest rates will, create, it will skew the structure of production so that there's, there's an underinvestment in commodities, like in just very simply like, you know, growing wheat and like pulling oil out of the ground, all that. And we've seen that. Like, if you look at the commodities sector, people thought it was dead for decades. Like who, you know, the world's largest companies are no longer like the oil producers and electricity products, boring, right? It's all about tech and growth. And so you get that, you know, it's really interesting how things radically change when you

artificially lower the interest rate. But then that means, of course, in a depression, all that gets turned back. You know, it gets rolled back. And all of a sudden people, if you look at Wymar, which is, of course, extreme. But there are percentages that you can see where people all of a sudden spent like 39% of the household budget on food, like things like that. Like that's an, of course, you know, that's an extreme. situation, but that's what happens in a depression. And so that's why. And to her like,

yeah, and we're, we've gotten to the point where we've been doing this for so long. The ZERP has been going on for so long that that, that spring is coiled really tight. Yes. So what you're talking about is those effects are going to be that much more powerful when we do have that deflationary event. Right. And, and I mean, to me that also explain the fact that we've been doing it for decades. I mean, it's been done to us, really. But the fact that it's happened for decades, it's so hard to explain to people that maybe just, you know, dollar cost averaging in the S&P 500, it might not be enough to keep up with inflation even because the SMP 500 or any average stock market is highly skewed towards consumer products, whereas what you want to have

exposure to is inflation resilient assets. And that's more hard commodities, maybe like metals, just very simple stuff that is going. to be the building blocks of some future economy, some future growth. But right now, we're broke. Like, we shouldn't be thinking about building the next Apple store. We should just be thinking about how to, you know, how to get food on the table, literally. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, I guess to finish it up, like the argument for Bitcoin to me has always been, because from the start when I did my, before I knew about Bitcoin, I knew I was searching for assets that had, that were scarce and that had low third party risk because what you want in a depression where this

structure of production is being rebalanced you have a massive transfers of wealth that are happening massive massive and so that value has to find a channel to go through and that's why in the depression in the 30s Keynes John Maynard Keynes was invested in gold mining stocks that's where he made his money during the depression those kind of things because those are the channels through which the value goes to then later be reinvested. And so I think Bitcoin is just a phenomenally excellent channel to be a recipient of that kind of value. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to, I want, Troy, I feel like I've put you in a corner and I, you never put Troy in a corner. So did you want to. Is that a roadhouse reference? Yeah. It is. It is. Nobody puts baby. a corner.

Did you want to tag in anything? Yeah, just, I mean, I hesitate to say anything about macro with these two gentlemen. And I'm a big fan of both of their, both of their thought and work. I think something, you know, when the banking crisis started, I was thinking of in terms of, is it inflationary, is it deflationary? Because, you know, when money gets destroyed, it's kind of not like physics. it doesn't really have to go anywhere because price is just like where the last, you know, marginal seller met, the marginal buyer. And people do kind of think of it like as if there's energy or there's a quantity of fluid

that has to be preserved. But really what happens is we've had an elude, we have real productive goods. And that's a real thing. Like there's a quantity of stuff out there like oil or wheat. But wealth, there's an illusory quantity. And during one of these deflationary episodes, just like everything is collapsing. And I learned this lesson the hard way in 2007, 2008, when my instinct was to buy commodities in gold as the market was crashing.

And I did. And then I just watched them plummet, like further and further. And the only thing people wanted was liquidity in the crisis because debt was collapsing and there was no trust in anything. And so what did everyone flee to? Like the dollar, the dollar was what grew early on. And then and then everything else followed, right? Like, stock market exploded once there was a full like contraction. Everything exploded after that. But initially it was just like everything fell. And it would not surprise me if, if Bitcoin had that sort of, you know, acted like gold did during a deflationary contraction.

I think what's different this time is, Ben, something you said, people realizing that they don't have money in a bank. I mean, people just, we talk about dollars as if they're the same, whether it's cash or whether it's a deposit you have at Wells Fargo. But the deposit at Wells Fargo is just a promise from that bank. That's all it is. It's not a dollar. And you don't have dollars in the bank. There's no such thing. And go back to Tours Point early on, you know, what you have is a promise. And then you've got this FDIC promise, which is also not back. And so rather than sort of being in the, is it inflationary, deflationary? And I know there's complications because I read your stuff, James, that, you know, what we're really think about is inflationary is the response

to this in order to handle our debt during a deflationary episode. We're going to create inflation, right? But will that on net be inflationary? I don't. know, I would leave it to these guys. But what I did see that special was that the light, at least for some people, yeah, Tyler Durdin, yes, IOUs in a bank. For some people, the inside outside money thing clicked, where they for the first time realized that a savings account is just a promise to pay from the bank and nothing more. And that that promise wasn't necessarily good. It sort of depends on what the bank has done. In a way, it was like the realization that people had in crypto who were into, you know, Celsius and Voyager and so on where they were like, oh, I've got my Bitcoin like earning interest.

You know, I've got Bitcoin earning interest. I've committed it for a quarter and I'm getting 5% or blockfi or whatever. And then suddenly it's like, where did my money go? You have a lot of people asking, you know, Mishinsky, where their money is? I gave you my money. Where did it go? Who has my money? And it's kind of like,

it's that physics picture. Well, it had to go somewhere. No, it did. There was like a bunch of fictional value out there that it chased after. And then there's simply nobody who wants to buy Tara Luna anymore. And like there were people who wanted to buy it. Now nobody wants to buy it. And so all you ever had was a note.

There was a bet made on your behalf. your money isn't anywhere. It never really was. It didn't, it's not, that's not what banks do. They don't go store your money and that's not what Nexo does with your money either. Now people are realizing that not just in the crypto land, but in bank land. So now it's like, and it's gone. Yeah.

So now it's like, okay, that's the thing that makes me bullish about Bitcoin long term rather than, you know, the supply of money is the realization that, that self-custody is very, very different from, you know, custody, but more than that, it's not just self-custody, but that, you know, an obligation or an IOU is fundamentally different from a bearer asset. And how do you avoid that risk? And there are precious few ways to do it.

And Bitcoin is the best of them, right? So that's kind of another dimension of the realization that came out of this crisis. that long term, I don't know how much, what percentage of the population that dawned on, but an importantly larger percentage than before the crisis. And that will just keep happening. People will keep realizing, like, you know, as banks either fail or get bailed out, because they are underwater, they'll realize, like, what money, what their money is, and that there's just a mere philosopher called homophony.

The two words sound the same, money and money. but they're really completely different things. Money in the bank is not money. Money in your wallet in the form of cash kind of is money. And people are just waking up to that fact. That makes me bullet. It reminds me of kind of what you're talking about, of where the thing that you have technically,

again, in the context of the dollar losing value in that instance, or, buying a bunch of quote unquote crypto in it losing money. It reminds me of back with the Bitcoin, BitConnect thing back in the day. And there's this dude that was pumping it, Trevon James. And when shit hits a fan, like, yeah, there was this whole thing where like the, the, the, the, the, the, the Kinect thing was effectively like, okay, you put in Bitcoin,

you buy our BitConnect token, and then you lend your token out to, the mystery people and then that gets you like some obscenely high interest rate because apparently people really love the Bitcoin Act token and want to borrow it all the time which is it was obviously just a straight up Ponzi scheme but so obviously what ended up happening was like they took all the Bitcoin and then and then they got served with a notice I can't remember what states but basically saying like you're not allowed to do this and and then the Bitcoin neck token, which was only had any value because you bought it and then got a stupid interest rate on it immediately plummeted by like 99.9%. But the main thing that what you reminded me of is,

is, you know, you didn't actually lose anything because you didn't have anything was, was his rant when he was doing his car selfie live stream. And he was like, you did, listen, he's been pumping this thing the whole time. you didn't lose your money. And then he pauses, okay, you kind of lost your money. It was the most and it was the most memeable thing. But like, in a way, he was kind of, kind of right in that what you owned hasn't disappeared. Just the purchasing power of it has.

So you still had your tokens. You just couldn't do a damn thing with them. They were worth, you know, 0.1% of what they. they used to be overnight. What he was trying to explain is this was not an I or you guys. This was a Fiat token. Exactly. Yes, exactly.

It was a faith-based token. Yeah. You didn't lose your money. I wonder if we reached that point with the dollar. You didn't lose your money. Well, you kind of lost your money, but one day, one day. When I went to Miami last year and it was my first time going to a pick up. coin conference. I had the strongest urge when I went on stage to do the BitConnect thing.

I mean, it was like really hard to suppress. Exactly. Hey, big time. It's so hard not to do that. Yeah, 100%. Awesome. All right, Jenwin, I'm going to do a rotation here, Tour. Thank you for the topic. Obviously, tons to talk about there, but we're going to toss it down. And actually, Troy, I'm going to, I'm going to keep it with you for a moment. And I'm going to cue you up with the simple question. Why are you bullish? Take it away. Okay.

First of all, I want to say, I'm not bullish price-wise. I don't take a position on price. I never, never do because I make terrible predictions about price. I would be fabulously wealthy if I had made the right decisions, and I've made almost perfectly wrong decisions. So I'm not going to say I'm bullish on price. I'm bullish at a deeper level because I'm, I think we're making, well, I think we're making headway on informing and educating people about Bitcoin.

The event that came to mind when you asked like what makes us bullish is next week. Next Wednesday, there's a policy summit to the Bitcoin Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. It's the first like policy summit of its kind that's just about Bitcoin and not crypto. and there's just an amazing cast of people who are there. Senator Lummis is going to be there. Tim Ryan, former congressman's going to be there. Ted Cruz is going to be there. Senator from Texas.

Tom Emmer, the majority whip in the House is going to be there. Greg Schultz is speaking. He's Biden's campaign manager. And of course, there's the usual, thanks for pulling up. Yeah. They're the usual suspects there from the Bitcoin. Jack Mallors. Roy Mabob, Alex Gladstein.

Nice. Incredible. Some people from industry. So we've got policy people, industry people, lawmakers, you know, academics like myself. This hasn't happened and it really needs to happen. We have a confusion between Bitcoin and crypto in D.C. We have some kind of allies in the United. the crypto world who have actually done a lot of good work for Bitcoin. They've been the primary

people fighting for Bitcoin in D.C. throughout its life, they've been kind of mixed up together, right? But the downside of that is there are important differences between Bitcoin and crypto and lawmakers and policy people and pieces of the executive branch need to hear and understand that. Like, we actually agree with a lot of what Senator Elizabeth Warren has to say about crypto. Like we agree that like 99% of it is scam filled and trash. And so it's like the people are going to be surprised to hear that, that some of their critiques of crypto, we're actually kind of sensitive to a lot of that.

And also we're going to give a full-throated defense of mining and Bitcoin's role in in, you know, helping people live better lives and be more free around the world. So this kind of makes me bullish. The people who are going to be there, it's an invite only thing. If you're listening and you want an invitation, you'd like to come, you know, there's still a slot on the website where you can ask for an invitation. If you want to donate to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, that would be awesome. We run this thing on a shoestring. We get nominal payments. I am net negative in my work for Bitcoin. I've definitely spent more than I have made from the

Bitcoin Policy Institute is basically volunteer work. I think it's a hugely important work. It kind of makes me bullish that it's happening and we're going to start building relationships. The other thing I'll say is kind of related to that. I went to a conference last week in New Jersey, at Princeton, New Jersey. And one of the people speaking there was Carol House, who is the, I want to get this right. She was the former. Of course, of course her thing doesn't pull up right now. She's the former head of cyber security in the National Security Council, but she's held a lot of roles in government in the White House.

And she gave a talk, and this is why I feel comfortable talking about it's a public talk. She gave a talk in which she was kind of saying to the crypto industry, like, prepare yourself for serious regulations coming down the pike. You've got a lot of enemies in D.C. right now. obviously we've heard about like a choke point two point oh she doesn't think that's like a coordinated effort but rather just a coincidence of a whole bunch of really savvy old-time insider you know political appointees who know how to get stuff done and they're kind of all on mission on cracking down on crypto and and but there's like a lot more coming our way and one of the things

she said at the end of her talk was, like, you guys need to get the relevant people in the room and talk about how to police yourselves, like how to regulate yourselves, basically, or, you know, you're going to be regulated by us, the state. And you have to get it done. Like, you have to figure out how to stop payments from going to North Korea. Like, if we have an address in North Korea that we want payments not to come from, you guys have to figure out how to stop that or like she used this phrase like roll back the chain like you have to figure out how to do this because and then she just went through the law and her basic point was in the u.s. you have the freedom of speech but you do not have the freedom to transact as soon as speech

carries value with it it is no longer a freedom that is protected by the first amendment it is now subject to basically complete surveillance and control at the discretion of you know our overlords So it was like, it was just one of these moments where I was like, okay, back to the Noster discussion earlier, we've got to be ready for this at the level of mining, at the level of pools. I mean, this is why stratum v2 is so important, but also why we can't have too much concentration of mining in the U.S. or U.S. controlled regions. This is why Russia makes me bullish this week. I know, I'm glad that 20% of mining is still happening in China.

I'm glad that it's in Iran. I'm glad that it's in Nigeria. I'm glad it's in places that are beyond the reach of the U.S. government. But my panel was next. And the question of our panel, the title of our panel was, if Bitcoin is the answer, what is the question? Right. And of course, there's a computer scientist on the panel from Princeton who was like,

yeah, I don't think there is one. Computer scientists, like, you know, they like touring complete technologies. And I had like an easy answer that Carol House had just set me up for. I was like, okay, so Carol House just said, we need to find a room with a relevant, like, power players in it so that we can police ourselves. But there is no such room for Bitcoin because there's 40,000 plus node runners spread all around the world. And they're the ones who matter in governance. And so the question to which Bitcoin is an answer is, how could you build a monetary system such that there is, no possibility of getting people in a room and deciding to comply with a central authority.

That just isn't even a possibility by design. If you try to design a technology like that, Bitcoin would be an answer to that task. It is the answer to that task. And then like it, all of the discussion about like Ethereum versus Bitcoin or other, you know, the qualities of the chain, it became crystal clear to me in that moment what Bitcoin is. And it's like, we're going to find out. Everybody speculates about the security and decentralization of these various consensus mechanisms and historical chains. We're about to find out, you know, in the most brutal way. This is not theorizing where academics talking about it, policymakers, talking heads. No. Like, somebody is going to say at some point in the future,

you cannot you cannot mine a block that includes these addresses. And then the really nuclear option, which we couldn't get a straight answer from her on, is like, what about you can't mine on top of a chain that includes a transaction from such and such address or to such and such address. And that one, which was like kind of like, that's like last resort.

Like basically get your act together, that's a possibility. But obviously that would be a last resort. But it's like, okay, well, we're going to go there. I mean, there is no in-between option between this and that happening. So it's just a question of time. Fundamentally, philosophically, we do believe in the right to transact, whether or not it is enshrined in U.S. law as it is right now.

And we have a tool that enforces that, right? It's not a political question. It's not a legal question. And then the question is just like, okay, well, will the government try to take that tool down, what will their moves be and will they win or will the users win? And so my head is just full of that, like coming battle, which we've always known it was coming, but it was really weird to hear it from somebody who just came out of the White House, who was also a moderate, I think, within the White House, not our enemy at all.

She was just like, I'm just the messenger, you know? I don't hold these, like, I don't hate crypto. She's a super smart person, I should say. And she seems to be appreciative of some of the things that Bitcoin can do. So not an enemy, not hostile, but just conveying, I think, Washington consensus that, of course, Bitcoin has to fall under the laws as they are. And of course that means that basically means total surveillance and control of transfers of value. And so I guess, I don't know if this is bullish or what, but you know, we're on this path of the Magnific. ignoring us and then making fun of us and then, you know, laughing at us and then fighting us

and then winning. And I've been here for the entire thing since 2011. The ignoring part, the laughing part. The laughing is stopped. We are full on fighting right now. I don't know bullish or not, but given my mindset, it's long-term bullish. We're we are being taken very, very seriously and we're going to find out who wins in the realest kind of nature channel kind of way. Yeah. I'm here for it, man. What you're saying is who's going to be on the receiving end of fuck around and find out is what you have.

Pretty much where we're all. Well, it's yeah, it's progress, right? I mean, we have to go down that path to get to where we want to be. There's no question about it. And Bitcoin had to be a certain size, has a certain, have a certain number of users, have a certain amount of attention around to get to that point. And we're there. We're there. We're there. And we have this battle on all sorts of levels. It's a technical battle. It's also a political battle. Like, I don't know about you guys, but for me, Bitcoin has risen to the top of

my issues politically. And it's a social battle. Like the more we can win hearts and minds and get people to use this technology, the stronger our political base will be. Of course, If they took these kinds of measures, they would be fought in the courts. We have a legal battle. And I just want you to picture this, and I'll shut up. I want you to picture what happens when the most powerful force on the planet, which is the U.S. Treasury Department, Carol House also is former FinCEN person from Treasury. If they come at Bitcoin and miss, you know, like, they could miss in different ways.

They could lose in the courts. They could get crushed in an election because we, we make them look stupid after they overplay their hand, or they could lose in the most dramatic way where they get what they want legally. Bitcoin just sticks around. Maybe the price is depressed for a while, but it just doesn't go anywhere. People keep using it. And then eventually politicians are like, hey, why did we make this thing illegal? And then it rises again. But after if I think they know this. I think they know the stakes of trying to defeat this thing and losing and suddenly exposing themselves as not the most powerful force in the world. There's another one. It's this peer-to-peer

distributed network, which even they cannot defeat. Right? So high stakes game. I'm just great point. Like Omar Little from the wire said it before, right? Like come at the king, you best don't miss. Not this. No, no, it's absolutely true. Like the the threat of embarrassment is an enormously powerful force and it might prevent the government, from even trying, but it might not, you know. And I do think that people in the U.S. tend to sometimes have a bit of the idea that the U.S. government is the government. Whereas if you look in the history, like very powerful nations have made huge mistakes

and kind of like lost the game before. Like if you look at, I mean, I always go back to the, you know, 1600s, but Spain was the most powerful nation in the world. and they made the mistake of mercantilism, protectionism, and they just lost the game. They lost it. And so the U.S. government, I don't wish it to be, but they could make a similar mistake.

We're on that path, right? Clearly. But the great thing about our government tour is that it's completely incompetent, and they just fight each other, and there's just so much gridlock that even if one side does want to come at it, you know, then Senator Warren,

assembly her anti-crypto army whatever it was you've got the other side's going to go oh okay so she's against that so maybe we should be for it yeah totally and so in and it but the great thing about what you're saying troy and i agree is that that conversation is there it's it's come to the forefront and we're having it we're going to have it before this election right going into this election and it's going to be important now i agree with you two or it's uh well there's a few things like we tend to think in North American terms, right? You know, like Ben, Greg likes to say that Canada lives in the U.S. attic rent free. But, you know, yeah, we tend to think of it as, well, this is a U.S.

This is going to be a United States-dominated thing. It's not necessarily just because the United States has the global reserve asset and the global reserve currency right now. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't mean that we, that the United States, United States is the overseer of this technology. It's just not. And, you know, this is going to be growing grassroots in Venezuela and Lebanon and in Ghana. And that's where this is going to grow. And that network effect is going to grow grassroots from the ground up. And just like you said, Troy, it's not going to go away. Even if the United States says, yeah, we're banning it. We're going to

60102 it. Whatever they do, it's not going to go away. I mean, Russia is is absolutely. mining. Why is the hash rate going up so steadily? You know, I mean, they're at the, and so is China. China's got, they've got the municipalities, whatever they're called in China. I'm sorry for my ignorance there, but they're protecting miners from the government. Why? Because it's good for local commerce. And so that's, that's just reality. It's not going to go away. And the conversation here is, it's going to get louder. And what does that do? It just keeps putting it on the front page and it wakes people up to saying, hey, should I be paying attention to this thing? Because it seems like it's,

it's very important to the politicians. And the more and more people who are in the center, the 80% who are not far right and who are not far left, the ones are in the center like, maybe I ought to be paying attention to this thing. Because I don't trust what the government's telling me. Yeah. You know, Troy, I wanted to tap on to a couple things that you said there. So one of them was you send it in and around and I'm sorry, I'm forgetting her name. Who is the woman that came out? Carol House. Okay.

Okay. So she was effectively saying like, this is great, but, you know, also you need to police yourselves. And it's very interesting from that perspective. I encountered something similar last year at the Oslo Freedom Forum. So Alex Gladstein invited me out to do a Bitcoin workshop and start teaching people how to set up Bitcoin wallets and so and so forth. And after everything was all done, I got one of the after party things. I got speaking with one of the organizers. And, oh, what do you do?

And I said I was one of the people on the Bitcoin track there. Oh, yeah, that's all super interesting. And then she said something to the effect of, I love what it's capable of, but I also think that, you know, there's this big push for this, like, bottom up approach. But like, then you can't prevent the bad, like, basically saying like, then bad people can use it. So like a top down approach so that we can ensure that like the good people can use it. But then, and I had to go through the conversation of, well, that's not how this works because if you have a top down approach, then effectively you've got what we have right now.

And so you're canceling out. You're basically saying in countries with responsible governments, you effectively have a dragnet where you can catch all the bad, the quote unquote bad people and then the good people get a free pass. But the inverse is true. When you have a totalitarian government like what you guys are working to help people fight against. When you have a totalitarian government

and Bitcoin is top down, not that it even could be, but if that was the case, then all of a sudden, you're no longer on a level playing field. Bitcoin just all it does is create a level playing field for all. And in a, you know, quote unquote like country with responsible government,

that means that you're going to have the occasional criminal pick up a dime bag of weed, on the Silk Road. You know, like, that's, it's just going to happen. Instead of using US dollars. Yeah, exactly. Instead of, you know, in the alley with a $20 bill. But this is, sorry, I was just going to say, but like the inverse is true.

If you have that top down approach, a totalitarian government gets to stamp out dissidents. When you have an open system where everybody's on a level playing field, you can't shut down bank accounts with a button. You can't prevent fundraising mechanisms. You can't prevent peer-to-peer transacting. You can't prevent people from railing back against a state that tries to stamp out people that doesn't approve of what they're doing. I saw it here last year.

I saw it here, what, 14 months ago. And I'm in Canada. I'm in Canada. and they were shutting down bank accounts. And Troy, you were there in the room when I did the interview with Peter. And I chatted through the whole thing of how quickly it went from people are protesting. And within two weeks, they shut down two fundraising campaign worth tens of millions of dollars and started shutting down bank accounts. for a and might I say a peaceful protest like I and I'm not trying to like you know shit on on on on motivations for various protests but like if you look at the Canadian protests we literally cleaned up our own garbage like they the protesters bagged their own garbage and put it beside the bins when when somebody did

something disrespectful and like there were no porta potty so they urinated near like a memorial the next day you had protesters out there shoveling snow and like cleaning everything up and so this was a very respectful and peaceful protest there's going to be a couple dickheads it was the largest protest in canadian history well they still shut down bank accounts they still basically cut off people's access to any sort of banking. Bitcoin makes it so that those type of actions are impossible whether or not you like the people using it. And that's kind of how it needs to be.

Yeah. Yeah. What was amazing at this conference last week was Roya Maboub spoke about her, how she runs her business in Afghanistan and making. payments to women throughout Afghanistan for content or whatever. Or she's doing an educational thing there too. How Bitcoin allowed her to function under the Taliban's rule in ways that she couldn't have done through the banking system.

It empowered a lot of women too who were her partners and clients, many of whom gained a lot of money from the appreciation of Bitcoin. as well and that allowed them to pay for their education and so on. Of course, yeah, Ben, I was there in Oslo too and I heard just story after a story like this. And what was amazing was that session just preceded the session from this, you know, government person and listening to them back to back, you know, the one angle is like, Roya's angle was, and she was asked about this directly in Q&A is like, yeah, I'm sorry if some other people are using this for bad ends elsewhere, but that's what allows us to function and how many women and girls don't have access to money

or all of the things that money makes possible. You can't pay for things and you can't earn money. Think about how that limits your freedom and how many women around the world are limited in that way by repressive regimes. I mean, not even, you know, it's not even just like, a protest. This is like just day-to-day life deprived of this. Yeah. If you want a technology that allows them that freedom, it will come with the risk that sometimes you are not going to be able to tell people not to spend money in the ways that you don't like. And somebody from the audience of a law professor from the University of Chicago also pushed this question, which was like, how much does it even cost us to administer this kind of

massive surveillance network that you're talking about, compliance network that you're talking about? Is this the kind of thing where in order to catch a few wrongdoers, we saddle an entire, not only do we deprive people of basic freedoms, but we also saddle them with this like, you know, regulatory compliance burden that, you know, is a damper on the whole economy. It's a damper on the whole economy when money has to move. And of course, it builds moats around existing companies who are large enough to spend a lot of money on compliance. So it's anti-innovation. It's, you know, and it's simply not efficient. And it's, and it stomps on people's freedoms. You know, it's just a stark kind of contrast.

And back to the point about Bitcoin sort of winning in the long run, if a state tries this strategy of, you know, You know, basically the Treasury wants to see every transaction in the world, to your point to her, the U.S. government takes itself to be the government of the world when it comes to money. They think they have authority over every single transaction on the planet. And they want to see it and they want to be able to stop it. It doesn't matter if it's, you know, it's between somebody in Nigeria and somebody in North Korea, like the U.S. government wants to have a say in it. But also between all of its own citizens.

At some point, this is like a Soviet-Afghanistan kind of war. where you devote so many resources of your largesse and surplus as a state to tamping down things that might run afoul of your power and imposing economic burdens on your citizen. You collapse under that weight. And places like Nigeria, like Turkey, like Lebanon, like Vietnam, where they need it, Argentina, Venezuela, right? That's where people are just going to not ask permission. they're going to fucking do it in Afghanistan. They're going to reap the rewards of that efficiency. And you know what I mean?

You can get with the program or you can die like a slowly decaying empire, your choice. Yeah. Yeah, that's how Napoleon failed, right? I mean, he like, first of all, got rid of the existing infrastructure to, like, raise taxes. So that was hard. And then he had a grudge against Great Britain. And so he tried to, like, prevent them from trading with the continent. which was hugely expensive.

And eventually everybody went around him and he just couldn't afford to defend the whole empire anymore. And it just collapsed in a matter of just a few years. I was just going to say earlier that the logic of this idea that like, but bad people could do bad things with Bitcoin. As soon as you apply to another area, it gets so ridiculous. Like, oh, but what about cell phones? Like, oh, my God. like we shouldn't allow people to produce cell phones because a terrorist might buy one and do something bad with it or like hamburgers like maybe they could nourish terrorists and like we should prohibit that and it's just like hamburger terrorists yeah i mean yeah like come on guys like it's just a it's a privilege that's been in in assumed for generations now like we get to sit close to the money spigot we get to have access first we get to dial up and down economies

around the world because we have the reserve currency. And I think the White House or whatever, Washington doesn't really realize that it's a privilege that you can lose if you abuse it, you know, and they've kind of been abusing it. Yeah. There's nothing more ridiculous to me than punishing the medium rather than punishing the crime. You know, again, it's as ridiculous as you pointed out. Oh, if we allow everybody to buy shoes, somebody might. might commit a crime and then run away.

Like it's very scary proposition. Nobody, yeah, you got to. No more shoe bombings. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's, it's ridiculous. And Troy, I think you mentioned the back-to-back sessions. I'm wondering if you saw the same session that I did. Because it was, it's funny, it was, it was an ESG session, but it was on the social.

And it was effectively a guy up front. And I've got to say, again, in the context of the human rights foundation, basically saying like Bitcoin is a tool for freedom, there's some disjointed messaging. And the reason being is the session that I watched was effectively a guy up on stage saying, all right, so what you can do to help in these situations is you can divest from things that may be enriches. bad people. And how do you parse that with a global open monetary network? Like, like inherently, you're having people on stage saying, we need Bitcoin in order to enjoy freedom. We need Bitcoin in order to push back against these totalitarian regimes. But in the same breath, you're saying also divest from anything that enriches anybody doing anything bad with Bitcoin. Well, not Bitcoin specifically, but the They were saying like, you know, dump the following things and you can help defund the bad people was the general sentiment. But those values don't line up. It doesn't work with an open system like Bitcoin. And I feel like those two things at some point within the HRF will come to a head.

And I think reality will prevail, but a few people are going to have to do some soul searching and realize that in a world where you're trying to. to help the most downtrodden, you're also enabling some people to do things you don't approve of. Reality. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Reality coming home to roost. All right, gentlemen, I'm going to do a final rotation here. Troy, that was a fantastic topic. So thank you for bringing that here.

And also, I will say I'm very excited for the Bitcoin Policy Summit, the sheer quality of people in the room, and might I add the diversity of opinion in the room because there's people from both sides of the aisle there. And I do think that that's an important aspect that a number of people not specific to one political ideology have realized that there's value in big. I mean, hell, Troy, you're going to share a stage with Ted Cruz. I know. I got to say, it's to the credit of David Zell and Grant McCarthy, those two put this thing together in not a whole lot of time on not a whole lot of budget. It's been working their asses off to make it happen.

And yes, one of our core commitments, really, as a policy institute, is to try as much as possible to reach across both sides of the aisle. we know that Bitcoin is becoming politicized. It's really very close to being a straight up Republican issue and a straight anti, you know, a democratic anti-issue. Whether or not that happens, we think that Bitcoin as a tool is broader than that. I think it's worth reminding ourselves a lot of Bitcoiners are in China. They're Chinese, right? Like that's a big constituent of our community.

They're not very, very loud on our Twitter. They don't have a big role in a lot of our conferences, right? But they're a big part of our community. And then if you look at where Bitcoin's being used, you know, yeah, it's Nigeria, Vietnam, Turkey, Lebanon. We got a lot of German bitcoins tend to be more on the anarchist side of things, right? Pirate party kind of more left anarchist. Of course, we have a lot of American, Canadian bitcoins. on the right side of the political spectrum.

We just think the tool is, it's being politicized, but we think of it in a broader way than that. I think across the board, all of us at the Policy Institute, and we have people representing different parts of the political spectrum, and we're gonna try to maintain that in our representation at these events and who we're inviting,

because ultimately we think of Bitcoin as a human tool. It improves humanity. It's a tool for the grid, That's what my session is going to be about. It's a tool for our energy systems. It solves problems on the grid. But also, Bitcoin solves problems for people. And there's very few political ideologies that are flat out incompatible with it.

Those are authoritarian ideologies, and we're anti-authoritarian and proudly so. But within anti-authoritarian and under the umbrella of anti-authoritarian political ideologies, we're pretty wide open. We just think Bitcoin's bigger. it's bigger than our social political tribes. So far I've been impressed with everything I've seen from the Bitcoin Policy Institute. So great work, guys. Yeah, I really.

I think it's important. I think it's valuable. What you do, it's high quality. It's very focused. I love that. So it's always good to hear when David Zell and Coe are, you know, whatever new things they're up to, I'm always looking out for it. Yeah, we're laser focused on educating lawmakers.

media policy people about Bitcoin in particular, right? Nothing else, not crypto. And we try to hold ourselves to high academic standards in doing so. We want our policy judgments to be really well founded in fact and science, where that is possible, right? Our goal is to be impeccably credible. We don't want political wins that. sacrifice our long-term credibility as an institution. We want to be the ones who always turn out to be correct when there's a lot of froth in the water.

So we're playing a long game here. So you're really setting yourself apart from every other major institution out there. We're trying to. We're trying to leave it to a group of bitcoinsers to actually rely on truth for their talking points. So anyways, gentlemen, we're going to. to do a final shift here. Again, thank you to everybody in the chat. There's been toss, no, tons of comments here.

I'm going to start pulling up a few more of them here. And I will go and back and find Rusty. Did have a question, a macro question. But James, first, I'm going to toss it to you, and I'll cue you up with the same question for the last time. Why are you bullish? Did he breathe? Oh, wait.

You're still there. Hold on. You froze for a sec. Start over. My connection is good. No, no. There you go. You guys, I keep seeing the connection go out. Okay, so I'll keep it short. I mean, it dovetails pretty well between what Tura and Troy are saying, which is with everything that's happened this past year, Bitcoin has come front and center to the conversation. And I mean, it's on front pages. It's in the news. And it's not just number go up. It's not just about, oh, this crypto fantasy or, you know, some sort of speculative asset. There's still that going on, of course.

But for the first time, I think, and this Bitcoin conversation has shifted. I mean, significantly. And it's a very important shift. And so what we've seen and we've been watching this for years is Bitcoin's been at the front end of that risk on asset, you know, class where it's at the tip of that spear. And as people go to risk on in their investments, Bitcoin kind of leads the way. And when they take risk off, Bitcoin leads the way down.

So it leads the way up, leads the way down. But with everything that's been going on this past year, with what we saw, with what we're seeing happen in Japan and the debasing of their currency, what we're seeing happen in Europe, and what we've seen happen in the UK, with the leverage and the LDIs of leveraged debt instruments. What we've seen happen here in the states with the banks. What we've seen people for the first time, I'm hearing normal people around me ask, you know, what should I do with my money?

And should I put it in this Bitcoin thing where the government can't take it? It can't just, the banks can't lose it. Like I want to store something. I want to store some of my value there. And I've been preaching this, for so long, so long, for the years, the few years I've been doing this, I've been preaching, hey, just put some of, put something in there, you know, put one, two, three percent of your net worth

in there and just leave it. Don't worry about it. And just leave it there. And for the first time, people are waking up to the fact that, hey, this really might be that important because all of a sudden, they're starting to hear about, well, first of all, banks can fail. And if you're not in a bank that's protected, you could lose a lot of your money. And there's not, I mean, not everybody can get a, a big account over at JPMorgan, you know. I mean, you could be at Chase, but who has cash sitting around in these accounts just to sit there, right? So where can you put your value, like Tura is talking about with real estate? Where can you put your value that it can't be deflated? It can't have this massive deflationary event around it. And if it does, that's going to

actually benefit for. And people are starting to hear that. They're starting to listen to it. And then the final thing is from what Troy is saying in that conversation, the political conversation is, hey, they can seize assets. And these CBDCs, this is a cynical thing. And I saw one of the comments that something that scroll by, they were saying, look, they're, they're for, the governments are being forced to talk about and present CBDCs before they're ready. And it could be, it could be catastrophic for them. And that's true because we're going to have, we're already seeing massive pushback here in the states about CBDCs. You know, their, their, their Hail Mary is, hey, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to have UBI. We're going to have universal basic

income attached to CBCs. And that's how we're going to slip it through, you know, but I don't think that's going to work. I think that I think that that Trojan horse will fail. And for the first time, I feel super, super bullish about the conversation changing to the real purpose of Bitcoin, which is not number go up. It's not just for it to just become worth more dollars. It's to protect your hard-earn, your hard-earn work, your work, your energy that you've placed your trust into this currency that's devaluing in front of you and can be lost. It can be usurped. It can be controlled or frozen. And for the, you know, I think, and for me, that conversation is, it's critical and we're there. And, and that gets me excited. So even though I do talk about the fact

I see we're going to go into recession, I really believe that we're going to have a hard downturn here. Do I know? No, but I think it's a high. probability. So even though that that's a high probability, my long-term view on Bitcoin is so bullish because of everything we just talked about. And that is only going to force this conversation to go to the next level. And that's that's exactly what we need. I love that. I want to open it up to the other guys first. I've got a comment that I want to make. But Troy Oterre, do you want to dive in? That was just, that was just awesome. Totally. Words. Words. I mean, I like what you're suggesting about Bitcoin as an insurance policy.

It really is totally valid to use that analogy. And I think years ago, you could make the fully equivalent analogy easier because, like, for example, homeowners insurance is about 25 bibs a year. So 0.25% of the value of your home is what you'll pay for, insuring it against fire and other kinds of disasters. And so for a long time, you could actually do that with your portfolio, like put 25 bips into Bitcoin. I'm talking when Bitcoin was $10, $100, et cetera. Yeah.

But now we're in a situation where you're calling your insurance agents like, hey, like, I want fire insurance. And he's like, oh, yeah. Like, I just, I walked by your house this afternoon. I saw your kitchen is already on fire. Oh, yeah. But can I still get insurance? Like, sure, it's 5%. You know, like so it can make sense that you would put that amount into Bitcoin if you actually want to insure your assets against a stackflationary depression, for example, you know, a bond market crash, you know, a scenario of Argentina-style bankruns.

So, you know, we already had a background early this year. So it makes sense that the premium for your insurance is going up. that's another number that's that's going up yeah yeah that's a good point i mean get me the number of that insurance agent because it sounds like he'll give me 15% on my dead grandmother insurance uh Troy i or james i i did want to say one thing like my main takeaway from from your talk is is just a dissolution of trust in in everything um is kind of we're headed That's it. That's a good, yeah, exactly. That's a great way to put it. The trust has collapsed in the last two years. I mean, they locked us up. They made us take, you know, this vaccine. I guess we're going to get, you know, this is going to get Shadowvan. I said it. I said it. I said the word, you know, but you can blank it out. So, but they're, you know, they made us do these things and people are waking up the fact that, man, I'm not sure we can trust. that they have good intentions, you know?

So many people were naive in thinking that for so many years, but people have woken up in the last couple of years, you know. It's trust at all levels, right? Like it's governments, it's banks, it's media, it's every other major institution. There's questioning on all sides. And what I mean by that is if a certain entity isn't echoing your current values, the instant kind of knee-jerk reaction is

there must be an insidious purpose to it or they must be completely wrong or they're towing the line for something. And I see it across, I mean, we saw it a lot through the pandemic from people on the right. As soon as Elon got a hold of Twitter,

now people on the left. Oh, it's all disinformation and everything. It's because everyone, everything is just so divided. And I think people are just, everything is, is, is kind of crumbling trust-wise.

And people don't know where to place their anger. But like the, the base layer of trust, the language that we use to, to place our value, money, it's eroded. It's broken.

It doesn't, it doesn't properly. Like, you can, you can, I mean, the money is effectively supposed to be a way of projecting our values in the world, right?

Like you spend your time, you spend your blood, sweat, and tears, you earn this mechanism through which you're able to convey your values by where you place that value, what you purchase. And you expect to, in a way, see that reflected in the world around you. And it's not because people can turn a dial, they can pull levers and push buttons, and they can basically take the values of the people and reallocate them to where they see fit.

And so people aren't like, and a large swath of the population aren't seeing their values properly reflected in the world around them. So it's no wonder that there's a confusion and there's anger that nobody knows where to place because it's you're working your entire life towards something and you want to see something staring back in the mirror

that reflects your values and the time and the effort that you put into your labor, you want to see that having some sort of an impact. But when your impact can be erased in a calendar year, because they just printed 40% of all existing money and decided where that goes and what gets that value. And your freedom, because now the, you know, the powers to be the W. they're, you know, they're saying these things out loud now. For the, you know, they're really saying them out loud about the, you're going to eat bugs.

You need to, we need to consume less energy. You know, everybody's going to have a carbon score. It's like people are starting to hear this and wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So you're going to, I have to live within 15 miles. I have to work within 15 miles where I live. And like, like, I could stay in that radius forever. I can only leave for like a week a year. Like hold on a second.

And so, you know, people are starting to hear this and think, all right, this system really is broken. We have a problem. And so, yeah. I taught a class last year on trust and testimony, you know, believing others. And you said it really well been. We have a kind of cultural crisis of trust. And that isn't a good thing. Because in part, how our species got to this point was through specialization, dividing labor, and trading.

This is how economies grow. You do the thing you're best at. You trade for everything else. And then the total output of society is a lot greater. But it's also true for knowledge. We don't all verify everything about everything, or we would not live in the 21st century world of science and technology that we live. in. You literally can't know everything about everything or verify it yourself. The world is too complex. And we got here through specialization and trust. And so it's kind of like that for me,

watching the system break down is a tragedy because we need it as a species. Like we do. And the same politically, right? Rather than each of us doing everything in government and all weighing in on every decision, we like trust some people to make most of those calls for us. And we have them run agencies and you know what I mean? And we have them run armies. And so we delegate our sort of intellectual labor to centralized, you know, bodies that either bodies that either either acting on our behalf or they are investigating on our behalf. And then we trust them. And that's like the mission of like the FDA, stuff like that. You know, there are, they are governmental bodies that are designed to offload the cognitive labor that it would take all of us to learn that stuff.

And then figure it out for us, digest it in an easy form and then give it to us in a form that we can trust. All of that breaks down when trust breaks down. But that is actually how we function and money is an extension of that you know it's another area where our trust has been abused and continues to be abused again and again and again and it's actually like i think they're all related and you put this well ben it's not just like there's trust in money that's broken down there's trust in about truth there's trust about acting in our own best interest as a government is the government really serving us the citizens and we we work really hard you know or not just at our jobs, but across our lives as part of a society, sort of assuming that the system we live in

will reward that work fairly, that the authorities that we, that we have elected or have been appointed are acting in our best interest, whether it comes to money or government or decisions, or truth or anything else, or universities like this one. And then once that trust gets fractured, we don't just get a collapse in one of those areas. We get a collapse of functioning across the areas. And then every Joe Schmoe on Twitter has to figure out, like how, you know, how MRNA vaccines work and shit like that, which, you know what the hell?

We should not have to think about this. This is not how a society should be ordered, right? That everybody has to learn everything for themselves. But also our decisions we don't trust. It's kind of like onshoreing in the international trade, right? As you don't, if you can't trust the supply chains and partners across countries, you have to build everything at home. What we're getting now is like the onshoreing of knowledge,

the onshoreing of belief formation. And just like in international trade, that comes at a huge expense for efficiency, you know. And Bitcoin is this amazing tool because it does give up efficiency. like the most efficient thing is just to have one single centralized ledger and then just boom you're good you know you have to duplicate anything it gives up efficiency for you know absolute certainty about what has happened that's the trade off it made and in an era in which trust is collapsing that is precisely the tool that we need on the money front a fixed issuance no way to mess with it and then i think if we don't get fucked with on the money side and we know we're not being fucked with on the money side. And Bitcoin does more too because it can timestamp as well. It can store arbitrary information. I know this isn't about ordnals and stuff, but, you know, Julian Assange parked those documents from WikiLeaks on the blockchain long before

ordinals. It was already used to anti-memoryhole governments who would abuse our trust. And tools like Foster also will be, you know, bastions of anti-censorship or censorship resistance that prevent governments from abusing the trust. So I see these decentralized tools across the board, and especially Bitcoin, as protection against the abuse of trust and hopefully help us get through this collapse of trust that we're in and actually rebuild institutions that are trustworthy

and earn our trust. Authorities have to earn our trust. They have betrayed and lost it, and that's led to a collapse across the board. what we need is insurance against that abuse and then the slow hard work of rebuilding institutions that earn it back. It's it's I agree with everything you just said and I think I think money is actually at the crux of it because there's been a a lack of consequence for not reflecting reality. And as as and that's been allowed to. snowball. It's been allowed to snowball for a long time.

I don't know if Troy would agree, but I would argue that kind of in a variation of what you're saying is that institutions, especially lasting institutions, are built on trustworthiness. And then at some point, they kind of get their own momentum and they kind of lose, they can lose track of why they were founded in the first place. Like, you know, there's a lot you can say about the Catholic Church, of course. But I think part of why it became such an important institution throughout the Middle Ages was because it helped people unite in a selflessly enough way to protect their villages and cities from raids that were happening from the Huns and all these other tribes who were pillaging repeatedly Europe.

And so there's having this institution that allows you to coordinate resources and keep the local lords in check and those kind of things. was very powerful. But then at some point, Europe was wealthy, wealthier and wealthier. And so the need for that protection mechanism diminished. And then all of a sudden, the Catholic Church had all this power that they started, you could say, abusing. But in another way, you can say they lost their way. Like they forgot why they were there.

And I think similarly, the financial system was there because the gold standard is a tough system and in a globalized world. It's very difficult. It creates all kinds of problems with where do you store the reserves or what if there's a war. And so it kind of made sense as a hard fork solution for a while. But I don't know. I just think that they lost their way and they are no longer trustworthy, unfortunately.

And what we build in Bitcoin is a system where you don't have to trust anything and we have a trustless basis. And then people can earn trust on top of that, like institutions, companies and You know, we were talking about Nostr, like these extensions. Maybe people are going to do like content, like editorial services on top of Noster. And so they can earn our trust with that. But it'll be based on something real. I think, yeah, and your point, tour, and what it all comes down to is the fact that the system is what causes people to act poorly, it allows them to, right?

It allows legislatures to talk to a company, go buy that company's stock, and then go approve legislation that's positive for that company, reap the benefits of buying that stock, and have absolutely no repercussion for it. And it happens over and over and over and over again. So that's just one little dark area that's, we're starting to shine a light on it, but it's a little dark area of the system that is just, it doesn't, the incentives are not aligned for the people. They're aligned for very, you know, people who are very powerful and high up in these corporations and the executives. And they're aligned for the legislators, but they're not aligned

for the people. The people do not benefit from all that. And that's, and that's the problem is the system is broken. What you're saying is that, and I agree with you, when you have a, when you build a system on a trustless, you know, protocol, then you don't have to work. about that because that it cannot be manipulated in the same way and that's and that's where why i'm so bullish is that we're going towards that direction right yeah i feel like uh jeff booth has just entered the chat yeah i talk to jeff a lot yeah it's very very reminiscent of jeff you know it's it's hard it's hard to step outside the system to critique the system we're always critiquing it for one on its own terms and in its own language, right?

But I love that you just did that, James, stepping back and you did it to a tour, to our, you know, you have to appeal to history or you have to appeal to Bitcoin itself is a way of us stepping back to see these major challenges to our system. Yeah, this is what Bitcoin lets you do. You start to say, but wait a minute, why? why does the system work like this in the first place? Like, why do you have that authority? And why should I continue to grant it to you?

Yeah, I'm extremely bullish on how Bitcoin itself allows you to make extra systemic observations about the system. You know, it's something we're all doing it. And Bitcoin is what's enabling us to do it. And just to echo Jeff one more time, it also allows you to picture in your mind. and bring about a future of, you know, love, hope, and abundance. That's something, once you step outside that system, you can envision that and help bring it into being. Yeah, it's that beacon of hope.

It really is. And it's out there, but it's getting closer. So it's getting brighter, right? I think so. Jens, I think this is a great time to start rounding us out here. I like to do one thing at the very end, if that's okay with you guys, I like to just do a quick round of any final thoughts you might have,

anything you didn't get off your chest, and then also if you happen to have a recommendation, always much appreciated. When I say a recommendation, I mean something that's maybe helped you in your journey of understanding Bitcoin, whether it be a book, a video, a website, an app, a piece of hardware, something that you think people would find value in checking out.

then feel free to toss that out as well. My general takeaway from this chat is we're seeing people recognize the cracks in the system and build alternatives to fill in for their deficiencies. We're seeing that we saw it with money and we're seeing that with speech. And we're accounting for, which I'm very happy about, we're accounting for the lessons of the past. Like Bitcoin is a correction, a correction of what went wrong with gold, right? It was, what were the deficiencies in gold that allowed the revocation of the gold standard?

You know, Bitcoin accounted for and corrected for those deficiencies. You see Noster and, you know, Bitcoin or Bitcoin, the internet was meant to be this open protocol for everybody to be able to interact freely with one another, but we saw this centralization of social media platforms. And funny enough, it took a bitcoiner to create something to what seemingly successfully routes around that and allows people to interact freely with one another without being censored. And so I think the world and there's a sense. of people that are recognizing the issues and building to rectify what we've experienced so far.

And I think that's very exciting. I want to, this is partly ingest, but my recommendation tonight, and I don't mean ingest and don't check it out. But because we've got Troy here, I'm going to recommend everybody follow Jason Mayer. He's releasing a book called The Progressive. case for Bitcoin. And so he will be dropping that soon. But go follow him on Twitter at C. Jason Mayer.

And if I'm not mistaken, he does have a website, Bitcoin Progressive.com. And that book should be dropping soon. And the reason I'm so excited to see that drop is, I think regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, everybody sees something of value in Bitcoin and everybody kind of projects their own vision onto Bitcoin because it can be useful for them in different ways.

But at the end, Bitcoin is just a mechanism to help find truth and project it through our world. And I think no matter what, even if some of our assumptions about what is true and what is not are wrong, I'd rather know than not. And so if we have people of different belief systems coming to Bitcoin because they think they see something in it, even if their assumptions are proven wrong, at least they get to find out. And that's a beautiful thing.

So that's where I'm going to check out Jason Mayer. I'm going to toss it to tour next. Dude, final thoughts, recommendations. Take it away. Yeah, I mean, I would say for myself at least, what I found is that I make the best decisions when I'm like relaxed, I'm connected with people around me, but I'm having fun,

like making these. I was very happy when you were pulling up. I was wondering. By the way, if this was like a Bitcoin meetup, like just in the vein of like what was the question, like what song were they playing? Like we got to make that song somehow.

That's, yeah. I feel like it's, some Eastern European like metal or like like some sort of like I don't know thumping bass I don't know maybe the the New Zealand guys who are those guys again oh yeah the great songs yeah yeah I know what you're talking about yeah yeah yeah the the Maori dance before the all-black's actually this yeah I generated this image using the word haka it's in there so like it is

actually. Oh, that is it. Partly inspired on the Haka. Yeah. That's awesome. There you go. But so, but so, yeah, when it comes to, I don't know, ideas about what, you know, who to follow or what to do or something like that. Well, tooting my own horn, I would say check out the Texas Bitcoin Foundation. Like, we do a lot of really cool stuff. Natalie Smolenski, our chair is actually going to be at the conference with you, Troy, in D.C.

She was also at the one last week. She's everywhere. She is everywhere, yeah. And then I would also say keep an eye on adamantresearch.com, which is my shop, we have something really special coming out soon. And of course, I'll be announcing it on Twitter as well. But very soon, something really cool is coming out. I can't say more.

I mean, your website is very cryptic about it. Announcement coming soon later this month. Yep. There you go. Well, let me just say it's going to be bullish. Awesome. Love to hear it. Perfect show to give it a show to it.

Awesome. Tura, thanks for that. Let's jump to Troy. Again, Troy, final thoughts, recommendations? Go ahead. Well, first of all, just a real pleasure to be back on today. This was awesome. These are all three of you are people I greatly admire and enjoy and follow your work.

And they've benefited a lot from me. So just thanks for having me and thanks for sharing some time. In terms of what I, techno Viking, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I got a couple books to pump. One is, you know, Alex Gladstein's book just dropped called Hidden Repression, How the IMF in the World Bank Cell Exploitation and Development. After his awesome, very, very long piece in Bitcoin magazine on structural adjustment, But I think this is almost like life-changing read from Alex.

Once you see how the IMF actually works and the World Bank, you just can't ever live in the world in the same way again. I knew a little bit about this through my brother, but who knows a bit about development economics. And apparently it's not really news within development economics. but within the broader world, like we think of these as pretty benign forces, the IMF and the World Bank, or even benevolent. And when you see what they actually do,

they're making people poorer and more oppressed. They're destroying natural resources, and they're pushing people into a kind of slavery, really. So it's awful. People need to know about it. Alex's book, I think, is going to be hugely important, Not just to Bitcoin, but just to people generally. I hope it takes off.

The other book I have to pump is by my philosophy friends, Andrew Bailey, Craig Wormke and Bradley Rettler. They have a draft of a book called Resistance Money, a philosophical defense of Bitcoin. And it's awesome. I have read it. We did a book workshop in Seattle a few weeks ago where we went through it with a bunch of, you know, a bunch of scholars and different sorts, economists, policy people, political science people, and we ranked it over the coals. And it's just really good, man. It's really, really high quality. It's not going to be out before Miami, probably more like the end of the year, something like that.

We don't have any firm date on when it'll be out. But it's coming through an academic press, but it's not really an academic book. It's a book with academic rigor and thousands of footnotes, but also written for an ordinary audience. I'll give away the first opening sentence of the book. The opening sentence of the book is Bitcoin is for criminals. At the workshop, somebody said, you know, I might work on Capitol Hill,

and I just know what's going to happen. I can just see Senator Warren saying at some hearing, like pulling out the book and saying, here's three preeminent philosophers who are pro Bitcoin. And this is the first sentence that they say in their book, Bitcoin is for criminals. And I could see, I looked at each of these guys, you know, like during the discussion, I could just see them just like doing the Chad yes face like, yes. There's so much, there's so much great stuff in this book. It's going to be a reference work and it's going to be a classic.

I'm super bullish on that. Oh, that'll be great because she'll have. already quoted the book as a reputable source. And then you can take all of the good stuff that comes later on, be like Elizabeth Warren's favorite book also said, that's great. That's fantastic. I can't wait to check that one out.

We'll toss it to James here last. James, final thoughts, recommendations. Go ahead. Well, likewise, so I feel blessed to be on the stage or in this room with you guys. You know, I've been following all of you for a long time. So I appreciate the chance to just have a good discussion with you. It's always it's enlightening, it's engaging, it's intellectually stimulating.

I appreciate it. So that's first. And so thank you, Ben, for assembling us. And then, you know, I do have to give, I have to tell people if you have not yet read your fellow Canadian's book, Jeff Booth's book, The Price of Tomorrow, for anybody who's listening, everybody's watching, please, it's not a Bitcoin book. It leads you to the reality of why Bitcoin can help us and save us. But it is super important to understand just those inflationary versus deflationary pressures.

And that is what really solidified Bitcoin as the hardest money, the sound money that we need for the future. And so if you haven't read that yet, please pick up a copy, you know, and read that book. If you want to really understand what's going on in money. So, yeah, I love it. Best. Again, one of the greats and such an accessible read for everybody, too. Truly. Definitely check it out.

Love Jeff. Gentlemen, I'm going to wrap it here. thank you all so much. I know we, as I so often do, we ran over by a solid 40 minutes, but that just means the conversation is good. So thank you guys for sticking around. Thanks for agreeing to come in the first place.

And I hope to run into, am I going to run into all you guys down in Miami, perhaps? Sure. We'll be there. Awesome. Well, thank you guys. You're all welcome back anytime, and I'll hopefully get to see all of you in a few weeks here.

Awesome. Thank you, Ben. All right. Thanks, first. Have a good one. All right. Everybody, thank you so much for watching. As always, like, subscribe, share, all those things, help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs.

Shout it to everybody in the chat that's been dropping comments and everything. I hope you enjoyed this. Again, what a monster rip that was. If you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. That was Hottle, Hodel, Coin Kite, Nunchuk, Start 9. They're all down below. Speaking of Miami.

That's coming down the pike, as I learned, is the proper vernacular from Greg Fosser earlier today. But nonetheless, that's coming up quick here. 27 days to Miami. I'm super excited. This is my fourth time. I've been to every single one of them. I hit it up in San Francisco for the first one. It's been Miami ever since.

It's a barrage on the senses. If you're going down, make sure you focus on. what you want to get to. Pick out a few things you definitely want to see. You know, make sure you, everyone's a while. You might get caught up in a conversation, a shit-coigne kind of conversation. You realize that your time is scarce there. So, you know, focus on what you want to get out of the conference and beeline for that. Anyways, if you want to do, if you do want to pick up tickets, by the way, ticket prices go up in just under five hours. So if you want to get him before they jump another 50 bucks per

per ticket. You can go to b.tc slash conference and actually for an extra 10% off use code BTC sessions. If you're going to be in Miami a little bit earlier, I'm doing a four hour cold card deep dive on Wednesday, May 17th. So this is basically

for anybody that either hasn't used a cold card or they've just kind of started dabbling and you really want to go from zero to hero. We're going to go through the entire initial setup, using it with sparrow wallet on your desktop, air gaping transactions. We're going to wipe the thing and recover with the seed phrase.

We're also going to dive into some of the more advanced features, trick pins and pass phrases and BIP 85 and all kinds of stuff that you probably don't even know what I'm talking about, but you will. There's five tickets left. Five tickets left. And it's, again, the whole point is it's small, intimate. I want to be able to get to every single person, answer every single question. So if you're in town, you can grab tickets for it at my website, BTC session.

It's over on the far right under in-person workshops. You can also book me there for private sessions if you need one-on-ones. If the free tutorials on YouTube don't cut it, you need some more handholding. You can get me there. And then finally, if you really liked what you saw, same website, just hit the tips button and you'll see my tip page. And if you want to help out in any way, send me a cuck buck, buy me a coffee, or you can help me with any of my infrastructure that I'm running every month.

Or you can just give a custom tip and drop a few sets via lightning. It's all there. Anyways, guys, BTC Sessions. DotCA slash tips for that. With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. And I'll see you guys next time

for your daily session. Tuddle the Bitcoin.