On The Brink with Castle Island - Parker Lewis (Unchained Capital) on unlocking Bitcoin's potential with multisig (EP.148)

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

Parker Lewis, head of Business Development at Unchained Capital, and author of the Gradually then Suddenly series, joins the show. In this episode:  Parker's progress in our Bitcoin fantasy league Our views on how Bitcoin gives purpose Bitcoin's relationship to the prospects for fiscal spending How the virus may have been an excuse to extend the fragile credit system Why Covid-related spending is often framed in moral, rather than economic terms How Bitcoin eschews academic debates Unchained's mission and current product focus Why on-chain multisig is such a good blend of resilience and convenience What multisig enables in terms of bitcoin applications What credit in a Bitcoin economy looks like Bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset and how Unchained is building for that future Why Bitcoin custody is fundamentally hard Parker's feelings on avowed Bitcoiner Cynthia Lummis being elected to the Senate How Bitcoin aligns with American values Parker's favorite piece in his Gradually then Suddenly series

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to On the Brink. Today, we're bringing Parker Lewis onto the show. He is the head of business development at Unchained Capital. Many of you will be familiar with Parker. He is the author of the Fantastic Gradually Then Suddenly series where he systematically debunks a bunch of critiques of Bitcoin. It really is an amazing all-in-one resource for those rebuttals to Bitcoin critiques. We had a great conversation. We talk about how Bitcoin gives the people that work at purpose, why fiscal stimulus is often framed in moral terms. We talk, of course, about on-chain multisig, why it's so useful the applications it enables, and why on-chain multisig makes life much easier for corporates potentially looking to allocate to Bitcoin, which, of course, we've

seen a lot of in the last year. Lastly, we talk about Bitcoin or Cynthia Lummis's accession to the Senate and why Bitcoin aligns with American values and there's not necessarily a contradiction between politicians liking Bitcoin and Bitcoin's core objectives. Strongly recommend the Gradually Then Suddenly series. I'll post a link to it here. Let's dive right into our conversation with Parker Lewis. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market.

And the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin.

Parker Lewis, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for appearing and sharing your time with us. Yeah, Nick, thanks for having me on. And while you beat me in fantasy football a couple weeks ago, we ended our losing streak last week and I'm now happy to be on as a guest on your show. It's my pleasure. I've been an admirer of yours from a distance for a long time. You know, it's a travesty we've never actually met.

I'm not sure this counts this meeting properly. We'll have to figure it out at some point soon. I need to come to Texas. I think you're in Texas, right? Yeah, we're down here in Austin, and I think unfortunately this is as close to people that aren't right in front of each other are meeting these days.

So I don't think I've gotten on a plane since March. So I look forward to the days where we can get you down here and then I'm backed up kind of in the Northeast as well. So let's cover the pressing and important topic first. What's the deal with your shared fantasy team? What's going on there? Well, our quarterback had his ankle torn off, which, you know, when you have a quarterback that was dominating the league and then you have two of his best receivers next to him that really threw us a curveball. But, you know, our running back room is really a disaster right now, but we're kind of keeping the team together with Scotch tape and I feel like we're going to make around the playoffs.

We've got Aaron Rodgers and Devante Adams that are putting up multiple touchdowns of game. So there's a chance. There's a chance. And so you split your responsibilities for managing this team with Will Cole. Is that right? Yeah, that's correct. I like to refer to myself as the Monday morning quarterback of the managerial staff. Will has to deal with all of the technology and actually putting people in and out of the lineups, but I get to second guess his decisions.

So it really, it's the best of both worlds. Getting to play fantasy, but not having to pull the trigger, but then can question my co-manager at every wrong turn. So you're sort of on the investment committee, and you don't have to worry about the back office nonsense. Correct. Yeah, that's basically it. I take all the glory and none of the responsibility if the team loses.

So you guys are actually doing okay. you're just outside. You're on the bubble for the playoffs right now. I have to admit I'm sitting comfortably in a playoff spot right now, which is very unusual for me because I am terrible at fantasy and I auto-drafted this year. Yeah, that is something that is special about this league because I actually retired from fantasy three years ago. I won my league and rode off into the sunset and told myself I likely would never play again. And CK asked me if I wanted to play in the Sats Bowl and, you know, kind of Will was also kind of under consideration and we just decided to jump back into it. So I got a little rust and, you know, you added to our three game losing

streak, but we turned it around last week. I think we're five and three now. So, you know, above 500 going into, going to the midway mark, you know, feels pretty good. We got a chance. That's all I can ask right now. Yeah. So for the, for the listeners' sake, so you have an idea of what we're talking about. This is a highly competitive Bitcoiner Fantasy Football League. I think we, what was the buy-in? This is like a hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin or something? I think it was a million sets. Oh yeah, sorry, wrong. Wrong unit of account. Yeah. How dare I. I mean, because a million stats by the time this pays out probably, you know, doubles the purchasing power from when we entered the league. That's right. I mean, who knows what the winning prize could be.

you know, at the end of the year, I mean, it could be enough to purchase a small yacht or, at a minimum, you know, some kind of watercraft, maybe a jet ski. Yeah, we, if they can purchase one of Michael Saylor's six or seven yachts, that would be nice. Yeah, I was, I, I think we might have just listened to the same clip where he was, he said, what did he say? He said, you know, I have a lot of material possessions. I need something spiritual to work on. Yeah, he was like, I don't need work.

I've got plenty of things. I've got like six yachts and five planes and however many houses. I wanted something to view that I actually enjoy. I wasn't sure if he was being facetious or if he actually has multiple planes and yachts. I don't know what possible use you could have for more than one of those vehicles. I took them literally, but it was one of the, it was the most humble way, like the most humble brag ever. Like I didn't take it as being insulting to any degree. Like, yeah, I've got five planes and six yachts.

Like, I don't need anymore. Like, I want to. No, I love it. I love it. You know, some billionaires use their wealth to like buy sports teams. And that's how they get their fulfillment. And to me, that's like quite empty. And then some billionaires, you know, use their wealth to like foment protests in other countries or something and destabilize regimes.

And then some billionaires go on Bitcoin. podcast all day and talk about how great Bitcoin is. Those are the best ones. Yeah, and stack billions of stats. You know, it was interesting because I don't know, I listened to this. I haven't listened to the podcast yet, but it was that two-minute clip on Twitter. And I think somebody put in the message, they must have read Nick Carter's post from the weekend where you had just released your Bitcoin at 12, and I read that over the weekend. And I felt very, very similarly. It was just kind of you know, one of those things that, you know, when I read your piece, it was not to be sappy, but it was just, you know, I write a lot about Bitcoin, but yours was just more

poetic. And Michael Saylor's kind of comments about Bitcoin, I think we're just very in that same grain of kind of being on a mission, being purpose driven, thinking about Bitcoin beyond just wealth or kind of, you know, even on. our own material lives, but kind of working on something that's far greater than ourselves and having purpose in that. So, you know, I think it, you know, not your piece was inspiring, but I think also kind of the way that Michael thinks about Bitcoin is inspiring to a lot of people, including myself. I think, you know, we Bitcoiners inspire each other.

And that's, I thank you for saying that. I mean, that's part of the reason why I write these things is so that the people that are actually on the ground building. Bitcoin products and making it into a functional system like yourself, you know, get a little burst of energy. So happy to be of service. Yeah, it definitely, I feel like, you know, for me, personally, you know, when I write and kind of what I'm doing, you know, I definitely feed on energy from other people, you know, like I, I am somebody that also am sensitive to that idea that says, you know, kind of there's the contingent that says, hey, there is no Bitcoin

community. But there's definitely relationships. And I think that. that people look to their peers, and they are guided by kind of, you know, I think as it relates to, you know, I don't want to prescribe it to everyone, but a lot of people that work on Bitcoin do it because they recognize the weight and the enormity of what we expect the long game of this to be and want to find a way to contribute. And I think that I think one of the things that you wrote about in your piece was that Bitcoin has a way to make people feel small or to kind of put things in perspective as to how big the world is or how big the universe is and how big Bitcoin in terms of what we expect its function to be or what I expect its

function to be in the world and how significant that that will be. That, you know, when Siskasaurus had a great quote on Laura Shin's podcast a couple years ago where he said something along the lines of, you know, when my grandkids asked me kind of what I did in my life, you know, what do I want to tell them? And it's that, you know, I want to be remembered as somebody that was one person of a large group of people that in a small way helped Bitcoin be successful. And I thought that that was just very well put. And I think it's kind of how I think about, you know, kind of people that I know in this space, you're writing the work that I do that I feed on other people's energy, but then I also recognize that Bitcoin doesn't rely on

any one individual, but it also wouldn't be what it is if people didn't take the action to contribute it in the ways that they do. So just wanted to really compliment you on your piece. Yeah, it's very well said. And the emotions that I feel when I think about Bitcoin, I mean, obviously Bitcoin is an interesting technology and a very important monetary technology. But beyond that, you know, there is a spiritual element. element to it. That's what I was trying to convey in the piece. And I know some people think that's really sappy or maudlin or kind of excessively emotional, but working on these incredibly challenging things, these very long-term projects, I mean, just look at how long it's going to take

us to activate schnor, for instance, you know, which is a pretty minor change. You know, working on these things should inspire those emotions, regardless of your precise role, whether you're working at a, you know, brokerage or an on-ramp, or you're building the core technology, or you're an allocator helping monetize the technology. That counts as contribution. You know, stacking stats is literally you're helping progressively monetize this technology. So everybody has a distinct role to play. And, you know, the emotion I feel is really one of submission to a greater cause. and you might say that's because there's a god-shaped hole in a lot of our lives. And we as millennials in society look for new religions.

But I don't see it that way. I just think it's important to have these long-term, you know, strongly opinionated projects that we work on. They give us a purpose. It certainly gave me a purpose when I didn't have one. So I feel very privileged to work on this in a small way. And, you know, I have a lot of respect for people that are able to directly instrumentalize giving Bitcoin exposure to the masses like you guys are up to at Unchained, which is one of the most critical things. I mean, helping people take self-custody and making self-custody easier. Yeah, I appreciate that.

And I also feel similarly because it's, you know, in a sense of either this was another thing that was in your piece or something that triggered a thought of mine, which was that it's like we all have to be okay being one very small part. And we know that the things that we do kind of contribute to the aggregate, but also knowing that, yeah, no one single company or one single act or one single article is going to change the dynamic. of Bitcoin or that things that that kind of the world would go out without kind of single acts, but but if you if you didn't have those added up, then it wouldn't. And that ultimately we are kind of all contributing. And in particularly those people, they're just storing value in Bitcoin. Because I think that is something that's often missed that you don't, that while and would love to kind of get in, talk to what we're doing it on chain, but it's also just that if you think about where we are in the spectrum of Bitcoin being 12 years in, you know, kind of the title of your piece,

Bitcoin at 12, that the people within their first 12 years that decided that were those crazy people to say, I'm willing to store my value in this network. And I'm going to take the time to understand how it works to do that, whether you're holding your own keys or you're not, that that imbues value under the network. And I really, I think about Bitcoin, and I think what it will merge and increasingly be thought of as a new pricing mechanism. And basically, I think about Bitcoin as repricing the entire world and it's going to be the entire world or globe's pricing system that will evolve from it and that those people that are just buying Bitcoin are doing that. They're like Bitcoin, they are slowly helping build Bitcoin's pricing mechanisms. And so whether it's people that

write, create content, create infrastructure, like what we do here at Unchain, that everybody, you know, it's not any one of those things. They're all dependent on each other. If people weren't storing their value in Bitcoin and Bitcoin wasn't worth 250 billion today, we wouldn't have the capital to build on chain. That's kind of how I think about it. So it's very, it's reflexive in that way. So we're recording this in kind of the pallid morning after a pretty controversial and dare I say confusing sequence of electoral events last night. I personally was up to about 3 a.m. watching it unfold. I don't know about you. I'm generally with the opinion that, you know, horse race politics is like an inferior form of sports, where it's just another way that people get

entertainment with a lot of the action being kind of completely irrelevant and just a substitute for a tribal sort of feelings. Regardless, we're now maybe in for kind of a week's long contested election, who knows. What do you make of the Bitcoin price action? I'm not to turn this into a price-focused conversation. We've seen Bitcoin appreciating over the last 24 hours. Do you feel that there's any connection there in terms of the kind of political gyrations we've seen, or is that just Bitcoin doing its thing? You know, it is, it's hard to say that it isn't. You know, I think I kind of, you know, I was probably up to a similar time, albeit in the central time zones, so probably went to bed of bed of ground too, but got to

the same point of, well, nothing more is happening tonight and just seems like a total cluster that, that, you know, everyone, you know, I kind of have as a perspective of the sun's going to rise tomorrow and, you know, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, a Trump fan, or not, the Federal Reserve is still going to print trillions of dollars this year and next. And that that's the real, you know, kind of keeping the eye on the prize and that we will get beyond this. and we've got to cross the bridge one way or the other. But that, you know, looking at Bitcoin, I think to, it seemed as kind of things became, you know, really the price started to run just as as polls started to close and, you know, kind of

seemed to suggest that it was in response to uncertainty where, you know, kind of, I don't want to say that because I have that view that, you know, doesn't really matter if it's a Republican or Democrat, they're going to print a bunch of money. and that's what Bitcoin stands to fix in the long term. But in the short term, I do think that there was, you know, kind of some concerns and people buying it over, you know, potential uncertainty that would come, less so kind of because it was some statement about, you know, worries that Biden would win or anything like that, but just more, hey, what happens if markets become uncertain or destabilize over a week?

Or what if this is drawn out for a month? And what does that mean for Bitcoin? So I do think that there was some impact. there and I think that it will be interesting to see. I'm more not necessarily concerned, but one of the questions that I have is, you know, do people buy Bitcoin because of that uncertainty, but then does that uncertainty bleed into the market where there's kind of a sell-off in the broader market that causes the dollar liquidity crisis, something like March that then kind of causes Bitcoin a spike and we all know that it will rebound, but just kind of, it could, it could cause

kind of greater kind of volatility in the short run if this takes weeks, if not months to figure out. Yeah, one interesting thing that I noted from the discourse is this prevailing view in the industry that really regardless of the winner, it looks like we're due for fiscal stimulus. And it's been interesting seeing the discussion around how to kind of continue to add liquidity to the economy now that interest rates are about as low as they can possibly go and QE doesn't really seem to have had a noticeable effect. And, you know, if you look historically, newly printed dollars kind of end up trapped in the financial sector.

They don't make it into the quote-unquote real economy. And so then you see this narrative shift to, well, what we actually need is for Congress to introduce this money into the economy through expenditures, through spending, through fiscal. And the kind of prevailing narrative is that regardless of which party ultimately takes power, that's going to happen. And so what I saw, at least within the cryptosphere, was just this view that either outcome was good for Bitcoin in terms of potentially giving rise to a more reflationary environment. I don't know if there's any truth to that, but Bitcoin seems to be responding positively regardless. Yeah, I do think that there's probably some extent of it just kind of getting beyond it, kind of having that date coming up and not knowing what was going to happen,

even though now that there's a certainty, at least it's behind it. And I think people are now being able to come back to that conclusion that says, yeah, either way you look at it, there is an inevitable path, and it is trillions of dollars of more stimulus. And I also believe that there's only one way that that actually gets paid for, and it's because the Fed, one way or the other, has to finance it. And I do think that kind of the overarching driver is that, or the way that I look at kind of how that money that is printed

or, you know, kind of if we're being pedantic to say digitally created and then kind of finding to credit expansion is that the Fed's whole system is built around its credit system and that the consequence of shutting down the economy and kind of Atlas shrugging a highly levered system with a global pandemic and then the shutdown of economy is a massively deflationary credit impulse and that the Fed and Fed and Treasury and in Congress, in terms of combining the weight of fiscal and monetary policy, in order to keep that system propped up, have to get more money flowing through the system. And I kind of think about it as, you know, the fiscal policy helps, right? I don't want to say helps because I don't think it

actually solves a problem, but in their world of creating a short-term solution is figuring out how to allocate dollars and then the Fed ultimately providing them. Now, the Treasury is actually going to borrow them and give them the Congress to allocate them, but the Treasury won't wouldn't actually have the dollars to allocate if the Fed didn't digitally create more. Right. Right. So they're all having to coordinate together. And so that is the inevitable pass.

So like while people can be, you know, kind of feeling like a punch to the stomach because of, you know, kind of the way that this election is gone and questioning whether things are above board or not, it's like if you actually step back and look at the playing field, it is the landscape is the same today in terms of in terms of what really. matters, which I think is the economic system and the precarious nature of how that plays out and that the Fed's going to be printing more money and that the biggest thing that any of us are all going to be working on probably for the rest of our lives is Bitcoin. And so that was going to be true regardless of what happened on November 3rd. Yeah, and it's so funny because we're in the most political, the most polarized political environment in living memory. You know, I mean, if you'll, there's this is.

great academic Peter Turchin that kind of traces political discord through the ages. And his view is that were actually at an equivalent level of political polarization to 1850, you know, before the, before the Civil War broke out. And not to get too dramatic about it, but you can quantify these things in certain ways, like looking at how, for instance, members of Congress are voting and how much collaboration there is or lack thereof. And despite all that, despite this extreme, you know, pitched level of political polarization, the one thing we have bipartisan consensus on is we need to print and allocate those dollars and increase the government's role in the economy and spend. because, you know, I guess the pandemic is justification for that.

But, you know, we've had similar diseases, you know, in the past 1968, 1957. We didn't have this level of stimulus back then. So it seems a little bit convenient as an excuse as far as I'm concerned. I really think about it. I do think it's, or the way that I would frame it is if it was, wasn't the pandemic, it was going to be something else. And what I mean by that is, the financial system was inherently fragile because the longer that it extends in this very

precarious over levered state, which if we go back to the financial crisis, that the QE that they put there only, like it didn't actually solve a problem. It actually made the problem worse. We started with a credit problem and it induced a credit system that was already highly levered to expand by 25 trillion plus or 25%. And we end ourselves up in an even more fragile state. And that if it wasn't a pandemic, it would have been another financial crisis that was set off because people started, you know,

the CDOs that just started getting going. Or it would have been, you know, kind of, you know, a massive, you know, a trade war or something else that just caused some disturbance to what was a fragile system. and then on the heels of that, if you want to keep that system propped up, you have to constantly inject more and more money because it's all built around a credit system that doesn't have enough of the base money to actually satisfy the liabilities. Yeah, and it's so funny to me when I hear, I listen to like these mainstream, you know, macro

focus podcasts, and the discussion, it's always framed in moral terms, which is astonishing to me. So it's always framed in some, you might hear something. like, well, the pandemic was an act of God, and it's no one's fault. So the government has to rescue the economy because, you know, we're guiltless here. And it astonishes me because, you know, regardless of whose fault a virus was or lockdowns were, the fact of the matter is that the economy is highly levered. We've been binging on debt, you know, for the last 10 years, but really since 1970, and of course you're going to be exposed to the slightest tremor. That's just the nature of being highly levered. So the fact that that's, you know, the pandemic has used as a justification

for more stimulus, effectively, more bailouts. It cracks me up the, you know, the fact it's always framed that way. Of course you're going to be exposed to the slightest kind of, you know, turbulence. It doesn't really matter what the turbulence is. What matters is that you put yourself in a position such that you can't delverage easily. Right. And I love that you kind of frame it as it's just, whether it's funny or like, you know, kind of curious that they, they defend or reinforce their actions with this moral case. And I love, like the way I frame it is, I always hear this line repeated, which is, oh, that, like,

in response to the Fed printing $3 trillion dollars between March and, you know, creating three trillion dollars between March and June. That's crazy. People say, and traditionally in the financial world, I come from like the hedge fund world before that, kind of restructuring, worked in investment banking. But those type of people say,

man, that's totally crazy. It's not going to end well, but they had to do it. You're like, wait. Right, right. Really crazy, not going to end well, but then you just make some crazy logical or leap without any logic that says,

but they had to do it. do it. What do you mean they had to do it? Like that isn't, that that's not the way that you would deal with your own personal life. It's not the way you would deal with your family, but they have, the government's, you know, has this magic ability to print money. And, and you, while you also recognize that it ends badly, there's some moral obligation to do something. And I think that the, what breaks down there is sometimes not doing anything, is better than doing something. And everybody knows that intuitively in their own day-to-day lives. But then we go up, up several kind of, you know, higher levels or orders up and, you know, there's a logical gap.

And we'd say, oh, we got to do it because we got to do it. And that's just not logic. And it does end badly. And I think, you know, what I, you know, I think while I think you're right in that there is a consensus on either side that, A, we have to print money and be that the government has to spend trillions of dollars or we're not going to have economic prosperity, which that is a consensus on either side. And then there's another consensus emerging within the Bitcoin world, which is, no, we don't have to do that. There is a better way. And now we have two actual competing economic systems and may the best man win. And this is what I love about Bitcoin, because you can get hobbled down in these historical arguments about the relative merit of a

gold standard or our Fiat standard or maybe even incremental changes to the current Fiat standard. we can devise mechanisms to reduce monetary discretion so that the central bank has less influence. You know, maybe we can move to nominal GDP targeting, for instance. It's a proposal I hear a lot or some other monetary rule. But bitcoins, they don't care for any of that. They're much more interested in praxis. Bitcoiners are just, you know, saying, well, withheld to all of that academic discussion,

let's just build an alternative system and see if it works. Because we've been discussing monetary arrangements for decades now. Ever since we left the gold standard, people have been griping about it. But there's no substitute for actually building something new, which is why Bitcoin is such an optimistic. And you could even say progressive movement, even though it's hearkening back to these older ideas. They just set to hell with that and decided to build their own.

Yeah, I completely agree. It's the best thing about Bitcoin. because, you know, because it's voluntary, right? And because it's ultimately competing it, one way to, or one way that I think about it is, there's a cohort of people that are libertarians and want to end the Fed or want to audit the Fed. And now we have this thing, Bitcoin that's just, hey, we don't need to audit the Fed. We don't need to end the Fed. We're just going to out-compete the Fed, you know?

And maybe we don't, but we think we're providing something that, And a lot of, you know, not we providing something, but in Bitcoin, like what Bitcoin kind of represents in terms of a value proposition is a different alternative to the legacy monetary system. And people can, we can debate and have intellectual discussions about economics and whether Keynesian makes sense or we can let ourselves get triggered by Stephanie Kelton and MMT on Twitter or we can just either decide to store our money in Bitcoin or work on Bitcoin, write about Bitcoin, whatever we want to do. And there's actually a market test that individuals can look at and say, which one makes more sense to me, A or B, A is the legacy

system, B is the B's Bitcoin. And the more people that look at that equation and evaluate it, those two competing monetary systems, they will voluntarily opt in. That's my expectation. That's why I'm working and doing what I'm doing. But it is great because we're not having to, it's not an intellectual economic debate anymore. It's just a practice. It's like, okay, doesn't work. And deflation's bad. Okay, we'll see, we'll see how people, you know, when they think about a currency, what they actually do in their daily lives and how that all adds up. And our economic system probably works better than yours. But, you know, you do what you. You do you. It's just the classic academic versus practitioner argument. You know, the academics,

consider Bitcoin can find plenty of reasons why it's going to fail. And Bitcoin has just said, well, you know, let's see. Well, you know, may the best man win. And so we've seen so far and, you know, by the numbers, probably about 100 million people worldwide, as far as we can tell, have owned Bitcoin in some capacity, not all of them on-chain. Lots of them have owned it in an intermediated way. So I guess maybe that's where we can transition unchained. So your objective as a company is to help people own their Bitcoin directly or institutions or businesses, you know, with the built-in tools that Bitcoin so handily provides, namely multisig, which I think is super underrated as a technology, especially the fact that we have native

multisig. That makes life a lot easier. So tell me a little bit about that. And in particular, your new idea around Bitcoin in a business context and kind of the products you're building out to service that. Yeah, definitely, because I do think it's one of the things one, I wouldn't kind of be working on it at Unchain if I, you know, when I think about

what it is that we're doing and kind of the mission that we're on, it's recognizing that, you know, there's a couple of things that make Bitcoin I would say orders of magnitude better as a monetary system or as a currency or monetary medium, however you look at it. And that being that Bitcoin is permissionless and that it has this emergent property of being censorship resistant. And really it unchained in me personally and why I'm here and I think kind of a lot of the folks that are here,

we really align behind this mission, that those things are important in Bitcoin. And while we recognize that there's going to be a whole range of, you know, there's no one-size-fits-all. I consider somebody that, you know, kind of buys their first Bitcoin at Coinbase. I bought my first Bitcoin at Coinbase. I am a client of Rivers. And so it's not, it's not a purity test because, you know, there's not a one-size-fits-all solution. But there is something incredibly empowering. And there is something also that the majority of people that stay in Bitcoin longer find greater security in holding their own Bitcoin keys. And really what sits at the core of what we're doing at Unchain is helping to build a custody platform and a financial services ecosystem that is built around individuals and businesses holding their own keys.

And it also lives in a world like I mentioned that says it's not going to be 100% of people. But when we do analysis on the blockchain and data science, we're not doing chain analysis. but looking at research and trying to evaluate how many people use third-party exchanges versus actually how much Bitcoin is on a primary basis held by an individual or a business with their own private keys. We estimate that that number is over 50%. And we think that it's a massively underserved market. We think about ourselves both on an individual level as customers and as a business as a customer,

ourselves of our services. And then we think about them as extensions of offering them to other people like us that need better security for our Bitcoin. And in the way I look at the Bitcoin world, it is I see, you know, you mentioned it before, maybe 100 million people have Bitcoin. Practically speaking, you know, a smaller subset of those people have a material exposure or have a material percentage of their wealth in Bitcoin. Maybe it's 5 million or 10 million, but 100 million people have Bitcoin. And looking toward a world that says billions of people are going to have Bitcoin. I think everyone in the world is going to have Bitcoin. I think everyone in the world is going to have

Bitcoin. And a really fundamental problem of Bitcoin is if I'm going to secure a material percentage of my assets in this digital form of money, I need to be very secure or very comfortable that I'm not going to have that wealth disappear. And so what we do it on chain, we use multisig. I think the thing that you keyed on there, it is something that distinguishes Bitcoin from a lot of other cryptocurrencies, others that are built around Bitcoin have native multisig as well. but that multi-sig is, I think, going to be the standard for those that facilitate self-custody, which we kind of estimate as being over 50% of the market over the long-term. And what we're doing in Unchained is really helping to commercialize that.

Take and kind of, you know, someone similar to that that's working on that is someone like Kasa. But I think companies like Unchained and Kasa are going to be kind of really the standard for how people secure their Bitcoin over the long term because they're using multisig. They're able to have the security of their own private keys. So when they're transacting with Bitcoin, they're actually authenticating and creating signatures and in many ways, companies like Unchain in terms of this product and costs, we're really creating an application layer that allows people to interact more seamlessly with the blockchain rather than abstracting that away.

And so then when we think about that in the context of the strategy, it is businesses are extensions of individuals and individual bitcoins that demand private key ownership or describe greater security in that, they're going to be either working for businesses or are going to have businesses themselves. And we're getting into this phase where we were increasingly having individual clients that needed applications for their businesses because their businesses have different challenges. And we can create this ecosystem at Unchained where we can solve all of their personal and business needs in one place for that market segment of people that want to hold their own private keys. So in addition to spending my time riding, it's also a pleasure

to work here and to be able to kind of be solving real problems for Bitcoiners. So the way I like to talk about multi-sig is, you know, if you think about the design space of all the possible ways, you can hold Bitcoin. I like to say that it's really the best blend of resilience and convenience. And it's not perfectly resilient and it's not perfectly convenient. But it's probably the best single tradeoff in that, you know, it's like a multivariate optimization problem in terms of the ways that you're trying to get a. exposure to Bitcoin and still be able to use it. So what specific things does Multisig enable? I mean, what kind of creative uses does Multisig allow you to pursue in terms of owning Bitcoin? Yeah, I think that, you know, because I do think of it that way that it's, it's the right balance

and has the greatest degree of fault tolerance at the same time where you, you know, it's accessible. And I also expect, or kind of my perspective is, that people will think about their Bitcoin security in layers in terms of what percentage needs to be super secure, what should be kind of more accessible, but still very secure. And then what may be, you know, kind of used or, you know, having a level of security for day-to-day payments where you may have the equivalent of a few days worth of expenses or a week worth of expenses rather than your life savings. And I think that there are likely going to be multi-sig applications that help people,

but that kind of have a different kind of type of construction of keys, whether keys are cold-stored or keys are combination of cold-stored versus on a phone or only on a phone with two-factor authentication, something like a block stream green. So I think that everyone's going to be kind of having multiple different variants of multisag to be solving different problems as it relates to their Bitcoin. But then as we think about services, multi-sig can also open a lot of unique type of applications. And I think that if you're thinking about Bitcoin really at any layer, it's just a construction of keys, right?

There's what's referred to as a UTXO set that establishes who owns what within the network and that those UTXOs are controlled by keys and that probably over time, more and more of those UTXOs or unspent transaction outputs will be controlled by not single keys, but multiple keys. And so a few of the different products that we're working on on a chain, one's a product that exists today. But rather than we basically have a Bitcoin backed loan. And a unique thing about multisig that you can do with a Bitcoin backed loan is what we offer to our clients is a client post Bitcoin as collateral. We issue a dollar base loan so they don't have to sell their Bitcoin. They can have access to dollar liquidity. But they don't have to have.

to trust unchained. So we offer that in a way where it's a two of three multi-sig, where unchained holds a single key, the client, the borrower holds a second key, and then we have a third party independent kind of intermediary that holds the third key. So no single individual can unilaterally move funds. The individual can validate that their Bitcoin isn't being re-hypothicated, and they can validate that the address is unique to them. And one of the keys is in that address or is controlling that address. And, and the, and the, and the, and the, And then we're also looking at a scenario where we may lend Bitcoin, but that it sits in a similar construction where it's a two of three multi-sig.

The lender holds a key, borrower holds a key, and unchained holds a key. Now this would be an application around kind of, you know, a trading kind of type loan where the Bitcoin, you know, can kind of have credit to be traded on, say, in exchange, but it doesn't actually need to move. So it's interesting where you start to think about the financial relationships based on how keys are held. And then if we go up a layer, if we think about even in this. this isn't something that we're working on today, but we'll likely be working on in the future.

An application like Lightning, Lightning is an application of multisig. It's different than what we do today at Unchain where we just think about someone's the lion's share of their Bitcoin savings that they want to be hyper-secure. But today, the Lightning Network basically enables payment channels, where it's a two-of-two multi-sig, and it's more of a trust-minimized setup rather than kind of the trustless property of the base layer. But it is another extension of Multi-Said where we could have these payment applications where facilitating not necessarily even high-frequency payments back and forth,

but just smaller transactions that can be netted and settled on the blockchain at a later point in time. So I really think that the future of Bitcoin, the way it scales, I think it scales and layers and that at each one of those layers, Multisig will be playing a role in an unchain. We basically want to be helping our clients access each one of those layers. and those multi-sacred arrangements and being the expert and the technology provider that helps fulfill that. I think it's fascinating the way you talk about it as kind of a base of a monetary system, not the sole layer. You know, I think people had this kind of pathology in terms of, you know, Bitcoin is so good at settling value. They thought it was solely a payment system at the base layer.

But, you know, my interpretation of what you're saying here is that it's much more. expansive than that. And really, we should be thinking about Bitcoin is this sort of high-powered base money or this sort of collateral under the system that you can use to build all sorts of financial applications. And maybe even the base of a credit system, is that sort of too expansive? How do you think about, you know, because Bitcoin makes for such good collateral, you can verify that a third party has it. You can express conditions for handing it over. How do you think about the relationship between Bitcoin and credit, which I know is a very controversial topic in Bitcoin circles? Yeah, I think that one, I think that this that is going to evolve over time,

where as we're in this, what I consider to be Bitcoin's monetization event, that it will serve increasingly as collateral where people will want to hold it. It's rational to want to save a currency that is appreciating and spend a currency that is depreciating and that in that context kind of being able to use Bitcoin as collateral and be able to do it in a more secure way where again, I think the principal reason why our borrowers take loans from unchained is because they want to hold on to their Bitcoin for the long term. And we give them the flexibility to do that, but they wouldn't take that financial product if they thought that there was a risk to losing their Bitcoin. The whole reason that they're taking that loan is because they want

to preserve that optionality and they believe that Bitcoin is going to be the reserve currency in the future. And we can do it in a way because of the properties of Bitcoin that give them the assurance, sorry, that Bitcoin is there and that they can prove it that it's there. And they're not trusting, you know, in our omnibus ledger that the Bitcoin that we're saying is in our account is there. They can actually validate it on chain and that's very valuable as a property. And then I think as it relates to credit going forward, I think about Bitcoin is, yes, it is money and there's nothing fundamentally wrong about credit. And, you know, it's just that in a Bitcoin world, there are no bailouts and we won't ever get to a place where we live in a world where it's

levered today. Like, you know, one of the, one of the, I always find it useful to, to provide micro examples. You know, it's like, you would never lend to somebody for 30 years to buy a house at two and a half percent. That just, you know, if you go around each institutional investor and say, hey, would you lend money to, to person A, B, or C for 30 years at two and a half percent, no one would do. But then we do that every single day, all day long, because it's abstracted away from the people whose money it actually is. So it's, yeah, there is. At a fixed rate, too, at a fixed rate.

It's preposterous. Yeah, it's like a best case scenario, you're going to give me my money back in 2% in 30 years. And, you know, worst case scenario, you're going to lose it between then and now. And I'm not going to have the benefit of that optionality. And so it's it's that those type of things won't happen because with a fixed supply and no bailouts, the market interest rate is going to have to be, you know, a fair rate. and determined on the market and not manipulated by more and more money being flooded into the system. But that yes, Bitcoin will be used kind of in a credit context. I do think once we get,

you know, my own personal perspective that once we get to a hyper-bitcoinized state, which I think that Bitcoin is going to transition from a store of value to something that's more used day-to-day to facilitate commerce, that then it's going to shift and, you know, people are going to be borrowing actual Bitcoin to build a business or to build a plant or building and that that, you know, kind of it shifts from collateral to a funding currency over time. But that in that world, you know, the credit system will exist. It will just be far smaller and that the actual, the coordination of economic resources will be facilitated primarily by the base money itself, but that also the function of credit will continue to exist.

it just kind of won't be able to become metastasized. Yeah, you know, I actually asked the monetary historian, the great historian of free banking, Larry White, that exact same question on this podcast, actually. And he gave me a similar answer. So you're in good company here. He said, you know, Bitcoin lending is hampered by the fact that there aren't many businesses that have Bitcoin denominated

to cash flows. And so, you know, it wouldn't really make that much sense to take a loan in Bitcoin terms if you don't expect that your cash flows are denominated in Bitcoin. Now, there are exceptions to this, though. So trading firms that mark their book in Bitcoin, you know, and miners, miners obviously earn a return in Bitcoin terms as opposed to Fiat, although they can convert it to Fiat. So if you look at it carefully, that's actually those are some of the big consumers of Bitcoin credit right now. Yeah. And I do think it's one of those things that as Bitcoin, I'd say, as the Bitcoin adoption density increases, those type of use cases will increase. And that the nature of, say, Bitcoin denominated credit today is just geared toward where the applications exist. And it is kind of on the trading side, hey, if you're an OTC desk and you borrow Bitcoin for inventory,

you're going to be paying Bitcoin denominated interest rate because you are using that Bitcoin to generate revenue because you're using it to make markets for people. If you're a miner and you're earning in Bitcoin, you're using, if you're borrowing Bitcoin to facilitate, you know, kind of either financing equipment or financing an expansion of a mine, that it's actually going to productive use. So I think that those type of circumstances will have increase over time. It'll just evolve as Bitcoin evolves in terms of what it's actually, how it's facilitating and where it's facilitating commerce.

So speaking about Bitcoin in a corporate context, I would say that I'm typically sort of on top of Bitcoin narratives, but this is one that really took me by surprise this year. this notion of Bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset, I will confess that that was not something I was expecting at all. And then it became an enormous phenomenon this year, obviously primarily capitalized by micro strategy, Michael Saylor. So tell me about how that intersects with what you're doing at unchained, you know, especially as it pertains to some of the sweets of products city belt.

Yeah, I think when we, because we really sat down and made a commitment at the end of last year that we needed a product that worked for a wide variety of multi-person organizations and really kind of coming at that conclusion from, you know, A, kind of having been deploying multisig, self-custody solutions to individuals and recognizing their needs and talking to clients and kind of seeing that there was a gap there, that they were increasingly, you know, kind of thinking about this too, just in, you know, kind of context of small businesses, kind of mom and pop businesses where, you know, there's an individual, they own Bitcoin as an individual, and now they're thinking about it in the context of their business, and wanting, you know, those type of people, because it is natural,

and if you think about it as you interact with the bank today, especially for entrepreneurs or small businesses, they like to have their personal and business banking at one place. Like they want to deal with, you know, with somebody that they try. and they don't want to be working across systems. And so we recognize that there was a need for that for some of our early clients. And it's one of those things where sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good. I think we recognize that there was a use, but we kind of set down that path. And it was really, really has been our single largest investment in 2020 is kind of building business logic to have kind of, you know, the, the foundation for the type of system level controls that sit on top of keys that you would expect.

of a traditional financial institution if you're a business and if you're managing a treasury. And so we kind of recognize that, hey, there's this massive group of people that demand that they hold their own Bitcoin private keys. And each of those individuals is either going to be working for a business or they're going to have a business of their own. And they're going to, it's like kind of the least path of resistance. They're not going to hold their Bitcoin one way as an individual and then be comfortable doing it as another way. And they're going to have that neat thing.

will want to do it at one place. And if we can solve their personal and business needs for holding their own private keys, then that kind of, there's synergies between kind of business and personal Bitcoin banking. And then we, I say, kind of got a little, you know, a little bit better lucky than good in a sense of right before we're ready to launch this, Michael Saylor announces that he, you know, decided to, you know, allocate 250 million of his treasury and then he added another 200 million or maybe I think it was 425 million total. So we got a little bit lucky there. And then he kind of go to, or I don't want to give them all the credit, but he kind of asked the question, why doesn't Square do this? And then Square bought it. And it was really, it was

really before that where, you know, spring of last year, before we had even launched the product, we had, we had clients that there were businesses that were using our application, but it was very much a one-to-one experience. And it didn't, it didn't solve. We basically had an imperfect product that businesses were using because they needed it, but that there are inherently challenges that businesses have when securing Bitcoin and holding their private keys that individuals fundamentally don't have. Whereas in an individual context, sovereignty, you know, amongst Bitcoiners is really important or really censorship resistance or preserving the permissionless nature of Bitcoin is important. But when you're a business, the financial

control is really important. So as an organization, You may want to have that censorship resistance or permissionless access to the network, but you may not want one single individual to be able to unilaterally run off to the digital Cayman Islands. And so really kind of our application is flexible enough to build kind of system level controls and to be able to distribute keys across multiple parties to have kind of in the business context, have different people, have different level of permissions where we can basically deliver over time an application where it says, hey, if you're a business and you're used to these type of financial controls with, you know, at a system level with your bank, we can deliver you that, but then we can

add to that the foundation that's built on private keys. And if you go to a traditional custodian, then you're going to, you're going to only be relying on the system level controls. And we can kind of tailor that to your organization and really be in a position where financial controls at a system level augment private keys and that you don't have to live in a world without those. And so that's that's really kind of the vision behind it and it was really guided by seeing businesses and individuals that were using our platform, individuals that weren't using our platforms in that business contests, but asked about it and businesses that were that really just demonstrated that there was a gap there. And I think in the long term, not that we're there yet,

but I think that there is a vision here that is we want to unbank the big corporations of the world where they don't have to go to the bank where the micro strategies, you know, don't have to go to a third party, considering where they can be their own bank. But really thinking about that is if we, if we go down market from there, it's really the individual and the small business and the small to medium size business, they're the most likely adopters of this early because it's their own wealth. They're in control. They can make those decisions quicker. They don't have large treasuries. But we are at the same time working with subsidiaries of public companies or pre-IPO companies that are looking to move Bitcoin into treasury and understand why holding their own.

keys can deliver greater security. So it's, you know, it's, again, recognizing that there's not a one-size-fit-all solution, but there is a large universe of people that hold their own private keys and their businesses or extensions of them and they need applications to help them in the business context. And it's just, it's such a challenge, I think, because and it's a new challenge, because we've never had to reckon with value stored as information before, ever, I would say. Ever. We've had to self-custody, things before gold for instance i mean you know lots of families have experiencing have experienced self-custodying you know precious metals and so on but we've never had to think about this notion of having to keep a

secret that is the key to a large amount of money and so these habits are are hard to inculcate in people and i really do just think it's going to be a long-term process of you know making people used to this idea of digital bear assets. Yeah, I think that's right. And it's kind of it's this difficult challenge where there is this permanence of Bitcoin, right? And that's the whole reason why it works. So when you create a Bitcoin signature and send it out into the network, there's no takebacks. And that permanence, if it wasn't there, Bitcoin wouldn't work. Bitcoin, you know, if you could reverse a Bitcoin transaction, then it wouldn't be viable as a currency. You can't have a decentralized monetary system on top of which the global economic system or a new global economic system

is going to be built. If I could send you a Bitcoin transaction, you give me your car and then I can take my Bitcoin back. That just wouldn't be viable. And so that permanence is a necessary function, but it's really scary to somebody initially in terms of, you know, say I have a million with the Bitcoin. If there's a greater than a 0.000 or 1% chance that I could lose that, I'm not going to be comfortable storing my money that way or in that currency. And that really the way that I think about our role with unchained, and it's not just us, because I think Kasa does a great job of this too, is delivering an application where people can have that permissionless access to Bitcoin and preserve the censorship resistant in a way that is fault-tolerant

enough that they're not worried that they're going to lose their Bitcoin. And that in that world, if you can deliver Bitcoin custody in a way where clients have their own keys, but there's still a sufficiently high degree of fault tolerance, then they're actually going to be more secure. And that then I think the same or, I mean, for different reasons, the same question comes into to play for a business. And that's why I think early on or kind of in the highest degree, highest preponderance, is the small businesses that are owned by those same type of individuals that have already crossed

over that mental hurdle. They're the ones that are kind of more forward thinking about adopting this as a business solution, but we think that that's going to change as we mature. But it's also a function of the application, right? It's like as Bitcoin rises in value, as these applications are used more, we're building out the monetary system every single day. And our application is just one part of that. and that as we make it better and more capable and more sophisticated and easier to use,

the more comfortable people are doing it. And then there's more capital to invest in that. And those solutions just become better and better. So it's an iterative process. It's something that, you know, I don't expect the apples of the world to be using unchained tomorrow. But when we, you know, kind of have expanded the platform and we're two, three, four years out, that, yeah, is that a possibility?

But it is a process. So Parker, we've had you with us for about an hour now. Before we go, there's another pressing news item to discuss. So yesterday, Cynthia Lemis was elected to the Senate in Wyoming. So she is your, the mother-in-law of your teammate and colleague will call. So I just wanted to ask you what the mood is like in the office today. I mean, how pumped are people? I mean, she is a bit-coiner. She's going to be. the, I guess the second female bitcoiner in the Senate, along with Kelly Loeffler, we'll see about if she wins her runoff election. But, I mean, what an amazing development, not just for Bitcoin, but for Wyoming, too. Yeah, it's, so the spirits are high here. I think that, you know, kind of on the one side, there's a couple things that, you know, obviously we're an organization of people. So I think there's a lot of mixed emotions about the way that the election is. gone and the consequences. But I think one of the unifying forces here is that we're still

kind of 100% guided by our mission around Bitcoin, but then also Will Cole, who's somebody, childhood friend of mine, we went to preschool together and now we're working together, you know, at Unchained on Bitcoin. And he, his wife's mother was the loan Congress, so Wyoming has one seat in the House of Representatives. She filled that seat either for three terms or four terms, and then she vacated the seat to go back to Wyoming. And I spend time up in Wyoming with them quite a bit. Will's here, Will and Annalise split time between Austin and Wyoming, about 50-50. And I should say, Senator, I used to call her Cynthia now, I must call her Senator-elect Lumas. She's a great advocate for Bitcoin. She's held, I think she was,

she went to Satoshi's roundtable in like 2015. So she's not someone new to Bitcoin. I think she bought her first Bitcoin in 2013. So before she kind of burst onto the scene and ran for U.S. Senate, she's been, she's held Bitcoin. And I think she understands it at a very intuitive level. And so I think that I think she's going to be a great advocate, you know, kind of here we're extremely excited that she was successful in her run.

But it's really interesting because, you know, not only is she just, a Bitcoiner, I think she'll be a great advocate for Bitcoin in the Senate and that, you know, it, you know, we want more and more of those type of people that are both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. But then also with what's going on in Wyoming, you know, we saw that Cracken got licensed as a bank there and there was a lot of work that people like Tyler Lindholm and Caitlin Long and, you know, there's, there's, there's, I've met a number of them and I can't name them all. But there's a lot of people in Wyoming that put in a lot of work to lay the foundation to create the regulatory apparatus to bring and to help diversify

their economy by attracting Bitcoin-based businesses to Wyoming. And so I think that from, you know, kind of Cynthia Lomas going to the Senate, it's, you know, in part, she's a, you know, a Bitcoin because she owns Bitcoin and she understands the value that this type of you know, kind of monetary system that isn't, you know, kind of part or at least competes with, you know, the other currency systems. But then I think she also recognizes what Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is doing for Wyoming and the economic development opportunities there. So there's just a number of reasons why I think her win in moving to the Senate will mean a lot. And I think that I think she'll be a leader there and that she will be an advocate for Bitcoin.

So I'm really excited in here. We're not only we excited for Will and Elise and Cynthia, but we think it's going to be great for Bitcoin to have her there. I'm excited too. And, you know, this is a reason that we've actually, we've had dedicated three episodes of the show to the developments in Wyoming. We had Caitlin Long on from Avanti. Obviously, she helped spearhead all those laws,

you know, clarifying the legal nature of digital assets. We had one of the founders of Two Ocean Trust, which is not a speedy, but they got a no action letter from the Wyoming Banking Board. They went for the trust company approach to be a custodian of digital assets. And then we had my former colleague, David Knitsky, from Cracken Financial now. And they got the Speedy Charter. So, I mean, I just couldn't be more excited by the environment in Wyoming, not just because, you know, they're taking. taking a very progressive stance to, you know, regulating digital assets to the extent they can be regulated. But also because there's an incredible vibrancy in terms of allowing for new bank

charters and new financial institutions to emerge, which, you know, if you consider the history of this country in the last 20 years or so, the number of banks has shrunk dramatically. And there's been huge consolidation. The average size of bank has increased when that happened. you know, larger banks lend to large businesses, smaller banks lend to small businesses, that's a rule of thumb. You just have less credit creation for small businesses and less competition. And just as with any sort of oligopolistic industry, the product is worse. And it's easier for the state to regulate them and conduct things like Operation choke point. So I'm just excited by the prospect of there being

newer bank charter systems such that you could create a bank and maybe we could reintroduce some vibrancy into that ecosystem. Yeah, look, I agree. I think it's really meaningful for a number of reasons. I think for what you mentioned there, and I think one of the things that you were alluding to there is, you know, for a company like, you know, cracking, being de-risk, not being at risk of, you know, a bank deciding that they're not going to bank you. to have that capability themselves, but then also potentially, you know, kind of, you know,

a company like unchained, we have a bank and, you know, if there are certain banks that aren't friendly to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, like Wells Fargo. And I think, you know, in certain ways, it helps protect the infrastructure that we're building today. It also helps the mainstream Bitcoin. I think that they are, you know, in addition to creating kind of regulatory certainty about Bitcoin custody. They've contributed to rules making around kind of the lending business that we look to at Unchain. And so there's just, there's a lot of value that's come out of it. I think that it will foster increasing competition. It will help secure a number of the Bitcoin infrastructure companies going forward. And that, you know, kind of also coming back to it,

having, you know, kind of people within state legislatures that feel very strongly about states' rights and then having somebody like Senator LaColomewis being in the Senate and protecting and fighting for states that are kind of controlling kind of what goes in within their four walls is important to have. So I think it's really big for a number of fronts. And if I were to summarize the last 10 minutes or so, this conversation, I mean, my view is really that Bitcoin is a phenomenon which totally aligns with American values. And, you know, people sometimes miss this, and they get distracted by the fact that lots of miners are based in China or something like that.

But fundamentally, I think the phenomenon of Bitcoin is a neutral standard of value entirely aligns with core American values of privacy, protecting the individual, autonomy, and freedom. And, you know, these core rights that are in the first 10 amendments of our Constitution. And there's very few countries that are actually suitably placed to defend a system like that. So I don't see any contradiction between, you know, states people and, you know, being fans of Bitcoin. They're being more Bitcoiners in Congress. I don't see an issue there. Honestly, I think America stands a benefit from embracing Bitcoin. Yeah, I think that I think that's absolutely right.

I think that it couldn't align more with those kind of underlying values of individual freedom and individual rights, like you said, the First Amendment. And so I think that really to its core, it actually helps protect and reinforce each of those. And so I think, you know, I kind of would say jokingly that, you know, Bitcoin is very important to the national security of the United States. That it aligns very well because it helps protect individual rights. So, Parker, before we go, you wrote this great, great series called, or you wrote most of the pieces, I think, in the series called Gradually and suddenly, you know, really rebutting a lot of these issues people have with Bitcoin, which is awesome because I use these a lot, you know, just piecemeal for rebuttals to issues people have against Bitcoin. of those posts of which there are many, which one is your number one favorite?

That's tough. And I also have to give you some credit because in one of those posts, I snagged the pictures of your fud dice. So I like to think of my pieces as just being a longer winded way to make the same point of your fud dice. So I kind of just, you know, roll the dice, pick the subject this week or that week. And so they're, you know, but it also, I think to the point, I appreciate that that you're finding them useful is that, you know, many ways I use my writing to help distill my thoughts, but then also to leverage my own time. So rather than explain the same concept, 100 times I can send the article because people kind of have these recurring questions. People have different questions, but often, you know, kind of their common questions because there are things that we all are not, I would say all of us, but many people have the same. kind of challenges when they're looking at Bitcoin and thinking about it

because there are things that just are inherently confusing about it and that, you know, logically need to be, you know, answered as somebody who's kind of coming to understand Bitcoin as a superior form of money. So it's been a fun thing to write. I have, you know, it is kind of, I think I have written all the articles in the series. I would say my, the best one if I was to point somebody through the one I'm most proud of however you'd say it, if I was pointing someone to one of them, I would point them to Bitcoin obsolates all other money.

My favorite piece is probably Bitcoin is a rally cry, where I kind of, it was more of a, you know, red meat right after the March 12th massacre where Bitcoin got cut in half and then the Fed printed trillions of dollars that kind of really tried to rally the spirit. So kind of best one, Bitcoin obsolete is all the money, favorite one, Bitcoin is a rally cry. Beautiful. Yeah, I like to say. are you even a bick-coiner if you don't write propaganda in service of the coin I won't be doctrine people that's what I do and and by that standard you're one of the

truest and most faithful bit-coiners Parker remind me to give you one of my fud dice when I when we get the opportunity to meet I still have some remaining but don't tell anyone because people are going to ask me for them I will when when you make your way down to Texas before you come, let me know, and I will make sure to remind you to give me one of the last remaining limited editions. And if I'm coming up to Boston, I'll ping you to make sure we can meet up. So I can get one of those for my store of Bitcoin art. Yeah, it's important that everyone has paraphernalia because Bitcoin is so immaterial. You know, it's dematerialized.

We need physical analog items to embody it. That's why I have so many hardware wallets. We do. I just bought a new friend of mine that I met at Bitblock Boom a couple months ago, had to run the numbers and then had the GetTX Out Info set on this shirt. So I just bought 21 of those. So I'm going to be giving out those. And I'd love to have a set of a fud dice to go with it. I think this is why Bitcoin art is so popular. That's my hypothesis, because there's nothing to Bitcoin. And so we just want reminders that it's actually a real thing. It's not true. just kind of a collective fiction. We need to materialize the dematerialization of money. Well, this has been great. Thanks so much for coming on, man.

Really, you know, look forward to seeing what you guys produce here as well. Yeah, I appreciate you having me on, and I look forward to knocking you out of the fantasy playoffs. I'm like on for stuff. All right. God willing.