Shaun Newman Podcast - #613 - Dave Bradley

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Chief Revenue Officer at Bitcoin Well, he founded the world’s first bricks and mortar Bitcoin store and co-founded the iconic Bitcoin company, Bull Bitcoin. SNP Presents returns April 27th Tickets Below: https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone/ Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text: [phone] – and be sure to let them know you’re an SNP listener.

This is Alex Krenner. This is Dave Collum. This is Bruce Party. Hi, this is Jeremy McKenzie, the raging dissonant. Hello, this is Maxim Bernier. This is Danny Bofordford. This is Chuck Prodnick. This is Vance Crow, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast.

Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Thursday. I got some thoughts on Twitter here in two seconds. But before we get there, government deficits running out of control. Is that a teaser or enough? I don't know. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. Now might be the perfect time to diversify some of your hard-earned savings into physical money that can't be printed. Of course, I'm talking gold and silver. And who else but silver, gold, bull.

Of course, they're my favorite when it comes to gold and silver, offering a full suite of services to help you buy, sell and store precious metals. They ship metal discreetly, fully insured, and with tracking straight to you. If you've never tried it, I've done it before, and I tell you, it is pretty slick, and you won't be disappointed when it comes to your door.

And if you're not interested in it, that's completely fine. Now they have the option to text Graham, so you can text or email down on the show notes is the details. And I'd appreciate it if all of you lovely folks would continue to blow up his text line, blow up his email, just say, hey, thanks for supporting independent media, thanks for supporting the SMP. It goes a long way, and I do appreciate it. Of course, they have been a major sponsor here for 2024, and we hope to continue the trend of them enjoying being on the SMP and being a part of this community.

I know there's been lots of people texting me. They've been talking to Graham and have been, you know, really enjoying that as well as going down a bit of the silver gold, I don't know, rabbit hole, I guess. So that's been really cool to watch and see. And some of the texts I've got from people or from you folks reaching out has been really cool as well. Now, my Twitter thought is I scroll Twitter, you know, usually in the mornings. If you follow me, you know, sometimes I post, sometimes I don't. You know, we post some clips, that type of thing. But I'm always looking for, like, new people to follow on Twitter.

And this morning, the one that came across my thing, which, you know, we'll wait and see how long I follow Roseanne Barr for, but I clicked on her and said, you know what, I'll give her a follow. What the heck? We'll see what Roseanne says. And so I've been, you know, that's my new one today. My question to you, the lovely listener, is if you're on Twitter, who is somebody that you have recently followed or follow that you don't think I know about. And if that's,

you know, I don't know, you decide and shoot me a text. I would love to know who you're following on Twitter. Maybe there's somebody there that would be a great guest, I don't know, or maybe there's just somebody who would be a great follow on Twitter. I'm not sure. That's usually where I go, if I'm going to pick on a social media, that's usually where I go. And it's never dull, that's for sure. McGowan professional chartered accountant. That's Kristen and team. She's been in the financial industry since 2009. She's absolutely wonderful.

She deals with me all the time. And they offer accounting, bookkeeping, business consulting, and training, financial planning, and tax planning. And they're looking for people. They're looking to hire. They're looking for a CPA. We'd love to grab somebody local who understands the industry and our community. She also believes in supporting this show and supporting free speech and starting conversations. Yeah, her team's pretty cool.

If you're looking for more information on her, McGowan, CPA.ca. If you're looking to apply or you're interested in maybe a new career, that type of thing, you can always reach out to me as well. And I can connect you with Kristen and her team to all the CPAs out there. If you're looking for a great little company, Kristen's got it going. Got it going on. I don't know why I rambled off there. We have SMP Presents Cornerstone Forum.

We're stuck at 19 tickets. That's what we got left. 19 tickets, you know, and only 24 days to go. So that's, if you've been on the fence this entire time, 19 tickets remain, and I want to get a sellout real bad. So down on the show notes, SMP Presents, Cornerstone Forum, hope to see you there, April 27th and 28th. Okay, let's get on to that tale of the tape. He's a chief revenue officer at Bitcoinwell. He also founded the world's first bricks and mortar Bitcoin store and co-founded Bull

Bitcoin. I'm talking about Dave Bradley. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Dave Bradley. Sir, thanks for hopping on. Thanks for having me. Now, I was just saying to you. I don't know a whole lot about you. I'm going to assume my audience doesn't know a whole lot of boat ship, but that could be wrong. You're in Alberta boy. Tell us a little bit of votes yourself. Yeah, I'm based in Calgary. I am widely known in certain circles is the strongest and best looking Bitcoin entrepreneur in Canada. And I've been in the... What circles are those? What circles are those? Well, you know, there's a whole story behind that I can tell you, but I do have an endorsement to this claim from Daniel Smith that happened a few

years before she was premier. And I've got a video of the endorsement up on my website. So, if the government says so, it must be official, right? Oh, yes. If the government says so that now we know where the circles is. It's the government and we know how much we love to trust the government on this side of things. Sorry to interrupt. Carry on with your best looking strongest Bitcoin. Yes. Yeah. So I've been in the Bitcoin industry, pretty much the whole journey through the launch. I got into Bitcoin in 2010 and I've founded and run a number of different companies in Bitcoin. And now I'm mostly working on sort of events and media stuff that I'm trying to bring more. people into Bitcoin and, you know, just educate people within the space because there's so much

bullshit in our industry, frankly. Rewind the clock back to 2010. Whenever it is, you read about this. What were you doing before that? Like, how did, how did Bitcoin get on your radar? Yeah, I'm, uh, I've always been kind of like a serial entrepreneur. You know, I was like hustling to make money when I was six. And, uh, I was running, uh, before I found Bitcoin, I was running a recycling company, actually.

which is a totally direction that I could not see myself going today. But we were doing curbside recycling in Calgary before there was a city program. And we lost a lot of that business to the city. And right around the time that I was selling off the rest of the business, I found Bitcoin. And I found it because I was trying to look up video cards for gaming. And I found some forum posts about it. And it was like back then it was like a really, really weird thing that was just really just the base.

nerds were interested back then. And when you read it, you're like, this is it. No, not at all. I didn't get it for a long time. I did this thing that almost everyone does when they first hear about Bitcoin is they kind of write it off. They're like, maybe that's interesting, but I don't think it'll take off. And there's usually a pretty simple explanation for why they write it off.

And then you keep hearing about it and it comes back into your frame of view. and eventually, you know, you start to take a serious look. So I did that. But then also, once I did get into it, I still didn't really understand what it was. I don't think really many people or maybe anyone understood what it was or how important it was going to be in in 2010, 2011. And I was looking at it like a lot of people do these days as like, you know, maybe it's an investment.

Maybe it's like a way to make some quick money. Definitely looking at it as a way to increase the number of don't. that I had back then. So what made you, that's what, I guess you go, yeah, I didn't believe in it, but you still, you still followed it, still got invested in it. It still like did all these things. Obviously, you believed in it somewhat then, or you just thought it was a way that maybe have a little bit of fun.

Yeah. So early on, like back then you could mine Bitcoin with a regular computer. And so I bought a slightly better graphics card for gaming than I was otherwise going to buy. And I got very lucky. I started mining Bitcoin right around just after it hit $1. And very shortly after I started mining, it went from $1 to $14. And the first computer that I bought for it paid for itself in like 11 days.

And so for me, it was just like a way to make money back then. I was like, I was mining Bitcoin in my basement. I was selling them on this website called Local Bitcoins where I would like meet people in Tim Hortons for cash. and they for sure thought I was a drug dealer. But I was just like, you know, I was making fairly small amounts of money, selling very large amounts of Bitcoin and buying more computers. And eventually I filled up my basement. And it kind of just scaled from there.

It got to the point where I was meeting like five or six people a day at Tim Hortons. And I was like, okay, this is, I should turn this into a real business now. So you filled your basement with computers mining Bitcoin. Yeah, I did. And it was, it was really hot. they produce a lot of heat and they're very loud. And so for one summer, when it was really warm, I shut the whole thing down because it was only getting me three

bitcoins a day. So I was like, this is not worth it. This is not a good investment. So isn't that funny now? Because if you would have just kept all the bloody Bitcoin, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny because there's, you know, at this point,

pretty much everyone's heard of Bitcoin. and one of the things that I hear a lot from people when I talk to them about Bitcoin is like, you know, I could have got in at this price, but I didn't. And like, that's kind of true for everyone. Like I could have got in at a lower price too. But that's not even the hard part. The hard part is like whether you mine the bitcoins, you buy them, like the hard part is not selling them. You know, when you're when you've 10 times, you made 10 times your money or 100 times your money,

like it's a very rational move to sell at that point. right? And so a lot of the bitcoins, myself included, like we, we don't have nearly as many bitcoins. Like I've done very well with Bitcoin, but like I don't have nearly as many as I used to. Yeah. Well, if you're mining three a day, is that, that's what you said, three a day, right? Yeah. You know, you think about that now with the price at, what is it, $70 U.S. dollar per Bitcoin, roughly? Yes. Forgive me if I'm off on my, my spot.

You know, where I sit, you know, as a guy who, you know, if Vance Crow is listening wherever he sits, he's just foaming at the mouth that I brought another Bitcoin guy on. I look at it and I'm like, well, what does a guy do? There are 70,000 US dollars per Bitcoin. How does a guy get involved today? What do you say to that? Yeah, I mean, there's something they're called unit bias,

where it's like it seems like it's expensive to buy one Bitcoin. And it is, but you don't have to buy one Bitcoin. You can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin. So you can go and buy five bucks worth of Bitcoin and you're going to get the same relative price exposure to your $5 as somebody who buys the whole one. Right. So the simple answer, I guess, is like you don't need a lot. And what we usually advise people if they want to start getting in is that like, especially, you know, in the world we're living in right now, like people don't have a lot of disposable income to go around generally. And so just like a small, a trickle even, you know, some people buy like $10 a week. Some people buy $100 a week. And the people who've been buying $10 a week since like 2015 are

doing really well. So the way that I look at it is Bitcoin is a long-term savings technology. Kind of similar to gold. But if I go back to David Oransky, the last guy I had on talking about Bitcoin with huge, huge potential is what you all keep telling me. Yeah. So I think when you compare it to gold, you kind of have to go back to the root of what Bitcoin is and what gold mostly is as well. And that's money. So Bitcoin is not an investment.

It's not like a stock or a bond. It doesn't convey any rights. It doesn't give you any yield. All you're getting is a form of money. And the point of money is to take the value that you create with your time and store it to use it later. And if you're trying to do that with dollars, you're going to have a bad time because while you're sitting on the dollars, the government's printing more of them. And so they're becoming less rare and therefore less valuable and you lose spending power. And that's basically what inflation is.

And that's, I think, something that a lot more people can really wrap their head around now. You know, like if you were to go back five years, like most people have heard the word inflation, but didn't really feel it or know what it was. You know, it's like this nebulous thing that you hear like the news talk about or something like that, right? And they'd say, you know what? Inflation's at 2%, inflation is at 3%. And you're like, okay, great, that sounds fine. Nowadays, we're hearing these numbers. They tell us numbers like, you know, inflation's at 7%. But we know that's not true, right? Like we've gone to the grocery store. We've paid rent. And pretty much anyone can feel the bite of inflation these days. And so,

Bitcoin is better money than dollars or than gold because you can't make more. So Bitcoin is, I would say, the hardest form of money to produce and therefore the best money that we've ever had. And that's why I think it's going to be, you know, a transformative force in the world as compared to like back in the day 2010, 2011, like I mentioned, it was like a quick way to make money for me back then. So what do you think, you know, you look around Alberta, right, sitting here in Alberta, what do you, in your conversations when you're walking around with people, what do you, what do you notice and like, what do you, you know, feel pulled to tell people, you know, because I don't know, I listen to that. I've heard it now, I don't know, every Bitcoiner I talk to who says the exact same thing. Roughly, I mean, I'm not trying to lump you all together.

but very similar. So, you know, like is it because the ideas this foreign concept is it because it's hard to get into? What is what is the thing that you see in, you know, in Alberta? You're like, more people need to use this. And then what is the hold up? Yeah, I think part of the hold up can be just complacency. You know, it can be technically difficult to figure out and it can be daunting to try to get into something new that you don't really understand like that. And And with money, people are very, very cautious to trust something new. Right. And so there is like a bit of education that needs to happen beforehand.

Company that I'm on the board of, Edmonton-based company called Bitcoin Well, that's the focus there is really just making it as easy as possible. So it's like it's like the site that you send to your aunt if your aunt wants to get into Bitcoin. And we make it just like dead simple to send, you know, Canadian dollars from your bank account and you get Bitcoin into your own wallet. So we're doing as much, you know, as much as we can in terms of education. That's kind of why I want to go on shows like this is because I want to, I want to talk to, I want to talk to the group of people that I feel are like the natural next wave of Bitcoiners.

And I think that's people that are sort of in the freedom community who have identified the problems, which is namely the ever-expanser. reach of the government, the ever-expanding money supply that the government is printing to pay for all of their pet projects and, you know, absurd spending that is reaching levels never before seen anywhere in the world. And so we're all feeling that. You know, when you go to the grocery store and your chicken is double what it was a year ago, that's because the government took that value. The government took the value in the dollars that you were holding. And so now that people are seeing that problem, I think that the, the window is open for the conversation at least.

And so we're seeing a lot more. And we have been really over the last like two years, especially at our office in Edmonton and remotely, we're seeing a lot more rural people. We're seeing a lot more of an older crowd looking to get into Bitcoin. And it's almost exclusively just people wanting to protect their money from Trudeau. Well, I mean, I don't think it's at this point, you know, The reason why I'm, you know, I got a sponsor who's silver and gold and I got good friends who are Bitcoin. And I got both who are like both, right, pro both. Because they're watching what's happening with money supply and what's happening to the value of the dollar and going like, where does this go?

Not good places. So what can we do to ensure that although we're affected, we're not nearly as hurt by what they're doing as everyone else? And Bitcoin certainly in the conversation, it's funny. I almost think it's kind of in the same breath as silver and gold in that people are hesitant on both until they actually do it. And then once they do it, they're like, oh, in a way they go. So is that the hump that people got to get over is just like, just walk through the steps and get it done? Yeah, there's a hump of inaction for sure. And when inflation was at 2%, like the pain wasn't enough to get people out of their rut.

And it wasn't enough to make people say like, maybe I should spend some time on this. But now like everyone's feeling it with the cost of living. And it's getting harder and harder to ignore. And I think that's like I said, it's opening the door to get the conversation going. And you see a lot of people going down the road of gold and silver. And I think it's kind of the same path. It's I see gold and silver in a way as almost like the gateway drug. to Bitcoin because the reasons that people move to gold and silver are the same reasons that they

move to Bitcoin. You know, gold has been the most effective money for most of the history of the world. And the reason for that was a few things. You need, you just need a few properties to make money really good money. So it needs to be verifiable, which is pretty easy with gold. It's not perfect, certainly, but people can figure out whether your gold is real. It needs to be fungible. So like all gold is the same as all other gold. That's a key property. It needs to be divisible. And in that place, in that sense, gold, like it is divisible, but it's not great. You know, if you take a gold coin to the store and you try to pay for something, it's not going to work very well. So there's a few areas where Bitcoin really does perform better than gold. And I think the most important one is in the

scarcity. So gold, the main reason I would say that it has been money for most of the most of human history is because it was it was hard to produce. You know, you couldn't just create it out of thin air. You had to go dig it out of the ground and, you know, there was a cost to produce it. Because if you allow someone to produce your money, they will. And so hopefully there's a cost to doing that. With Bitcoin, the difference is that the cost to produce the money doesn't change the supply of the money. So with gold, if the price of gold suddenly goes to $10,000 an ounce, you're going to get a whole bunch more gold mines that are viable and it can open up, and then the supply of gold will go up and respond to that price and demand,

whereas with Bitcoin, there is no way for the price to respond. There's no way, so there's no way for the supply to respond to the price. Yeah, because there's only a finite amount of Bitcoin over the course of the next, what is it, 100 years. Yeah, exactly. If memory serves me, correct. And, you know, it's interesting because I've heard Daniel Smith talk about, about making Alberta, maybe we should make Alberta the Bitcoin hub of North America.

I've heard Pierre Poliev talk about it, right? And then the prices of Bitcoin went down and then they slammed them for that thought process. Like as a Bitcoin, you know, here in Canada, when you hear politicians talk about it, are you excited? Are you like, I don't know if I want them anywhere near Bitcoin? It's a bit of a double-edged sword, I would say. I think that, you know, especially locally in Alberta, it would be great if Alberta were the focus of a Bitcoin push. We have a lot of natural advantages.

Like you mentioned previously, you mentioned Steve Barber from upstream data there. His company, the main thing that they do is they build structures that go on oil and gas sites that can mine Bitcoin in remote locations. So because Alberta's got such a large oil and gas industry, and we've been. got such a fragmented oil and gas industry with like hundreds of small companies with wells in the middle of nowhere, we're in a perfect situation to be able to harness that stranded energy. And so we've got an advantage in that sense. We've also kind of been a bit of a hub within the Bitcoin industry because we have a little bit friendlier banks here. So our credit unions, Alberta Treasury branches have been a bit more friendly than the big banks to Bitcoin.

And so for that reason, we've had a lot of companies already headquartered here in Calgary and Edmonton that are in the Bitcoin industry. So we've got a natural leg up. And I think we're just about to enter an area where a lot of jurisdictions in the world, whether they're nation states or smaller things like provinces, are going to start holding Bitcoin. And we're starting to see that with a few countries already. Al Salvador has made Bitcoin legal tender and is buying more every month. There's a number of countries that are holding significant holdings of Bitcoin because they've seized them and they don't seem ready to sell them. And then there's the unsubstantiated rumor that the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund has been buying up Bitcoin the last, you know, a couple weeks to a month kind of thing. So I think we're just getting to a tipping point where a lot more countries are going to at least start looking at it as kind of a hedge.

to, you know, the monetary debasement that we're seeing. And I think that would be a really important move for Alberta because we're in a spot where, if anything, we're suffering more than the rest of the country from the debasement of the dollar because the proceeds of what gets printed don't get spent here. They get spent in Eastern Canada. And so, and yet that drop in purchasing power comes across evenly. And since we have, you know, more industry and more people actually earning a living here, those people get hit harder to pay for whatever it is that the Laurentian elites

are going to want to pay for that week. So I think Bitcoin is definitely going to be an important part of the future of Alberta. And I hope that we're like, I hope we're one of the first jurisdictions to get out in front of it. When you were saying Bitcoin well, correct? That's, and basically the idea is to give people information and educate them on how Bitcoin works. and why it's important, that type of thing. Do you guys do things then in Alberta? Do you put on, I don't know, a conference, if I would, where people can come and experience some things about Bitcoin, learn, et cetera.

Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So to differentiate a little bit, so Bitcoin Well is headquartered in Edmonton. The main thing that Bitcoin Well does is buy and sell Bitcoin. And then there's a whole education component that comes with that because we want to make sure that people know what they're buying and know how to use it and stuff like that. Bitcoin Well isn't directly involved with the conferences,

but we do put on conferences. So we have a conference that myself and a few friends organized here in Calgary called the Bitcoin Rodeo. It's right before the stampede. It's July 2nd and 3rd. And we try to focus that really heavily on topics that are non-technical, and it would be interesting to anyone, whether they're in the Bitcoin industry

or whether they're like an enthusiast or brand new. So we're going to be focusing a lot on that kind of stuff. We've got some topics focused around Alberta and why Bitcoin is important in Alberta. We've got J.P. Sears. I don't know if you know who he is. He's a comedian that no one seems to know his name. Yes, I do.

J.P. Sears, I tried getting on the podcast a long time ago, and he told me no, JP. He said he was too busy. Yeah, I know who J.P. Sears is. He's got one of the greatest videos of trying to get in the stuff. swimming pool and he's guys like you need your life jacket no now you need your second life jacket oh yeah jp sears is fantastic yeah so jp sears for anybody who doesn't know is he's like everybody sees him on instagram and stuff like that he's the comedian with long red hair who talks about the absurdity of the world these days essentially so correct he's he's headlining um the conference he's going to be doing

a bitcoin focus comedy set um we're also doing a roast of a friend of mine called uh ben perrin who has a YouTube channel called BTC Sessions, pretty big in the, in the Bitcoin industry. So it's going to be a fun event. I'm going to have to talk about this offline. The most interesting, I'm like, okay, wait a second. If I show up to this thing, can I have an interview with J.P. Sears? This is a conversation for off air, but I'm like, you're telling me J.P. Sears is going to be in Calgary, July 2nd and 3rd.

That's what you're telling me? Yeah, absolutely. So it should be a good show. We've also got, I would say so. I would say so. Yeah, we've also got an initiative that we've been doing called the Saturday markets. We call them that because a SAT or a Satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin. Sure.

It's one 100 millionth of a Bitcoin. And so we put on these markets. We just did the second one last Saturday. And they're like a quarterly thing that's kind of like a flea market slash farmer's market where all the vendors take Bitcoin. So we're just kind of trying to create this like circular economy. Part of the idea is like, you know, I want to be able to spend my, Bitcoin and I want to know like I want to know a rancher that will take Bitcoin so that you know the

government shuts down the food supply and tells me to eat bugs I can go in I can go and buy real food without their permission so that's kind of the idea behind these things we just put on the second one like I said and we're we're going to be putting on the next one the day before the conference it's a Canada Day market and it's going to be at a place called the Saskatoon farm which is just outside of Calgary which is really awesome spot and yeah it should be a lot of fun. We're going to have just a bunch of different vendors selling stuff for Bitcoin. Where do people fall along with getting the information from you, Dave? I assume Twitter, but where else, or is that the best place? Yeah, Twitter is great. I'm Bitcoin Brains on Twitter,

and we have an account for the conference that is the Bitcoin Rodeo on Twitter. And then both websites as well, BitcoinBrains.com and BitcoinRodeo.com. BitcoinRodeo.com is where you can get tickets to all this stuff. And yeah, we've released about two thirds of the speakers so far. We've got some more to announce and you can follow that on the Twitter too. Cool. Well, I, you know, I'm to me, I guess, you know, when it comes to Bitcoin and the conversations surrounding it, I just don't know if I'm like, I'm like, I don't know. What else is there to talk about that people, and forgive me. I'm like, maybe I'm skipping over something that you need to talk about. So if there's something before I let you

out of here, you got to let me know because I'm just like, yeah, this all makes, I don't know, just makes sense. It's not like I'm going to spend 100% of my wages on Bitcoin. I don't, I don't know. I haven't heard of anyone say they should do that. Maybe you'll be the first one. It's been something different. It's, it's been like, no, you should probably diversify. I know a few different things. There's lots of different ways to put your money to hedge against inflation and different things like that. Before I let you out of it. here and I don't mean to cut it short. I just, I'm like, yeah, this all, I don't know. The thing I might have learned out of this is there's a conference in Calgary that I'm like,

that sounds very fascinating. Is there anything else that you're like, I need to make sure this gets said to these people? Yeah, yeah. So the way that I would look at it is you said, like, most people wouldn't recommend 100% of your salary into Bitcoin. I do think we're going to get to that point eventually where, you know, I take a portion of my salary in Bitcoin and I, I, I think I would take more if I had more places to spend it. But the way that I look at it is that Bitcoin is, like I said, a long-term savings technology. So it can change in value very quickly compared to the dollar in both directions. And so it's not a great place to store value that you need soon. So like if you have a big expense coming up next month, it's a gamble if you leave in Bitcoin

if the expense is priced in dollars. You could do really well. You could do really poorly. You might be up or down 20% and neither one would be surprising. But because Bitcoin is a long-term savings technology, if you sort of averages out over a longer period of time, you know, there's never been a time when you couldn't buy Bitcoin, wait five years and be massively up in relation to the dollar. And so people often, like I always get the question of like, like, where is the price going? What do you think the price of Bitcoin is going to go to? And like, I don't know the answer, but the best answer to that question is up. Well, yeah, up relative to the dollar.

Where do you think the price of the dollar is going to go? And we know the answer to that is like if you print enough of them, the price of the dollar is going to go to zero. And so as the dollar goes down, Bitcoin that is not being printed inevitably goes the other. Are you at all concerned about central bank digital currency? I don't view central bank digital currency as a threat to Bitcoin at all. Central bank digital currencies like they're not it's not functionally really that different than the way our currency system works now right the way that most of our money works is that it's in a database at the bank excuse me so if you have an RBC account RBC has your money which is really just digital air and they decide whether that balance is accessible frozen stolen

anything they want to do with it. And when we saw, you know, the trucker protest going on and the government was able to use their reach over these big banks to freeze a lot of accounts, it was a fairly clunky process. And it, I think, was only able to be executed the way that it was because they had the emergency powers at the time. Right. And so the banks have a fiduciary duty to protect your funds when they're in there.

And they can't just give your funds. to the government just because the government asks, right? The difference being we switched to a C central bank digital currency. Instead of being in a bank database, your money will just be in a government database. That means they won't have to ask anyone to freeze it. So it's not a competitor to Bitcoin in that it's not going to change the scarcity of the dollar. It's actually going to make the dollar less scarce as they print more digital versions of the dollar and then spend them inevitably.

I can see the central bank digital currency being used as part of a large scale bribe system, similar to the Vax pass, you know, I could see it being like, you know, we're going to do universal basic income. Everyone gets $2,000 bucks a month, but only if you take it in this central bank digital currency. And in order to sign up for the central bank digital currency, the obvious vector that, you know, we keep hearing about is much like China that we're going to have like a social credit system so that, you know, maybe it's like, you know, they're tracking your spending now because

you're all spending in their database. And maybe one week, it's like, oh, I see you bought like $250 with a red meat last week. And that's going to have a big impact on your carbon footprint. So this week, we've determined that you're not allowed to buy any red meat. And you're also not allowed to buy anything more than six kilometers from your house because the carbon impact would be too great for you to drive that far. So it, it's, it's, it's, it's, you. It's a very scary prospect of a technology that they might use for like really totalitarian dystopian control over people and over our financial system. But Bitcoin is still the remedy to that because Bitcoin is money that they can't print.

It's money that they can't stop. And it doesn't really matter how many different kinds of money they want to print. They're all going to be worse than Bitcoin. Yeah, well, I can't argue with anything you said there. the just then that you know when it comes to central bank digital currency and different things like that how they can manipulate and control different things i don't fully understand how that will um work on the value of a dollar i i'm actually a little bit confused in that way you know when you talk about the value of a dollar going to zero when they're printing so much i'm like yeah actually that i completely understand what you're talking about. As soon as it goes digital and they can manipulate everything

because they will have that control. And they already, already honestly do. I'm like, I don't fully understand how that'll work. Like it will work the same way or will it be different in your mind? Yeah, it would be a little bit different. The way that money is created is pretty complicated. It's really created through a series of loans from the Bank of Canada to the commercial banks. And then the commercial banks then have the ability to create more money by lending out more than they have. So they use fractional reserve lending. And that's really the way that most of the so-called like our current digital money ends up being created, whereas a central bank digital currency would provide a much more direct way for the government to create money and

spend it because they could just literally change their own database. They could say, you know what, we used to have a trillion dollars, but we didn't like having a trillion dollars. So now we have two trillion dollars. And then they can spend it. And that's absolutely. what I see them doing. And so if anything, it's going to provide an angle for them to print more and more quickly and with less oversight. You know, the Bank of Canada is supposed to be, you know, a neutral party separate from the politics of government that has been set up to manage our money supply.

That's very obviously not the case. Not the case. We know that they're entirely political and that they print money specifically to further the political goals of the party. to empower. But, you know, we're going to remove that pretense entirely with a central bank digital currency. And it'll just be a, it'll be a full on open faucet whenever the spenders want it. Whenever they need more money, they'll just turn it on and spend it. So I think in the long term, the invention of a central bank digital currency will speed up the collapse of the dollar.

there's also this this really interesting element to central bank digital currencies that I think is going on right now where it's actually helping to get people's attention because people in the in the freedom community are hearing about these things and saying like no thank you right like we don't we don't want a social credit score we don't want to be tracked and I think that the the globalists the the socialists you know they've mostly done a pretty good job throughout their recent power grab of knowing how far they can push. But I think they're losing the narrative a little bit. I think they've started to push a little bit too far. And the result is that more and more people are waking up to their game. And I think that Central Bank Digital Currencies has already started to be like a boogeyman. You know what I mean? When you ask people, do they want that? The answer is resoundingly no. Like the Bank of Canada did its own survey about whether or not people wanted Central Bank digital currencies and I think it was off top of my head I think it was something like 70% no.

So this is something that people definitely don't want and I fully expect them to do it anyway. But I think that that, you know, it's just it's it's one more line that they've stepped over. And every time they step over a line, they wake up a few more people. And the more people they wake up, the less power they're going to have in the long term. Yeah, it'll be, well, I mean, it ain't going away anytime. soon, is it? I mean, honestly. So it's just something to pay attention to and see where it goes. You know, are we talking about the dollar or Bitcoin here? Because it could be, the dollar could be going away sometime soon. I was more meaning the globalist outlook on where they want the future to go.

To me, that's not going anywhere, which means CBDCs are not a foregone conclusion, but you can see what's what they're trying to do and that that isn't, that mentality isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I don't mean in 20 years it's disappeared and Bitcoin could be the mainstay. Okay. But between here and there, there's a lot of things that are going to go on. And that's more of what I was meaning. Yeah, absolutely. We're probably going to have a bumpy road here.

There's a book that I would recommend to absolutely everyone called The Sovereign Individual. Really interesting book written in like 1996 that predicts a whole bunch of stuff that has gone on since then. Namely, it predicts the invention of Bitcoin. and it predicts that the invention of money without the need for the state to print the money will permanently reduce and then eliminate the ability of nation states to tax us through inflation. And I think that's really the core of what allows the globalist agenda to continue. The globalists are essentially at the spigot, the money printer, and they turn it on and shed it around to their friends whenever.

they want and now they don't know it yet but they've permanently lost the ability to print money like that because every time they do it um you know the the the the the tea gets diluted so it you know you're you they're they're adding to the money supply without adding any value and they can only do that for so long now that bitcoin exists um i think it's just inevitably going to going to go to soak up all the uses of money and we live in a world right now where like you know the dollar is starting to lose its ability to be money and so all these other things have started to take on the characteristics of money and people are using things like real estate and collectibles and and cars even uh as a way to store their value because the dollars don't do a good job of it but none of those things are good money and so

it's it's really just a matter of time before people realize uh you know i want my value in the best money there is. Well, I appreciate you coming on and doing this. I'm always interested to, you know, kind of expand the thought process on a bunch of different things. And when it comes to money in particular, you know, I got a lot of different people that I respect talking about different avenues of it, and one of them certainly Bitcoin. And so to have somebody on again, here in Alberta, talking about it, you know, I got time for that. And, well, with your conference coming in July, I don't, who knows, maybe 10 people show up from the show or maybe a whole bunch of people hear that and go, oh, that'd be interesting,

you know, certainly it's got my, you know, my interest peaked. I'm like, that sounds interesting. Specifically as a guy who hasn't been in it since 2010, right? Like I haven't I haven't been paying attention to the journey of this until, I don't know, even if it was three years ago. You know, I've had Steve Barber on stage with me. So I've, and then Vance Crow showed out to him again. You know, they've been, I've been around some people who are quite steeped in the knowledge of Bitcoin. So I've been hearing this for some time and have another come on and discuss it, I think is important for the audience for sure.

So any final thoughts before I let you out? No, I think that's pretty good. You can check out our website again at Bitcoin Rodeo. We've got our early bird tickets are on sale until April 15th. That will be the cheapest way to get tickets. Cool. Well, there you go, folks. Yeah, thanks for hopping on.

And we'll see where the future takes us, Dave. Yeah, thanks for having me.