Shaun Newman Podcast - #892 - Scott Dedels

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Scott Dedels is a Canadian financial services professional, financial advisor educator, and licensed insurance broker. He is the co-founder and co-CEO of Block Rewards, a company focused on developing Bitcoin compensation and rewards tools for employers. He is also an author, having written Bitcoin for Financial Advisors: A Simple Manual for Understanding an Emergent Financial Instrument and The Dao of Bitcoin: Towards a Cosmology of Energy Money. Scott Dedels X:@lanternbitcoin To watch the Full Cornerstone Forum: https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastGet your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionWebsite: www.BowValleycu.comEmail: [e-mail] Use the code “SNP” on all ordersProphet River Links:Website: store.prophetriver.com/Email: [e-mail]

This is Viva Fry. I'm Dr. Peter McCullough. This is Tom Lomago. This is Chuck Pradnik. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is J.P. Sears. Hi, this is Frank Paredi.

This is Tammy Peterson. This is Danielle Smith. This is James Lindsay. Hey, this is Brett Kessel, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday. I'm going to say it one more time. I am happy to be back in studio after a month of July being out and about on the road.

It is awesome to be sitting. here in studio again. This is home, and I enjoy this chair. Now, with the number of balances of silver needed to buy an ounce of gold, you're near 30-year high, silver is now a bargain price when compared to gold. It's a perfect time to protect a portion of your savings with silver. At silver gold gold, they have a wide variety of best value, silver for every budget.

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Cornerstone Forum 26, yes. Yes. Oh, I'm going to keep talking about it. because it's a good reminder of Sean, just finalize the date. I'm working on it. The new studio, I'm working on it.

I'm working on it. There's lots of things to come there. Excited. We're back in the saddle here, and we're going to be pushing some things pretty hard. We're looking forward to unveiling both of those projects to all of you. If you want to get involved in the studio in particular, just shoot me a text, skills, labor, materials, money.

Then we've got a wall going up with rock. have your name engraved in the rock. I'm very excited about it. And if that's something that's of interest to you, just shoot me a text. Lots of easy ways to get involved with that. All right, if you're listening or watching on Spotify, Apple, Rumble, X, YouTube, you get the, you get it. Just make sure to subscribe, make sure to leave a review.

You know, while I'm looking at this, I just want to check on Spotify in particular. But I know Apple's the same way. At the top, that. There is, you can rate the podcast stars. Right now I've got a 4.7 and only 367 reviews. If you are a Spotify listener, I would love it if you would leave a review. Don't care if it's a one star, five star, you decide what you think of this show. But would love to see that number bump up from 367.

Heck, I would love 400. Hey, I don't think that's too hard of a number to get 43 people. Yeah, let's see if we can't bump that up. here over the coming days weeks. I would love it if people would start to rate it on those apps. That's a, you know, don't get me wrong. I don't pay attention to it that much, but it does help folks, and I would appreciate your help with that.

All right, all that said, let's get on to the tale of the tape. Today's guest is the co-founder and co-CEO of Block Rewards, a company focused on developing Bitcoin compensation and rewards tools for employers. I'm talking about Scott Dietels. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Scott Dietl.

Sir, thanks for hopping on this morning. Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be here. Now, first timer on the show, you got to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, where you came from, what brought you to this place. Don't feel like you got to go 10 seconds.

We would love to learn a bit about Scott this morning. For sure. Born and raised in Edmonton, spent most of my first half of my life in Alberta. I started a career in financial services in 2008, working in employee benefits, pensions, and medical and dental plans. And I had a very successful career in that space. The short version of how I kind of ended up here is in 2020, I became interested in what money printing was going to mean for the fixed income market. markets and kind of 60, 40 portfolio boxed up retirement plan allocations that we were, you know,

selling to our group retirement clients in my practice at the time. And so I was kind of early to the party on inflation. I went to U of A and took a history degree there. So I didn't, you know, I kind of landed backwards into into financial services retail like a lot of people do, didn't have a background in economics or finance. And I spent kind of the first three, six months of lockdown trying to study up. I was reading, you know, university economics textbooks and the history of money. That's how I spent my time in lockdown. And I was eventually recommended by coincidence a book, a technology book called The Price of Tomorrow by a Canadian entrepreneur and technologist named Jeff Booth. And that book is not explicitly about Bitcoin, but he does talk about

Bitcoin as part of his thesis. The book is really about this idea that technology gets adopted because we create something that represents an improvement to how things we're doing before. So it enables us to do something either cheaper or faster or better. And if it didn't, we wouldn't adopt it. And so the reality should be that progressive technological improvement, should be making everything cheaper and more affordable for everyone and making everyone's lives more abundant. And the thesis of the book is that the reason none of us are experiencing that in our day-to-day lives is because we exist in a monetary system that depends on the continual expansion and devaluation of money. And so that the productivity gains that we should be

realizing as a society are never passed down to the end consumer. because that sort of economic productivity is harvested by the people at the very top of the food chain, the bankers, and the political elite. And so that book really put me on a rabbit hole. I thought I had been studying money and investment and financial products for the better part of 15 years, realized I sort of really didn't understand money at all. And I went really hard down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, trying to understand the technology and the economics behind as alternative idea, completely flipped me on my head. Maybe a year later, I was in the process then of selling my benefits practice and getting

out of that line of work. I thought very strongly that my experience in the world of sort of consulting for employers on total compensation and group retirement services had put me in a position like, I was thinking about products that might work in the workplace. to bring Bitcoin to the employee population. And that idea eventually became a company that I co-founded two years later, Block Rewards. And that's what I'm doing today. Today I'm a co-CEO at Block Rewards.

We are building enterprise software for employers to start thinking about incorporating Bitcoin into their compensation and rewards and their strategies for recruiting and retaining staff. Now, before we get it to any of that, you know, I find it interesting, you know, went to school at the U of A for a degree in history. It's funny. And then you go, so I didn't do any economics. Well, it's funny on this side, I also took a degree in history when I went to college. And I always chuckled because I took nothing in media.

I took nothing in sales. I took one course on economics, probably your basic introductory, you know, nothing to, I probably remember that much from it. And yet here I sit. So like, you know, the degree in history, I'm kind of curious, like, what particular focus did you have in history? What caught your eye in the past? You know, and this is actually, I think, partly why I was kind of predisposed to understanding some of these ideas as quickly as I did. Because my area of interest in when I'm studying is a period in history called the long 19th century,

which is kind of the French Revolution and the American War of Independence to World War I. It's like a really fascinating time in human history, cultural advancement, Mozart and Beethoven and Rembrandt and incredible architecture that's all over the world, you know, political power plays

of the collapsing dynasties across Europe, the British Empire. So that was kind of, that was kind of where I spent most of my, you know, imagination and unconcidentally, that was the last time the world was running on what we call sound money standard. So during that time period, there was still inflation, but money was much more closely tied to gold. And the rates of inflation over prolonged periods were much, much less observable. So like in Canada, between kind of 1880 and 1913, there was basically zero inflation.

And prices of stuff just didn't change. And so, you know, there's a great argument to be made by historians that the way money works in terms of its ability to perform reliably over long periods of time is a key influencing factor in society's ability to flourish. Because, you know, money is this like found. foundational plumbing for how we interact with each other and plan for the future and make, you know, long-term decisions as a society. And, you know, the way the world looked in that time, they were building these incredible beautiful buildings that we just, you know, like the

Alberta legislature is a great example. Like that was the tail end of that period. And it still stands today as one of the most incredible pieces of architecture in Alberta. And, uh, And we don't build stuff like that anymore. And I think a part of it is what has changed since the time we built that is the enactment of the Bank of Canada. You know, in the Canadian dollar in the last 110 years has lost 99% of its value. So it's actually not possible anymore to think about these sort of grandiose feats of architecture because it's just not practical in a world where money, the value of money is decaying. as fast as it is. You mentioned

basically in 2008. Now, I'll probably butcher this, but basically going into the financial area. I don't know what to call that. But regardless, you're starting to learn about finances and

helping people with it, correct? Yeah, yeah. I started in February of 2008 and then... What a time, by the way. Yeah, till like six months later. I was in a room full of investment fund managers, you know, trying to strategize how, you know, what was going to happen and what this meant for the markets. I was really just trying to find my feet in terms of, you know, basic understanding of this stuff.

2008 was really an incredible time, which I think, you know, we experienced it differently in Canada here because we were exposed to a market crash, but we didn't see the same housing correction that they did in the U.S. And then QE was sort of enacted, this unprecedented, this start of really an unprecedented cycle of continuous money creation, which led to ballooning values of assets over the following 12 years, really. And, you know, like, it's unironic that shortly after that was the creation of Bitcoin and minted into the, an inscription on the, on the first block of that was processed on the Bitcoin

blockchain is a message that it was a headline from the time, Chancellor on the Brink, which is a reference to, you know, impending doom in the banking system. So, yeah, it's kind of a funny thing that all these things happen once. You know, I'm still a student of history. And I think that people will in 50 years look back at the coincidental timing of the 2008 crash and the creation of Bitcoin as this, you know, divergence of sort of. Yeah, they won't see coincidence at all. They'll probably see something very different. You know, over the 12 years, because if I'm doing my time frame, right,

In 2008, you get into that, but you mentioned it's not until 2020 when you're sitting in lockdowns, you start doing more reading. So in the 12 years there, then there's nothing that you're like, something is very off here. It's 2020 where something, well, I mean, I know what happens, but walk me through that. Because if I'm doing my time frame, it's not like in the first 12 years, you get run over by something and you're like, oh, I got to start thinking. Or was it sooner than that in 2020 just cemented it? No, you know, and this is the thing I think where still most people, and certainly most people in financial services are still trapped, because it's a thought paradigm that we are, you know, adopted into at birth, this idea that everything grows forever. And the name of the game is simply, you know, grow faster than everything else is growing. And so this is kind of how we conceptualize wealth accumulation and wealth preservation.

and we're not really thinking about the way that money, like the underlying technology of money, of how that thing is performing at its job. We're thinking about how our portfolio of a mixed bag of stocks is doing or whether we should have had stocks instead of real estate. And they're all just things that are expanding. It's like if there are solar systems inside the universe and the solar systems are expanding and so is the universe.

We're trying to measure all. these things that are moving against each other. And so I think it's very normal that people don't really question that because that's just how it works. And how I've come to view things. And this is kind of why that book about the deflationary nature of technology was the thing that really flipped it for me because it really highlighted for me this incongruence between what's happening in reality and what we're able to measure and I'm with our money system. And that's, you know, that's not something that we can really take stock of by measuring it in other things that are still measured in that money system. This is the beauty of

Bitcoin. You know, I think that Bitcoin is kind of the metric system of value. Because what Bitcoin does, because it has a fixed supply and can never change, it's actually then like, it's the one thing that doesn't move. So it's the one thing that doesn't expand. as everything else expands. Like we can always make more houses. We can build infinitely up and build a never-ending amount of apartments like they did in Toronto. You know, there's always more companies to invest in. But there will only ever be this fixed amount of Bitcoin.

And everything else in relation will just simply expand around it. And that's also true of every supply of currency. You know, like they, you know, Canada is kind of the same as the U.S. you know, 40 plus percent of all the circulating money today has been created in the last five years. So, you know, the media portrays that in some kind of like mystery as to why the price of eggs is like three times what it was five years ago. But it's simply that they've absolutely flooded the market with money and destroyed the unit of purchasing power, the unit of value. So, yeah, this is something that I think people just are still, you know, it's what happened to me, I think is accelerating.

So I got to just slightly earlier kind of understand that one, we're misled in thinking about inflation as being related to prices when it should be related to how much money there is. and this is one of things I think that like financial services people are really sleeping on because the rate of expansion of the money supply in Canada since 1970 is between 8 and 9%. So that means that roughly every eight or nine years, there's a doubling of Canadian dollars. And this is why we've observed the price of assets over that time appreciate in a spectacular way that they have. And this is also something that we fundamentally basically have a complete misconception of as a society. When we think about inflation being 2 or 3% or whatever the TV tells us, when the money supply is expanding at 8 or 9%.

So if your goal is to beat a consumer price index and get 5, 6, 7%, you're still underperforming the rate of currency to baseman. And partly it's because, like, if you actually read economics textbooks, they don't teach this stuff. Like, this is just something that is not broadly distributed. They come from economic schools of thought that aren't really taught in schools. But it's, you know, it's a sensible way of thinking about how money works. And, you know, I think that this is part of the reason why the financial system has become convoluted and so complex is because, we've solved all these other problems without really considering the most base problem, which is, is our money doing what it's supposed to do?

With the money supply in Canada since 1970, every eight to nine years doubling. So the amount of dollars in circulation, if it was a million, just to use a nice number, from 1971 to 1981, then there was two million Canadian dollars circulating. And then the next time it was four million, and then eight million, then 16 million and so on. I assume I'm getting your example or your, I shouldn't say example, you're talking to what's been going on relatively correct. Obviously, the number amounts are not the same, just the thought process. Is there anything that you've seen from this Canadian government or society as a whole that would say the next eight to nine years, the next decade, we won't see the same thing happen again? Is there any slowing of it?

Has Carney come in and all of a sudden we're like, oh, actually he's doing some sound things with money and maybe we're not going to see nearly that in the next decade. I love this question. Thank you. And there's two parts to it. And I want to make sure I get to both. So the first part is the mathematics of it already, we know with certainty that that's impossible.

And part of this is the government's experience the cost of servicing debt in the same way, regular borrowers do. So the government of Canada pays interest payments on the money that they've spent that they don't have. And compounding works on the cost of servicing debt the same way it does on growing your investments. You know, in the investment world, compounding is like the most critical tool you have. Start earlier. Compounding is your friend. You're going to, yeah. I mean, so this happens to federal debt too. And the cost of servicing debt compounds exponentially over time. And our debt has reached a point where just the cost of servicing the debt alone is going to make it like basically next to impossible to not have the debt grow as a result of like this extra cost burden.

The second piece is, you know, like the federal government refuses to even put out a budget. And I think part of it is an obfuscation of the fact that they're obviously planning to spend this thing into the ground. And this was true under the Trudeau government, and it's already proved to be true with Karning. And so I think that, like, we have seen nothing to suggest that the federal government has any plans to curtail spending and be responsible in any way. You know, like, it's not that long ago where governments used to talk about trying to actually balance the budget. You know, like that was like 2015, 2010. And these were normal ideas before the Trudeau liberal government came to power.

And things change fast. And I think that so we have a very high likelihood of spending ourselves into bankruptcy. And I think we're already close. Like the chances of the Canadian dollar experiencing sort of a structural repricing in the global market to me seems fairly reasonable. I think that there's some good arguments that it's already underway. Like, I think that we've experienced over the last 50 years fluctuations of the exchange rate between the U.S. and the Canadian dollar, where it's gone down as low it is now a few times, and it's gone above parity. And so to the average person, they might just feel like this is part of another cycle, where we

could, again, at some point be above parity with the U.S. dollar. And I think that, you know, fundamentally, a lot has changed since then. We're more like the, you know, broke person that has maxed out credit cards that hangs out with rich people and pretends to be rich. Like, I think that's a better way of thinking about it. And our debt is, you know, compounding in a way that is going to make it really difficult. And there's no opportunity for us to change the way we're thinking about spending. I mean, the government isn't talking about it.

So this is another reason why. people have spent all this time trying to figure out really how to grow their money in a way that it's faster than money is losing value. And that's not something that people really articulate because they're not really, I don't often thinking about it in that way. But I think that's really what subconsciously most people are trying to do. You're like, you need to grow your money because on some level you understand that in the future it'll be worth less than it is now. And and so, you know, ideally you grow it way faster and you experience like an improvement in your quality of life. But we have to do that because we do on some level.

I'll understand that the price of things in the future is going to be more than the price of things now. And so this is where Bitcoin has really democratized a solution to the problem of never ending debasement of money, which is by making. universally accessible a form of money that's very easy to buy in any amount and has this one really simple but incredibly innovative feature that it cannot be printed it cannot be diluted it cannot be debased and if you understand that we exist in a system that is not broken the government devalues our money as an important tool to keep their status quo in place so So money printing for the government enables them to enact on perceived mandates that they don't need permission to do.

Like they can just create more money once they're elected. And we get like a, we get to vote on it every handful of years. But the access to money creation really enables government autonomy. And that is something that they will continue to use as long as they can. So this is another reason to feel certain that your future purchasing power is like in peril. And if I may, like, you know, like even if you got the right government in there tomorrow. Yeah. In order to change the direction we're heading, you would have to eliminate spending.

So you'd have to eliminate a lot of free things. You'd also have to curtail the size of government. You can understand the pain that would go on. Yeah, I mean, like the government. We haven't seen, we haven't seen a single politician willing to take that type of pain because it probably means being unelected the next go around because people don't want jobs and social programs and all the things taken away. And as the government debt balloons, it's like the only thing then they can do is take on more debt to service the debt. I mean, that sounds, I sound like a moron for saying. that way, but I don't know how better to say it than that. The debt's growing. They have to service

the debt, which means they have to find new unique ways to service it. And their options are taxes, print more money. Yeah. I mean, and I think, you know, it's important to call it what it is and think about printing money as another form of taxation, because it absolutely is. It's a silent, non-consensual form of taxation that they do uh you know when when that money is created for them to you know act autonomously the value of the money that is eroded that you already had you know it's like it's like entropy in thermodynamics like where the energy is not created or destroyed is transferred so as your as as the purchasing power of the money that you've already earned and paid taxes on is eroded that that value is just transferred to the new money that was printed out of thin air. You made another great point

there that I wanted to come back to and now I've lost it. Oh, yeah, I mean, the other thing is that the government is the largest employer and they're the fastest growing employer. And so cutting the government is also like, you know, going to make the jobs situation look even worse than it already is. And like, so there are just so many reasons why, you know, we're on this. like one-way train to the value of the loony being less and less and less. And this is where I think like you can you can try other things that are still going to be priced in loonies to outrun this freight train. And that could be real estate. It could be, you know, it could be stocks. But it's a, that's a form of gambling that is still going to be heavily tied to, um,

the value of the dollar. And Bitcoin really is an uncorrelated financial instrument because it's global and it's borderless and it's solving a problem that is actually impacting everyone. So my wife's Australian, her family, you know, we go there as often as we can. They're experiencing essentially the same problems in Australia. You know, all of these sort of Western governments, the UK, we're all in the same debt predicament. We're all in the same government overreach predicament. We're all in the same money printing predicament. And so this is an opportunity for people all over the world to really play defense and sort of claim sovereignty by de-risking.

You know, I think people think Bitcoin is risky when they don't really understand how robust and how secure it is. Well, if I may, the risks I hear about. Bitcoin are certainly there's the people who go, you know, like it could go down to zero, right? And you lose it all. But that that isn't the ones that I think are valid. And maybe you can shed a light on this is like, okay, so you got your Bitcoin wallet. You got your code of, you know, words and you got all these things. And if you lose that, like, is there any getting back to your Bitcoin?

Or if it gets stolen, is there any getting back to your Bitcoin? Like it's with a credit card or something, and maybe that's not a good example. But like, it's just understood that there's risk there. And if you're attacked, if somebody steals it, there's ways to get relieved of that risk

through insurance probably and different things. They have, you know, ways to mitigate that. With Bitcoin, people worry, and probably rightfully so. If they lose said words

or said access, it just disappears forever. Is that still the case? Am I even saying that right? I mean, you are saying it right. There are lots of different solutions for that particular problem. So if that's the thing that keeps you up at night, there is something called a multi-signature wallet where you can have your words distributed

with a few other signing authorities and two out of three people need to get together to sign a transaction. And so if one of those people loses their information, you know, two out of three would have to lose the information or be held at gunpoint or any of these things. Like, you know, any property would be basically,

most things could be confiscated or stolen. You know, like if you were, if you were custody and gold bars in your basement, you'd have some risk or the same possibility. Somebody kicks down your door and tries to take it from you. I think, you know, Bitcoin is very difficult to steal. It's, it's not impossible. You know, nothing's impossible to steal. Yeah, fair point. I hate to ask a, well, I've been thinking that since you started talking,

a guy who went in the financial industry, I assume, you know, believed in what you were doing and, and, like, you know, like, you know, you put your money into certain realms and you're going to get this return and everything else. since transforming, you know, selling off your business and really leaning hard into Bitcoin, I've heard different financial guys say, don't put all your money in Bitcoin, put, you know, X amount in, and, you know, you should have other things in different places. Are you a believer in that philosophy? Are you like, Bitcoin is the way, and I've moved everything I got into Bitcoin. I hate to go into personal finances too much, and you don't have to use amounts or any crazy thing like that.

Just kind of curious, you know, like as a guy who went from, you know, in this one realm to something that, you know, like Evachyipik the other day, you know, is with World Bank of Canada. And they lock her out and then say, you know, your business, we, we deem it too risky and all these crazy things. And, you know, and, you know, now has obviously moved on, showed up to Bow Valley Credit Union as, as, you know, being like, we'll take your business. And we don't think you're too risky. and on and on it goes. You know, in your own side of the world, do you go like, you know what? Like there's still a place for stocks.

There's still a place for this. Or you just see the ever creation of money as eventually it gets to a point where, you know, you should have just thrown all your money in Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. And shout out to Brett Olin at Bow Valley there. You know, doing great things there.

I'm a fan. I think most people who are in traditional finance really shouldn't be having an opinion on Bitcoin. They're not educated enough to talk to clients about it. And most people who are in that business don't know how to properly assess a recommendation around a portfolio allocation to Bitcoin because they don't understand what it does and how it works. So I want to say I think that we have really over time, certainly over the 20 years and

my time in traditional finances. we have confused a lot of different terms. So firstly, we have confused investing in gambling. When you're investing in stocks, you're gambling. You know, you're gambling on a management team. You're gambling on a sector. You're gambling on a brand. You're gambling on a technology.

You're gambling on market forces that you have no idea how that's going to go. And we have also confused... or fused the terms saving and gambling. So, you know, going back into the 90s, our parents, whatever, nobody would have had 100% of their investable assets in the stock market and in the stock market at all times. This is absolutely gambling. You know, we used to have this, you know, a more diverse mix and there would be bonds.

There would be, you know, interest-bearing instruments. We thought about de-risking as like, you know, really, like GICs. And then that de-risking became like owning some Coca-Cola and Walmart and McDonald's stocks. And so like things, what's happened is the average person unconsciously has had to increase their risk tolerance without even really thinking about it to try and keep up with currency debasement. And these are other interesting charts that we didn't talk about earlier. But like if you overlay the growth of the S&P 500 on top of. of the growth of the American money supply, they're basically exactly the same chart. And the same can also be said of the average price of real estate in Toronto and the Canadian

money supply. These things are just really capturing the inflation of money. And this is why I think people, you know, and people who are trapped in the traditional financial services paradigm aren't really in a good position to advise people around how much Bitcoin they should own because they really haven't fundamentally understood this basic problem. And I think that this is the assessment where people think about Bitcoin as being risky because they think there are some possibility that it could go all the way to zero. The more you learn about that, you know, obviously anything is possible. But the likelihood that that is going to happen is really quite small.

And when you view it that way, I think that everything else compared to Bitcoin, I view, is incredibly risky, whereas Bitcoin is something that has a fixed set of unchanging principles that anyone can understand and determine for themselves. And then you're really just making a bet on whether or not you think more people over time will find those principles attractive as something that they should own for themselves as well. And really what the Bitcoin price has done in going from a dollar to $150,000 over the last 15 years is a measurement of a lot more people buying than are selling. You know, it doesn't go only straight up.

There are, you know, periods where people are in incredible amounts of dollar profit and they're selling some or maybe they're trying to buy back in. But like the trend from the start. And if you look at Bitcoin's chart like, you know, on longer time frames, longer than four years, it's really just straight up. And what it looks like is the adoption of a technology. It's like the adoption of the internet where you get one user, you get 50,000 users, you get a million users, you get 100 million users. That part is exponential and it appears that that's what's happening with Bitcoin right now.

So how much Bitcoin should someone own? I think it starts with reframing around risk tolerance. And my personal belief is the least risky thing you can do with your money is save it. Because we used to save. We used to be able to save. When money worked properly, we didn't have to gamble it. We didn't have to gamble all the money we had just to try to have some hope for tomorrow. And Bitcoin is a savings tool.

It's a place that you can buy an amount of Bitcoin and whatever amount you buy as a percentage of the total amount that will ever be available will never change. and as more and more people buy and the pricing dollars goes up, that value of the piece that you bought will go up and the amount that people would buy with the amount that you bought initially would be less. And this is something that can play out forever until every person in the planet, every company,

every municipal government, every provincial government has a need because this problem affects everyone. And so I think that, you know, what we're living in right now is a mass transformation of the perception of Bitcoin and the understanding of what it does. So we've already seen, you know, because it's appreciated reliably in the way that it has, the American BlackRock Bitcoin ETFs have been far in a way the most successful ETF products ever launched. And the Bitcoin price action in the time since that's happened has been, you know, pretty spectacular. But they can continue to buy, like as long as there is continued demand. And this is really what is unique about Bitcoin, you know, that is different than every other asset you might be able to own.

I mean, there are a lot of different properties that are unique to Bitcoin. But Bitcoin has us truly inelastic relationship between supply and demand. So the demand for this thing can theoretically go to infinity, can reach every person alive. And the total amount can never change. So the price can continue to perform the way it has. And I think a lot of people, you know, a lot of Bitcoin naysayers, traditional finance people, want to believe that they miss the opportunity with Bitcoin because it's gone from a dollar to $150,000. And so that must have been the golden time.

But, you know, if this money system problem continues to play out the way it has over the last 20 years, over the next, in, you know, 2050, a cup of coffee bill will be $50 and a Bitcoin will be worth $20 million. You know, like, it's just, this is just a function. Yeah, it's just changing your mindset on I missed, I missed it to like, even if you think you missed it, if you changed it. If you change that to, as you pointed out, you take everything we've talked about here. The next 20 years is the government, folks, is the government going to stop printing money? Just ponder that for a second. And the answer quickly for me comes to no. I don't think they're in any position where they can stop doing what they're doing.

I think they've created a very large problem. And there is a way to solve it. But I don't think any politician where we sit today is willing to solve it. And I don't even know if society is willing to solve it, I might add. So that means it will persist. And if it persists, you go, well, what's Bitcoin going to do in return? No different than gold and silver. What's gold and silver going to do in return as you go along?

Is it going to go down in value? Or is it going to continue to go up? And the answer, you know, if you just do simple math, would be up. Now, how much up? I, you know, I can't sit here and say. And, you know, we can throw out all sorts of numbers. You could just look at the track record of what Bitcoin's done and the adoption of it. And as it becomes more socially acceptable, as people start to learn more about it,

as the technology around it becomes easier to adopt it, right? The hoops to actually buy it become less, not more. I mean, don't get me wrong, the Royal Bank of Canada says, no, there's too much fraud there. We're not taking that. But then there's banks like, once again, Bow Valley Credit Union, you just sign up and they got no problem with it. And all of a sudden, you can see where there's going to be a flood of people go to, say, Bow Valley or what other financial institution doesn't and these hoops become less and people start to learn oh you just go here and you do this all of a sudden you go it's it's it's going to go up

which means you haven't missed the boat certainly i think i can say for myself and probably for scott as well if i'd been around and been thinking about it when it was one dollar if i had a time machine back to the future it i'd go back and i buy a whole bunch of bitcoin but that isn't the you know as it sits right now that invention at least to my knowledge has not been invented, which means all I can do is buy a little bit of Bitcoin. And it's no different. I don't expect to sell it tomorrow. I look at it and I go, it's just one of these things that I'm putting money into.

And in 20 years, we'll see what it's at. But long term, I think it's going to be a fantastic investment. I mean, like, it's like if you knew with 100% certainty that your house was going to burn down and you had the opportunity to buy house insurance, you would buy it. And that's what Bitcoin is, right? Like, and I think that, you know, the phenomenon that you're describing will happen again. You know, like people in 15 years will say like, you know, you used to be able to buy a Bitcoin for $150,000. And today it's $10 million.

Whatever. And I have no idea what $10 million will be worth in 2040. But like this is, this problem is so big. And it doesn't just, I mean, this is the thing about Bitcoin is, the, the, Canadian government could get their stuff together and, you know, bring austerity. But like, unless every other country does the same, eight billion people still have a problem that they need solved. And so it would still be good for Canadians. And the other piece that we haven't talked about at all. And, you know, like, this is kind of an auspicious day to be talking

about Bitcoin after Nova Scotia just banned, going for a walk in the woods. Going for hiking. going hiking now I must say when you have a fire problem in you're having no luck and you're trying to curb it out I get it that extreme circumstances need to be taken but banning people from the forest and issuing a $25,000 fine I think is is Canada I was just in the States for a month Scott and my dad had called just before I walked in here and we're talking about something and we're all talking about Canada I'm saying you know know, it's wild to me to come from the United States where they got a whole serious problems themselves. But when you come back into Canada, in the first like 10 minutes, I'm like, oh my God, what country does this? You know, like $25,000 fine if you're caught hiking. Yeah, we've set some dangerous precedence for the government thinking it's their job to do all

the thinking for people. And, you know, it doesn't matter what your opinion on this is. We, have already enacted like financial penalties for not doing what you're supposed to do. Like we have a precedent for that here. And, you know, it's not widely accepted today. Canadian people don't tend to think of Bitcoin as being money. But this is the other sort of beautiful part about it is that no force on earth can prevent one Bitcoin address from sending Bitcoin to another Bitcoin address. It is uncensurable money. And so in addition for you, as part of participating and owning Bitcoin to have the ability to protect your wealth from theft

that happens as a result of inflation, you also have a guaranteed ability to transact. And if you don't have the right to transact, you don't have any other rights. You don't have right to assemble. You don't have freedom of speech. If you have been excluded from the financial system, you have nothing.

And so this is an innovation that we should be appreciating more. here and you want some Bitcoin purely for the ability to spend it if you need to, you know, I get gold people come at me like, you know, if there was some kind of problem with access to the traditional financial system, nobody would be shaving flakes off of gold from their gold bar to be paying for their groceries. Like it's not divisible. It's not spendable. And if you go to other places in the world, and I have traveled all over the world in my Bitcoin journey now, I'm fortunate I get to speak at conferences.

Places where the money has already really failed. Those places are the ones that are really innovating and accepting Bitcoin as a medium of exchange and a form of payment. And there are places all over the world where it's super normal. And because what you see, and those countries are just further along the currency debasement road than we are. You know, I think that there's a little bit of a, you know, an idea. here that, you know, the first world will always kind of stay the first world. But, you know, it's just as true for people that go bankrupt and we're rich and now they're not. Like, we're spending ourselves into a place where it's going to be difficult for the standard of living

that we've experienced during our lives here as Canadians to continue. And I think that, yeah, so you go to other places in the world where that's already happened and money just cannot hold its value. And necessity is the mother of invention. So we went to El Salvador in November and I didn't spend a U.S. dollar in a week. I spent only Bitcoin. And so, you know, I think sometimes, too, we have this perception in Canada especially that because you can't pay for your Starbucks with Bitcoin, that it's not being adopted globally as a currency. And that's just absolutely not true. It's just that our point of sale terminals and our money is a medium exchange in Canada, it works pretty well.

And the rate of theft in inflation terms, until recently, has been just slow enough that people kind of complain about it, but nobody's really trying to innovate how to transact in other currencies. But this is another problem that compounds and accelerates over time. So I expect that to change here too. Well, when you, when you, I'll say it again, I've got a ton of time for gold. And, and, and, and I see such similarities.

I mean, obviously there's differences. But even when we do the Cornerstone Forum, we always have Bitcoin and gold sit side by side because I think there is, there's value in both of them. Like I just, I just see it. They just make sense to me. The thing that sticks out to what we're just talking about, you know, like how they can't censor Bitcoin. Well, I mean, what's everybody's fear of is CBDC is that they control everything.

And if you can't go and buy groceries because they deem what you're doing as not in what they want you to do, which I mean has happened in this world. And certainly, you know, like you just look at what it's gone on in this country. I don't think any of us go, that's a far off dream. I think it's like, no, they're probably waiting for the right opportune time to enact the CBDC. It will get wildly adopted because, you know, what do most people say? Well, we don't really use cash anyways. We're a cashless society already. So the next logical step is just to have a CBDC.

And what's the big issue with that? Now we'll just, we'll get rid of the paper. and it's not a big deal. I mean, heck, we got rid of the penny. And you know, you think, what's a penny? I was like, well, I don't know. I used to roll those suckers when I was a kid. And that was money.

It's money. That's what it is. Yeah. And so you go, it isn't that far off. And when that comes and they can control any one person for saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, speeding, just take it to wherever you folks want, because I'm probably missing a hundred of them. You're like, well, then they have you by the,

the nuts. And in COVID, how did they get groups of people? I can't lose my job. And that was why the vaccine was wildly adopted by a lot of people. They said, I was in between a rock and a hard place. I couldn't lose what I'd work so hard for. Well, this is going to be, I guess when you talk about Bitcoin, the real upside of it being unconsorable or, yeah, ungovernable, is that they can't do that. They have no control over it. I think that's a really valid point. Yeah. I mean, and like, you know, this thing about Nova Scotia, like they don't have, the decisions like this don't happen in isolation, right? This is a test run, in my opinion, of something that be rolled out elsewhere. You know, and the trend, you know, just like we're

talking about is the trend towards more government spending or less? I think we know the answer. is the trend towards more government overreach or less? You know, I think we know the answer to that too. I'll let listeners, you know, make their own decision. Yeah, well, I know where this audience is going to say, yeah, I would agree. Now, forgive me, I've taken all this time, but I like getting to know somebody and then you leave me off on, you know, merry little trails.

Block rewards. Walk me through this, what you're doing. so that I can understand it. The audience can understand it. Yeah, thank you. So like I mentioned, my background was in benefits in group retirement savings plans. And with Block Awards, we've kind of fused the two to create a platform for employers to offer Bitcoin to their employees in a way that's like revolutionary.

We're sort of a first of its kind company. And I fully believe that employers have this tremendous opportunity today to get their staff, saving in Bitcoin, learning about Bitcoin, interacting with Bitcoin, bringing into their company, all of the great things that happen when people start studying Bitcoin because it's something that sort of expects a little bit of critical thinking, a little bit of effort to understand some basics. It breeds sovereignty and self-personal responsibility. and it's also the best performing asset ever. So, you know, we have customers.

Our launch product is called Bitcoin Savings Plan, and it's a payroll tool that works like a group RSP, but it's not registered. But the benefit is your staff actually get Bitcoin. And you can't register Bitcoin in Canada right now. It's not considered a qualified investment. So you build a savings plan or you're, you know, however you might want to customize it as an.

employer, employees have the option to contribute net pay and buy Bitcoin off of a deduction. And the employer has the ability to gift their employees, Bitcoin as a reward or a perk, as a taxable benefit, or create some kind of a matching program. And we have customers today, actually most of our customers are Alberta-based companies that, you know, some run a group RSP and they run a Bitcoin Savings Plan side by side and they run it with the same, you know, it's whatever $2,000 a year match. And if you want to participate in the RSP or if you want to put 50% of your money in the RSP, you can. And you run the Bitcoin Savings Plan side by side and let the employees have their choice. And so it's really,

it's a first of its kind tool to, you know, let employers imagine a future where this is a part of how they think about recruiting and retaining staff. Like I said, it's performed in a way. we've got customers started Bitcoin savings plan kind of two or two and a half years ago when the Bitcoin price was in the 20,000s. And, you know, an employee that saved five or 10,000 over that time that today they've got 50 or 60 grand. And there isn't another benefit an employer could have offered in that short of a time window that would have done that for their staff. And those employers absolutely love us. And their staff will never leave that company because they have, you know, potentially materially change their financial future. and expose them to this really important idea at the same time.

So, yeah, that's kind of the nuts and bolts of it. We are building other products. I think that, you know, where the employment market is headed is the average person is going to be interested in job postings that say, you know, partial payment in Bitcoin is available. And like, this is a thing that is, it's a new idea today. And so it might sound strange, but, you know, there was a time not that long. ago or email was weird, right? Yeah, forgive me. I don't think it sounds strange at all.

But in fairness, in fairness, I sit in this desk, you know, I sit and I talk to all these people and it is taken, you know, shout out to Vance Crow wherever you're sitting. You know, he's been harping on me for three or four years about Bitcoin, right? And I've been trying to understand it at times. It is just, you know, it's so hard to get my brain around, you know. And I just think of myself. So then I think about my listeners. And I think about then I think about society that doesn't listen to any of this. And I'm like, yeah, there's going to be some people that have eyebrows or what.

But there's a growing number of us that if you're saying, you know, like you go work a job. And in the job, you have employee benefits where they match. If you put in X amount, we'll match it up to a certain point. Right. I don't think that's a, that is not a weird idea. I mean, that's actually a pretty regular idea. It's a nice little, oh, that makes sense. I should put a part of my paycheck into that.

If you're saying the companies could work with you, and now let's say, let's just, let's just go small numbers, folks. It's just like you put in 50 bucks and then employee might as fit and they can do that through block awards. I'm like, all of a sudden I'm like, I'm interested. Like I'm sitting here. I'm like, that idea makes a ton of sense to me. It'd be an interesting thing as an employee to hear.

It also would suggest to me my employer is thinking wisely about where the future is heading as well, as much as what it could do for me, you know, beneficially with buying Bitcoin. 100%. You know, and we have that feedback from our current clients. Like, ultimately, I think that as this plays out and as Bitcoin continues to be adopted in the way that it has, people who start doing this now, two, three years from now, are going to have some very grateful

employees. And, you know, there's lots of room for corporate adoption for Bitcoin, too. And it's just where the puck is going. And so, yeah, I, I'm thrilled to be in the position we are right now because I think, like, the timing for the adoption of this is spot on. I like the hockey reference. You know, that's a great reference. Sorry, a hockey guy on this side who once did all hockey podcasts, right? Now I'm deep in the weeds on just about everything. If you're a company sitting anywhere that's listening to this and you're like,

I'd like to learn more about that, where would you send them to? So there's an intake form on our website, blockrewards.ca, to get yourself registered for a demo if you want to go straight to a demo. You can catch me, you know, we're active on LinkedIn, too. You know, and I'm, I'm, you know, I'm happy to chat to anyone that's just kind of curious. So, you know, that would be another easy way. Scott at blockrewards.ca. You know, I should say, too, like, you know, there aren't any rules for a product like this in terms of, you know, we don't care. If you've got 50 employees and only two of them might actually want this, you know, like what we're,

we're a Bitcoin company. We feel that we're providing employers with something that's really unique. And we just want to get as many employers as possible exposed to the idea. So, can you imagine though there's 50 employees, only to adopt it?

And over the course of three years of having those two employees sit at the, because I, you know, when back in a previous life, you know, like go before I was podcasting full time, I used to go in,

sit with the group of guys in the morning coffee, We talked a lot about finances, the stocks, what are, what are company's stock because we were a publicly traded company. And everybody talked about it because part of being a part of that company is you could do exactly what you're doing except with the company's stock, right? They match. And so, you know, and this isn't a unique idea whatsoever. And so you think if only two adopted out of the 50, how many over a year to 10 years, I wonder what that number would change, right? Like I would assume it would be huge, but I could be wrong.

Maybe it's more complex and I don't give people enough credit. But I think sitting around the water cooler talking about what a company is doing, your company's doing, happens every single day. And if all of a sudden, you know, you got two on there, I think the adoption would probably be shocking over the course of a five-year span. I don't see why it wouldn't be, you know, like if all of a sudden a company, you know, to, to, to, always come back to gold, you know, I've, I've had Nick Moriano's on lots from Silver Gold Bowl. If all of a sudden the company I was working for was matching buying gold, I think that perk my ears up. We're doing what? You're going to do, huh, that's interesting. I'm kind of interested by that. And, well, that's cool. For any companies, listen, I think it'd be a worthwhile

conversation at least have. I would, you know, it'd be interesting to, you know, if you're listening to and you take them up on it. I would love if you'd text me, whether it's right now or in a year's time, because I'd just love to hear more as it goes along. I think it'll be super cool to fall along with Scott. And maybe I'm jumping the gun. Maybe it's 10 years down the road.

I don't know. I hopefully am here. Hopefully you're there, and hopefully things are better in a sort. I just don't give any, you know, when the government's trying to make it better, I have very little optimism in that.

I have a lot of optimism in people and solving problems. I think that's what a lot of Bitcoiners and others are doing. And I got a ton of time for that. You know, before I let you out of here, is there anything else that we skim by that you're like, I want to make sure people understand? You know, maybe just to echo what you're saying,

like I've built this product or like, you know, envisioned this service because, you know, we want to help people solve a problem that the government is not going to solve for us. And employees tend to get involved in financial things when their employer gets behind them. Most people really don't understand, you know, the financial world and they rely heavily on, you know, programs that are put in place by their places of work. And so there is just a huge opportunity to really do good. And that's like, you know, that's the mission here. That's why we're

doing what we're doing. I think that, you know, the win-win here is we've created a tool that can really change the trajectory for a company and for their employee population. And we're trying to like, you know, help build the world that we want to see. So, you know, for all these reasons we were talking about earlier in the show, there are some structural things that people need to understand about the way money works. And what we've decided to try and do is create a solution that can be distributed on a broad basis through an incentive mechanism that makes sense for everybody involved. And, and yeah, please, if you're interested at all, reach out, I'd love to chat. Appreciate you coming on, Scott, and best of luck with everything. Look forward to hopefully

bumping in you at some point. I assume that will happen if we haven't already. I feel like we've probably been in relatively similar circles, but look forward to meeting you in person. If I haven't already, and maybe we have. I, you know, I'm trying to remember. You're probably at the Bitcoin rodeo at one point, I assume. But regardless, look forward to running into you. All the best, and I appreciate you hopping on. Thanks, Sean. Likewise.