TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #308: Becoming un-cancelable with Mark Jeftovic

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Mark Jeftovic to discuss Bitcoin, tyranny in Canada, and becoming un-cancelable. Follow Mark Jeftovic on Twitter Check out his Writing Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off

Are we recording? Get the thumbs up. What is up, freaks? Joey Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of TFTC. May trigger some of you guys, but we had a doctor on to talk about COVID, treatments, his thoughts on vaccines. Doc Woods, towards the end of his career, 75 years old,

has been treating patients in Wyoming for 43 years, almost half a century. and he has a perspective on what's been going on and the treatments that have been artificially prevented from getting to patients. I'll let you guys listen to it. We just had an almost two-hour conversation. It's brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital.

I'm looking at some Unchained employees right now through the glass windows here at the Bitcoin Commons at the TFTC studio. I see Justin Moon. He's not part of Unchained, but I can just see him. Beautiful mullet. Unchained's here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model. They're here to bring you financial services.

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We are an official media partner of that conference specifically. Go to the mining conference. I have my laptop on me right now. I'm going to make sure that this is the correct website. The miningconference.com. Where does it take me? Where does it take me? It's been the wrong.

It's been the wrong. I've been sending you guys to the wrong. This website doesn't exist. how come miningconference.com let me check nope that one doesn't work

let me go to brains I'm actually shocked the brains guys haven't reached out to me we're going to find BMC 2022 oh it doesn't even have its

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it's up there. The Bitcoin Mining Conference 2022. Main event, June 15th. Side events, 14th, 16th. Sorry for sending you freaks to a website that doesn't exist for like the last three weeks. Go to Brains.com.

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Go check all this out at Len.HodlHodl.com. And Eastern Europe Conference is hot as well. The Baltic Honey Badger Conference will be back this year. I don't know if I'm supposed to tell you freaks that, but whatever. I just did. Last but not least, talking about conferences. We got one coming up here in South Beach, Miami. April 6th to 9th.

Nice. The Bitcoin 2022 Conference. It's going to be the biggest conference ever. World's Fair, Chicago, 1908, whenever that was. It's going to look like, what's it going to look like, Car? What's the 1908 World's Fair? I don't even know if that's the year. In Chicago, that's going to look like,

hmm, hmm. That's going to look like a couple of SPCA people on the corner like trying to annoy you like hey come talk to me it's like no the world's fair is going to look like that

compared to Bitcoin 2022 April 6th to 9th in Miami South Beach Miami it's at the South Beach Convention Center okay it's the biggest

fucking thing that's ever happened in the existence of conferences day one the sixth such a big specter

I can't even talk I gotta drink some water the 6th is industry day if you're looking to get if you're in the industry if you're looking to climb up the industry

you gotta go to industry day you're gonna be bumping elbows with some heavy hitters some hitters the 7th and 8th are their general conference days there'll be CEOs presidents

President Bikali's coming he's an avid canoeing he's got an avid canoeing hobby and he's just gonna talk about canoeing on stage and they've got beautiful lakes in el salvador president bukele likes to pull his canoe out quite often and enjoy the scenes and there's many intricacies that go into the hobby of canoeing and president bukele is going to take the stage at bitcoin 2022 and really dive into the intricacies that that exist when when you're canoeing but you're not going to want to miss

that. Michael Saylor's going to be there as well. Jack Maller's going to be there. This fucking asshole made Marty Bent might be there as well. I hope not. I really hope not. What else is going on? Richard Hart is in my menchies. Fuck Richard Hart. Hopefully he's not at Pickling 2022. If he is, I should call him out for being an accomplice to murder in Guatemala. Kidding. Your say. but word is on the street. Bitcoin 2022, day four, music festival on the 9th. Logic, Deadmau5, Neil Young, and Joni Smith are going to be there.

But they're not actually a part of the festival. They're going to be on the corner with the SPCA people begging for money because they kicked themselves off Spotify in reaction to Joe Rogan. I think a very similar conversation to the one that we just had with Doc Woods. So if you haven't bought your tickets to Bitcoin 2022 yet, go to b.tc slash conference and use the code TFTC to get 10% off your tickets. Enjoy it, freaks.

bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What's it like running a DNS company these days? It's never been boring. I mean, we've been doing this for 23 years. We started in 98. and i've always said dns policy attracts all the crazies i guess myself included and uh it's always something but these days it's kind of getting a little a little more heated up with cancel culture and deplatforming being just par for the course these days yeah i mean dns specifically is always

an interesting topic because that's that's what many would consider to be a a weak point in the the internet stack and actually being able to become uncancellable um unassailable as the uh book that you wrote which tries to teach you how to how to prevent yourself from being canceled so is dns a weak point yeah absolutely it's it's the dial tone of the internet and um it was actually the bitcoin movement that proved me wrong on one of my core assumptions because before Bitcoin came along, everyone always used to say, we need a P2P DNS. Whenever ICANN or VeriSign or someone did something egregious, people would say, we need a peer-to-peer DNS infrastructure. And I would always chime in and say, that's all very well and good, but it's impossible because

DNS is an inverted tree by definition. You can't have a peer-to-peer infrastructure without name collisions. And then Bitcoin came along, and it didn't address DNS head on. But then there were forks like Namecoin. And even now, things like Handshake and Ethereum name service, which we've been involved in, which just took that blockchain ledger architecture and said, well, hey, look, you don't need an inverted tree root. You can have an immutable ledger instead signed cryptographically. I think that has changed the game for DNS, but it hasn't really become apparent yet, but it will, especially now because the incentive structures have changed drastically. Why do you think it will become more apparent in time? Because you are really at the

mercy of big tech in a lot of cases. And people seem to think that it's okay to attack your core infrastructure. And there are fewer and fewer companies who are willing to put a flag in the ground and defend your right just to be online and say things that people disagree with. So The incentives are such that people building out journalism outlets or just have something to say but don't want to be subject to attack are just going to start looking at these alternatives. I look at the statements like ICANN, they're this regulatory body that oversees the namespace, the TLDs, like the . and .com and .us and .ca, they've put out statements about things like decentralized naming systems. And they're kind of in denial. It sounds a little detached from

reality. But what I do is I look at, let's say, the adoption curve of all things crypto, all things blockchain, like number of active addresses, number of active transactions. but when I get specific on naming-enabled things, you look at the number of Web3-enabled devices, and it's just going up exponentially. Everyone who's got MetaMask or something like that plugged into their web browser, well, suddenly, that's not just about sending tokens around the internet. You can actually see the whole Ethereum name service ecosystem of naming, and there's more to that as well. There's the handshake, there's unstoppable. And so this is all kind of happening almost as a side effect of the decentral revolution, that people are doing this to

get a non-state money or to move into non-state controlled currencies. But this byproduct of it is that they're getting visibility into decentralized namespaces. And I think it's getting more traction now because that's not the core motivator. It's just a side effect that will take on a life of its own. What I mean by that, back about 20 years ago, there was other initiatives like new.net. They tried to have all of these new TLDs that weren't visible to the rest of the world. You had to download a browser plugin and plug it into your browser. That's how you had to get it to work. And it was just too high of a barrier to the entry for just the average person to do this, just to see these namespaces where nobody was there. But what's changed now is

there's all of this adaptation and migration and movement into this decentralized ecosystem already. People aren't being incited or incentivized to download these plugins just to get visibility into these new namespaces they're realizing they already have this visibility because they had already been incentivized to add these plugins and web3 capabilities to their devices and to do other things and it's like oh hey i can see dot crypto domains now i can see you know all of these other you know dot forever dot eth and and it's just all sort of like a snowball gathering momentum with the the new sort of decentralized dns ecosystems popping up are there any pain point scaling issues you see with those because that's

the one thing thing of like ethereum specifically like is yeah ethereum's got a gas problem yeah sorry i cut you off but it's got a gas problem yeah does it also have like a scalability problem to actually be decentralized in the future. MIKE GREEN Yeah. I mean, there's always that debate of how decentralized is Ethereum really. But I think they invited me out to their working group back in 2017 out in London, England, and I went out there. And what I realized when I got there was that all of these roadblocks aside, there's real momentum here. It's really happening. and that momentum is just getting stronger and stronger so uh yeah there's scaling issues yeah there's gas fee issues but i just you know i think they'll get around it i think there's

going to be others there's tezos has a naming system now and uh um bitcoin i mean there's i don't know if there's anything happening quite like it in bitcoin I mean, I've actually been keeping half an eye out on it for years since I got involved in Bitcoin and even was working on some experimental initiatives in it. But nothing's really that I've seen has really asserted itself yet. Yeah, that was funny. The other week with E&S specifically, they had their lead developer canceled, which is. That bothered me a lot. That really bothered me.

You know, and I wrote a post in the ENS DAO that said, look, you know, I've been fighting cancel culture and deplatforming for my entire life. I think this is a bad move. I think it sets a bad precedent and it will it will hurt the DAO more than it won't. And I know Brantley, I've dealt with Brantley. He helped us with our DOT, with our DOT ENS implementation. and uh you know not he he he was canceled on a tweet that he put out that before ens even existed and it was in 2016 i believe 2015 i thought and so it just really there's this idea that everyone you interact with on this planet must have the same moral and ideological compass as you, or not only should you not deal with them, that person should have their life destroyed. And I just, like, I can't agree with that. I mean, people have the right to be wrong. They

have the right to disagree. They have the right to, you know, say what they're going to say and learn from their mistakes or double down on them. It's not really our business. But now I'm probably going to get canceled. Thanks. We're all going to get canceled. No, it was funny reading the postmortem of that. It seems like the dude who led the charge against him was saying he was like a hardcore Christian as well. And he's just trying to get rich. And And once the stake in the DAO, once a larger stake in the DAO, just used cancel culture to get it. The person who started the cancel process? Yeah, it was more of a social engineering experiment, or not experiment, actually.

It was successful, an attack via social engineering to get him out and take over his boats. It's a very fascinating story of how these DAOs can be corrupted and attacked at the social layer, which is Ethereum's long-running problem, in my opinion, is that the social layer is not strong at all and it allows things to be changed on a dime and probably bad decisions to be let into the protocol. But yeah, it's a fascinating spot. But these are important problems to solve.

don't want to focus too much on ethereum but again going back to something you mentioned you have been fighting cancel culture for quite some time now and i mean easy dns has been around for 28 years is it 23 1998 before 1998. two co-founders and i bought them out like in 2004 or something like that and so was cancel culture something you saw pretty coming pretty early because it's it's not something that's been really prevalent until what like six seven years ago maybe yeah i would say what um what made it front and center in our career or our trajectory was wikileaks 2010. and uh we got pulled into that one literally by accident because uh And they got canceled by extrajudicial means by US politicians.

And they leaned on one of our competitors to take them down, and they did. And the competitor was named very similarly to us. They don't exist well. So it was a company called EveryDNS. They were on EveryDNS. EveryDNS got bought by Dynact. Dynact has since been bought by Oracle. but somewhere, somebody typed, we've been canceled by EasyDNS. They weren't even a customer with us.

It was just a mistake. But that went around the world faster than anyone could shake their head. It was in the New York Times. It was in the Guardian UK. It was in the Financial Post. They were all saying the same thing. And this is also where my cynicism for journalism came from as well, because they were all regurgitating an incorrect talking point from Twitter saying EasyDNS canceled WikiLeaks. So we had the ire of the world on us. Like they were just, you know, it was unbelievable. And we were trying to get in front of it to say, they're not even a customer here.

I don't even know what you guys are talking about. And then what happened, so that was a whole battle unto itself. Docker wrote a hit piece on us or threatened to write a hit piece on us because we wanted them to issue a correction. They were saying anyway. And then at the end of it, someone came to us and said, well, look, would you take WikiLeaks on as a client to get them back online? And we said, of course we will, right? Of course they should be back online. So we brought in, you know, we got WikiLeaks.nl, WikiLeaks.ch, and then the .org domain kind of got trapped in limbo, So it never made it on, but we got their mirrors back up.

And that was even a whole other maelstrom. And for a brief period there, it was intense. And it was the shot heard around the world. And after that, I couldn't believe, A, what was happening to WikiLeaks. I remember Senator Lieberman, if you remember him, going on national TV, praising companies like PayPal and MasterCard for, he actually said, breaking their contracts with WikiLeaks. So behavior that should have gotten you sued in a court of law, here's a politician praising you for breaking your legally binding contracts.

And I just found that beyond the pale. and then the second part of it of course was the journalistic response because it was just like incompetence compounded with just just which i have no words yeah exactly exactly yeah it's disgusting what they've done to julian and wikileaks that's actually something something i wrote in the newsletter yesterday it's very fascinating um there's something about timing with all this and you've wrote a piece on it like bitcoin's timing of its launch is particularly beautiful we'll get into that but i think what we're finding out in the last two weeks with what's going on in canada specifically even though wiki leaks had

mastercard paypal visa cut them off people thought you guys cut them off but you didn't you actually wound up taking them on as a client props to that uh and that they turned to bitcoin as well um and that was a big part of bitcoin's early history obviously you know the famous satoshi email where please don't kick the hornet's nest. We'll have everybody on our backs. It's not exactly what he said. And you fast forward, the Silk Road happened between now and then. You've had other instances of pretty high caliber stories proving Bitcoin's use case, but there's something about Justin Trudeau using the Emergencies Act to freeze the bank accounts of protesters that has really woken up a large number of people in who many would consider normies to the value prop of

Bitcoin. I think it was proven with WikiLeaks, it was proven with the Silk Road, but maybe the timing is just perfect. Bitcoin's a big enough of a brand name that now when Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, is freezing bank accounts unilaterally on a whim with no due process uh it seems like this for some reason or another is the the aha moment for for millions across the world don't forget cyprus like i i still think so i 2013 was when i first got aware became aware of bitcoin and that's when easy dns started accepting it as a payment method and that's when cyprus happened and in my mind this was always the core driver for me in believing in Bitcoin more than number go up, was that I think Cyprus was what broke Bitcoin into the

public awareness more than it was at the time. It was the first real kind of explosion out there. And what Trudeau has done is Cyprus on steroids. Now, today, the word is circulating that the RCMP is working with banks to unfreeze all of the accounts frozen. And there's all kinds of subtext around why. But I think personally, my guess is the lawsuit started rolling in. It's one thing for the deputy prime minister to go on TV and say, we're going to freeze these bank accounts. We're going to indemnify the banks from liability. And you don't need a court order. It's one thing to say that. Now, OK, I would imagine, I mean, if my bank account was one of the bank accounts that was frozen, I would have my lawyers filing in superior court the next

business day saying, that's all very interesting. Now, let's put this to a legal test. But I don't know if that's what's happening, but I hope there's some legal tests to it. But be that as it may, the damage has been, well, either the damage has been done or the victory has been achieved, whichever way you want to look at it. I mean, one of my normie neighbors rolled by me the other day right out here, rolled down the window of his Tesla, and he yelled, hey, Mark, I got to get me some Bitcoin now, right? And everybody is like, I got to get Bitcoin now. And everyone is saying, we've got to get our Bitcoin out of the exchanges and into self-custodied wallets. And even the authorities here are even panicking about that. They've set

off this chain reaction. I don't even know what they were thinking. But it's that age-old thing with politicians. They don't think about trade-offs or incentives or second-order effects. Well, let's get into that. I saw you responded to a tweet I posted the other day. They're really fucking up their great reset and you think they're going too fast too soon. I think that was probably a big part of it. It was like the trucker convoy is really putting the pressure on Trudeau and he tried to come down with an iron fist thinking people would be docile and the exact opposite happened. Yeah. All through this pandemic, I really had to sit down and introspect on, do I really believe there's an all-powerful global cabal that's

driving this in a top-down conspiracy? I've come to the conclusion just through, I don't know, I started to think that it's more, there's no conspiracy, there's dynamics, and there's incentives. And so what happened with Trudeau is, I mean, I think when the pandemic hit, I think the Davos crew and the WEF people, the World Economic Forum people, just saw this as an aha moment. Like, all right, it's go time. Let's go. And they did push it too hard.

They did push too much too soon because the kind of world that these institutional, centralized politicians, technocrats really want, they do want that China-style social credit system where everything is controlled and regimented. And I think my reply to you is that they pulled 20 years of creeping totalitarianism forward into 18 months. and what trudeau really did was he just hammered it completely mishandled it and he just and he put himself in this awkward position where he couldn't back down because if he backed down it would look like the truckers won at the end of the day i think the truckers did win

they they set off a global conversation about this that's still ongoing and still going on around the world and is much more intensified here in Canada yeah certainly set it off and I go back and forth is it incompetence is it hubris is it pure incentives but then you see so I've got helicopters going on overhead um but then you see like a video I'm sure you've seen that video of Klaus Schwab going around um from 2017 when he was on a panel and he was bragging about having young World Economic Forum, young global leaders infiltrating the Canadian Parliament and Trudeau's cabinet specifically. And then you had somebody, some PM come to the floor last week, and I guess he was zooming

in and he was trying to ask a question on behalf of one of his constituents who watched that video. I was like, I think we should be asking questions on the floor about what is the extent of the influence and the uh the immersion of the world economic forum in our politics are they influencing us from within this this unelected uh i don't even know what to call this unelected organization that that seems to like to project influence on the rest of the world via policy recommendations that a lot of the time get implemented in many parts of the world yeah and this is this is is this is an age old dynamic, right? I mean, you used to have the builder burgers where the,

you know, the boogeyman of the day or the trilaterals, and I don't mean boogeyman in a dismissive sense. I just mean in, um, extra national sort of networks of people who cast undue influence, right? Uh, how much influence do they have in, in the best of times or in the worst of times. And I think what happened with this pandemic was that a huge vacuum opened up and the World Economic Forum was able to just rush into that vacuum. And so much so that they inhaled so much oxygen out of the space, like behind the scenes, that it can almost be indistinguishable from a global cabal that controls everything. When all of the global leaders came out of the davos meeting chanting build back better like zombies like how was that

supposed to look that just that just seems like something out of a james bond movie or the sequel to manchurian candidate yeah i mean the super cuts of that's funny to see who's fallen um from the build back better crew yeah like governor cuomo before he got kicked out of office yeah the Mayor of New York City, de Blasio, Trudeau, Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Macron, all these people out there saying build back better, build back better. It's very creepy. But there has to be some level of coordination there, right? These people aren't just randomly saying this in different parts of the world at the same time. You had a build back better bill here in the United States.

it yes the whole name yeah what makes it what makes it um seem so powerful and i guess it is so powerful is that the mainstream corporate what we call approved media here in canada is completely in line with it and they cast so much influence over society however i'll qualify that and say i think mainstream media is in secular decline that will probably accelerate over the coming years and um i had another point which i actually already lost the lost the plot on my other point it's just it's gone i'm gonna i'm gonna pour myself some coffee here it'll come back to you no it's uh it's been fascinating watching this all unravel and i do think the corporate media is on a secular decline as well and that's why i think i'm very

excited to be speaking with you right now i don't think i am very excited to be speaking with you right now because i think unassailable specifically i haven't read the whole book but the gist of it um is really trying to empower individuals in this age of transition as we move from the industrial to the digital age and to basically create their own platforms allow them To compete with the dying corporate media and get people out of the trance of being subjected to the propaganda, the messaging that they just repeat and parrot on behalf of people with misaligned incentives. And I think the show is a great example of independent media that has emerged in the digital age. Obviously, we have Joe Rogan who's making a big stink and really putting a thorn into the eye of the corporate media.

They don't like what he's doing and how he's conducting his interviews and the information he's getting out to the public. And it seems like there's a lot of volatility in the media space, particularly right now as we move through this transition. Tell me about what your outlet is. like i started listening to your podcast but i listened to it through my apple podcast feed because i usually just do audio only right but i heard references that you your videos go up like you're not on youtube right uh we're in youtube timeout right now we had a doctor come on the show

and uh in reference the VAERS database that um suggests that there may be adverse reactions to the vaccinations that are being forced upon people right now and youtube decided to put us in a two week time out because of that um yeah we're trying to syndicate on bitcoin tv rumble um and anywhere we can this is going on twitter right now as well but we hope to blast it out to as many platforms as possible um right now we we host the podcast on anchor which is owned by spotify so that's pretty centralized but there's plenty of um other hosting providers that we could easily switch to if need be uh and then on the written side of things i think that's where we really have a good sovereign stack we're actually building something right now that we think will compete

with substack and basically what we've done is taken ghost cms and injected it with btc pay server um and made it made it so we can self-host our our written content um and monetize via bitcoin in a non-custodial fashion as well right yeah that sounds great because you know i i don't have any inside knowledge into substack i don't know who runs substack but when i hear independent journalists talk about oh i couldn't take the mainstream corporate gig anymore so now i'm free I'm over on Substack, I always kind of wince when I look at that. And I'm like, how long is Substack going to stay free? But not free as in no cost. I mean, how long is it going to be where Substack is perceived to be this refuge away from corporate blinders and

even censorship? When are they going to start taking people down for saying you're not allowed to say that on this platform i just because it's another single point of failure right everything is under substack.com i think barry weiss who's one of the biggest contributors on substack she was on a podcast last week and even she was opining it's when not enough they'll then the woke mob will eventually get to everybody um and she was seeking alternatives barry if you're listening we're building one for you but yeah no i agree i think i love it's just something i stumbled into ghost i wanted a cms to re-syndicate to syndicate my newsletter and have a one-stop shop for the newsletter the podcast and other things that we do at this weird media brand that

we have um and we just chose ghost because it was a nice easy open source uh cms that made it easy to self-host and then we started playing around by injecting it with btc pay server and then And on their end, they really turned it into a really good newsletter distribution mechanism as well. So we'll probably transition our newsletter to Ghost full-time as well. And then, yeah, it's just nice having our own site, tftc.io. That is ours. We control and we don't do it yet, but we plan on getting our own servers and hosting on our own servers. So we have complete control over everything that we do at TFTC.

and then if you're referencing every different channel on that platform using like a handshake domain or something or any kind of decentralized domain then um you know you're really cooking with gas there it's like as more and more people have these we'll just call it web3 enabled devices just just uh as a matter of course yeah so how do you view web3 that's a big meme right now It's one I've actually thrown an ire towards. I don't think you need a blockchain for Web3. The DNS use case is intriguing. I've had many conversations behind the scenes of people

who really highlight that DNS is a very centralized part of the Internet and there needs to be a solution to solving that. But Web3 to me is like what we're doing at TFTC with the content that you can self-host on your own server and you just inject it with BTC pay server and you can pay 10 cents in sats to be delivered content from something that I control and you're basically leveraging Bitcoin,

RSS feeds and more distributed hosting. Does everything need to be a blockchain on that back? Are you putting stuff on IPFS? No. Do you have an opinion on it? I haven't looked in the IPFS in quite a while. Yeah. I know Impervious, they're coming out with a browser,

and I know they hinted that they'll be leveraging IPFS a lot as well. The browser's out. I have it on my phone. I know a couple of those guys. And yeah, so that browser kind of excites me because I think my definition mentally of Web3 may be different from everybody else's in the world because I don't think specifically of like Ethereum or DeFi or Dapps, well, maybe to some extent Dapps. I think Web3 is anything that gives you visibility into a blockchain from your personal

device right if you've got a phone that can look at a blockchain if you've got a web browser with a plug-in that gives you visibility into a blockchain in my mind that gives that that's web3 um i don't know how accurate or coherent that is for a lot of people but that's just my sort of shorthand for how i think about it and i and so what i think is going to happen is there's going to be more uptake. So that's like the network edge is growing, right? And it's not like you don't have to have this resolver stack on your computer that's walking down this inverted tree that's controlled by this centralized authority. I also think, not meaning to geek out on DNS too much, but I've been waiting for a kind of decentralized explosion in resolvers to

happen as well um we see a little bit of the opposite right now but i think it's going to go the other direction at some point because the incentives are there and by that so like there's a dns server that just answers questions about a domain name right like uh you know where is example.com and the server will answer with an ip address that's a dns name server a resolver is on the other side of that question answer dialogue. The resolver is something your ISP uses or your gateway at your company. And it's asking all these questions. Like I got a guy here who's looking for, you know, greatamericanmining.com. And then it's going to go out and find the answer. It's going to come back and give them the thing. That's what a resolver is. And I

think what will happen over time is you can run a resolver on your own laptop right and i think that's going to start happening more and more you can run a resolver on your iphone because what's happening is large companies are forming like google's 8.8.8.8 or cloudflare 1.1.1.1 like they're all providing this hey it's a free resolver service but they're kind of data mining that. Eventually, they can even do traffic shaping with it. If enough people are using their resolvers, then you have this other incentive to data mine it. I'm not saying that either of these companies are doing that. I'm just saying the potential is there. The gateway is open to even shape traffic. You can expect another edge of the network to form

around people starting their own independent resolvers and if you do that then you can say look i want my resolver to resolve handbrake or handshake domains and unstoppable domains and ethereum name service domains and then again you're doing this end run around the i can route i've never heard of resolver before so i'm just trying to conceptualize this in my mind What needs to happen for your iPhone to be able to resolve something? So a DNS lookup has to have two sides to it. Someone's asking the question and someone's answering the question, right? So answering the question, that's an authoritative name server.

That's what EasyDNS does and other companies like it, right? The resolver is like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 or OpenDNS or Quad9, which is, I think, one of the better ones, 9.9.9.9. They're answering all these questions. They put in this sort of value add that they say, look, we're going to block known malware domains. We're going to block known phishing domains. We're going to put a security layer on that.

And that can be beneficial, for sure. but um there's also you're adding another single point of failure you're adding another choke point you're adding another gateway yeah so as a dns provider and somebody who runs a dns company like are you do you think you're gonna get an immense amount of pressure an overwhelming amount of pressure from from governments at some point in the future that's going to force your hand in some instances don't mean to put you on the spot but i think about this all the time i think about it a lot and um we have our own line um you know we've said no to certain companies and individuals who wanted to come on here and we just said you know it's just from a business risk

perspective it just doesn't make any any sense for us um and we've taken flack for that too we've taken flak for saying no, but there are companies that we have that, you know, Zero Hedge is a client and Zero Hedge is being touted in the media as being a Russian intelligence asset. So I kind of had the conversation with my wife the other day. It's like, oh man, I don't know if I'm going to be able to handle the stress of this. I mean, we'll handle it. Like we're not taking down zero hedge ever period full stop it's not going to happen um but uh yeah we i think about it all the time yeah i mean i think people don't understand the gravity of like how centralized is the dns space how many competitors you have would you say

so it's one of those things and i used to talk about this a lot on another podcast i had protocols versus platforms right so platforms sort of build themselves on top of open protocols and then they tend to get large to the point where they suck up all the oxygen in the space right so email is a protocol okay and anyone can stand up an email server and send email around gmail is a platform that soaks up a lot of oxygen out of the email space and suddenly if google decides they don't like your mail server they can just start throttling your traffic from your independent mail server so dns is the same way anyone can stand up an authoritative name server the same thing that i was talking about that you can put a resolver on your laptop or uh or on your

phone you can you can get a vps for five bucks a month and put a name server on it and those are your name servers so there's nothing stopping you from doing that but where i think that comes back to resolvers and it comes back to pressures like deplatforming and DOS attacks. Nowadays, to operate a name server, you've got to have DDoS mitigation and things like that. Otherwise, at some point, you're just going to get hit, especially if you're running something that is taking a little bit of deplatform pressure that you want to get out of the way of.

So it's going to, over time, it's been a battleground. It's faded a bit. I think it's going to come back and be a battleground. There was a really, just one line out of an Obama speech back when he was still president, and I can't remember the news event that incited it, but he said something in it that actually printed off the speech and underlined it. And he said, you know, the danger of unauthorized name servers. And I couldn't believe that that came out of the sitting president's mouth.

And I was like, Jesus Christ, this is scary, right? That there's a talk about dangers of unauthorized name servers. It's again, I don't mean to go on too much of a tangent, but like it's this pressure now up here in Canada, the Ontario Securities Commission is now reporting tweets to the RCMP about Brad Armstrong and the Kraken guy saying, you got to get your money off the exchange and go into a self-custody wallet. So it's the same tension everywhere, centralization versus decentralization. You buy Bitcoin, you should be self-custodying, and anybody can self-custody. But there's this pressure to centralize that. So you're not the custody, and you're in an exchange

where they can put their thumb on the exchange. For name servers, anyone can set up name servers, but there are these dynamics that are pushing people to DNS providers and things like that. So far, we've held up over the years and we continue to thread the needle and fight the good fight. So I don't really expect the zero hedge, for example, I don't think they'll ever come straight at us for Zero Hedge. But what they could do, and I've never made a secret of this, they can go to VeriSign. That's the inverted T, right? So ZeroHedge.com. They can go to the

people who run .com, VeriSign, and they can pull it straight out of the .com zone without us having anything to say about it. And that's happened. I mean, we'll get an email from VeriSign because we're a registrar we're accredited under dot com we'll get an email from them that says pursuant to a sealed warrant we've pulled this domain out of your out of your zone out of your account and out of the tld zone we can't tell you anything about it have a nice day that's it now in the past those domains were like kind of dodgy pharma domains like you know people selling like morphine online off a website out of russia like i can okay so we didn't even know they were on the system and it happens but you know when does that mechanism get employed for you know

talking about freedom which is now an alt-right word up here in canada who knows what's it like being being a canadian in canada right now well you know canada's always been a left-wing country right we've always been left of center um with this sort of like conservative countercurrent running through it i don't even identify as a conservative actually i mean i ran for the libertarians in 2015 um you know i think it's i think uh i like elements of both classical liberalism, like the free speech part of it, and do whatever the hell you want with your life part of it. And then some elements of conservatism, which is like you can't print money, you can't print your way to prosperity, which makes me a libertarian by default, which is a very lonely

thing to be in Canada. But I think it's turning. I really do feel like when this election cycle finally plays out. I don't think the liberals or the NDPs will, I think they've basically kissed off the working class for a generation because there's a lot of rage, but it's a lot of unspoken rage because you can't speak up because you get canceled. You get called a racist. You get called ignorant and infantile just for saying, how come my business has been locked down for two years and my kids are wearing masks at school and you guys are flying around on private jets with no masks having parties and talking about how everybody else is going to live their life under this great reset it's just i think there's a lot of unspoken ire about all that

yeah no i mean just being in the bitcoin mining industry and speaking with a lot of albertans and the oil and gas industry and how they've particularly been maligned over the last few decades specifically yeah absolutely and it's yeah it's a great shame it's like hard working class people and it's happening here in the united states too they're literally not even given the chance to live the life they want to live as oil men because these activities have been deemed too dangerous for society despite the fact that oil and gas are completely necessary for modern society um it's yeah i know it's i'm sure you're you're familiar with dunberg right his piece like in our energy policy is bonkers right well that's again that's another thing

there's so many i'm more i'm easier to believe that there there was some weird conspiracy going on some some kabbalah people because it seems like there's attempts at a controlled demolition and energy policy is part of that energy is extremely important and what we've seen in the western world i mean you germany has electricity rates of 40 cent a kilowatt hour um uh residentially and that's because they've phased out all their nuclear power plants and coal power plants for for wind and solar new york city just sat down its nuclear power plant a couple years after banning fracking in the state and Manhattan electricity prices went from something like $0.09 to $0.16 in the last year per kilowatt

hour, which is a significant rise. And you're seeing in Canada with the inability to extract as much oil as you potentially could. We could all be energy independent, but we refuse to be. And then you have this Green New Deal coming here to the United States, at least they're trying to bring it here that would destroy our energy sector and the reliability of our grids as well. It seems like it's everywhere you turn, whether it be COVID, energy, great financial crisis

and reaction to that. They're just trying to create systemic weakness so that people are scared and they're more easily manipulated. That's where my mind goes. It's hard not to go there. it really you know i'll admit that um yeah like why isn't nuclear a bigger part of the conversation because that that's like the you know i've always said we're gonna get off of fossil fuels if for

no other reason that there isn't an inexhaustible supply of it right like we're gonna run out someday. We got to get off of it. But why are we deliberately intentionally forsaking even things like thorium or the new pebble bed generations of reactors that could completely revolutionize the energy landscape and it's outside of scope. But that's changing a bit lately, I think, the uranium story um there's been some changes in england but going back like is it a cabal that's doing a controlled demolition it's it's one of those things for me where um it's just too big of a question to even ponder in the sense that if it's incompetence is it conspiracy does it make a difference right in the outcome it almost doesn't like the same we're still on the same trajectory

I think we're heading, and that probably could dovetail in with your thinking around this, I think we're headed for a monetary apartheid, where the outcomes, the big impelling factor behind all of this is the debt. We're finally, I think, hitting the end of this debt super cycle that we can't kick the can the way we have been for decades. And so something has to happen. And all of this other stuff could just be window dressing and veneer for how do we handle the end of the debt super cycle. And it could feel like a controlled demolition because you want people to be helpless. You want them to be completely reliant on the government. And that's the mindset of a centralized government. But I really do think that we are, I think there has been

a secular shift or there is a secular shift occurring from a centralized, it's the centralization versus decentralization, right? I think that is happening. The computer network changed it all and so um ultimately i don't think it's gonna succeed but the near term is gonna be pretty brutal i mean i was listening to your show with alec spesky did i get the yeah yeah you know the clown show right the clown show continues but i don't think the clown show can can i don't think it can actually sustain because the fundamental architecture of society has changed so all of this great reset green new deal all of that are like linear extrapolations of industrial age mentalities and configurations and and those days are over they're ending and

it's violent and it's turbulent and it's chaotic, but we're in a different architecture now. It's a network decentralized architecture. So no matter how much seeming power and control and wealth this paradigm has, it's an outgoing paradigm. It's just the game has changed. And so the people who controlled most of the levers of society, either institutionally or personally or dynastically, they aren't going to let it go easily. Who would want to? Who would go easy into that good night unless you decided we're going to do a pivot and we're going to get with the program? But those are the exceptions rather than the rules. So I think long-term, it's just it's inevitable i know you guys kind of frowned upon that idea in another one of your shows but

i still think of it that way yeah no i mean i i do i mean i think the transition and the power is underway it is inevitable and like you said you just have this incumbent class of people that is so used to having power and they're clinging to it With death grips, and it would be interesting, and pivot, if any of these people are clinging to powerlessly, I mean, pivot is your best option. How do you want to be looked at in the history books? It's something I think, if you're the people sitting there, you have to see the writing on the wall.

You mentioned the debt crisis. It's mathematically impossible to revert to that crisis, to ever pay back the debt that we've accrued, to ever make right on everything that has amounted over the last century. It's just not going to happen. They know that. We know that. They know that we know that. We know that they know that we know that. We're at that point where it's like, we know that you know, that we know, that everything's fucked. We've got these decentralized networks on the internet, Bitcoin and things like BitTorrent and other networks throughout the world rising. People are liking them.

They're providing more utility. They're uplifting people from poverty. They're opening access to information and wealth that was literally unfathomable only a century ago for humans around the world. You should pivot. just you know it's the other thing too it's like a weird tightrope that they have to walk over time they should pivot and really let the stuff flourish and be remembered in history as people who recognize that the folly of of the system that they had built and said you know what yeah

we fucked up we're gonna let this this this organic emergence these emergent systems thrive Because it does look like that it is giving people more opportunity, more equality, not equality of outcome, but just equality of access and opportunity. And yeah, that's, I mean, but with that being said, they probably will never do that. There's something about hubris and man's ego that forces some of these people to go down with the ship. and well the the question then is is it really up to them right and i used to think it was and lately maybe up until a week or so ago and i still actually you know i still believe it it's not it's not really up to them like this is just happening it's just that's just the way it's going and i think this these extraordinary clamp downs on freedom are not a sign of their

power. It's a sign of their weakness and their fear that they're really like, I think the whole system, this whole thing could turn to dust almost on a dime, right? The everything bubble could pop. Who the hell knows what's going to happen in the Ukraine? Even that aside, supply chains, energy, financial system. What happened in Canada the night Freeland announced we're going to seize your bank accounts, no due process, indemnify the banks, there's not a damn thing you can do about it, and all four big banks crashed that night? I don't know what happened there. I didn't really get any sense that it was a coordinated DOS attack or anything like that, but something happened. right something reacted to that statement and um yeah people were assuming it was a bank run but

do you think it was yeah but it's like who knows you don't know but something definitely happened and one of the things i'm actually working on a blog post about this which i'll hopefully get up in a day or two. I generally find it futile to try and predict what's going to happen. What I do is I look at what can't sustain. What are our core assumptions? What are the linear extrapolations that are being made about the future that just can't hold up? I find it more useful to think in those terms and always to think in terms of probabilities or scenarios more than absolutes. But it's almost paralyzing to say, to get involved in a mindset of this is what's going to happen in the future. Because it's almost overwhelming enough to look

at what's happening now and say, this isn't going to continue to hold up. But I just do find it more useful to say, what are the assumptions that can't hold or are unlikely to hold than what do I think is going to happen in the future? Who's doing what or who's in control? Nobody's in control at the end of the day. I think that's the reality. Well, yeah. And that's probably why we have this systemic fragility throughout the system because there are people who think they control these emerging complex systems it's the technocratic impulse right it's that that management by experts don't worry we've got this we can micromanage we know the exact rate of interest rates we know the exact level of money supply that has to be in and none of it's ever worked

i don't really understand where this conventional wisdom that it works comes from because it's just one long record of of compounding failure but here we are and uh another helicopter what i what i do want what i do worry about is when like i think the next you know exaggerated crisis will be climate and it's going to be well we can tune the climate we just have to climate lockdowns and complete energy rationing, which actually brings us to the Bitcoin energy thing, because I think that is a battle that we can't lose. Because once you see that somebody else has an authority to have a say on Bitcoin's energy usage, you basically said other people have authority over all energy usage. Why does it stop at Bitcoin? Why shouldn't it stop at whatever?

uh keeping up with the kardashians was i think you know alex gladstein once said or or uh you know heated bathroom floors like what are the things you know we're what's going to be outlawed under pure communism right yeah no and it's a fight that i'm on the front lines of these days and yeah and i think we're gonna win i think these these uh hate to use the word but synergies between the energy sector and the Bitcoin mining industry are so profound, obvious, and game-changing that it would be a great shame to prevent that net relationship and that symbiotic relationship from blossoming.

And I do think that Pandora's box has been opened in the specific regard of the integration of the energy sector and the Bitcoin mining sector, and there's no going back. I mean, you have executives at some of the biggest energy companies the world whether it be oil and gas when solar nuclear hydroelectric really seeing the results of implementing bitcoin mining into their operational stack and again it's undeniably making them more efficient making them more profitable and giving them ways to be more reliable moving forward as humanity that's exactly what we want but i do agree the climate change

narrative is coming i mean they're projecting uh out of davos that this is what they're going to transition to next but again it's like all right you know it fooled me once with the great financial crisis for me twice with um this this pandemic reaction and the lockdowns and everything that's ensued since march 2020 and like to immediately transition uh the same people into trying to lecture us about the the climate is i think i think they're going to have significant reduction and marginal returns on their ability to actually convince people to to go with the show that that's why i think you know covid despite all the disruption may may have that silver lining to it that it really just exposed the veneer of like this is really all just kind of like societal

wide gas lighting and bs and you know i don't think people are gonna buy it unless they like drop back 10 yards and punt and like wait another decade before they try and roll out the whole climate hysteria thing and i don't think the system as it is today has got a decade of gas left in the tank yeah it definitely doesn't i don't think i mean you already have klaus schwab talking about blotting out the sun i mean bill gates as well they wanted to do it weren't they going to like test it in sweden or something a few years ago wasn't that wasn't that the sequel to highlander you remember that movie but like this is another perfect example the hubris of the the expert class what they think could possibly go wrong yeah right let's not think

of any negative externalities of sending uh sending dust into the atmosphere to blot out the sun no way we could lose control of that and kill off most of the life on the planet But I mean, this happens, this is like, that's the dynamic across all spectrum, right? Because the central bankers are trying to do it with the economy. The technocrats are trying to do it with the climate and with social interactions, with lockdowns and social distancing. And it's just, no one has really like, you have all this ample evidence that it doesn't work, right?

And no one really acknowledges it. And it goes back. I mean, it's sort of the gist of even Austrian school economics, which is non-interference. Just let the market sort it out is how it would happen in the economic realm. And it would happen the same way in the human realm and even in the climate realm and everywhere That if human activity was really having an impact on something, I think the externalities would create true price signals, which would show that to everyone. And people would just figure it out one by one at a time that aggregate together into a real meaningful signal. I still believe that because I don't – I think all failures – all things that have been purported to be failures of markets or failures of capitalism are really just government policy and government interference failures, every single one of them.

Completely agree. I mean, again, we can't – I mean, we literally can't have good pricing signals in the markets right now because the money is all fucked. Imagine how much better the world will be once Bitcoin is widely adopted. We're on a Bitcoin standard. You actually have an accurate measurement of opportunity cost that affects capital allocation in ways that make humanity more efficient. You have quicker feedback loop cycles because you're getting quicker information about malinvestment. um and you just have capital being allocated to where it should be where it's most effective where it's most needed here here's something i think about though and it's almost like the devil's

advocate question but i think about it a lot because i mean i'm totally all in on bitcoin and i wrestle with will bitcoin become the bitcoin standard or is it just a phrase i've used is called Notgeld, which is a German term, which means emergency money during a time of hyperinflation. Let's say a Bitcoin standard emerges and Bitcoin becomes the world global reserve currency. Wouldn't everyone who holds Bitcoin not want to spend the Bitcoin? You already see that today, people are like, well, I'd rather just borrow against it to buy something because I don't want to sell my Bitcoin? Or is it a case that everything would reprice to a point where it takes a smaller and smaller number of sats to conduct your transactions, that that's the incentive to be

using this as your currency? I think number one, push comes to shove. People need to eat. They need have a roof over their heads they they want to go do things so they will spend money if they have to number two yeah i mean hypothetically if the world does adopt a bitcoin standard in the future the the increase in purchasing power won't be as profound as it has been in over the last 13 years since its launch um it will be more akin to to a low interest rate um you'll have the opportunity cost there uh yeah then on top of that like i i still very interested to see how a bitcoin standard plays out obviously it's not here yet and i've always been fascinated with a december 30th 2010 bitcoin talk.org post by hal finney which he came out and essentially

said that bitcoin will get us back to a free banking system which existed in canada scotland in the 18th and 19th century, I believe. And that has always made intuitive sense to me that Bitcoin will enable this free banking system to emerge where you have private banks competing with each other. They use Bitcoin as reserves and have different offerings to their clients in terms of interest rates and benefits and stuff like that.

uh that um that could make facilitate more um more velocity of money at that secondary level above bitcoin as a reserve currency below it um yeah and i could see play many ways i mean i see it right now there's people listening to this podcast who are sending us uh i mean this is from another episode they'll show you right now um there's definitely people listening today yeah literally 10 minutes ago, if people here are sending me 39, 38, 40 sats per minute, people spending it today, I get paid in Bitcoin for some of the advertisements on the show. I pay contractors in Bitcoin. People are spending Bitcoin every day, and there's still massive upside potential. I mean, I ask it philosophically, because I too, I mean, we've been taking Bitcoin payments

at EZDNS since 2013. And at the beginning, I thought, well, if Bitcoin really moons, all this will stop. But it never did. But what I did, of course, obviously, the number of sats to register your domain name just dropped dramatically. And so in my mind, I thought that this is what makes sense here is that it's taking less and less sats to do this. but i do think you have all the shit coins right and i think aggression's law and i think if a bitcoin standard comes everyone's gonna have like they're gonna earn sats they're gonna use that as the bedrock of their financial standing and then they're gonna do there's gonna be like most of your day-to-day transactions are probably gonna happen in some kind of like altcoin shit

coin token whatever maybe multiples of them no because then you have a hot potato with those coins right yeah because i mean i was like that's what people thought about litecoin in the early days you'll have silver to bitcoins gold that's how it was marketed then they've had dogecoin stable coins and i think yeah i think once you have a saturated market in terms of the amount of value that's been dumped in being orders of magnitude higher than what it is now uh the spending will be uh won't create too much of a a mental cost for users thinking about the the opportunity cost of increased purchasing power moving forward i think 20 30 20 40 at least decades from now i don't think um the the the sort of bitcoin spending

Bitcoin regret will be as large as it is today. It's so easy to send via the Lightning Network. Again, there's people sending me 40 sats a minute right now. That's half a penny. In a pure peer-to-peer fashion. That's at least what I think. You mentioned Gresham's Law, but Gresham's Law, many would argue, only has the ability to exist if you have no free market for money, right? The bad money drives out the good, so that's the bad money would be fiat currencies driving out gold and silver as money because it's sort of mandated. And then the opposite of that's Thiers' Law, where the good drives out the bad, where you

revert to a free market of money, which Bitcoin has allowed us to do. And then people consolidate on the best. The good money will drive out the bad. So people will be dumping. Maybe I'm actually reversing it in my mind when I say bad money drives. Because I know the original meaning of Gresham's Law. But I think it's not that it drives out, that the bad money drives out the good. It's just the good money gets valued higher than the bad.

So you're going to spend the bad on your day-to-day living expenses. keep the good for investments or whatever. But no matter what, I still think that non-state money, for me, that's the key driver of it. That's what changes everything. That's what says, OK, the whole structure of civilization has changed. I may not be able to look through the economics of it into the future as much as just understanding the incentives. Like, okay, so on this hand, I've got this stuff that's printed out of thin air that loses 10%, 20% of its value every year, and my government just announced that they will take this away from me with no due process or appeal.

Or over here on this hand, I've got this digital gold that no one can touch that's increasing in purchasing power every year and i can like walk out of the country with a brain wallet and re-access my wealth anywhere else in the world which would i rather have right so that's kind of a no-brainer that's all i need to know right now yeah yeah freedom money is is in vogue at the moment which is a beautiful thing to see hopefully it stays about for quite a while is yeah and so how do you are you optimistic about the future there's a question i've been asking a lot recently um i am i i sometimes fear that it's going to get worse before it gets better but um i'd say at the beginning of the pandemic i was in danger of

being swept away by negativity and pessimism and i just but then the more i started thinking about it and you know doing a lot more um research and you know even just like starting to uh adapt more meditation practices and things like that i just started to calm down and realize that uh this too shall pass right that so overall i'm i'm quite optimistic of the future i think humanity is headed for the stars, a Star Trek society. I think that, uh, I mean, transhumanism is a little bit of a, uh, uh, uh, what's the word I'm looking for sort of a wrong turn. Like I just, uh, we don't have to get, that's a whole other show to talk about that. But I think like we've got 8 billion supercomputers walking around on this planet and we're developing the technology and

the tools to unleash the potential of every single one of them. And, uh, we don't have to create artificial intelligence we don't have to create you know transhuman upload your mind to the cloud we got it all right here we got the whole package we got like i said eight billion supercomputers walking around on the planet and uh and we and technology is moving forward at a blinding speed blinding in every avenue so yeah i'm happy you brought that up because uh we are both in agreement that the metaverse is a scam yeah actually i wrote an article called that yeah i think so i think that's another you know if i did believe in davos circle jerk conspiracies that would be one of them to just say let's just shove all the plebes into the metaverse so they

don't take up any space in the real world and just leave them there so put the useless eaters in the pod put the goggles on them have them fight in the digital world it's yeah it's been weird sorry go ahead there you go well just you know uh in the matrix they were used as batteries right but you know the conspiracy theorists love this one but it's real it exists the the microsoft patents for humans mining crypto right so stick all the useless eaters into the pod and and mine crypto off their brainwaves and uh yeah yeah and like the metaverse it's been a real shame to see just for me a little shame it's just like huh like why is this becoming a large meme in the last year specifically to me it's just some weird forum nihilistic escapism that it's a product of

people not wanting to confront the hard problems in the real world whereas i see the hard problems of the world are just massive opportunities to make things better in meat space here you know like i have a child my niece my nephew my family in here it's like why would i want to escape to this this digital goggle world away from them yeah being my wife being flesh it's beautiful my wife writes romance suspense novels right she's working on her second one now and i've been pitching her on a story for after ever since she wrote her first one i said look because she loves like the whole jane austen which is like basically their love stories of forbidden love between classes right that's the standard jane austen or charlotte bronte she does her modern

take on it romance cyber thriller that kind of thing i said okay here it is one's in the metaverse one's in the real world they're forbidding love right you fall you know the the the the real world is where the elites live the the plebeians live in the metaverse and they one from each falls they meet they fall in love it's forbidden love and then the twist at the end is the one you thought was in the metaverse is really in the real world and the one you thought in the real world is in the metaverse you know one of these i like that yeah i like that plot that sounds like a good movie that you're uh you're thinking up there um mark there's been a fascinating conversation uh thank you for for answering my dm again i said for you freaks i'm sitting down

i don't even think i introduced you i'm sitting down uh with mark left of issues uh he you're founder of easy dns correct yeah one of the co-founders yeah one of the co-founders and then bombthrower.com is your blog that gets syndicated on zero hedge yeah um that's it yeah that's what i saw i saw one of mark's pieces on bitcoin and the situation in canada a couple weeks ago um on zero hedge i read it and that's one thing you're an incredible writer it was uh as somebody writes daily newsletter i was like damn i wish i could write this this eloquently um so yeah the way you describe bitcoin too it's very poetic and um a lot of passion comes through in your writing so i was like hey i'd love to talk to this guy i think um uh i think we need more people like

you're getting ideas like this out there like things are pretty chaotic right now but we do have the tools and the facilities to make the world a better place, Bitcoin obviously being one of the most important tools, which is why we have this podcast and do what we do here at TFTC. MAX WIETHE, MD, PhD Well, it was great meeting you when you reached out to me on Twitter. I said, oh, it's the real Marty Bent because you get so many fake Bitcoin luminary on Twitter. It's like you got to check how many followers does he has is really and when you know when they start the conversation with like how is your trading going today it's like oh okay this is the wrong guy but uh i love the work you're doing with great

american mining like i told you like i write the crypto capitalist letter and we actually it's not pure bitcoin but i'm probably one of the first newsletters covering the bitcoin stocks and so i already knew you from your fortress technologies days oh god what are they called now i can never remember the new name cathedral cathedral so you're gonna mix up i'm at cathedral now um and i'm no longer at great american mining but uh both companies oh i see you're all the way in cathedral yes yes i sit on oh i sit on the board and i'm pretty involved with um helping them facilitate uh stuff in the mining industry just from having been around for a while yeah beautiful so yeah i've been following you doing that work since i launched the newsletter

there and uh yeah you're one of my favorite companies so it's great thank you i think we've got a lot of big things coming so definitely awesome keep a lookout for cathedral's gonna have a big 2022 i'm very excited uh it's almost the end of february i think we're gonna have a very hot spring and summer uh it should be very interesting to see where we end up at the end of year great all right mark um we got to do this again this is a fascinating conversation uh thank you for joining us where can people find out more about you so azdns.com is my day job running there uh bombthrower.com is the blog that uh you know there's a mailing list there you can get the The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto and then the crypto.

If you go bombthrower.com slash trial, I think we've got a trial on for the crypto stock newsletter, if it's okay to say that. And yeah, that's it. I mean, that's Stunt Pope on Twitter and Bomb Thrower on Getter. Yeah, that's Stunt Pope and Bomb Thrower on Getter because who knows when I'm going to get tossed off of Twitter. so yeah our our days are numbered it seems drink be merry for tomorrow we die at least well mark uh again it was a pleasure i hope you have a great rest of your day yeah and i'll see you uh i'll see you on the internet yeah are you gonna be you're obviously

gonna be in miami i take it yeah i'll be here you're gonna come down oh yeah got it all booked so all right that's good i'll meet in person in miami though that'd be great all right take care peace and love freaks