TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #375: Keeping Your Bitcoin Safe From Exchanges with Phil Geiger

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Phil Geiger to discuss the self custody. The dive into how multisig works, the dangers of platforms like FTX, and the importance of distinguishing between Crypto and Bitcoin. Follow Phil on Twitter Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl CrowdHealth Upstream Data TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc i sat down with phil geiger from unchained capital not your keys not your cheese freaks learning some hard lessons in real time i mean i'm not trying to preach this for five years now on this show but many others are i feel bad for them FTX debacle it's a big one it seems to be pulling down others with it

Gemini rumors that Circle may have some problems today that's why I need to leverage Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties or just its native properties in general you can control your Bitcoin and you should do that

and Unchained Capital helps you do that and right down the hall from me here at the bitcoin commons and they built their company on the first principle of eliminating single points of failure in your custody model and this is brought to life with their two or three multi-sig volts which you hold two keys unchained holds one key we go through it in the interview with phil how these volts are constructed how they eliminate single points of failure and how you can get peace of mind knowing that your bitcoin is secure in a multi-signature vault and that you're not going to get FTX,

that you are not the yield, that you have the sats you think you have. It's what Unchained helps you to do. So if you're a Bitcoiner, if you're a high net worth individual, if you're a company with a Bitcoin treasury, if you're a fund looking to hold Bitcoin, Unchained has the solution for you

to make sure that you'll never have to worry about getting FTXed. Go to unchained.com. Check out their concierge team. If you're panicking right now because you're worried that your coins are on a centralized exchange that has not gone under yet, but you're worried that they may, go hit up the concierge team. They'll help you set up a vault and move your Bitcoin to the vault and have peace of mind that you're not going to get rugged. Go to unchained.com slash concierge. This was also brought to you by good friends at Brains, Brains, Brains, Brains.

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So if you have an ASIC that's compatible with BrainsOS Plus auto-tuning firmware and you're not running it, you're an idiot, especially in this environment with hash price below $0.06, Bitcoin price around $16K, hash rate still going up, you need to make sure that your profit margins are as high as possible. Downloading BrainsOS Plus auto-tuning firmware on an ASIC that it is available for is going to help you increase your profit margins. you gotta you gotta be eking out every set you can in this market environment so go to brains.com b-r-a-i-i-n-s.com check out the pool check out the firmware check out brains insights check out

their blog check out their books check out everything they have going on brains b-r-a-i-i-n-s.com this report was also brought to you by good friends at lend excuse me at hodl hodl their lending platform at hodl hodl lend.hodlhodl.com again this is another this is the this is the future of finance freaks. Everybody's like DeFi, DeFi, it's the future of finance. We're gonna have all these utility tokens. We're going to barter. No, the future of finance is building financial services that eliminate single points of failure by leveraging Bitcoin's multi-sig properties. HodlHodl does that with their lending platform by creating a product that allows you to use Bitcoin as collateral to get a relatively low interest rate loan from other individuals in

a peer-to-peer fashion with no KYC, no AML. And again, this leverages Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties. What you do is you put Bitcoin in a two or three multi-sig escrow wallet. You hold one key, your counterparty in the loan holds one key and HodlHodl holds the third key. You get stable coins in return for that collateral. And since you have one key in that two or three multi-sig quorum, you have visibility into the escrow wallet so that you know that your sats aren't being re-hypothecated and that when you pay that loan back plus the interest attached to it, you're going to get your stats back. You have confidence that you're going to get your stats back because you can see that they are staying put in the two or three escrow wallet. Lower rates,

no KYC, no AML, peer-to-peer, the lend.hodlhodl.com. This report was also brought to you by our good friends at CrowdHealth. CrowdHealth is here to help you do healthcare in a new way. You're taking sovereignty of your Bitcoin and your wealth. You should take sovereignty of your healthcare as well. Stop getting caught up in the black box that is a health insurance industry that does not care about you, that does not try to get you the lowest prices possible, that treats you as an input in an Excel sheet. CrowdHealth is here to help you rethink healthcare. It's not health insurance. What you do is you become a CrowdHealth member. You're going to join crowdhealth.com slash TFTC. Use the code TFTC. You're going to get $99 a month for the first

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CrowdHealth community to get crowdfunded. To date, they've had 100% of their bills paid. They can't guarantee that 100% of bills will get paid. However, it is a working model, has worked 100% of the time now. And since most CrowdHealth members have to make strict health requirements to become a member, the cadence, the frequency of health events within the CrowdHealth community is less than the overall population. So go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC, use the code TFTC at checkout to get $99 a month for the first six months and join their Bitcoin community. Because if you join the Bitcoin community after, I believe, six months of building up your health account, you'll be able to then pay your monthly

fee and put a portion of it into that bank account that's dedicated to you that you can always take back whenever you see fit if you decide to leave crowd health you have that money there and then they'll also stack sats alongside that you take a portion of your monthly payment and put it into bitcoin and speculative attack your future health care cost join crowdhealth.com slash tftc last but not least this rip was brought to you by good friends at upstream data who is the creme de la creme of building infrastructure for upstream oil and gas providers and utility companies uh either looking to operate with generators and data centers on site or to mine bitcoin specifically they have their hash huts i am a very happy hash out customer

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upstream data has the infrastructure for you to do that very easily upstreamdata.ca reach out to their sales team tell them the tftc sent you and enjoy this rip with phil geiger you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central 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. Phil, how does it feel knowing that you are the yield? I don't think I've ever experienced a brand collapse faster than the word yield. Like every time I hear yield at this point, I just shudder. It's even at this point, it's worse for me than crypto. Oh, I don't know about that. Really?

I think they're synonymous. Yeah. I think in a lot of ways they share, they come from the same place, which is you are the yield. You are the yield. The yield does not just magically appear, freaks. You are the yield, and we're finding out in real time over the last week and a half, or really the last week. I mean, when did you reach out to me, Sunday?

No, it was Monday. Monday. Two days ago. And we sit here, so it's Wednesday, November 16th, I believe. obviously we had FTX go down last week BlockFi went down with them and this morning

Genesis came out and said hey we're gonna halt withdrawals on their yield products specifically right that's right but that's how it starts right oh the yield product you can still withdraw and you know other products are just fine just pausing the withdrawals on the yield products

Gemini came out hey we're we're good we're pausing withdrawals on our yield product rest of the business is fine genesis had a lot of partners a lot of partners working with genesis on their yield program and i don't know guys i don't know freaks at this point if you still have funds with these custodians that are offering you yield you got to withdraw into self-custody. Yeah. Until this all blows over, right? Withdraw to self-custody. Don't say that. Withdraw to self-custody. Don't wait for it to blow over and be like, oh, the yield's good now. Oh yeah. Don't go back to the yield

because you are the yield and you don't want to be staked. When you think you're staking your crypto, what is actually happening is these companies are staking you. And a lot of times you can't get off the stake once you've been staked right they have you captured yes so what i was going to say though is withdraw to self-custody sleep sleep well and watch everything blow over from the sidelines don't you don't need to participate on this absolute disaster and the the way to do that is to take control of your keys yes which is what we've been preaching for some time why did it take all this to have people learn this lesson well at unchained our phones have been ringing off the hook this week and what it is in my perspective is that

everyone knows that they need to take control of their bitcoin they're like yeah oh man, I know I got to get my coins off of exchange and I have my cold card in my closet and it's just been sitting there for six months. And it's just, you know, I want to watch the next episode of Great British Bake Off and I'll do it afterwards. I'll take control of my keys. And then after that, you know, they've had a couple of beers during Great British Bake Off because that's what you do. And then they forget about taking control of their keys and they put it off for another day. But when you start seeing massive moves in the market and exchanges and custodians collapsing, that triggers like a fear response in people. And a lot of times people have made

the decision to hold their own keys way before they actually get up off the couch and start setting things up. I don't know what it is, but it's something I've experienced time and time again. I mean, I have people emailing me who I spoke with a year and a half, two years ago, we had a nice phone call or I met them in person, talked to them about holding keys and they said, yeah, that's a great, that's great. I need to do that. Absolutely. I get it. A year and a half later when everything's collapsing, they're like, I need to be holding my keys now. It's like, yes, but a year ago. So I mean, you alluded to it, but like how big of a week historically is this for Unchained?

This is one of Unchained's best weeks ever in terms of new client acquisition, in terms of trading volume for our Bitcoin purchase product. And it's interesting. While the Bitcoin collateralized loans are in a little bit more of a precarious situation, And with the price dipping, you know, if the if your collateral hits a certain percentage, we do issue a margin call and we do have some clients that are struggling there. And I never want to see that happen. But while all that is happening, the other side of the business is taking off like a rocket.

Yeah, we're as I mentioned, you know, our our our kind of frontline sales team, their phones are ringing off the hook. Um, and it's, it's unfortunate. I mean, it's great, but it's also unfortunate. It's like people are desperate and we've been there the whole time. And, uh, it's something that I, I just keep thinking about is, you know, how can, what can I be doing differently to change the message to help people make that decision and take action sooner so they can sleep well at night. Yeah.

So in your mind, what do you, what do you think we can do better? Cause we have been preaching this for years. I mean, Unchained's been a sponsor. Yeah. On this show, for almost five years now, it feels like at least four, four and a half, coming up on five, we've been preaching two or three multisig, take custody, not your keys, not your coins, you are the yield, trusted third parties are security holes. these all seem like very cogent direct message vehicles but for some reason people have not learned until they're forced to learn as they have been forced in the last week what are you thinking moving forward we can do to engender a sense of urgency i'm not sure about what we can

do to engender a sense of urgency i mean i think there are certain people that just have to be burned before they understand why we scream about holding your keys and eliminating counterparty risk and eliminating single points of failure from your Bitcoin. What I do think we can do is try to soften the message of holding keys to a newcomer. When we talk about holding keys and people start researching, doing their research on how to hold keys, what they find is, you know, a 30 page article about, you know, how to generate your own seed phrases and how to use your full node to, um, you know, how to connect your full node and how to set up your wallets and use multi-sig on your own. And I think all of those things are great. All of those things are

absolutely what people should end up with, but that's in my opinion, not where they should start with. Like if they see a 30 page document about, uh, you know, obtaining non KYC sets through mining and running your full node and verifying everything, it, it turns people off. It that's the, that's, you know, those, those like mainstream media tweets where they're like, nobody's going to learn how to do all this. Like, that's what they're, I think, referring to what we need to be pushing a little bit more uh more delicately or whatever is is like you can worry about all the privacy and you can worry about you know all of the all the most technical ways to ensure that your seed phrases are generated without any counterparty risk

after you've secured your bitcoin by holding your own keys in the fastest and easiest way possible like there there are now multiple companies with teams of people that will literally walk you know your aunt through holding the private keys to their bitcoin and you know you're you're typically actually in all scenarios you're making an anonymity trade-off you're working with a partner who knows you are i'm sure you've paid for the service in one way or another but first take control of your keys like the easiest simplest way possible download you know blue wallet or samurai or whatever any mobile wallet move some funds and help people understand that it's like you can start with five bucks worth of bitcoin on a mobile wallet but start and then

you progress you take the next step slowly and at the end you get to the point where you know you have the most cypherpunk setup ever it's you know you're mining off of you know your your own solar installation and all that good stuff but that's that's the very bottom of the rabbit hole and we definitely don't want to in my opinion present that as the first option for people it turns people off what what these custodian platform custodial platforms offer is like it's exactly the same way the legacy financial system works you set up an account you forget your password you set up your 2fa you your 2fa device falls in the water while you're boating and so you just call them and they reset your 2fa but it's just insecure you're making a massive

security trade-off with bitcoin because bitcoin is not the dollar it just functionally works different no and this is something i was discussing yesterday there's a layer beyond all this or before all this trying to think of conceptually if it's before or beyond but there's this layer of personal responsibility that people really have to come to grips with like this does with great power and the power of controlling your own bitcoin is great power becomes great responsibility that's something i was saying yesterday we live in a day and age where personal responsibility is not as high on the priority list as maybe it should be in bitcoin particularly holding your own keys and controlling your own Bitcoin

really demands somebody taking personal responsibility over their money. And I'm beginning to think maybe we have to start the narrative there where, hey, this is very important. You have to be personally responsible for this. And how do we get that message through of with great power comes great responsibility, and you have to take that responsibility. and it's worth it potentially i think what people don't realize is they are making a decision to go with a service that is lower security by not learning how to hold your keys like

you're responsible yeah yeah it's but you're you're actively making a decision you're not you're not just like oh i'll learn how to do this later you're saying i'm comfortable today with a significantly, categorically worse form of security for my Bitcoin. When you're working with one of these exchanges or custodians, what is securing your Bitcoin is not how they're holding their keys, which is an aspect of it. It's primarily your email login password. Do you have 2FA set up for your email?

If your email gets broken into, someone has all the tools they need to socially engineer your custodian to steal your Bitcoin. They have your email address. They can start communicating, uh, with the account team at XYZ custodian, the account team, you know, we'll ask some verifying questions. I'm sure you can dig up all your, you know, identification stuff from when you've emailed other, uh, services in the past with your ID or passport or whatever, and they'll reset your two FA and then your funds are gone. Right? So it's not, it's not even how the custodian holds the keys, which, you know, is important, but what people don't recognize is the most common way that people lose Bitcoin with a custodian

is just getting their account logged into and hacked. So all of that is connected to the internet 24-7, 365, 2FA, and a password for your email login or your custodial account login is significantly weaker than a private key. Yes. And this is another thing we should lean into is, I mean, that's the big boogeyman scare narrative that people use is if you do take on the personal responsibility to control your own keys and hold your own Bitcoin, you maybe don't want to do that because you're likely to lose that information and lose your Bitcoin forever. When objectively looking at that throughout the history of Bitcoin, most people have lost the most amount of Bitcoin by trusting these third parties. I think that that's the most people have lost Bitcoin through trusting these third parties most number of people I don't know if it's the highest number of Bitcoin because there was a lot yeah the guy like lost his hard drive in the that's yes the most number of people have lost

Bitcoin via these third-party services I think that that's correct um I don't think people recognize so another thing that that is just kind of fascinating about Bitcoin is especially if you're newer, you think, oh, well, everyone's using these exchanges. Everybody's got, you know, everyone's using a custodian. They're not learning how to hold their own keys. That's crazy. That's, too technical for me. Something like 80 or 75% of all of the Bitcoin that exists is currently under the control of private keys, not at an exchange. And especially after the last couple of weeks, I think something like 200,000 Bitcoin left exchanges. So exchanges are probably left with maybe, maybe 2 million Bitcoin in total. So the rest of the Bitcoin, 19 million, roughly,

you know, some of it is lost, but maybe 17 million Bitcoin, 16 million Bitcoin is currently being controlled by private keys that individuals hold. Bullish. That's super bullish. And, you know, if you look at on-chain data, uh, those people are, are just cruising. They're not selling their Bitcoin. They're not moving it right now. Yeah. It's insane with this. I mean, they were talking about it was mentioning they threw on cnbc this morning i had the early bird shift with the children and that was one of the stats they threw out there jim kramer was like aghast he was like for some reason the price is down but 75 of bitcoin holders have held bitcoin uh throughout the last six months which is insane we have jim jim kramer referencing the huddle waves yes that's

bullshit no it's hilarious that it dumbfounds these people yeah because that's the other thing with this whole the events of the last week is the blow-up of ftx and the contagion that it has unleashed really leaves us a shit stain obviously on the crypto industry but it drags bitcoin down with it and these people are dumbfounded because they're like how could these bitcoiners see everything that's going on and remain calm and the public or the talking heads don't understand that many bitcoiners once they understand bitcoin understand that there's a clear distinction between bitcoin and crypto and if you're doing things the right way you're going to be okay definitely and i it's so so interesting to me that and it's because i i've been in bitcoin for

long enough at this point where like crypto just looks like such a train wreck to me but i think to the general public crypto is actually a lot more familiar you know it's not actually innovative it's just the legacy financial system turned up to 11 it's like everything that's terrible and predatory about the legacy financial system, just cranked up, accelerated, less secure, faster collapses, you know, more quote unquote profits or yield in dollar terms. And it's garbage. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a global revolution in money. Like it is a foundationally resetting the entire global economy on a sound money that

the whole world can use and so it's very difficult to see that at first when you when you're thinking in dollars and you're out to make more dollars and your whole life has been dollars and everyone around you accepts dollars it's hard to see that the dollar is falling apart oh it really is and it's going to take time to get people over over that edge it was really interesting too the last week. With the lower inflation print, lower CPI print last week, we did have markets rallying on that. It was a shame to see Bitcoin had this whole shit show. It wasn't really Bitcoin yet, FTX shit show going on, dragging Bitcoin down because people were going bunk on their loans. So they're forced to liquidate Bitcoin to cover their liabilities. And that's the unfortunate

situation we find ourselves in and am i too much am i smoking too much opium to believe that this particular contagion event will be a tipping point in pushing the public to realize there's a difference between bitcoin and crypto and not only that but i should probably be taking possession of my keys or taking possession of my bitcoin using keys that i control I think once the wreckage kind of settles and the rubble clears, people will look around and see, okay, what's left standing? And they'll see Bitcoin-only companies in a position of strength, or at least not complete weakness, right? Like comparatively strong does not necessarily mean that the Bitcoin companies are strong, but, uh, yeah. And, and, you know, slowly over time, it's going to click in more and more people's brains that, wow, Bitcoin is the signal. Crypto is the noise. I am the yield holding private keys is categorically superior security. Like there's, it's, it's unquestionable. There's no question about it. Holding your own keys is more secure. Do you have to learn a new skill? Definitely. Are there people who will teach you

that new skill and walk you through the process and be extremely gentle with onboarding you? A hundred percent. Many, many companies, many teams of people out there will help you take control of the keys in in a way that you feel confident with and i think yeah it's you know we got to onboard something like eight billion people to private keys it's going to take a while but the more people that get confident with it and understand how bitcoin is different from the dollar and from any other currency the the more and more people take control of keys and that's that's what we're seeing this week is more and more people are purchasing hardware wallets i think ledger announced that it was the best week of sales ever um like again at unchained we're

seeing very very huge volumes for us and uh it's great i mean more people holding more keys makes bitcoin more anti-fragile makes it stronger um and this is the process of decentralizing bitcoin right like now we've had you know many cycles where bitcoin pools on exchanges the worst exchanges collapse the bitcoin that people can salvage is moved to private keys and very very very very rarely almost never does that bitcoin go back to an exchange like it's a one-way exit i always think of bitcoin as kind of two two one-way exits the first one is i understand that bitcoin is a neutral global form of money with a fixed supply of 21 million and i need to have some i to save in it. That's the first exit. The second exit is I'm holding the private keys to my

Bitcoin and nobody can confiscate it from me without authentication from one of my keys. And those two things together are so powerful that there's nothing that a government or, you know, central bank can do to compete with that. I heard, you know, one of the funniest things I saw, I think it was yesterday, was an announcement that a bunch of banks are teaming up with the Federal Reserve to fast track a digital dollar. Yeah. Like the dollar's already digital. It's already digital. It hopefully somebody, someone out there will think about like, wait a minute, the dollar's digital. Why, why is my central bank trying to launch this thing? And then they'll look at cryptocurrency and then they'll be like, oh, maybe it's, it's, maybe it's Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin's the only one that's really survived this, this disaster. So is my central bank publicly announcing that they're being disrupted by Bitcoin?

Are they trying to compete? Are they trying to compete with Bitcoin? Maybe I should own some Bitcoin. The other thing that I think is kind of funny about this announcement is, for a while, I've just been thinking that central bank digital currency kind of competes directly with these private banks. It's like, why would I need my Chase account if I can just have an account with the Federal Reserve, assuming I want dollars, which I don't. And so I think the next step for a lot of these banks is to you know offer the central bank digital currency but then also add bitcoin it's like okay cool we've just uh put bitcoin in the hands of you know or at least exposed you know millions millions of

more people to the idea of bitcoin that's in my opinion like bitcoin's anti-fragility like they have to compete with the fed now as well as uh bitcoin so well this actually touches on an interesting point because there was a comment from gary gensler this morning out of the sec funnily enough one can argue that he was complicit in this FTX debacle but he came out this morning and said alright

moving forward we need to begin creating guidelines to clearly delineate to distinguish between what the CFTC handles and what the SEC handles and I think it was

availed foreshadowing of like boxing out native cryptocurrency companies from providing their services of buy, sell, custody, Bitcoin in favor of the big banks who they would deem to be better fiduciaries. And I think moving forward, we really have to lean into this

where the regulatory backlash that could be coming our way after this FTX blow up could be completely counterproductive because if this ftx blow up taught us anything it's that people should be holding their keys and not trusting third parties whether it be ftx or jp morgan and that's what i worry about is the regulatory backlash is going to be like no you can only use it with these trusted institutions when it should really be all right we need to educate people how to take control of their Bitcoin and custody it themselves? Some people are going to try their very, very hardest to lose their Bitcoin. And I don't know

how to help those people. But what I am noticing is that the scale of all of these collapses is just increasing. And so I think you're right. I think the next level, so the government's looking at this like oh man these these crypto unregulated crypto exchanges and custodians uh they're not secure we need to have our our you know private banks become custodians to protect the consumers um but the exact same thing is going to happen with them too like you can't it's not it's not of of in my perspective a long-term viable business model to hold bitcoin on behalf of other people. You're a single point of failure for a pool of Bitcoin, which is the most valuable money in the entire history of humanity. And there are native properties of this money that

allow you to eliminate any single point of failure or all single points of failure. So there's no need for anyone to have their bitcoin uh be at risk of of loss from one company it's just not it's it's not something that you have to put up with anymore yeah so for any of the new freaks that are here let's dive into that what about bitcoin's native properties create this environment in which you can eliminate these single points of failure i like to start with just this this simple statement that all Bitcoin live in Bitcoin addresses that are tracked by the blockchain, which is a database of all Bitcoin transactions since the beginning of Bitcoin. Each Bitcoin address is constructed and controlled by something known as a private key.

Now, a private key can live on a piece of hardware, like a hardware wallet, signing device. A private key can live on software. So on your mobile wallet, the private key shares what's known as a public key with software to build your Bitcoin address. So an address is actually kind of a it's a public key taken and manipulated and turned into a Bitcoin address. The private key allows you to move the Bitcoin out of the address. So the private key is used kind of construct the address and move the bitcoin out of the address now you can build bitcoin addresses from one public key or you can build them from many public keys if you build a bitcoin address from multiple public keys that's called a multi-signature address so for example the most

common i would say is a two of three multi-sig three keys are used to construct a given address And any two of those keys are required in order to spend Bitcoin from that address. So for anybody who's new to Bitcoin, who may be coming in after I went on the Glenn Beck show yesterday, I went on the Barstool show yesterday, another way to view these public addresses are individual safety deposit boxes associated with your private keys. I like to use the metaphor treasure chest. Yes. Yeah.

there's a treasure chest where your bitcoin live and you can have one lock on your treasure chest and i consider a lock like a public key you can use one public key to build an address you can use one lock on your treasure chest or you can have a treasure chest with multiple locks three locks two out of three keys are needed to unlock it i think that's a good metaphor because it it also um multi-signature addresses just work a little bit differently than single signature addresses in another way. But anyways, I like to start with this concept of a single address. And then when I think about a Bitcoin wallet, a Bitcoin wallet is really a series of addresses that are controlled by the same kind of master private key. And I think of the master

private key as my seed phrase, my 12 or 24 word seed phrase. So a seed phrase can control a wallet of Bitcoin, which is, again, a series of Bitcoin addresses that are all constructed from that single seed phrase or from multiple seed phrases. So what a wallet is not is a device, a hardware wallet. I don't think that's a very good term for what a hardware wallet does. I think they're more of like key managers. A wallet is not the software that you run. So I don't view Sparrow or Electrum or Unchained as the wallet. I view the wallet as the collection of Bitcoin addresses that are tracked by the Bitcoin blockchain that you control. Now, the software is what helps you to display your wallet. So it goes out and it looks up your Bitcoin

addresses on the blockchain. It'll consolidate all of them and say, hey, here's your wallet. And again, a wallet is a collection of Bitcoin addresses controlled by your keys. So there's a lot of moving parts, but I think having the right mental framework helps people to visualize what's going on. Because with multi-signature and with many forms of Bitcoin wallets, you can take your seed phrases and you can rebuild your wallet, your collection of addresses in different tools. You can set up a wallet in Electrum, single signature wallet in Electrum, take your seed phrase, pop it into Sparrow, you'll see the exact same wallet. And that's because the wallet is your collection of addresses.

It's not the tool that you're using to view your addresses. It's not your hardware wallet. Your hardware wallet is your keys. So with multi-sig, it's kind of the same scenario. But with multi-sig, you need this idea of like a treasure map. You need all of the information, all of the public keys that were used to construct your wallet. You need to have those. And we typically at Unchained, we'll give our clients a wallet configuration file.

It's just a text file, essentially, that has the public keys. That's the treasure map to your treasure chests. And then you can use the treasure map in any open source multi-sig software to find your wallet and you can use your keys to spend your wallet. But so in this way, for all of our products and services, including Bitcoin collateralized loans, Unchained itself is never the single point of failure. Unchained could completely disappear. And if you have in like a catastrophic scenario, so we always like to think about the catastrophic

scenario, as long as you have your wallet file, your treasure map, and you have enough of the keys. You can find your wallet in open source software. We published our own caravan. Sparrow is a great alternative. Electrum can be used. You can find your vault. You can find your collateralized Bitcoin. And then you would just need to gather signatures from key holders and you could spend your Bitcoin. So it's funny. We had a lot of folks calling in when they heard the FTX news saying, okay. And a lot of, uh, let's just call them crypto influencers, um, calling out, Oh, I heard rumors about, uh, yeah. Like if they're very technically illiterate because the whole way that we've designed our product, our platform and our company is that we are not

single points of failure for our clients, Bitcoin, as long as they have followed the instructions and set up their vault correctly, uh, which we will, you know, walk them through that as well. So we empower our clients with all the tools that they need to never have to rely on unchained. And then we are their financial partner. You can buy Bitcoin from us. You can hold the keys to your retirement, Bitcoin and IRA. You can take out a loan, um, use, use our business accounts. Right. But at no point in time are we going to, we don't have the ability to lose or spend your Bitcoin without authentication from one of your keys.

And this is where the signal is and why I've been proud to have Unchained as a sponsor of this show and the newsletter and Rabbit Hole Recap for so many years and why I'm very confident in supporting you guys. Again, the signal is here because when you talk about the world of crypto

and they're like, we're revolutionizing finance and we're doing that via DeFi and decentralized exchanges and we're creating this token bartering ecosystem where you'll have all these utility tokens. That's the noise. The signal here is if we are truly going to reconstruct a new monetary and financial system using Bitcoin,

it's going to be built on these multi-sig quorums between many institutions and individuals. Yeah, the irony about all of this is while Unchained is a company, we're a financial services company, our products are significantly more decentralized than any of defy because all of defy is based off of these absolutely unnecessary tokens so launched by a team right so that's the single point of failure it's like whoever has the key is the single point of failure in all of defy and there's many single points of failure like it's it's uh it's it's counterparty risk on top of counterparty

risk on top of counterparty risk and then just insane rehypothecation everybody is just trying to earn yield and again it all comes back to this you are the yield yeah like i still it's still like absolutely shocking to me that um the the whole like ethereum staking contract where you just deposit your Bitcoin and then, or your, your ETH or whatever. And you can't withdraw it. And they scrubbed their website for when they're going to be able to draw it. Oh, it's coming in six months. Oh, it's coming in six to 12 months. Oh, we have no idea. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what you get when you buy shares of the Ethereum company. Yes. Yes. But going back to the, like, going back to like, so how do you, like, I think Unchained

has built the base layer infrastructure for the financial system of the future where we're going to transition to a Bitcoin standard, a hard money standard, and the services are going to be built around these multi-sig quorums where individuals and institutions are confident to engage with financial service providers

and financial service providers are confident to produce these services because everybody's going to know where the bitcoin is at any given point in time and if anybody tries to cheat that the person is getting cheated will notice and start raising alarm bells and hopefully take legal action against that absolutely there again i'll just reiterate this point in bitcoin there is absolutely zero need for any single company or entity to be a single point of failure for the funds, for client funds. It is not a requirement for how Bitcoin works. Bitcoin works in ways that allow you to eliminate single points of failure by distributing keys. The other thing I'll mention is what your statement reminded me

of is this uh concept of proof of reserves and it's hot right now i hate that concept you cannot you're trusting another company to to show you their reserves the only way that you can prove the reserves of your bitcoin is by confirming that you have the keys to your bitcoin address by using your hardware wallet to check your address on the device and then to use your full node to look up your address or your wallet balance and confirm that it has received real Bitcoin. That is the only way to prove your own reserves of Bitcoin. And when you're using a service that works native to Bitcoin, that uses the tools that Bitcoin allows us, that Bitcoin provides us, you can very easily do this. You can prove to yourself that you have the keys

to your Bitcoin address. You can see the address on the blockchain. Your device will tell you, yep i'm one of m keys to this address and then you can use your full node and you can go look up your address and make sure that that address has real bitcoin in it um that's i don't even know what that's comparable to it's like it's revolutionary yeah like you it's like if you had a comparable to anything it's like if you had like one of those twenty thousand dollar gold verification machines uh where you could like verify that your gold was real but then also could check that, uh, the total supply of gold hasn't been changed. Um, or is, is, you know, what you would expect it to be. It's kind of like that, but you know, it's, it's better because

you can do this for free. Like this isn't, this isn't rocket science. Uh, you know, one of the other things it's like, man, this year has been insane, dude. But like thinking about the Craig Wright trial, like all the guy has to do is sign a message. You're Craig Wright. You signed a message saying that you were Craig Wright. I did sign a message saying that Phil Geiger is Craig Wright, but that was to demonstrate how easy it is to sign a message using your keys. It's like, you can do it on completely free software. You can generate a seed phrase for free. You can use free software to sign messages. um if you have the keys to the bitcoin it's trivial to sign a message saying that this is

my bitcoin and then you've proven cryptographically that you control the bitcoin yeah so it's you know all these ideas they sound they sound very intimidating i think to a lot of people but the the user experience of a lot of these tools has gotten so good over the past few years that you sit down you download sparrow wallet you know it takes five minutes to set up you have you generate a seed phrase you write it down you know or you buy a hardware wallet you buy to buy a cold card or trezor or ledger or you know any of the other awesome hardware wallets out there like they really focus on user experience and they make it pretty easy it's like can you can you write down a grocery list on a piece of paper can you not lose that grocery list great you can

hold the keys of your bitcoin yeah you're gonna be fine yeah it's not that hard but again this is a good segue into something i want to touch on which is like the biggest knock is like my tech literate illiterate aunt or your average joe is not going to be able to do this it's simply too daunting but you've seen from firsthand experience that this is it the case uh it's It it's not the case that your, your aunt can't, sorry, this is a double negative. It's your, your aunt's going to be able to hold the keys to their Bitcoin, to her Bitcoin. Um, my team at unchained is the concierge onboarding team. I founded it and set it up because I realized that there isn't just an educational gap when it comes to Bitcoin. It's like an educational

chasm. It's massive. Like people just need, uh, need a guide to shepherd them through the process. Um, there's, you can, we can put out and we have at unchained and really just the open source community has put out, you know, amazing educational guides that will walk someone through step-by-step and do it in a very secure way. And regardless of all the, you know, step-by-step free guides we put out, people still just want to hop on a call with somebody trusted, trustworthy and walk them through it. And so that's what my team does is we will ship out hardware waltz. We ship out treasures to our clients.

We walk them through setting up treasures, writing down their seed phrases. Of course, Unchained never sees any of the seed phrases. Then we help them on our platform construct the multi-signature vault, which, again, just involves connecting your hardware wallets, sharing extended public keys. So those locks that I was talking about earlier, you share the locks to your treasure chest from your devices. and then we combine those locks with our lock with unchained lock to form these bitcoin addresses that are protected by three keys and you know we'll even help folks move bitcoin from exchanges or from single signature wallets we've helped folks recover bitcoin from old kind of mobile wallets that went under or disappeared we have a really strong technical team and we're there for

you on an ongoing basis too. So if you ever get stuck in a situation where you've lost an element, a key element, you have us to reach out to. You can hop on a call with us and we will help you recover your Bitcoin. And I think that's the other thing about our approach is many people will say multisig is too complicated. It's not the right place to start for a newcomer, but I would argue very adamantly the opposite. And in particular, in this collaborative custody model, I think it's the simplest way to deliver superior security for newcomers you set up two hardware wallets you build your vault the individuals have four physical items to protect two devices two seed phrases as long as they separate one of those seed phrases there's no single physical or digital

point of failure for their bitcoin they can lose three out of four of those elements and unchained can help them recover. They just can't lose all four. So, you know, the first step is separating one seed phrase and then we work with our clients to help separate more seed phrases and then separate devices so that we have a little bit more redundancy. But yeah, even if you just separate one of those elements from the other three, like I think it's the most secure way to store anything because there's no physical or digital point of failure. Like Fort Knox is secure, but there's a physical point of failure yeah it's like there's one fort knox and if you bomb it you know you can get access to it and then even before you bomb it you can't audit it yeah or you can audit your

bitcoin that's right you can audit your bitcoin there will only ever be 21 million um and your full node will show it to you yeah again i really want to drive home the future of decentralized finance or finance on a Bitcoin standard, I believe very vehemently, very ardently, is going to be built on multi-sig quorums with individuals acting or interacting with different service providers or other individuals, whatever it may be. And then this is how we avoid the FTX situation. This is how we avoid the 2008 banking crisis. You create these financial products. Yes, They may be credit restrictive to a certain extent. I'm not saying credit won't exist on Bitcoin,

but for most vanilla financial services, like on a Bitcoin standard, like the gold standard or the Bitcoin standard, the standard is going to be, I think moving forward, what Unchained has set the precedent for, is if you're going to interact with these services, It's going to be using some form of multi-sig quorum, like the loan product. An individual obviously doesn't hold two keys in that quorum, but they hold one.

So they know that their Bitcoin isn't being rehypothecated. And then even in that product, too, it's not Unchained holding the other two keys. It's you holding one and another third party holding one. That's right. Yeah, the financial services, we distribute keys among three parties for our loans. That's our kind of primary financial service today. outside of our retirement, our IRA, which is where you get to hold the keys to your retirement Bitcoin. But for the Bitcoin collateralized loans, yeah, the keys are distributed among

three parties and two out of three parties have to collaborate to move the Bitcoin. And maybe most importantly, well, that's probably the most important, but secondarily and very important as well is the title of the Bitcoin still remains titled to the client. So, you know, it's not, you haven't become an unsecured creditor of Unchain by taking an Unchain loan. Like we put your collateral into a Bitcoin address. It cannot be rehypothecated based on the cryptography that secures the Bitcoin protocol. Well, technically it can if you and Kingdom Trust did, but if you and Kingdom Trust did collude to take the Bitcoin for whatever reason, which would ruin your reputation immediately what would that would be a felony that two companies colluding to commit a

felony yeah yeah so i guess okay the the bitcoin can be lost but there is still no single point of failure like it always requires multiple actors doing something nefarious yeah no the reason i brought that up because i had people tweeting at me like well kingdom trust and unchained can collude to take your bitcoin i'm like yeah well if they do that it's a felony yeah the other thing that i it's it's so um i've mentioned this a few times to people but like in the worst possible scenario you can possibly imagine you're always going to lose your bitcoin but like you have to be thinking about the likelihood of these things and uh the likelihood that yeah two separate companies like kingdom trust uh is a you know we're we're like a small partner of theirs they

have an entire business outside of holding one key to our collateralized loans like are they really going to put that at risk for your individual loan and then also convince us or vice versa, right? Like two companies that have their own company's best interests at heart would have to flagrant, flagrant, flagrant. They do have to break the law. Like, you know, it's possible, but there's no scenario where you can, you can consume financial services without some element of trust somewhere like that's that's how financial services kind of work yeah if you want yeah a good or service you need to trust that the person's going to deliver that on the back end exactly um so yeah i think there's no uh yeah so just to recap like you can you're you're using one

of your keys to construct the address you can confirm the address on your device you can confirm the address balance on your full node uh the keys are distributed among three parties the title of the Bitcoin remains titled to you and multiple companies would have to commit felonies to take your Bitcoin. Yeah. And we're not, you know, we're not like forcing people to take loans. Like loans are one of our product. Our primary products I would say today are helping people secure their long-term savings in a multi-signature vault, helping people secure the keys to their tax advantage, Roth or traditional IRA, Bitcoin, helping people secure the keys to their business treasury, and then buying Bitcoin directly into the cold storage. So those are kind of some

things that we've been investing in over the last year. You know, our loans were our first product, but we recognize that a loan is something that you might need sometimes. Everyone always needs the strongest form of custody yes yes and now let's dive into why this exists which is the FTX blow-up so FTX users collectively I believe there's around a million unsecured creditors that are waiting to get their funds back and probably will be waiting forever and I doubt that they'll be able to salvage any of those funds but out of those million unsecured creditors they believed collectively that they had access to 70,000, more than 70,000 Bitcoin that they thought they had sitting on FTX, but it has become apparent that they had actually zero Bitcoin.

That's right. It turns out that FTX clients were the yield. Yes. The Bitcoin went into the black box and immediately disappeared. And yeah, I think I heard something like they have one Bitcoin or something and they have a 80,000 Bitcoin liability. Um, I'm laughing. It's, it's, it's horrible for those people and like never want to see people losing their funds or, you know, never want to see people committing fraud like this. Cause it's truly awful. And like just negative sum, right. It's just destruction of capital and time and people's savings and that's not something to be cheering on but like

man we've just been we've just seen it over and over and over and over and over again like it's all so avoidable and it's it's kind of exhausting right it's like yeah of course ftx is going to blow up like maybe maybe just to be clear like i believe that all centralized custodians will follow the same fate because it's not a sustainable business model it's not secure to have a single point of failure for a pool of client bitcoin i would agree i mean the temptation to re-hypothecate is too high especially if you have vc-backed companies publicly traded companies and they're getting pressured by their capital backers or for their shareholders in the public markets to drive revenues.

I mean, the lowest hanging fruit is like, all right, let's take this Bitcoin and lend it out on the back end to get some yield there. And what we've come to find year after year, cycle after cycle, is that those centralized third parties aren't really good at discerning who is a good counterparty in the loans that they're giving out with your Bitcoin.

it's the it's the fiat hamster wheel like when when savings are just being manipulated and debased you can't just you know be a doctor deliver care to your patients and then go home and relax you have to be a doctor deliver care to your patients then go yolo your funds into sushi swap or whatever the fuck um defy in order to earn yield like it's just it's it's a tragedy and It's the symptom of central banking. Central banking, I think, is just an abomination. Listen to what you just said. There's legitimate investors, high net worth individuals,

retail investors that have degraded their integrity and their self-respect to such a point that they truly believe that going onto one of these decentralized exchanges and buying SushiSwap and farm yielding it is innovative and makes sense. Like this is peak idiocracy clown world, just like listening to what you said. Like there have been people that have stared others directly in the eyes as earnestly as possible and said, yes, I'm currently yield farming on SushiSwap. I've got to, oh man, I just finished this brain surgery.

I need to go harvest my yams gotta go check out my crypto dick butt NFT see if the floor has been yeah it's insane dude it's like just listen to it and people in our industry that's like one thing I want to make

clear this is not our industry this is crypto it's almost like it's a dark comedy that somebody's writing in real time yeah and people are are thinking it's legitimate it's it's very frustrating to me personally that i am lumped in associated with these with fucking losers yeah by like by you know the broader the mainstream media and people who who don't see the innovation which is that a new sound form of money has been discovered, invented, whatever you want to call it,

and the entire world is now trying to figure that out and is trying to move towards the soundest form of money. I've said this a few times, but the innovation of Bitcoin was not that now I can take Bitcoin, copy the code, and create Shiba Doge coin. it's not that i can that everyone can be a central banker and print their own money it's that finally we can all protect our savings from other people printing money like the fun the first principle here is that printing money does not produce value printing money

like captures value or moves value but it doesn't produce value no and that's going back to like the open source nature of this i think that is the fatal flaw of your your crypto enthusiasts as they viewed satoshi launching bitcoin as an open source software project and said oh he wants us to fork this and create these others um these other networks he's allowing us to do that he's encouraging us to do that maybe uh even or even if he's not like i'm encouraged to do this because i can do it when the reality of the situation is bitcoin is an open source software project so that people can be confident in it because they can audit the code themselves and read it it's not open source because uh people just want it to be forked off and manipulated and

spun up into a new network it's open source so it can be auditable and people can have confidence that they're actually interacting with a consensus system with integrity that's right it's open source so that you can verify that your savings haven't been debased and that you in fact are no longer the yield but people are so used to being the yield like and and with the dollar like you are the federal reserves yield. If you're saving in the dollar and you're playing in that system and you're trying to, you know, get more dollars, you've been captured. You are their yield. With Bitcoin, you're free. Is it easy? Hell no. It takes a lot of personal responsibility. Like it's, it's, uh, it's a, it's a very simple thing. Like, uh, yeah, I think American Hoddle

said this one time like it's holding bitcoin is simple but it is not easy like what you're opting into is is freedom right but freedom isn't free it's very painful for a long time like and especially uh periods like this the very very bottom of the bear market like people starting start going a little more deranged than usual you know things start collapsing um but bitcoin leads the way like it's it's you know we've we've lost purchasing power but we will gain back purchasing power significantly faster than you know the broader financial system and like you know a ton of crypto exchanges and just cryptos in general are going to go to zero because printing money doesn't produce value it's not valuable no it's it's negative it's it's a negative because

it perturbs opportunity cost that's right you perturb opportunity cost you can't make viable economic decisions which is a net negative for the potential value that could have been created had that not otherwise happened yeah i mean i just think about too like uh silicon valley like think about all of the the wealth that has been dumped into these like vc-backed crypto currencies and exchanges and stuff it's like they're wrong from first principles and yet they've just dumped an inordinate amount of other people's wealth into these things like guys printing money does not produce value like a new token is completely unnecessary it makes your project weak which is what we saw with ftx they printed their own token it became a massive target

for traders once the alameda balance sheet was out in the open sees he was like oh let's nuke it to zero like yeah so it's it took him three days 30 billion dollars to zero three days yeah just an immense destruction of capital in a huge waste of time massive waste of time and it's like all these yeah all these vc companies should be absolutely ashamed of themselves and yet they're you know all the all the like articles about spf coming out like they're just you know they're They're ramped up on dick pills or whatever. Yeah. They're just like...

Well, that's the one thing that actually gets me angry because I do feel like we're in a race against time and all this crypto bullshit is a massive distraction that is taking away from time and energy that could be dedicated to fortifying the Bitcoin network and educating people about how to properly use Bitcoin and secure Bitcoin. And yet we're forced to be distracted.

like we should not have to be talking about FTX blowing up because they spun up FTT and Binance destroyed the value of that token. That's right. We should be talking about unique key quorums between different institutions to provide services to individuals, open source payments processing software that allows people to receive Bitcoin for their businesses, a better wallet ux that allows people to handle their bitcoin um in a in a much easier and user

friendly way like these are the things we should be focused on as bitcoiners we certainly are but all that money and attention that has been and it's insane when i mean obviously we've dove into the numbers at 1031 just to try to highlight um the misallocation of capital in the crypto space like bitcoin is the biggest network has always been the biggest network from market cap from users uh from a distribution perspective yet the amount of capital that has been dedicated to bitcoin infrastructure bitcoin only infrastructure is a pittance compared to quote-unquote crypto like we're talking orders of magnitude more capital directed at these things that don't make sense from first principles compared to bitcoin which

is structurally sound from a first principles perspective i think a lot of it too is kind of comes back to living in the dollar world like in the hubris maybe that the dollar is the world's reserve currency and it'll always be the reserve currency and my fund or whatever is like our goal is to earn our LPs more dollars. And so crypto can look a little bit more attractive that way because it's not disruptive. It's more of this, it's again, it's the legacy financial system turned up to 11. Um, and so it's not, not innovative, not disruptive. It's a way for the Cantillon insiders to earn those dollars. Um, but what it does is it sets, uh, it sets the us back significantly we we have the ball right now you know we have the global reserve currency

today um not for much longer and it's our game to lose like all these other countries around the world like there's no they don't want to be using the dollar it tastes blood in the water yeah like it's the same thing as this is the same same thing but at a larger scale as this like stupid ftt blow up it's like oh wait the dollar is actually pretty weak and the u.s is tied to it and it's like if If you thought FTX was bad, wait till you dive into the U.S. government's debt exposure and the Federal Reserve's balance sheet. I mean, we're heading that direction. Like, it's the scale of everything that's happening. And you've seen it yourself.

You've been in Bitcoin for a long time. Like, the scale just keeps increasing. Like, now, you know, crypto donors are the number two donors of political parties. And we have senators that are, like, talking about Bitcoin. like Bitcoin is definitely going to be a topic in the 2024 presidential election in the U S like the scale is getting larger. When I started in Bitcoin, uh, the price would pump if any mainstream media published any article about it. Yeah. Like, and now it's, it's like, yeah, the scale is just massive, man. And it's going to get more massive. And, um, you know, we're, we're going to see

exactly the same things that have played out on a micro scale in the shit coin crypto industry happened at the macro scale with nation states air dropping tokens it's like guys we already saw stellar do that we saw stellar airdrop a token like federal reserve why are you airdropping cbdc token like we've seen what happens we know what happens yeah and then bringing it back to the context of the distraction of crypto again i really think as bitcoiners we and i don't care how pissed all the shit coiners get at us or the vc funds that are invested in shit coins get us we really need to beat the drum bitcoin is not crypto there's a clear distinction we don't want anything to do with you degenerate fucking losers like we're here to actually build something that's

going to last for centuries hopefully millennia and the reason i bring this up right now is because on the barstool podcast they asked me an interesting question it was like is this ftx blow up a systemic risk to the broader economy and i had to think for a second and the answer no but you had pension funds investing in ftx like so no it's not a systemic risk to the broader economy however it's beginning the avenues to which crypto can become a systemic risk to the broader economy are beginning to get wider like pension funds throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at ftx that they had to write down to zero last week has a material effect on pensioners that are depending on that fund to handle their money and if we don't make the

distinction clear now and really try to change the tides in the broader public like stop focusing on this bullshit it can become a systemic risk at some point well i think i think fiat just warps our sense of risk like we we can't actually measure risk like we had pension funds that were invested in celsius yeah like holy crap that is the most obvious it's been it was the most obvious Ponzi scheme for forever since it existed, like since it was founded. It's like, but yeah, it's like for these pension funds, they look at Celsius, they look at FTX and say, oh, you know, this seems like a pretty low risk bet. It's, you know, whatever. When the lowest risk, literally the lowest risk thing I can think of is Bitcoin is just holding Bitcoin,

holding the keys to your Bitcoin and being patient, staying humble, stacking sats. Like there's, you know, is it volatile? Absolutely. Right. But it's not risky. Like Bitcoin is extremely decentralized. There's, you know, 100000 nodes around the world. The there will only ever be 21 million of them. You can verify them on your computer. You can hold the keys. You can move the Bitcoin permissionlessly. It's super low risk. Is it is the value volatile? Absolutely. right now ftx it's just it looks like a company to people who are used to investing in companies maybe it looks like a low-risk company in this quote-unquote new new industry crypto again printing money is not productive so it's not an industry it's a scam uh but if you're like oh i

gotta get some exposure to this crypto thing like you look for the companies and you invest there because that historically, or at least in the fiat economy, is the lowest risk thing to do. You know, the dollar, the dollar is extremely high risk. It blows up every 10 years. Every 10 years it blows up and causes hundreds of thousands of people to lose their job. And like, it's just insane, man. I don't know. Like Bitcoin, yeah, purchasing power is going to go all over the place, but it's super low risk. Set a multi-sig, put one of your keys separated from another, from your other keys and like you're good yeah i guess it makes me yearn for a world in which it was easy for people to separate bitcoin the network from the price associated

with the token that lives in that network because if you do that like bitcoin doesn't know bitcoin the network that is this collaboration of full node operators miners and individuals sending messages that turn out to be transactions through the network. The network has no idea that we've attached a value to these UTXOs. Yes. It just knows that a hash below the difficulty target has been found. A miner is ordering a bunch of transactions that are valid and spendable into the block that he wants to add for finding that hash.

The block's added. He gets his reward, or she gets her reward, and then you keep going. that's all bitcoin knows that's also why i would say bitcoin is always secure it will never not be secure because this whole concept of like energy expenditure is just handled by the network like it just knows it's like oh too much energy all right raise the difficulty adjustment oh not enough energy lower the difficulty adjustment so i can keep processing transactions like as long as the incentives don't change

because they were set up correctly in 2009 Bitcoin will always be secure yeah it's how do we get

this through to people how do we reach these keys how do we what are you doing I don't know man it provides an opportunity for us

yeah price stays low we can stack more build more that's the other I mean maybe you just bully people

not bully people would say hey keep doing that stupid shit over there we're gonna stack more sats and we're gonna build companies that are gonna accrue insane amounts of value as more and more people wake up to this that's another thing we must mention is through all these cycles all these boom and bust cycles more people begin to realize that there is fundamental value here the more people learn how to tune out the noise and find the signal that is bitcoin so that's not going to Yeah. When Unchained sees all-time high volumes, I just think, or new client volumes, I just think those, that's a new cohort of people who are never going back to the old model.

Yeah. Again, two one-way exits. I understand Bitcoin is a form of sound money. There will only ever be 21 million. I have the private keys to my Bitcoin. Nobody can confiscate it from me. Those are so unbelievably powerful that you don't go back to an old model. No. The old model is completely borked, freaks. It's garbage. It really is.

You are the yield. You're the yield. That's the lesson we have here today. That's right. Should we leave the freaks with one last lesson? Sure. I don't... I was hoping you were going to...

Hold on. Let me think about it for just a second. Yeah, I'll leave. I'll say something, which is... we need people to develop better bullshit beaters. Like, Sam Bankman-Fried was an obvious bullshit artist. Do it. Just look at the guy.

He's like turned into a goblin in the last year. And that's the other thing too. For people who are allocating money in the quote unquote crypto space, it's astonishing, number one, that you're allowed to manage people's money considering how terribly you've allocated it, particularly if you invested in FTX.

And the reason being is if you've ever listened to him speak, he never makes fucking sense. Like I started calling him out last year when it became glaringly obvious that he didn't understand proof of work. It's like, all right, if you're going to run an exchange and push for regulations and act like the wunderkind front man

for this industry, I would hope that you at least understand the intricacies of proof-of-work versus proof-of-stake, and you wouldn't be touting the electricity expenditure per transaction metric, which is completely bunk and doesn't make any sense from a first-principles perspective. And he goes on Oddlots and literally says that overt Ponzi schemes are good business models earlier this year. Like, where are people's bullshit meters?

Like how can you, like, I don't know if I've just been blessed with a very good one, but I don't, I don't think it was hard to tell this guy was a bullshit artist. Yeah. The bullshit artists are so prominent still. I mean, I just think about Vitalik. It's the same thing. You listen to the guy speak and he just jibbers nonsense. Like when he was up on stage with Jimmy song, like what he wasn't saying anything. And Jimmy's like, you hard fork every six months months you're centralized and he doesn't have a response to that he tries to just go in a completely nonsensical direction and it's the same thing it's like for some reason it's it's the elizabeth holmes syndrome or i mean she's kind of you know

been been um a hot topic recent not recently but in the last 10 years or whatever it's the same thing it's like the strategy is always the same it's it's wunderkind it's like oh somebody who breaks the mold and then they surround themselves with influential people like sbfs got you know tom brady tom brady and he has uh bill clinton and tony clare and tony that should have been a fucking glaring warning for anybody he's up there with fucking war criminals yeah i mean elizabeth holmes did the same thing she was surrounding herself with obama and hillary clinton and vitalik does the same thing surrounds himself you know he's got that photo with putin and all those it's like oh guys stop being the yield you don't need to be the yield anymore

you don't need to follow these clowns around you can just you know perform your your your daily job you know you can just depend on yourself you don't have to depend on these wonderkins that's the beauty of bitcoin you just have to again it takes a lot of personal responsibility but if you develop the courage to take on that responsibility at the end of the day you only have to depend on yourself yeah that's right you don't have to worry about whether or not ftx is high on amphetamines having weird polyamorous sex in his mansion in the bahamas and and burning your your sats on fire just lighting lighting your savings on fire um yeah it's it's it's weeks like this that make me so thankful that i'm bitcoin only and uh

it's hard because yeah the the broader the broader kind of normies or whatever look at uh look at all this is the same and they say i told you so i told you bitcoin was for money laundering and bitcoins for criminals and you couldn't wait till after thanksgiving to blow up your exchange yeah but uh that's right this week at thanksgiving so i did one year for thanksgiving give a presentation uh about bitcoin presentation at thanksgiving my uncle asked me to he's a he's a career banker so i set up a presentation um it uh uh i don't know i don't think it worked was there a projector uh i yes there was a projector um this is incredible yeah and i I started, I started in the wrong spot and I, uh, I started by asking people what money

was and, uh, the answers were illuminating, but not the type of answer that I was hoping for. It was like, definitely got the collective hallucination, um, which like, think about it. Like really you're spending your entire life and your energy and your time to earn and save in something that is a hallucination, like have some self-respect. That's an insane statement. No money's a tool. Um, but anyways, got that, got like money is coins. Uh, money is, you know, X, Y, Z. So it was a, it was a tough, it's a tough audience. My, my extended family,

but, uh, I don't know. I think maybe I converted a few of them. Um, overall, I would say not a successful presentation though. So, um, I think I'm going to recommend the Pierre Richard, uh, model uh or sorry the bit uh it's not pierre it's bitcoin is savings was saying this recently but um you know lock the door during thanksgiving don't let your family leave until they understand uh bitcoin how to run a node that there only ever be 21 million um and uh and give your family some tough bitcoin love this thanksgiving yeah freaks do not relent lock the doors make them download the wallets i wouldn't say don't give them bitcoin i've you know what i've stopped gifting people bitcoin and i think maybe this is a hot take but uh what i will always help people with is

purchasing bitcoin making that decision to buy 20 bucks worth of bitcoin i feel like is a very different decision than setting up a wallet and receiving someone else's bitcoin because when you send someone Bitcoin, you're telling them, Hey, this isn't as valuable to me as I think it is for you. It's like, it's making an exchange. So what I've started saying is, Hey, I'm, I'm not going to send you any Bitcoin. I'm trying to accumulate as much as possible, but I will help you set up a wallet and help you buy 20 bucks worth. I like that strategy. Yeah. Cause it's like, yeah. And anyways, you know, I've sent, I used to give people Bitcoin and they would lose it. And, you know, tried to gift it on different, you know, with different tools, paper wallets,

open dime, stuff like that, and it's just always been a bad idea. Just regretted it every time. I might have to adjust my priors here. Think about it. I will. Phil, we're going to win. Hell yeah. I mean, we're in the best position to win.

Excellent. Leveraging its native properties, doing things the right way, even though most people don't realize it. We've been battered, but we're strong. These beatings only make us stronger. That's right. we're anti-fragile

yes we absorb it and we we emerge from it more decentralized more people holding keys and yeah

we you know we get we get heckled pretty heavily quite a bit and the heckling will get louder and continue

and that's that's why holding Bitcoin is very difficult but we're right yes holding Bitcoin makes it easy

to say hi haters yeah keep hating keep heckling keep hating i just renovated my house just bought a ranch yeah not yet but soon not at 16k pickling oh hell no no i'm like uh let's see sorry honey we're uh we're not gonna we're not turning the thermostat up to you know 70 degrees anymore we're going 67 we're having chicken for thanksgiving this year uh phil it's been a pleasure i believe this is the first time you've been on the show yeah marty thanks man i've been a a long time listener but yeah first time caller

yeah it was a good call we've got a lot done anytime you want to uh send out the phil signal or unchained signal that the team is always happy to to hop on and help support you and your podcast man you've been crushing it for the past what five years now five years luckily the signal doesn't have to travel far yeah probably yell from here and get somebody in there that's right yeah uh where if there's any new freaks listening to this where can they find out more about you more about unchained uh what you guys are offering so i'm phil geiger uh you can follow me on twitter at phil underscore geiger uh or email me at phil at unchained.com and when you think about unchained, just think about it as the one-stop shop for all of your long-term Bitcoin needs

built from these principles of self-custody and keys being distributed to eliminate all single points of failure from the security of your Bitcoin, including yourself, including unchained. And from that foundation, we can then offer you the financial services that you need to help protect, manage, and grow your Bitcoin over generations. So starting with our vaults, helping you with Bitcoin collateralized loans, helping you hold the keys to your retirement Bitcoin

so you can not take that massive penalty to try to liquidate your old 401k and buy Bitcoin with it and then have that future tax burden, like roll it into an IRA, hold the keys, you have the private keys, and so on. And yeah, our business accounts, buying Bitcoin, like we're here for you.

We're building out that one-stop shop for all Bitcoin financial services needs on this foundation of multi-signature where clients hold as many or as much keys as possible. It's the future of finance, freaks. Go check it out. Peace and love.

Okay.