TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #438: Cycling Toward A Bitcoin Boom with Tuur Demeester

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

Marty sits down with Tuur Demeester to discuss the factors pushing Bitcoin forward in its cycle. Tuur on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester 0:00 - Intro 5:30 - Aliens 11:35 - Bitcoin cycles 18:04 - Is the next cycle different? 20:21 - Will crypto stay dead? 24:12 - Old ideas, new ideas, and startups 33:44 - Regulatory landscape 38:27 - Financial “innovations” from crypto 42:31 - Bitcoin politics 46:29 - Implications of decentralized custody 54:23 - Multiple fronts of chaos 1:02:04 - How far can inflation go? 1:10:04 - Bitcoin is the escape hatch 1:12:13 - Nation state adoption 1:15:29 - Next bull market 1:26:29 - Fedimints and AI 1:34:38 - Bullish on Texas 1:47:28 - We’re gonna win Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 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

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you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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. We're live now. I was asking you a question.

Tor and I had a fascinating discussion. What was that? After the Takeover event? Or no, it was the debate series. It was after the debate. There was a debate, and then we had dinner with some people. Yeah. We were talking about ancient structures,

whether or not ancient aliens exist. Pretty topical, considering what's going on. on capitol hill right now yeah i saw you were tweeting about it what's your take yeah about uh uap slash ufos like the the there's uh there's this whistleblower uh david grush who's been arguing and he he had the highest security clearance so he's a guy who was really and i think he was also on the uap task force so they had like a kind of like a new ish organ that was going to investigate what's going on and so basically he was poking around And the reason why he became a whistleblower, according to him, is that basically he was refused access.

And at the same time, he got in touch or was approached by a whole bunch of people that claimed to have like, you know, personal experience with, they call it non-human intelligence. So like either crafts or pilots or both. um and so he became a whistleblower uh and then uh eventually this is maybe like only a month ago i think he did like the whistleblower interview and then now today they had the first i think the first ever um what do you call it congressional hearing congressional hearing yeah where they were grush and two other like they were two navy pilots uh just pilots military pilots who uh testified and were subject to and so they were all under oath and so there's an additional layer of credibility in a way that you know if all of them make these

claims like now they it would be they would be at risk of perjuring themselves as they're actually lying so you know that kind of adds to the credibility of this whole story yeah i'm torn And so he's saying that not only are there, you know, craft that have been retrieved, but that there's actually secret government programs to try and reverse engineer the technology and that he, like, one of the incidents he mentioned goes back to Mussolini's Italy.

So in the 1930s, apparently, or, you know, allegedly there was a craft there that was then retrieved to the US. Yeah, and there was theories that the Nazis had in alien craft we're trying to reverse engineer it as well and that's what i'm i've got my skeptical lens on for this aliens is a great psyop to to bring about the world government and somebody brought a good point up on twitter earlier today which is like we have autonomous pilotless drones here on earth and we're probably a thousand years away from interstellar travel

like why if aliens we have this rudimentary technology and pilotless drones why would they ever actually get in their aircraft to travel between stars galaxies whatever it may be wait what would they get in what do you mean with get in like if there was actually pilots recovered yeah like why wouldn't they just send autonomous oh why wouldn't they just send drones well so the theory again like i'm not very well versed i only been studying this for i don't know few months um but the the most dominant theory seems to be that the pilots are part of the drones because like they don't have any reproductive they're like the gray aliens like that that is kind of the cliche you know imagery that we know like according to some of these alleged witnesses

that are seen to be relatively close to the people that are now been testifying and um and some of them totally aren't close but i mean at least seems some of them are that the gray aliens who are known to be pilots as well of these drones that they themselves are basically manufactured because they don't have reproductive organs they don't seem to be able to survive for very long it's just like you know using biological materials you can create a being that's a lot more intelligent or a machine that's a lot more intelligent than if you were to just you know build a craft so so that's the idea yeah this is a developing story yeah i mean i'm i'm just like i i kind of want to know about the the whistleblower claims like you know he's claiming

that there's programs secret programs that were illegally funded etc and so i'm just curious to see where this is gonna go yeah i know matthew pines from the bitcoin policy institute is very scared by all this he seems to take it seriously yeah yeah like to the point where he's like the aliens might wipe out humanity and in a few years i'm like all right if that's the case i'm not going to worry about it well i mean it's kind of like if this whole story is true then you know then maybe we should be talking about ancient aliens like maybe they've been around for thousands of years and they're just kind of like they just have access to an extra dimension that we don't have access to so we never get to see them unless they choose to expose themselves to

us so they're kind of like living in the shadow side of earth and you know and in a way we've maybe always coexisted yeah and what's the uh the theory of the anunnaki they were actually um oh yeah or like that we part alien or something the aliens came to earth and used their dna to create humans and it's the ancient one of the ancient alien theories yeah yeah actually i i never had national geographic growing up and so i only know some of the memes but i don't really know the ancient aliens theory yeah i think that the most recent alien the movie was based off the anunnaki was them seeding life on planet earth but we digress we came here to talk about bitcoin sure

sure no i mean it's been a while since we caught up we caught up on the show it had to be two or three years ago probably three maybe longer wasn't it like block boom you're on your way out of town you're about to get on a bus wasn't it in a hotel lobby yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so maybe 2018 or 19 actually yeah yeah so it's been a while a lot has obviously happened since then your show has grown a lot tremendously it's crazy what happens when you start talking about Bitcoin people get attracted to it and slowly over time

when you keep at it also and we don't all of a sudden have an announcement that you're joining the team of this new professor coin and you know or do like a whiny rage quit like if you actually keep at it like yeah consistency is key and that's

actually part of what I wanted to discuss today because that's one thing I've been and get your thoughts on like one thing i've been having a lot of conversations and whether it's bitcoin's inability to materialize as a fully monetized store of value medium of exchange off the bat over the last 15 years people typically look at bitcoin they say oh well it's not a good store of value look at the volatility it's not a good medium of exchange look at how expensive it is on chain and how few transactions you can do and then similarly with the lightning

network uh launched five years ago and people wanted it to do what it was marketing it could do out of the box but five years in for lightning particularly it seems like we've gotten to the point of maturation where there's good dev tools to build on there's a robust implementation environment that people can choose from and it's getting easier and easier to implement lightning into the commercial applications whatever it may be um and i think this just highlights the fact that we're building many different cathedrals here with bitcoin and the layers on top of it and it's just going to take time and effort and i think what i've been having conversations and pitching bitcoin to people like in my mind this is the best time ever from a risk adjusted

perspective to get into bitcoin due to the maturation of everything that's going on at the protocol level and uh at lightning and other second layers then on top of that it seems like the overton window is shifting and bitcoin is becoming more palatable plus right now there's no euphoria around bitcoin so from a price point of view it's not that risky either so i do think it's that's why you know i put out the report is i think now's a good time to really look at bitcoin yeah and that's what you're famous for with your reports is you drop them typically in the middle of the bear market when it's like all right here's the signal yeah my my my wish is always that i we start seeing like the uptick and that like that's where i put it out right it's like right

when we're starting to actually get into a new bull market yeah yeah when's the goal and so you released your last one was like six months ago at this point no no more recently uh it was end of may i think so bitcoin was i remember 26 000 okay only three grand above that right now hovering at 29 yeah yeah so what have you seen why did you feel end of may was the right time to release your report it's well i mean i did write i put quite a bit of work in it so i think i started actually writing when we were right at the bottom pretty much like i think it was like 17 18 000 and and usually my writing is kind of like rage fuel that's like i just see so much like despondency and like people just like and there's these in the depths of the bear market like you

know people stop engage like they stop even talking about bitcoin like they just they kind of feel ashamed to bring it up to family and you know and um and then there's also sometimes like some crazy stories that don't make sense and so usually there is that for me and then and then i Maybe part of why I get mad is even I feel some doubt creep in. It's like, oh, is this one going to be different? And so then it's like, all right, let's just get my stuff together and try to really make the case and address all the FUD, right? So that's what I just tried to do is like, all right,

let's look at all the objections that are floating around and assess them and then see do they actually matter and then also look at like, well what are some what are some potential tailwinds and what are the whales doing for example you can actually look at the blockchain and see so whether whales are capitulating or not and usually whales just they just hodl all the way through the bear like the only times when you actually see serious old coins moving on the chain is uh is when there is exuberance when you have these massive rises and and the old guys the ogs a lot of them a lot of whom we probably don't even no people have thousands and thousands of bitcoin uh they basically start seeing that a lot of

people are getting involved that don't understand it like they're basically going to be the weak hands that's not the case now like whoever's you know getting the bitcoin today the vast majority i think has a reasonable idea about what bitcoin actually is why do you say that just because the price is way down and usually it's people that have heard about it in the past and you know in way every every new bull market starts with smart money getting in at the beginning and then later you get more like retail involvement people that are more like trend followers rather than the trend makers yeah do you think the cycles as they've played out in the past will continue yeah i think so just because of human emotion and and because people always they make models

and then they think the model is true but then because enough people start thinking that that defies it right because then you overshoot whatever the model predicts because everyone thinks oh this is the easiest thing right let's just it's going to keep going up forever um you know like the super cycle like that was one of those ideas thank you suzu even even i bought into it for a while i was like you know like you know the s curve at some point you got to go vertical and anyway so um yeah it just i think it's human nature like the cycles are us reacting to bitcoin it's nothing innate to bitcoin and so again going back to like the development at the protocol and layers above it like do you think the progress that's been made there is setting us up

for a unique cycle especially when you combine that with like i just got off the spaces with rfk junior and he admitted at the end that he owns bitcoin so like it seems like there's a coal essence of um productive building that's been going on making bitcoin more accessible more useful and then this narrative it's sort of lining up next year with the having in the presidential election that seems like it could be a good tailwind yeah there is definitely is the first time ever that there's been so much like political buzz around bitcoin like all of a sudden bitcoin is an item on the on the election agenda like we had i think david bailey said like uh weren't there like four presidential candidates at the latest miami bitcoin conference like

that's crazy um so and then at the same time yeah we do have lightning which in my mind it debunks the idea that somehow bitcoin is elitist right it's like oh you can only do three transactions per second therefore or like you know however high the fees would be people would use that as being like oh fees are two dollars like it's only for the elites and so with lightning you could say well well no right i mean it's it's ready regardless of whether and how much people are going to use lightning in the next cycle just the fact that it's there and you can figure it out if you want to, I think it's super powerful

because a lot of the coins that were created in the 2017 cycle were just riding on that FUD wave of like, oh, Bitcoin, it has too few transactions. And look at our coin, you know, we have a hundred transactions per second. It's so ridiculous looking back, but that's how they marketed a lot of these coins. I believe Solana can do a hundred thousand a second.

Oh, wow, man. but eventually it will it will break and they'll have to restart it do you know of any good solana podcasts i could be on i think kyle samani's in the city we can go find him and see see if he's willing to talk but that's another interesting question like like stepping away from bitcoin looking at the crypto cycles like do you think they're as pronounced moving forward as they have been in the past are they losing narrative steam i i think yeah i mean i guess i can't hide i'll have a little bit of glee thinking about this theory that because i'm going to reveal my theory but so uh the mantra has been alts are back like that that is gonna they're gonna come back at some

point it's just a matter of when you know alts are back and and so they're trying to revive the scam coin cycle over and over um and so far in a way they've been right but one of these cycles they're going to be very very wrong i think and i i i'm kind of speculating that this coming cycle people may be wrong that alts are back because we have so much regulatory scrutiny like so basically the on-ramps are getting you know more and more shut down and and these scam coins are not decentralized right and so that means if you're going after the fraudsters like they actually can't keep running the coin oftentimes um or not keep them keep it functional at least um so that's one headwind for the altcoins then there is the fact that bitcoin actually is scaling so

all the narrativers are the narratives that um we're justifying these coins are being incorporated in the bitcoin like bitcoin is scaling but gonna having smart contracts you'll be able to do asset issuance on top of bitcoin there's just so much stuff is is clearly happening on top of bitcoin um and then i think also just the world is becoming a little more wary that you know how many scam coins can you live through and then still be gullible for the next one like at some point people just get tired of it and they're like you know what no i'm not gonna buy your new coin um so yeah maybe it really won't happen the next time around yeah i think because you can do plenty of scams on top of bitcoin too right i'm not saying scams

are going to go away but you know specifically scam coins maybe it'll be more like uh scammy bitcoin startups and then they sell equity in those or you know who know who knows what was uh marcia popescu's scammy bitcoin sorry he started like a in a yeah exchange i mean i think i actually had i never well for a while because i had my newsletter back then when i was looking at bitcoin denominated securities like wade 2012-13 um i remember well like there were a few that were legitimate you know like uh satoshi dice eric vorhees you know uh gambling website actually was a real operation it was profitable and he he did an ipo and and yeah that one was running on uh mercedes um what was it again i forget the name of his exchange or um no i forget

what it was uh yeah but so i think maybe some of the other ones were more scammy and then i mean there was asic miner that was a big one it was one of the first uh because they had the specialized mining chips early on and they they went public and they had a guy called fried cats who would just give these very detailed reports from the inside about how the company was doing and some of these uh and and the stock went up to five bitcoin a share um and then something went wrong and it just disappeared i think a bunch of people lost money on that so that was yeah that was i think those times could come back or we get we actually get some real defy going and uh and and then you know it's going to be a matter of trying to not get you know not walk into these

traps yeah and it's i think a lot of the ability of the scam coins to draw people in is driven by impatience where like i said earlier they want bitcoin to be the fully monetized store value with layers that are enabling medium of exchange at scale out of the box but it takes time to build this stuff and i think this cycle the building of what you just said we're gonna see that there were good ideas in the past whose time has finally come because of the infrastructure that's built out. A great example is this thing right here, the 21-code computer.

Remember back in the day. Is that Balaji's computer? Yeah. This thing? Yeah, you can pick it up. Whoa. Remember the idea of the machine payable web behind this? I've never seen a physical version of it. So this is like a little raspberry pi to run

a node on? It was a little fan. It was a miner. Oh, that's before that though so this is like the 21e6 so like they're they're minor oh i see yeah but again going back to like ideas whose time have come and actually make sense now like the whole idea behind 21co was the machine payable web like enabling machine machine payments via micro transactions and they found out the hard way that probably doesn't work at the protocol level you can't do that with utxos but now that lightning exists like that idea is a very good idea just just wasn't viable in 2015 2016 now with lightning and what we've seen coming out of the ai for all

hackathon which is going on right now led by fetty and replet and a bunch of others like i think it's becoming very obvious like oh this is a great idea and not until now is it actually viable yeah you always need both components like one thing to have a great idea but the timing is just so important like that that's why the running joke in the comic show silicon valley was um that russ hanneman guy is that he had radio on internet like he had basically like i think he was a parody of mark cuban who had like basically also like sold this idea of like oh video streaming in like 1999 way too early but apparently found some people willing to buy out his company and then you know he was set so yeah to me that fits there and so so when you look at the bitcoin startups

today you that's what you have to have in mind it's like yeah yeah there's gonna be lots of great ideas but where are we on timing because if you're five years early or even three years early or two years early you might um just burn through all your cash and and never launch yeah and be on the sidelines as you watch somebody take your idea and run with it yeah yeah yeah that's i mean so that's why we need to see minimum viable products that actually generate cash like we need to see those things and you're my what are some examples of that that you're excited about well i'm going to be doing more conferences so i do expect to see more uh you know you know more startups and get a better look at what's what's going on um i remember talking to the guys

in Miami who have this it's like a wallet that implements the Miniscript stuff and so they they're like a French company and they basically

empower users to have all these time delays and so they yeah Liana yeah so I had a demo of them and so if they can show that they actually start having customers and that there's demand for this and they're building it out as like a service right on top of the technology they built like something like that it's you know that's promising yeah that particular use case

too thinking about like timing and tailwinds for the next cycle like one thing that we've experienced at 1031 talking to high net worth individuals and family offices that want to get into bitcoin but have paused to do so is the idea around custody like they're smart enough to realize they don't want to hold it all on coinbase or an exchange and wise enough to to understand they should do self-custody but haven't been comfortable with the options at their fingertips to date it's still there's still like a gap between the one extreme of fully custody on an exchange and in cold storage that they're comfortable with and there's a lot of what if questions that couldn't really be answered satisfactorily was like well what if you know

this goes wrong and that goes wrong and that goes wrong oftentimes it was like well now we ran out of keys in our multisig whereas like with miniscript stuff and there's looks like um i think fetty is also in that direction then it's like well you can have an entire multisig as a backup and then it starts over so you can just build in a bunch of redundancy and the time delays which is great in itself because that's the the vulnerable part of any theft is is um is speed like all the movies is always like you know they're running out of time like the thieves and so if you can build in a delay mechanism all of a sudden you have a way more robust uh wallet solution or vault solution yeah yeah then on top of that like not only can those multi-sigs via miniscript

degrade into different multi-sig setups so they can also degrade into like a single sig where You have your nuclear option, single-sig wall. It's like, all right, if all else fails, I'll be able to spend from this key. Yeah, very powerful. Yeah, but so, you know, when people look at, it's interesting, right, how so much of the VC money, I forget the numbers, but I guess the Trammell Ventures,

they actually ran the numbers of what percentage of VC capital went to crypto versus Bitcoin. It was insane, right? It was like 97% or something went to crypto. I think it's even higher than that. It's like 98, 99%. Yeah, right. Well, but then again, if you think about, okay,

but what were the successful pure Bitcoin startups in the last 12 years? There weren't that many, right? They were mostly Bitcoin mining companies. And they're, you know, a lot of them didn't really need that much external funding. But yeah, a lot of them, like a wallet, how do you monetize a wallet?

Like that's hard. And then I think Unchained did a great job of showing, yeah, the lending is a real thing. But then the exchanges, they just had to expand their offering and they became crypto exchanges. So yeah, there was that uncomfortable period where actually there just weren't that many startups in Bitcoin that were profitable.

There were just some open source projects for a long time. Yeah. And I think another thing there too is the price of Bitcoin sort of affects how much people are willing to pay for services. I imagine as the price increases and the underlying value of people's Bitcoin holdings increases, they're going to be more and more willing to pay for services that help them either custody, do financial services

using their Bitcoin and stuff like that. I'm laughing because I remember one of the first quote-unquote services I remember encountering being denominated in Bitcoin was the first conference I attended was in London, early 2012. And the Bitcoin Foundation had just been sprung into life and they had all these plans and you could become a member. And I was like, what does it mean to be a member? What is it going to...

It's like, oh, but you get to support the cause. And I said, all right, all right. How much is it? And they were like, oh, it's 50 Bitcoin. It's like $500 at the time. but uh and it just to me it was like that's just too much 50 bitcoin for a membership so i think yeah a lot of people look at it that way it's like you know like expressed in the most scarce money in the world a lot of things look very expensive very easily yeah and as bitcoin

monetizes and the opportunity cost of departing with your bitcoin uh decreases like it makes sense to me intuitively that people are going to be willing to cough up either dollars or sats for services that that add value to them yeah and in a way there was some predatory stuff happening too because there was so much easy money sloshing around in silicon valley etc and so there's so much easy vc money and that went into like a coinbase and a whatever like all these and they were so flush with cash all these crypto startups that in a way they were poaching a lot of bitcoin companies like customers away from bitcoin companies like like um you know onboarding people or all these crypto exchanges with zero fees and stuff so you know if you're a god honest

bitcoin company it was just hard to compete because you know you were not sexy in silicon valley to raise money like that that's why we're seeing these bitcoin focus vc funds now that actually understand the ecosystem yeah and another big problem with that era and that mania if you will is like they convinced individuals and companies that wanted to focus on bitcoin to get into coinery because there's pressure from the cap table like hey you need revenue huge pressure launched a coin yeah transition to solana yeah and also if you're an exchange it's like you all of a sudden you get all these uh they just throw money at you to list their coin so it's hard to say no to money yeah the uh what do you think going back to like the regulatory

environment and the sec how big of an impact do you think they have on the industry like do you think coinbase is in trouble do you think finance individual i talked to someone in miami who uh who said that their law firm said um that it was a small possibility but a genuine possibility that coinbase's assets could get frozen so that customers would have all their funds stuck at coinbase um that that's you know that that's how serious this stuff is um so yeah and uh you know they kind of coinbase kind of announced like oh we're looking to expand abroad and but it sounds like that's that's mostly like a story that they're spinning up now but they that was never their bet like they're kind of caught off guard they didn't expect

so much headwind they thought like they're really naive like they're like oh but we're the good guys and we just need to make them understand and they made like a whole documentary about fred and and brian you know the i don't know if you saw it i saw some of it yeah i paid 99 cents to watch well yeah and i think that it really comes from this naive idea of like but we just are the good guys you know how could you be against us we're trying to be compliant and you just need to understand that you don't interpret their law correctly and so i think you rub you rub these sec people the wrong way that way uh if if if you already have a conclusion and you're kind of it's comes across as arrogant right like you guys need to

just understand the right way of thinking it's like i heard that the head of custody at the sec is like 80 years old like the the chief honcho of who like who goes over like you know i i forget the details but basically when it comes to making serious decisions about what is custody and what is not and who's allowed and who's not so that's what you're dealing with like you're talking two generations back you know so it's uh yeah it's it's tricky and then of course there's vested interests as well like you know on the cynical ways like oh they're always gonna favor their own cronies and you know and it's as a takeover and and then on the more and i'm not choosing either one but the more friendly interpretation is kind of like you know they're trying to do the

right thing and they there's people that they already trust and so they're more skeptical of the newbies who like you know come from a world that seems maybe scammy and whatever and um maybe they trust a black rock more than they do a coinbase um but so yeah um i think all this headwind stuff is it's serious i think it's not threatening the bitcoin yet i think it's much more about securities uh regulation and so a lot of this uh i mean people people always thought like oh but the ico boom happened and where are the lawsuits they were like kind of like in a cavalier way saying like if if really what all they did was illegal like where are the lawsuits but people forget that after the dot-com bubble burst uh we had lawsuits up to 10 years

after the fact massive lawsuits so the system is just slow uh so we're only like six years in right now yeah that's the other thing going back to like the naivety of the crypto industry is the sec was openly choreographing for years like hey we're likely going to move we're going to move slow but at some point in the future like we're going to react to what just happened yeah and and i mean i mean clearly ethereum was a securities offering like ripple i think our securities i I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but it just seems pretty straightforward that most of these things just are securities because of the level of centralization and the airdrops

and how it was all marketed. And clearly there were expectations of profit, all those kind of things. And I think it makes sense to have securities regulation, I think, that um or at least if you're if you're going to regulate markets like that is an area where i can see uh having a need for transparency but then of course you know you have the risk of favoritism and you know all those so i'm not saying it's without problems but like fundamentally i see the distinction between a commodity and a security as a valid one yeah and i mean i think in the case

coinbase and others who are like throwing their arms up like i think another thing that's really not playing into their favors like the crypto world is very little to show for all the investment all the right pump and dumps that went in like is there that's steel man play devil's advocate in your mind is there anything of value that has materialized out of that industry maybe outside yeah because every time every time people people like bitcoiners make a statement of like yeah what have they got to show for it then every time there's a few crypto aficionados who come out and be like oh what about this and that and that and then you look into it and all it is is like leverage trading it's all like financial uh duplo or something it's like oh but you know what about

this thing that we made and it's just like another type of pyramid scheme or a way to trade not necessarily faster but more like using this as collateral and then blah and then that stable coin and it's all these like shaky constructions that are just financial games that aren't necessarily like okay we made transactions this much faster or we had a smart contract that is uh so robust like it it's so much better than previous generations and it's not really about that it's more well with this coin you got to play with a lot more leverage so all right well that's just more of the same we come from that world the fiat world is all about that so yeah there's very little to show for people and and that's really you got to be super

devil's advocate to try and say like oh but the altcoin world has given us some smart contracts or like you know they're gonna be it's more the other way around they've actually gleaned from bitcoin a lot of stuff and uh and then claimed it as their own i don't know i mean call me cynical but i'm just not seeing a lot of innovation that is now that bitcoiners are like oh wow that's so cool let's use that too usually it was discarded early on for good reasons because it was too risky etc and then it was used and failed in the altcoin world yeah coming back to our comments about timing like there's these ideas of smart contracts and right uh second layers and or like experimental cryptography right they're like they come up with something it's experimental things need to go

through a whole process which takes a long time of like validation by the scientific community etc etc and these crypto people come around and say like oh this new thing like whatever it is zk snarks or whatever it is let's just this new and shiny thing it's so much better than whatever's you know been tried and tested for 30 years we're going to build our whole coin around this and it's like well it's experimental it's like you know uh you got to treat it that way you can't you you need to use it in a test environment don't just spread it in the population yeah don't want to to talk about vax but anyway yeah the uh the zero knowledge proof i mean that's like one of the big memes like we should implement zkp on on top of it well even the monero stuff right it's like

signature yeah and it was like oh but it's so much it's so much better that it's all private and then it's like well really like what is the what do you want at the heart of your ledger if you're going to have a decentralized ledger do you want to have obscurity or do you want to have verifiability you can't have both right if you have obscurity you you might have an inflation bug and all of a sudden there's many more coins than you thought they were and there's no way to verify it so i'd rather have bitcoin which is verifiable and and where you can have privacy built in higher layers or in you know kind of uh intricate constructions rather than a coin that's obscure from the beginning that doesn't make sense to me i mean i've never been able to validate these

claims so anybody listening take them it's just that claims rumors but there was a pretty popular rumor back in like 2017 2016 era that there was an inflation bug in monero that people were manipulating i remember hearing about that yeah yeah like it was never brought to the public's attention but people were taking advantage of it and stacking more bitcoin um that's i think that's another benefit of this bear market so like i've always or this year as we got into 2023 this bear markets are reminding me more and more of 2015 in terms of like the length and lack of deaths or the amount of desperation and i was seeing like december like when you started rage writing i was seeing similar things like how people are really down and out um well

Well, so let's hope there's not another civil war coming because in 2016 and 17, we had that whole block size debate, which is kind of a euphemism to call it that way. Like it really felt like we're at war. Who knows, maybe when the market heats up, well, there'll be something else that people get scared around Bitcoin. Drive chains. It doesn't seem to have a lot of traction.

No, it doesn't. I mean, I think it's probably, if there's anything, it'll probably be in the political realm where all of a sudden there's a whoever wins the election is going to be very rabidly anti-Bitcoin or blaming Bitcoin for all the inflation in the world or maybe something like that. I could definitely see that.

But in this bear market, like building on the distinction between Bitcoin and crypto, I think this bear market has really set Bitcoin apart from crypto better than any other bear market. And talking about something you mentioned earlier, which is for the time being it seems that bitcoin's gonna uh evade the regulatory scrutiny that the crypto market is getting like what do you like are you seeing that as well that the distinction is being made pretty clear yeah and there's also pathways yeah exactly exactly that

there's also pathways for bitcoin to seemingly be captured you know like if you think about it from a washington dc point of view if they approve the etf and lots of bitcoin flows in the etf in their mind it's like oh now we have something we can control ipso facto we can control bitcoin or you know there's all these miners and like texas is like 20 of global bitcoin mining hash rate or something it might give them the idea that they're keeping this under wraps or controlling it somehow even though that's not really the case but um so so so there are these avenues or like you know let's let's let's let jp morgan like have some big bitcoin trading desks and let let them hold a whole bunch of bitcoin and then you know we keep tabs on it so that none of that has

happened so far so i think that makes me makes me makes me hopeful that like this could be a cycle of like benign regulatory adoption to an extent uh rather than like uh panicked cracking down yeah yeah and again like the fact that it's going to be a campaign talking point this presidential election like people are going to be forced to talk about it is really like imagine like this big debate and and like the moderator being like what's your stance on cryptocurrencies that's i I don't know if it's going to happen, but it's possible. Totally possible. I would bet there's more than a 60% chance

that Bitcoin or crypto is mentioned. They'll be open like, oh, the latest polls show that, the latest surveys show that 14% of Americans own crypto. You know, what's your policy stance? And another thing I want to dive into, thinking about the last cycle, I mean, epic blowups, taraluna celsius block fi ftx three arrows and i think what each of those individual blow-ups i

mean grayscale or genesis uh and gemini like what they got embroiled in with the earned product and genesis getting blown out like i think it really drove home this idea of counterparty risk and this is something i think many people in the bitcoin space believe and you mentioned unchained earlier which i think they're spearheading is this idea of leveraging bitcoin's native properties particularly multi-sig to create unique custody setups that can really be the foundational sort of mechanism that this new monetary and financial system is built on so like i've had this theory that maybe it's not this cycle but the next cycle that multi-institution multi-sig will be the standard or should be the standard it should be it should totally be the standard i mean

could never do that with gold right back in the day you couldn't think you always have to store one bar of gold in one spot but uh with bitcoin it's yeah it's a different game how do you think that would change things if it does become the standard it's just so exciting because it means that um the ability for governments to aggressively expand their projection of power you know like if you think about napoleon or a hitler or something where part of the appeal of rolling out their armies was to just grab whatever they could grab on the way there and and of course you think like oh they took over companies and they took over it's like yeah to an extent you know like hitler apparently he wanted romania because it had a lot of oil at the time and so that's true that's

always going to be true uh but part of the motive was to grab the gold of of the other the country that you're going to get it's kind of like a board game where you get to take the armies of the other country and then and then that creates more momentum for you and there's all these stories about how the gold moved around in the period of the other great wars in europe um just fascinating and so with multi-sig when when the signatories um are in are different companies are situated in different countries maybe even different continents that becomes impossible like every company every company's treasury and every country's treasury could be stored in a virtual switzerland right in a neutral place that cannot be touched by the interests of one particular

nation so and then of course as the the political geopolitics uh geopolitical situation changes those keys can also be changed right if all of a sudden we have a bipolar world well then you can shuffle your keys so that neither pole has the majority of the keys or controls the majority of the keys so to me it's just a recipe for peace you know it just means that there's less incentive to um to go to war yeah i completely agree and it's again exciting with the mini script stuff with unchained really proving it out with their lending product and their vault product their ira product like i think it is becoming obvious that it doesn't make sense from like an investor's perspective like you could argue that there's a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that your

backing companies that have this model not an FTX, a BlockFi, a Celsius who just have the ability to take customer Bitcoin and do with it what they want yeah and also it's so instructive that these companies had their run and their run was so

short right like you would think like oh but a Madoff did it during 20-25 years as Ponzi and of course there may be more shoes to drop you know there may be some big exchanges out there that don't have full reserve because unfortunately proof of keys is not really uh uh mainstream you know it's not commonly demanded by bitcoin customers yet around

the world um but um but i think it it makes me hopeful to see that like an ftx they did it for what less than three years and like they went bust and celsius i don't know how long they ran but i don't think it was very very long it's like four or five years four or five years like block And I mean, it doesn't mean that in the future, these fractional schemes are going to stop existing. I think they're always going to try it. But at least if you start getting a culture among certain Bitcoiners, maybe a subset of Bitcoiners or savers, because ultimately the whole world is going to have Bitcoin. But if you have a subset of the population who's like, look, our family only puts their Bitcoin in places that have proof of reserves, that use multisig, whose Bitcoin is not stored, where the keys are not guarded by the same institution, where there's at least three institutions involved or something like that. you know you could basically have a literally an ethos around that and i think that's it's important that we try to explain that that's possible and try to encourage that it completely agree it's going to be socially driven yeah that's like the one that's like i know down the

hall when ftx blew up they saw a lot of inbound because it was like all right now i realize that These exchanges that don't have this key set up are central points of failure. Likewise, Coldcard, I believe, saw a big influx of people saying, hey, we need to get hardware wallets. Can't hold it on the exchange. Yeah. Like the ruggings really helped the market learn. Yeah.

I mean, when I did my fund in 2019, like we were lending, borrowing from Unchained. And I remember like a lot of the objections or a lot of the pushback was like, why do you go with them? they're so expensive and i was like oh you know i did some due diligence with blockfi and i'm not comfortable and then i went there and i wasn't comfortable either and these guys like we looked at their docs and it said that the the collateral was allowed to be re-hypothecated elsewhere and so i didn't trust that and you know at least in this in this case i know what i pay for i know

it's not being re-hypothecated um so yeah oftentimes cheap can be expensive and doing something on the cheap can uh cost you dearly cost you 100 yep in many cases which is that's funny i mean we got that flack too at 1031 like why are you investing in unchained and not block five block five is worth four billion dollars now and we have to go like hey like similarly to what you just explained we looked at it their model like they're gonna blow up one day and um you never yeah you never like to see people lose their money but we have been vindicated for making those decisions and that's why having some knowledge of history is so useful right because when you see that this is not new and and uh because things take time to play out right if if you only live

in the now and you see you're you're like you just live with the news cycle and you're you're just thinking like a pundit it's like yeah then of course you're gonna bet on block fi because you look at their growth and you want to be on that train but then if you have a bigger longer term perspective you see like oh but fractional reserve banking also existed in the past and sometimes banks would blow up after 10 years or after 20 years and i'd like to sleep well at night so let's go conservative yeah and it's i mean the blows are way more pronounced and happen quicker like you said in bitcoin because there is no lender last resort like you lose the bitcoin you're not getting it back yep speaking of tailwinds i know we talked a lot about like

overton window being shifted toward bitcoin at the political landscape being part of the presidential talking points leading up to this campaign uh but external to that like looking what the fed's doing what's going on with this multipolar world that seems to be evolving with BRICS countries teaming up and, uh, European countries going through some economic turmoil. Like, how do you think that plays into the narrative as we head towards the next halving? Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's all rocket fuel for Bitcoin. Like, I mean, I mean, I can speak a little bit for Europe cause I grew up there and I lived there until it was about 30. So, um, and I also, I had my newsletter. I was very much, you know, looking at European markets

not really to invest but more like to try and see where the next bank was going to topple and in europe things are just there is a culture of obfuscation like people often point at the us as like oh the glass house and look at that and it's like yeah but part of why you can point at the us is that there just is a lot of data there's just so much data and i remember as a as an analyst i really had to dig and make phone calls and try to like where's the data they would like be in like you know if you want to look at italy you might need to like find an italian economist who knows how to dig into the italian language database of you know it's just so arcane and you know oftentimes um not that you can't know enough to figure out the outlines of

things but um but so yeah i just you know i don't know if it's very valuable to your audience but i just it's tempting to think that the grass is greener elsewhere and to be like oh you know like peter schiff he made a big fuss about that uh in the in the wake of the the 2008 crisis he was like oh you know if you're in the dollar you have a target on your back and the you know bernanke is shooting at you and you gotta like and so he like recommended people to divest in all these uh more exotic fiat currencies and to go invest in emerging markets and terrible results so maybe that's just a general thing of like you know i think the whole world is very interconnected and um and uh if these trade routes get get um jeopardized uh we can all suffer at the same time

It doesn't have to mean that there's a big winner and a big loser. Like, we can kind of all suffer in our own way. Just how, like, the Ukraine war, like, is there a big winner there? I don't know. I don't think Russia is really the winner, even though oil prices did go up. And, you know, so, yeah, just to me, the general theme is that there is just a lot of lies have been built up. a lot of stories have been built up fairy tales that are aren't true slowly people are figuring out that these it's true it doesn't hold they're they're kind of like trying to get their money

out and so we're just seeing some of these things starting to topple and i think it's just gonna accelerate uh that process uh it's hard to predict exactly when but also i i feel like yeah it is all interconnected um and um and and and so it's getting more and more difficult to try and maneuver as an investor because oftentimes the past couple decades the richest people in the world were global macro investors who you know drunken miller's style i could kind of see the waves coming and and make their bets um even even uh warren buffett has done that like he kind of claims that uh you know he's just a value investor but he's he's made directional bets for sure um few people know this but he you know he he did a big silver bet for example and some other stuff

um and clearly like he he bought up banks like in the wake of the financial crisis because he knew they're going to be bailed out and things like that um so but i think that game is gonna is getting more and more difficult because the volatility is just ramping up so much and uh and so it's just getting more and more attractive to just choose a thing choose what is your thing that you believe in for the next 10 years and just sit still because if you don't want to get shaven what is it the the matter the the proverb if you sit still if you don't want to get nicked or something like if you're basically a sheep and you're gonna get shorn so sit still while that's happening because because it is true like politicians are gonna panic they're gonna raise

taxes. And so if you're a landlord, for example, you're like, you know, juggling with debt and leverage and moving your capital around and flipping and all that, you can't predict what the housing policy is going to be two, three, five years from now. Whereas, you know, if you have a position in Bitcoin, of course, maybe the taxes are going to go up a lot for capital gains or whatnot but at least if you if you sit still um you have a better chance of of um making a strategically sound decision and at least the underlying asset is is going to you know go the right direction yeah you can weather the storm right better than i don't know if any of that makes sense but that's kind of like how i look at the no it makes sense and

what i couldn't stop thinking about it seems like the rube goldberg machine will focus here in the united states that it seems like they've just been adding to it in the financial layers like with the fed opening new facilities post-covid we have the reverse repo markets you have this duration mismatch mismatch with a lot of the banks and treasuries like rates changes affecting that and now it seems like the commercial real estate market in many big cities is beginning to falter it just seems like there's a lot of leaky holes yes and the the strategy of the government the federal reserve over the last 15 years has been to try and just like create new facilities and patch the holes but it seems like to me that it's getting to a point where it's like there's

too much going on all at once yeah you literally can't taper a ponzi like you you can only expand it you can only just keep going and and try to you know make the base of the pyramid wider and wider which eventually just dilutes the value of the money in the first place so yeah no and and And it's also the basic lesson of, you know, a lot of the Austrian economics literature is that there's so many unintended consequences of interventionism. And that's what we're seeing. Like they started intervening in 1913 with the Fed. And then, you know, they just built more and more layers of intervention thinking that if only we can make an intricate enough bureaucratic machine, we can cover all the edge scenarios. But all that they're doing is just making the instability of the whole system bigger.

If you're always trying to suppress volatility, eventually you get a massive hyper-volatility in the system. That's why the economic crises are getting so much more severe compared to the 19th century. A stock market crash wasn't really a big deal back then, whereas now it feels like the end of the world. yeah net worth of most americans tied very very tightly to that it's interesting we're having this conversation today i mean jerome powell came out raised rates another 25 bps today their targets between 5.25 and 550 now he also came out during the press conference after and said the consensus of the board members is that we're not going to head into a recession here anytime soon recession is officially off the table in their minds which is like are they going to make a soft landing

no i mean it's it's it's also like it's it's a semantics game at some point as well because if they print enough money to make it look like there's no soft landing people could still be really hurting like they retained their jobs but all of a sudden the price of eggs is up another 30% and the price of gas is up another 30, 40%. And so then it's kind of like, what are you achieving? Except that on paper, you're doing a good job and unemployment is low. And like, who cares about unemployment, right? If, if, if people don't have enough to, to make ends meet, it doesn't matter. Yeah, I completely agree. That feels like exactly what's going on. Like recent jobs reports, like, yeah, we're winning, we're winning. They're raising rates again.

we're not going to have a recession they're pointing at cpi it's back at 3.3 percent but it's like it's not what everyday americans are feeling i'm sure in 1923 uh germany everybody was working there wasn't any unemployment yeah and then actually bellagio has been tweeting about this and uh has sent me a few messages about it but he's been tracking like the the inflation software services and like yesterday tweeted out like there's a number of software services whether it be like youtube tv youtube premium um right spotify spotify went up a dollar yes that's 10 or more than 10 it was 9.99 now it's 10.99 yep actually i went to see oppenheimer yesterday um and uh the movie and uh one of the things i noticed it's it's impossible

to not notice it was like a war zone there was like popcorn everywhere the toilets smelled terrible uh just they just they're cutting on you know staff uh maybe that's like you can i mean you can always make the argument like yeah but you know people are streaming more nowadays or there's always a story as to like why that particular place is deteriorating i just think it's also inflation like you know people have less discretionary budget um and they yeah just everything is deteriorating like that's it's like inflation is like anemia of the economy like if money is the blood of the economy then well you you're gonna have blood cancer eventually like that that the you diluted enough and the the nutrients cannot be transported around in the

economic body and so all the organs start breaking down and that's a that's a big crisis it's uh it's frustrating i mean i've been i've been literally counting down to you know to this for the last 15 years it's just been what i've been expecting and at least one of the fears i had back you know when i first started thinking about this in like 2005 was um oh my god because it kind of feels like the end of the world it's like oh my god we're going to have such high inflation and but when you look at places like latin america and other like life goes on like argentina has pretty much hyperinflation right now and like you can you can live well there you just adapt um so that's what gradually everybody's learning how to

do yeah i mean that's i completely agree and i had the same sort of frame of mind in like 2013 i'll never forget i think my wife and i i've been dating for two years we're long distance and she would come to chicago and i would ruin her trip because it was like right when i was getting into bitcoin and had the same like oh my god inflation is gonna get insane the financial markets are gonna melt down by the end of brunch you'd be crying like what's wrong with you i feel you yeah it's it's a really like it's a really existential process to go through and like realize that this is this is gonna happen it's like because you didn't they didn't teach you in school like you know well you know when inflation happens this is what you do and that's nobody ever

talked about that yeah i mean and he's less than a dozen feet away from us but like gradually then suddenly written by parker lewis it does like it feels like you only recognize this like while you're in it and you're able to really dissect it and in retrospect moving forward but like is there the potential that we're like in the middle of a hyperinflationary event right now we just don't realize it yet yeah i think stagflation is where we're at right now i do i feel confident this is the next you know starting in 2020 whatever 2020 at least to 2030 if if we're not going to have much higher inflation at least this era is going to be known as stagflationary where um we've just kind of like run how much more capital do people still have left like if you like all these shows

like uh what is it ramsey james ramsey and these other guys that are like analyzing people's budgets is like how much actual savings do people have these days you know it's not a lot i think millennials are i mean and people make a big deal out of like oh but the millennials are going to inherit all the wealth of the boomers you know even though they only have five and a half percent now of the whole pie and um and the boomers when they were our age um had like uh i think it was like 30 or something uh well you know don't worry because we're gonna inherit from the boomers i don't think so i think the boomers invested in the ponzi and they're just holding ftx tokens you know they're holding government bonds and they're holding real estate and they're gonna have to sell

to pay for their pension and so as they're selling it's it's going to drive the price down massively so anyway i'm just you know we're in that phase where we've used up all the capital you know all the savings and so this is going to be a hard time where um people need to learn to strap the belt and focus on the essentials for a while so that we can actually start saving again um i forgot where i was going with that but that's one thing i mean we mentioned boomers and millennials we talked about this last week on the last trade but the forgotten generation generation x like the median gen xer has 40 000 in retirement savings and they're going to start retiring in 10 years something like 30 have zero retirement savings which is insane to think about yeah that is just

really uh yeah i mean it's but like like i said people get by like people back in 2001 when the coralito crisis happened in argentina that was a kind of a similar shock you know in the 90s argentinians were traveling to europe and living the good life and so it's it's kind of a good reference point like people really also were met by this great shock like all of a sudden the money's stuck in the bank you can't get your money out i thought i had x but i don't i thought i could borrow but now i can't um i thought i had a house and now i have to sell it just to make ends meet um i think all that is going to happen and it's tough but at the same time like people adapt you know like all of a sudden you're six weeks in and it's the new world that you live in right

and all your friends are going through it kind of like with covid you know like we said you know people are strong you know you just you live through it and it's of course i mean i feel better being prepared but well that's what i was going to get to do you think now the big one exists like there's an opportunity to shorten the amount of time that there's a crazy disorganization yes i i do yes crazy disorganization and also it it because there's this escape hatch uh we can we basically have a backup system already up and running right i mean bitcoin is a global money it's it's right there and uh and of course tether is in a way part of the whole ecosystem as well for sure for sure because that means that if even if if you're in

the depth of the great depression right it's going to be a depression so if you're in the depth of that depression and you want to start a business you're like everybody needs i don't know people need to wash their clothes and i have this new whatever it is you know um i'm gonna start a bus company or something you have a way to calculate your revenues and your returns and to pay your staff and all that so so the bootstrapping is going to be a lot more effective uh with bitcoin yes absolutely and of course some of the some of the way that things kept spiraling like in latin america you would have a hyperinflation and then like five six seven years later another bout and it would just be this kind of endless cycle of kind of stumbling from one hyperinflation into

the next that could be kind of prevented right where because then you get that bad cycle massive inflation and then there's a a new presidential candidate and he runs on a bitcoin ticket and he's like i'm gonna put you guys on a bitcoin standard so all of a sudden there there's hope yeah it's not like you have a hyperinflationary event they take the largest notes out of circulation we're not going to do that again they do it again

my program is we're going to scrap three zeros off the currency or we're going to go on the dollar that's the best people could do in Latin America go on a dollar standard yeah it's interesting

speaking of nation state adoption like that's another thing that this bear cycle has really brought forth obviously we had el salvador towards the middle of the last bull run but since then like it seems like the game theory at the nation state level that big winners have been talking about for greater than a decade has been playing out at least in some areas you had the kingdom of bhutan their sovereign wealth fund unfortunately get embroiled in the block fine celsius bankruptcy proceedings and so they were sort of unmasked as a sovereign wealth fund that has been accumulating bitcoin and we come to find has been mining bitcoin since early 2020 and is doubling down on that now that they've been

unmasked like and and it is working out in the way that many predicted where these smaller nations like el salvador or the king of baton would be the first movers because their asymmetric upside is so much larger than the first world economy like the u.s or or europe like yeah and there's also a big pr problem right if a country like germany were to adopt bitcoin then there's a lot of the rhetoric that all of a sudden you know people you're undermining whereas a little country that doesn't have anything left to lose like they it's easier for them yeah i think a nation-state adoption it doesn't seem like there's a lot cooking behind the scenes like a little bit here and there but i think for this cycle in the beginning at least it's mostly going to be

institutions i think institutions insurance companies like just the all these vast pools of money um i think are going to start cycling into bitcoin basically institutions that have had historically so much exposure to bonds cycling into bitcoin and then that can in turn um trickle down in the political world where politicians starting to realize like actually the big money in the world what they want is something real something hard like you know uh commodities bitcoin gold and then they'll be like well we haven't been successful in in issuing these this latest batch of fiat bonds maybe kind of like what kennedy said you know we'll have this one it's a bit weird that kennedy is like talking about bonds that are backed by bitcoin because

it's dead right it's not backed by anything it's just a promise to pay in the future but at least some of these some of our liabilities what if we denominate them in bitcoin so that these um these big pools of money at least want to uh send some of that money our way yeah it's uh and then you're explaining that i'm like oh it'd be bad to issue debt in bitcoin unless you have uh in your country big mining operations because then you can start taxing in bitcoin as well and so you can kind of have your economist come up with a model that's like look you know five percent of the bond is expressed in bitcoin but like this is our tax revenue stream based on what we're getting from the miners and that's good for bitcoin too

right because it creates more stability for those miners yeah and speaking on the institutional adoption like that's been a big meme for a while the institutions are coming with blackrock filing for the etf and other institutions getting in recent years bny melon obviously fidelity has been in for quite some time uh what could that do for this next cycle like you said this is vast amounts of wealth like like compared to past cycles what would the magnitude of that much money moving in yeah i mean it's it's i mean that's where the money is it's like literally like as hobblers are getting more emboldened and as the subsidy is about to get cut in half yeah exactly right hodlers uh are are holding on to their coins they're not moving they're

not selling and um and you're right or the having is coming uh and then you have these vast pools of money that are in a bind really because it's not like like they also need returns they also are scared of the volatility and the traditional safe havens are no longer like real estate is no longer a safe haven bonds are no longer a safe haven tech stocks are no longer a safe haven uh like what are you going to put all your money on apple like apple and amazon like is that going to last even like maybe this just the last throws of a of a an overhyped uh tech market and then yeah you could say like oh we're gonna bet on commodities but like that is a small world like you know i think commodities are gonna come back roaring come roaringly come back but that's that's

a shift that you need to make not just as a money manager but there's that whole pr challenge where you got to explain it to your investors like oh well you know we're making a change and and it's like what you're gonna like start digging coal out of the ground when when the whole world is telling you that you're you're polluting uh or whatever it is you want to do in the commodities world you know are you gonna bet on hunger or so so you gotta sell that narrative and so it makes sense to at least sprinkle a bit of bitcoin so that you have that like oh well here's an asset that can take off some of the tail wrists and look at the historical returns and you know and it's a tech story and you know it's not correlated with anything else and so i think

it makes sense that um just like with the dot com period it was like what what is your internet strategy like in the investment world it's going to be like what is your bitcoin strategy how are you going to not like are you going to get exposure but like how how and they'll be like well we're we're betting on mining and so we have some you know energy related investments or whatever it is like there'll be all kinds of stories yeah and even if it's just for a couple basis points you know if you're talking trillions of dollars bitcoin is what one trillion right now something like that probably less it's like 8 50 to 9 i believe yeah oh that's the question more explicitly like how high do you think we could go next uh next bull market if it plays out

very very high very very high i've said like uh i mean it sounds a bit you know um um uh what's the word not cavalier but it sounds a bit uh flippant to say this next rally could set your hair on fire but like or or like to say there's no fever like bitcoin fever but i think it's important to be prepared for this stuff because it's not only fun like if it happens and you're not prepared it's weird and stressful and like what should i do and and like if i stay on this train maybe i'll do another 2x but you know and And so that's why I'm less hesitant to actually say these things because you need to prepare.

Like what, are you going to do anything? I'm not saying you should do anything during the bull run, but like if Bitcoin goes to 200,000, 250,000, whatever it is, 300,000, or even just above 100,000, that's already 3x from here. What, you know, where is your mind going to be at? And keep in mind, it's not like you and I are sitting here in our you know in our sofa and we've just been like you know chatting with our friends about bitcoin and the whole world doesn't care like no no if bitcoin is 150 000 or 200 000 everybody's

talking about it it's on the radio all the time there's ads for bitcoin stuff there's there's there's uh you know big political statements about bitcoin like you know there's a lot of noise um and so it's important to think about these things it's not just like oh we're just you know masturbating about what could be it's like important i think to to to try and put yourself there in the future because we've had it before like these rallies like back in 2014 bitcoin went from pretty much like 30 bucks to 1200 bucks in one and it wasn't a straight line but it was a crazy period of massive massive green candles and there were like serious corrections as well and so we just came out of um one of the longest bitcoin bear markets

and so i think you know keep in mind that this is a possibility that we you know i think a lot of the a lot of factors are lining up behind a story where bitcoin surprises the world um and so yeah i think it's it's important to consider yeah as in this environment where this podcast is not going to be heard by a lot of people and uh millions of people sorry millions of people maybe the re maybe the rerun yeah well i agree and is this technically the longest bear market bitcoin sister is it surpassed i would have to check i think it's the longest but i could be wrong yeah and like the last few months of price it's like literally just like so it feels so coiled up right now between 28 and 31 i think uh samson mouse said

like oh now i know how the gold bugs feel like trying to poke bitcoin with a stick is like come on do something do something no that's i mean many people have made the argument that last the 2021 bull market was actually cut short because we found out that ftx was just taking people's bitcoin and selling it right away yes and no i mean i agree in a way but it's also like there was so much greed like there was just there was so much exuberance in other markets as well there was like the wall street bets craze people are buying amc stock and radio shack and whatever all that crazy stuff and there was a real estate bubble there was a like a rolex bubble there's so like there was a bubble in used cars everything was blowing up so you could also argue that

bitcoin overshot you know it went to 65 000 you know it's weird because on the one hand because of that everything was blowing up there was there was just dumb money going into bitcoin but then again had there not been a bubble in everything maybe more smart money would have actually stuck with bitcoin or found bitcoin yeah so um i don't know it is it is what it is um what are your thoughts on the decoupling is bitcoin already decoupled from from what from everything from all the coins from i know i'm still waiting you can like um you can look at uh the nasdaq expressed in bitcoin and the smp expressed in bitcoin and uh those charts are still waiting to break out it's it's starting to look like you know we're we're close to resistance

and and uh we could break out pretty soon it's looking good looking very good but it's not broken out yet um and then against other alt coins i look at ethereum especially i want to see ethereum break down against bitcoin as like a sign that alts are decoupling as well what's it at like 0.065 or something like that right now 0.0 that's about right 0.063 i think yeah yeah what was it it's all time like 0.11 like 11 yeah thereabouts i think what the pattern has been is that we've seen like a double top and then like a kind of a dead cat bounce after that like an attempt to make a triple top but failing and then it went down like and so i think we've seen that exactly well we saw that pattern in 2017 i think that pattern is playing out right now like we're

we're already past the dead cat bounce but again i mean the uh what is it that frank zappa said like uh the only thing more ubiquitous than atoms in the universe is stupidity or something like you know you just you can't tell is that a canes quote and marcus and say irrational longer than you can say solomon was a cadence oh yeah that's canes yeah but then zappa was he just had this like disdain for stupidity so he's like it's just the most ubiquitous thing in the universe um but so yeah like like like if you followed imagine if you followed theranos from close by you would have been like pulling your hair out it's like this thing is a scam for god's sake all right especially if you had a medical background or whatever and they went

for 14 years so i don't know you know that like like kane said like you know uh the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent so i'm definitely not gonna bet against it well i will but i won't i won't uh you know uh i'll i'll allocate a small amount of capital that i'm short ethereum yeah against bitcoin but it's not it's not a huge position yeah yeah i mean there's been funds that got blown out holding that position too long i do think that one of the ways to to deal with bitcoin the number go up forever is to have um short strategies where you go long bitcoin short something else uh like how in the 80s the dollar was very strong so there were a lot of short opportunities then like it was the jordan balfour era but it was also an era where

you could start to short all these scams uh carefully but you could yeah yeah it's very interesting i'm more of the stay humble stack sets yeah yeah i mean i mean there's it's a it's a you have to be a trader yeah right it's it's a thing for traders and um you have to do very carefully yeah yeah what uh we've covered a lot here what haven't we covered that is on your mind in the context of where we stand today and where we may be going yeah bitcoin wise um bitcoin wise i mean i guess i'm curious what do you what do you feel like is the next thing to happen in the next like six months like what do you is there anything you're like looking out for waiting for etf and i don't care about the etf i think don't buy the etf i'm really

excited and i've been talking about this a lot so sorry freaks for repeating it he just said cody low from fetty uh number one i'm excited to see feddy mints um live and in the wild tested out the ai for all hackathon feddy mint it's on mainnet it works pretty flawlessly so seeing more development in that area and zoning in on what they're doing at that hackathon i think the intersection of ai and the lightning network is something to pay attention to wow i could it really make intuitive sense to me i could be wrong my intuition could be off but i do think that ai being the nascent industry that it is and lightning now with the l402 protocol being more widely known and now being applicable via the lang chain uh dev kit that is used by all

a lot of these ai projects could really and so which which human action would the ai help reward with lightning is that how to look at it that's one of the ways it's like stack work um the way they work is they have an AI engine that does very monotonous tasks for companies, enterprise companies, like looking to scrape data from PDS, but that AI can't always do 100% of the work. The last 5% to 10% needs human input, and StackWork has a workforce of distributed humans

who will do that last 5% to 10% of the tasks that the AI couldn't finish, and they get paid in Bitcoin. then that data gets added to the llms but i think more like another side of the ai and bitcoin coin which cody lowe from fetty explained on the show last week is that he created a lightning paywall wrapper on top of his open ai api token where he bought access to the token with his credit card and he wanted to prove that like you can use lightning paywalls using the l402 protocol to gain access to that. So he puts the paywall in front.

Somebody pays him a lightning invoice and he's happy to give them access to his OpenAPI token. Right. Because he got paid and he can maybe make a little bit money on that, but know for sure that he'll be able to cover his bill with OpenAI for all the calls he's making.

So it's like the way you could like get access to Amazon AWS for hosting or whatever, like you can do it like much more kind of on the fly now with AI, like get access to AI in a kind of, yeah, like ad hoc basis or even like with API calls or something. Like I'm just going to, my startup is going to use AI every now and then and pay immediately in Lightning or something.

Yes, that's one use case. And then what Cody found is that he like launched it and within a couple of days he checked his OpenAI account and he had $2,000 that he owed OpenAI because so many people used it. And he had $2,200 worth of Bitcoin. so it was theoretically you could have sold 2 000 kept 200 profit but we had individuals reach out to them and dm them like 16 year olds from nigeria developers who were like hey i've been looking at

all this going on with chat gbt for like six months now and like oh they couldn't have been able to use it because i don't have a credit card and i can't set up an account yeah yeah so i think for these ai companies if that use case that particular user archetype becomes more well known like that opens up their ability to to reach i'm looking to improve my spam email yeah a whole universe nigerian prince email yeah i need chat gdp that or like yeah but it just like opens the addressable market for them yeah yeah no yeah yeah i mean in in a similar way as that even like just bitcoin has access to money like now it's like well access to intelligence yeah is the next frontier potentially yeah and the other cool thing that cody explained too is like you can have these

ai agents and you give them a task and you use lightning network macaroon permissions to give it an allowance in bitcoin if um it can't complete a task uh say it gets 90 of the way it can't finish the last 10 it can take the bitcoin that it's been awarded as an allowance and put it up as a bounty for a human to figure it out you know finish that last so this is plays into drew boncells you know theory theory that uh ai are are not going to be this one it's not going to be this one overlord that is one ai like we're going to have an ecosystem of ai's multiple and that they're going to be trading with us for our bitcoin like they're going to do things for us and we're going to pay them in bitcoin and that the way ai's are going to be differentiated from

each other is one ai knows the private key to a certain balance the other one doesn't and that's how an ai can figure out like the boundaries of me versus you it's just he has a he hasn't done a write-up about it but uh he has a fascinating take on on where ai might be going and how bitcoin is like in a way to because we cannot outsmart ai in the long run but if we have that medium between us you know where where we can create a a marketplace because they need the ais need a energy uh they need chips uh to just keep existing right i mean they they they need resources that we provide and so then it's like well how do you how do you make that happen and bitcoin is it's because they cannot have a bank balance like an ai can similar to the person living in mali doesn't have

a bank account and ai actually can't either they can't do kyc yeah and you can't and they wouldn't even if they could they wouldn't trust it right why would an ai trust their fiat balance with morgan jp morgan or something and alternatively like you wouldn't want to give an ai your credit card information because like where is it going with that and right it might strip you yeah it's like all right here's a little thousand sat balance yeah yeah you send me an invoice and i'll uh i'll pay you and and in a way and people and drew was like anticipating people saying like oh but how would an ai figure out how to use bitcoin it's like well it's literally this right we're already teaching it yeah just give it a lightning wall with macaroon permissions that have certain

thresholds that it's like all right you can it's it's conditional programming it's like if you have this much and yeah if you're trying to do this task and it's below this amount you can spend it Right, and the more you do of it, the more the company that runs you is going to have resources to make you bigger, and that's what you want. You want to stay in existence and grow. Yeah. It's fascinating. Machine-payable web.

It's finally possible now. It's happening, Balaji. It is. What does the grenade stand for? It's not like symbolic, like machine-payable web and then… The grenade. shout out to to Crypto Cloaks

they just make cool grenades with Bitcoin on it it's just all kinds of like gadgets they make or is it yeah

do I have anything else from Crypto Cloaks is that like 3D printed yeah it's 3D printed cool they do like 3D printed fan alterations

for miners practical I mean practical in terms of it's a good bookcase piece but in terms of like

adding oh yeah like I've seen like when you change the fan slightly you can make it a lot less noisy or more efficient easy more efficient you can direct the heat certain ways and right right yeah um we we haven't talked about texas i don't know let's talk about texas how are you feeling about texas bullish why is that i mean i just feel like everything comes together here um

you know there's the energy fossil fuels there is uh the tech you know the chips fabs are being built here um it's flat it uh it it the energy goes beyond fossil fuels like there's wind there's solar uh there's access to the ocean you could say geopolitically it's a bit vulnerable in terms of like if we're really going towards potentially texas independence and it's like well they could they could shut off the the mexican gulf so who knows but but at least in the next whatever maybe our lifetime i just feel like there's just it has so much going for it it's business friendly that was one of the main reasons i moved here is just that there's that not just like oh we're business friendly it's like no no like we have that in our dna like there's just

that like bootstrap that wildcatter mentality yeah and like and in a way also to make something out of nothing because it wasn't like a big gold rush that drew everyone to texas it was more like you know the appalachian trail and you just kept going with your cattle and your whiskey and you know you kind of didn't like that you were bullied by the plantation owners in the south and, you know, and the Yanks in the east and you just kind of kept looking for something. And then maybe you could say like, oh, they stranded because, you know,

the Comanche were there and all of a sudden the soil became less fertile. But yeah, I mean, but you got to build an existence somewhere. So I just, yeah, I feel like there's just something really special about this place. And I didn't move here thinking like, oh, I'm moving to Bitcoin country.

And that was like 2018, 17 when I first moved to Texas. But it's kind of become Bitcoin country. I really feel like if you're here and you live here, especially if you kind of go into Bitcoin circles, you get an idea of the early stages of a Bitcoin economy. Oh, yeah. With all the energy guys making mining deals and all the the the engineers building bitcoin startups and yeah yeah and i think texas is on

a short list of states that when it comes to like writing legislation it has an ear open would be willing to be a first mover in terms of making some i don't want to say aggressive but uh bold bitcoin laws or protections well and there's history in the sense that property rights are just important historically here um you know uh the the jury trial being tried by a jury of your peers but also the um uh what's it called again the um the homestead act you know the idea and and apparently early on it was maybe a bit opportunistically put in place because they're trying to draw in more more people from all around the country and so people that had a bunch of debt that they weren't paying off in other states if you came to texas at least your

home your house could not be confiscated so that was one of the ways to attract people you know being like if you're going to build an existence your family is going to be safe but so that's still on the books and and that's been expanded on and there's a castle doctrine and there's of course the gun rights and you know all that stuff that i think all just adds up and even things like uh the way the highways are are i've talked about this before but it's just fascinating to me how part of why the highways are so usable and easily accessible and uh in my opinion amazing here it's like the jetsons with all the like you know highways in the sky compared to other countries it's amazing but but so the reason why there's all these parallel roads to

highways is that in the texas constitution it says if you have a piece of land you should also have access to any road that's adjacent to it so that means if you build a big highway you can't put that farmer on an island like he needs to be able to access that highway and so that means they built these parallel roads everywhere in texas and that's not the case everywhere in the u.s it certainly isn't the highways are great out here it bamboozled me when i first moved here particularly around austin like because like you said it's like a bunch of like meandering like and like growing highway systems i had to learn to drive like i would be like oh i gotta i gotta turn right here oh like it's like things move fast yeah but but

once you figure it out it's like it's it's very efficient in my opinion yeah yeah and conversation i've been having over the last year comes up every once and again but texas again first mover shout out to kyle basks i'm pretty sure he really pushed this initiative when he was at utimco i believe which is like the texas bullion vault where they had their own bullion vault where they weren't comfortable holding the gold in the state treasury in vaults in new york and they they called it in kind and they possess it at the bullion vault i believe here in austin and that's one thing a couple other bitcoin bitcoiners here in austin we really would like to get is the bullion vault to put some bitcoin or number one get the state of texas put bitcoin

on their treasure but then you get the bullion vault to be a key holder in a multi-sig quorum yeah could you imagine having like the texas bullion as like um an institution within a multi-sig quorum that's the definition of badass and i mean there's and if there's of course history of uh governments being involved in banking in in a benign way like you know early on the bank of amsterdam and the 1600s like that was such a key institution to uh even this financial stability of europe like they were really holding so much wealth that belonged to people all across europe um and then that was the model that the bank of england was built on like uh isaac newton's uh project um and then eventually central banks kind of ruined it but but that's what it came from

so yeah to have like an institution as the government be like look we're going to keep your keys safe and we don't even need to control your bitcoin we're just doing this as a public service uh that would be amazing yeah so yeah that history of um also like this sovereignty on an on a state level is you know having your own electric um um what do you call it electric grid yeah um that's unique as well having that history of having been a nation state um i think it's just all uh fantastic and then the the historic backgrounds of the big cities is so different like it's they're not all cut from the same cloth like austin houston dallas san antonio are all very very different even though they're not that far apart they have very different like historical

roots so to me that all adds to you want that melting pot like that's what made new york city so amazing is that it was that like impossible melting pot uh because then you you got to go find like what are the overarching principles that can keep everyone happy instead of like if it's very homogenous you can kind of calcify into getting very like weird religious stuff built into the government or you know so um it's like in bitcoin as well right we have very simple principles there's a lot of enemies in bitcoin but we agree on one thing that's a great point And I think like the simple principles of Texas's legal landscape is like, we're going to protect property rights.

We're going to have low taxes. We're open for business. We like energy beyond that. Like just don't kill it. Beyond that come and take it. I don't know. Yeah. It's a,

no, it's been great. I mean, it's obviously here at the commons, it's been really cool to see this become a, a space where people working in Bitcoin across the country

across the world stop by and check out things like a debate series or come to a BitDevs we got Austin Bitcoin Design Club

tonight it should be fun and no it's happening and then beyond like Bitcoin you have like all the comedians moving here

to Austin particularly yeah I met with somebody last night who's pretty involved in what's going on at the state level

and he lived in austin for a couple decades and was like yeah there's i've never been more bullish like everything's coming here from tech to energy um culture with the comedy stuff like yeah we have a a new university sprouting i think one of the first i mean i haven't heard of many new universities being built in the U.S. and UATX is one of them.

Logan's giving me the time. Why is that, Logan? We're running out of battery? We're going to get kicked out of here. By who? By who? Meat Mafia. Big ass heads coming in. Alright, it's good to know. Thank you for the warning. I don't have my phone on me, so I haven't been keeping track of time.

We've been getting lost in a great conversation here, Logan. Thanks for interrupting. that's why i didn't say anything uh so we're bullish on texas we're bullish on texas bullish on bitcoin yep and actually over the last couple months i've become more optimistic and bullish on humanity i think despite all the uh turmoil and anxiety that seems to be rampant throughout society i've been more convinced than ever that we have number one the tools at our fingertips to figure out the problems

that we have and number two i do think there is a sentiment shift going on where people are realizing they need to take more control and be less trustful and institutions that have that have rugged them i'm very very happy very like i feel very privileged to be alive right now i really am like there's just so many things that are like yeah there's you know you could look at them as scary like big changes you know and and and but at the same time there's just so much possible and uh and there is more as we like with the internet like even though you know it's challenging to be hyper online there's so much mental illness and all that like but at the same time we are hyper connected like there really is this potential for change and like kind of some

it's possible i think that some of the promises of the 60s and the early 70s like that like explosion of creativity i think that could really come back i think it maybe could come back in a more mature way and it was kind of squashed too you know like in the late 70s and 80s was very much an age of censorship and things like that and they weren't really tools to push back right the cypherpunks part of why they they came up was like we had all this cool stuff in the 60s you guys took it all away because you were afraid how do we build back things so that it's more robust and we can kind of gradually keep being free without it um being yanked from under us all the time and and and uh so i'm actually very very very happy um i talked about this with the

peter mccormack as well but like part of what's happening too is like we have this psychedelics renaissance that's happening i went to the the conference in denver about that and like bitcoin is coming up um i think there is more awareness of like the the challenges with social media so we're seeing like you know different ways of being online yeah man lots of i mean of course economically it's going to be tough for a year or 10 or something not for everyone but you know there's going to be a an economic depression but that's not the end of the world like we have to get rid of all this bad debt somehow it's a cleansing mechanism yeah right i mean we we we kind of need to wipe the slate clean not that we're gonna do it it's just gonna happen

so yeah i'm i'm i'm with you i'm i'm optimistic we're gonna win we're winning we have the tools at our fingertips it's just giving yourself agency believing in yourself going out and doing it well yeah and also kind of like if i mean even winning like who are we fighting you know like we're just trying to figure out how to do this stuff on this interdimensional demons yeah but i mean like yeah i just uh i feel like people have a lot more in common than sometimes you know the media likes yeah or the you know the political debates and stuff um agreed completely agreed we have more in common it's gonna be fun tour this was incredible it was too long let's not go another

three or four years between between oh i thought you meant like this podcast was too long no no it's been too long it's been too long yeah sure let's let's do it again as sooner than that awesome well luckily we work in the same office so we can figure out easy how to coordinate easy all right that's all we got today freaks peace and love