TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #439: Mining, Memes and Meetups with Thomas Pacchia

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Marty sits down with Thomas Pacchia for a chat before the pubkey mining meetup. Thomas on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tpacchia Pubkey: https://pubkey.bar/ 5:30 - Is DeFi borked? 11:13 - Blockspace scarcity 21:56 - Will shitcoin cycles continue? 28:42 - No soft landing 32:01 - Large scale investors 42:27 - Mining meetup 53:06 - What drives hashrate growth from here? 58:18 - Treasury management 1:00:55 - Pool monetization 1:09:51 - Scammers and hamsters 1:12:48 - NYC Bitcoin makes Marty bullish 1:23:05 - Memes and NFTs 1:28:58 - Derailment and riffing 1:36:29 - Bitcoin conferences and new Pubkey locations 1:44:08 - Hex and hardware wallets 1:46:58 - Reminiscing from our prison cells in 2030 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. I'm not leaving. I don't think there's any reason to leave.

I think it's going to be fine. You know, I think that there's going to be an American resurgence at some point. The country still sort of holds most of the cards, globally speaking. We were talking about this yesterday. uh drew and i were talking about sort of the the chinese population um uh problem sort of the spread between you know of age labor and how most of the gen z class is doing sort of not most but like a significant portion of gen z you know chinese labor force is doing the lay flat like why would i why would i just grind endlessly that's happening here too yeah for sure for sure

we got to like find a way to reboot and i think that the energy industry and the bitcoin mining industry is doing a decent job with this although it's not like the most like labor intensive activities but rebooting sort of manufacturing and industry sectors in the u.s like would be a massive massive unlock i agree i think i think the ties are turning in terms of the narrative around bitcoin mining and energy we have what was it kpm no not kpmg it was a ey came out with that report yesterday i didn't see that one of the big four consultant firms came out and said bitcoin mining is actually good for the environment and for for the energy sector i'd be surprised if it was ey because i think um they've been very like ethereum'd up over the last you know six years

or so i think paul brody wrote like um a new book on why ethereum's awesome he probably has missed like the last couple of years of actual developments within the ethereum ecosystem um where there's sort of like a a willful like like you know blinders on um what is going has anything been going on there um well uh in like d5 land there was the curve rugging um from the the founder i don't know i don't follow it that closely but i actually i read a thread on it yesterday so apparently he took out like a huge collateralized loan to buy yeah like a hundred million dollar loan yeah to buy a house in australia or something like that and the house is like super mid like it's terrible i think i'm saying the scammers have the worst aesthetics i'm

saying that it's like a mcmansion like castle like in australia and it's it's just very gaudy but yeah so i think that um at one point i guess the the collateral on that 100 million dollar loan reached like 35 or something like that i hit like a liquidation price and then that had um a bit of a cascade uh across the entire like i don't know fucking liquidity pool or whatever is this a learning lesson in the world of defy that will lead to changes in the way these protocols are structured that will make them functional no and stable in the future or defy is a concept completely borked um i don't think defy is a concept that's completely borked because it was i mean it was borked from the beginning and it really is just sort of turning

through some of the same mechanisms that are in traditional finance to begin with so i think that is just like another it doesn't matter if the contract's written you know in stone or on a at a bar like it's still a shit contract and if the point of most defy is to sell a token and a lot of the yield or you know a lot of the like follow on liquidity and yield farming from that comes from just you know turtles all the way down tokenomics then you know I think it'll just come around the racetrack again right now there's a lot of scrutiny from the SEC the SEC five years after the hex launch like finally gets around to figuring out that richard hart is a

scammer like again scammers have time lots and lots of time to do these things how he's the one of the worst too he's so yes he's uh he he's hard to look at i i it would be nice if you were able to have um muted pictures like it would be a great feature for uh for x if they were able to like identify a picture of richard hart and i would be able to say like please don't put this in my i do not want to see him in his louis vuitton the fucking like the the peacock twerking stuff it's just so um nauseating like i said like it i think and i was going to tweet this out the other night but i couldn't articulate it and i don't know if i'm going to be able to articulate it clearly here but there's just something about the class of scammers where it's sbf richard hart

um going over like just a traditional tech like sam altman with world coin yeah like they're not aesthetically unpleasing very cheesy bad taste and i don't know maybe i just have a better eq than most people but it's pretty obvious to me who are those classic scammers give me another like dan larimer project give me a bit shares eos steam you know eos did pretty well for itself right they just have a tremendous amount of bitcoin they have what three hundred thousand one does and they've and they've plowed that into that project bullish which um i think had a presence at the the bitcoin conference actually but it's like an i think it's an eos based like decentralized exchange just backed with like a

fuck ton of bitcoin yeah well god bless this is a conversation we've been having on this show over the last few weeks because it's an idea that's been stuck in my mind for a while matt and i've been discussing it on and off on rhr over the last like six months and it goes into the nature of the crypto cycles moving forward like has bitcoin reached a point of maturity at the protocol level at layer two with lightning and fediments emerging and other ideas being thrown out there where the tropes that were thrown around 2017 even earlier like 2013 2014 2017 2021 with defy that like bitcoin can't do this stuff like is bitcoin beginning to prove that it can do the things that the shit coins are saying it can't and if so

will we see crypto cycles moving forward as pronounced as they have been in the past uh i think that's a great framing i mean i think that there is um an adoption curve that's going to take way longer than people expect for a lot of the like if you look at sort of broader crypto as research and development for some of the use cases that will eventually come to you know hardened protocols like bitcoin and lightning um the activity that's taking place there is largely bullshit, right? They're like novelties, the DeFi stuff. There's a tremendous amount of money. There's a huge opportunity for venture funds to take tokens and dump it on retail. You know, I think Meltem said the quiet part out loud at the conference recently,

but she's 100% right. I mean, that exit, that exit liquidity and the speed at which you are able to get that exit liquidity is incredibly attractive. So, you know, in a period where there's a bit of a regulatory arbitrage and the SEC has a very difficult time going after blatant scams like Ripple and Hex and other ones, then, you know, you can move fast enough and get wealthy enough. And the scams, you know, seem to make sense. But in terms of like shifting to the actual utility, I think the ordinals and inscription thing was a very, very good view into just how long it's going to take for the real activity to hit bitcoin like inscriptions and actually time stamping data is an incredibly powerful concept that i think we're still tinkering with

but we saw a boom and a bust of the same exact you know nft projects you know limited edition 10 000 mint you know flip flip them quickly if you get a rare rare like stuff like that is like sort of flash and pan um do you have any rare wares ravers i've never people there there's like a a couple i think bitcoin magazine came out with like a plug your wallet in and find out if you have rare satoshis it's enticing but it's just like i don't know if i'm gonna put my you know my finger in the electrical socket it's like i don't know how this shit works i'm too busy to figure it out like you know not plugging in my wallet um i think that they're interesting concepts and people like clearly like them like you have collectors like there's not a huge

difference between if somebody wants to have like a serialized satoshi and look satoshi's don't technically exist i get that but it's all bullshit to me it's all bullshit but you know so much so much collectible so much of the collectibles market is bullshit like look at what happened with the pokemon cards where you had insiders at the factory that were just scooping off the legendary you know cars and selling them on the black market but like it still has value it's something that people get a lot of enjoyment out of and you know i think it's i think it's you know don't rain on somebody's parade if they're having fun especially if it's only hurting themselves i think is like you know kind of my my approach to it well

agreed like the only hurting themselves that that was one thing that was really let me reframe it as long as they're not hurting others right like if they're if they're wasting money and people can look at like collecting football jerseys or something like that well that's what i wouldn't get into like people predominantly in emerging markets when the ordinals mempool congestion was at its peak in what march or april like people were like oh shit like i can't send an on-chain transaction right now it's way too expensive is that hurting others or do we have to realize the block space is scarce yes it may have hurt that individual use case at that particular point in time but if bitcoin's going to be successful we should assume that that type of transaction is

going to get priced out and needs to be bumped up somewhere else bump it up i mean look you know yes i think it's a good thing like block space has value inscriptions ordinals like proved that i think definitively that if block space has value it will be used at a certain price full blocks all the way high transaction fees bump this stuff up to you know lightning liquid wherever um and we experienced this firsthand at pub key we we turned off on-chain transactions just thinking about the mechanism of payments like on-chain transactions are not good particularly for you know a merchant or an in-person transaction like you can wait if it's you know cross-border e-commerce or something like that that's fine but you know when you're standing in

a bar and it's a crowded bar and you're trying to close out a tab like an on-train transaction simply doesn't work from you know bar operations and also from like the customer experience perspective so the ordinal spike we had one issue and it wasn't even an issue that was specific to bitcoin it was somebody was trying to send from their coinbase wallet and it just like took a while to broadcast it um but we sort of like used that as an opportunity to say you know what we'll go we'll go lightning only just because it smooths things out on both sides so much yeah and you you guys particularly here at pubkey probably need to do that because you attract a lot of smart bitcoiners who probably know how to double spend and yeah i mean there's a lot of different

reasons to do it and you know look you know i think the total the total bitcoin revenue right is still under like two percent well it was crazy to see because we're we have the uh the mining meetup tonight where we're going to go over the galaxy digital mining report and i was actually prepping for this since i'm going to be moderating i was reading through the report around the corner at a coffee shop this morning it was pretty jarring the um the amount of fee revenue that's been acquired in the first half of 2023 it was something like 87 around 8700 bitcoin or last year at that point in time it was like 2300 so it's like almost a it's like a three and a half x yeah and they have the chart i i believe they have the chart uh they do in the

report and we'll pull that up but so much of that was captured in like what a two-week span around the conference like just before the bitcoin conference in miami uh and then it sort of has fallen off a cliff since then and i think it takes a little while for you know there are lots of projects that are building like ordinal inscription like exchanges and there's other infrastructure that needs to be built out for that market to come back and have the same impact reflected for you know transaction fee volatility i think that that comes back and that's just i mean that was a fresh breath of air for mining operations i don't know i think but how much of that activity in april was similar to like the activity that we see in

defy land where it's a bunch of insiders just juicing the numbers to portray like high activity versus actual yeah look well i think that there was something very um uh philanthropic about udi's project because miners needed that help and the only one that was able to provide it was udi at the end of the day yeah i'm completely kidding i was gonna i was expecting you to come a little bit harder after that one my response is going to be that i think i know the problem here yeah you're talking into your mic my mic just shuts off or something like that is it yeah there is a little bit of a cross but what i was going to say if miners need help should i just here i'll look away from you

are we sitting too close no we're fine okay that's fine if miners need if miners need help that's their problem like you can't depend on yeah look i think um transaction fees aren't going to save miners i think that this is a good metric to look at um as far as like the the progression of you know just minor economics in like holistically because we do need transaction fees to boost over time as the block reward subsidy decreases like there's going to be a lot of attention on transaction fees so i think you know using the bitcoin blockchain in ways that are other than you know just payment mechanisms you know opening and closings of channels i think the time stamping mechanism is very powerful and will probably play a role uh you know for the

indefinite like for the future is open time stamps uh an example of something that proves that's not the case peter todd's project yeah um that's been going on for what i think it was a decade now yeah but that was that was just sort of like a notary service right rather than inscribing the actual data like into the transaction itself right i think that was just a time stamping mechanism that was a hash that pointed to something else like a new york times article or something like that yeah a marriage certificate okay so that's a distinction a deed i mean we've always had the capability of doing that but it has to reference um you know the actual data in another database it has to be providence on chain yeah yeah but now you can actually embed

the nft or you know whatever um into the blockchain itself into the bitcoin blockchain uh into the block um whereas all the other projects if you look at ethereum solana they're still pointing to other databases which is just aws and things like that it's kind of funny that bitcoin accidentally did this stupid nft stuff in a far more you know effective manner it's true yeah i'll give i'll give the ordinal screw that i always end up having to talk about ordinals you brought it up it's a good example but um how did we get here yeah just talking about cycles whether or not not shit weight cycles will be as pronounced moving forward so um yeah i think that they'll

probably be as pronounced um people are just very slow to understand the elegance and simplicity of bitcoin i don't see that uh dissipating anytime soon i think that that's going to be a really like sticky like ongoing issue for bitcoiners and stuff that we have to deal with just in terms of like education talking through you know the differences between you know uh aws blockchain blockchain stuff and the mechanisms uh behind bitcoin that deliver the censorship resistance and and the other properties that make it you know the powerful you know communication protocol that it is today yeah i think i'm i'm on the contrarian side of this i think the market has learned a lot of lessons over the last 10 years i mean we had the old school bitcoin talk.org

shitcoin launch uh what did you have the um the fair proof of work launches the the proof of stake coins like feather coin and all that um popping in as well and then we had the ico boom obviously then we had defy along the way more ways people come in stay come in stay and alongside everybody looking at the sidelines has sort of been viewing this too like all right there's something weird going on here and then you get the validation from blackrock and i do think the utility and we were talking about it over there in the quarter before we came to the couch but i do think that the utility that can be brought to the ai industry using lightning network paywalls will be a use case that really sets bitcoin apart because i do think that they're going to solve

the problems that they have particularly with the amount of capital that goes into the electricity and then um preventing chargeback risk they're going to need to use something like lightning I agree with all of that. I am a little bit more pessimistic or I'm going to give a little bit more runway for the scammers to stop taking advantage of people that do not have the time or necessarily the technical capabilities of differentiating between these two things. I think that the SEC has already lost a lot of these battles. Well, that's one thing I want to bring up. I saw you tweeting about Ripple the other day. judge came out and said uh yeah this may not be the correct ruling here the second judge is completely right in my opinion like we have a framework to assess these things there's a tremendous amount of money being poured into law firms who are the first ones through the

door at a lot of the regulators um you know explaining why you know their project doesn't fall under this or that um it's what happened with ethereum way back in the day they they got some of the largest law firms in the world to be the first you know people through the door to start the conversation ethereum is not a security and when they do that over the course of you know we're coming up on what eight years yeah um you know that's a lot of money that's a lot of time uh to find the effective pathway to buy more time so eventually it's going to go to congress and they want new laws and i think it's going to be successful i think that ethereum is going to get a carve out um where it absolutely shouldn't it was launched as an unlicensed unregistered security

it continues to operate as such um there's going to be lots of regulatory capture i think consensus pivoted years ago to being more like compliant on chain compliance focus they're basically chain analysis for ethereum despite being the for-profit arm that launched ethereum um and i'm just very pessimistic like they can't even wrap their they can't even wrap their hands around ripple like i think richard hart's probably gonna you know be somewhat successful like i don't think we're going to get a lot of jail time out of spf that's a totally separate issue i mean maybe some of the other ones doquan whatever like they'll certainly capture some of them but just woefully woefully and ineffective and i wrote about this when i was at fidelity in in 2016 i had an internal blog

called the bit still area fidelity and in one of the weekly updates um i talked about sort of the sec has a choice to make here um they can play whack-a-mole over uh and and go after the egregious scams like the ones that are just completely blatant um they can go after the exchanges which were already pretty decently well capitalized but this was again back in like 2016 2017 when i wrote this that could have been an approach or you go after ethereum and ripple which were the big ones back in the day and you have a seminal court case and you get after it immediately fast forward from 1617 to today it's not viable like the the sec doesn't have the resources to fight you know ethereum or ripple for that matter and i think that that's being

you know played out right now so when a lot of the the crypto lawyer like think boys you know say like you know oh it's just going to be a mess it's going to flip-flop from one judge to the other like congress needs to act of course they want that because they're involved with that they're lobbying you know a lot of you know representatives and in that in the house and senate as to why you know extraordinarily well-capitalized shitcoin project a b and c are not securities and they're just like bitcoin a validator is like a minor and they're talking to staffers they're talking to interns they're talking to lobbyists and they don't have the time to understand the difference and you know bitcoin obviously doesn't have that presence we don't we don't like pour money into

lobbyists to to you know work on the painstaking education to bring people through that so i'm much more pessimistic i think that we'll we'll continue to get these waves they'll just morph they'll be within you know i mean look banks did it forever right you know how did we find ourselves in a situation like oh wait um i think it'll just take a slightly more you know tradify sophisticated you know uh compliance like obstacle course but there will always be a way to do it i'm still gonna push back i don't think so i mean i hope you're right and i'm not depending on and i want to be clear i'm not like depending on let me fix this yeah here let's pause for a second and see if we can fix this because we'll want to fix this yeah so i think the the last big

shit coin pump definitely coincided with just a tremendous amount of free money being flooded you know post-covid um i guess that goes to more and you've had a lot of really great macro guests on in the last like month or two uh you always do but i think that there's been especially good um good conversations around that do you think that this continues or they end up printing more like if there's more free money and they have to like ease up a little bit uh on uh like where do you actually think that that's going because i think they they have to resume right they have to resume the printing i think the problem is going to be everybody's expecting the soft landing i'm about to talk with alex thorne

i was listening to galaxy brains in the drive up here galaxy brides their latest interview like that was the the pre-interview macro talk was like yeah we're gonna get a soft landing the fed's doing this incredibly well and i just completely disagree like i don't like cpi print maybe 3.3 percent but it there's no way inflation's just 3.3 just go to the grocery store go to the gas station try to fly anywhere these days um it's rather expensive and then on top of that like i think fed just rose another 25 bips and the day after we had uh obviously a inventory draw of oil that was way higher than expected so wti ripped above 80 dollars i do think that energy inflation is going to continue and so from a narrative perspective like we forget about when we talk

about hyperinflation like i think we're in the beginning stages of it and it's part mechanical part social uh mechanical is obviously expansion the monetary base flooding the markets with liquidity uh the base of the currency but then the social part is like do people actually believe that these central banks can maintain maintain the monetary system and i think what's happening right now with the fed raising rates and i think inflation is going to come roaring back in q4 this year particularly driven by energy at that narrative that uh the fed created a soft landing is quickly going to go out the door we're going to be at five and a half to 5.75 percent fed funds rate at that point the fed will have embarked on the most aggressive interest rate hikes at all

time they would have barely been able to reel in inflation at that point that's when the social part kicks in it's like oh shit they just raised rates almost six percent over two years two two years and some change and it did very little to fix inflation and now due to the debt situation uh i mean that's the other thing like the interest expense on the debt is at a trillion dollars now it's going up like it's doubled year on year yeah so you have those things and then fed's gonna cut rates and exacerbate that that problem yeah that's when the social part kicks in and people go they have no control of this yeah at which point it's like all right no more i don't have time to speculate uh whether or not if ethereum or solana is gonna

flip in bitcoin like it's pretty obvious that bitcoin's been here for 15 years uh it's matured and the um the promises that were levied about the second layers are beginning to come true and you're seeing that in the market yeah i i'd like to i think that that's all those are all really great points and if you look at who was really fueling it wasn't in my view and feel free to disagree with this it wasn't really a retail phenomenon it was really bootstrapped by large large deep deep pockets um so who are the venture funds that we're really plowing in and who are the lps that were you know plowing into these venture funds to just execute these you know pump and dump you know highly speculative bets in like solana and things like that like are we looking at

multi-family offices that are just trusting like take your pick andreessen horowitz or some of the the really big VCs that are out there. Because that cascade, those multifamily offices are the ones that are the primary beneficiaries, right? And their relationships with the large banks that are beneficiaries of the printing press. So if that's not there to spur sort of the retail feeding frenzy, or to get like a little bit of it going, then I could see what you're saying, where you're you're you're more you have a easier time scrutinizing value for value well yeah let's put ourselves in their shoes like let's say the scenario i just laid out comes to fruition inflation isn't fixed the geopolitical situation in the world continues to get worse we had south

africa come out yesterday and saying this bricks nation meet up next month is going to be a pivotal point in history it seems like the multipolar world is only going to get more polarized and at the same time we have the halving coming up next april again all the fundamentals around bitcoin only getting stronger and hot aways as the price went on exchange there's only 21 million bitcoin and the minds of these multi-family offices once they realize which i think black rock whether you like the utf or not like that signal is massive and signals directly to that caliber of investor like they're going to begin to really internalize the opportunity cost of playing stupid games in shitcoin land versus getting their portion of the 21 million and

as the price of bitcoin rips six figures low six figures mid six figures potentially like they're going to be able to get less and less bitcoin and again the opportunity cost of playing those stupid games is going to be so large it only grows as the price of bitcoin goes up what year you think the fork wars can commence uh i don't know i don't i don't think we're gonna have another one absolutely i don't think so 25 26 at the latest in my view over what um so i think the blackrock etf gets approved i think it controls a tremendous amount of bitcoin and you know there's some you know not great imprecise language that could be read from an adversarial perspective around you know what they identify as the you know the victory blockchain the the one true

the one true back the blackrock bitcoin but as we learned well true i agree that language exists but like blackrock the etf it's just a an immobile vehicle where bitcoin just sits and what we learned the 2017 fork wars is if you actually want to support what you deem to be the winning train you actually have to like send those coins through nodes you know for all his faults bernard silbert uh was pretty hands-off uh in retrospect i think that he was ideologically like um you know he liked bitcoin he dabbled with a lot of um but i do think that there was a passiveness to you know a situation where you could have somebody being far more activist around you know throwing around their weight and their their bitcoin holdings right we're not going to be dealing

with a roger veer we're going to be dealing with a far more formidable foe if blackrock turns into an activist that understands the underpinning of you know bitcoin core developments like bitcoin core is still quite small at the end of the day um you know the bitcoin community is pretty robust and i think that the fight won't be necessarily an easy one but i i would expect it my bet is 25. back half of 25 we'll be dealing with these issues i'll take the other side of that bet because again like i don't think there's many layers to that scenario just laid out that like don't compute again the etf is just supposed to buy a bunch of bitcoin have it sit there and what are they calling them

approved partners can take that bitcoin in kind but that's only gonna be like fidelity and a few other bds like to put their weight behind a certain fork they're gonna have to move that bitcoin like is that in like are they able to do that via the mandate of the trust they've set up like yeah i think i think that the language or at least the initial drafts the language in the initial drafts definitely allow um some flexibility for moves like that but you know we're also talking about one of the biggest you know investors in broader esg like they have pulled back from that quite a bit yes she's dying it is dying for now i i don't think it's dead and i i definitely don't think that you know a lot of the uh money and ideological like pursuits

behind esg are dead i think that they might be taking a little bit of a of a breather right now but um i doubt that we've seen the rest of that and the world is you know starting to to wake up from that um nightmare i think again i'm much more i'm surprised by this you're usually more pessimistic like i'm the pessimist uh uh this chat well i'm becoming more optimistic because i do like again like the coalition of events that's happening in bitcoin and external to bitcoin is making me extremely optimistic look at confidence in institutions all-time low it's getting worse every day yeah like they're dealing with that too black rock is one of the largest institutions in the world and people are becoming increasingly increasingly um wary of what they're

doing yeah i think that like the backlash like if we thought the backlash against barry and coinbase was bad i just wait until you tell everybody blackrock's trying to fuck up like the open monetary system of the future are you going to be around the fight again yes of course if i have to i don't think i will have to um but that another thing i feel like the old guards getting tired no i'm definitely not getting tired i'm i'm not you i mean like in general my batteries are charged i'm ready to go moisturized but hydrated on top of that as well i think this is actually something as bitcoiners we need to do a better job of framing like the etf particularly and then going back to like the lightning use cases it's like all right

with the blackrock etf obviously you'll be able to get exposure that way it doesn't seem like you as an individual with exposure to that etf are going to be able to take that bitcoin in kind the end of the day you're going to be depending on the fidelities of the world to do that for you and then give you the bitcoin so most likely you're gonna have to sell i don't know if fidelity has enabled withdrawals yet no they haven't so yeah unlikely retail withdrawals for from fidelity's perspective i think are still you know a ways away fdas which is an institutional product fidelity digital asset services allows for that but that is like a that is a institutional grade product yeah for like funds um but the retail product i would be surprised if they opened

the floodgates for that i i would agree and so making my point for me it's going to be possible for you to actually get bitcoin without taking on a large taxable event when you sell your shares to the etf to get actual bitcoin and why i say that is because i do think what's being proven out with the lightning network and like the emergence of fediment is that bitcoin as a medium of exchange as a payments protocol it's going to be extremely useful yes it's probably uh like best to just hold bitcoin as a savings vehicle right now and ride the monetization wave but the monetization wave can come fast it can come strong you can wake up in five years and your bitcoin could be worth a lot and then around that the infrastructure could be so mature that

people are actually using bitcoin transactionally and so when it comes to the blackrock etf i think we need to go to people and be like hey like yes you want bitcoin exposure but here are some examples of how people are actually using it in their day-to-day lives if you get exposure via blackrock you are going to be cut out from that ability and so when you're thinking about your allocation of bitcoin make sure you're getting it via an exchange or a product that lets you actually take it in kind at some point in the future when you will inevitably want to use the utility of the network on the internet or in day-to-day commerce and meat space uh global south definitely has a number of advantages here yeah utility through necessity

uh utility of bitcoin in the absence of sort of the robust you know rails we've been talking about this for a long time in bitcoin but i do think that there are some really like positive developments in the last couple of years where that is just becoming clearer and clearer for folks dude uh cody lowe gave a demo of fetty mainnet at the lightning summit in nashville a few weeks ago and it was just like wow it was like magic yeah how how it worked like it actually works exciting times very exciting times so tonight we have the mining meetup we do galaxy sims coming um what else is top of mind for the mining meetup to discuss with the galaxy folks in their perspective uh superconductors completely borked are they real no i had no idea what this

was until like a week ago the concept of superconductor let alone they're just trying to hit you with the trauma hammer over and over again aliens climate change superconductor yeah you haven't you haven't had enough trauma you're still too cogent uh when you're discussing some of the macroeconomic forces in that play here hit him with the hammer again you got free energy there's gonna be fucking laser cannons that can destroy the moon like next week or something like that no like i said i was reading the report earlier and i think uh probably the most underappreciated theme of the last two years is the geographic distribution of hash rate like middle east stepping in yeah baton stepping in

latin america aping in as well i think that's very underappreciated right there's a tremendous amount of wasted energy everywhere on the planet and being able to capture that and build infrastructure in you know isolated or disparate areas is just such a straightforward win like it's just non-negotiable um to be able to capture some of that ways and then use it for other infrastructure that would be critical for that community no matter where they are is just it's it's fire it's the wheel yeah and the one question i want to ask beyond that too is it's not really a question that was a statement but the man the asic manufacturing landscape at the end of the decade like how does that shape up because bitmain their latest batch of xps

not sure if you've heard but they can't really take the heat as well yeah as earlier batches weren't there issues with the psu for the pros or something i think that one of the 19 pros yeah i think the j pros had a psu issue was which was fixable uh this is going a little ways back but you know the s17 was a bit of a dumpster fire yeah the epoxy on the hash board is completely belted or something yeah so um these things happen there's so much unplugged equipment like we're ripping right um and did you see adam back uh saying that we're going to double by the end of next year so we had like 700x a hash no he was saying what's next it was a like a thousand no we're at like 375 right now it's more than double than like triple i think

that he put out like a thousand x a hash yeah which is which is what i don't know what comes next uh zeta hash zeta hash is gonna be kind of cool to say yeah um i mean we're seeing it standard we've been plugging in like top of line asics and it's crazy how much hash rate you can get with a megawatt of power yeah top of line models yeah are we over securitized on hash rate you don't know yeah depend some miners find out the hard way um but going back to your question on you know uh apparently like the latest xps like if you go over a certain degree i believe it's like like they can only handle like 75 degrees celsius the hash board's good and if one of the chips on the hash board breaks it borks the whole the whole board not good no um apparently

miners are very good i mean the tooling around things like you know the firmware you got brains you got luxor um luxor is really uh impressing people that are downloading it yeah yeah um it's a really great product shout out luxor um but also other things just monitoring software like foreman i think that like holistically the entire industry has gotten a lot smarter from like an operating perspective so if you know those boundaries i think miners are going to like catch on pretty quickly there's a ton of unplugged equipment still just warehoused right like a lot of inventory as some of the um uh the big like credit facilities that were written years ago from block five celsius you know galaxy foundry nidig anchorage like as those are unwound i think

that healthy asics are going to eventually find a good home and get plugged in but bitmain hasn't really slowed down i think that they have been very defensive with their allocation from tsm tsmc um and i would assume the same is true for you know micro bt and canon like it's really sort of use it or lose it um so there's a lot of capacity i'd like to see more foundries i think that everybody would like to see you know american foundries get you know serious again well going back to your point about optimism and like reshoring manufacturing did you see what's happening in arizona with tsmc yeah it's a big facility why did it get derailed it got temporarily they couldn't hire any engineers because nobody's smart enough in the u.s dude wow i did not see

that they had to import something like 10 000 engineers from taiwan there are lots of highly skilled individuals that would love to come to this country to work like i feel like that is the easiest like get the fuck out of the way but we're talking about like congress i agree i'm optimistic on the future of the u.s i think bitcoin's going to play a big part but we really need to get back to like actually learning shit um yeah that's going to be the biggest hurdle for us moving forward yeah yeah i think they literally couldn't hire americans because we were too dumb um that's very sad to see it to hear when did that hit is that last week i read an article about it last week yeah that's not good um that's a major facility i mean look they

were they've been pouring tremendous amounts of money into that i don't think that you know that should not be a death blow for the project like those they they need to figure that out i mean yeah they imported the people can actually do it so they brought them over imported i don't know if that's a supply chain issue yeah they couldn't get containers they put a bunch of engineers and a shipping container got them over there that's terrible um yeah i i think that that'll be a little bit of a choke point eventually but um i don't know do you think it levels off do you think sort of like network hash rate hits like a level or it just continues to to rip like indefinitely yeah yeah we have these cycles right it rubs and then it hits a

level and then miners wake up they're like oh this is actually pretty unprofitable for me we haven't had like a big like sustained dip right they're like short outside of 20 was it 21 with the the china yeah that bounced back so quickly like you like if you zero in like if you zoom out a little bit on that chart it's a blip well i think the trend to pay attention to and i want to preface this with like it's going to be very important to filter between the hype cycle and the actual signal in the ai industry is becoming abundantly clear that that is going to be energy intensive too so i do think there's going to be a lot of competition for these data centers from the ai industry i actually think that's a trend that's beginning to pick up

within bitcoin mining hosting facilities to begin to co-host asics and gpus yeah these these uh llms and so i think that will have somewhat of a dulling effect on the growth of hash rate if that's one scenario the other scenario is just we build out so much energy infrastructure they can handle both um dyson spheres mining bitcoin i guess that's what's going to need to be determined capture stars sounds like a competition from ai price out miners and curb hash rate did you see the wind drought is that what they call like what what happens when it's not windy anymore there was no wind in texas yeah recently two days ago guys up here tweeting about it yeah super interesting prices shut up is it a drought

what happens if there's no wind what do they call that a dearth of wind a dearth that could be it that sounds good the dearth of wind um okay so there was a dearth of wind um and that had pretty interesting effects on miners in texas as well i think that we'll probably we'll probably discuss that tonight but um a lot of them had to shut down we've seen in recent weeks it looks like we're about to have back-to-back downward adjustments phenomenally driven by miners curtailing in iraq in texas yeah yeah how much total hash rate do you think texas is putting out at this point i think the latest estimate i heard which i then heard i was like yeah that's believable it's like 20 so 20 of the total yes

it's what like 70 that's very impressive like texas is really like throwing some weight around yeah where we have right now we got 375 350 3 yeah 75 sounds right yeah um i think we're we're chugging towards 400 here yeah um fascinating yeah it's got another trend to pay attention to we should probably talk about tonight shout out to the cathedral boys for really publicizing what they did but um having a underclocking overclocking strategy cockroach miners yeah on the go i think this is going to be much more um much more of like a like prevalent strategy for like small mid-sized solo operators going forward it's going to make it it's going to put a lot of pressure on the large-scale public miners because you know they're competing against you know nation states who don't

necessarily care or have the same considerations that public pubcos do uh hobbyists and you know hobby is growing uh from one asic to 10 a6 and you know lots of people that just want to participate in the network for whatever reason and then i think the small and mid-size operators getting a little bit more savvy around this like cockroach mining uh uh strategy that drew an aj like were very very like eloquently um outlined in a shareholder letter i think right um i think that's going to start to put a lot of pressure on the large pub coast that another piggybacking on this discussion is like what drives a larger percentage of hash rate growth moving forward like mega mines or small to mid-tier mines because i think that's one thing that we've learned in

this bear market it's been a great time to plug in asics over the last six to nine months if you believe that the price is going to rip and asics have obviously been very cheap so it's been a good time to build out infrastructure and does the strategy of focusing on smaller more distributed sites that are 10 to 20 megawatts um and being able to build those out in like six to ten weeks depending on the size become a more advantageous strategy than going and buying a gigawatt facility and taking three years to build that out yeah i think so and i think i think that you know there are a couple of like you know fine-tuning tweaks that can be made in the the real world in terms of like operating a data center operating a mine i think we're going to see in the next four years

this is going to be uh the era of revenue optimization and risk management for you know the production of mining operations so i think there's going to be a lot more functionality in what you can actually do with the hash rate itself in terms of you know evening out transaction fees If that volatility risk increases, you know, different approaches to difficulty, volatility risk. And I do think that, you know, variance is going to become a bigger issue sooner rather than later. I think mining pools are sort of like a centralized, you know, attack surface. And we had Matt Williams, who's the head of derivatives at Luxor here last week for the mining meetup. And we went into sort of the role of a mining pool.

they're basically like you know luck swaps like swapping out variants at least like a mining pool that pays out on the expected is really just trading the fix for a float so so there's a lot of viral by shares that have been produced maybe a block hasn't been found but you can offload the risk that those shares hold before a block is found yeah you get paid out so you know a mining pool that's paying out on the expected value or the you know uh whatever they they agree agree to in terms of a determination of the price of hash rate and then the quantity that a miner is sending a pool. There's a bit of a balance sheet game there, effectively.

Whereas if you look at like brains, where they're paying out on the expected, you can have lengthy periods. They're paying out on the actual, aren't they? I'm sorry, the actual. Yeah, that's what I meant. They're paying out on the actual, but you can have lengthy periods

and your revenue is quite lumpy. And I think most mining operations, I think, are there any public companies that mine with Brains right now, U.S. based? I do not know. I think that Brains has had trouble, you know, keeping. They lost Riot, right? Yeah. You know, they probably still have some.

And, you know, this is nothing against Brains. Brains is, you know, going back to Slush Pool. They invented the entire concept. But, you know, public companies and reporting, you know, their financials to shareholders on a quarterly basis. are just naturally going to seek out whatever way they can smooth that out. So with mining pools paying out on the expected, offering a swap that effectively deals with the lumpiness of variance volatility risk, they have clearly gravitated towards that. That's become sort of industry standard.

It comes with a host of issues on the back end that we haven't really seen come to head yet. But I think that all volatility risks embedded within hashrate are going to see sort of the same tooling in the next, you know, four to five years. So this is the cycle where hedging tools for mining operations beyond price hedging comes to market. I think so. And I think it's hyper localized. So, you know, to enter into some of these contracts, one of the crux of the issue is the underlying collateral, the basis of the contract in case, you know, it just explodes. not viable when, you know, you have a U.S. buyer contracting with a miner in China. Like, you have no visibility for that underlying collateral. You don't know, you know, what condition it's in. You know, if you have to trust in courts for legal recourse to, you know, get

custody of that, you're kind of fucked. What about Bitcoin held in a multi-jurisdictional multisig? Yeah, but, you know, are miners holding a lot of Bitcoin? Are they holding a lot of dollars right you could do it with dollars too but you know particularly now the cyclical nature of of the mining industry being as soul-crushing as it is like they're not holding cash or bitcoin like right now it's certainly soul-crushing it is hard it's one of the worst businesses on the planet it's kind of like um hospitality in new york city it's very masochistic people keep coming back to the trough it's it's intriguing it's addicting it really is the highs are highs and the lows are low the highs are very high for mining and hospitality

that's another thing maybe we should talk about tonight and right now just like treasury management it's like the treasury management that went on at the height of the bull market at the end of 2021 was baffling to me yeah i mean people should have been clipping off like a percentage of their their holdings locking in cash people are just ripping at that point though like think back to like the isolation of covid 2021 bitcoin is going absolutely nuts you still had the premium for gbtc everybody is just like you know it was full top gun like you know craziness at that point yeah and that's something i think about a lot is this is i've been in since 2013 so 2014 2017 2021 so i've seen three like ripping bull markets and for the mining industry

particularly i think that's something the teams really need to prepare for is those bull markets before you get into the bull market basically have a strategy where all right if we mine this much bitcoin and the price reaches this point we're going to scalp off x percentage and hold it in cash just so they could survive i mean i guess there it depends it depends on the miner right and what they want to deliver to shareholders really well that's that's another part of the discussion is due to the volatile nature of bitcoin mining as an industry specifically like how do you communicate that to shareholders so like yes we're at all-time highs and we are selling some bitcoin but believe me believe me it's a prudent decision that you guys you shareholders

will appreciate in the bear market yeah i mean i think that most most mining operations the way that they articulate their value proposition to shareholders is where the high beta play on we're an energy at uh arbitrage right we we have a we have a machine basically to take cheap energy and make it you know and create something more valuable that we can liquidate quickly um you know there are mining operations that you know look to hold bitcoin depending on you know the type of time of cycle i think gda has done this very well very effectively over the over the years you know riot and others um have done it done it quite well but it's uh it's a tricky it's a tricky game yeah yeah you have to weigh the balance like do we sell the bitcoin do we

dilute shareholders do we get more debt yeah um do you see a lot of consolidation coming oh yeah i think that there's a lot of you know small to mid-sized miners that are probably just you know um i think across the entire stack actually though uh we haven't really talked too much about foundry being the crown jewel of dcg like at some point that has to start to play out right like you know well we've sort of already seen it play out with them adding fees right like this is the first step towards all right something's going on here for you guys that are unaware foundry essentially was able to offer free fees on their mining pool because they had a deal with genesis where if you're going to liquidate if you're going to mine with foundry

and then liquidate bitcoin you would run that flow through genesis and obviously with genesis being embroiled in the lawsuits that it is right now that's not possible so they've had to monetize yeah adding fees to yeah their customers and most large pools for a period of time are doing that it's effectively like a loss leader so binance i think would even pay in certain circumstances for that that that stream of hash rate being pointed to their pool as long as you could lock them in for you know exchange custody solutions and you know would make sense in isolation it's a good thing to to attract but it's one of the reasons why mining pools are not necessarily like the the best like going concerns because that that fee that that like uh that that fee margin that you

can charge a miner for effectively swapping out that um variance risk just collapses over time yeah but maybe it comes back now that you know foundry is not able to do that and you know they are expensive operations to run well i think the progress i think the pool will continue to be lastly they just have to get really creative with their value-add services i mean luxor is a great example with their um firmware obviously brains offers the firmware too luxor's got their uh their cash settled futures contracts yeah the ndfs they also have like an asic brokerage business they all do consulting and stuff like that i just i i think that this the the center point of the mining pool being the future of a lot of these companies is gonna is gonna evolve i think

they they start to look probably more exchange-like um uh hash rate admin e admin e in terms of like splitting up streams if there are multiple um like you know ultimate beneficiaries of you know the production of bitcoin um and then stratum v2 right so if you go back to the thing we were talking about before i won't say the name again but you know block construction going to the miners rather than being sort of the privilege of the pool um i think is also another catalyst for um mining pool businesses you know evolving sooner rather than later yeah but that the hangover strategy too is like yes the privilege of constructing the block gets reallocated to the individuals within that pool but the privilege of broadcasting the transaction still

sits with the pool still sits with the pool yeah right so that's like one thing i worry about like the pools are pressured not to broadcast blocks with certain transactions included does that even does is it even a value add to have the individual block construction maybe we need more pools i agree maybe we need better connectivity i mean you know the luxor and foundry you know night egg a lot of the most significant pools are us at this point you know there's still some chinese pools and you know it's like foundry's number one yeah what is it um f2 pools not two is it yeah f2 pool i think still is f2 pool and another chinese i think it's like v chain via via and then binance i think

those are the top four and binance yeah yeah um binance chinese are they singapore malta maltese maltese remember that whole thing they moved to malta that's where i'm back still is full-time i thought that it could be wrong probably um no it'll be interesting um i'd like to see stratum v2 you know um get pushed out no to be clear like strata v2 has many benefits It's beyond the individual block instruction of an individual miner. Privacy benefits to the way shares are transferred between an individual miner and the pool makes it much harder to man in the middle of tech and jack hash rate. It's whack-a-mole. There are no shortage of live wires that need to be addressed in sort of the growth and the continued resilience and anti-fragility of Bitcoin.

but um you know i think mining pool centralization is one of the things that you know deserves more attention um but is it that big of a problem like like historically it's not a problem until it is but it was a problem in what 2015 with g hash with g hash and you know people moved in haste yeah but they just they just opened up other entities there was a lot of like that was a perception thing as well right like a of that hash rate stayed within the organization it's just they renamed it and hacked it up okay um in the same way that you had you know a lot of the a lot of the main pools were you know we saw this during the block size war where you know a lot of them sort of effectively rolled up to gion

in one you know way shape or form um so they weren't like totally autonomous in separate pools yeah um it hasn't look it's a nice fallback because at the end of the day a miner can just say you know what i'm going to take some variance risk now and you know that's that uh it really i think hits public large miners harder than anyone else because it's the entities yeah it's the entities that have to uh ultimately you know report to their shareholders and their board on a you know quarterly basis um who will probably have you know some really negative uh uh effects if they do have to take on you know variance risk full time if there's a problem with the pools could these derivatives markets solve that like maybe we don't have any pools in the future and

people are just the so i made this point i made this point with matt i think that matt and luxor would probably disagree with the exact you know framing and the vocabulary that i used but mining pools are the original hash rate derivatives in that they're really just a swap for luck buying cash yeah and especially specifically the ones so not necessarily you know um uh the paying out on the actual received bitcoin and then hacking it up on pro rata basis the ones that are paying out on the expected are you know the balance sheet games that are you know more swap like in nature than than anything else yeah so that is you know a form of a derivative product that that that's been pushed out there i think that you know that

could take many different shapes and sizes right you can have somebody that has deep pockets and they're like you know what i'll take that it can be an otc deal right where you're like okay i'll smooth out that variance for us i'll pay you for this but i'm going to take the bitcoin you know when we ultimately receive it yeah there's always the hardcore cypherpunk romantic urge to return to the days of f2 pool concept like braypool that eric and bob i don't know if they've been working on it recently but no not eric there um it's um uh it was a uh a lib bitcoin uh contributor is working with um dr bob on on braid pool um eric looked at it i think um a while back but it requires like i think a second coin yeah you need a token yeah and then like fetty pools

who knows if they're viable but that's a very intriguing concept of sort of combining stratum v2 with like the idea of a fediment where you have a mint um a federation of miners of a certain size that run the run the mint and then uh maybe allow individual miners within the fedi pool to construct their own blocks but um the federation members sort of switch out who broadcasts the block so that's a sort of step in the right direction yeah of you have many individual actors within a single fetty pool and each of them has broadcasting capability which could be great a step in the right direction if it's viable do all the things like we need to test them out i you know viability doesn't just

happen out of the box it needs to you know be tested in the wild i'm very happy you said that what this is another part of my thesis is like going back to like shit coins won't continue there's again the caliber of the scammer in the space is aesthetically unpleasing they're ugly it was the best looking scammer i think alex legal is probably good looking scammer i'm trying to think of another they're they're out there i don't know point being there's charles not only they're aesthetically unpleasing it's a combination of being disingenuous which i think most of them are and impatient i think the retail side of things is more impatient like we're building cathedrals

here yeah like bitcoin over the last 15 years taking a lot of work to get it where it is at protocol layer and everybody's been shitting on lightning for the last four or five years like did you really expect this second layer network to launch and be like scalable completely workable out of the box so i do think that there are some benefits to projects outside of bitcoin like i deviate with this i think monero is is fascinating it it does not outstrip the capabilities of bitcoin i'm not saying that it does i don't think that they should be compared apples to apples but you know having things away from bitcoin testing different approaches to privacy preserving technology i think is important to have like out in the wild i'm not saying that that makes it

investable i'm not saying that it's something that people should be using for these transactions but i do think having you know money at stake and testing these things live um has certain benefits but the one that i like the most recently is um hamster gg uh where they i've just seen like hamsters racing what's the best they take four hamsters i'm a big popcorn guy uh and they race them every hour racing four hamsters is this like an erc22 i think it's like a binance and some guy is just like managing 20 hamsters we're probably on like the fifth or sixth edition of popcorn but like popcorn is good teddy's good too what is popcorn popcorn is one of the hamsters that runs very happy i don't know any of this you should you will we will look we need

hamsters we need hamster race gambling on the lightning network like like please like we could do that easily help me with my uh degenerate activities set up a horse to go into buying your smart chain to to wager on these fucking hamsters 10 10 0 1 yeah and digital garage they've got 10 10 0 1 won the first cohort of wolf yeah they got fantastic presentation dlc's on lightning yeah do it it's that's an awesome project i'm very excited about them yeah um i really like the wolf incubator i think the second cohort you know well we we naturally get some of them um at the pub for for meetups or just you know um random nights they'll pop in and talking some of the teams that are going through the cohort now is is really awesome there's good

stuff coming yeah it's good to see new york bitcoin scene survived well after it was just so callously abandoned by marty and matt like we had to resuscitate the community and keep it alive well i was going to say a lot you deserve a lot of credit for you three gentlemen are doing here public thank you we definitely no i mean i love pubkey i appreciate that um a pub key is really sort of it's just a vessel and it's worthless without the community they're like everything that jay's done and cultivated and i think that we're coming up on a on a big uh anniversary for bit devs uh there's you know new york is not dead it's the only thing that's been declared dead more than bitcoin but it's also not perfect like there are elements of new york that

attract the blockchain blockchain dlt crypto scammers and that is definitely that has a like outsized presence here um so i'm happy that the like the weird idea of pubkey is getting you know a lot of traction and support from all sort and sorts of different stakeholders throughout you know bitcoin and throughout new york city because you know i think it sort of is um is proof that you know the community here the bitcoin community here still still is alive and and doing quite well i agree i didn't abandon it it's okay i had a young child it's not your i was in a studio apartment it's not your fault it's not your fault am i going to start crying how am i not myself

i'm really bullish right now how bullish you want to start talking prices like rip your tits off bullish that's bullish i think we get like 500k 500k would be that would be great we'd probably close the bar for a couple days if it happened in like a 12-hour period it's just like close the bar shut her down shut her down everybody get in here yeah exactly i would not be surprised like again the macro tailwinds the maturation of the protocol and the layers above it and it do be undervalued it's like undervalued it has always been this way i think that like you know we have always seen something in it throwing a price target out there but i don't

care huh i'm gonna get a lot of shit for throwing a price target i can't believe you did that um what do you think what what by what time i think 500 yes in future um but like if you if you like slap like a date on it like so 2026 like we're gonna we're gonna turn into like charter lists uh here like q4 2025 early 2026 so i saw something uh for the past you know holders holders aren't selling dude so the hodl waves are at an all-time high uh bitcoin held on exchange is at you know one of the lowest points probably since 2016 something like that um and i think the third most important thing is transaction fees those are the three metrics that i put the most value in um hodl waves you know the amount of time bitcoin has stayed in the same

address the bitcoin held on exchange um exchange omnibus wallets and the third one being you know transaction fees are just an extremely good indication for like actual usage the amount somebody's willing to spend to memorialize a bitcoin transaction um all three of those things are fucking looking really great and the macro back backdrop at the moment is um this is what bitcoin was was made for i think like this moment in time so um i too am catastrophically bullish yeah um so it's going to zero you heard it here it's fucking done i am so much more comfortable in a bear market than a bull market bull markets make me can't even fucking think extraordinarily extraordinarily anxious like it's just like it's over and you're just like you know you're going

through like you know just a fucking horrible time i like the the bear markets when everybody's like this is terrible it's just like it's like the uh buster scruggs like first time like the the buster scruggs and the ballad of buster scruggs was uh it was like a a collection of vignettes by the coen brothers and one of them like the guy ends up at the at the gallows and he has the noose around his neck and he's next to a guy that's weeping and he looks around and just goes first time yeah um it's uh there's there's a certain like calming uh aspect of the bear market because there's time and you can actually get shit done it's the it's the it's cliched as shit at this point but bear markets are for building and it is true to a certain extent and you have

much more like uh insightful conversations with people that are not necessarily distracted by just you know looking at how much money there is like floating around yeah um we had uh i don't think there's an article coming um uh in the in the wall street journal that really focused on like bitcoiners um like a lot of the questions that i got were about like you know watching the price and it was just like you stop doing that after a while like you know there there's not a lot of productivity it's actually kind of like it's like doom scrolling on twitter there's no um active uh engagement of any like positive value in doing something like that you need to go out and get your hands dirty completely agree and that's why i'm actually very happy with

myself oh yeah this bear market i think for me personally has been like the most productive in terms of like actually building out what i view to be a foundation that will really help me benefit in the next bull market um like i've shown you we have some stuff planned for tftc it looks great very excited i think um i'm really excited about that too we're gonna launch that before the end the year probably before the fall and then on top of that like the mining stuff like it's been really fun um building stuff out like in the bear market mining is fascinating um i didn't really focus on it personally until 2018 2019 when i got it and like the looks that it throws like you know from a bitcoin perspective looking at you know supply chains energy power infrastructure power assets

um it's just it's a perfect match uh for the bitcoin you know community and it is just a deep and vast rabbit hole that you can go down it's a whole network um but that's been that's been very positive i would say in the bear market and also like you know despite a lot of the pain uh it was very productive i think you know what happened with celsius what happened with block fi needed to happen it had to happen and i think that it probably happened at the right time agreed um you know i'd like to see some of the gbtc stuff pushed to conclusion i am a little bit nervous about some of these large you know etf investment products they are not going to have you know classic redemption windows same thing same thing with gold right try and redeem physical gold uh

out of an etf it's an extraordinarily you know painstaking process if the etf allows you to do that um so you know i'm a little bit you know more concerned about that stuff but i think that we're we're seeing really positive momentum i mean that blow up when we were talking about the three indicators that i like the most the hot waves bitcoin held on exchange and transaction fees uh bitcoin held on exchange is you know at its lowest point because of 2.3 something like that yeah 2.3 mil yeah out of 19.6 bitcoin 19.6 million because there's only 19.6 bitcoin i know you said earlier 21 i was gonna do the nerdy like fact check or 19.1 about the lost ones no 19.6 is like what's been distributed to market it's like the free float oh i see what you're

saying well what about the lost ones we're just gonna pump our banks are satoshi's coins lost are those counted in like the i've seen a couple of different like estimates for like how many bitcoin have been you know destroyed it's like what three to four million or something yeah yeah i think satoshi's are included in that yeah where you have like a satoshi it's four to five million with his included he has a lot of rare sats i've shot the fuck up he has a lot of rare sets there's no such thing so so many of these explorers is just like well that's like so i actually had somebody reach out like going to a bathroom in a dive bar with a glory hole i was just like don't

i had somebody reach out to me last week and they were experimenting with ordinals and they were going on block explorers like looking i think it was like an inscription a text inscription he was like looking for it on chain i had to explain to him like no like that inscription is encrypted in what like hex data yeah and you need external software to decrypt that hex data and then present it to you yeah he's like oh should i just be using op return i was like yeah yeah if you actually want to see it in the explorer let people have fun if somebody's having fun and they're not hurting anybody let them have fun it's i i still think going back to to like bad aesthetics like all the nft grades like the worst aesthetics like which one i'd like

all of them they're terrible i like the the the nintendo ripoff ones the the the shrewd or whatever to have no you don't like 8-bit art no what about the pepes i like the pepes you're sitting below the like i said there's 15 you're trying to own it we've talked about this in madrid you're trying to own a meme and that's literally impossible like a memes whole reason for being is that everybody can collectively understand what it is intuitively yeah you can't own that collective intuition yeah what do you see in pepe pepe's a mirror i've heard yes i think he's hilarious i do too it's the best meme it's so expressive and then the story i i still think my favorite bitcoin magazine article of all time was sort of the dive into you know the history the origins of

the pepe meme feels good man into its sort of self-cancellation from the anti-defamation league and then even the anti-defamation league saying like yes okay it's in like minor circumstances where this is an overtly like racist meme and now it's like back and like it's like everywhere will pepe ever die we'll be like we'll get to a point where we're like oh this isn't cool anymore i think that pepe is probably one of the most successful memes of all time uh if not the most successful like what what would be considered a more successful meme um i just had a terrible joke coca-cola product memes maybe like uncle sam i don't know uncle sam uncle sam that's i mean it's more propaganda or memes propaganda wildcat

yeah memes are absolutely propaganda yeah do you have any miladies no god no they're aesthetically unpleasing and she can murder what's the story behind milady she murders her boyfriend or something like that i don't know so they have run sort of my understanding is that the miladies uh community has run i think four or five different like self-cancellation campaigns with just like really like a boring stuff um that like somebody will pick up on and just be like this is terrible uh but i don't think that any of it's actually true and they're just putting out like really like shocking cancellation stuff like you know basically what you know the 4chan idiots behind feels good man did when like their meme their pride and joy was getting too

popular i mean i'm for that in the sense of like people i do think that that's funny i like jokes that's like a funny like you know cultural phenomenon like built for like 4chan reddit and twitter yeah but i think like milady and pepe should live in like telegram sticker packs you don't need them as nfts i don't disagree i don't disagree i think that that's fine i don't think you need to attach my i think i should think it's against the ethos of like meme culture is to try to attach economic value to this thing yeah but look collectors they're collector they're collectors items right like what's the difference between a trading card and like a digital representation of you know that that you know trading card iq i pulled a michael

jordan baseball card out of a pack of upper deck when i was eight years old seven years old best day of my life he was playing minor league baseball for the white socks you know what card i'm talking about they're kind of worth it's probably worth like 21 bucks but like i felt like a billionaire that day yeah it's only worth like 21 bucks it's the memory of that maybe it's just not for me i don't know i mean the funny thing is that i'm like a big supporter of the ordinal stuff i do think that like 99.9 of it's complete garbage like i i don't disagree i don't have ordinal holdings like you know i've dabbled with like some stuff uh from like a like you know curiosity um but like yeah

like the vast majority of these things are completely fucking worthless like worthless they're negative because you're gonna get tax consequences too yeah so like i like don't get me wrong i think the inscriptions and embedding data is really fucking fascinating and impactful uh in a broader bitcoin context you know looking specifically at the rare sat ordinal nft projects like great like user adoption but everybody's gonna get fucking burned and i hope you know a decent percentage of them stick around to be like i wasn't totally wrong i wasn't wrong about the bitcoin stuff but i was wrong about uh this eight-bit mushroom that i purchased for ten thousand dollars well that's i mean maybe i'm

a curmudgeon maybe not able to have as much fun as people should be able to have but i'm like i take it from like what we're working on is way too fucking serious to get distracted by this bullshit no no i mean it pisses me off you gotta have fun with it it has to be fun like that's one of the main things why that's one of the main things behind pub key like because if it's fun it's inviting and you're going to save more people you want to have a fun church you want to be like clapping in the aisles well that's the problem is like people are too much focused on the fun where they're going to buy something for 10 grand and realize they have like six satoshi's in a wallet speaking of uh ck from bitcoin magazine is still the only person to do the trifecta orange

pills oh he got the whale the dolphin and the pleb during twitter spaces is those drinks or hot dogs they are drinks yes i told you i have to drive tonight but you're we'll figure it out we gotta text my wife see if i can sleep on your couch oh man and your wife how are we doing yeah exactly look you know lucy lucy and rayo will be thrilled to see you um so how are we doing on time it's alex thorne coming here yeah we're good i being we're not scheduled to uh talk for another 20 minutes okay what else should we talk about look at this look at this strapping young yuppie in the corner over there it's my favorite thing about pokey is when somebody like christian just like walks in and sits down and laughs at his

at his phone are you looking at your tings are you looking at your tings he's got some he's got some really noxious and vile tings is reddit dead i thought reddit died i mean i haven't been on reddit in a long time fantasy football do you do fantasy football no i mean i do but i'd never like i actually just a text from my college buddies last night they're like you're out of the league you've been removed i've been removed from why you weren't setting your light up yeah i see i see our long live national nightmare is over it's exactly what my my buddy texted i think the last time i've used reddit was probably for like our fantasy football um just because i don't follow anything football

related in the off season um and uh it's more of like a monkey throwing darts approach to like a draft i mean it is it was always fun coming back for the summers and spend the summers down the shore and fully immersed in like the philly culture like shores essentially philly east yeah where i where i live at the shore south of south of lbi it is philly heavy it is crazy how much the sports drive the culture in philadelphia yeah it's not crazy i mean i love it there's an endearing side of it well it's that it's the cheesesteaks the trank like what else the frank for now we're gonna say philly i love philadelphia philadelphia is a great city the the you know um the restaurant and bar scene has always been good and i think that it has gotten

so much better which is high praise because again it's always been very very good food is always like philly's restaurant culture because it's one of the few like major metropolitan cities that's got a big byo culture yeah and i really appreciate that the dive bars are still amazing yes um still a lot of you know just uh really uh terrifying philly bros fighting to smoke cigarettes inside um we will die on that hill sigs inside is a hell my dive bar map has a lot of philly hits what's your favorite i like oscars and dirty franks dirty franks um i forget there's another one that you bob and barbara's bob and barbara's yeah thank you um also also quite good i haven't gone to a lot of the fishtown ones what's the johnny barbara's is fishtown which one

birthday bar birthday bar yeah that's in south philly though south philly no there's something that's supposed to be johnny johnny brenda's noxious and vile johnny brenda's isn't noxious and vial no no no i forget that it's fishtown's got a great irish bar rentis or something there was there's something i don't know i gotta look it up fishtown's got a great irish bar that serves some of the best italian food like uh there you go murphs go check out murphs yeah a comfortable place to sit yes they've got like pennies at a bar yeah um how are the beagles this year i think they're gonna be good it'll probably be good i mean eagles yeah they got their kelly green jerseys that's what everybody's been talking about the last couple weeks i don't

act like i love you i watched the eagles we have gatherings i just don't get too immersed in it yeah i used to cry during the games like middle school fucking arped out i think arped out still secretly cries during philly's philly eagles games yeah it was very emotional middle school um i'm excited for it though you know football coming back soccer's coming back ah real bedford yesterday are you into real bedford uh i haven't watched a game yet but i'm supporting them it makes me so fucking happy i really i really truly yesterday i saw yeah and they won one zero against milton keynes irish they played milton keynes like keynes is yeah whatever yeah well no i think like the town is like neat after him so the bitcoin team beat you know that is

poetic it's great i i just love the whole thing um yeah pure joy i did what bitcoin did three weeks ago and yeah you and grant did yeah i haven't listened to that one yet i'm sure it was good though very bullish yeah but he was talking about like real bedford and i'm really it's really impressive what they've done it's awesome i want to go see a game so bad like and seeing like the live stream like the the field like the whole thing like you got like a lot of like carpenters and plumbers like going maybe a couple pints before the game and play a tuesday night game maybe get into a fight that's the way to do it it's awesome the whole thing is so cool um also just thinking ahead because like peter has a very like bitcoin builder mentality about

this like what if they do just rip through you know call it like four or five seasons and they are somehow able to advance for four or five seasons straight we're starting to get to you know somewhat robust leagues in the in the english like you know you know football i think you said they're they're now in like the sixth league step six but it's technically the tenth level yeah because you have premiership obviously than the one below that yeah champion and then champions and then two more yeah so they're probably a decade away from champions yeah for sure but like you know a solid five years of progressing you start to get a little bit like oh shit like it'll get bigger each year the stadium has to be able to you know uh uh host like a certain

amount of fans that it's actually quite regimented as you move on you have requirements in terms of like you know the the stands have to be covered and you have to host i don't know call it like 10 000 like you know um uh fans um as like requirements for advancing so i think it gets quite costly but like imagine if 10 years from now we have a grassroots bitcoin soccer club like that would be fucking incredible i would definitely go to a game i want to go to a game this year i i gotta figure out the time well he said he's doing uh he's staying put in bed for january to april he's trying to get a lot of people to come out that sounds like fun are you going to amsterdam no we have a 1031 event what what's on your conference circuit

for the rest of the year nothing nothing uh tab conf i'm gonna go to tab oh atlanta yeah nice i'd like to go to that one as well um i love riga i don't think i'll be able to make regia i may go to amsterdam um i love amsterdam um good town there's i love the conferences there's just a lot of them too many conferences it's the same people usually uh quite echo chambery and i find myself asking like does anybody get any work done like no everybody get back yeah to the office we got a lot of shit to do yeah um i think that we have hit a little bit of a uh a saturation point for the conferences um i like what they're doing at bitcoin park in nashville like dedicated like structured events two days like the lightning summit the mining

summit yeah they'll do noster later this year it'll be interesting there's also i think the bitcoin conference is moving to nashville as well yeah middle of july it's gonna be toasty i was there a couple weeks ago middle of july it was toasty it's humid i hate the heat i love the heat i hate it i'm a winter person i hate the cold ah makes you feel alive did five winters in chicago it definitely makes you feel alive but also there are no real like cold weather conferences riga's like riga gets there a little bit but the baltics the baltics in um in september uh are actually like quite nice it's a little chilly at night yeah the first year i went it was pretty cold last year was nice

i wanted to do a pub key pop-up um in riga when pub key philly that's the big question pub key a kick in the baltics i like that would have been the just ripping balsams strap on some balsams strap on some balsams uh pub key philly pub key dc um you know we uh we're gonna we're gonna look to expand um probably accelerate it um by end of year we have a couple of things that we need to sort out um where are we looking to philly we're still looking like written house area fishtown fishtown no i mean where it has to be stay as far away from kensington as possible where's uh upenn that's university city so west philly west philly it's too far too you need something yeah you need like old city written house so one of the one of the requirements that

we have when we're looking for like future locations is you know we're effectively we're very well located in Manhattan, but we're also on NYU's campus, um, you know, West village in between financial district and, you know, the Midtown sort of financial hub. Um, so location is really key, particularly for pub key, um, because, uh, about 70% or so of our total clientele are not Bitcoiners. So we want to continue to push that. I think that that's the right like ratio where we're providing sort of like a blue ocean opportunity um and just by having you know a cool bar with good food and you know the right vibe and aesthetic um by attracting a lot of pre-coiners everybody's a bitcoiner they just don't know it yet like by by getting them in the door and

enjoying a bar where there's not a lot of bitcoin iconography there's like some but like you don't it doesn't like hit you in the face that it's like overtly a bitcoin bar you're not going to like the bitcoin embassy and find out yeah exactly it's more like in the dna and we have like events and people like they're like so what's that event in the back and it's just like oh please come join our cult have you heard of the church of satoshi you'll have to cut you'll have to cut the palm of your hand open for access yeah come kiss the shrine of michael saylor but like by making it accessible like you know that's one of the the that was one of the driving forces uh behind pub key was you know the conferences are great if you know what you're doing i think the conferences are

hard and there's a high barrier to entry there's the cost there's the travel you're sitting you're listening to panels and you know that you're not like going to the fun parties or the dinners or like stuff like that like i think you know these third places you know the commons the park you know pub keys like they provide something that is a little bit more like permanent and always on um that you know the conferences you know simply aren't able to provide and this is this is all in the physical like meat space right like if you're trying to access the virtual town hall by like you know yeeting at people on x and like fucking reddit and like you know just reading about it in wall street journal and new york times like it's it's a horrible horrible horrible way to

get introduced and ask questions for this tech like you need to have a human touch completely agree you know and you guys are doing great thank you the the touch that you guys have you guys are touching many thank you thank you many lives yeah we have some um so we we basically have you know new york empties out in the summer um which was like our little pub key bear market you know july and august is a really good time to retool and build so you know we launched back in october um we've added some um uh really good team members recently and we have a bit of like a relaunch coming um like september is like the the true it's not quite a relaunch but that's really like from um what is it alpha to beta or whatever beta to to full production whatever beta

to alpha yeah beta to alpha alpha comes first wait alpha yeah pre-product what is it called uh christian is it alpha and then beta or beta then alpha you're you're hitting the main you're hitting the main net yeah exactly so like we're we're um we're launching you know pub key production alpha first yeah uh we're launching pub key productions and then we'll be starting to really like uh accelerate into uh into into new markets new cities i want to talk we'll have to talk yeah maybe we can link up here yeah for sure this has been fascinating always a pleasure are you gonna make me drink am i gonna yell that by my wife i don't make anybody drink it's against the law uh but you know i think uh i think that we you know we'll probably it's up to you man

you don't have to drink let me text my wife all these zoomers are putting new york city hospitality out of business they don't want to drink anymore what is up with that it's a great shame we got a lot of uh non-alcoholic options here though we throw we throw different looks the soundboard we uh i was hoping to have this live but like we're gonna um we're gonna start to play with the soundboard more uh for like little reaction things during like the twitter spaces we had uh put the npc meme on it we had a uh ice cream we had a recording of me saying comb rocket on one of the rhr that was on our soundboard for a while i think matt lost the file we were talking about coins just me going comb rocket

that's great but egregious again like come rocket there was ass coin again i'm a crumb i saw that that video of portnoy uh remember he was doing one of the pizzas yeah and the hex guy came up to him yeah the hex guy probably like around all-time highs and portnoy is actually like kind of nice he like listened to him i think dave gets it i've spoken i spoke to dave like probably not this bitcoin conference the last bitcoin conference we got lunch i think he gets it yeah i think he's just a made man though he's a smart guy um but yeah that hex video and shout out to ledger for leaking all um you know mailing addresses of their clients did you ever receive one of those um i got like a hex and pulse chain

like one pager in the mail i uh never bought a ledger so no good for you i was not in that data dump good for you yeah yeah like three apartments ago i've since moved yeah no never bought a ledger i was always a treasure maximalist and then went straight to cold card after that ColdCard's great. I like Passport. I think the Passport device is quite nice, too, without creating a screaming match on Twitter. I do think the device is nice. It's ColdCard's software. I'm not getting into that. I love the stuff that CoinKite is producing, though. High barrier to entry, I would say.

These devices, all of them, even like Trezors, I think are kind of daunting. and that's what ledger ledger really dumbed down the experience i think quite well trezor was better than like huh i never owned a ledger but i've like played around with one yeah i thought trezor's ux was better yeah some of them ledger's ledger makes it really easy to get into the the deep dark you know shit coin stuff yeah that's um you know if it's bitcoin yeah i agree with you i think the the tresors did like a really good time a a really good job um during the the uh fork wars you get your bitcoin diamond you get your bitcoin gold out your bitcoin cash your sd nice little dividends plow it back into bitcoin i like that it was good they made it kind of easy

and they discontinued no i don't like that it was just you didn't like that are you still holding your bitcoin cash you don't like dividends no i'm not holding that bitcoin cash i had to use like jimmy song made like a key splitting tool that yeah is yeah um i recall correctly i think that that's what trezor actually is yeah i think so i could be wrong about that um those were the days are we what are we gonna be talking about like at 2030 looking back when we're all in jail yeah are we all going to jail just in the gitmo do you remember sunlight marty remember the sound of the birds

remember we're eating sludge every day uh what are we going to be talking about in 2030 i think um superconductors well how they destroyed bitcoin in any i think it's gonna be the global south and i think it's gonna be an american resurgence almost like simultaneously i want to be clear i think the global south vernacular is terrible what happened to emerging markets what's bad with those yeah you also get a bunch of like you get the aussies and kiwis looped into it and nobody's talking about them when they're referring to the global yeah there's there is this like there is this like a hierarchical vision it's like sad it's like you were below me yeah many different connotations are

ambiguous yeah um the global south uh there are a lot of changes happening i feel like africa is uh having a pretty um serious moment what's happening in asia uh i'm more i'm very bullish on south america i think it's gonna be oh south america yeah uh argentina has has a has historically had a difficult time getting out of its own way um there was some unrest in chile uh a couple years ago but i think that that's largely calmed down chile is i think underrated they were going back to socialism i do think recent elections have brought back more of a conservative leaning party if i recall correctly yeah it's going to be really interesting i mean there's a tremendous amount of power

there are tremendous resources uh you know the paraguay is it paraguay what's the iguazu uh hydra paraguay paraguay and but they sell a fair amount of that electricity into brazil and they're using that substance like hundred year contract to mine bitcoin um uh so i think that there's going to be you know just a lot of moving pieces particularly around bitcoin mining and you know bitcoin adoption yeah i was talking to somebody the other day that lives in columbia and apparently in south america like a lot of people on the ground he was talking like an uber driver and he was asking about like what do you think about el salvador what they did with bitcoin they don't really care about the bitcoin thing but i think we need more

bouquets around south america to just come in and stomp out it's such a fuck it's such a fascinating thing where like americans who really have no cultural context no historical context are able to sort of like, you know, get preachy about some dictatorial dictatorial dictatorial dictatorial. Yeah. Stuff that can be perceived as like being authoritarian. And, you know, there definitely have been, I would say elements of that, but you also have a situation where, um, you know, the, the sovereign debt is actually performing like quite well for El Salvador and crime is down and crime is way down and it's fixing some you know long-standing systemic problems um every once in a while you need a dictator to step in imagine if he just gets a

proper bitcoin rip like we're on a 500k so he's gonna look like a like a genius yeah um and then you know you also have the mining bonds i'm looking forward to the the james bond villain volcano mining operation i don't know if that's still moving forward i've also heard that the the proper bitcoin city has has i don't know if stalled but it's been sort of like deprioritized i don't think that was a good idea the bitcoin city thing yeah cities need to be emergent you can't just build one you can't just build one what about the line that's exactly you don't want to live in a line no i don't want to live in a line that thing is weird i hope they build it like just out of like from like a pure weirdness curiosity perspective it's just like

that thing looks really weird yeah yeah i mean it's it's 15 minute city what if it's really just noah's ark in the middle of the desert yeah what if they know and it's actually protecting against aliens oh god the aliens because the aliens can't see the line i can't or something i can't believe how many people have fallen for the aliens that i have so matthew pines yeah he's a big one he's like really into it he's really worried about it too i'm like dude come on come on do you believe in aliens do you think that they're aliens yeah probably yeah i don't think our they crash landed on government property and jody foster we're only talking to our government officials terrible waste of space matthew mcconaughey great movie aliens

could be demons you know yeah they could be they're probably just looking for natural resources like everybody else yeah and water thank god we have superconductors what's your favorite alien movie i thought predator like the most recent not predator uh yeah like the one where they went into the anunnaki oh yeah the recent uh aliens no that's a predator that's aliens versus predators that's what it was alien versus predators no the one where it's like it's like ancient columbia or something that's prey prey that's prey no they're on a different planet huh yeah the same answer predator i'm a big aliens 2 guy they're on a different different planet who the humans yeah alien versus predator yeah uh district nine fantastic district nine was really

good uh i like alien and aliens huh starship troopers that's a good one it's great meme came out of that one i'm doing my part they're afraid it's afraid i one time i slapped janet yellen's face on that big monster she's afraid she's afraid of bitcoin um yeah aliens are probably real what if they're already here i mean yeah there's people what's your what's the deepest darkest conspiracy theory that you fundamentally believe in i can't say it i know the answer i can't say it on air I don't think you do know the answer. I don't think you do.

I've never told you this. If it's worse than the one I'm thinking of, I really would like to know as soon as we stop rolling. Okay. But this has been great. You want to take a break before you talk to Alex? Yeah, let's do it. Thanks.

Peace and love, Freaks. Take care. Thank you.