TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #548: Bitcoin's Exchange Theory of Value with Parker Lewis

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Marty sits down with Parker Lewis to discuss his new piece on bitcoin's vital function as a unit of exchange. Parker on Twitter: https://x.com/parkeralewis Read Parker's article: https://graduallythensuddenly.xyz/exchange-theory-of-value/?ref=tftc.io 0:00 - Intro 1:26 - Money touches everything 11:06 - Exchange theory of value 17:20 - Unchained 18:12 - Exchange is not zero sum 25:12 - Debasement interferes with market communication 33:21 - Zaprite & SOTE 34:54 - Is now the time to switch? 41:59 - Educating Zaprite customers 53:00 - Don’t rug yourself with fiat 57:53 - Bitcoin per unit mindset 1:06:10 - Competitive advantage against the vicious dollar cycle 1:11:34 - Parker’s urgency 1:16:13 - Political influence 1:28:22 - Check out Parker's stuff Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

Its ability to be exchanged is the only reason why it stores value. Parker Lewis, head of business development at Zaprite, a prolific educator and writer in the Bitcoin space. His series, Gradually Then Suddenly, has helped orange pill many Bitcoiners over the years. And the more exchange that's available, the more valuable Bitcoin becomes. And that's the logical connection for people so they don't just sit there thinking, I can sit in my burning home, not go out and create value, not demand Bitcoin as payment, and think that this house isn't going to burn that dollar inflation is this vicious cycle and there's no easy solution to it there's no silver bullet of saying i'm just going to opt out when do you cut over you're assuming

well there's going to be these rails when i need them it's like well how do they just magically exist at the time when everything's collapsed and when you need them you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if 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.

Is your water okay? I believe so. I think we're winning. Feels like the energy, energy feels like winning. The conversation I had yesterday with Courtney, that was one that makes me feel like these tangential parallel movements that we've been talking about for a while are finally going to converge. there was some uh we talked about fiat food and obviously we had sam from sure tail

creek farms in the other week similar conversation there is different groups of people philosophically aligned um running towards what i would deal uh deemed to be sort of virtuous end goals whether it's clean food education around clean food getting preservatives out of our food they're becoming more receptive to bitcoin and that's something you're very passionate about it's making sure that these people are accepting bitcoin as payment so that they can continue to do what they do whether that's running a farm or educating people about how big pharma big agriculture big food is poisoning the the lifeblood of our energy which is the food that we yeah i mean i think that or we had matthew leshak in uh to i think it was the awesome bitcoin club

at the beginning of the month and yeah he's almost someone that came from it not directly from the bitcoin side but more from the the food side and talked about how he read the fiat standard right here um and then that chapter just stuck out to him and he almost didn't believe it was true that the chapter in fiat standard on fiat food so then he started doing research and now he's become this i don't say great advocate but it's just this champion who's connected it to the money system who's figured that out it's like okay it's not just that the food's broken it's that the incentives are tied back actually to the money system and if you don't fix the money then you're not going to fix the derivative or a higher level problem that

you know exists not exclusively but in large part because of the economic incentives and that you know whether it was having sam through the commons from shirttail a couple weeks ago or um the interview you did yesterday of like reinforcing these people not just that they should accept bitcoin payments but the first key being that the problem that they're experiencing it and whatever vertical they're working in or passionate about in this case because I kind of put them in two different buckets. One's the health care system, one's the food, and those two things are related.

But if they're trying to solve a problem, whether it's related to Sam having a more direct-to-consumer model on the food side or someone who's looking at the health care space and looking at trying to make America healthy again, if they're not identifying that the money is a big part of the problem, then they're never actually going to be successful in solving it. And so the first step is connecting that Bitcoin isn't just a thing and that our thing is Bitcoin and their thing is healthcare. So therefore, it's not Bitcoin.

Money touches everything. And money sits at the root of all these problems to a certain degree. And figuring that out first is a necessary step to actually making progress. Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty confident that Courtney had an unlock yesterday during our conversation, particularly pointing to fiat food and describing similarly but going into more depth than what you just did with matthew and it's funny like somebody who's like a nutritionist focused on food and health and the effects of big pharma and big food on the overall well-being of american citizens

particularly she had no idea the connection because it was funny she the reason i brought it up she brought up 1970s like something happened in the 1970s and you look at diabetes rates obesity rates um heart disease rates from 1970 and i was like have you read fiat food yet and she said no and so i had the opportunity to be like diving into what matthew what safe originally wrote about matthew expanded on which is they had to present to the american public that food prices were low so they had to subsidize all this cheap crap and do the hedonic adjustments in the cpi to make it seem like your food costs were lower than they actually were if you wanted to buy nutritionally dense good food and she had no

concept of that monetary effect on what she had dedicated her life to which is food and nutrition well yeah and after the podcast when we were all talking it's like once that idea connects it's like well imagine your food your money just starts getting worth less and less and less how How do you not have to substitute for worse and worse things? And that the impact of that is wide ranging and pernicious. And then once it unlocks, it becomes obvious. But if that hasn't unlocked and you're looking at a problem like she's looking at and then trying to figure out solutions, but if you have not connected it to the money, just imagine

how ineffective you're going to be in actually solving. Um, if a large part of the problem is because of the debasement of money and value not holding into the future and your whole life functionally being debased, uh, without, you know, not only a way out of it, but not basically being able to see half the equation. Like you can only work at a higher order rather than a lower level to solve a problem and you're functionally just you just keep swimming upstream um and never can actually make a dent yeah i've got some salt of the earth in my throat i'm trying to work through right now but great product by the way great product oh bring that up after we finish recording i have something to bring up there um no but it is crazy getting to the root of the problem which

is the money because that's a lot of what we spent um our conversation on yesterday was like all the solutions to the health crisis the obesity epidemic in the u.s is like throw a pill at it like um and ideally one that someone has to take for the rest of their life yes and um solving that root cause is like getting good nutrition back into um american society and getting good food back in but again going back they're fighting this higher order where it's like we need to pressure kellogg's to take the food dyes out and make sure we're not poisoning our children and again this isn't a knock on anybody like you're in your lane you're focused on what your core competency is like the inability to recognize that that is a symptom of the need to

flood the market with cheaper goods because you're debasing the money hasn't connected but once that does connect. And that's something I'm hopeful for. If Trump gets an office and RFK and the movement gets some, um, influence within the administration is that I like to think that we have enough people within the orbit around some of the decision makers that may come into power to really help them make this connection. Yeah, I agree. And I think that it does feel like we're starting to stem the tide you know just culturally it feels like and a ton of people are or majority people are still in the matrix but it feels like enough people are out of it and are connecting these dots that it creates the opportunity for real meaningful acceleration of

that trend and more and more people connecting that they're all related and that the money is at the crux of all of it because on one side if you're looking at it and saying a lot of this problem is due to constant debasement of money which leads to constant debasement of everything around you that if you also you know haven't connected that that's part of the problem then if you're not solving that part of the problem you you you then can kind of realize well i'm never getting out of this like if someone you know we were having a conversation with Courtney after the podcast yesterday, it's like, Hey, if, if, if you can't actually save good money, then like how, even if you wanted to like stop replacing, you know, good

quality beef with cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if you don't have the savings to do that, you, you can't do that so that you actually, and it doesn't just make it magically easy to do. But unless you take that step to start being able to actually be able to afford things and then like, well, how do you afford things if everything constantly gets more and more expensive because they keep printing money and debasing it, then you're like, okay, well, we actually want to solve this. It's not just kind of educating about, you know, oh, this is the problem, but actually giving somebody a viable way to fix it. And if they're not saving in a form of money that preserves their value over time, they're functionally not in a

position to do that it's just you're you're just still in a hopeless position knowing that there's a problem without a tangible solution to actually better people's lives yeah and that's i mean sort of flung this on you but i think it's important to rehash the multiple conversations we've had over the last couple weeks with people that we think should get bitcoin because it highlights the order of operations to ultimately what we're going to talk about which is your piece bitcoin's exchange theory of value value and the importance of accepting bitcoin as payment the order of operations people first have to recognize this problem and identify bitcoin as a solution only at after that point can they begin to do the research and really

orient their business and their personal finances in a way that allows them to protect themselves against this debasement that we're describing here right or their cause of it's you know in the case of Courtney working on this like broader effort to really change how people think about health and make a dent in that or you know Sam you know building shirt tail the farm and then local pastures the distribution grocery store to get you know product directly from the farm to the consumer to say you know I you know first understand the problem second understand the solution and then being able to operationalize the solution to to advance either a business or a cause and initiative and um you know ultimately what got me not just to you know talk about you

know why i wrote the piece but just focusing on bitcoin payments period is yeah and we had a conversation about this i think on the podcast probably a year and a half ago after this slew of bank failures so like thinking about you know pausing from the idea of just you know the consequences of monetary debasement on all aspects of life but just when your bank is at risk of failure and that and then and what was happening you know and with a series of those saying what would we build if you know reliable access to our banks didn't exist that's what really set me down the journey of bitcoin payments in the first place but then beyond that you know when we think about bitcoin as part of a solution which into your question it's like yes we all recognize the

bitcoin store's value but until it's like we're never actually going to get to the other side of the problem if the system isn't working independent of all other systems right and a key part of that is being able to um interact directly from an economic perspective and exchanging value um and you know i think if there's an area of bitcoin that's most underdeveloped is the payment side but it is you know key to whether you know it's a farmer building a local grocery store and saying okay i'm recognizing that the fiat currency is a problem well if the fiat currency is the problem and bitcoin is part of the solution then being able to take bitcoin directly from my customers is very logically part of the solution and that same type of thought process extends out to

virtually everyone that's looking to or how they should be thinking about bitcoin and looking at it as an aggregate solution to this problem is it fair to say to you that you think there's been an over index on viewing bitcoin solely as a store value yeah i mean i think so but not because that's a problem in itself but just like helping people understand and Roy from Breeze wrote a great article yesterday kind of taking a different approach to explaining similar concepts but recognizing that Bitcoin's only able to store value because it's easily exchangeable um and you know if I'm helping somebody understand Bitcoin from zero to one I'll oftentimes focus on a very simple simple concept like it's got a fixed supply money can't

be printed and money that can't be printed is going to store value better than money that can be easily printed and that's a really easy concept for somebody to get especially if they're first starting down the path to understanding bitcoin but if you go a layer deeper it's that money's function to store value is necessarily tied to between a series of exchanges it actually doesn't have a purpose if there's not an exchange on the front end where you begin to store value and then an exchange on the back end where you realize that value it's really important that whatever you're storing your value and maintains its purchasing power between those series of exchanges but if it weren't exchangeable on the other side then it will not store value the so

thinking about bitcoin's fixed supply in a vacuum like i'm just going to sit here and save it forever and that's how i'm deriving value of it is just misunderstanding the function of money and part of what i explained the piece is that at a fundamental level at a very logical level bitcoin does not increase in value merely by you being willing to buy and save it because every time you buy someone is exchanging value to you you're transferring some value even if it's dollars as an indirect intermediary, and that the consequence of that is that anybody using Bitcoin, they're ascribing value to it for what they're able to exchange in the future, even if they're not intending to do it for the future or long into the future.

And the more easily Bitcoin is exchangeable, the more value it will garner, but it actually garners the value or it increases in value because this is what i explained the piece that trade is not zero sum that the actually this would be a turtles all the way down problem if there wasn't mutual benefit to two parties to a trade um because that's actually how value is created through the division of labor and through specialization and so i just i wrote the piece and part of the reason why i'm focused on bitcoin payments is because it's a critical aspect of Bitcoin's ability to store value. And if you're just thinking of it in a vacuum, like it's just a store of value and not a medium exchange, you're not actually understanding.

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that extremely easy. You're able to hold your own keys. Again, it's the bank of the future. Go to Unchained.com. Use the code TFTC when you check out for any of their products. You'll get $50 off. Check out their concierge onboarding if you're looking to do it the right way. unchained.com use the code tftc yeah let's dive further into like these exchanges not being zero sum um because you you describe it well in the piece and i think it's really important for people particularly like laymen who aren't um like fully versed in Austrian economics and just economics more generally and who want to understand this from first principles like why and not zero sum like what i think particularly exchanging money to build capital to provide value

to the rest of the world that is net positive so think about a couple ideas and i'll kind of jump not necessarily the end of the piece but kind of um towards the end of an idea in one of the early sections where it's like think about bitcoin and its fixed supply perfectly fixed terminal state no more bitcoin no less bitcoin 100 of all bitcoin is being saved by somebody at all times and then think about what's functionally happening in that economic system money is moving between individual to individual business to business individual to business and the actual exchange of money is being used to build more and more things more and more goods exist more cars exist more homes exist more humans exist as humans procreate and build things and

then think about this fixed money supply distributed across more goods and services rather than less that is actually the function by which the monetary unit increases in value constant nominal amount of currency and more and more goods and the purchasing power of each nominal currency unit buys more for that reason but it's actually the money that's coordinating the trade that's actually allowing for more goods to exist that's the inherent function of money and so one of the examples that i use in uh in the piece is thinking about steve jobs steve jobs used money to pay a a bunch of employees and to pay manufacturers, suppliers to build an iPhone. And the iPhone is capital. That's the accumulation of capital. Now everybody walking on the planet or virtually

everyone can have the benefit of an iPhone. So each individual trade, if I, if I was to think about jobs paying an individual money to do a, to do a service in this, you know, very complex process to produce an iphone the person who got the money benefited and steve jobs mutually benefited and then everybody else who bought the product benefited as well but the value creation happens through the series of individual trades that ultimately allow people to build goods and services that didn't previously exist and through that process is how the underlying value of the unit increases if that makes sense yeah it makes total sense um to me at least but i hope anybody listening just understanding the process by which value is created and brought to the world

i think an iphone is perfect example not only is apple benefited massively trillion dollar company um but individuals who own iphones have added more value to the the world just by having the accessibility of an iPhone where you can build apps. If you wanted to, you can access the internet to be more productive on the go. And so overall, productivity has certainly increased due to this one simple product. And that product was the product of economic exchange, exchanging value via money to coordinate all that activity to produce that end product. Yeah, and so kind of like using a different example, which would be, if you think about every exchange, there's two core concepts.

It's that, one, the utility of money is to coordinate trade and economic activity, and that is actually what allows for division of labor, specialization, and gains from both of those, division of labor and specialization. and that this fundamental idea that trade is not zero-sum. And what that doesn't mean is that certain trades can't be, like some trades can be zero-sum and some trades can not intend to be zero-sum, but an entrepreneur can speculate in trying to build a new product or service and it not being valued by the market.

And in that case, it's not zero-sum, but the basis of trade and the reason why trade persists is because there's mutual benefit. And so whether it's an individual working at a company, the company is getting a benefit because that individual is performing a role and then the individual gets paid in money and then they benefit from future optionality

saying I can go to the market and take this money and facilitate more trades or a producer of goods is buying some input to a capital good and their supplier is benefiting from the optionality of money and they're getting the good in return to then build a high you know a good that's further down the production to say build a car

right they they bought a chassis from a company that you know supplies chassis to gm and gm ultimately builds the car and and everyone along those series of exchanges benefits and you know the similar thing would be in the context of an oil well you know some you know there's a guy working on oil rig right now and he's getting paid money and now he has the future optionality that money and the company that he's working for has the future purchasing power of oil that's coming out of the ground. But fundamental to all of those is that each party to the trade benefits mutually for different reasons. And when you add it up, that's actually what creates value in the economic system. And the reason why I tied this into Bitcoin is to help people understand

that if they're just sitting there on their laurels, staring at their Bitcoin, like that's not actually how value gets created in the world. And that's actually not how value gets created in Bitcoin. That's not why the price of Bitcoin goes up on their screen. The value of Bitcoin goes up on the screen, obviously in part, because people are learning about Bitcoin, understanding why it stores purchasing power, but at a more fundamental level is because people are going to be able to use that medium to facilitate a series of exchanges, ultimately to deliver value to other people and the more of that that's happening the more valuable bitcoin will become because that is the purpose of money and it will also logically trend towards direct commerce because that's the

most efficient form of trade well yes and i think it's important to highlight like the complex process what we just what which we just walked through becomes harder and harder as your money gets to base this coordination um in this these transactions mutual benefit um in a currency that is increasingly and um ever faster be coming to base at some point like it's not mutual um because the like if you use extreme examples zimbabwe venezuela like people get paid and they'd have to go spend it right away and the person they were exchanging those bolivars or zimbabwe notes with were the people that ended up with them like actually got the shit out of the stick because unless they could turn around and spend it immediately as well like that was um arguably

like a bad trade-off for them right and so you know kind of addressing something on the bitcoin side someone might say well if i give you my bitcoin and then it goes up massively in value then didn't i get a worse deal from that trade and the the answer is it's like if you are spending any form of money like if you're spending dollars it's theoretically at the opportunity cost of not owning bitcoin so it doesn't actually change the calculus and yes anybody who is endeavoring say to invest if you were spending for investment purposes you should ideally be thinking about it in Bitcoin terms and to say, Hey, well, if I'm going to exchange this Bitcoin to go try to build this product, you should have the intention of only doing that. If you expect you can get more

Bitcoin over time, what happens when money is storing its value in this end state is that money is actually storing its value rather than losing its value. And you bring up a really important point, which is, and this is something that I do not think that people appreciate because they think well i'm just going to save in bitcoin and spend my dollars but as the dollar gets increasingly volatile relative to goods and services and loses more of its value more quickly it actually makes the process of trade and exchange harder and a great example of that which is, you know, for, you know, people should go listen to the podcast that you and Sam Moffitt recorded from SureTale. He talked about having to look at his business basically after the fact,

realize what his costs had actually gone up. And then basically like a year or two later, then increase prices. He's constantly having to reevaluate his business model because the money supply is changing, not just because his market is changing independent of that fact. And that itself creates friction to trade in that as this continues to go on, that what's really happening is the like what inflation is. It is money printing, but what hyperinflation is as an extension of that is not just because they printed too much money and the money became worthless. it's that the degradation of the money and the debasement of the money actually made trade harder to coordinate. As that happens, certain businesses fail and goods actually start to become scarce relative to the amount of money. It's not a constant amount of goods

and services and more and more money existing. It's that the more and more money existing is actually what causes the goods to become scarce because a business model breaks. A business keeps raising their prices until they price their customers out and then their customers start stop showing up and they can't continue to service the other ones because their business has now become unprofitable and in that sense as fiat currency loses its value increasingly it becomes less and less mutual if i'm saving in bitcoin i spend a small portion of it and the rest of my bitcoin gets worth a lot more that was still a mutually beneficial trade especially if i was a consumer buying something like steak that I needed to survive till the next day. But this broader

point of you can't just sit and I think about that, you know, the dog sitting in the house on fire saying everything is fine. That's what I think is actually most relatable to this idea that I'm going to store value in Bitcoin and never spend it and think that that's just going to continue to go on because there's a real consequence to you taking a bad form of money directly and it losing purchasing power until you can ultimately get into the good form of money. And the way to solve that for all parties is just to transact in the good form of money and to be exposed as less and less to, to the bad form of money. Yeah. It's either the, this is fine meme or congratulations, you played yourself

because the mindset of I'm just going to sit on my Bitcoin and spend dollars, not recognizing that spending those dollars with people that provide you goods and services that make your quality of life possible does not put them in a good position to continue to provide that good or service into the future. You're functioning just externally.

What you're doing is you're externalizing the cost of the fiat system onto the business owner that you supposedly value, right? And so in one of the prior pieces I had written, I explained that if you don't actually value the service and you don't want it to be around, maybe it's not rational to spend Bitcoin. But if we value Sam and Shirtail and local pastures

and we know that he's going to be better off if he has Bitcoin and collectively, all of us, if we can cut out the fiat system and that that's going to be important to the future viability of our ability to exchange value with our local grocer, who's also our local rancher, then it becomes very rational. And that if you're just sitting there, because there's this, there's this logical dilemma for the scenario where it's, I'm just going to save in Bitcoin and, and spend in dollars. it's either you're holding a lot more dollars than maybe you should be or well when does that

change when does inflation get so bad and not just bad in degree but the speed at which prices change because that's actually what happens in hyperinflation when do you cut over like it's almost you're assuming well there's going to be these rails when i need them it's like well how do they just magically exist at the time when everything's collapsing when you need them the reality is it happens because there's already an there's already an a mutual incentive to pursue it even with say the friction of the tax system um and for people that are high agency to realize well i can't just go from today to this future state where everything's working if something's not making it work along the way progressively

and that it's not actually consistent with reality to say, like, I'm just going to sit in this burning home where inflation is getting worse and worse, price changes are getting more and more frequent, more economic imbalance exists rather than less, more censorship in the financial system exists rather than less, and the Fed's lowering interest rates and they're about to have to print money.

this house on fire is only going to be further engulfed in flames so if somebody's not high agency then and what will ultimately happen for maybe most people is certain people are high agency and those people will benefit because of the people that were um complacent you know yeah the people that are complacent will benefit because other people who are higher agency say like okay i'm not going to wait till i can't escape the burning house i'm going to go ahead and help create a solution. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at Zapparite.

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the pink lemonade go to drink saute.com that's drink sote.com use the code tftc when you make your purchase and you'll get 15 off i'm telling you get on it freaks you're gonna love this stuff and that's so i think what we mean this is something we talk about a lot about just not in the context of payments but like timing and obviously merchant adoption was a big meme back in like the 2013 2014 error like roger vera bitcoin jesus that it's part of the reason why he um forked off because he didn't think um bitcoin is a medium exchange at the protocol level was being prioritized enough um and think like solutions like lightning but it arguably at the time 2013 2014 the market wasn't ready for merchant adoption bitcoin was a fraction of the market cap

that it is now um i guess that's what i'm trying to get at like how do we know when the timing is right like is inflation increasing at a pace where you think it is wholly necessary at this point in time to begin uh adopting the rails um just for redundancy sake whether that's because you want to have the rails available to accept the better money um to protect yourself from debasement or Or have the better rails to protect yourself from a banking crisis, which creates an inaccessibility to your money. Both. Yeah, and no one can time anything perfect, or no one has perfect knowledge to say, is now the right time. There's a few things that I look at to at least think conceptually about it,

which is multiple $200 billion banks failed practically. One of them failed practically overnight. The other one failed over a matter of a couple weeks. And those were the third and fourth largest bank failures ever in the United States. So the system is still just as fragile as it was in 2008, as it established that it was in 2020, and again demonstrated in 2023.

another thing is that yeah bitcoin is you know at equilibrium now storing over a trillion dollars of purchasing power and i believe you guys at tftc put out i you know i think people can think about these different ways but that bitcoin is this somewhere between the fifth and tenth largest currency system in the world base money yeah base money um but base money is relevant if If Bitcoin's at the very inception of another adoption wave, if adoption increases from here at an equilibrium of $1 to $1.5 trillion, if adoption increases by 5 to 10 times, then that's $5 to $10 trillion. that not only represents purchasing power that merchants become interested in to say, okay, I can sell to that market or I want to sell to that value. It's also that value is an output of enough people valuing Bitcoin

that there's enough potential density to begin to drive a trading economy, right? and again that that is difficult to forecast of like when is enough density enough but as there's greater density there's greater opportunities to trade and exchange just by definition as there's more people holding bitcoin there's more buyers and sellers more there's more consumers and businesses you can connect with yes yeah and so just thinking about the say the size of where bitcoin is today a trillion versus a billion in or between a billion and five billion in uh 2016 you know when that might have been um and saying that it's a hundred to a thousand times larger right but then also again if you recognize that if you've recognized

that the fiat currency is a risk to you from a balance sheet perspective from this store of value um, quote aspect, then it should become logical. Maybe the, the danger to you does not seem as clear and present, but if that currency is a risk, then the rails of the currency are logically also a risk. And that it's one of those, if not, if not us, then who, If not me, then who, if, if, if now, then when, right. Um, and because there's so much negative asymmetry at a system level and at a business level that it's logical and instinctual to protect yourself against the risk of ruin to say like, I can't wait until I absolutely have to have this new rail to then begin thinking about building it and that the more high agency

people there are that think that way the less pain there will actually be um and so you know and then and then it does you know it's always re-anchored back to this fundamental to help people understand which is storing value to what end right it only exists if its ability in its ability to be exchanged at some future date. Even if you never intend to spend it, the value of Bitcoin is dependent on your future optionality to spend. And the more of that that exists, the more valuable the currency unit is to you.

If you had Bitcoin and you could only sell it at one place, if you could only exchange it with one party, how valuable would Bitcoin be? If you could only exchange it at five places, if you could only exchange it for 10 places, if you could only exchange it for fiat currency and you were dependent on those centralized sources, what's the value cap of Bitcoin? If you're able to spend it at every merchant around your local economy, just the sheer number of people that are willing to bid for your Bitcoin, the more optionality you have, it should be logical. Oh, the underlying medium is actually more valuable to me, the more places, not less than I can spend it. And that only happens. And again, I think about this very logically.

It's like somebody is not going to accept Bitcoin as payment, nor do I think they should be accepting Bitcoin as payment or even using Bitcoin as medium of exchange if they don't first understand why Bitcoin stores value. At that same time, its ability to be exchanged is the only reason why it stores value. And the more exchange that's available, the more valuable Bitcoin becomes. And that's a logical connection for people so they don't just sit there thinking, I can sit in my burning home, not go out and create value, not demand Bitcoin as payment, and think that this house isn't going to burn. yeah and through your work i mean what are you guys seeing in zap right like what is the typical like is the typical archetype of your customer somebody who's recognized this there's newer older obviously we use that bright tape voice everything we do here tftc i mean i made the

logical decision to run my business on a bitcoin standard seven years ago um but or in terms of like new zap rate customers what is what are some of the different archetypes so i mean we we focus the product and what we're actually building specifically and you know in part how we market it but also how we build it specifically to people who already understand bitcoin um so really there's two archetypes but they have one thing in common the two archetypes are bitcoin is core to their business they work in bitcoin mining they run a bitcoin podcast they host a bitcoin event or conference or first something core bitcoin is central to it so that's that's one archetype the other archetype is just a small to medium-sized business that's

generally privately owned that has one or two key decision makers that understands bitcoin and understands why Bitcoin is important and understands why they need to make an investment in infrastructure to be able to diversify and be able to make for their customers that want to pay them in Bitcoin, make that available, basically reducing a risk from their business.

The thing that is common across both of those archetypes is people that understand Bitcoin. What we find, I find, is if I'm talking to somebody that's having to be explained the benefit of bitcoin at the same time that they're trying to understand should i accept this as money as payment directly it's a it's ultimately a waste of time for both parties it's like hey go read a book go read the bitcoin standard go read gradually then suddenly you know broken money um but more

and more people that are just sole proprietors or you know um you know like sam is taking bitcoin on his um online store we're working on you know trying to convince him to do that in person obviously we need the tools to be able to do that um local dentists just set up a local orthodontist bike shops so it very very much is that small business where once the idea of bitcoin unlocks for somebody the business owner can take the forward action to implement that obviously it's a lot more difficult the larger a business is the more stakeholders there are to gain a consensus to then, and then it's also oftentimes more expensive to them to be able to implement something because there's a lot more red tape, a lot more approval processes that things need to

go through. But it is just normal people who understand how difficult running a business is and understanding how much more difficult running a business is when what you're being paid in constantly gets destroyed. And so we're really focusing on the early use cases where it's either a core, you know, common, there's Bitcoiners willing to pay and there's a lot of, you know, where Bitcoin is core to someone's business. But then also for the people that Bitcoin isn't core to their business, they're basically saying, okay, I understand this medium Bitcoin. I understand why if I don't take this step, I'm going to have to at some point in the future. And I can use it as a strategy advantage now and today by attracting Bitcoiners to my business. And even if they don't

pay me in bitcoin the fact that i accept it is a advantage over my competition it's a way for me to find customers and so um those are really the two archetypes that that we're you know targeting the product toward and are the people that are coming in um most commonly yeah and for that small to medium business that isn't core to bitcoin um i know that you talk to a lot of your customers every day like does that redundancy give them peace of mind like even if people aren't spending bitcoin with them i don't think it's so much peace of mind i think that um it is it is always twofold it's i'm doing this to eliminate a cost and so on that side it's part peace of mind but it's more again that high agency like i'm solving a problem you know like if a business owner

identifies a problem in their business, they don't necessarily just fix it for peace of mind. It's like, okay, I fixed that problem. Now I can move on to the next problem. I can, I can know that that, that, that piece is solved. And, and so I don't necessarily think of problem solving as, as just peace of mind. And then it's forward action of saying, okay, now that I have this, I want to turn it into an asset. I want to make this known to my customers, make it known why am doing this why it's important to me and why they should come work with someone that's values aligned and you know and that's you know very logically other bitcoiners so um you know peace of mind i said is only one kimono but they want to actually then get value beyond that um and so

it it's kind of leveraging it not just as a cost center but to you know take ground yeah I don't want to say partly answer, but I was going to ask next, what do you think needs more attention, actual tools to facilitate these payments or the education around why people should leverage these tools in the first place? And you mentioned something that reminded me of our former doctor. She retired, but that's one thing I really appreciate. She used Zapp, right? I paid her in Bitcoin, but she did have this section on her website,

which is like we accept bitcoin explained why she accepted bitcoin and she was values aligned with sound open source money and that alone um by her accepting bitcoin and having to explain why because people could see it at checkout like you just see it and there's no explanations of why am i doing this as a business owner some veronica particularly felt compelled to to explain why that's in and of itself like a an education touch point for for people who are not aware of bitcoin um but still the broader question like what needs more attention right now education around why or why you should use the tools or attention on making the tools as seamless and easy to use as possible so it the answer is it's um they each relate to the other which is the tools have to

exist in order for and they have to be easy to use in order for someone to have the opportunity to be educated on why they're important to then adopt them but then the more that people adopt them the better the tools have become and the more resources you have to go out and educate more people on why they're important and so i think that on the front side it is delivering the actual tool that for a sufficient number of merchants to be able to adopt um is is necessary but beyond there it does then the first step is educating the merchants the the bitcoin holders saying you if you are a business owner you should invest in this for your business and you should open up this avenue for your customers and that will benefit your business on a range of

on a range of levels that next step which we do encourage business owners to do is to make it known that you're accepting bitcoin and not just that but why because in veronica's case it was she valued sovereignty she understood bitcoin and she wanted to tap and attract local patients here in austin that were values aligned yeah her service was open to a broad-based people but it became a not just like a marketing channel And I'm like, how do I go, you know, acquire customers on the internet? But, okay, this is what my service is. How do I find people that actually value what I'm delivering to the market?

These Bitcoiners seem to value the service I'm delivering. If I do this, that will be a signal in itself. And if I tell them why, then I'm more likely to attract more of them. And you can say that, you know, I don't want to say she's unique, but she's somebody that's very sovereignty-minded and Bitcoin resonated with her very well. But anybody that's figured out why Bitcoin is a better form of money and is recognized, as I'm talking about as a business owner, that why the fiat currency is a problem and they open up their business, like thinking about a dentist in Michigan saying, hey, all my customers, you can pay me if you want. And if you're in this local area, come to me if you're a Bitcoiner. It's a way to signal and communicate that your value is aligned. and the more that people know that you're accepting Bitcoin

because you understand Bitcoin and that you're saving in Bitcoin, that is also a necessary, I don't want to say necessary, it is a piece that is important to getting people to actually pay you in Bitcoin. Because if you accept Bitcoin and you're immediately converting it to dollars and everyone knows it and they know that you're not actually values aligned, why would they do that if they have dollars? They'll just spend the dollars there. And that's not in every case, but it's a two-sided equation.

It's like the tools exist. The merchants have to be educated why this is important. So those people that are sitting in the burning house will say, okay, I'm a Bitcoiner. I understand Bitcoin. I run a business. Me not doing this is actually low agency. If I do do this and if I invest in this side of my business,

I can then go market and acquire Bitcoiners around me. There'll be a lot of benefits that come from that. and then as that happens like if the rails exist and no one uses them the rails will not get better or the rails just won't exist and so there do have to be and we think this is very much a merchant led um you know two side of the equation which is like it's not consumers saying i want to pay in bitcoin it's people that run businesses that understand the benefits of bitcoin understands the risk of fiat rails and say yeah i'm going to to build this in to my business before i have to and then turn it to an advantage but in order to turn it to my advantage i need to educate my

customers because that was core to maybe why i decided to do this in the first place because i was educated so it becomes logical to extend that education yeah it's the converse of what we talked about earlier, which is, again, you don't want to be the congratulations, you played yourself meme, like holding your Bitcoin and not supporting the business owners that you depend on for the goods and services you use throughout your life. Conversely, the business owner wants to attract the Bitcoiner because they want that customer that actually has good money, has money to spend and actually preserves value to sell their goods and services. It is a symbiotic.

Yeah, it's a very symbiotic relationship. I gave a presentation a few weeks ago talking about the various different benefits. And that, I think, is one of the, again, it is hard to appreciate if you are sitting there looking at the world saying, I'm going to just store value in the Bitcoin and I'll deal with fiat as a rail,

not realizing that the fiat system and the rails of that are a risk, that if you are not more like this, this seems like a tail event. The reality is it's an inevitability. So you might say, well, it's not going to happen for two decades. I'd say it probably happens in this decade, but even if I'm wrong, is there, is there some reason why you wouldn't benefit from the same logic. And that, that logic is, well, and I use this cartoon not to make light of what's happening in Venezuela, but there's this cartoon where a guy shows up with a wheelbarrow of dollars and Maduro's or Bolivar's, I guess, and Maduro's

sitting at a, um, in a shack with several rolls of toilet paper. And the guy shows up with a wheelbarrow of full of cash and then walks away with one roll of toilet paper that if your customers and if you're not catering your customers to people who hold bitcoin so if your business is highly catered to people that only have fiat currency as you need to increase prices if i think about sam and local pastures as he increases the price of eggs it at a certain point people that only have fiat get tapped out by fiat price increases. And that's ultimately how your business gets impaired because your revenue either goes down because you lose customers, you've increased price, which means that fewer and fewer customers are sharing more and more of the burden, or you're

constantly having to invest marketing costs to acquire more customers. So it's kind of like running on a treadmill. But one thing happens for certain as you continue to increase prices, somebody some one of your customers says i i can't keep paying this i'm i'm gonna downgrade my life to some shittier factory eggs yeah um and that by catering your business to people whose money is storing purchasing power and you know continues this example is like hey when the egg price increases happen if i can actually purchase more eggs despite the dollar price increase because my bitcoin has saved value i'm saving the majority of my value I can continue to be a customer that's where I don't actually have to degrade my lifestyle I

I can sustain the dollar price increases because my bitcoin's purchasing power continues to go up despite that fact well put yourself on the other side of that equation which is the business owner if you don't have customers like that eventually your customers start showing up your customers can no longer be your customers and if somebody's looking at that equation saying like what's the likelihood of that happening it's that is happening every single day like right now and because as food at the grocery store costs 50 more than it did four years ago they still have to keep buying food so they might not only have to substitute you know one quality of food for lower quality food but they're cutting something else out of their life so it's like even if you're not raising

prices somebody else is and they might have to turn your service off because they can no longer sustain it. And that is happening every single day right now. Today, we see videos of it all the time. And the faster or the sooner that someone says, I'm open for business with Bitcoin. I get it. I know why I need to value you. I know why I need to cater to you. You can pay me in the money that you hold. And I actually prefer that. And if you pay me in that, I actually have a better chance of continuing to be able to deliver this service that you value, there's the mutual benefit. There's how Bitcoin's actually creating value.

The more exchange it's helping to facilitate, the more value you actually get from the remaining 99.9% of your Bitcoin that you didn't spend on that individual transaction. Yeah, and let's dive into one of the marketing tactics that we've been talking about the last few weeks, which is publicly positioning your products in a Bitcoin per unit and tracking that and articulating that to the market. Yeah, call it a marketing tactic, strategy,

just something that is logical for if you're a business owner, as an example, and you follow this logic that as you increase prices, you're ultimately pricing somebody out. You're impairing your business because you're now having to recreate a customer from that person that gets priced out. And if you keep doing this and you're only tailoring your business

to customers that have fiat or you're not actively trying to get customers that have sound money, whether they pay you in Bitcoin or not, you're going to face this dilemma. And that what really matters, and this is where, you know, I was like, clearly the dollar is still the unit of account.

Clearly the dollar is the primary reserve asset. However, as more people hold Bitcoin in reserve and Bitcoin will become the primary reserve asset for the reason that it will become the primary medium of exchange in the unit of account. But if you are saving in Bitcoin and because Bitcoin increases in purchasing power for the reason that it has a fixed supply

and more people are adopting it, for all of those collective benefits then your unit of account is really Bitcoin and so even if you're not tracking things in your daily life

what it means to be a unit of account humans do hundreds if not thousands of economic calculations in their head that they might even be conscious of on a daily basis that's all still done in dollars but there's a moment where you're thinking about something, maybe like a house that you're going to buy. And you say, how much does that cost in Bitcoin? And what percentage of my Bitcoin is that

house? You're starting to price things in Bitcoin. Well, because they keep printing dollars and because people continue to increase prices in dollar because their input costs are going up, that the way that I think it becomes logical to measure your own effectiveness as a business is to start to think about your dollar price increases in Bitcoin terms. And so, again, translating this to a finite surface area so someone can understand what I'm talking about, it is I did this analysis, which was looking at the eggs at the local farmer's market

going from $8 to $8.75. This is a great example of congratulations, you played yourself on the Fed's part. Yes. We'll explain that and then dive into this. Well, yeah. Well, in this, I'll explain that now. six years ago the price of bitcoin was dropping from its astronomical rise i would say it was

correcting from 20 000 down to three or four thousand and the fed wanted to dunk on bitcoin and said hey look the price of eggs are going up in bitcoin terms and so they wrote a blog and realistically it was about volatility but they were making this point that the cost of eggs was was going up in Bitcoin terms drastically. And then if you extend that and the blog is still up and they have a chart now that is like a Fred chart, uh, St. Louis fed produced. That is the cost of eggs and dollars side by side with cost of eggs and Bitcoin. And you can see that the cost of eggs national average in dollars has gone from a dollar 47 to $3 and 81 cents a dozen and increase in dollar terms of 160 but from that low of 2018 when the fed put out the the piece to

highlight that the price was was increasing in bitcoin terms over time for fundamental reasons the price of eggs drops in bitcoin and that it actually costs less now in bitcoin to buy the same dozen of eggs so extended so it was like yeah that was that was the own on the fed's part but it did demonstrate these two divergent trends also establishing or helping to establish why as a business owner, you should start to be thinking, again, I'm not saying price things in Bitcoin to your customers, but thinking about as you're contemplating changing dollar prices to use Bitcoin as that lighthouse, as that anchor to say, am I increasing the cost of my good in nominal terms and real terms? Or am I just accounting for the fact that they've printed

more money? And the way to do that is to say, and I'll use a hard example, which is our local rancher, $8 of eggs going to $8.75. And that $8 price was the case from 2021 to 2023. And then just a few months ago was increased to $8.75, which is a 9% dollar price increase. But if you look at it over any of those three years in between, the current price of eggs in Bitcoin terms is less. So yes, he increases price in nominal terms and dollar terms, but he didn't increase his prices in real Bitcoin terms. And if his business is catered increasingly to people that have Bitcoin, then that's what ultimately matters to them. And any business owner that is trying to sustain themselves can accept that dollar price increases are inevitable because

dollar they're making a lot more dollars. But if you're not able to consistently maintain or reduce your price in Bitcoin terms, then whatever dollar price you're reflecting is probably going to impair your business more than it otherwise should. And again, it's not to say start pricing your things in Bitcoin is that start being aware of your dollar price increases and thinking of them relative to the change in the price of your good in Bitcoin terms over time as this barometer, this kind of check and balance to see whether or not you're actually becoming more effective in the hard money term, which over time becomes the more important arbiter. And then my perspective is people should actually lean into it because in certain cases,

price increases in dollar world are inevitable. And just as, you know, I might get out on Twitter and talk about how, yeah, Hey, this good or service just increased this amount. It's to start leaning into it and saying, yes, we have to increase our prices because they're making a lot more dollars. Our inputs are going up in dollar terms because there's more dollars floating around competing for the same number of goods and services, but we didn't increase our prices in Bitcoin terms. We encourage you to pay us in Bitcoin and we'll continue to be transparent

about why we're increasing prices. But the more you can help us of paying us in the form of money that can't be debased will allow us to, in real terms, actually reduce prices over time because that is ultimately what we think matters most to our ability to continue to deliver this service. Again, I'm not saying that someone's going to hear that

and immediately be like, yes i'm going to do that tomorrow but fundamentally that is the right logical way to think about it and it's the it ultimately becomes the recipe of survival and success for a business owner and the way that they start to shift over to a bitcoin standard not just accepting it not just saving it on their balance sheet but thinking about the the relationship between this kind of waterbed that's existing of dollar prices constantly changing and and the impact that has on their business and making sure that they can always look to the anchor the thing that's not changing bitcoin and say am i am i raising my price in bitcoin terms because that would make that would

not make sense because they haven't been printing bitcoin and then looking at that over time um and that becomes one way that over time you slowly start to normalize into uh ultimately a bitcoin standard in bitcoin prices yeah and we've been uh we've been spitballing ideas around because there has to be some sort of like trailing index on this because just bitcoins price volatility like if you let's just say you increase let's say we have a similar cycle the cycle's passed we have a blow off top next december and you increase prices that month and then you increase six months later and bitcoin's gone down like 30 whatever it may be um technically that would be like an increase in bitcoin prices um so that we've been trying to figure out like what is

the index or the trailing time period which you track this right and i think that you know reality is you you do it like bitcoin is still volatile um but the question is if you were if you were increasing and this is the other side of the equation of like if i was a business owner how i'd be thinking about this if i'm increasing my prices every six months like i've got a real problem um and that's just reality and and and part of this discussion or this line is accepting this fact that dollar inflation is this vicious cycle and there is no easy solution to it there's no silver bullet of saying, I'm just going to opt out and I'm on Bitcoin now. And that's it. It's like, no, that's not the way the real world works. If I'm a local ranch, if I'm a local

grocer, if I'm a dentist, whatever I'm doing, I have, you know, maybe 1% of the world understands Bitcoin. I've got costs that are dollar denominated. I've got more dollars competing against an existing pool of resources, that's just a reality. But I can either be lower agency and not take marginal steps to move off of that problem, or I can be higher agency and take those marginal steps. And so thinking about it and saying, hey, like in the local ranchers case where I was showing this example, I looked at it as a two-year average and looked at it compared to 2021, 2022, 2023 saying like, okay, like, you know, is this, is this generally a line? It's like, it's, it's a best effort. It's not, I mean, maybe I have to, but I'm at least paying

attention to this and being aware of it while I'm doing it. And if you're looking at something over an average, then you're taking into account volatility. But the other half of how you solve this is if you're saving in Bitcoin, your balance sheet, over time, and again, there's no quick solution to this, but if you are progressively saving in Bitcoin, that balance sheet is what is paying and helping bear the brunt of dollar price increases. Because if you were thinking about passing price increases onto your customer, but then thinking about them in relation to Bitcoin. If you've been saving in Bitcoin for a year, maybe Bitcoin has gone down over that year, but if it's two years, if it's three years, you, you increasingly become, you know, in the,

in the green or in the black to say like, okay, I've stored purchasing power. My inputs are actually cheaper now because I've saved in Bitcoin. And when my supplier increases my price, I can look at it and say, do I want to pass that increase on to the customer or, you know what, I've saved in Bitcoin for this reason. I'm going to choose to defer the price increase to gain a competitive advantage against my customer because I can still buy the same amount of product. Now, marginal profit is always important and you're not going to want to be running any activity at a loss. But by having your balance sheet saved in Bitcoin and thinking about like, you know, one way that I relate it to business owners is thinking about each gross profit unit and saying you get the gross profit unit and then from that point forward, it's degraded and degraded and degraded. Imagine if each of those gross profit units marginally, not a hundred percent all at once was converted into Bitcoin. Because also when people are accepting Bitcoin payments,

it doesn't magically just show up that a hundred percent of their business is getting paid in Bitcoin. It's 2%, 3%, 5%. For us it's like 20%. Yeah. Right. And so that might become what you are just able to save and put away. But then over time, as you need to pay your employees more, Well, you've had the Bitcoin and it's offset the dollar inflation, so you're good. And part of the impact of those dollar price increases is blunted by your balance sheet. And so by looking at this collectively, it's like, okay, we can't just magically solve this vicious cycle of dollar inflation. The only way out is through the storm.

And I have to start thinking about both how I pass on dollar price increases to my customers as well as how I manage price increases from my suppliers or my inputs with this tool. And looking at it collectively on both, you know, being conscious of Bitcoin denominator, or I'd say real terms as well as nominal, and then also how you manage your balance sheet is the only way to actually solve a problem. Yeah. No, I admire and really value your, not only your, I don't want to call it zealotry, but your passion for this particular problem and solving. Cause you really hooked onto this problem like two years ago when inflation like hit nine, 10%. And I remember having conversations

with you, not panicked, but like, we need to go to a gas station, figure out how to get them to epic we need to go beef initiative was blowing up it's like good we're getting the ranchers figured out but there is this urgency i would argue there certainly should be some urgency to get everything that we've been discussing into motion as quickly as possible because we have been in this period where the rate of inflation has come down that's lulled i mean a lot of people into a false sense of security what i would say is certain things have started to come down in price food has not and anything generally marginal service wise has not like fuel has but again we've massively depleted our strategic reserves that's the functionally on a marginal basis like

printing oil or gas and so there's just this fundamental reality that as the fiat system deteriorates it doesn't get less expensive in fiat terms to deliver goods like it becomes more and more efficient with sound money to deliver services cheaper and cheaper that problem does not magically get better and we are setting up for this next point of they're lowering interest rates and they are about to print a shit ton of money this problem is not you know it's like kind of if you're in the eye of the storm maybe that's the right analogy and it's not to to panic but it's a it's a it's to operate with urgency and intentionality about there's a there's a problem it's clear it's present we can be higher agency

and go you know figure out how to put one foot in front of the other and actually advance towards solving a problem or we can sit back and you know hope and change the strategy um and that you know i do you know we've literally lived in a world in 2020 where and again it was a government led shutdown but the beef at the grocery store stopped showing up the solution to that problem was like go shake a rancher's hand and make sure that you have a relationship with that guy and so that that guy keeps putting food on your plate and you have a direct relationship you reduce your risk. But just thinking about that problem as a microcosm to everything, it is that businesses fail because of inflation. More businesses fail as inflation worsens

because they're constantly having to spend more of their time looking at this, understanding how they're backwards and that they need to increase prices. And then they impair their business by pricing certain customers out. And so if you accept this premise, which is that it makes businesses harder to run with inflation, it's not just, you know, the academic economist saying, well, you know, or the person sitting there saying, I'm just going to store my value in Bitcoin and not spend my dollar saying, okay, well, as that, cause as that, if I look at that business and I show up tomorrow and it has, it's now charging me 5% more. And then I show up in six months and it's charging me another 7% more that that is the, the business basically trying

to get ahead of a problem and that it doesn't fix itself. The only way that that problem is fixed is by saying you start accepting Bitcoin. You can stop, you know, in the future at some future date, stop increasing your prices for the reason that you have money that's not getting debased over time you know like that's the only way out and so just the more people that that focus in on like that problem is not getting solved period unless you have higher agency and the people that are that are the almost by definition highest of agency are bitcoiners and people that run businesses and then the overlap of people that run businesses that are bitcoiners they're the ones that will say like i'm not going to just sit in this fucking house as it burns i'm going to go

you know turn on my business say you can pay me in bitcoin and as more bitcoiners exist more more people will see that very logical path yeah and i think it's important too obviously there's a lot of anticipation for this presidential election it does seem like it's trending in the direction that many of us wanted to go in which is away from the incumbent administration towards um a more what i would deem to be more sane administration um but i also think as people are becoming more confident that trump is going to get back in office there is a level of complacency because he's out there talking big game we're going to drive down energy prices i'm going to solve inflation but the structural issues that exist

in the u.s there's too much debt not enough dollars still persists there's not many levers he can pull outside of a complete decimation of the administrative class and the federal government that would actually quell the problem or solve the problem in any material way and i find it hard to believe that that is going to happen easily if at all um and so just trying get to the point like despite the fact that it seems like a more sane administration may be coming into power um as we head into 2025 this inflation problem is still external to that it's still yeah i would say it's foundational and so that's one of the things that there can be certain policies that are marginally ben better and beneficial to worst policies and

those should be pursued right if it makes sense to incentivize building manufacturing in the united states rather than allowing companies to literally hop across the border not be subject to the same costs and then pop them back over but maybe that's a good policy i probably agree with that until people talk about the fact that the printing of money is the source and I understand the two things relate to each other. The government wants to spend a lot of money and the Fed finances it out of thin air because the two people are in bed together.

But if you didn't have the ability, the forcing function is taking away the ability to print money. Fed's never going away on its own. Only way to solve it is Bitcoin. And my view is that until people start to talk about the money printing as the problem, then they might be very well intentioned about solving other economic issues they're never going to solve the problem of inflation for the reason they're not talking about the right thing but then

also and what you mentioned is something i talk about a lot graduates and graduates and suddenly which is there's just a structural imbalance between the amount of debt in the system and the amount of actual dollars and that is what dictates that almost regardless of what even the government does at this standpoint they're going to have to print more money otherwise that entire system collapses and it's the printing of money that actually defers the collapse and that in my view is the the causal relationship that dictates why more and more money will be printed mathematically um and that yeah i saw a clip from uh what what's the um thomas massey and he had this

cup of iced tea and he said let me show you what happens when you print a bunch more money and he took a bottle a jug of water and he poured it into the tea he's like this is dilution this is what happens when you print money again Thomas Massey's talking

about it I don't think that at least at a congressional level even though he's read the bitcoin standard and talked about it on a podcast he's not talking about bitcoin as part of a solution in front of Congress. Obviously, Cynthia Lummis is Senator Lummis. But yeah, so I think that there's just this structural imbalance. And on one part, I talk about it being debt to dollars. On the other part, it's like when you think about the economic imbalance,

it is that, and this is what also drives hyperinflation, you have certain people that have more dollars than they could ever need. And you have this whole other swath, probably the majority of people that don't have a role in the economy to be able to sustain themselves and they have no savings and economic imbalance just gets worse and worse in this world and then you have people that have way more dollars that are just ejecting out because they don't need them ever to actually facilitate the things they need in their daily lives while at the same time you have people that have nothing and balance is ultimately what you're striving for and balance does not mean equality balance means a way for an economic system to constantly find balance by

through trade by delivering mutual value um and so ultimately it's better than worse if somebody who respects the constitution and doesn't you know go after their political rivals like the democrats out of trump and somebody that actually has a perspective on an economic policy that will be more sustaining rather than exporting all of our manufacturing to other countries and then having them ship back in and paying for it basically via the printing of money to be there like that that is better than the alternative but it doesn't get solved like the problem of inflation everything that we're talking about like there's no way out of this vicious cycle the dollar can't fix itself it's too far gone it's too far broken and it only becomes more

you know fractured over time the imbalance only gets greater as a function of time that doesn't mean that something doesn't correct slowly over three months and then gets worse over the next year. But it's a, it's a functionally a one-way directional trend. And that's why, again, I'm not, I'm actually very optimistic. It's just like, Hey, the way that you become optimistic is by actually taking the forward steps to permanently solve the problem. And that's where it comes back to if you're a business and you're not taking that forward action, you know, that inflation is causing your business havoc. If you didn't constantly,

and Bitcoin's not going to solve this in the short term, but if you're not constantly having to think about raising prices just for the fact that you know that they're printing money and that you have your employees that are constantly asking you for raises because their cost is getting more, you know that inflation is causing you a problem and there's only one solution and it's Bitcoin.

And if you're not taking every possible advantage to solve that problem, you're just dead in the water. you know yeah i think and it's very apparent to anybody who's listening to this podcast i much prefer trump and hope that he gets into office but i do think he has been making a strategic misstep in choreographing or attempting to choreograph that he's going to bring down prices because i think structural issues that you just described it's impossible and that's My hope is that he does develop the intestinal fortitude

and understanding to actually call out the problem. He's going in the opposite direction, saying the dollar is the best. And he's launching a shit coin. And he's launching a shit coin. But that, I mean, again, strategic misstep in the sense that there's a very, not only a possibility, but a high likelihood that he does get into office. We have an economic crisis. We have to print a shit ton of money, and inflation goes back to where it was

a couple of years ago. We have a repeat in the 1970s that go inflation. And I would hope that he has surrounded himself with advisors and people within his administration that are capable enough to recognize and have, again, the intestinal fortitude to basically say it publicly because that's the big problem. It's like the elephant in the room that you're not allowed to point at and acknowledge is that the dollar is a problem.

the fiat system is a problem and until that is recognized you can't at least at the federal level what we're describing here is how to save yourself at the individual small business level but this problem has layers going all the way up to the top layer of the federal government and until it is officially acknowledged and confronted head-on which i think senator lummis with the bitcoin act is trying to do but i think we need more momentum in that room look i think that clearly trump doesn't get it he's at least figured out why politically he needs to align himself and so that's that's at least an improvement right like

take what we can get take what we can get i also believe that there are people around him who are much closer to actually getting it um just from hearing people or choosing one person as an example the vague ramaswamy i think that he's starting to to clearly understand it same with rfk like rfk's speech at the bitcoin conference was phenomenal and um there's still the possibility that he didn't fully get it you know he went and talked to the shitcoin conference but the way that he spoke about it's like if you do you accept that knowledge distributes over time more people understand bitcoin not less that the way that rfk jr talked about bitcoin from the 2023 conference to the 2024 conference, markedly different, you know?

And so there are increasingly people around that aren't just sympathetic to it, but I think are increasingly grokking it. And that will be beneficial because I agree that there's this economic tsunami coming and they're going to have to bring a shit ton more money that's going to make the problems worse. And having people that are seeing this field

and recognizing that this is the only way out and that there's going to have to be some pain to be felt is not dystopian, it's not, you know, not optimistic. It's actually just pragmatic and saying, the way that I can actually solve this problem and be optimistic and be okay with tolerating pain is by knowing that I have a path out on the other side. Well, if you're not actually keying in on the medium that's actually causing it, then it's a lot harder to be optimistic or to, to be able to sustain and to,

you know, weather that storm. One of the things I increasingly appreciate about Nayib Bukele, you know, when he, when he spoke at CPAC, not only did he explain, you know, why do they tax you, humiliation ritual, humiliation ritual in a very succinct way of saying like, they don't tax you to fund the government, they tax you to give the illusion that you find the government because that allows them to continue to print money and that when the currency fails when the charade fails like there's going to be a lot of pain like he's at least honest about that he's taking a forward action to protect their local economy

and advance their local economy there's going to be a impact to their local economy and the way that he speaks about it is saying like there's unavoidable pain to come like that is that is unavoidable. And while he might not say this next part is like, he understands why. And in certain cases, he certainly connects it to the money, but he doesn't talk about it in a, in a negative sense. He just talks about it in a, in a realistic sense and saying, if we're not being honest and we don't have any realistic chance of way, you know, finding our way through this storm or actually coming out the other side stronger um and you know basically saying like they're the more you accept on the front end the more easily you're going to be able to to move forward um in a

effective way yeah how should we leave it with the freaks we're called to action should we sit up there i'll just say this was powerful this is the best we've done in a few years i think we see that every time and now it only gets better freaks it only gets better the uh i thought the last one we did was pretty good though bitcoin and the not the american dream but uh nothing more american than bitcoin that was pretty good no in terms of like actual like i think this is i mean you're preaching to the choir with me but we've been talking about this a lot over the last two years and more specifically over the last three weeks because i do feel that urgency again um to to really secure at least the businesses that i'm

dependent on to to receive goods and services because you can feel it coming back like the nine percent increase in sure tail like that's where we get our eggs like holy shit it's happening again um despite the fact they're saying that inflation's dropping the rate of inflation is dropping um i do hope but i can't imagine that people listening to this do feel inspired to act and go go out there and seriously think about solving this problem yeah so i'd say one if you haven't read the article go read the article um bitcoin's exchange theory of value that's on my blog gradually then suddenly dot xyz um except hopefully logically once you've that that bitcoin actually increases the value as it's able to facilitate more exchange and that

the medium bitcoin and you know value period is created through trade and to not sit there and just stare at your bitcoin on the screen and thinking like i'm going to be okay um because this inanimate object on my screen is going to create value on its own and if i just sit here for long enough that it, that it will. It's that, you know, to be high agency, particularly if you run a business to say, I accept that I have this problem. I've already found Bitcoin for the reason that I've accepted this problem and I shouldn't stop there. I should actually work progressively, if even incrementally or marginally to cut the problem out at its knees one step at a time, one day at a time. And if you're in the position to do so, and generally businesses that are

privately owned, one or two key decision makers, somebody understanding Bitcoin, they're the ones that are in the position to lead, to say, yeah, the rails exist, they're workable. Are they going to get better over time? Are they going to get more, sorry, are they going to get more and more seamless? Is friction increasingly going to be taken out of them? Of course, but they're in a position right now to accept them. And if I don't, if not me, then who? and to take that action and the customers will show up you know if you leverage it so um and then for the rest of the bitcoin is out there accepting that you know just that idea that that you know there's no moral imperative to go out there and spend your bitcoin that's not the message that

i'm carrying it's that while there's no you know you don't need to go spend your bitcoin to for for it to create value if no one does if no one is high agency then yes we got a real we got we have problem and that when you actually go if i think about going and spending you know a small percent of my bitcoin with cole's stake it's like i'm i'm spending like point zero zero zero one percent of my bitcoin and it's like i'm saving everything else and by by having the foresight to say i can't just sit in the house while it burns i actually gotta go solve my problems and i can do that by helping to not only educate people on why this is important but putting them in a position to accept that you know that they can adopt the tools if they want to in a very accessible way

more people that do that than less that we're going to be so um you know each day is a day to take ground and more ground is taken by more business owners saying that they want to um accept bitcoin as payment so since you're uh too much of a gentleman too humble i will give the shill for zap right is the perfect tool to begin accepting these payments particularly because you have both fiat and bitcoin payments in parallel and i like the way i forget who described it to john but we were talking about this at uh over beers a few weeks ago um is like you have this venn diagram of people that accept fiat and people that accept that will accept bitcoin in the future and there's that the circles are beginning to to blend and the small intersection in the middle is

getting bigger and bigger and zap right is the perfect tool to facilitate your business you're accepting a money generally whether it's bitcoin or fiat as those circles converge yeah yeah and i didn't intentionally leave out zap right but i do think you know and again my message is broader than that like there's a lot of great companies building a lot of great tools um you know one thing i didn't mention you know it's like there's a lot of different there's business owners there's consumers there's people building in the in the bitcoin community and and financing and accepting that like hey like this is this is an aspect of bitcoin that's actually critical to its proliferation as money the more we can do to affect and perfect it as money the the more

valuable everything in the bitcoin ecosystem becomes but yeah at zap right um you know it's not just that we accept bitcoin in dollars it's a huge benefit of it it's like we recognize that on-chain payments are just as important as lightning um we have an api where people can manage it's one of the popular use cases of zap right and anybody who has development resources that is in bitcoin being able to manage one api where they can facilitate all their bitcoin and fiat payments is incredibly powerful so anybody that could potentially be interested in our api reach out to me and yeah um you know we support people like local dentists to you know highly technical large businesses so yeah like tftc um yeah exactly we're still as i say we're we're

highly technical big business we have we have camera media mobile media empire media empire well we're going to need to do those save the ranchers let the ranchers save the world you know focus on our you know things that we control can control in our media environment and one by one we're gonna win peace and love freaks Thank you.