TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #608: The Digit Addiction Pandemic with Ivan Makedonski

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Marty sits down with Ivan Makedonski to discuss his article "The Digit Addiction Pandemic". Ivan's Article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-digit-addiction-pandemicMisty Breez: https://breez.technology/misty/Bulgarian Bitcoin Movie: https://geyser.fund/project/bulgarianjourney 0:00 - Intro0:36 - Digit addiction7:28 - Digit lords10:51 - Fold & Coinkite12:23 - Shaking the addicted mind15:39 - Tragedy caused by fiat21:27 - Life as unit of account26:10 - Unchained36:39 - Getting clean from fiat31:28 - Building the bitcoin standard40:57 - Misty Breez55:20 - Speed of adoption57:47 - Go and experience bitcoin1:01:36 - Movie shill Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.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/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Hi, Vin. Welcome to the show.

I love the fishbowl camera lens that you've got going on here. Yeah, like we call ourselves that we're in an echo chamber. Now it appears that I am. Yeah. Thank you very much for the invite. it was i would say a long road to get here at least for me but very very appreciate i am a fan of the show for years now well i'm glad to have you on particularly to talk about the piece that you wrote the digit addiction pandemic see drawing parallels to substance abuse and our our addiction

to digits in the digital world and i think maybe that's a good jumping off point is what what inspired you to draw these parallels between substance addiction in our relationship with digital digits and in the modern digital world yeah i would say that the first main idea was i was struggling how to finally separate the altcoins and tokens and all sorts of stuff from Bitcoin but when you write a piece you are thinking how do I structure it in a whole cohesive timeline sentence narrative stuff like that and I would say out of all of my articles that I wrote that thing came to me to unite all my thoughts into this addictions to some abstraction or disconnected from reality

thing, and that's how it became the addiction, and pandemic is just trendy, so that's why I used it. But yeah, that was the initial thought, how do I separate Bitcoin from everything else as a thought, but through this narrative of addiction, I make comparisons between all sorts of stocks bonds tokens in games views in social media with the addictions of chemicals or anything else that we could get ourselves addicted to yeah so i guess let's really dive into it like defining digit addiction how it manifests and the negative externalities that emanate from our addiction to these digits in our in our modern age yeah uh okay so the

the main idea about digits i do believe that digits were fundamental for our society because to invent uh zero was a big deal to invent from one to nine the arabic numbers were awesome stuff but when you use those abstractional digits to connect them to reality that is extremely useful and that is numbers for temperature numbers for length numbers for time all sorts of stuff but when you connect all those abstractional stuff to things that are disconnected to reality like fiat currency or all sorts of derivatives out of that, that is where the problems occur. But now our society that is used to numbers going up in houses, in bonds, in all sorts

of stuff, even though in nominal value it increases but in purchasing power it decreases, we get addicted to that thing. We need it to go up because if it goes down, we crash and the whole system crashes and we don't want that but if you play that over more than a century this is where we end up and now we are just so addicted to those numbers that we need them to go up that that that is for me the parallel that that is now the addiction and we're so fearful of that those numbers going down that we're not willing to sacrifice anything else yeah it's almost a how am i trying it's it's subversive because

while it's very clear that this addiction does exist and it is pervasive it's not well understood by the people that are addicted to it they don't they don't understand why their monkey brains are saying i need this number to go up uh if it doesn't my life is worse off and this really gets to the core of the problem which is the fiat currency and i really like how matthew mazingtious from porkopolis economics defines fiat currency it's this wickens wickenstein's ruler where the sort of measurement is always changing and so you need larger sort of base uh base units to to attain the same purchasing power in the real world and i think that's something that bitcoiners have been trying to do for for

some time but i really like the way in which you draw the parallels and define it as this digit addiction um in this structure of the fiat monetary system really fosters this addiction Yeah, and even you are using that imagine the ruler is changing all the time. But if you apply the same thinking, imagine the temperature that we measure stuff. It's always changing. It's the exact same manipulation or weight. Imagine that you get up on the scale, the weight is completely different than the day before, the year before, and stuff like that. It will be chaos.

All those things are extremely valuable. But now, for the first time ever, somebody figured out that the exact same connection to reality can be applied to value in the form of Bitcoin. And now, this is the base of measuring value. uh the only thing that why we are not completely there is that we're not all using it so the network effect is not eight billion people it's still in a few million i would say yeah and again it goes back to this misunderstanding of what what money is and why you go out and try to accumulate it and hopefully accumulate more so that you can maintain your quality of life in a in a world of perpetual fiat debasement and that debasement is controlled by what you define as

like digit lord so let's get into digit lords who are what they are and how they force us into this life of addiction yeah uh well when you design that system uh why i love that narrative is that Now I can separate from this thing that Jeff Booth, big fan, that he says it's not they, it's we. But I disagree with him that in the fiat system, there is a they. And the they are the people that are manipulating and distributing those numbers. Anybody that can create digits out of nothing and put it in one computer and buy stuff with it, That, for me, is the digit lord. I talk about in the different industries that in fiat currencies, that's the obvious thing. But then, if you go to stocks, to bonds, what is a bond? A bond is something that should represent money, but it makes it more appealing that we are going to give you a yield.

If you go to money itself, you don't need a yield. Money should be money. It shouldn't be something that multiplies itself because somebody said so. Those are, for me, the digit lords and how it fits with the narrative of addictions. They are manipulating all of our lives through the digits, and they give some authority to digit distributors, the brokers, the bond dealers, or I don't know, every industry has its own digit dealers, and they turn us into addicts. One last thing that I'm adding to this equation is that every single one of those things has some benefit because if it had no benefit, they were not going to addict us to it. But if you get addicted to that particular benefit, and let's say for fiat currency,

the easiness of use of the dollar globally, now if you try to drop it, it's so incredibly hard so that means yeah you got addicted to that benefits and it's also fits why orange billing is so hard because people that are used to the Fiat systems and getting addicted to convenience or any type of benefit they're used to it's so hard to let it go and get on a completely different standards and we all cooperate. The most beautiful thing that I see in Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is not asking. So either you understand and choose it, or you suffer the consequences of not understanding and not use it. Listen, Vreaks, I know you're tired of me talking about Fold,

but I'm going to beat the drum. I'm going to beat the dead horse. If you're a Bitcoiner living in the United States and you're not using Fold, I'm just going to ask one question. What are you doing you're leaving sats on the table they've got gift cards they've got their debit card you can use your credit card just connect your credit card to the fold app use the fold out to pay off your credit card and you're going to stack your credit card points and bitcoin as well they even teamed up with crowd health to give their members fold plus membership at no cost don't leave sats on the table go sign up for fold today go to tftc.io slash fold there's nothing to lose except sats that you could have stacked so freaks this rip of tftc was brought to you by our good friends

at coin kite they make the cold card queue my favorite hardware wallet the most secure hardware wallet on the market as you can see it's got the blackberry form factor full keyboard it's got two secure enclaves you create your private public keys offline the device never has to go online never does go online so you keep your bitcoin secure if you have your bitcoin on exchanges and you're looking to get it off secure it in the best way possible pick up a cold card queue go to coin kite.com find the cold card queue use the code tftc for five percent off if you're a power user of bitcoin like i am if you're running a business on a bitcoin standard if you're just a bitcoin or wants to secure your bitcoin get the most secure hardware wallet on the market go get

the cold card queue it's a beautiful thing yeah i guess that gets to the question that how like addicts have a problem right they never want to admit they're addicted to something i'm not sure if you're aware of a show that was famous here in the united states many years ago called intervention but it was essentially a family or group of friends would get together and try to intervene with an individual in their lives who was addicted to something and that was one of the running themes of the show is the the um the common occurrence of the addict basically having this aggressive reaction to the intervention itself saying i'm not an addict i don't need help i'm fine i'm going to get through this by myself and

i don't need to change it's not that bad and i i guess how how do you go through this detox and this intervention process with individuals who are stuck in fiat land how do you how do you shake them and say hey you you have a pretty massive detrimental addiction that is that is not good for your quality of life like you need to get off the sauce how do we incite that detox process uh i would say for every person is different but that detoxification happens outside of the comfort zone. That's why all of us resist. I'm not immune to it. I'm used to the things that are convenient to me. Just because I understand some part of Bitcoin doesn't mean that I'm not addicted to other stuff. It always happens outside of the comfort zone. If you're

forced out of your comfort zone, there is big resistance. But I'm also a fan of Wim Hof, the Iceman, if you're familiar, that he recognized that if you go into the cold, but if you're willing, you know that there will be pain, that there will be resistance. Something completely changes in our minds of how you perceive that exact same experience.

That is where our brains, our bodies, everything grows. But if we are forced, there's a lot of resistance and you want to go back. You want to get away from the pain. But if you're willingly going outside of the comfort zone, that's where the most expansion happens mentally and physically. And Bitcoin has both. I would say my experience was definitely a mix of two. I had an enormous pain in the fiat system, and when I connected Bitcoin to the potential saver for my pain, that's why I became a believer very fast. But going back to your question, I can say those are the two choices, and we're going there in my view anyway, but it depends how people get there.

majority will be out of pain yeah well let's pull on that thread of your experience feeling pain in the fiat world and recognizing bitcoin as a potential solution how how did that manifest okay uh a little bit of context so the first time that i heard about bitcoin was 2013 but I was busy in my life and what I was busy with is that in 2008 when the financial crisis happened, my mother was a pretty successful lady in Bulgaria and in 2013 she said I want a divorce with my father. It was too big of problems happened. The financial stuff was things that were putting fuel to the fire, I would say.

And in early 2014, my father decided to kidnap and kill her. And that was my pain, that for seven years I was dealing in the fiat system with inheritance problems with all sorts of stuff yeah with lawyers with relatives with my smaller sister I had to deal with the problems nobody asked me life is like that deal with it and when I finally decided to study Bitcoin in 20 December 2021 and I connected that if all the assets of my mother were in Bitcoin, then they were going to die with her. Maybe my father was going to think about if he really wants to kill her or not.

And I would say then I have regrets that I didn't study in 2013. I don't know what would have happened then, but that was my biggest, biggest pain. that's why i say it's a mix of the two holy crap i am terribly sorry to hear that that's insane and it does uh i mean in my own life i don't have anything that pales in comparison to what you through what you went through but i do recognize sort of similar themes with my dad's career growing up like we we felt the the impacts of all the financial bubbles that that happened throughout my life and his career pretty acutely my family he was in the asset management space um he raised money for funds

um and 2001 the family moved down or in 2000 we moved down to south carolina so you could take over the south southeast territory here in the united states but the dot-com bubble burst essentially what right when we moved down here and when we moved down to south carolina within a year of moving to south carolina he got laid off because of that he built back um he built back his career of the course of the next seven years in 2008 happened um that knocked him off his trajectory as well and then uh all throughout both those financial crises like that that created an immense amount of stress for a family and that's something that i've sort of honed on honed in on and i think made me very receptive to bitcoin when i found it was

recognizing that this way in which the fiat world operates was sort of uh fundamental to the stress that that our family felt financially directly and again i'm so sorry to hear what happened to your mother and the stress that was brought on your family um because of this stuff too which pales in comparison to it but we had to deal with but that's insane Thank you for the condolences, but why I put my face out there and why I became such a strong believer? Because again, I was an idiot that I was ignoring Bitcoin in 2017, in 2018. I have other problems, this and that, and I finally capitulated because my soulmate

was chasing me for more than a year to study about ethereum and my final straw was a close friend returned the money that he owed me and i asked me from where do you have the money and he said oh in crypto everything is great in 2021 and i intentionally started to study uh this and to prove that this is and in the process of that i found out about bitcoin like i couldn't find a hole in Bitcoin. I'm not a developer. I am a physical engineer. I was studying civil engineering, so I have that type of logical thinking. But my main point is, going back to the beginning of the conversation, I was still an idiot. I had to connect it to a big pain of mine that this was the solution. And now I am thinking, how can I fully transition into a Bitcoin standard?

because i'm never going back like nobody can convince me out of the thinking that oh fiat is better at this point like no fucking way yeah and i think i've reached a similar point in my life as well i think it's pretty safe to say that if anybody's been listening to the show long enough and bringing this back to like the wim hof mindset it is a pretty hard thing to do to make the switch to like a full bitcoin standard on your personal balance sheet especially if you have a family i've got two kids another on the way been married for for many years and making that jump not only as an individual but once you get other individuals that you're responsible for um sort of dependent on this as well uh the the stakes

increased significantly so i think that wim hof framing of you know there's going to be some pain but you got to do it anyway and just change your mindset is very important and on that thought like what are some things mentally that you think people thinking about bitcoin should visualize in terms of the pain they're probably going to endure that they should expect and just have the intestinal fortitude to stomach it well while they're going through it well okay there are two questions for me here not just one one is what to focus on and what's to ignore like to avoid the pain is really well what are your visions for your personal life I always say to everybody that make a list of everything

that you want to achieve in your life everything that you want to buy in your life and that becomes your priority if you don't start with the life you can't detach from the number going up in fear the perception of number going up in field because even if you measure Bitcoin with fear you still are not measuring the right stuff you're using the old system but for me if you make that list what you want to accomplish and you start measuring that with Bitcoin that is the ultimate goal for me because you can say oh my life now costs let's say 50 Bitcoin for the next 50 years or for my family or whatever in

four years it will be let's say 10 Bitcoin then it will be half a Bitcoin and it will decrease that is the proper measurement for me but if you're measuring anything with fiat that means that you're not detached and that is what to focus on but how to deal with the to stomach the pains out of okay let's not take too much pain in the bear market first of all why do you feel pain uh like again you're measuring not in the proper ruler but uh also you're not structuring your life uh the way that you want it to be uh we are always going to have troubles pains whether we are on a bitcoin standard or not uh but uh if you want to get into the Bitcoin economy, my life becomes richer in the bear market.

I connect to such high-quality people, my network increases with the people that I communicate, we build together, we experience that promise of freedom from Bitcoin when I communicate with those people. When Bitcoin goes down, it really doesn't affect me as much because I don't see it as an investment. I see it that this is money and the money is not meant to be store of value only. It is about those three things finally coming back to one thing because when fiat money happened, they separated the two functions of gold and that's where the problems of gold began, but now it's uniting and those functions are even better than anything before.

It really, for me, you should use your life measured in Bitcoin. If you use any type of fiat digit, that means you're not detached, at least mentally. And if you make that shift, all the rest of the things are so much easier to deal with. At least in my experience, I can't promise for everybody. Our good friends, Parker Lewis and Dhruv Bansal, are two of the deepest thinkers in Bitcoin. While they come from very different backgrounds, they've landed on the exact same conclusion. It's Bitcoin that matters, not crypto. This masterclass lays out why 21 million is the key breakthrough,

how Bitcoin, not blockchain, creates decentralization, and why everything else will be built on Bitcoin. Understand why Bitcoin works and why nothing else does. Watch the premiere at unchained.com slash TFTC. that's unchained.com slash tftc now it is really important because right you don't want to bring the digit addiction to your life under a bitcoin center you have to reframe and use sats as your unit of account and think about right pricing everything in sats mentally to basically look at what i have what i'm spending and am i happy with what i'm spending or is my the number of

sats that i that i possess and that i own going up ultimately over time and if it is it means that i'm spending wisely and producing more than than i than i spend on a month-to-month day-to-day basis and it's funny you mentioned the bear markets and the strength of the network of individuals that hang around in the bear markets because if you're there when the price is down 80 percent and you are working on making sure that bitcoin succeeds you probably are ideologically and philosophically aligned and while we're talking on this particular topic of uh digit addiction it's like analogous to alcoholics anonymous networks when when the bear market comes you have that that network of people who are detoxing their life from the digit addiction and getting

on a bitcoin standard that are there as a support group to let you know you're not crazy there there is a there there uh their signal here and this is worth um sticking out of air market and building through it uh i will add a little bit of nuance i agree with everything but you said to use bitcoin as the unit of account i'm saying even a step further use your life as the unit of account and then measure the bitcoin in that because we all have one life yeah but Everybody uses and wants to achieve different things because I had Bitcoiners that say, oh, get one Bitcoin or whatever. Like, no, start with what, I'm sorry, what do you want in your life?

Because if everything that you want in your life, let's say, is 50 Bitcoin, you don't need to get to one. You need to get to 50 if you want to have it now. But somebody in Africa, maybe he needs 0.01 to have the life that he wants. So that's why, like, use the unit of account of the life that you want. That is the little nuance that I wanted to add. And to go back to the, how do they call when alcohol is slip up? There was an English term.

Yes, the relapse. And if you, let's say, relapse and start measuring Bitcoin in fiat terms, you're going to go to the ETFs, you're going to go to, oh, this one is giving yield, you're going to go to everything else, and now you are transferring where you put your energy, your power is taken away, and you're supporting the fiat standard further. So, be careful. So, those are the two comments there. Yeah. And so do you think, I don't need to ask you, I think you're very well in the camp of you got to actually use Bitcoin not only as a savings vehicle,

particularly in the form of an ETF or some wrapped derivative Bitcoin exposure. You need to actually be stacking sats, possessing them, and taking control of your wealth to truly detox from this digit addiction uh yeah like if you want to completely detox yes i do recognize that there will be a transitional period like uh right now all of the debt is insolvable and if it collapses it collapses to nothing but if you back it with bitcoin that one at least it gives a hard stop at some point so so i do see that bitcoin will be used and financialized so it has some bottom because right now the debt has no bottom uh so but i do view it as a transitional period and for me again

personally with my story and where i want to go is that if you're touching anything fiat that means we're not on a bitcoin standard so that is my end goal but even today i can't completely live on the bitcoin standard and the bitcoin infrastructure uh so i'm a little bit of a hypocritical uh in that sense but that doesn't mean that i'm not recognizing uh those two things and where i want to go particularly yeah so this gets into the whole conversation about building the infrastructure that makes the bitcoin standard possible i mean that's a lot of what we do at 1031 is investing in companies in the space building out the infrastructure and we think it's very important and i think there's a very strong case to be made that as this infrastructure gets built

out it actually makes bitcoin more valuable because it's more accessible more intuitive better user experience around interacting with utxos and second layer solutions which is a lot of what your focus at breeze is and you guys have have launched a product recently to really make it as easy as possible for people to to start using bitcoin in an intuitive way in a very user-friendly way out of the box but i think broadly speaking in your view what is meaningful participation in the bitcoin ecosystem look like uh i would say anything like The life that we currently have is built on fiat. So all of that needs to get on Bitcoin.

And it doesn't have to be developing an app. It doesn't have to be writing a script. I always say that the barbers, they build their business on fiat infrastructure. And now they need to develop the barber infrastructure to be on top of the Bitcoin infrastructure. With payments, with the community, with I don't know how the hairstyles will affect this particular thing, but I'm saying the infrastructure is important. And anything, if you're pushing education, yeah, that's a little bit more theoretical, but very important. I wouldn't be here because of people like you and all the Bitcoin podcasts out there. but do even more like do some action like go pay some satsis very easy thing

except Bitcoin for payments that's again even easier based on the writings of Parker Lewis but anything in that sense is good and if you help out to build the network the social network and the usability that is making all of this work better faster stronger like if you just hollow yeah we are the center realizing the ownership but we're not promoting the again the Bitcoin standards like we are using the field standards but backed it up on Bitcoin save storage or something like yeah we we need to use everything and my latest article was really comparing those two things yeah I know it's a critic to

Michael Saylor but yeah I take the chart of Jesse Myers where people store their value and I think that needs thing needs to collapse people shouldn't store their value in usable things. People should store their value in money. That's it. And all the other things should be utility. But when do we get there? I have no idea. With Breeze, I am incredibly lucky that they chose me, probably because of the passion I exert in the interview, and I would say that I'm the biggest cheerleader for Breeze because it really aligns with my mission, and they're pushing this, I would say, hard. And we still learn in the company that user experience in so many cases is the most important thing.

Tech, yeah, it's important to work, but for people, they care about user experience. and on that note do you think this is something that broader crypto has gotten better than bitcoin to date i have no idea because that's a big uh that's been a big trope for some time and i've been skeptical of it is this idea that there's a ton of attention in crypto and it's because they've created environments that are conducive for developers to build really impressive uis and user experiences using javascript libraries that make it intuitive like bitcoin is too clunky and i just find that hard to believe um i don't have any idea either because despite the fact that

i critique it a lot i've not uh i have not played around with a lot of those tools because i think they're built on unsound foundations yeah uh i agree with that and uh good that you picked up on the having no idea yet they're building tech but for me one of the best things that I really care about these things like a bit seem up like that for me is an indicator of the economy but all the other stuff they don't have a bit seem up and merchants and stuff like that making it into the daily lives of people they are trying to pump some people the bags they are saying oh this is a cool take or whatever and eventually they will lose like uh either slowly or suddenly it

doesn't matter but uh for me bitcoin becomes part of people's lives and crypto for uh is becoming part of speculators and stuff like that yeah you can speculate uh i tried to when i was doing the the research, I intentionally went into some shitcoins just to confirm for myself and it was horrible. People don't know what they're building actually, at least what I've researched. So I doubt that they'll do anything really, really meaningful. They might do some cool game or anything that let's say a million people uses it, but Bitcoin will be everywhere i agree and i think that's one thing that has annoyed me as people have been

trotting out that narrative like there's a lot to learn from crypto we should be applying some of it it's like i really don't think we should be um porting over degenerate bag dumping technology uh onto the bitcoin landscape particularly when you consider the for philosophical underpinnings of bitcoin which is low time preference save money do not go and seek yield just simply store your money your wealth and better money you'll be rewarded in the long run which brings me to the point that there's still a ton of low-hanging fruit in my mind as it pertains to positioning bitcoin and highlighting the better user experience that already exists in terms of just like pure peer-to-peer transaction

broadcasting and receiving of of bitcoin outside of any centralized mechanism whether that be swift wiring system fed wire whatever it may be um and then on top of that like lightning that definitely has its pain points but still even with those pain points it's significantly better technology compared to the fiat rails i'm thinking of podcasting 2.0 uh in oster specifically just being able to people are going to listen to this podcast and stream us sats many of them from breeze wallets um that that they've set up and it's coming straight to my lightning node that i run here at tftc and then noster obviously with the explosion of that peer-to-peer communications protocol and embedding the lightning network and now e-cash into that protocol like people are

basically helping others monetize content that they deem is valuable using bitcoin and the user experience is literally click a button and you send stats from your wallet to somebody else's immediately it's pretty good and i think we should highlight and foster that that superior user experience again there's certainly pain points that can be designed around and made better but i think we should do more of celebrating the incredible nature of bitcoin as it stands today yeah yeah like we have so much work to do like just because we are early uh doesn't mean that uh it's going to happen by itself um the thing that i started seeing recently provoked by a close friend is that things don't happen by themselves people make things happen so be part

of the people that make things happen like we're not going to get there by just calling that that will bring nothing like that will get us to digital capture 2.0 so fast like yeah but if we actually use it I can talk until my face is blue to tell you all how easy it is to use lightning or Bitcoin and stuff like that and anybody can construct an argument against it like that happens we know with some gold trolls that they are doing this but if right now if you give me a QR code I can directly send you from Bulgaria to US, like in seconds. And I don't have to explain anything, people experience it, but they'll see this on the screen. But if you give this thing in

their personal lives as experience, they personally experience it. Their chemicals in the body change because of it. And it solves a problem that they're facing, now you get them and it's not going to happen just all theoretically let me explain you this and this and people like you are doing this now for decades we're not the majority Bitcoiners is just hard but and things like Sri Lanka two years ago and Lebanon when their fiat economy collapsed people maybe heard of Bitcoin but they didn't experience the thing that was going to save them people that were before and after and they experienced I believe

those are the real true hardcore Bitcoiners like me coming out of enormous pain they will never go back and that's the thing that I'm very grateful for everybody that did this and that's why I loved and I quoted you in the article that we will win uh i know that we will win because there are people that are never going back not only that uh are never going back but the fiat babies are declining and bitcoin babies are increasing so we will win the adoption game in the second and third generations so i'm very very hopeful i am as well and that comments on experience really

piqued my interest do you think when it comes again going back to this whole concept of detoxing yourself from the digit addiction and coming to a Bitcoin standard do you think

experience will lead to some of that recognition of the need to detox or do you think people will have to come to that recognition first and then have the experience like other products that can be built that create an experience that has a light bulb go off and is that it does that create a a better top of funnel sort of mechanism to get people into bitcoin or is it a personal recognition that needs to happen first and then you experience

it and that experience confirms like okay there's something here uh it's kind of tricky i don't know what is the solution really. But because, especially in Breeze, we know the pain of lightning a lot and that whole concept of opening and closing channels is a bad thing for the lightning experience. If a person experiences lightning through some type of lightning pain or somebody close my channel or this or that, you'll give them a negative experience and they'll confirm what they already believe. The experience doesn't mean that we build it, but it needs to be good, that it needs to solve people's pains, not create new ones.

That is the comment. The thing that I love about the experience is that it's undeniable. Like I said, if we talk theory, anybody can construct an argument against theory, to be a denier or anything, but if you show and people especially can touch, even though abstraction or digits are coming to them, if they truly experience, they cannot deny it. Okay, let's say they cannot, but some people will find a way to deny it. That is what I love, that if you solve their problem, now they have to justify why they are not using this better way that's what i love because it reverses the argument now we don't have

to defend bitcoin if you give them that solution of the problem and experience they have to justify why they are not using bitcoin so that's what i love yeah well let's dive into misty and what you guys have been working on a breeze to make this experience particularly with the lightning network more seamless so that people don't run into those pain points and i think uh this is something this design architecture of these bitcoin wallets has become more popular in recent years by combining multiple second layer solutions to make the experience around lightning specifically Yeah. I would start by saying, Roy is my mentor here, and I'll build on the article that he wrote I would say six months ago, that Lightning is the common language, that Lightning is

not just this thing that will solve magically everything, but Lightning, we do view it that it plays a very strategical part of the whole ecosystem that that will be the connective tissue the glue that connects all the other networks and Misti particularly is built with the liquid network so and we provide a lightning interface for people using it and from for us lightning will be this that But whether it's third layer, some custodial thing, whether it's ARC, whether it's some other protocols coming into play, at this point they need to use Lightning so they operate more freely.

And that is what Lightning will do. And we are trying to push Lightning itself, so we are building those type of solutions to connect to those subnetworks themselves. But even when I hear, Roy, when they started before my time, before me joining the company, that they were building some cool tech. They were innovators. They were the first people that said the term lightning service

provider and stuff like that. He said, even when we built it and it was working great, nobody cared. But in the Breeze wallet, when they put a podcasting player, the usage increased 10x, an order of magnitude more. When they put in a POS system, again, and it's this thing that he also says, we don't need more lightning apps.

We need apps with lightning. So it needs to integrate that experience into our day-to-day lives. So those are kind of the focus and how we built in Breeze, but I am, as I've said, the biggest cheerleader. So if you want to talk tech and strategy, I can connect you to Roy and he's the real big voice about those kinds of things.

Yeah, I definitely need to have Roy on. I can't believe it's been eight years of the show almost and I haven't had Roy on, but I think that's exactly the right framing in two parts there. Lightning as this common language, this connective tissue between these interoperable protocols, whether it's ARK, Liquid, these Chomi and Mintz that are becoming more popular, Cashew, and Fetiment protocols.

That's the way forward, particularly for scaling and sort of extendability of how you use Bitcoin, whether that be more privately cheaper quicker um is you can use lightning directly or use lightning as this common language this connected tissue to interop with all these other protocols that are being built on top of bitcoin and i think that product market fit of bitcoin or excuse me lightning as this connected tissue is is being validated in real time via products like misty um the lightning gateways that chompy mints are using to make it interoperable as people are paying lightning invoices you just make these experience such that you point pay an invoice

and the end user has no idea that that bitcoin's coming from liquid through a gateway to lightning from a chompy and mint through a gateway to lightning it just works and we're beginning to see arc uh take hold as well and both the teams building on those protocols with arc uh labs and and second coming to market like it seems like things are really beginning to accelerate there in terms of people recognizing of how to design and build on these interoperable protocols which is incredibly exciting to see but to the second point of roy like we don't need more lightning apps we need lightning in more applications and i think that is just abundantly clear and like a simple application like here for tftc both sending and receiving invoicing invoices using zap right

like we send invoices out to advertisers and they have the ability to pay bitcoin on chain lightning and they can pay via fiat but that's an example of like an invoicing application that makes it easier for us to run on bitcoin standard similarly like we receive invoices and we have the option to pay in fiat bitcoin over lightning or on chain and i find myself paying over lightning more and more because it's simply cheaper we actually save money particularly when factor in the fees that stripe and credit card processors take which a lot of our um a lot of the people that are invoicing us are beginning to put a premium on because they don't want to stomach those fees um so i completely agree with that we just need bitcoin integrated

into more applications and i mean this is very much in line with what we were discussing earlier which is this sort of red herring of bitcoin should be integrating things from broader crypto because they have good ideas over there it's like no not really like and i think a web 3.0 and i think podcasting 2.0 rss and bitcoin over lightning and what we're seeing with noster and zap since you have this open source communications protocol um and the ability to monetize on that protocol using bitcoin or that's via lightning or or chami and vince now and that maybe you can give credit to the 3.0 meme like that was a good idea but it was just implemented terribly uh in broader crypto and uh what web 3.0 really is is just integrating bitcoin into other open source protocols and

applications built on those protocols which we're beginning to see yeah and how i hope that it happens is that in the article again going back to it, the digit addiction pandemic, I do see not only those Bitcoin related networks to connect to it, to Lightning, but Lightning can connect even the fiat digit networks that we will experience the ultimate network effect. Imagine, let's say right now, all the franchise type

of stores, restaurants, anything, uses probably a loyalty digit. That loyalty digit for me is the CBDC in our current days. You can't use it in a competitor. The inflation is higher than the real inflation because those stores also experience inflation, the fiat inflation, so they need to put double inflation on that so they can play the exact same game, but in their own terms. They say all sorts of controls on those loyalty digits, but right now, what if they do exactly like one of your sponsors' fault? They replace that loyalty digit with SAT or MLSAT, and now you completely plug into this network

that you're not debased, and you give this to your users. You can give even smaller things, That is a real valuable economical thing. What now if another fiat network won any type of game that has currency in it? What if you replace that with milisats and now a six-year-old kid can earn sats and be part of the real economy, go create a career, whatever they want from six years old, go buy bread and go buy toys or whatever they want uh getting out of that game and they become again part of that network i i think that we're going there anyway but uh i i want to happen faster but uh that's what i i'm saying that lightning can connect so much more than just bitcoin

directly related stuff yeah i mean on that note of the transition to this bitcoin standard in your mind how do you see it playing out in different scenarios like a suddenly scenario or longer drawn out scenario like what do you think are the conditions um that exists that could lead to either of those those end states a quick steady adoption or a quick sort of rapid adoption or a slower steady control transition adoption phase that is the question that it's for in my mind it's unpredictable like uh i can make arguments for both uh i do think that if the fiat type of infrastructure breaks and now bitcoin becomes more and more dominant it we may get to a suddenly stage. But going back to Lebanon, they had the suddenly thing collapse and they're

not majority Bitcoiners. So you need to be in their face. They need to experience the solution going back to it. Because if you just have pain, it's not enough because you You get to something else that mitigates that pain, but it's not the solution. It will be a mix of both. Maybe some countries will be suddenly, maybe some dictator will buy all the Bitcoin and will collapse their own currency, even though it's hard. Maybe some printer will start buying Bitcoin. I have no idea.

That's the impossible question. I know that fiat degrading is inevitable. Bitcoin getting stronger is also inevitable. So I don't worry about the other stuff. If you focus on the building, you rise with Bitcoin and you can build on top of it. If you don't get into it, you just watch on the sides and you'll be forced to make a decision later on. Don't forsake your descendants. make make the transition quicker rather than delaying it is my advice i think it's worked

out well for me and uh my pro jenny up to this point um but on this like to wrap up with like if you had to give or pull out one key message from from your piece and give one call to action for anybody listening to this what would this be I would say experience Bitcoin with all its limitations, with all its benefits, but experience it and judge for yourself. The thing that we have the biggest beef with crypto is that we say Bitcoin only and shitcoins and stuff like that. Yeah, but we should just out-compete them, not waste time of argumenting against one or the other.

We should simply out-compete them, and we have been for 16 years. But trying to say that other things do not have benefits is kind of pushing people away. They say, oh, we are toxic, stuff like that, because everything has its own benefits. Everything has its own negatives. But if you never experience Bitcoin, you cannot judge. And I do agree completely that if you want to go to a Bitcoin standard, every single individual can do it suddenly. But as a humanity, I don't think it will be suddenly. But I do think I will be able to see it.

So we'll see. Again, it's an impossible question. but going back to it just experience bitcoin with everything and use it where it's valuable for your personal life like that's it you heard it here freaks go experience bitcoin if you haven't already it's pretty fun i can i can tell you from experience it is magical using bitcoin sometimes you take it for granted but uh i like to believe myself like every i do have periods where i take it for granted but there's at least once or twice a week when i'm using bitcoin i'm like holy crap i can't believe i just did this i could pay logan here on a sunday night laying in bed i get an

invoice from him just pay he just got paid immediately after sending me an invoice on a sunday night didn't have to wait for anything to happen is that cool to you logan do you feel a magical experience when that happens i think so i think so well ivan um really appreciate you taking some time to do this thank you for writing your um your piece on digits and our addiction to them i think it's really important to to recognize that they're if you're out there you're newer to bitcoin you're new to the show and you're hearing bitcoin framed as this scarce asset this monetary panacea to the ills of of fiat um that's one way that's probably how most people are hearing bitcoin but i really like this framing of frame

it the other way don't don't focus on the benefits of bitcoin first recognize that you are addicted to digits that are controlled by digit lords that you have no ability to to manage or dictate what they do with these digits that control your life, then once you recognize that Bitcoin's there as a solution, then you should go really try to understand it, experience

it, and recognize that there is a better way. It's already here. Just not evenly distributed. Absolutely. And one of the things I'll share with the freaks a little bit of a shield that that's what we are focusing here in bulgaria that we want to make a movie

that completely ignores the preaching of bitcoin and we're going to record something that to show experiences of it uh with merchants with how people are building here and uh yeah i'm excited about that project because it's my home country but we are trying to do something different with this particular uh bitcoin documentary because i think we are ready to get outside of theory theory if anybody wants to learn about bitcoin it's more than enough out there already you know in 2013 there was almost nothing but now i do want to focus more on outside of theory what is that whether it's culture whether it's payments whether it's anything else but i choose to focus on as i said that experience to show what we're building here in bulgaria yeah well it's a

an example of bitcoiners walking the walk uh we talk a lot about um the corruption of fiat is based on this um fundamentally corrupt and what many would deem to be wrong academic theory of neoliberal keynesian economics debt is money we owe ourselves it's not a problem we can just print baby print um it's a theory that is being played out we're seeing how the application of that theory has negative consequences on our life but as you said there's been a lot of talk on the theory side of bitcoin i think let's walk the walk and just show how people are experiencing and actually use it making sure that invalidating that that theory is being applied appropriately and it actually it actually computes from theory to actual application

yeah and anybody that would like to contribute because i would say every time that i ask the bitcoin community or a bitcoin friends uh they they want to contribute in some form uh i try to some somebody that doubles in altcoins like i don't know like they don't want to share anything like even the humans that are attracted to the incentives are completely different uh but yeah anybody can any bitcoiner wants bitcoin to happen uh for me and that's what i love and i see in austria people zapping for no reason other than oh i can do it but even in geyser where we set up our movie to get some funds there i see all the projects people are raising funds and i love that you don't need to ask your

currency to be converted or anything you can send this ads from anywhere in the world for any reason and you don't have to ask anybody for it yeah i did this last week with no bs bitcoin.com they had their geyser fund up and recognized we've been using them as um fodder for rabbit hole recap topic topics and i had donated to their their efforts in a while and i was like you know what it's time to to give back to the no bs bitcoin team they've been helping us out a lot whether they recognize it or not with rabbit hole recap and i should support them it was a boom point send i'm pretty sure they're not in the united states and so international satch transfer immediately very cheap yeah it's awesome like

uh so very few are still experiencing this type of thing because right now i would say i'm so much less richer than some bitcoin whales or anything because i mean really in bitcoin what i told you is uh in 2022 but my life is so much richer because of the people that i'm surrounded now by the things that we are excited to build uh so for me uh again bitcoin is not the highest priority uh and when i became a father uh it dropped down even further so yeah ain't that the truth ain't that the truth let's do it for the kids ivan we're gonna win because of people like you thank you for doing what you do um we will link to everything in the show notes from your articles to um misty from breeze and you said do you have a geyser for the documentary

yeah yeah it's called build on bitcoin the bulgarian journey yeah so yeah we are i uh as i said we set up that and we use it as a website because money works there we don't have another website because money doesn't hell yeah all right ivan you go enjoy the rest of your night and uh hopefully we do this again at some point in the future yeah maybe after the movie well thank you very much for having me peace and love freaks freaks thank you for listening to the show i hope you liked it if you did like it please make sure you subscribe rate review the show it helps us out a lot and also if you like these conversations i've come to realize that many people listen to the podcast they don't know we have another sort of layer of this media company

we have the newsletter the bitcoin brief go to tftc.io make sure you subscribe there a lot of the topics that are discussed on this podcast i write about five days a week in the newsletter we also have the tftc elite tier if you sign up for that become a member we have a private discord server for the elite freaks out there where we're dropping ad-free versions of this show and having discussions about everything we talk about a day early logan wanted me to make sure if you want to get the show a day early become a tftc elite member you will get that we have our discord server right now it's conversation between myself and tftc elite tier members but we're going to expand that we'll probably do closed q and a's with people in the industry

i may be doing macro mondays so join us go to tftc.io subscribe find the button in the top right corner of the website become a tftc elite member thank you for joining us Thank you.