TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #649: The Golden Age of AI-Powered Entrepreneurship with Rod Roudi

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

Marty sits down with Rod Roudi to discuss the unprecedented opportunities for entrepreneurs in the current AI-powered landscape, the convergence of Bitcoin, AI, and energy technologies, and how Bitcoin Park is creating unique experiences while maintaining the cypherpunk ethos amid the "paper Bitcoin summer" trend. Rod on Twitter: https://x.com/bitkite Imagine If: https://bitcoinpark.com/imagineif Bitcoin Park Nashville: https://www.meetup.com/bitcoinpark/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: 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/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ 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 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 recording on august 5th freaks the man the myth the legend himself rod rudy you're so kind here to talk uh i mean we're just talking about entrepreneurship it's fun

it's fun being an entrepreneur you're getting dms dude it is the best time to be alive to start especially the u.s just to start a side hustle or a business i know we've like touched on it and we riffed on it for like the last two or three episodes we've done but dude just the tooling i i know this is the podcast where you ask me questions i don't want to ask you a couple questions like that op uh opportunity cost uh app that you created like how did you even i mean we we alluded to it i think on the last pod but the fact that again i'll put myself on the left side of the bell curve a guy like me can just spin up a quick hustle or a quick uh side business like no problem is unbelievable like this opportunity cost i'm curious like how that even came to fruition

it all it all happened at the the magic of bitcoin park austin you know you had uh justin and anthony running their their ai meetup uh in the spring they were they were doing that it a weekly clip so i went to a couple of those and i've always had this idea tftc obviously media company we've been around for eight years and the monetization model is ad driven which is great i love our ad partners and it's a good business but it is a bit cyclical particularly in the bitcoin industry where ad dollars dry up when the bitcoin price goes down And so I've always in the back of my mind over the last five years, specifically, I think during COVID, trying to think of how to diversify revenue streams here. And I like to view TFTC as this holding co.

We actually do like our corporate entity name is TFTC.io Holdings Inc. And so we have the media and I've always wanted to sort of branch out into product development oriented around Bitcoin. And I'm a big believer in the best products are ones that you create because you're scratching your own itch. And one of my itches is like how much Bitcoin am I leaving on the table by sort of spending, I want to say egregiously, but not being conscious of the spending on a day-to-day basis. And to be able to do that, I think you need to be able to price things in Bitcoin. so that was what i settled on the initial mvp was a mobile app where i would take a picture of something like my laptop and then it would spit back the price of bitcoin it was hard-coded but it worked as like a prototype and mvp and then i showed it to people at the

i demoed it at bitcoin park austin one of the ai meetups there where we had a vibe code sort of demos and i demoed that and i showed it to a couple other people and talked to a good buddy i trust actually in the nashville area who has built a bunch of products and was telling him about the ideas like dude an extension like this this would like scale on the internet and i was like that's a great idea so i spent three hours on a saturday just uh having a conversation with chat gbt to spec out the app told it what i wanted to do which is basically hey looking great to create a browser extension for chrome and firefox that converts any fiat price to bitcoin i want it to be open source i want it to be as private as possible i'm not trying

to collect anybody's data and after a couple hours with chat gbt i was like all right here's what the product's gonna look like and then i was like all right put on your product manager hat and create like a roadmap and spec for me and it did that and i said okay i'm gonna use replit to build this hell you uh give me the prompts that i should feed replis agents to to actually build this and that's essentially what i did and then about an hour of iteration on replit using their agentic framework uh had a working extension where i could siloed it into chrome and firefox and it wasn't perfect but it worked and that was really cool and then at that point for me as somebody who's not a developer uh i had a piece of software in my hands that was running in my

browsers that i could hand off to a seasoned developer who actually understood how to get it to the to the across the finish line and basically was able to hand him the zip files of the side loaded extensions and was like do you see what we're doing here he's like yes i know exactly how to clean this up and make it what you want it to do and that's that's where it led and it's been cool we're actually working on a mobile app now getting back to the original vision um but it's been fun you know you touched on a couple things just the ad spend drying up i think traditional models in general are um there it's the future is going to just be different right and uh i think there's going to be a lot of these type of apps and i don't know what the

monetization model is but there's going to be other ways for other brands to get their message or product in front of the right people one area that's really interesting and i mean i hope we can help create this category but it's more on the community driven uh spend and marketing spend so it's like a lot of brands you know kudos to block you know supporting uh creating spiral and supporting open or jack supporting open sats and you got other brands and companies supporting um opens uh like things like open sats uh brink and others and i feel like this is the next area just to to piggyback on that one thread of where dollars and focus may deplete in this one area but they're going to increase in other areas and uh we're seeing that a little bit here at the park

which is really exciting yeah no that was the crazy thing about this whole experience and still like how cheap it was like i was able to get the mvp handed off to a developer and i've been paying him on a contract basis over the last couple months as he's iterated on the extension started working on the mobile app but it's been we've been able to fund it i don't have to go raise money for this product and the other beauty of it too is i got to your point about new ways of doing things i've always had this idea because we've built up a brand and a viewership base over the last eight years is pretty material and i've been following a lot of people i'm sure you've heard this too but like the the idea that you're gonna like every new

company is gonna need a quote-unquote content creator to get distribution um they're gonna to partner with a content creator to to make sure they can get their product into people's hands and um another way to do that is like if you already have a media business with good distributions to begin launching products i think most famously we've seen that with mr beast with this chocolate and other things that he's that he's launched but obviously we're different we're in a different uh sort of lane than mr beast and so we're focused on bitcoin oriented products um but yeah and i think that's the beauty of it too another benefit of it being so cheap to experiment and to get these things out is that i think you're going to be able to find ways to monetize faster so it's

like the the browser extension that's completely mit open source anybody can fork it do what they want with it access it but i think and people have done that already i've seen in the github but i think because of our distribution our brand um we've we've had the ability to get like a material user base like thousands we have thousands of users already it's going up consistently wow every day and then on top of that so that's like on the business product side we've used ai to build it and get it iterate quickly but then on the marketing side too i'm not sure if you've noticed we've been using google vo3 create these very emotional educational videos about money being debased throughout history and themes around bitcoin and it's the fastest i've started

many x accounts in the past i think we launched the opportunity i i just in may i think i secured the opportunity cost app op cost at op cost app on x i secured the the name but then we didn't start posting until like late june and i think we already have 3 000 followers which is like the fastest of 3 000 but it's leveraging ai tools particularly google mayo 3 and their video capabilities to create like marketing material for very cheap too dude yeah i mean probably just nerd out on all this stuff and i'm cool with that but i couldn't agree more on the workflows i got to give a shout out to jack uh jack lesser who runs operations lead at bitcoin park austin i kind of gave him a little bit of direction and then he just crushed this imagine if website

right and then rob born who's uh leading research education and programming at the park i was like hey man can you experiment on this the veo three or two whatever it's called on creating these uh videos we actually had a partner of ours create the uh uh the original imaginative trailer but the one the custody and treasury summit that we just announced today that was all done through Veo 3. And I'm like, holy smokes. And by the way, the one thing I keep thinking about is this is not the end product, right? This is just the initial platform. It's going to only get exponentially better from here. I saw Elon tweeted out something about Imagine, which is their video rendering thing. And I can't wait to experiment with that. But again, I go back to just that

that one person sitting saturday for a few hours right and they're like i want to create this and then they create a video they or they create the product first and foremost and they're like okay cool this is the product this is the message that i want to get out there and they're able to create 90 on the way there a almost world-class trailer video i like look back on the website that we have uh for imagine f and i'm like you know this would have probably uh it would cost me like or i would have spent like six months of development time i don't know how many ftes i would have spent just to get this level level v1 out and i we did that in less than one day i mean it's just crazy to me

sorry trucks in the background i put it on mute but yeah no it's and i think it's important too for anybody who's thinking about this i mean you mentioned it with jack but like workflow is important and for the opportunity cost stuff we'll have literally two calls two 30 minute calls a week typically late at night the developers on the west coast i'll stay up to like 9 30 and we'll just have like a catch-up call twice a week and particularly for the videos like we have this really cool workflow we'll we'll get together as a group we'll decide on the next sort of video we want to do the next story the next plot line uh and then we'll story board in person on a call and then we'll take those notes and put them in either claude or

chat gbt to basically like all right here's the story we're trying to tell here's all the primary resources with the data that we'd like to sort of get to the audience and we need you to help us like come up with a a plot and a storyline and then it gives us like 20 bullet points like okay here's the storyline and it's like all right let's make a more robust storyboard with an actual script and then we'll go through that and then beyond that it's like okay going back to what i did with opportunity cost going from chat gbt to replit it's like okay google veo 3 really likes um it works best if you describe what you want in a json file um so we need you to render this script down to json and make it portable to google veo 3 and it does that

and the pace at which we're iterating on the we're going to be able to get one out every we think every week or every other week but we want to make we want to play because it's i'm sure you've seen it like there's been an explosion of these bitcoin oriented ai generated videos this summer whether it's paper bitcoin summer or what um fomo 21 what neil and those guys are doing um but we want to find like this emotional like in-depth storytelling niche and lean into that and the pace at which we're able to ship it and the cost to do so is insanely low yeah it's it's the create what did you coin it's like uh at the and i think it was at the park austin uh and jack had sent it to me and i was laughing um i forgot what you you'd coined something around like it's time for

the podcast the idea guy yeah it's uh that's ready to run now the idea guy can actually do stuff Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, no, I mean, shipping with amazing people, like the two areas I go back to and why I think knock on wood, Bitcoin Park over time will be durable and successful is our focus on the member experience and then having a great core team to deliver upon that experience. just those are take whatever business you have whether you're a tire company a freaking custodial services company whatever focus in the people and you can make magic and uh yeah it's there's no better time to be alive right than right now yeah i gotta give a big shout out to ed moses and elijah um at tftc you know i mean it's crazy too moses and elijah i think they're like 19 and 17 oh heck yeah so how did you find them out of curiosity noster i saw moses posting on noster about being available to do react js work and i think i do my research on how to make

opportunity costs like as performant as possible react js was the uh was the recommendation i was like oh i'm actually looking for somebody and sort of opened up a line of communication there and then was off running and then elijah's his brother who happens to be a video producer and so like when we started doing these videos it's like oh you got a brother that does this like let's uh let's go let's pull him into the mix you see that yeah but that's like the note we haven't cracked yet is monetizing and obviously the extension's open source working on the mobile app but that's a lot of the discussions we've been having this summer is like all right let's like keep iterating keep building new stuff and then try to figure out what the audience with the

users sort of like lead us to a product that can be monetized yeah it's been a fun experience yeah i i will say um i think you know your core you have a lot of revenue streams uh with all the work that you're doing and what allows you the freedom uh is to not think you have to like think monetization first you can think cool product first and then downstream it's like oh we can do this or do that um and that adds to the to the experience that's at least you know like thinking about the park it's all about the member experience and we've just been continuing to add to the member experience whereas we could take these shortcuts and like do upsell cross sell and all this other stuff it's like no no how do we add to the existing member experience

new benefits that increases the retention and most importantly them to like shadow from the top of the roots like roofs like you should join our meetup or come experience something at the park and i think that's where guys like you are going to continue to accelerate versus other folks that are just doing quick twitch things and just trying to get some quick twitch money Sup freaks. This rep at TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at CoinKite. They make the cold card queue. My favorite hardware wallet, the most secure hardware wallet on the market.

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for 5% 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 Bitcoiner who 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. So freaks, guess what? We launched a browser extension. It's called Opportunity Cost and it helps you see the true cost of everything in Bitcoin, convert prices to Bitcoin as you browse the web opportunity cost automatically displays fiat prices in bitcoin or sats helping you think in a bitcoin standard it works on amazon zillow x your bank account quickbooks you can convert everything to bitcoin it's really cool it's also 100 open source mit license we don't

collect any data all of the conversions happen in your browser on your local device it's a great way to recalibrate your life and begin thinking in sats go check it out at opportunity cost dot app that's opportunity cost dot app like tftc it's funny because i wear the 1031 cap and obviously we're investing in companies um that need immense amounts of capital to go achieve their goals as they build out critical bitcoin infrastructure um but here i have the luxury to bootstrap all this like the media is and i can use the proceeds the revenue from the media to fund these these one-off experiments but again going back to the point i've had these ideas for many years but i've never felt comfortable to go actually try to execute on them because of the

funnily enough the opportunity costs and the risk that is involved is like only three or four years ago if i were to go build something like this it probably cost me tens of thousands of dollars where yeah i think collectively over the last four months like we've we've invested right around ten thousand dollars but we have a product out there we've got we're putting out marketing material we're growing our user base and we sort of have confirmation and i think before we even got confirmation that there's something here i think we spent like five grand so it's like a five grand investment to get the product out there and like confirm like there's a there there we should yeah we should bleed into this yeah you know i i think

you touched on a couple things like the you know by the way this is maybe a little bit of a tangent but um the crossover i've experienced with 1031 businesses uh has been really interesting when i say crossover is like you guys have a portfolio of i don't know how many companies you've invested maybe 30 or 36 36 companies and uh like one example is uh we just signed up for uh primal studio and uh so and you also touched on workflows like i cannot stress enough you know as a founder the importance of really looking into your workflows you know at first i'd been pushing off uh uh implementing the primal studio because i couldn't see the workflow on the this the small team that we have now it makes a complete sense and it's like perfectly integrated into our

workflow don't judge me but like the the three audiences that like the park is going to be focused on cultivating and curating and building um x noster of course and believe it or not linkedin linkedin is this like terrible beast but people like will engage with you on linkedin and actually read your post because everyone's always looking for a job and so linkedin is that place uh for that i guess um but uh and i was i'm losing my train of thought but then we also just signed up for uh strike business and do you have a strike business account i do or no okay that's like at its infancy right now so we're going back to the workflow side it's like getting those integrated on the workflow we had this one issue with zap right which i believe is also a

1031 portfolio company shout out to parker john and will that we we now use their payment link for our event ticketing which i was also reluctant to actually implement because we had a like a really nice workflow with type form but now it's just so much easier with using the payment link to actually get paid and we integrate it with strike because like they actually support natively lightning inside of zap right and i think they're the only partner on the bitcoin brokerage side or bitcoin bank side that does that and so anyways i don't know why i'm talking about that but it just makes our life easier in terms of building these workflows as a very very small team that and i'll go back to one other point which is around focus dude we can only probably ship like

three or four major things per year and that's like i i've slept pretty well at night in general or i try to the one thing i like sometimes keeps me up at night is like is this the most impactful thing me and the team can be working on like these three or four initiatives right like this imagine if uh experience the custody and treasury summit the research uh products that we're launching like uh this year are these the most impactful uh experiences for the the community i believe them that to be true but we'll see yeah what um what makes you think these things are now switching back to my interview yeah uh seat what makes you think that these are the most impactful things you can be working on this year yeah it's so going back to listening to the members and what they're

kind of like the questions that they're asking and kind of what their focus is on and then doing the crossover of like what i'm personally interested in so that it gives me energy dude this convergence of bitcoin ai energy and freedom tech is unbelievable unbelievable we just spent the first i don't even know like 15 minutes just talking about ai tooling and how it's reshaping our entire lives you know whether it's on the personal side or on the business side okay now we integrate freedom money into this whole equation we are off and running that's why these these guys even building these fiat businesses leveraging ai that don't know bitcoin and they're focused on like web three crypto stuff nope no shade more power to you i think

it's just such a differentiator for us because we're already integrating bitcoin into those workflows and those businesses that will be well ahead of those folks uh in terms of uh business opportunities and such and so and then coming back to the energy side i mean you were i really appreciate your uh participating in the texas energy and mining summit and you know also always participating in the national energy and mining summit dude it all comes back to energy like at the end of the day it is a race to abundant energy and we need as much energy as humanly possible to flourish and so then the last point is like around really cool freedom tech right across all sorts of different areas whether it's on the defense side the health side you name it um it's

really interesting so i think your guys's thesis where you guys are investing in in the freedom tech world is massive i think this is where the puck is going some of these folks and that's where i've been very fortunate and i don't know how but i've been doing the podcast with kathy wood every month the bitcoin brainstorm um and then she actually came up with kind of like was explaining like this whole where the puck is going on the convergence between all these areas and i was like kathy i really want to do a summit of summits and i've been thinking about this like more based ted talk type of version and she's like let's go i'd love to be involved and so that's what we're doing this september and um yeah i couldn't be more excited about it yeah and that's what friday

and saturday was that the 18th and 19th or yeah so september 19th and 20th in nashville and we actually were renting out the fisher center for performing arts so we have this beautiful theater yeah thank you man um and you know so we got kathy we have dr laffer we have uh uh adam back and there's a number of other folks that we're going to be you know uh announcing as speakers we're gonna have a whole 1031 stage uh as well like i imagine you have this beautiful theater with like 10 minute ted style uh presentations that all start kind of with imagine if and you have these really deep fireside chats and some really amazing folks and you know it's not it's one of those things where not only the speakers are amazing but the people in the audience are

just as amazing if not even more amazing than the folks on stage and then really like what the park i think does a really good job of is curating a really dope experience i not to go on a tangent but i've actually been inspired by you a bit and i've been writing more especially with ai but not like the sense of i've always wanted to write a bunch of things and i always have like this apple notes of topics i want to write about and finally with the the help of like some different prompting and so on i can get like a a good 60 of what i want out in terms of the framework i want and then i go in and edit it as i see fit and then i post it like this morning we announced the custody and treasury summit which is september 17th and 18th right before uh imagine if i wrote this post

and they're all called like this is dumb but hear me out and this one this is dumb but hear me out conferences suck like literally every conference i go to is just like kind of soul crushing in a way i'm like in a past life when i was doing it for work it was truly soul crushing because i'm I'm like, man, I have to just be here, do the same rigmarole and so on. And I just feel like every experience is this like rubbery chicken plated, you know, lunch or whatever. And it's just the same vanilla stuff. And so, you know, with the park, you know, we take a lot of pride and responsibility in making it the best Bitcoin and Freedom Tech experience you'll have. and so we're trying to do that now not only with this custody and treasury summit september 17th

and 18th but also imagine if and um yeah i'll get off my shelf soapbox there for a second no it's i think the timing can be more perfect because i think it's becoming very clear particularly here in the u.s that we are in some regards way ahead of where things are going in terms of a lot of the dominant ai companies are here in the united states though there are a lot of open source models beginning to eat into that dominance um but i think it's inarguable we're ahead like what i was describing with chat gbt claude replit google v03 all american products that are truly unleashing productivity that has never existed excuse me but we're also behind in some ways like particularly on the energy side like you said yeah we need to expand our energy

generation and capacity egregiously exponentially exponentially um over the next decade and i think that's the biggest question when i'm excited for imagine if if i i i'm confident i'll be able to make it but there may be some uh yeah some life events that get in the way uh good life events um but like yeah like i'm fascinated to see what everybody's saying around energy and it's funny because we've been focused on energy in the bitcoin space for i think the better part of seven years now when bitcoin mining began to hit industrial scale and we were on an island getting yelled at and laughed at um for wanting to use more energy but now that ai's here uh it's a foregone conclusion yes we need more energy energy is good we need to plug in all these computers and

create this uh this uh robotic brain this globally distributed brain uh and i'm not going to be the the sour puss is like hey like we were doing this we were here first we've been preaching this abundant energy thesis for for many years now and you guys are are here and it's funny that the the uh sort of um the sort of connotation with increased energy production is now positive because silicon valley and big tech is behind it but whatever you're here now like let's actually talk about how we're going to do this because it is a massive problem i think it's unsolved and getting people across these three industries energy ai and bitcoin together could is going to be extremely powerful because i think number one the demand is there the need

is there and when you think of industries with incredible amounts of brain power i can think of like three more where if you get them all together they can probably think of creative solutions to these massive problems totally and this is the thing i i hope it's so much the park we're trying to create durable experiences year over year and what i mean by that is you know if you're not able to make it and i'm really happy for you guys for what's to come um we're planning is to do it the following year but like every unique every year is going to be its own unique experience that you're going to i want to do everything i can to be like man i need to get wherever i am in the world i need to get to nashville during that time so i can experience it like there's really two

areas that i zero in on for the experience one is specific knowledge uh generation and and and that entertains informs and inspires and so how do we get that into the room and then get folks to learn from each uh learn the second is like deep connections that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten and that's where i think that in real life like going back to the austin you know during COVID and you guys were always open for meetups and people were flying in. Same here in Nashville a little afterwards. Deep personal connections in real life still go a massively long way. We're creating so many unique experiences at the park here in Nashville. I got to give a shout out to Andrew Davis. He's absolutely crushing it. We have a park 101. We have a park 102. We

have a lit devs now we have all these things because he's just like pushing it and you're just seeing all these people just show up so i think at this convergence of bitcoin ai energy and now freedom tech i think the future is extremely bright and bringing these folks together to help platform them and there's a lot of amazing uh other uh events that are going on like for example this the all-in summit i'm actually a fan of the pod for the most part and uh they do it like a really great one and i kind of want this to be the the freedom tech version of the all-in summit right it's like super focused on those areas and we don't deviate outside of that yeah what uh what topic are you most looking forward to specifically so there's

a couple things that uh we'll have some that are specific to bitcoin we'll have some that are specific to ai and we'll have some that are specific to energy there's a few things that we're working on right now that cross over and converge on all three that'll be really really interesting um uh one on the defense side one on the energy production side um and and and honestly, entrepreneurship side. Um, so, uh, across those, I'm honestly really excited about, uh, Kathy and Dr. Laffer also, uh, participating together because, you know, Dr. Laffer was Kathy's mentor is still is her mentor today. We actually recorded a pod, um, last Thursday. I want to say it was me, Dr. Laffer, uh, Lorenzo on Kathy's team and, um, Kathy and Paolo from

Tether. And it was fascinating to see how curious Dr. Laffer was just going in and digging in deep into Apollo's business background, monetary history, all that. And so Rob Warren on the team, on the Bitcoin Park team has been working with each of the kind of the speakers and kind of guiding them and helping them prepare for this. So tracking to be really, really special there. Over 10,000 investors downloaded the original How to Position for the Bitcoin boom when Bitcoin was just $27K and it called for $120K plus. That target's now hit. So what's next?

Tur Demeester is back with the 2025 edition, refreshed for the mid-cycle moment, packed with new data, new insights, and Tur's latest price outlook. Plus, you'll get exclusive access to Charting Our Way Through Chaos, Tur's new 30-minute Q3 2025 presentation explaining why this bull run might be only just beginning and what forces could push it to the next level read the first ever mid-cycle report from adamant research at unchained.com slash tftc that's unchained.com slash tftc and also if you're using unchained you can use the code tftc for 50 off any of their services go check it out what are your what are your thoughts about the people out there who are looking at paper bitcoin summer and saying that

bitcoin is losing its cypherpunk roots and the ethos that got it here on any credence in that you know um i do have a lot of thoughts actually on that and honestly i was a somewhat reluctant to launch the custody and treasury summit we had planned this at the beginning of the year to to launch it and we were planning to do it right before imagine if which we did we just announced this today uh because it seems like the narrative is just around this let's use all leverage possible to buy bitcoin and it's like what are we back in 2017 2018 around the crypto stuff and it's like do whatever it takes to buy as much crypto as possible only there's only one way this thing goes and it's up i'm like how many times have you and i experienced

and you more than me because you've been in bitcoin way longer than me an 80 percent drawdown it's probably going to happen again in our lifetime like probably and so for folks in general and this is a bit of a like a tangent riff like just be disciplined and happy creativity loves constraints and be happy there's there's beauty in enough meaning figure out what you love to do with your family your personal life and you know your health and just stay within those areas and you can build a really wealthy and beyond imaginable life and business but when you're talking about like hey i'm a treasury company i'm gonna go issue this and then i'm gonna raise it at this level honestly i'll be honest with you marty it's so over my head so

i'm not as like well versed to explain like talk through it all but anytime again i'm on the left side of the bell curve when you're like okay i'm going to go raise debt at an interest rate because i'm going to buy bitcoin and that number is going to go up you know above this threshold there is this like domino effect that can happen on the way up to whatever price you want to like make up in the world to all the way down to 80 90 drawdown from whatever the price that we have god i don't want that to happen but um that's why i think on the treasury side as it relates the custody and treasury summit we got uh folks that are uh small business owners we got family offices uh we got um other folks institutional folks as well that are going to be attending as

well as participating but the focus is on like what are the treasury strategies that we should be implementing like tftc for example i'd be curious to know like your guys's treasury strategy everyone has like a treasure a bitcoin treasury strategy if they're accumulating bitcoin It's like, hey, we accumulate 100% of our Bitcoin, 20% goes into cold storage, 20% goes into collaborative custody, and then 60% is in our full custody with Strike Business because we use that for paying employees, paying vendors, whatever else. I'd be curious to know, that's what I'm curious about at the Custody and Treasury Summit. It's like, what are those strategies and why and how do you implement those? um but i'll i'll say this i think there's a an opportunity to help shape that narrative especially on paper bitcoin summer with a lot of eyeballs on us to say how do you custody your

bitcoin and then just leave the pregnant pause and be like what do you mean i leave it with coinbase what what i don't i don't know what you're talking about and it's like or i have it with a strategy or this stock or whatever and i'm like okay you know that's not your bitcoin and you don't have it until you're actually physically custodying it yourself and so if i can spend maybe a minute that's another area at the park that's why i was so bullish on on bringing rob on the team it's rather than being this boomer and that you know yells about all the problems that are wrong i really want to focus on figuring out solutions where i think is the right solution and we'll figure out if the market believes uh what my solution is is the right one one of which

is at the custody and treasury summit we're going to provide produce a custody report where it breaks down what's the state of bitcoin custody in 2025 from uh and and honestly uh we're in the review process right now but i look at it personally in four pillars there's you know single sig uh custody that's either hot wallet or cold wallet and we can go through that a whole jam then there's a multi-sig there's full-on custodial multi-sig like i think on ramp is more full-on custodial uh multi-sig then there's collaborative custody like unchained and casa and then there's just like you know full-on multi-sig that's self-custodial like caravan and some of these other open source models then you got full custody uh which is like river and strike

um and there's another tier but i'm not even going to bring it up in the custody report which is like this uh marketing rapper on top of a third-party custodian like i wouldn't even recommend that those brokerages to custody your bitcoin because it's like two layers away from you actually holding your own bitcoin and then there's the fourth one which is insured custody which is really in general i'm you know i'm not a whale to be in that world but like what rob hamilton and anchor watch are creating they're creating that category right now in insured custody and i'd be i'd be watching what they're building right now because i don't want this to happen and i hopefully it doesn't happen but if one of these uh etfs or one of these large exchanges

gets like hacked and then they lose a bunch of bitcoin i don't know what the repercussions are But if you have an insured custody product like with Anchor Watch or I think maybe Fidelity is also in the game there as well, there's another insurance level that, no pun intended, that you want to implement. So I really want to go deep into those areas. And I think on September 10th, we're going to send it out to all the attendees so that they have it. And then we're actually going to print it out physically for them so that they can take it. And then a lot of the people and companies cited in that report, maybe if not all of them, are going to be, you know, invited to participate in the custody and treasury summit. So we want to do that year over year so that going back to the experience side, you know, how conferences just suck and it's just soul crushing. I'd rather an organizer be like, hey, we created this specific industry report tailored to payments, tailored to open source, tailored to custody, tailored to global Bitcoin adoption, tailored to energy and mining that we thought you would enjoy since you're attending our summit. And here are the folks that are going to be attending so that you can best prepare on how to leverage the two days you're going to have in Nashville. I'd be blown away if someone did that for me.

And, you know, it would be the price of admission would be negligible for that. Yeah. That's something I think about a lot. And I think actually it's important to bring up, funnily enough, the banking crisis of 2023. Like you want to figure out all this today so you don't have to worry when something does go awry. And your example exchange gets hacked or something like that. but like we saw because of the operation choke point 2.0 like silver gate went down and signature went down the silicon valley bank went down and those were three of the very few banks that would

actually work with companies in the space and so you're playing bank hop potato and then you get to the last bank that ultimately fails in silicon valley bank you're like i i don't know where to send my money like these other banks won't let me set up an account so we saw a lot of companies like just like wire the money to bitcoin trading desk whether it's on chain strike whatever put it in bitcoin and then either put it in multi-sig or just hold it on an exchange and i think that event highlighted like if you had done that before you wouldn't have to worry like that's like when it comes to our strategy with our bitcoin treasury here at tftc very similar to what you described we have a number of exchange accounts we have multi-sig cold deep cold storage we have

other wallets we put and we split it up but um basically i think we're pretty well set up where i can sleep easy at night knowing that the bitcoin is secure because we're doing it the right way and i think that's one of the interesting friction points that exist right now and i think is just a product of trying to teach old dogs new tricks where historically people are very familiar and comfortable with like oh i have a brokerage account i have a bank account i keep it here and i think we're still in that sort of messy learning period where people unless you're seeped in the industry like we are don't understand that there's better ways to do these things and to eliminate centralized third party risk uh in an extreme way if you do it the right

way and i'm very happy you're throwing the um the treasury and custody summit because i think that's one area that we still need to get over the hump for particularly for new entrants getting in the bitcoin um totally let's do it the right way make sure that you're taking advantage of the sovereign properties of bitcoin exactly and like i think jack dorsey said it best he was on a podcast i think presidio bitcoin was doing which is if we just look at it as a store of value it will be captured and will be basically neutered and i i couldn't agree more with that we need to show like there's there's so many great things that are being built in the bitcoin space i mean the ux just on nostra alone is unbelievable the the advancements that they're making and then the

ux in just custody i mean dude in 2017 or whatever 2018 we're just like looking at a small screen trying to like verify a freaking bitcoin address it's like what are we at first i was like why am i doing this like what the heck is going on and there's now even companies like phil geiger i think is advising uh one company i wish i knew the name so i can give him a shout out but uh maybe bronta or something um where they do uh verification on the address before sending it because everyone's like bronta okay uh like i always get nervous even sending like 10 000 sats i'm like man okay if i'm getting nervous and i've been doing this for a long time like do other people like fat fingering an extra letter here or whatever but just the a we got the amazing

people that are coming to Bitcoin every single day. B, the product just gets better and better and better because we're built on open source, like straight up. And C, it's the coolest thing we could be working on is all this freedom tech stuff. So I'm cautiously optimistic. That's why I was a little nervous about this whole paper Bitcoin summit and then also including treasury in the name of the summit. But honestly, the emphasis on custody and also tying it into treasury strategies i couldn't think of a better time to help shape that narrative and provide a resource again for folks to continue their continued education in the space yeah and that's one thing um that i think private market company like companies that aren't public yet that are

private if you're cash flowing you're profitable and you're thinking about this uh strategically Like there, there are obviously custody products that exist, but I think in terms of like leveraging the, like if you have a, you're producing a ton of EBITDA, it's a sustainable business that's been around. You want to keep it private. That's one thing I've seen behind the scenes just through the nature of what I've been doing at 1031 is there are private lenders and private financers that understand the Bitcoin play and will begin to offer products and services to let you pull forward some of that cash flow and put it into Bitcoin before it rips. And so, that's the other thing, as it pertains to treasury strategy specifically for companies run by Bitcoiners that are very successful and producing a lot of cash flow. The options are going to be there. where alternatively i've talked to a lot of people who are like i'm trying to get to public markets as quickly as possible to access that pool of capital because they have fomo about their

bitcoin treasury not growing as quickly as they'd like to as well but i think the market both private and public markets are recognizing the opportunity and um it would be cool to get some private market financers there to talk about some some different sort of structures that they could offer totally for example uh max over at debify he's flying over for both custody and treasury and imagine if so i'm really interested on the you know even though i've kind of pooh-poohed a little bit on the uh of lending side i'm actually interested on some of the um dlcs and and like what lava is doing with shazan and a lot of these other uh products because i feel like the price to lend the money should competitively go down because you're providing the most pristine

bearer asset that there is which is bitcoin so okay like shouldn't my interest rate be lower because i'm providing you the actual uh collateral here so um and you know there's just a number of ideas there and that's where i think what's selfishly for me is i got to scratch my own itch uh and also talk with all the members here at the park and say do you would it be cool if we did it this way and get feedback and then we continue to uh iterate and build the experience that we all want to participate in yeah no i completely agree on the bitcoin collateralized lending like it makes no sense when i mean on chain it's a perfect example they've issued over a billion dollars worth of loans over seven almost eight years they've had zero principal loan loss

I think when you're looking at it from a risk-adjusted perspective on the potential to lose the principal of the money that you lend to somebody, it's effectively zero because Bitcoin is extremely liquid and trades 24-7, 365. You simply sell the Bitcoin, recover your dollars if the loan gets in danger, whereas if you apply that to real estate, it simply does not exist. you could have the borrower go into default and then it's like all right i gotta sell this house yeah housing prices are crashing so you're forced to sell it a lost and eat and that eats into your principle it simply doesn't exist in bitcoin totally totally there's just so many so many things and yeah i'm very very bullish but i will say just what's matt say stay humble and stack sats i mean just great advice great advice as always yeah i'm excited what um where should we point people to sign up for the summit and the imagine if yeah totally um bitcoinpark.com

forward slash imagine if um there's like we're gonna have always at our summits there's just a little there is limited space so we want to make sure the experience is great for everybody for the custody and treasury summit uh that's bitcoin park if you go to join our nashville meetup page you can go see the waitlist there but if you go to bitcoinpark.com forward slash custody hyphen treasury you can learn more there um yeah man and i i totally understand if you're not coming but you know parker's coming for both the custody and treasury summit and uh imagine if uh i gotta give him a massive shout out uh you know as there's paper bitcoin summer uh you know all of these different um what do you call them seasons of bitcoin and

now we got the season of bitcoin where parker's now a podcaster which is amazing i gotta give him a massive shout out and also tfdc that he's under like the tfdc umbrella uh i saw on twitter uh him and rob just posted there what his the parker's podcast is called center of hash center of hash in homage to uh to drew bansal's yeah uh concept of the center of hash in his uh in his uh bitcoin multi uh multi-planetary series that's amazing well and this is the good what was sad for me was you know in 2017 and 2018 when i was really learning about bitcoin i was learning from about bitcoin from you odell and there was a number of other great bitcoiners i mean you're still on twitter but like matt's not he's like on uh noster only and there's a

number of people that just dropped off whether they got wrecked or whatever but to your point around the cypherpunk ethos i mean these guys were just like hammering the status and you know people to be like oh you're really gonna have full custody yeah yeah gfy you know still have fun staying poor and like all the the the funny uh in a in a good spirit uh funny uh memes now it's like all right i just joined this uh publicly traded company to be the director of bitcoin strategy it's like more power do you i'm not again i'm not trying to throw shade but it's just a different season of bitcoin where i hope especially going back to these summits marty it's like we focus with tight groups of people on a specific topic that we can build out like what presidio

bitcoin is doing in like they got like a design week they did quantum computing like i love that in the sense that we're we're tackling different bitcoin and freedom tech topics with intentionality and like some specific purpose around a specific with a specific group of people so um it's i come all the way back to it's great to for big parker to be a podcaster now yeah we need more podcasters that's right that's right now to your point like paper bitcoin summer public market treasury strategy is definitely interesting definitely exciting to a certain degree but not my cup of tea what really excites me is the the freedom tech and beyond that like just building businesses that that produce products and services that people like and you can sell at a profit and then funnel

those profits into bitcoin and develop your bitcoin strategy your treasury that way and a lot of people are fading or opining that the cypherpunk ethos has been lost, but it's there. If you know where to look. If you look at what Callie and the Cashew team are doing and what's happening on Noster and... Callie's my replacement

for Odell on Twitter. I just go back to him and I'm like, dude, this guy is just straight fire every time he posts. Knock on wood, he'll... Yeah, we'll see. There's folks like that that uh want to continue to support and not not me continue to support like just whatever we can

do to freaking boost up guys like him and there's a lot of guys like callie that are behind the scenes building really cool shit that is just unbelievable yeah like evan and zeus haven't stopped shipping you've got i mean i think the jury's still out on whether or not roll ups on bitcoin will scale but they're giving it a very good try over there like starkware and alpen labs and they're launching stuff and simplicity just got yep with adam i was just talking with the blockchain team yesterday yeah it's unbelievable yeah and that's where if you're looking in the right this is where i know we're about like an hour in um and i don't want to tease something but this is something we're going to be working on in earnest in 2026 um everybody and their mom

is like uh you know we have a lot and we're very thankful like there's a lot of folks that support the park that are well outside of austin nashville and they're they're members of the park almost undoubtedly they're like hey i would love to have a bitcoin park in my city and i'm like man you know how much capex and all the things but now i'm like you know what i think there's there's a chance uh marty that we're gonna accelerate and start these pop-ups across um the u.s and because i what i want and i think i we need to do at the park is help get the messages out of like the importance of custody the importance of like how institutions could be or should be thinking about bitcoin as it relates to the amazing properties that

make bitcoin so special levered uh explaining cashew out there explaining fetty and how the usage of those uh federations there's just so much more that we can be doing and i think the ground game of getting out there supporting other bitcoin uh meetup organizers uh we have a soft plan and a q4 uh internal team goal to map this out so if you're listening now more to come on that front we need to pop up in philly so there's 12 cities and philly is on the list all right it's good to know well i can't wait to help you brainstorm the uh the philly pop-up okay yeah man i would love that all right um i hate that we only have an hour but i have to go pick up a car i'm sure i don't know if you listen to rabbit hole recap but i had some

car issues last week and i just got a text earlier this morning that it's ready so i'm gonna go are you buying a new car or are you getting your car back i bought a new car and then uh it broke within a week so it's been great what's the uh op cost on that uh i i think they're comping the fix because it had less than 200 miles yeah and i brought it back but uh it's uh it's manageable it's manageable i'll say that good deal good deal dude marty i i can't thank you enough man and keep killing what like across all the fronts man i'm super impressed and inspired by you yeah the feeling is mutual ron we're gonna win we're gonna win all right 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

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