TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #772: Bitcoin Is The Peaceful Revolution with Average Gary

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. The recruiter was good at being a recruiter and then, you know, my ex-girlfriend's stepdad was like telling me sea stories about being on a ship and using rebar to spear hammerhead

Starting point is 00:00:46 sharks to like off the side of the ship. So I signed up, fully psyoped into freedom, played a lot of like Silicon, US Navy seals on playstation 2 and call of duty and all these other things so i like fully bought into that whole psyop very much like let's go spread for human democracy yeah um so yeah bubba would tell me stories he he was a captain of large ships and he would tell stories about having like take the ships down the mississippi into the gulf i'm like navigating that but i forget when he was deployed think it was after the gulf war like in the 90s really like before um 2001 and he would tell stories about it they would just get uh get commands just like there would be like stranded

Starting point is 00:01:30 boats in the ocean they just like use their artillery to sink them yeah yeah i mean there's no like international law right there's once you go 12 miles off the coast you're like international waters and it's i don't you know there's not there's like rules and treaties and ways that things should be happening but yeah if there's a boat out there you just blow it up yeah i don't want to dox too much but if you're comfortable sharing so you enlisted when you're 18 what year was that i was oh wait oh wait yeah yep and so you got deployed in 2012. i was in boot camp when the meltdown happened ah what was that like i had no idea i mean i was completely oblivious um i remember distinctly there it was the same thing so like 9 11 i was in like sixth grade and i just

Starting point is 00:02:09 remember like the teachers were all like like worried and i remember the same time like when when you know the whole lehman brothers bears whatever was like crashing because i was in boot camp from august to october of 08 and i just remember like people were very much paying attention to the news and not to what we were doing i'm like okay what's going on here like something's happening i don't know what it is because they don't they completely isolate you from the outside um to you know it's a whole process but uh i came out and in hindsight there were a lot of like second career older men joining the military at the time and in hindsight it's like if i'd been paying attention a little bit more it's like oh these guys like just got their

Starting point is 00:02:51 asses handed to them because of the crash and needed something to go do and the military is a fantastic you know if you're looking for something like the military is always there they're taking volunteers all the time steady pay great benefits you get the pension all these other things and so there was like i was 18 and there was a bunch of like older older men that were were joining at the same time which i think was a boon and i mean going back to 2012 when you were deployed what was that experience like um i'm very fortunate so none of my deployments i saw combat like i thank god that i never i was never shot at we got mortared right so like called indirect fire they're just like sending mortars on the base um nothing super close but

Starting point is 00:03:34 But I was never in gun-to-gun combat, and I'm very thankful for that. As a young man, you glorify combat and you think about that. But then as I've gotten older and reflected a lot more, it's like, no, I'm really glad I don't have those demons to deal with. Because there are, I'm sure you've heard about veteran suicide numbers, guys go through hell in combat. And I'm thankful to not have that hell to have gone through, while still very, very much participated in it. I called myself a FOB-it, right? I never left the FOB when I was downrange in Afghanistan. I was like intel sort of back-end support,

Starting point is 00:04:12 running operations on the backside of things in my nice air conditioning without exposing myself too much to harm. How high-tech are those operations in the battlefield? I mean, they're pretty high-tech. There's this guy on YouTube called Data Slayer. And he releases all these YouTube videos about like, i built military grade radios using like open source whatever um some of the things that he's

Starting point is 00:04:38 building were like being fielded and deployed like mesh radio like wi-fi mesh radios right so like one of the systems that some of the guys were using would have this like wi-fi mesh radio so that way you were on this ridge and another guy was on this other ridge another guy was on this other ridge and it would talk long range wi-fi so that way they could all all the all the sensors could collaborate and coordinate with each other and this was 2012 right so you can you fast forward and just look at the trajectory of software like what palmer lucky's doing and everything warfare has become even crazier um one of the things that in another universe i would have gone on to do some like technical r&d work for naval special warfare um i'm glad again glad i

Starting point is 00:05:18 didn't go that path i decided to get out and like be with my family and ended up going into a different kind of warfare r&d it's like open source battlefield we find ourselves on of ideas and technology but um it was pretty sophisticated even even in 2012 because that's where a lot of the bleeding edge tech always comes from is from war right so are you officially retired from the navy or are you in reserve i'm not retired okay um no i got out 11 years four months and three days okay um just separated no retirement um just decided it wasn't for me anymore i had a young i had my first kid and i realized that being away wasn't worth it anymore um the navy was going to send me back to like a regular unit and i was gonna have to deal with like regular navy problems

Starting point is 00:06:00 which is not great i was in middle management too and i started to see like behind the curtain of like oh all these people that have problems they're now my problem because i'm like the middle management i'm a navy chief right it's like the middle management senior enlisted of the navy and so i'm like having to counsel this guy on like sexual harassment like no you can't talk to this woman like that in the workplace and i'm doing it like multiple times and nothing's happening to this guy he's just like still around he just like gets shoved into a different department or something like that so it's like seeing that there's a lack of the ability for anybody to actually drill in and have consequences for people that weren't doing their jobs was like

Starting point is 00:06:38 super demoralizing and then also the navy stopped giving me sort of like what i wanted to do i wanted to go into like cyber i wanted to go into these more advanced technical fields and then he was like no you're a chinese linguist according to the manning numbers right because everything's just like a number according to all the personnel numbers like we need you here to be this job um and we're not going to send you over here because you're too high rank and the whatever the numbers worked out didn't didn't accommodate that it's like this weird formula what are your thoughts on hexeth and the trajectory of the armed forces under the second trump administration you know i haven't paid too much close attention to it um from what i can tell i like that there's

Starting point is 00:07:16 is like an actual aggressive like assertiveness to the military i think the whole oh we're the department of defense but we're going to go out and like conduct offensive wars was just a huge misnomer and like completely misleading so i'm happy that we relabeled the department of war because that's what it is um you know hold comments on recent military actions uh but i i think it's it is a positive trajectory i think though that there's still a lot of things to like wash out in the broader complex that is the federal government that are like deeply deeply entrenched so i'm cautiously optimistic but i think there's still some like very deeply rooted um entities that are not aligned with like this whole like hegseth revamp and revitalization like they're

Starting point is 00:08:03 giving people like tea i love it i mean all my boys were on tea anyway it's like it's not like got my one buddy that he's just like he's just super big and yoked because uh you go in and you you beat your body into a pulp and especially in in the special operations community right and again i'm not i was just like an intel guy i got to work and enable this special operations guy so like by no mean am i like an authoritative like special operator so let me just like throw that out there but i worked with a lot of these guys and i have a lot of friends that were in this community um and guys like their body is just destroyed you do the reason why the special operations are so good at what they do is they do the same thing over and over and over and over

Starting point is 00:08:43 again until you don't even have to think about it and so you're in and out of helicopters and humvees and boats and like all these you know physically demanding things your body just starts to tear down and so a lot of guys would look for other things like tea or you know hgh or whatever whatever like juice they were looking for um like there's a guy there's a team of marines in afghanistan that they were unable to take helicopters because they all got so big and jacked that they were out like they outweighed the capacity of the helicopters so they had to always go on ground now that's like too far in my opinion but if you're signing up to like destroy your body for you know your brothers on your left and your right and for the greater good

Starting point is 00:09:25 of the nation uh i think you should be able to have access to some of these like performance enhancing drugs we'll call them right i don't see any reasons for that like you want the tip-top shape military if you're going to fight a war if you're going to have a military like the purpose of a military is to close and destroy the enemy um to do that you need to be physically dominant uh it's becoming less so with the drone warfare and all this other stuff but still you still have to be able to like take 100 plus pounds carry it for you know 15 kilometers go execute a bunch of people take things off the objective whatever it is and then also exfil and you have to do all of that without your body breaking down. And the reality of our

Starting point is 00:10:05 bodies is like, they just don't work after a certain point. Yeah. It's insane to think about. It often makes me feel like a pussy. I was like, God damn it. And it is like, it is true, you have to truly admire the people that take that burden on and go do it with the intent to protect the country and the ideals that it was founded on. And I think that's one thing is very conflicting for civilians and i imagine veterans alike where you get to a point where it's like are we are we the baddies uh did you ever ask that question not until after i get out

Starting point is 00:10:39 right so um it's a it's a heavy thing to consider but i uh you know i cheered when people died i don't think that is good for your soul um but it's a it's a reality right you're watching the the stream the live stream basically of a drone and then i puff smoke dude's gone and then you all cheer because that was the guy um in the moment it's fine but like reflecting i'm just like man that like there should be some very stoic sort of like not a celebration but stoic acceptance that okay job's done move on to the next thing but it's not like i don't think anybody should ever celebrate somebody else dying like that just is uh that just doesn't work out and then you look into the monetary implications of the forever wars and the debt funding and all that

Starting point is 00:11:27 kind of stuff and this is like a huge thing and i'll say you know bitcoin veterans in general has this sort of thread throughout it's like a lot of these guys realize that some of the things that we were sent over to do were not necessarily for the benefit of the nation but were the benefit for the people printing the money uh and that's why bitcoin is like a huge thing for veterans and the veterans that finally get bitcoin understand what's at stake and understand that you have all these tools in your toolbox and ideally we never want to get to the point where violence right we want to be extremely peaceful peaceful is not harmless it's peaceful meaning you have a capacity that is restrained bitcoin enables you to be extremely peaceful and also

Starting point is 00:12:06 have a way to usurp and go against this apparatus that is just this beast that's just like churning through people and souls that are it doesn't stop right no just was it the monetary aspect that led you to reflect and think about or was there a particular moment yeah that you were sitting and reflecting and saying i mean what was i doing what are we doing yeah the monetary aspect was the first of it just because um there's like some you know smedley butler has some quotes like war's a racket um all wars are bankers wars that's somebody else i think so like understanding that kind of like opened the the door for like oh wow like this was what i was told we were doing was not necessarily the ultimate motive right even though there might have been some kernels of truth

Starting point is 00:12:56 in there some like good things some good intentions it's like no man there was we could there was opportunities to have like closed and destroyed the enemy that were kneecapped or halted or whatever it was and these people you know it there's a there's a monetary incentive to keep the machine going to keep right all these contract companies all these logistics and supply companies like they get paid if they're downrange doing the support and the supply and logistics they don't get paid if there's no war right um that was the first revelation the second was just like i returned to you know my faith in god um and understanding and reading into like what the bible says and everything like this it's like oh wow there's there could be a just war i don't

Starting point is 00:13:41 think the wars that i fought in were necessarily just not at the point that i fought them in right maybe early on you can make a case for it depending on what kind of theories you believe on the origin of the war which that's a whole nother rabbit that's a rabbit hole that i don't want to have time for um so like you know i'm open to all those concepts and theories and some of my i think are that hold some carry some water but um yeah once you just start looking at like the war that doesn't stop and what that means for your soul and for the souls of the people participating in it and the fact that is purely extracting from the american populace to go fund this mass mass murder campaign uh that's heavy that's heavy and that that's murder campaign

Starting point is 00:14:23 was and was the defending of the poppy fields real too oh i don't know i can't comment on that one okay yeah all right but what at what period of time were you having this revelation interesting enough it was um shout out to my boy tim uh he's a guy that orange peeled me he coded sort of like liberty pill me uh he's been just like a fantastic friend of mine for a long time and i lived with him so i went to afghanistan and then 2014 i started going into this special operations community right doing intel stuff there um and that's where i met tim and just over like bourbon and drinks at the house we were living together and he's just like starting to introduce me to these ideas of like liberty and self-sovereignty and like all these other things and that's where

Starting point is 00:15:09 it was it was weird being on like the tip of the spear the you know the proverbial tip of the spear like bleeding edge kind of stuff while at the same time starting to see uh you know the rampant fraud waste and abuse that was in the military to just like go do something because by the time i got into that community we were like ramping down from afghanistan you know kind of rolling up all those things like the unit that i got to within a week of arriving like our last group of people that were deployed to afghanistan like came back and gave their full like debrief and everything so it's like a period of time where i was like what are we going to do now like what what what is our purpose like what what are we doing like we we spent all this time training for iraq and

Starting point is 00:15:47 afghanistan everything like that now that's like ramping down what's what's next right and then you just start to see it's like well nobody has any idea and everybody's just trying to figure it out to see where we can throw money at things and that's where i'm like oh wow okay so my boy's telling me about like the federal reserve and the money printing the kantian effect like all these things and then at the same time i'm seeing is like hey it's uh it's september we have a bunch of money to spend who needs gear or who wants to go to a course and i'm like oh oh wow like this is because if we don't spend our budget we're not going to get budget next year so it's like this whole game of like we need to spend in excess so that way we can ask for more money next year to do

Starting point is 00:16:25 more things and then that just like the loop so this is an official special ops group that's not deployed and you guys are giving autonomy to do things or what budget it wasn't autonomy it was it was it was part of the normal military budget right and you have a budget to like train man and equip right or man train and equip and it's fully within the scope and it's not that it's like inherently bad but it's like these incentive structures of and you can see this across the entire government right is you have a budget for a given fiscal year if you don't spend your budget the next time they come around to like you know do the line item for your budget they're like oh well you didn't spend your million dollars so we'll give you you know 900 000 well that like

Starting point is 00:17:06 for a given organization within the government like that doesn't work out right so it's just like getting a very clear picture of like these things i was learning and reading about but very clear and defined within the dod of like oh wow yeah there is like this gross budget inflation problem and it's not it's not like in a malicious thing in the sense that like you know the commanding officers and the people running these organizations there's there's no malice they want to like do good but the do good is like to spend more right it's like this perverse incentive of like oh we need to spend more money if we don't spend our money they're not going to give us the same amount next year they might even give us less so when we get to the end of a fiscal year we have

Starting point is 00:17:42 some money left over we got to figure out how to spend it now there's like legitimate uses to spend that right it wasn't like all just like boondoggles but at the same time just the incentive the fact that it's like oh we have money to spend we need to spend it and then you start talking to people like as i've talked to people throughout the government that manage like budgets and stuff they're like oh yeah that happened in you know this organization apartment of energy the yeah everywhere it's always it's it's part of the rampant like usurious inflationary nature of our monetary system and like the incentives are so clear it's like if you have money who doesn't want more money and who doesn't if given the mandate to spend the money who's not going to do

Starting point is 00:18:18 it exactly right yeah it's again it's not a malicious thing it's just like the the system is just designed to make you want to consume and spend more over and over again all right so bringing this back to tim what was tim's background was he was he i won't get into his background okay he's a friend that's okay that's all i say he's a good friend from like was it like uh broadly speaking was like liberty-minded growing up because yeah he had like he had like a libertarian background right that was like his sort of philosophy that he introduced me to um you know good christian man was his first foray via the the monetary system or was it like free markets and freedom of sensation i don't know for me it was a monetary system uh i read it was a tom woods

Starting point is 00:18:58 rollback yep i like that was the first like sort of like liberty book that i dug into for whatever reason i started listening to tom woods great great man to start listening to yep it was i learned that 30 minutes every day i was like okay this is good and so i read his book um and that was like my entry point to all of this was like oh the money is broken which is why i think once i got to bitcoin in the future it's like oh i had the money broken problem i just didn't see the solution until much later so money broken problem incepted in your brain what like 2014 yeah 2015 2016 yeah right around then what what was the first time you were like oh bitcoin's the solution so fast forward again to 2021 um i was working in big tech i was in the office because i was

Starting point is 00:19:44 essential um and uh i'm looking for anything that is remote right so like because all these people are going remote now and i'm in software and i'm like doing software engineering and uh i wanted a job and again tim's like oh hey bro check out this crypto thing so you know he did his time as a corner uh but he was like hey go check out this thing so like i interviewed at celsius oh yeah what was that like did you meet they ghosted me they it was fine it was like i'm glad i interviewed i tried to get an interview a kraken like dodged a bullet there absolutely dodged a bullet um i didn't land a job there at all right like there was no i had no proof of work this is like something i came to realize too but it got my

Starting point is 00:20:26 foot in the door of like the idea like i bought some ethereum right because he was like oh you gotta go do some smart contract you're a dev you gotta go do this and then come to find out i need like i don't know like three grand worth of eth to like do anything fun or exciting i'm just like what is this and it costs like 30 to send it to my own wallet and everything i'm like i got kids i can't afford this thing and so it was like you know ethereum and bitcoin i was like okay well let me go check out this bitcoin thing boom node was sinking within a day like i had my old gaming laptop up and running downloading the blockchain doing ibd syncing and i was like huh okay and then like i send myself some it doesn't cost you know 30 of whatever i bought i'm like okay what is this

Starting point is 00:21:03 it's all open source and so i just started like going down this rabbit hole of like okay what is this bitcoin thing because it's to me it was like accessible and it was like cheap i guess which is funny to think about um and so like i just started exploring that and just i got onto twitter again and just started like poking around there uh eventually it landed on rhr right that was like one of the first i was gonna say i feel like you've been like a ride or die rhr fan like for like obviously many years like it feels like longer i feel like you were like an a1 day one no not that long uh but you know i have this this blessing of adhd that i've really learned how to channel and manage and so like when i get into something it's like i'm going down the rabbit

Starting point is 00:21:43 hole and i'm like free falling so you know i i did find a remote job uh at a startup it's not worth mentioning but uh they laid off like 14 of their head count after the first year i was part of that and i acknowledge why because i was simultaneously like on my gaming laptop like managing nodes and and like losing money on lighting channels and like doing Bitcoin Twitter stuff and trying to do my job at the same time. Um, and so I was just like completely checked out from the job because I was like rabidly consuming Bitcoin content. Uh, I, I listened to the whole sailor series with breed love.

Starting point is 00:22:17 Like that was a huge, like unlock of like, oh, this is a thing. And like this, like this matters. Um, and that was like a, a big unlock for me as far as like the conviction point. and then there's just just rapid consumption and just trying to learn every possible thing and and poking holes in it right like trying to figure out like okay where does this break down where does this what what makes this fail and you know it's apathy I think it's true um the mining centralization thing that was like that was a big thing I found there was a blog post um by Adele that was like titled fetty pools it was like looking for something to do looking for a problem

Starting point is 00:22:55 all that was not being addressed and i read this and i was like huh okay and i worked on fediment for a little bit um and i realized that there was not anyone doing bitcoin mining development like not in like an open source like large way um it wasn't for a long time that i finally came across like the stratum b2 project which existed at that time but was not not the project it is now um you know i was looking for like open source like pool software it was like ck pool but even that was like maybe i wasn't looking in the right places but it just seemed like mining and engineering and mining was like the right place to go uh and i feel pretty vindicated about that today yeah but yeah as you should like and so with your special ops intel

Starting point is 00:23:35 background yeah i feel like you're well equipped to prod and probe the the edges of the technology around bitcoin like and i imagine you know when a system's secure and when it's not did anything about bitcoin impress or depress you about the security of the network no not the security of the network again is it was the it was the mining thing it was seeing that there was this massive um underdeveloped space that was centralizing and it's still to a degree centralizing i think we're getting better in that front but it was purely in the mining spot right like the cryptography which i've gone down that rabbit a whole i did a whole like year-long uh motivate the math series with uh fundamentals where we

Starting point is 00:24:21 talked about like he has this whole magic internet math thing but like i was the first sort of like test pilot of like learning cryptography because i wanted to understand like okay what is this math he's doing that he's got a website yeah shout out philly john uh die hard ride or die um the last one before we uh went into summer remission uh was about his fundamentals math yeah programs if you want to learn more about the hardcore cryptography of bitcoin i think he's open tours and you still have the podcast right yeah it's a new podcast with rob with rob yeah but there was a there was you know the prototype with with myself um that was a great it was a great time but i went in down that right it's like okay the cryptography i don't think cryptography is

Starting point is 00:24:59 broken i'm not a i'm not a quantum guy uh i don't i don't lose sleep at night over it um looking at the node implementation like i can grok what's going on in like bitcoin core's code base um you know i vibe coded a testnet for ctv activation client at like a conference one time like early on in the vibe coding days so like i feel comfortable enough but i feel like i still lack a lot of like the uh the academic rigor and sort of like patience really to be honest to like meaningfully contribute to that project um so i you know i looked into that but it was i don't think that's my cup of tea necessarily and so just kind of like looking around for different opportunities um i didn't see any edge cases though i didn't like probing it's like okay well

Starting point is 00:25:46 the cold card like clicked instantly right because if you're in if you're in comms in the military even not even like you know the super sweet secret squirrely stuff if you're in comms you understand that there's these like devices that you carry around that like you can't let anybody hold it right and it's like locked up in the safe at all times and it's like never gets connected to the computers right because it holds the cryptography keys for like the military communications right and so all these principles and properties of like security and cyber security and everything like that like i was like oh okay like bitcoiners are like doing this for their money and they have these special purpose air gap devices right and like pull cards is like one of a number of them

Starting point is 00:26:23 that you could use was like oh i i don't have to connect this thing to internet and it just made sense because i had devices that i operated that i couldn't like you don't plug it into the internet you don't connect it to the wi-fi like it's all a standalone self-contained system and that's how i learned linux right he's like you have to run this black box oh it runs linux i'm like what is linux like oh it's this operating system thing so um yeah i mean i definitely probed around and thought about it there's there's tons of like veterans like one of the things that military does is like sand table like war gaming right adversarial thinking like how would i attack this red teaming right um i try to get into that i have some friends that did like legit red teaming

Starting point is 00:27:03 like they you know get the the orange vest and the hat and go walk in with a ladder and say hey i'm just here to like fix the sprinkler to like get past security then go like plug in a raspberry pi somewhere and like you know hack the network um so like that kind of thinking definitely is applicable to bitcoin but from a technological standpoint i haven't the biggest thing is just like people running running the hash rate running the nodes holding the keys right not trusting that the benevolent overlords of the custodians are going to like do what is best in the in the minds of the people so freaks this episode is brought to you by blocks bitcoin ecosystem you probably know cash app you probably know square you definitely know becky if you've been listening

Starting point is 00:27:43 to the show for the last couple of years what matters most is that these are not disconnected random products they are part of a broader push to make bitcoin easier to buy easier to hold and easier to use in the real world cash app helps people stack bitcoin bitkey helps people custody without turning self-custody into a weekend engineering product square helps merchants run their businesses and increasingly plug into the bitcoin native payments rails listen this is the kind of ecosystem bitcoin needs we've been talking about this on the show for a while we know that we need the different parts to line up to make bitcoin everyday money block is doing just that Check the episode description for the current Cash App, BitKey, and SquareLinks.

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Starting point is 00:29:21 giving up control go to unchained.com and use the code tftc10 at checkout to get 10 off your new bitcoin multi-sig volt that's tftc10 at unchained.com and so you're you're having these realizations and it seems like into obviously because it exists independently other veterans are having these realizations as well and you guys started the bitcoin veterans yeah project and so how did that come to be so i didn't start it um there were five guys originally it started you can go look it up if you want to um but it started as like a twitter group chat and it was just this realization that there was no bitcoin veterans community like i think there's like maybe one other two other like bitcoin adjacent blockchain whatever

Starting point is 00:30:03 veteran stuff um but they just identified that there was this gap in the the bitcoin industry in the ecosystem community whatever you want to call it that there's like no veterans organization um and then understanding that bitcoin is like this important thing it's like oh well we need to be educating veterans and also the government has trained all these veterans on all these skills that like directly map onto all these aspects of the bitcoin ecosystem that we can be force multipliers for right like beans bullets and band-aids i mean you're like a6 electrons and you know like whatever else is like secure enclaves secure enclaves yeah yeah exactly like you know understanding that you have to secure the the radio crypto in a certain way directly

Starting point is 00:30:45 translates is like oh yeah there's my keys like i can't let my keys go online you know backing up physical security defense in depth like all these applicable skills to like i'm gonna run a hot wallet on some hsm somewhere well i better have like these layered security things it's the same thing the data centers are doing right it's the same thing it's like nothing new necessarily but the the gravity and the understanding of the day-to-day operations of doing that it's like veterans get that right veterans are molded to be leaders right you're taught to step up and get things done when other people are either demoralized or demotivated you're taught organization right like even if you don't know how to organize things

Starting point is 00:31:25 by the time you reach a certain rank in the military they've drilled into your brain this is how you get people to accomplish a goal this is how you define a goal if the goal is unclear you need to go take it back to your commander and be like hey sir what what are we trying to accomplish here let me develop the plan let me bring back to you we'll reiterate it let me go brief it to the boys and then we're gonna go execute but first we're gonna like train on this and everything so it's like the the whole thing originated from just like a twitter group chat and then it just grew steam it was like a bitcoin uh or twitter spaces so we're running we run one every weekday at 10 a.m uh on x now but this was like back in the twitter days we were

Starting point is 00:32:02 running one and it just kind of blew up like it was just like a thing people came in it was good conversations um we moved from the twitter group chat over to we have regional chats on signal so primarily it's run on signal um you know depending on where you're at in the country you'll get plugged into a regional chat those are veterans only and then we have this huge list of like topical chats right so it's like you want a gun chat you want a privacy or self-custody chat you want to there's like a tesla owner's chat right um there's a pilot's chat there is a chat for like health and wellness they're like any of these topics it's just veterans that are bitcoiners that are like hey i'm super passionate about this i want to run it so we spin up the chat we throw

Starting point is 00:32:42 in some of the founding members of the admins and then we make the dude an admin and we say here you go run it right like one of the most active chats is like the bitcoin veterans of christ and there's just like oh yeah dude theological debates and like all these other things going on um the regional chats are more for like coordination and like hey here's a meetup going on here you know the event tonight at pub key i like threw that out there i was like hey come on out so there's gonna be some bitcoin veterans showing up for that um but yeah it just kind of spawned into this like bigger group and to the point where we ended up getting a room at the 2024 conference for free which was awesome um and you know that blew up that was a huge

Starting point is 00:33:19 success we had like met vendors in there and it was like this very like low-key down in the the basement of the conference but like very very high signal event we qualify people on ham radio down there and so just kept gaining this momentum um and then the following year in 2025 we partnered with bitcoin park we're like hey can you host like a summit or something like that yeah absolutely right park's great love the park um so we did the the first like official sort of like summit named summit at bitcoin park in 2025 it was a day of just like speakers and it was a lot of just you know discussion of like what the what veterans are what are these topics that we go into right what is fifth gen warfare what is the what is the the fight for your health on the emotional

Starting point is 00:33:57 spiritual um physiological aspects right we had doctors out there like we have the bitcoin veterans as we've come to find out it's like veterans have this diverse group of skills and so they're everywhere we got doctors we've got pilots we've got mechanics we've got electricians we've got intel guys we've got you know admin guys right they all have these different skill sets and so they're getting plugged in in all these different aspects across the industry um you know speaking on stage running their own meetups running companies right so like this t-shirts this guy started bit print bit print solutions and he just identified that there's not like a good like swag store for like bitcoin merchandise so he started a swag store right and

Starting point is 00:34:36 he's got like lightning checkout and all these other things um but it's people like that that are just identifying these gaps and like filling the gaps right because again veterans are prone to action when they see that there's a problem or something or they're given a problem to solve it's like okay let's go ruthlessly attack this let's get with the boys let's figure out what's going on let's go solve problem solve and it's just kind of evolved from there and now you know we did uh um we're doing our third annual summit at bitcoin park this year november 9th and 10th uh bitcoinveterans.org summit 2026 for all the info we're still looking for like participants and volunteers and everything like that that's the other crazy thing is like there's no like official

Starting point is 00:35:14 like bitcoin veterans org like there's some non-profits that sort of like operation bitcoin does like veteran education they're partnered with the state of georgia to do distinct bitcoin veteran like workforce develop or um bitcoin mining workforce development and training and everything that is like an official org that is like exists but this like broader bitcoin veterans group is just people getting plugged in like there's no nobody's in charge of it like i'm not not in charge of bitcoin veterans right do i get asked a lot of technical questions like absolutely but there's other very technical people within the community and so it's become this network of individuals that just understand that there's two rules there's no violence and there's no

Starting point is 00:35:52 coins and outside of that like have at it bro you want to do like a bitcoin veterans pop-up meet up in like des moines sure go for it call it bitcoin veterans but no violence and no coins let's i mean i get the second one no coin seems pretty obvious to me no violence like what is the the sort of boundaries of that specific role is it like not uh advocating for violence is it not like getting together doing like a fight club or what is it it's not advocating for aggressive violence right here in america we have the right to self-defense we still have the second amendment right which defends the first um and so we have government sanction right to self-defense um that means that we are an extremely peaceful organization but again being veterans we

Starting point is 00:36:35 we are highly trained and highly capable that if there's violence to be met in, in a defensive or responsive manner, it's like, we're, we're going to be the guy showing up for that. Right. We got law enforcement. We've got people that are still active duty. Uh, so it's not so much that like, we don't practice violence in a controlled setting, right? Like rolling jujitsu or going to the range, the summit, we're going to have a range day. The second day of the summit is a range day at a private range, just outside of Nashville. Um, and you'll get some of the best training you ever had in firearms so it's not so much like violence it's like no calls for violence right and that's really to curb people coming in fed posting yeah right like we're not we're not trying

Starting point is 00:37:11 to incite violence we're not trying to incite a revolution the revolution is fully underway at this point and is completely peaceful one of the key things that i believe and i think a lot of bitcoin veterans would agree with me is the greatest appeal of bitcoin is the fact that i I can use this tool as a peaceful means to protecting my family, protecting my community and protecting my country from those that would wish it harm, right? I don't have to go out and mow down a bunch of people because they wish my community harm. Um, I can just be successful. I can stack sats. I can run a business that is cashflow positive and push all of my excess cashflow into Bitcoin. And eventually I will starve out the parasitic people that wish my,

Starting point is 00:37:53 me and my country and my community harm and they'll just die a slow death of starvation and that to me is like the direction that we're heading in it's going to be a long slow grind but that's why you build the community you build the networks you build your citadel right learn how to farm it's not that hard learn how to run the meetup if you're running the meetup in your local area now you have a network of people it's like oh billy does goats well we're gonna buy goats from billy and you know bobby over here he grows you know herbs and stuff like that and you know joe it runs like a a trash company so like we're all going to go and we're going to pay joe now to pick up all our trash not because he's got the best price maybe not even because he's got the

Starting point is 00:38:32 best service which he's a veteran he would but because he is on the same mission and he is ethically and morally aligned on this idea that bitcoin is money and it is a superior money and it lacks all these negative aspects of fiat so we're going to enable the people in our community that we want to win that will enable us to win by using bitcoin and funneling bitcoin into these companies right do you think veterans are more attuned to bitcoin than other subsets of the population yeah we like pain we know what it's like to suffer high pain tolerance yeah high pain tolerance you know we say that in the depth of we're at 64k right it's like i'll take 64 today absolutely absolutely i came in on the way down from 69 and rode that thing all the way down

Starting point is 00:39:18 listening to our jar every week it is uh i mean my pain tolerance threshold was developed like skateboarding and fighting my brother uh growing up but uh you get used to it the first bear market was certainly scary for me but uh yeah this time around it's like yeah it's just another one and it's not the pain right it's the ethos you know everybody that's a veteran stands up and swears an oath to you know support and defend the constitution um that like that is a thing you get some guys that will join it's like okay you we're either going to go to jail or you're going to join it's like okay commendable for you to like sign up and serve but we're still primarily a volunteer force um and so whether you were sold a lie on what the you know what

Starting point is 00:40:01 the patriotic mission was um a lot of us myself included still believed in like okay there's a country and i can serve that country and i can die for that country if needed in the defense of that country um and bitcoin is now just a new mission and a new tool that enables me to not die i can flourish i can flourish while still serving others right um so you get a lot of veterans that are service oriented right they they just want to do good whether they were misdirected or misguided or misinformed whatever it doesn't matter the heart was set on a on acts of service and they willing to sign up with their life to to carry that out and so when they get out you lose this entire identity structure you lose this entire support structure so that's another one of the

Starting point is 00:40:46 things that bitcoin veterans aims to do is like provide a new mission and a new community to get veterans plugged into another band of brothers that say hey man we get it we know you're out there alone on this island you're struggling with ptsd you're struggling with whatever it is like you don't know how to cope you don't know how to to exist in the world um we've got a community for you to plug in and we're gonna help you uplift yourself we're gonna teach you this new skill set we're gonna try to get you plugged into this new skill set and by the way if you listen to us and you stack bitcoin for five to ten years you're gonna be doing all right freaks look at me i'm glowing i've got like an angel's halo going around me you know why that is is i feel good i feel

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Starting point is 00:43:56 helene the bitcoin veterans really stepped up like in a big way yeah we raised over an entire bitcoin um to support operations in western north carolina eastern tennessee and when i say operations i don't mean like fema and all these other like ngo things a lot of them are like you know disaster scammers sometimes i don't want to denigrate a lot of it um the other thing to realize is like western north carolina is home to a lot of veterans already and so when we got onto the ground there and i mean like dudes got in their trucks with camping equipment and like whatever resources like water and food and like extra clothes and blankets and because we we understand what it means to live in, you know, a hole in the ground, right? You understand what the bare necessities

Starting point is 00:44:44 are. Like when you, when you have to take that ruck and throw it on and go like camp in the middle of the woods for like a week with your buddies, you don't want to take extra stuff with you. You know what the necessities are. And so the guys were like packing up trailers, packing up their trucks, driving out there and just making contact with the local people that were already plugged in and knew what was going on. And it just so happened that these local people were this group called Christian Rangers, um, in at least in the area that we were operating. and so we just basically plugged in and said hey how can we force multiply you and by and by god's providence i had all these mesh tastic radios these little like off-grid mesh network radios

Starting point is 00:45:17 and uh one of my buddies jordan shout out to jordan um i bought like 300 of these from china i imported them like a couple years back he's like hey man i got like this like bourbon night with my buddies like i'll take 80 of them off your hands and so i ended up delivering those to him lo and behold a couple months a few months later helene hits and we're like oh we have radios that work off grid that can be deployed like now and so one of this was like driving in all these mesh tastic radios to go hand out we had them on the national guard birds right the way mesh tastic works is like you have to be able to see line of sight and they kind of ping around in a mesh network and so you got people down in the hollers in the hills of western north carolina well you

Starting point is 00:46:01 can't get radio contact unless you have a national guard bird flying over top and now the messages can ping out up and out so before the starlings before like anything else we're going on there's like guys hiking through the woods or riding atvs through these back you know these back hollers to go check in on people making contact usually with local churches churches you tend to know like hey who's around right even if they're not attending the church they know like who's in the general facility and just making contact make sure there's water and communications right because everything was down the entire grid was down the electricity cell phone and so we probably had anywhere from like six to twelve dudes on the ground with their own vehicles fully funded via

Starting point is 00:46:40 bitcoin donations you know they were sleeping in like half finished condos and sleeping bags right meanwhile you have like fema taking up all the hotel spaces so that people coming in like can't like find lodging um so we did a very very low budget it was very low budget but highly effective because we knew that it's not necessarily about going and like figuring out how to just do it for the people there. It was going and figuring out who were the leaders in that area, enabling them to figure it out and distribute it. We actually linked up with this one guy. We got him set up with a cold card. We got him funded and he had this massive warehouse that he ended up using as a logistics hub to disperse all this disaster equipment. And so like he was not a

Starting point is 00:47:20 Bitcoiner. He was just a veteran. You know, we did our secret veteran handshake, right? You have a shared experience, a shared ethos. And so like, it's very easy to connect with other veterans and be like, Hey man, what do you need? Right. He's like, I just need funding. I got this warehouse. I just need people. I need, you know, a fire watch, you know, cause there's people there playing games with all the supplies arriving. So it's like some of, some of our guys just showed up and stood armed watch overnight over like the supplies that were being delivered. Right. It's as simple as that, but like that you don't get somebody down off the mountain and say, Hey, can you stand watch overnight here on all this stuff? It's like, no man, their entire house

Starting point is 00:47:53 washed away in a mudslide so even just a simple actor just like watching over you know people and stuff uh or getting up there they hiked up some of the guys hiked up to the top i think it's like bald mountain or something like that there's one of the taller mountains and put like a solar repeater node for mesh tastic that ended up just like blowing up the connections all across that area um so that was a response to helene and i mean we were we were on the ground within you know weeks before even like the news was like fully covering it right there's that weird like lol yeah the news was like you could only see it on x like hey is anybody coming to help well it's an incredible example of um distributed self-organization yeah that is actually i mean

Starting point is 00:48:30 to your point like fema just being reminded of some of the things that fema was doing in that i mean you remember the story from florida where people had like the destroyed buildings like in their driveways and they wanted they were like literally trying to pay private trash companies come in and pick it up and fema said no you can't do that and yeah they were allowed to sit there and just get moldy and create a health hazard and it's just like a glaring example the incompetence of the federal government where it's like hey you have individuals like yourself and other veterans who are self-organizing to solve these problems immediately and there's some bureaucratic zipping in the way saying like no you can't come pick up this trash yeah it's insane

Starting point is 00:49:12 well that's where i see veterans plugging in too right because um it doesn't matter what side of of the aisle you're on politically like veterans are still a very respected class right because we do we sign up with our lives it's like hey uncle sam you're gonna own me for these next four to eight years um and so there's there's there's definitely a a degree of respect there and so one of the things i see bitcoin veterans fitting is some of these harder conversations that might look like they're political one side or the other it's like no this is like a this is a problem for freedom right so like the old samurai case right the samurai developers are still in jail um i with the help of ai penned a letter to like u.s senators to describe like hey if you don't and

Starting point is 00:49:49 during the bpi day on the hill i went and talked to some of these staffers about not just like the samurai case but just in general that like open source developers should not be prosecuted for code that they write that's like taking like oh you murdered somebody with a hammer well i'm gonna go you know arrest the guy that made the hammer it's like that's not how this works right you're gonna scare people offshore you're gonna have a brain drain of some of our brightest and our best people leave the country if you do not protect open source software and open source developers distinctly in the bitcoin space right because bitcoin is such a powerful tool you're seeing these parallel now in the ai space right with all these open models um it's just you know we we as

Starting point is 00:50:28 veterans have a platform to go say some of these hard things because like throw your slings and your arrows at me like i'll dodge them i don't care like they'll hit me it doesn't matter because i i i will tell you my opinion and i'm gonna do i'm gonna go pick up the trash and come and arrest me bro yeah come on right come come i'm gonna do the right thing regardless of what's necessary i see parallels not that i'm saying you should do this but the whole flock camera thing right we don't want surveillance no nope so not only that i mean i mean we ourselves on the bitcoin news podcast i'm not published yet but we talked about the flock cameras the thing that's i mean obviously we don't want surveillance but then it's similar like chain analysis like not only are the samurai

Starting point is 00:51:09 guy's in jail um roman sterlingov is in jail for bitcoin fog and chain surveillance chain analysis tools were used to i strongly believe uh incorrectly incriminate him with starting bitcoin fog and bringing this to plot cameras too you have so many false positives where it's like i'm sure you've seen the videos i think there was a woman in colorado like the cop came to her house ready to arrest her yeah and she had to like prove on the spot like hey that's not me it's insane well that's like that's another place where veterans i think can step up is like we are in law enforcement we're qualified for law enforcement go run for sheriff right like if you want to make a change one of the other things is in civic service in civil like i'm not saying

Starting point is 00:51:55 don't run for congress don't represent it like i think at this point like federally like unless you're really really motivated and charged and you have the funds and the resources and the backing to do it uh i don't i think it's probably a waste of your time but locally your board of supervisors your mayor your your sheriff your you know your city auditor councilman whatever it is go get plugged in there and start you know talking about freedom tech go start talking about these principles that bitcoiners understand and that the broader freedom tech open source movement understands but go be a beacon of light in your local community to say no we don't want this right we don't need to be 21 million dollars in debt because you know all the boomers have mismanaged

Starting point is 00:52:33 this county's government for the past decade and a half right we can actually do something different as soon as you start doing that you'll start to see the tendrils of control right so my local area i tried to pitch bit bonds right i was like oh it's a great idea well you can't do it unless richmond tells you you can right i'm in virginia we are subjects of richmond right the county cannot do things without richmond's approval and express authority and so any sort of idea i have gone through multiple iterations with people in my local area like what can we do to like write the course on this and they're like oh well obviously we have to build data centers which that's another hot topic but it's like no we have to destroy this heritage farmland and plow it over

Starting point is 00:53:13 to build data centers and i'm like wait that's not the only way to create tax revenue but all these other mechanisms for tax revenue you have to go to richmond and get richmond to approve it richmond's not going to let go of that control so it's like veterans can plug in and any bitcoiners right it doesn't take a lot of money to win an election locally right so if you're a bitcoiner sitting on a decent stack and you're civically minded and you have the you know the gumption to do it like go go spend some money and run a local campaign or find the guy in your local area that's willing to run and just fund his campaign and get people in the local area have this grass that's bitcoin's a grassroots movement right enable people in your local area to rise whether

Starting point is 00:53:52 it's the business owners or it's the local politicians to rise up and say hey we're not doing this shit anymore we're done with fiat we're done with this stupid panopticon surveillance state we're gonna use free and open source software oh foia dude i tried to foil my county government they want to charge me four thousand dollars what to do an email query and i'm like i should be able to come in you can issue me an api key right this is 2026 you can you check my id scan my face my eyeballs whatever but i should be able to come into the county government sit down in a terminal and I should be able to query everything you do because you're my employees right you work for me as a citizen of this county and there's this whole like smoke and mirrors

Starting point is 00:54:29 thing around like FOIA like freedom of information acting and then they charge you an arm and a leg because oh it takes IT this many hours to do the query and then it takes so and so to review the query to make sure there's nothing in there that's like censored I'm like well first of all what is in there that's sensitive what are you hiding from us and a lot of the people were like oh well some people like email in that you know they some like domestic abuse victim will like email in to like seek out help i'm like okay you can flag that one as soon as it comes in but at the end of the week everything should be released publicly and i should be able to query it programmatically using my clanker to like figure out what you're doing day to day and who you're corresponding with

Starting point is 00:55:06 and who you're signing ndas with right because i blew up i i did pay for a four-year request it was very narrowly scoped it still cost me like 400 bucks but i found that my local board of supervisors had in fact signed ndas with data centers even though publicly they're like we don't know anything about ndas we don't know what you're talking about and we're like oh well what about these emails that we found and then everybody's surprised oh wow it's like no you work for us and the radical transparency that you desire so desperately for the populace needs to be flipped around and focused on you well that's what i was just about to say it's insane the inversion of the relationship between the government and the governed in this country

Starting point is 00:55:43 today and we're just as you're describing the complete opposite of what it should be we should be making tyrants uncomfortable again yeah yep well bring this back to bitcoin veterans i mean it started as a twitter group chat has obviously grown and seems like momentum yeah is picking up like if we're four or five years into this sort of amorphous loose association of veterans within bitcoin like what where do you think it'll be like in another five years and the and really with the context of the force multiplier that you described with bitcoin um specifically i think so and this is something that i've i've seen um in the mining industry specifically there's a strong veteran presence again because just the direct correlation

Starting point is 00:56:28 of like if you can run a mining if you can run a fob deployed you can run a mining site like if you feel like you're on a fob like the mining sites that i've been to out in west texas it's like it feels like a mining site there's a gravel pays and there's like all these like huts and boxes all over the place and like you know everybody's like doing meetings in the morning to figure out what we're doing for the day stay hydrated like all this stuff it feels like you're deployed i'm like wow okay but it's it that that's one aspect another one is you know you've got the the georgia bitcoin council you got the illinois bitcoin council um you've got various meetups that are all being run by veterans uh led by veterans um various groups that like are plugged in like

Starting point is 00:57:06 there's i'm fairly confident saying this i'm pretty sure at least one of the core contributors is a vet like there's a core contributor that's a veteran right he's not necessarily directly plugged into bitcoin veterans but the fact that there's a huge um alumni network essentially right like i've heard people talk about like oh you go to ivy lee school not for the diploma but for like the network of individuals well veterans have one of the biggest alumni networks ever right and they're all across the board you know they're in c suites at s p 500 companies they're in bitcoin companies they're in they're running meetups they're running you know random off-grid gas you know mining facilities right um they're doing security audits for whatever you know open source

Starting point is 00:57:51 tools that that they're using they're they're working on protocol development right so i see bitcoin veterans one just being um a bigger and more respectable name and it's really just a network of people and i i see it as um the organizations and the institutions of the first turning that we are going into um bitcoin veterans are going to play no small part in that and that that's where i see it that's why i didn't mention it earlier but i mean bitcoin famously has this this problem being a distributed network with no obviously central organization structure and it's not that i'm calling for that but i think the skills that you described earlier that veterans are equipped with around organization is desperately needed and i think you obviously

Starting point is 00:58:37 i won't speak for every veteran understand that the distributed nature of the protocol and the governance around the protocol is extremely important but bringing the organizational skills that veterans have to to work within that those confines but still get done seems like a very massive value add to the network absolutely well and this is like this is the whole thing uh if you ever talk to gabe lord of operation bitcoin he does that workforce development this is like one of the things he says is uh maybe not what he says but um what he understands is you know because veterans have these leadership abilities and the skills that have been developed um one of the other things is you also train to a point where you can operate

Starting point is 00:59:16 without command and control right so like you have to know what the final objective is right the objective is hyper bitcoinization how do we get there i don't know but like how do i and if you look at a command structure and you have command at the top and then all these tiers along the way until you get to the smallest unit of like a fire team right that fire team knows what their tactical mission objective is to the point that even if they lose all of communication and black out on comms and whatever that fire team together is an effective unit to go close and complete that objective and then also link back up with the rest of the units right so it's great to have like you know centralized command and control there's efficiencies to that but at the same time

Starting point is 01:00:00 veterans plugged in as leadership across you know this network of individuals means that even when a cell is isolated and there's you know you're alone and unafraid with no support or you know resupply anytime soon you can still figure out how to get the job done you can still figure out how to enable yourself and the other people around you right that's the force multiplication thing is we're not doing it like we're not james bond that's a whole psyop right like james bond is it's not like that doesn't exist for the most part right there's support there are you know tons of people um you can't do things alone that's one of the the biggest humbling aspects that i learned in the military was like yeah i'm a smart guy i'm very motivated high energy get a lot of done

Starting point is 01:00:42 but i'm nothing without the people on my left and my right and if they're not coming along and if they're faltering like you're only as strong as the weakest leak in your chain right so it's like shield lock with these guys and push forward together and you're gonna you're gonna push right through anything that you can ever come across yeah well you mentioned it earlier but we have it as a topic that we want to dive into on the list you mentioned that james bond not real is that is that fifth generation warfare is that a psyop so getting into this whole yeah concept of fifth generation warfare yeah fifth generation warfare um go back and listen to the bitcoin veterans summit there's a i think it's the pin tweet

Starting point is 01:01:20 on at bitcoin veterans um but there's an entire panel about it and you know you've had sequences like trench warfare like air warfare like all these developments and where we find ourselves now is in the information warfare right we are more interconnected than we've ever been um the internet has enabled us in for good and for bad to directly connect with any individual on the planet for an unlimited amount of time and duration um and that's been weaponized right that's been weaponized by our government other governments non-government entities individuals right like this episode is a form of fifth generation warfare right like we are i'm putting ideas into your brain right now that when you're listening to me talk um and it's never been

Starting point is 01:02:02 easier to participate in that the thing that i think trips up a lot of people is nobody knows that they're in a war nobody understands that you're in a war for the what you're thinking about what you're focusing your time and attention on and if you don't understand you're in a war and you don't understand that you are a combatant in this war because there's no like civilians and combatants right like it's very easy to like understand that if you don't understand that like you're just going to get eaten alive i mean how about the algo change this week an example of this fifth like how long have bitcoiners been disconnected from each other well i was at nasa so i was like completely unplugged for a while you know but uh i mean

Starting point is 01:02:38 as an example i mean twitter nikita this one guy who has central command over the algorithm yep of twitter just clicked a button earlier this week and every bitcoiner is like holy crap i haven't seen you on on this platform in years and yep it's like isolating bitcoiners and going back bringing in what we previously discussed which is a veteran's ability to organize when you don't have any communication with the outside world I think that was discombobulating for the the amorphous Bitcoin Community on X specifically yeah um not having the skills to recognize because I my cousin is like a big follower of me on Twitter and he likes he's been swearing to me for like two he's like your shadow band i can't find any of your tweets like all that and i don't i'm not

Starting point is 01:03:25 gonna put malignant intent in the like i'm not gonna accuse x of having malignant intent but i think regardless of whether or not they did the the outcome was this sort of isolation of bitcoiners and the inability to pick up signal from others about what's going on um so i think that's an example of fifth generation warfare it's a spiritual war too right like uh i know you're a man of faith i consider myself a man of faith it is a spiritual war as well because um you know the mind the body the soul is all connected and you know one of the things is if you're a man on your own you know like satan's out there looking for you on your own in isolation to devour you it's like he is a he's a prowling lion waiting to devour the lone man um which is why i

Starting point is 01:04:13 think like the internet's great but if you don't have like in the flesh real life people that you are getting coffee with right like the simplest thing you can do is find the boys in your neighborhood or in your whatever right like i got some some good bitcoiner friends that we get coffee semi-regularly but it's like go meet up in person because you will not have the same interactions you do online we are not like we have not evolved or adapted or whatever it is to this digital presence that is malignant or not is like sucking our souls into the cyber space and i would encourage more people to go to a bitcoin meetup right if you've never been to a bitcoin meetup and you're listening to this episode right now find your local bitcoin meetup even if you have

Starting point is 01:04:52 to drive three hours and go to it just one time one time and i don't know how to describe it and i feel like you could probably test it there's many other bitcoiners i feel it is like the first time you go to like a bitcoin event and you show up to a place where everybody is mutually aligned on this fundamental understanding of value right because money is a placeholder for something else it's a placeholder for value right and so bitcoin as a money means that we are all aligned instantly on the same value set at the fundamental layer and so now we can build on top of that and we don't have to start from like oh well do you think like printing money is a bad thing it's like well it's great for civic well no no no you want we understand 21 million is the hard cap and

Starting point is 01:05:32 like there's nothing else to it um and so we can start to build from there and there's there's nothing better than somebody in a room with another person conspiring yeah right and it's like well people conspire and they should conspire in the flesh and we say this a lot on rhr if you don't have a local meetup start your own and it's it's funny how god works because this is the second time this week i've recorded a podcast and i've been thinking about the gospel and the homily a mess on sunday which was sowing seeds and that's what these bitcoin meetups do yeah and i feel like there's some divine intervention this week specifically the last two conversations i have i'm getting goosebumps right now because like it very very much aligns with what the gospel

Starting point is 01:06:16 and the homily uh discussed this week so sowing seeds um i recently attended a farming god's way class right so my kids school is partnered with this farm uh just on a mountain ridge in west virginia and this old this this lovely woman um basically got thrown from a donkey cracked her skull was miraculously healed right has a seizure dog that's been out of work for years now miraculously healed attributes all to god is like i'm going to donate this and become an educational ministry and so i attended this class because i got in touch through my kids school i was like this is awesome i've always wanted to like feed people right like i'm going to retire into farming uh my wife doesn't want to be a farmer i'm like that's fine babe i got it i'll handle it for you

Starting point is 01:06:55 but like i'm gonna be a farmer right um i think like the meme of selling our chairs is great but like take it a step further and grow your own food right like nature has provided this like free thing called sun and water that you can just like grow your own food and yeah it might not be the best or the tastiest but grow lamb grow goats grow cows grow corn grow whatever it is like start working the land one um you will be physically more prepared if you're working a farm for anything that's coming right you're gonna be uh mentally prepared because you're gonna be outside the sunshine right um one of my good friends said it's like oh it comes to find out with all this health research like we just need to go back to farming because you're gonna be outside in the sun

Starting point is 01:07:33 eating real food carrying water chopping wood physically active right you're not living this sanitary lifestyle plugged into a blue light screen um so you talk about like you know reaping what you sow um i think in a very real way like i think that's where bitcoiners are headed is like we're gonna start growing our own food there's this already exists right greatgi.com i get my gi from from the big pointer soap miner i got the my bags over there i've got the tallow soap yep uh in this building right now sat stock coffee i get my coffee um i'm about to buy a head of beef from a mutual acquaintance down in washington virginia there i got a i got a quarter of that beef in my home right now so it's like food this fundamental thing is like get into that business

Starting point is 01:08:13 right find out what it is um there's like a company like oshi making like nut butter and nut bars and stuff it's like figure out what food is out there that you can make better as as a Bitcoiner, remove all the gross, like goy slop additives, and then go do it and sell it for sats. You're going to stack sats, right? Make bread. The simplest inputs is like bread. It's like flour, salt, and water at a minimum, right? You can add other stuff, but you can quantify this, right? And this is like, I think maybe business advice. You can quantify what your inputs are, and then you figure out what you need to sell it for to make a profit. And you can make a modest profit, right? You don't need to make 100% markup on whatever you're selling. You can

Starting point is 01:08:51 a modest profit you can do that for five to ten years continually you can grow that business and if you're stacking sats along the way and saving it it's like now you have more capital to deploy to make more bread and make you know bagels or whatever else right like you can grow into this thing go find some boomer that wants to retire out of his business start to get to know the business befriend the guy like there's still good people out there that have businesses that have no successors private equity is going to eat those things up flip them and sell them out to somebody else go find the mom-and-pop shops figure out what their business is figure out if you want to do that business go run that business and turn it into a bitcoin standard yeah and like

Starting point is 01:09:27 now you are the winner in the local area you're feeding people yeah i mean that's we're talking about literally sowing seeds right now too but like bringing it back to bitcoin veterans i think what you you guys are doing again is sowing seeds in the minds of other veterans and if you're successful in hitting a critical mass of veterans that get bitcoin and are motivated to organize around it and get shit done like talk about that force multiplier but you have like quite literally a military that is opted into we are not a militia not a militia but like military military trained individuals we do have a lot of guns though um who have opted into this right yeah yeah absolutely well i mean what is it i think secretary war or one of the the indo paycom admiral was talking

Starting point is 01:10:11 about how papara was talking yeah like it's there dude we're there well all right this is where we get into uh what are your thoughts on software the thesis i think it's a fantastic thesis and this is probably a contrarian to maybe the broader bitcoin veterans uh group um i think it falls down to implementation right like at a fundamental level it is database of keys right like it's key management it's a database right um introducing bitcoin to a cyber system does nothing new or novel that isn't already accomplished by other cyber security systems and protocols and practices right like i was saying earlier like having an hsm that is just a cold card is no different than having an hsm that's not a cold card right the same cyber security principles apply i think one

Starting point is 01:11:04 of the novel things that most people don't like most people are thinking like oh yeah i'm gonna secure like my computer with like bitcoin i'm like no you're not that's stupid i think that the whole you know pay-per-cue l402 thing that's legit yeah but hash rate defending critical military system that's like i know i mean i got yelled at because i jason on and i have a lot of respect for jason oh i love jason but uh great thinker great thinker and i think a lot of i mean obviously like bitcoin is a form of force projection on the world yep but like where i will draw the line and this does make not this does not make any sense is like hash rate cannot protect military systems i think this is where okay this is where i think there's there's a there there um the idea of a

Starting point is 01:11:49 macro computer right because if you zoom in like this phone right there's like tiny resistors and like different electrical components that are essentially controlling the flow of electricity right that's what like chips and doing electrical components are doing uh and i think there's something too and bitcoin mining is not like the only aspect of this but i think because bitcoin mining can saturate a ton of energy in one go you might be able to zoom out and essentially use bitcoin mining as a macro scale electrical component that can be observed like macro observed at a macro level to check the state of it right because that's essentially what the electrons are doing here is like you're checking the state of the electricity flow and this is

Starting point is 01:12:34 like gross oversimplification but you're doing that at a micro level right microchips i think there might be a there there at a macro level where you have the entire grids can be observed in a given state of electrical flow and bitcoin mining would 100 plug into that as as in a one of the electrical components so are you talking about like leveling out uh drawl on a grid system sure that's one aspect but it's not like it's not the leveling out that that's like one aspect of it it's the the reason why a certain pixel appears on your screen is because certain electrons are flowing and arranged in a certain way and are observed in a certain state right macro scale now and this is like when you have a planetary grid um one there's

Starting point is 01:13:27 the balancing aspect to it but like when you have a planetary grid what would be the best way for you to project signals beyond our solar system radio waves maybe right what are radio waves they're just electromagnetic pulses right they're they're um they're going through the medium that is the air that is space lasers i don't know the way that your phone modulates electricity to make the antenna vibrate in a specific frequency to send those waves out i think this is like my this is like a theory we're getting cosmic here we haven't gotten cosmic on this show in a while but i like it i think bitcoin mining plays a huge like you look at bitcoin mining with the smrs and all this other electrical infrastructure and grid and i think you can get to a point where we can signal

Starting point is 01:14:18 um like way way out there using massive energy grids and and people from a distance galaxies away are able to observe the given state and this is where like it gets a little cosmic because you have to worry about like the time dilation or the time whatever it is um between those two observation points but like nobody's going to be observing from like a galaxy way like my iphone but what would be very easy to observe is an entire you know the entire north american grid system in a specific configuration that is balanced and managed in the flows of the electrons uh or flows of the electrons are given a specific state to be observed using bitcoin mining and other grid assets does that make sense uh macro chips i'm planetary scale macro chips

Starting point is 01:15:14 i might not be mentally equipped enough intellectually equipped enough to so like like a transistor in a chip right i know yes right it's a flow it's it's either so you would design you would redesign the grid and that's like where my mind's going it's like okay i can see you design the grid and basically the idea would be like no electron is wasted to a certain extent yep like what what i'm thinking through like getting autistic about this is like okay what if you need to add like new forms of uh hardware that pull from the grid like that messes up the state right there's a new transistor gates right like it's like fundamentally it's like the gates openers

Starting point is 01:15:56 closed sort of thing okay and that's again very very grossly oversimplification but it's like is the energy flowing between point a and point b between you know el paso and new york is that flow what is that flow how high is that flow and bitcoin mining definitely can play an aspect in it just because of the monetization aspect of it right like you have this sink of energy this demand of energy that is completely monetizable from the first electron and so you can use that to create what i think is like macro scale transistors right like all these little silicon wafers that like super tiny like the most complex things we've ever done as humanity they're all working on this very very micro nanoscale but it's still just observing the

Starting point is 01:16:37 state of the electrons flowing and whether the gates are opens or closed okay now i'm picking this up now zoom way out and it's like is the flow of electrons open or closed between el paso and new york or between new york and boston or whatever right like things that you would need to if you zoom far enough and out the earth becomes microscopic you can still observe the state of that and react to that as a signal not to mention you could use that energy to broadcast you know whatever signal you want right the signal being broadcast is determined the modulation of the signal right the the data modulated onto that signal is determined by the configuration of the the chips that are driving that signal in that antenna right and when you think about like the

Starting point is 01:17:20 the crust of the earth right and it's like we can get into like pole shift if you want to as well oh god i try not to think about the whole shift well maybe maybe having a robust energy grid that is well balanced with bitcoin mining and all these other technologies are something that can help stabilize do we have enough time we're in the middle of the pole shift army yeah i think so yeah so when you learn land navigation in the military i'm at fort pickett in virginia learning land navigation and they're like oh by the way this map has the magnetic declination adjustment that you need it's a little bit off right so like that way back when i just kind of i was like okay cool i need to know that it's not it's like seven instead of five or whatever fast forward to like

Starting point is 01:18:03 learning about the magnetic pole shifts and i'm like oh wow like yeah the poles are moving around because my compass needed to be adjusted based on the map from like the 1960s right it's completely different so um i think there's a there there as well and that is very cosmic it's observable oh yeah absolutely definitely observable yep yep yeah i try not to think of it but i mean how can having a robust grid and so like going back to the uh the macro cosmic conversation yeah i think now i understand like the the mini transistor is like micro grids so like yeah daisy chaining natural gas turbines whatever to create a micro grid small module reactors and you just ping pong ping pong maybe you have massive generation facilities that are more centralized

Starting point is 01:18:47 in certain parts but um i think that's something i mean we're going to be discussing it tonight here here at pubkey um announcing the series with american bitcoin about uh energy policy energy strategy compute and different forms of bitcoin and ai but i think this implies beyond the specific topics to like national security absolutely at the pole shift level like the security of civilization broadly speaking we can't rely on elon elon's gonna do some a lot more cool i think but like he is but one man with one team so it's like we need a lot more people active and engaged on space exploration you know energy infrastructure um i'm fully bought into the whole like we need a grid renaissance i was reading a book called one second after have you

Starting point is 01:19:36 read that i've heard of it i haven't read it though fantastic well you'll get there after mandibles you know it takes me a while to get to the box yeah one second after basically like the the whole and it's been out for a while so i don't mind spoiling it but it's like a nuclear bomb detonates in the atmosphere above the eastern seaboard it wipes out all modern electronics right um you have a carrying event because the electromagnetic electromagnetic shield of the earth is down and we get a solar flare that wipes out modern electronics like same same right so it's a book that explores just outside of asheville north carolina western north carolina again uh explores like sort of what that might look like um fantastic read but i remember reading that and

Starting point is 01:20:14 like i think one of the prefaces of the book like the dude was right in 2001 trying to illustrate the fragility of our electrical infrastructure and our grid in america and then 911 happened and all the wind got sucked from any kind of sales that he might have started with like hey guys our grid's decaying and we need to do something about it uh that's why he wrote the book as like an educational sort of like fictional narrative um but you know got derailed by the war on terror right which and um so i i got here last night had a great dinner and then drinks after i won't say who but there's people obviously we have this event again tonight focused on energy policy and um but i was talking to somebody who's involved with one of the major utility companies in the

Starting point is 01:20:59 country and we're talking about the the fact that a lot of the conversation around energy has become partisan politics where it's like how do we how do we get away from making energy a partisan issue when it's it's literally has nothing to do with politics it's just about human flourishing like how do we educate people to understand that problems like the one uh explained in in the book one minute after one second one second after um and create a sort of optimistic energy around rejiggering the grid to modernizing the grid like that seems like something we should all want to get behind yeah i mean i think if you if you want to like attack it on one front it's like well if we have more energy production

Starting point is 01:21:49 your electrical bill will go down yeah it's funny like that's i'm not going to dox him i was talking to somebody at uh again one of the larger utility companies in the country and i had to explain the henry adams curve to him which is the henry adams go the henry adams curve is the uh energy consumption per capita over time i think going back to 1850 so one of the charts on wtf happened in 1971.com and uh there's no energy rich poor nation is that the one no that's i mean that's i think a derivative of it but like it was the henry adams curve for u.s um so like i think energy consumption per capita is what attracts in like 1971 it was like going up and to the right and then flatlines really yeah and uh that's one of the most underrated charts in the world i think

Starting point is 01:22:33 um but getting back to the point is like we have been um neglecting our energy infrastructure um many would say going back to 1971 um and we are behind we need to modernize it we need to update it we need to make it more distributed more robust and the fact that it is it has become a partisan issue is just mind-blowing it's like this is bigger than politics this is literally survival and the progression of have you talked to daniel batten uh it's been a while yeah yeah it's from zealand i mean he that was like one of the biggest things on the whole because a lot of i think a lot of the other side of the aisle partisan stuff is from like the green side the environmental side and daniel has just like blown all that out of the water like i followed some of his work like

Starting point is 01:23:21 it's been phenomenal and then at the same time you can point to gridless in africa you can point to what was it there was that article some dude wrote about i think it was like a village in malawi or something that has electricity now because of bitcoin mining oh it was the um in congo right the uh the nature nature preserve they were able to utilize the excess capacity on i believe a substation that sat at the top of a hill and the transmission line to decayed over time but the revenue from the bitcoin mining and they enabled them to rebuild transmission yeah i think i think having like highlighting and having those concrete stories of and yeah it's bitcoin which is great like probably propagandized by bitcoin but because bitcoin is is inherently

Starting point is 01:24:03 an energy asset and inherently tied to the grid at this point um it's like there's no excuse it's like if you want to uplift people out of poverty you will build energy infrastructure for them and the best way to do that is to find some capitalist that wants to make money on mining bitcoin and say hey we've got an energy source come drop your bitcoin mining shipping container next to this energy source you can make some money slice up some of us to develop this infrastructure and then like when we don't need you anymore take your take your toys and go home yeah and like people do that that's like it's happening that's happening everywhere and since bitcoin's distributed the network doesn't care maybe blocks slow down maybe block production

Starting point is 01:24:40 slows down a bit but yeah the network goes on difficulty adjust but bringing this back to like revitalizing the grid to be able to survive the consequences of a potential carrington event or a nuclear bomb emp pulse uh potentially destroying parts of the infrastructure like you got me thinking like you've heard of atlantis and if you're a big fan of um graham graham hancock and randall carlson they'll talk about uh civilizations advanced highly advanced civilizations of of um humanity's past that have been forgotten but may have been super super advanced but taken out by potentially a character event uh the hunger dryas was probably like an asteroid that created the great flood that's been talked about throughout history but

Starting point is 01:25:32 like like not to be hubristic we should never be hubristic but as bitcoin like we're obviously a highly advanced society like is this like a problem that similarly advanced societies and earth's past have gotten to but haven't surpassed but we have the opportunity to we have to recognize that i'm getting a little rambly and like heady here in cosmic yeah yeah yeah like is that it's like it's almost like fermi's uh the great filter right um or fermi's paradox like if we get the grid sufficiently robust yeah we can survive that event to be like the one iteration of humanity that's i think it's going to come down to what is what does sufficiently robust mean right like what does that mean because um does robust mean it's we're all

Starting point is 01:26:22 interconnected maybe to a degree but i think like you're saying these micro grids right if you can if you if you have if you have flowing water on your property go put in a hydro dam and start mining bitcoin right like that you could build a faraday cage around that setup and now you're the guy with electricity right now you want to make sure you're friends with all your neighbors so you're not the guy that they're going to kill because you're the only one with the lights on um but i think i think there is something to the the monetary incentive to expand the energy infrastructure via bitcoin mining that will it not will it is driving microgrids like we're getting microgrids because of bitcoin mining right um the you know you have i was just listening to 256

Starting point is 01:27:03 foundation today they're they were talking schnitzel was on there talking about how he is uh using mugina firmware which is the open source bitcoin mining firmware that they're developing to get to the exact wattage like we're tuning bitcoin mining to the exact wattage that is necessary for consumption which is a prerequisite for microgrids yeah well so let's explain this mugina shout out to schnitzel yeah and everybody uh contributing to the the open source mining effort and shout out to 256 foundation for really fostering and pushing that that forward but mugina like i think the big breakthrough is being able to communicate with individual um chips on a hash board yep and elaborates and expand on what that does for the efficiency

Starting point is 01:27:47 because i we just had uh we launched tftc roundtable obviously we did the the home mining energy playbook not obviously but we did a home mining energy playbook with the exergy guys we had a follow-up conversation with the tftc community on tuesday night um and between when we launched a playbook and recorded that podcast and tuesday's conversation literally is tuesday morning schnitzel now it's magina advancements and it's the data that we have in the uh my mining home energy playbook uh if you go to the solar section which is like in like i think part four of the playbook like you have a bunch of data in there and it's like the the bitcoin mining on using solar of reacting to solar pulls is very like volatile yeah like mugina like would allow you to like

Starting point is 01:28:35 really smooth out that curve which makes incredible efficiencies makes it more profitable and um it's pretty insane that open source firmware is getting us here yes um so on the mugina front i've i'm a big fan first of all shout out to extra g boys they sold me my home heater we'll call it and so i will be uh heating my home this winter and making some money while i do it um fantastic job but on the mugina front this this first of all you have to understand that most of the bitcoin mining software and hardware has come from china you have very clear examples of ant bleed and bleed in the past basic boost tons of other things of like chicanery which like okay cool it's a rational play well ampli was 2015 and i think most people came into bitcoin

Starting point is 01:29:27 biggest wave of bitcoiners came in post 20 absolutely postcovid yeah completely oblivious to ampli so could you explain what ampli was to people it was essentially a backdoor on the firmware itself um firmware is the thing that runs on like your thermostat has a firmware on it right so people that don't understand like the software aspects of you have your operating system so like ios android or mobile operating systems windows linux mac os or like desktop and laptop operating systems firmware generally speaks to like specific components for specific purposes and bitcoin mining machines have firmware that run on them and have historically been completely closed source and and cut off like from inspecting or understanding what they're doing and many

Starting point is 01:30:10 companies have built their business around jailbreaking that firmware to make it more efficient yeah and believe as i understand it was essentially just a backdoor it was a way for uh i think it might have been like remotely controlling or converting hash rate remotely brick there you go the machines yeah yeah um i'm in that cohort that came in well after ampli like i know that it was like this backdoor thing um but yeah the fact that you could have a remote entity because you have to be online to mine bitcoin right you don't necessarily have to be with recent developments with strategy 2 and datum you don't have to be like connecting your miners directly to the internet you can connect to your own infrastructure now so it's way better in that

Starting point is 01:30:48 regard and you can kind of like block it off from you know direct control but in generally speaking most miners are connecting over the internet meaning they're exposing a port a lot of these firmware developers will say oh well we need to charge you a developer fee so you need to talk to the developer server to make sure that you check that the developer fee is working well that's a that's a connection to their servers that they control and they're shipping you the firmware that you have no idea what it's doing so it's like oh yeah i see this connection out to this random server what is that i don't know oh that's the developer fee server don't worry about it now there's legitimate like there's a there there right with having a developer fee but also that

Starting point is 01:31:27 becomes an attack vector and a threat to where you get amplified where you can have your machine just shut down because you're connected to you know bitmain servers and if they don't like you they'll shut you down or if they want to mine more they're like hey we need less hash rate so we get more bitcoin yep uh or if i mean this was 2015 i believe and plead came out and i remember like i was in bitcoin like very obsessed with it for years at that point being like holy crap this is bad because like yeah if you believe that bitcoin is a a pool a tool of force projection not only for the individual but if we do believe that we're getting to the geopolitical game theory with bitcoin as a variable like that's like again fifth generation warfare uh another form of it is

Starting point is 01:32:13 like if you have these back doors in these chips and china has a sufficient amount of hash rate russia has a sufficient amount of hash rate and something's going on in meat space between u.s and china and they have that back door it's like all right we're just going to turn off their hash rate yeah it's a and this is like that just speaks to the broader open source thesis around like if the tools are not open source for inspection um i would consider it insecure at this point right like trusted third parties or security holes that's like a well-known well-known thing um but bringing back to mugina the fact that now we have open source firmware the crazy thing about mugina though is not just that it's open source so you can go check to make sure that it's not

Starting point is 01:32:53 backdooring you and going to brick you and so you you greatly reduce your risk it gives you control over your computer you give complete control right so like i have um a miner and i won't in in the basement that's heating the house this winter and it anytime i want to tune the power consumption on it it shuts down it stops mining and it restarts the whole thing which takes time which takes time burns the chips and so it's just inefficient from like a purely just in an engineering standpoint like there's no reason why it has to be that way it's just like the way that manufacturers deployed their stock firmware right and one thing i'll say is so i was a chinese linguist right so i have some insight into chinese culture the ruthless capitalists i know they're a

Starting point is 01:33:37 communist country but they they're ruthlessly capitalist like hyper competitive i've been trying to figure out ways to describe this because just being in the mining industry for almost a decade now and interacting with china i have a ton of respect yeah they are ruthless capitalists like the whole i mean again it's like hard to describe because it is command and control chinese kind of homogenous culture yes they're very homogenous culturally speaking so even if you're this capitalist they get done and all they care about is making money yep that's crazy yep and they're making a killing on these machines because they're making the chips they're making the machines the firmware is an afterthought just because you need something to run right so like

Starting point is 01:34:15 you've yet to see a chinese manufacturer lay into like serious firmware in fact they like put in safeguards to like prevent you from jailbreaking the control your warranty gets exactly um so by getting mugina one is like now we have say over the features that are running on your your mining whether you're a home miner or you're a mega miner having a say in the features is like huge right like if it's doing something that you that it doesn't if the stock firmware is not doing what you needed to do there's almost no recourse because these these manufacturers know they have you by the balls right they're like oh where you're gonna go get where you can get your asics from right so i'm

Starting point is 01:34:53 a big fan of proto like doing doing that like we need more people making more asics and more miners right um with open source firmware if we can jailbreak these and turn these out the features like having different hash boards right schnitzel was on the 256 pod talking about different he's got two different hash boards two different multiple different hash boards right like and there's there's not a little bit like an s19j pro and an s21 i think it was an uh i think a j uh 19k and j okay okay maybe some other but just the fact that like to my knowledge there's not firmware in the past has been open source or even that is supported having different hashboards in it right so generally speaking you get this bitcoin mining asic it looks like a metal shoe

Starting point is 01:35:32 box uh and there's three hash boards in there that have the little asic chips in it there's like 300 chips on each board and then there's this thing called the control board and the control board is like the brains of the thing it talks to the stratum servers it connects to the internet it does all like the logic and then the hash boards are just like purely like it does one thing one thing only it's like hash bitcoin and so you couldn't take a board from a different miner and put it into this other one because you had a bad board and in fact the firmware most firmware won't allow you to run with two hash boards instead of three right like they're like they fix that it's like oh you have three hash boards in here and we only designed the logic as such if

Starting point is 01:36:09 we don't see three hash boards it doesn't work we're not gonna work yeah or we're gonna we're gonna kneecap you if you're not like mining to our pool or whatever right they can do whatever they want it's their it's their software it's their machine you don't you bought the machine but you don't own that machine mugina is now enabling anybody to run the firmware that do whatever you want you want to throttle up and have 2 000 watts or 3 000 watts or 5 000 watts you can do that you can do that with a heterogeneous hash boards right and now with the with the uh emergence of vibe coding like now we can get really cool now we can get really sci-fi and like again that's very bullish on the exergy team and like the home mining and the open source

Starting point is 01:36:50 mining like this is i think going back to like microgrids and having robust microgrids like again making sure no electron is wasted um not only at a behind the meter or off-grid flare gas mining but now like literally at your home like you get as granular as your home making sure that your energy draw from the grid is as efficient as possible via bitcoin mining and it's profitable or maybe not as profitable but you're no we're not worried about profit we're not mining for profit we're mining for the heat yes it's useful yep and it can be it can make your energy consumption cheaper yeah that's that's the way to frame it yeah yeah the mining industry um you know i got into it professionally a little over two years ago um jumped right into like

Starting point is 01:37:38 stratum v2 i've been working on that um but just in general the the lack of engineering open source engineering development and talent in the bitcoin mining industry two plus years ago compared to today is night and day the fact that it's 256 foundation works the fact that you have stratomy 2 with a working group a protocol working group of like big names you'll see when you go on mempool. space right it's happening it's coming the fact that datum exists right like datum was a huge breakthrough right jason hughes just like strategy 2 is taking too long i think rust sucks i'm just going to go ahead and ship this thing and like dude it works it works like tons of tons of people out there are like building their own block templates right they're doing these awesome

Starting point is 01:38:21 things strategy 2 is further accelerating that the thing i'm most bullish on on strategy 2 is it's a rust project and um if you're not familiar with the bitcoin like dev ecosystem there's tons of rust tooling right so the bitcoin dev kit the wallet tooling lightning dev kit the lightning dead kit like it's all there's all rust and so now we have this suite of bitcoin software that's written in this you know same programming languages that's able to talk and interact with each other right i have a proof of concept um where i rotate a coinbase address every block on testnet 4 right so there's like a testnet developer network and so like pulster came into the stratton v2 project and did a pass on like the coinbase and like you know how that did so

Starting point is 01:39:02 now it supports miniscript so i could take wait so what are you like are you giving the mining software an xpub and it's just yeah recycling them every block you take a miniscript wildcard descriptor right so for anybody that doesn't quite understand you have like public and private keys for bitcoin this public key can be used to create something called a descriptor which is like describing the way that the wallet is formatted derivation path all these other things and you can do something called a wild card which just means like this is the high level description of what the wallet is if you start to fill in the wild cards with concrete numbers that's where you get like your addresses right and so i have i have a branch of code that takes a wild card descriptor

Starting point is 01:39:44 meaning like here's an x pub essentially very generally speaking here's an x pub and software programmatically every time you find a block as the pool just iterate one right and by the way like save it off so you know like which one we started on so you're not repeating addresses but it means that every block that was mined on this pool and I have a whole write-up hosted on GitHub. Um, but every block that was mined on testnet four using this pool that I, that I vibed very much. So, um, it's like, I'm way better at reading code than I am writing code. So like vibe coding has been a godsend, like huge unlock, but it works. Right. I have like 40 some blocks on testnet four that it's the same pool and it's the same wildcard descriptor, the same X pub,

Starting point is 01:40:26 but it's a different address that it was mined to in increments of one right so the full like descriptor you get like down to like zero zero one zero zero two zeros or three whatever whatever that descriptor looks like it would just iterate through those every time it was generating a new coinbase on a block find so a block was found and the pool was like cool we found a block let's go look at our wildcard descriptor iterate on one create a new address and now we use that as a coinbase payout so for those who are listening to that like sounds cool but like why why is that necessary um or what is the benefit of doing that if you're worried about quantum computing you don't want to reuse addresses right so that's like the big to do because

Starting point is 01:41:03 everybody loves to talk about quantum now so like if you are worried about this and you're a mining pool go talk to your custodian and tell them that you want to rotate the coinbase address every time it is technically possible right i'm having this problem with ocean where like ocean you sign up you just give them the address and like i get to pay out like i'm like the ux is such where i'm like okay i got the payout but the address that i that i have there is like obviously the miners are contributing shares and so like it's building up a balance and like so if i switch out the address do i get the balance from the previous address or would that ever be paid out it's like no yeah you should be able to just give them an x-pub yeah or like or like a silent payment address oh

Starting point is 01:41:44 absolutely yeah like i mean there's and that's where i'm saying i'm like i'm hyper bullish because like Stratomy two is like the mining rust ecosystem now, like all these other things like lightning and arc and like all these other ecosystems are also using the same language. So there's like this this synergy to use a buzzword between the different projects that it's going to get wild. Like Cashew DevKit, right? E-cache.

Starting point is 01:42:10 There are people that have been mining in a subordinate pool, right? So you have your main pool. i mean it's the last time you're on your shows that's what we're talking about yeah yeah yeah when we pick one plus plus it's it's happening on on mainnet now um and the pools have no idea like you don't have to pool pools are just accounting right a mining pool is just i never thought i'd be working on accounting software like but here i am um mining pools are just accounting and so you have these you can do a tiered structure where the prime pool is doing

Starting point is 01:42:43 its own accounting and there's nothing stopping you from just being a single consumer of this pool and aggregating all your hash rate through a proxy but at that proxy you're doing your own accounting right like perfectly normal it happens in corporate structures you got pnl at the top level you got pnl the different you know organizational structures so like it's just an accounting problem well with with ecash it's a database right it's a database that now gives you a bearer asset right the e-cash token is a bearer asset and with bitcoin mining every mining share is a shit coin it doesn't it's not bitcoin right it's the original it's an iou it's an iou right so they're all using databases to track this all the mining pools are using databases to track your

Starting point is 01:43:26 shares well let's just make the database a cashew database and issue you tokens and now you can take those e-hash tokens and you can go find your liquidity on the market wherever you can find it right and you can realize your hash rate you know probably gains or whatever your liquidity if i want to speculate i'll buy all the hash from you because i think that you know the pool is going to hit a block yeah and you can do this completely separate from what the the pool at the high level is doing you can just do sub accounting and now you have a community right he he punks right my local meetup maybe we're all heating our houses in the winter hey mine on my pool here we'll have ehash tokens that we can exchange and when the payout happens now there's a definitive value

Starting point is 01:44:04 for all these these ious that we have and now you can melt them over lightning and i can you know pay you for for coffee i mean digital credits become such a big meme and i think it's been misapplied in the way that it has but like this is the only form of digital credit that exists is like hash rate shares like fps is the first form of digital credit yeah that's a that's an iou yep it's like you're contributing hash and you're basically trusting that the pool is going to give you a commensurate amount of bitcoin um once it doesn't work though right like the fpps model as the block subsidy goes down the guaranteed bitcoin payout in each block as that goes down you need a proportionally larger bag of bitcoin to float the bad luck variance right yes because

Starting point is 01:44:43 what you're doing as a miner when you go to fpps pool you're saying hey i want you to take all the risk of the luck variance of bitcoin mining right because you might not hit a block or you might hit five blocks right so i'm gonna i'm gonna pay you and there's gonna be some vig there some like that the pool is going to take to basically carry that risk you have the alternative or not the alternative but one of the alternatives like pplns that's what ocean's running with tides uh demand pool is doing a version of pplns where it's like nobody gets paid unless we find a block right um and demand is doing this cool thing where they have factored in uh the subsidy versus the fee right so this i actually audited one of the initial write-ups of this proposal for the schema

Starting point is 01:45:22 where the guaranteed 3.125 bitcoin is distributed normally via pplns right but the fee is weighted so that way you can construct your own template and if you want it full of juicy jpegs and you got high fees in there and i want to have pure bitcoin and no nothing in my block because i don't like jpegs um your economic weight and reward for the mining pool is heavier so you should be rewarded more right just from pure economics like leaving out any other moral principles or anything like from purely economic standpoints if your block template is heavier and juicier in sats you should be rewarded more so this ppl and sjd that demand pool is using accounts for that in in their in their mining share accounting it says hey we're going to pay out when we find a block

Starting point is 01:46:05 but we're going to factor in what your block template looks like right so if you have a heavier block with higher fees you're going to get a heavier weight in this payout mechanism and is that determined by the heaviness of the block versus the expected heaviness of the block or actually really for the heaviness of the block right because in stratum b2 i'm sort of telling you the block template i'm using because what i'm trying to get out there was like what if somebody didn't have the intent to um mine a block that wasn't optimized for highest fees but they just accidentally mined an empty block or something like that like it doesn't the intent doesn't matter it's the outcome that matters absolutely okay as it should be right like it's it's cool

Starting point is 01:46:44 like cool you're telling me you're mining to me a huge juicy block but it's actually empty um well that's not fair and again like it's great that people can create their own templates i'm a huge proponent of that huge fan um but there is there's still an economic reality to mining that like you want to maximize for fees and if you're not doing that if you're opting to do that you should be rewarded less economically speaking than somebody that is filling their block with fees right and it's i also think private men pools are coming so that's a whole nother rabbit hole elaborate not in the way that a lot of people think and that are scared right um i think what you're going to see is so the way the way they exist now is like slipstreams yeah huge example

Starting point is 01:47:28 right like it used to be you know the the the dude that minted the four mega the first ever four mega jpeg right uh that was like a telegram you know hex transaction in a telegram message to somebody at a pool yeah right like that's historically how it's happened private men pools exist like you just contact the miners you can get your transactions in there right um accelerate like via btc has had an accelerator for what i think will be realized because the economic incentives align better right because like fees are great but like running the infrastructure for those kinds of things and like having to manage it that's an operational cost um what i think private men pools are going to realize as is these microgrids that we talked about right you're

Starting point is 01:48:07 going to have communities of people that are balancing their grid with their hash rate and um you and i are doing business in this community maybe we've got b2b deals maybe we just got you know i'm just paying you for the beef um i don't want to pay a fee on that transaction we got we got 100 petahash like what are we paying a fee for we'll wait a block eventually and i know you we we have cigars every night right or every every week like we meet up it's like the physical meat space the the proof of punch to steal a blurb from mvk um the proof of punch means that like i'm not here to screw you over you're not here to screw me over so we can actually wait to close our books out right i don't need to close my books with you and we can just keep

Starting point is 01:48:44 updating this you know psbt transaction of like okay well here i'm paying you a bitcoin oh actually well like let me you know let's let's re-up and like you're actually gonna pay me back or whatever it is but like we don't have to close our books out and because we're on this micro grid in our community at this bitcoin meetup we can actually have our own private mempool where we have zero fee transaction clearing anytime we hit a block this is like a new payment channel it could be like absolutely like you want to i'm thinking like naturally i'm like why not just use lighting or something like that when do you want to splice do you want to use the juicy omega splice that that dusty was just talking about recently right why do you want to pay a fee on that right you can

Starting point is 01:49:21 pay a fee to these mega miners or you can build your own block template and hash with your own hash rate in your community and again if you know that you have an exa hash in your community that gonna hit a block eventually in the next quarter we can just keep a running you know mempool of private zero fee transactions we don't even make it private right the relay will just like people just not pick up our zero free transactions but we can make sure that the node that we're using to build our templates includes those transactions always prioritize our transactions within the community and clears at zero fee because we are already incurring the cost of running the hash rate to pay for that transaction and you're saving on the transaction like i'm trying to think of the

Starting point is 01:49:57 incentives the economic incentive like could this week and well i know you're not a believer in the full blocks right you always take the other side of that bet i think memples memples will always clear eventually is my exactly right but when they stop clearing because i think they're like eventually we're gonna get the point i think they will stop clearly evidence they're gonna be all zero fee transactions in these mining pool communities they're gonna be micro graded zero fee transactions with fat juicy blocks of zero fee transactions because we're already incurring the cost by mining and so again like it's the first time i'm hearing this uh yeah yeah yeah this i didn't drop this one because i'm like because i'm thinking like uh it doesn't like so in

Starting point is 01:50:40 that case it wouldn't perturb the mining incentives because like if you find the block the the pool that mines the block because the miners within that pool are worried about the revenue from that block but in this use case that you're describing even if there's zero fees like you're basically reaping the rewards of the fee outside of the blockchain via the peer-to-peer meet space transaction you're doing so you don't care about the profitability of the block that you bind the profitability the profitable miners the roi miners like they're not going to pick up our transactions but again hash rate heating and if they do it's like all right cool exactly yeah pick it up please because the you know the mempool is clearing um but

Starting point is 01:51:19 otherwise it's you have a strong bitcoin circular economy that's all heating their basements or their houses or their businesses or their churches or whatever it is with hash rate that's enough hash rate to hit a block once a month you want to clear your books once a month for free come you know participate point your hash rate here and you can still point your hash rate to these bigger pools right like i said demand pool will pay you based on the fee rate so you're going to be economically award rewarded accordingly but there's nothing wrong with you like we don't care about the fees right because we're just we're mining for heat we're mining for the heats yeah this is fascinating stuff

Starting point is 01:51:56 mempools will always clear eventually i'll just i don't doubt you anymore well the uh like that what you just discussed where you just explained excuse me we should want that and there's like a where we are and how to get there and bring it back to like vibe coding like i think the sci-fi future that we envision like that's what like i've been getting accused and many bitcoiners been getting accused those of us who have fell down the ai rabbit hole very hard of like oh you're like distracted from bitcoin like don't like what are you doing it's like no like i'm trying to learn these tools and master them to the the degree that i can yeah so they can help steward bitcoin i participate in fifth generation

Starting point is 01:52:40 warfare i'm a propaganda arm for the bitcoin thank you for your service you're welcome thank you for your service uh the like and then just like working with the llms for for media it's like becoming obvious to me like we're going to be able to vibe code yeah these use cases um yes people say don't vibe code like critical bitcoin wallet software yet i'll go out and let them say like we're probably going to get to a point in the next few years where you could probably do that safely and um well you'll have a well-reviewed core yeah right like you still want well-reviewed fundamental foundational software right but but who's to say you can't like train a model based off of that fundamental core and have it like narrowly focused on that

Starting point is 01:53:22 fundamental core and build off that um we're becoming a projectionist and like so this what you just described like when it comes to bitcoiners focused on ai it's like that's what i think your focus should be is like how can you master these tools to the extent that you can project to the llm to build these use cases yeah very easily if that makes sense i mean that you're describing my day job right it's like um i wasn't great i was very average average gary online abg underscore gary on twitter average gary on noster um very average at software right uh but with an llm i know good software versus bad software i've read enough and i've debugged enough and i've gone through the pain of like learning enough that's like the llm is now rapidly iterating faster than

Starting point is 01:54:13 i ever could right because i just don't have the that foundational knowledge people pick up in like cs degrees and stuff of like oh you know just spitting out code right like the boilerplate like the the slog of just like typing it all out like i just didn't have that muscle memory so with ai and with llms now because i know enough to be able to articulate with a good context of like what i want or what i desire from for the outcome and i know how to validate the outcome right that's a big piece i think in engineering and coding is like having designing and projecting something that you can validate and then having making sure that those that validation is the piece that you pay the most attention to right so again like with bitcoin the validation is spin up

Starting point is 01:54:54 a reg test node and like send a transaction right and like does it work or does it not work and you can get to the point now where you can iterate on that transaction and on top of that parallel run a fuzz test to see where this where this vibe kicked up like yep yeah it's you know you've got a swarm of super intelligent interns that will do your bidding and if you're not clear and concise in your meeting in the meaning of what you want like they're going to screw it up but that's where the other side comes in is like you have a robust research and you know socratic dialogue tool to go hey i don't know what you're talking about here can you tell me more about that right and it can break it down and explain to you and give you links to resources on like

Starting point is 01:55:37 go learn about what this means hey go to the bitcoin stack exchange and go read the whole corpus of that sort of sub uh forum on stack exchange and see if somebody there answered this question years ago yep yeah two minutes later like oh yeah somebody did like in november steal that knowledge for me explain it to me like i'm five yeah and it will it will do this right well this was true back in 2016 but like can you go do some further research on all the development progression that's happened and make sure that that's not stale data like just knowing again i had that was the conversation earlier in the world of ai like what are the critical skills that people are going to need it's like first principles thinking and well it's it's the rise of the

Starting point is 01:56:21 generalists right it's the renaissance man now that becomes hybrid and that was there's a whole i think mike hobart wrote a book called like the second renaissance or whatever talking about how bitcoin is going to bring back like this renaissance of of art and science and math and engineering and all this good stuff because we have hard sound money again and ai is only going to further exacerbate this because you don't have to be an expert in everything because you have this tool that can make you expert in the very specific niche domain that you need to be in at that given point in time and you can use it and leverage the tool and grok and understand very in that moment in time and then move on to the next thing right and you just have to be just

Starting point is 01:56:57 the the intelligence becomes the discernment and the the articulation of where you're going like you were talking about the projection it becomes what what am i trying to accomplish here what problem am i trying to solve what are you know and and figuring out the edge cases or the who has solved it already or anything like that is like put the clanker on it man go out touch grass plant your corn grow your field come back and then like you know i want to learn you know ancient greek So it's like, I've got an agent loop, like figuring out what, what is the pedagogy of like learning a language, which I have some experience with that, but not for this specific one.

Starting point is 01:57:31 So it's like, I can go and tell Claude, Hey man, I want to learn ancient Greek. Like, how should I do that? Right. I could have sat down and gone through the slog of like watching YouTube and learning blog posts and like all these other things to go learn that and contextualize it. Or you let somebody synthesize and distill it, which I don't think like there's the danger of like outsourcing um the way that you think but if you know concretely what you're after ai is going to go get it for you well that's that's like one of my biggest pieces of advice is

Starting point is 01:58:01 advice to people venturing into ai is like be very cautious of asking advice of the lm the way i use it is like i know what the output should be yeah and i'm using it to help me get that output yeah and i think that's the most effective way to use these tools these tools at the current state that they're in who's not to say like maybe in the future they will be very good at giving you 100 accurate uh responses they have the hallucination has gotten significantly better over the last year alone it's not perfect but like when i write i pair write the the bent with martin our agent yep and i know what the output is i know what i want to present in the newsletter and if you get something wrong i'm like no you this up like right but like i pulled

Starting point is 01:58:48 this up like again it's a week or so i see some like i was telling you like the the homily and the gospel from mass this week it really stuck with me and come back and subconsciously i didn't realize until like we're having this i i as you may know if you listen rh i become a homeowner for the first time congrats thank you thank you the uh but we just did our like big landscaping overhaul for the first time we've been in the house for like three months and we did it last week and sub maybe i don't know if subconsciously it wasn't subconsciously i've been going out like watering yep like and like but i pulled that up because i have like my headphones and i have my phone i have the hose in one hand i'm like just talking to martin and the other like okay we need

Starting point is 01:59:26 to get this done like run this process it's like yeah yeah yeah it's you know um it's biblical to work the garden that was before the fall of man that we were given work to enjoy in the garden um and uh i i have definitely enjoyed getting the sun and being able like having more of my time to pursue that uh if you haven't yet i recommend planting a tree for each of your children right and uh and you might not see it ever shade you or your kids but your grandkids will sure be happy that they're yeah we uh we actually have to one of the trees on our property is dead so we have to cut that down so we're gonna have to plant a tree i've got three i gotta figure out where we can plant three trees on the property we have a massive ginkgo tree in our backyard oh that's

Starting point is 02:00:08 awesome it's so awesome it's i've become such you're crunchy now i'm not even crunchy i'm just like a homeowner now i'm like oh i gotta like tend to my land like freebie i've been a renter welcome to middle age i'm like i'm out there like in my shorts and flip-flops like watering the hydrangeas and like enjoying the birds and you walk by you're like in the mall chain like there's this weed popping up and just infuriates you oh dude we have bamboo in our backyard too which is good luck yeah good luck this has been awesome i agree thank you marty thank you well before we end um tying this all back to like bitcoin veterans and yeah maybe not speaking on behalf of all veterans but i think for any or maybe speaking to veterans that are out there maybe bitcoin curious

Starting point is 02:00:53 like what is your pitch to them um go talk to your brothers that are already in the space right like there's i guarantee you there's some bitcoiner that you know that's a veteran that maybe from your unit um if you got sucked into all this crypto scams i'm sorry if you got sucked into that uh i actually was talking to a veteran guy this morning he's gonna power wash the house for me and i was like hey can i pay you in bitcoin he's like oh no i got this other coin thing i was like all right man but he wants to sit down and talk right so reach out like people um respect your your your own privacy of course but i think it's never been a better time to like come out as a bitcoiner especially if you're a veteran to just like go and talk to other people in your life

Starting point is 02:01:37 other veterans to be like hey man this bitcoin thing's been super helpful for me right um maybe they've seen that you're winning and maybe they feel like they're not right um if if nothing else you can say hey here's a leg up like this has worked for me um you know if they're if they're drowning in sorrows and troubles um you know finding a community and a purpose again is huge so like if nothing else reach out if you're a bitcoiner and you're better in listening to this right now or you're just a veteran reach out to those you've served with those that you know might be fighting the demons um that we we all came home with um to varying degrees and uh yeah give it a second chance if you if you've encountered bitcoin in the past and you're

Starting point is 02:02:19 like no that's dark mark dark web drug money or it's a huge scam it's not we're winning and you can win with us if you want we're gonna win peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month

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TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #772: Bitcoin Is The Peaceful Revolution with Average Gary

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