TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #125: Alexander Leishman

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Alexander Leishman, Co-Founder of River Financial, to discuss: - Building River - Being a Bitcoin-only business - Dollar Cost Averaging - Complex systems - Bitcoin and American values - KYC/AML hypocrisy - much more Follow Alexander on Twitter Check out River Financial Shoutout to our sponsor: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Alexander Leishman, co-founder of River Financial, a new Bitcoin exchange, Bitcoin-only exchange, to be more specific, that is available here in the States, in eight states right now, they're looking to expand. But beyond that, Alex and I had an incredible conversation of why he started River, why they moved from Alto to River. River Financial is formerly Alto Financial for any of you freaks that may be confused out there.

Recent rebrand, river.com, great domain name. So Alex and I talked about what it's like being a Bitcoin-only exchange, why they're Bitcoin-only, what that allows them to focus on, what they're thinking about building, and then beyond that, why he's into Bitcoin and why we think that Bitcoin

should be framed as an American value. We should be shaming people in America specifically who don't like Bitcoin because Bitcoin aligns very well with the ideals that this country was founded on. So to be anti-Bitcoin is to be un-American, I would say. And I believe Alex would agree with me. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this episode.

We got deep. We did a little drinking. We had a six-pack and some whiskey for well over two hours. Great conversation. Got cosmic at the end. Alex is a big history buff, so we dove into some historical topics as well as a bunch of other stuff. So I think you guys are really going to enjoy this. And, yeah, a good way to ease into the new year.

That's not really easing into the new year. We come in pretty strong, I would say. So, yeah, a good punch to the face for this new year. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by Cash App. as you freaks know cash app is the simplest way to send save money and stack sats and now it's the simplest way to try to grow your money introducing cash app investing we've been telling you guys about this for months now all right you can now stack slivers of stonks if you so please on the cash app i know some of you out there like oh why are we stacking stonks

why are we stacking stonks hey if you don't want to you don't have to the option is there what do like here we like optionality all right if you do want to stack stocks for some reason maybe you just have an affinity for some company and you just want to buy their their stock maybe it's a little too expensive for you now cash app lets you own as little as one dollar worth of that stock okay because cash app is directly connected to your bank account there are no four to five day waiting periods for inbound transfers so you can start investing today their brokerage services are are provided by Cash App Investing, a subsidiary of Square and member SIPC.

As always, when you sign up, use the code stacking sats. That's one word, stacking sats. You're going to get $10, and then Cash App is going to be so kind to send $10 to our good friends at Owls Lacrosse. Owls Lacrosse. So download the Cash App from the App Store

or Google Play Store today, and enjoy this episode with Alex. Had a great time We had a good time boozing About a week ago Happy New Year freaks What is up freaks I gotta take a sip we just cheers

Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt Your boy Marty Bent here On a Friday the most confusing Friday of the year After Christmas um sitting down with somebody i'm very excited to speak with co-founder excuse me the founder of river uh financial alex leishman alex welcome to the podcast thanks for having me marty alex alexander leishman do you like alexander alex alex is fine yeah well my family calls me alexander but everyone else calls me alex yeah too long well this is the second time we're getting together

the first time we met was in riga correct that's right in the baltics yeah we met in the baltics we had to meet over in uh in latvia uh it was a good time it was a good time it was me you nick carter and uh i forget in a circle talking about uh yeah coins or something yeah i was outside of a food truck i can't really remember i think i was drinking a coffee or something a few years ago yeah yeah a couple years ago well it's good to be back in person with you yeah happy to be here a lot is uh what were you doing when we met then i was working at an investment fund and i was out in in latvia to you know just see if there was any cool bitcoin investments going on so a lot has changed between now and then before we get to what you're doing

now let's get into your story how did you get into bitcoin you've been doing this for a while now it seems yeah it has been a while um it's been a wild ride like it has for for most of us I first got into Bitcoin I think it was 2013 summer I started playing around with some web programming and using using Bitcoin to build a you know a fun project for Bitcoin donations because I didn't have to get hooked up with stripe or any real payment providers and I could just have something that worked right away without asking for permission but my interest in my interest in kind the ideas behind bitcoin go back a lot further actually when i was in college as a sophomore i

started reading a lot about austrian economics i started reading just about economics in general and went down the rabbit hole eventually ended up reading the denationalization of money by friedrich friedrich hayek and i was studying aerospace engineering at the time but uh got really interested in these economic ideas and by the time i was a senior in college i really thought you know one day my dream was to build a financial institution outside of the purview of the federal reserve basically offer people money that the government couldn't really control and what what uh what year were you studying this in college um let's see i graduated college in 2012 okay yeah so bitcoin had been around at that point but bitcoin that was launched while i was in college

but i didn't really know about it i wasn't you know i didn't have many friends in computer science wasn't really exposed to that. I think one friend had mentioned it once, you know, and didn't really think, think much about it. Didn't look into it. Not that it matters, but where'd you go to college? I went to university of Maryland from undergrad. Yeah. I grew up born and raised Maryland. Yeah. So Terps baby. That's right. One, uh, what's the, the life of an aerospace engineer major like? Yeah, it was, it was, uh, it was pretty lonely. It was a lot of work, a lot of studying. I was, i think i stressed myself out but overall i mean i learned a ton a lot of math first principle stuff i was really i was doing a lot of work on like autonomous systems dynamics and controls i worked

in a lab there that was the collective dynamics and controls laboratory which is basically how do we get fleets of robots to collectively behave and have certain you know and achieve certain goals so it was pretty cool a lot of uh the internet of things like yeah yeah kind of versus but I'll actually, a lot of these, uh, aren't internet connected. I did a lot of underwater robot stuff. So like AUVs. Um, and so actually those are hard to communicate with. So you need to rely on their, their own autonomy to, you know, to work because they can't really communicate easily outside of the water. Yeah. Interesting. Do you find yourself applying any, uh, the principles you learned in that major to the Bitcoin world? I mean, I think that, I think

like the first this idea of just i think like the you know dynamics and modeling systems is just teaching you a way to think in general which is like taking a simple thing or taking a complex thing and breaking it down into simple parts and that you can kind of uh work off of in bite size so for example you know when you're when you're modeling an airplane or something the first thing you learn is well let's assume this is just a dot right and their force is acting on this dot and how do we how do we uh model this if that's our model you know how do we calculate its its behaviors uh if that's our if that's our model and then you incrementally increase the complexity and i think with um with kind of building things around bitcoin like just taking those lessons has

been really useful because bitcoin is inherently very complex thing and i think a lot of people get overwhelmed by like how much there is to know and i think engineering just in general teaches you to like you know acknowledge you're not going to know a lot of stuff break it down into simple pieces and try to just like take bite-size chunks out of it yeah that's something uh after my conversation with dave column last week something i like tweeted out was like i think a lot of the world's biggest problems stem from the fact that people don't understand complex systems at all or don't aren't even aware that systems are complex absolutely i think that you know my time as an engineer at both in aerospace and and moving into software eventually really

hammered that home i think you know in software the feedback loop is so fast because you build things and you um you just iterate and iterate and you realize that you know every software engineer has introduced a million bugs into software inadvertently by making a simple change that they thought wouldn't be a big deal and then it broke a bunch of stuff and that kind of hammers home this idea that like nothing is really simple right and and more importantly it hammers home the idea that like maybe these systems can't be micromanaged or like you said you want to build a financial system out of the purview of the fed i imagine it's um i don't want to lead you here but i imagine it's because um you don't believe the fed centrally controlling a monetary system

is advisable absolutely i mean if you look at what works in economies it's kind of this emergent behavior from the you know individual actions of people pursuing their own self-interest but i think it's odd that as in the united states especially just speaking as an american we value the ideals of free market capitalism and this hands-off approach to an economy more or less but then the core of our economic system the money is managed by this priesthood almost kind of like communist politburo and i just find the you know cognitive dissonance there quite odd in our society how this is accepted um and goes unchallenged but we kind of as a society also collectively love free market ideas yeah well i think we like the idea of free market ideas

maybe that's maybe that's a more apt summary right yeah because it doesn't feel like we're living under a free market right now specifically because of the way the fed acts right well yeah i mean for sure i think i mean i think you know on the spectrum of like a way an economy could function like if you compare us to you know the soviet union we're relatively free market but you know we still have a long ways to go i totally agree oh yeah it's a sliding scale right it's the the story of the boiling frog yeah um so how do you how do you sort of build this this worldview into your product at River yeah so so I mean so the high-level question behind kind of this whole like money thing is well

if the Federal Reserve isn't you know isn't controlling the money supply who should write or what should it be and I think the the answer that people like me have come to is that we just let the market decide um and so at at river what we're doing is basically kind of the um manifestation of this of this goal i had as an undergrad and that's to give people access to this new type of money that is neither controlled by the government nor controlled by private institutions either when i initially you know kind of conceived of an i this idea i thought that maybe someday the company i started would issue its own money uh backed by commodities or something like that maybe we have vaults full of um you know some

commodity that that backed that backed the currency and you go back to like the 18th or 19th century canadian banking system and they had a free banking system yeah by hard assets i believe yeah and um the united states also had you know this well you know there wasn't a lot of hard assets backing some of the money but I mean we had gold backed monetary system for a long time and and actually so you know I think the long-term goal of River is to basically be this in this this big financial institution that competes with the current ones out there the JP Morgan's the Bank of America's the Goldman Sachs, but an institution that grows up around this new type of money. And that's Bitcoin.

And the initial goal here is to give people access to this new type of money because you can't build a financial institution around money if people aren't using it. And so our goal right now is to build features around building the best Bitcoin on ramp for people in the United States. yeah and you're just teasing a gif of how easy it is to buy to buy bitcoin yeah it seems very easy yeah it is very easy once you're signed up it's so signing up is pretty smooth just there's some kyc information unfortunately we can get into that if you want to talk about regulations in the united states but once you once you're once you're signed up you connect your bank account and you can just buy right away.

And we make that Bitcoin available to you in a few days and you're good to go. You can withdraw it, deposit it on-chain, Lightning Network. And we're focused on giving everyone the latest Bitcoin functionality. And on top of that, you're focused on Bitcoin only, which is a very principled stance in today's world of crypto, quote-unquote.

Why Bitcoin only? yeah so over my time in this industry i i i spent a lot of time playing around with these other coins when i was first introduced to this stuff back in 2013 i remember that was really the first alt season a lot of people yeah the multi the multi algo alt coins like vert coin you had many waves the the proof of stake stuff sort of a pure coin bear coin yeah pure coin there was feather coin aurora coin name coin name coin people are still talking about name coin people still talk about name coin so you know the btce type of alt coins back then btce rip yeah rip honestly that was probably

one of the most reliable you know businesses to ever existed in this space right so for you for instance i know ptc e went down like a year ago down 2017 i think the feds took it down yeah so it's a russian exchange uh well a lot of people think a lot of the mount cox coins went through there right yeah i think that's what really got them is they ended up receiving a lot of those coins and that was probably a mistake yeah um yeah but no but back but yeah a lot of people thought 2017 was great but i remember like back 2013 2014 the adult season was uh it was a funnier one because it was more underground cripsy was the was the up-and-coming exchange big burn big burn he that was the first exchange to list like all the alts and then it was a total uh total cash

out scam the guy just disappeared with everyone's money yeah yeah so you had you had exchanged big burn he was a dude from florida we don't know where he is now did he go to jail i don't think he ever got in trouble no as far as i'm as far as i i know maybe he did but i think i had only had like you know a few bucks on there when he finally shut it he ran off with everything so i wasn't too upset yeah big vern ran off i never i actually never like i never i don't think i was ever on crypts i was just like following on on crypto twitter i was always i was like i was a lurker back in the day yeah just like following people on crypto twitter talking about like trading on that shit um but you had that and then you also had like the the altcoin creators

just completely exit scamming oh yeah yeah my favorite i forget what coin it was with the dude it was like oh like the day he was supposed to launch he just took a picture himself in a robe and like a penthouse suite like took all your bitcoin bitches like then there was thanks and there was also that guy who ran neo and b neo and b it was just like but he raised a excuse me raised a bunch of money to start this bitcoin store or something people sent him a bunch of bitcoin and he just like ran off with it yeah this is have don't don't give people your bitcoin So, well, what's funny here is, so, you know, kind of having gone through that, seeing all that happen, after that, after I started kind of really wrapping my head around, after I started really wrapping my head around Bitcoin and really, which took me quite a while, as most people, I think, and realizing that all this other stuff was more or less noise, you know, I kind of was just heads down for a few years, mostly just focused on Bitcoin stuff. and then 2017 came along and i looked up i had just kind of shut everything else out i looked up

and all i realized all this stuff had happened that i had totally like just not paid any attention to there was this whole youtube crypto scene that just totally took me by surprise and all these people all of a sudden who knew i was worked on bitcoin for for quite a while at that point were asking me about these random things like one chain yeah like or like iota gollum or iota all these tokens and ethereum ethereum tokens and i was like what or like why are all these people asking me about this and i started looking at the prices of these things and the market caps and i was realizing things are getting like crazy here this is like this is out of control so so anyways but at that point i had been through one of those things already right i had been the

noob i had you know tried to buy the you know back when i was younger just buy the new coin that just came out and see if i could get it to pump and then you know sell it on some you know sketch exchange so i saw but but this the magnitude of the 2017 thing was totally different oh my gosh it was insanity man it was insanity and i you know i but so so anyways i mean long story short here is at the end of the day after all of my time in this space i've come to the conclusion that and and and uh my co-founder andrew benchin kind of says this in a in a very well summarized way which is bitcoin is kind of a technical revolution there there is really a lot of cool technical elements about bitcoin but it's really a more of a monetary revolution

there's no new cryptography in bitcoin you know it just it pieces together hash functions public key cryptography and creates this cool economic incentive structure around it all to get the world to agree on a ledger really this isn't this is a monetary revolution and and i think that in in this sort of revolution there's going to be it's mostly winner takes all i don't think there's going to be um this this plethora of cryptocurrencies that get you know are friendly and get along with each other it doesn't really make sense no and and the market has proven that like like we said like many times throughout the last decade the last 11 11 years and even throughout history right the only reason that we have so many national currencies is because

nation states have borders and governments to enforce those things but the world's money was gold and has been gold more or less for thousands of years for most of history you know other than government mandated alternative forms of money or money in places where they didn't really have you know access to gold nobody realizes though this though it feels um yeah i mean silver was a second right silver was a second place i think that i mean just that like people people don't realize like like gold was the money and then it's not anymore well it's funny actually funny story here just happened a few days ago uh i was i was at a christmas event with some extended family members and someone from my someone from my extended family said well how does bitcoin get

its value obviously this is a question that a lot of people in bitcoin have been asked pretty much everyone who's who from people who want to learn more about it and i started to describe well it's scarce it's easily transferable it's durable there's uh a lot of people who want something like this she goes and and then i said well how does the u.s dollar get value and she said well it's backed by gold and i said no it's not she goes wait what then what's it backed by and i said exactly and uh and and and anyways i think it just hammers home i i think actually i don't think people i think i don't think a lot of i think a lot of people i think most people know that gold has always been money but they still think it is right they still think that their dollar is gold

a lot of people still do no i this is a story i've told many times on the podcast like eight out of ten people i asked are like yeah it's backed by gold yeah they think these people still think the u.s dollar is backed by gold yeah so so i mean some people like to call bitcoin or money in general this whole like collective delusion you know they've read sapiens or something like that but and uh but really i think the weirdest thing about it's not a collective delusion no it's not the weirdest thing though that is a collective delusion is that the dollar is backed by gold which is literally a collective delusion and and so it's just it's kind of funny anyways no it's how do we do we have to shake people i don't like i have to go physically

shake people but sometimes it feels like you have to well i think that if there's not i'm not advising anybody to physically shake people i think that there's an interesting i mean this is giving me ideas right for maybe maybe we'll have a marketing campaign the dollar isn't backed by gold i think someone i mean if i was a billionaire i would buy b i'd be buying billboards in new york san francisco in the big cities in the united states and said the dollar isn't backed by gold it isn't people like what people like what i'd be like have a website have like a link to some website explaining it i just linked like the federal reserve they probably have a page that it's not back to like the what the fuck happened in 1971 yeah yeah yeah wtf happened is that is

that a real website oh yeah you haven't seen it yeah it's incredible shout out to um ben shout out to ben i forget your twitter handle right now ben prentice uh mr cool b shout out to mr cool b um uh wtf and um so if there's any if there's any billionaires listening who want something fun to do maybe put up some billboards what the fuck happened in 19 wtf happened in 1971 that's the website um him and uh insane clown car oh okay yeah awesome yeah um that's a great project yeah it's a good one um another another cool thing that would be has anyone made a u.s debt counter back but denominated in bitcoin uh i don't think anybody's made an official counter but i have seen somebody uh quote the u.s national debt in bitcoin terms recently it

was absurd it's like multiples of yeah more than 21 million for sure yeah yeah many multiples yeah it was uh insane like 100 i believe above way above 100 million yeah i'm sure that's insane uh it's getting it's getting precarious too like we're seeing capital controls that we were matt and i were just talking about on rabbit hole recap earlier today like did you see uh the lines outside the german gold dealers this week as yeah i did they're about to reduce the amount of gold uh which you can buy at an anonymous level by 80 from 10 000 euro to 2000 euro yeah i saw that and i think a lot of what a lot of people don't know is that franklin roosevelt confiscated of owning any real amount of gold when he was president with his executive

act 6102 and this has happened in the united states not just not just be up way beyond this way beyond just blocking purchases of gold it was literal confiscation of any amount of gold over token amounts for rings and jewelry and things like that. And a lot of smart people were able to avoid that because they knew how to get around the system. But I actually grew up with my grandma, who was not a fan of Franklin Roosevelt, telling me that Franklin Roosevelt actually confiscated

my great-grandfather's gold, her father. And so we actually have a poster of Executive Act 6102 in the River office on the walls so that people don't forget. well that's another thing we're talking about this has happened before in history and they're setting absolutely like that's you have to like look at the again going back to frogs boiling water you have to look at the small incremental steps that go towards the extreme events like executive order 6102 and this move in germany is one of them like they why why do they want to kyc at lower levels just so they have a registry of people that own gold and they can go knock on

their doors and get the gold from them at some point sounds familiar right yeah yeah when have they done that in germany before yeah but but it's not only in germany like let's not pick on germany it's happening everywhere oh yeah argentina i mean you see it in argentina you see it in every i mean at the end of the day every government paper money collapses at some point it's never the the the u.s dollar is one of the longest lived paper currencies i think to have ever existed i there were probably some some longer ones but i can't think of many yeah this this people will contend this but uh maybe the status average life expectancy of the of a fiat currency is like 27 years us dollar yeah it's been disconnected from gold since 1971 so it's at

least almost 50 years now now there is actually an interesting counter argument here or there are interesting arguments that i've heard which is and i'm not saying i agree but it's like money doesn't matter that much because assets at the end of the day are what really matter and money is just to you know money just keeps the pipes of the economy flowing um and you know i think it's an interesting thought experiment to think well you know what will happen if the u.s dollar i actually don't agree with this but i think it's i think it's an interesting point to consider is At the end of the day, if tomorrow all of our dollars became worthless, we would still own our houses, we'd still own our cars, we'd still own the goods that we own, but our cash would be totally worthless, which is terrible. But most of the economy isn't cash.

However, who's going to be hurt the most? It's going to be anyone who's saved in cash. all these like anyone who's safe for their retirement all these companies with stockpiles of cash and you know people are completely vulnerable to this right now they'll have to sell off their assets uh to continue operating well that's it well do they really even own those assets so we found this out in 2008 like after the banks left after the banks fucked up the economy they confiscated everybody's assets all their all their houses like who really owns those houses right in those assets and um physical goods at the end of the day are you know you can

only might makes right yeah with that stuff yeah that's true but like you can have like with cars you can have the dealership map tree with like an impoundment service or something like that yeah what like yeah what do you really own at the end of the day yeah i mean in bitcoin kind of solves it right because with bitcoin at least it's easier to hide it's it's easier to Keep secret from society You know what you own But even then If the government comes after you

And knows you have some amount of bitcoin Let's be honest most people are going to give it to them Because they have a lot more to lose than their bitcoin So you know I think there's this interesting kind of Kind of like Oh I hate to say that Is there a need for civil disobedience these days

When it comes to that shit Well, I do. I do think that civil disobedience is powerful, but I do think that it's important. So I think it's important to be realistic, though, because about, you know, society and most people and what most people are going to do. Right. If you have, and this actually gets into kind of my own philosophy about the importance of Bitcoin, but I think at the end of the day, like, I think Bitcoin helps a lot, but I don't think it's a cure for problems with the government, right? Problems with a corrupt government, for example. Like, I don't think Bitcoin is going to solve, you know, a corrupt, a developing country's corrupt government, right?

and so you know it can just help and it helps create a more stable system so like my whole bitcoin like hypothesis is that bitcoin doesn't fundamentally completely solve like any societal problem in its entirety but it leads to the development of a financial system that makes it a lot easier for people to opt out of which is like a check on how much i can get away with that that's my philosophy behind it all i'd say i tend to uh align pretty closely with that too yeah like it's it's just a better option right at the end of the day there will be services that build on top of bitcoin that act in shitty ways but again the nature to opt in or out to use your voice to exit the system is always there and the incentives again this is you said

this is a more monetary social phenomenon than a tech phenomenon the incentives of that the tech enables uh allow you to to exit easily which is better than the system that we live in now where you're sort of forced to be surveilled and have your purchasing power eroded over time absolutely and i think actually i think it was nick sabo who had a really great tweet about this which i always remembered which was if the door in is bigger than the door out be very very cautious like be scared that's a great that's a great uh quote right and and i think actually arthur hayes had a i think arthur hayes may have said something similar when he was talking about trading when you're getting into a position you need to know how you're going to get

out of it right if you're a trader um and so that's kind of one of the philosophies that kind of i live by and it's also what i try to you know one of the things that i'm hoping to maintain at river which is like i want to create this financial institution where people can trust us if they want to if they choose to right but they can get out real easy and i think it's like important to maintain that that's that's what i think is bitcoin really brings to the table is that dynamic yeah and how do you think it's doing so far bitcoin yeah bitcoin the if you had to i think if you had to gauge expectations in in 2013 against where we are today surpassed uh i think come up a bit short i think the recognition of bitcoin has totally

surpassed my expectations for it i don't i don't know about you um the attention it's gotten over the last five years is beyond what i would have imagined in terms of what the industry looks like i think we're far behind and and there's a lot of there's a lot of improvement left i think it it's tough right and this comes back to like this whole civil disobedience thing in this law thing one of the biggest threats to economic freedom in the united states i do feel like is this surveillance state that the Bank Secrecy Act created back in the 70s, which every financial institution is forced to abide by. We are too, unfortunately. It's the law.

Now the question is, what does abiding by it mean? What does the law mean? And it's a complicated thing. um, do I believe that people should inherently be allowed to buy Bitcoin without anyone knowing about, without anyone knowing about it? Like, absolutely. Would I love to be able to provide that service as a company? Absolutely. But, you know, the laws exist and we need to abide by them as a regulated institution and it's but i think it's on us as a company and it's on all of us as like a spool i'm speaking to americans here but this applies to europeans as well and pretty

much anyone in any country at this point to push their legislators and push for a system that you know isn't this massive surveillance drag net uh that that is responsible for our money because money i think at the end of the day is um how we express our desires and how we move our money is how we express our desires and uh if that's all can be seen by the government i mean that's pretty scary now it's frightening not just scary it's frightening yeah absolutely because we have it again and harp on this a lot too we have a decision to make we can go one of two directions the chinese surveillance state exported to the rest of the world or we break free it's not going to be easy to break free it's hard work absolutely how hard is the work you're on the

front lines yeah i mean here here's here's the it's a very complicated dynamic here because you know there's there's there's a lot going on on one hand you have these big incumbent financial institutions who from my time in the industry so far going to these compliance events, things like this I'm kind of the weird guy

who will ask like has anyone tried to repeal the Bank Secrecy Act and everyone just kind of like laughs because what a hilarious question why would anyone bother asking that I do that on purpose because I know people will laugh but no one's ever I know they've never heard anyone ask that question either

and I want them to have heard someone ask, right? I want to just plant that idea like, you know, this is a democracy. We can change these things if we want. I think that there's a bit of Stockholm syndrome. I think that a lot of these financial institutions and the people in them have been in this for so long that they don't consider

what an alternative world would look like without this massive regulatory system, this massive surveillance system that they that they have this whole you know department at a company like bank of america or jp morgan or all these companies dedicated to appeasing right that and then we have example after example after example of hypocrisy of the people who are writing these laws and the banks that are supposed to be following them just completely breaking the rules like hsbc creating uh specifically designed teller windows so that mexican drug dealers could

push their briefcase full of unmarked bills through and launder money the kyc the anti money money laundering was overtly routed around by the bank itself absolutely to think that like these these systems put in place to protect you from money laundering terrorists drug dealers pedos it doesn't fucking work it works against you yeah and i think that goes back to the saying that actually funny enough i saw on a meme once but it actually has always stuck with me which is the petty thief goes to prison but the big thief becomes a feudal lord right and i think that's what that's just some like rule of society is generally that's what we end up seeing and really the dynamic that's been created here is that these big companies one they can afford to break the

rules right they have all the money they have these government granted monopolies basically it's an oligopoly a bank charter is effectively a license to print money and at least you know for the bigger guys and getting one is incredibly hard if you're not part of the club and we've seen this actually with silicon valley silicon valley companies basically have been unable to get bank charters and i think there's a number of reasons for that but i think part of the reason is that these big guys don't want them to because they kind of know what that means for them and also this whole compliance system is great for them because the more expensive that they can make it to compete the fewer competitors they'll have right bank of america can afford to have 100

million dollars a year in compliance costs a company like mine who you know has a moderate amount of venture capital funding who's lucky enough to have that which is rare in itself i'm in the Valley, it's not rare in Silicon Valley, but in the United States, if I'm just a guy trying to start a business, that's just completely, uh, and I, and I don't have millions of dollars of, of money from investors. I can't hire a chief compliance officer. I can't pay a lawyer $25,000 to write an opinion letter, uh, about, you know, what I'm doing. And that's basically what this requires. And to these big guys, these costs are nothing, right? But to anyone who is a small competitor it's you you you cannot operate unless you have millions of dollars in financing

this is the free market at work freaks exactly exactly it's it's crazy um but people put up with it people put up with it because i think it's kind of stockholm syndrome i think that's a lot i really like that um that framing i think that you know if the founding fathers came today and they'd be pissed i think that we need i think that we need i think the dialogue needs to change i think the narrative needs to be flipped on this surveillance state and i think like snowden kind of kicked that off but i don't think it's really continued to gain momentum unfortunately um i think like when it comes to messaging messages people send to each other they get that because I think people can understand, I think the mass, you know, public can understand why

privacy for sending, for your text messages or your emails is important because everyone sent a message that they would be horrified if they knew like everyone could see, right? People can understand that. When it comes to financial things, I don't think people are as, weirdly, I don't think people are as sensitive about that because they grew up in this world where they just assumed uh everyone of the government and the banks could see all their transactions and i think the the biggest piece of evidence here is the venmo app i don't know if you've tried venmo you open that thing and you start using it and you're like why am i seeing all of my friends

transactions to other people you've seen people pay rent the default setting on venmo is public the default setting on venmo is to put the most popular from what i can tell social payments app in the united states is to publicly broadcast that's false it's cash app is it cash out disclaimer oh well that's good news that's very good news i think they're beating them now that's awesome well they're number one finance their app in the finance section that's great that's well because cash app doesn't do that disclaimer that was i mean yeah cash app doesn't do that for that reason yeah um sponsor disclaimer that's great news but yeah i mean so anyways that's enough of my rant about this no keep ranting okay sure i can well so what i think is that the narrative

needs to be flipped here and we need to push back against these rules and say not just i don't think it's just enough to say like it's bad for privacy i don't i don't think that's enough it needs it needs a stronger narrative and i think it needs to be that it's anti-american i think it needs to be that it's it's basically like we just need to label this as you know it's basically like communism right if you look at this i mean what would a communist what would a you know what would the communist politburo what would the communist uh government in china the soviet union want they would want full control over the financial system to see everyone's transactions that's what we have in the united states the land of the free and i think we need to figure out like how did it get

this way and who is behind this and why did this happen uh and unfortunately until until some big names help push something like this we're not going to see any any progress what big names are you thinking i don't know i mean i think if there's any hope it's weirdly i mean maybe what's going to be interesting here is to see how silicon valley decides and not that it's one monolithic thing but i think there's a set of shared values in silicon valley that um privacy is important even though it doesn't always manifest itself in the products uh i do think that but if that if that value is anywhere like i know this sounds really weird but like it's sounding weird it sounds weird but here's the thing right land of facebook

and but here's the thing the land of facebook is also the land of cryptographers right it's also the land of uh privacy advocates it's also the land of the eff so it's like you get the best and the worst right but what's going to be interesting here is does silicon valley try to just go around the financial system by helping promote something like bitcoin uh or you know i mean maybe libra's doing this although i think i don't know it's never gonna launch huh i don't think it's ever gonna i would be surprised if it launches as well but you know or are they gonna like just really play ball and try to get that bank charter right or charter and try to join the big boys in new york and and be part of the club and i think

that's what i think what we're going to see here in the next few years is the answer to that question what are you leaning towards i think some people are definitely going to try to play ball and some people are going to try to go i think i think even though it sounds really weird i do think facebook is actually not playing ball here and they are trying to do an alternative although i disagree that that alternative is that great but i do think i do have to give them props for trying something that is clearly pissing off the government right um because you can't argue that they're not pissing off they are and now i do think though what square is doing uh behind behind bitcoin is very fascinating to see and i'm very happy to see such a big company help support

something like bitcoin square however they're gonna be i mean it's tough right because they're their their their main business is dollars you know they're connected to the dollar system and uh is bitcoin gonna are they going to be able to get bitcoin to be this thing that can you know help replace themselves well yes i'm very encouraged again disclaimer disclaimer very encouraged as well um and i'm hopeful and i guess it's a good segue into again bitcoin focus like do you think it's imperative to be bitcoin focused because of the opportunity cost of focusing on other projects uh like is time is it that dire of a situation where you need hyper focus on bitcoin to help it fortify itself against outside attacks yeah and sorry for not

answering the original question i think we digressed here but basically yeah back to the you know why are we bitcoin only right um and what's the importance of that i do think that if there is going to be a money separate from something that the government prints it is going to be bitcoin and my hypothesis is as a company if we're going to help take this you know help build help take the financial infrastructure around bitcoin to the next level we have to focus exclusively on that and there is one there is just the the principle of it there's the philosophical reason and the economic reason i believe bitcoin is going to be the winner but even if you believe that there are going to be multiple winners

it's still kind of it's still kind of rational especially for a smaller company excuse me to do what we're doing because as an engineer i'm trying i mean i'm just trying to reason about the amount of work we've had to done had had to do right now to support bitcoin as well as we do already which is you know native segwit we built our own wallet from scratch so that we can do all this cool multi-sig stuff later and it's super flexible and we can uh support we support lightning deposits and matras and we're just our goal is to have the absolute best you know custodial bitcoin infrastructure that can hopefully someday enable a bunch of non-custodial use cases as well. If we had to do that also for other coins, I mean, that wouldn't just double

the engineering work because doing it for Bitcoin is probably the easiest out of any of them because we have all these great standards. We have all this incredible work that's been done over the years, building libraries and making sure these things interact well. Like I talked about in my Twitter thread about partially signed Bitcoin transactions, right? We have these standards that just enable all of our infrastructure to work well together. I mean, I can't even imagine having to do something like that

also for Ethereum and then maybe like, you know, EO. It's just the amount of work and the complexity of our infrastructure would, it wouldn't just double, it would quadruple or 10x and it'd become a mess. Yeah, well, and let's focus on Ethereum now.

Like I'm going to pick on Ethereum because of the fact that they're doing two hard forks in three weeks. If somebody runs a company, they're going to do a hard fork on new year's day yeah um yeah for their for their uh difficulty bomb yeah like what would that be like for you if you had to take on that if you were offering ethereum services and had to take on that burden yeah and this comes back to our discussion about complexity right it's like oh well it's just a simple upgrade nothing's gonna go wrong just like

you just need to be around for an hour to switch it over it's like well one that's annoying one that i have to do that at all on new year's day and i can't pick my timeline for it but two i'm like what like anyone who's ever run a production system knows that every even just a minor update can cause catastrophic problems and you need to be prepared for that and it's just it's just very strange that there's this such lax attitude towards kind of forcing upgrades on people hard forks specifically because hard forks are not backwards compatible and imagine have like uh complacent users who forget to upgrade because it's fucking new year's day now now here you know here's the harsh reality though about a lot of these companies is

i mean i'd like to actually know the number of companies that have to worry about upgrading because if i had to guess it's very few because most of them are using these uh ethereum well there's a inferior there's also um alchemy now i think coinbase just tweeted they invested in alchemy recently which is basically this managed blockchain service because it's such a pain in the ass to keep your ethereum nodes running people are just outsourcing it to other companies and you know it's the free market at work and so what we're seeing is you know it's not hard to run a bitcoin node you know people have run bitcoin nodes and haven't upgraded it for years now and they're fine uh but running an ethereum node is we're seeing companies like

like alchemy and like others raised you know eight figure sums providing businesses to run nodes for companies it's mind-boggling to me it's like it's crazy and so like companies are paying the plot has been lost yeah it's it's nuts it's nuts so um so that's what ends up happening right if i'm a company and i'm building a service on ethereum i end up just outsourcing it because i don't want to deal with it but then at the end of it at that point why are you even fucking here i mean what have i gained none of my end users can run those nodes or they they can't if they're very technical and want to deal with it but it's a trusted fourth party it's a trust you and amazon it's crazy it's crazy it's like not just amazon yeah yeah exactly it's a fourth party like we're

in my you know actually we're not my company actually river we're self-hosted yeah i'm not I'm just saying in that example. No, but in this example, totally. But I mean, that's another interesting aspect of this whole blockchain thing is you'll find that almost all these companies are running on AWS or Google Cloud. And we made a decision early on

that none of our critical infrastructure would run in any cloud because we had to ask ourselves this question. can we make a very short list that's completely complete that that's complete of who can access our servers right we can as a company we have a very short list of anyone who could possibly access our servers if we were running on aws or google google couldn't even give me that list aws couldn't give me that list and so if we're building a bitcoin company how can we seriously operate uh with by running on computers that theoretically hundreds or thousands of people

that we have no control over could access why do i have the feeling that's the norm though it's totally the norm because i mean to be fair it is a huge pain in the ass to run your own servers for a production system our servers are you know high quality servers sitting in a 2000 pound vault, uh, in a secure cage, in a secure data center, right. We're take security to the max. It's expensive to do it right. And the reality is, unless you have the resources to do that, you're not going to be as secure realistically or, um, you know, or as reliable as AWS and Google.

And so if you're making like a social media app or something, it makes no sense to self host probably unless you really care about this and you're willing to dedicate the resources. But if you're building a financial institution based on cryptographic material, you need to be prepared to do that the right way. And that was our theory. If we don't do it now, we're never going to do it.

Because once you're in the cloud, getting out is incredibly difficult. And we just wanted to do this the right way. Are you guys happy that you did it? Very happy. Very happy so far. It's been a bit of a pain. I mean, there's problems we've had that we wouldn't have had in the cloud, but we have good people.

And we also just have the engineering mindset at the company to run our own stuff. And I think there's an interesting culture it also builds when you're running your own servers and you're not just a cloud company because you become a real engineering company at that point. You have your own machines. You're doing your own stuff, and it feels more real. right and going back to like flipping the narrative on uh we're talking about flipping

the narrative on kyc aml but flipping the narrative on this it's actually funny we're talking about aws have you seen their commercials like running them oh yeah like all the companies that are running yeah i saw that yeah it's like a super bowl ad yeah they're like they just list netflix uh airbnb you know and for those companies yeah i mean there's no way they're ever getting off that's like ingrained in the narrative right yeah how do we flip that narrative like oh you should be self-hosting that's a good question and i don't i don't know the answer and i think my experience with this as a company is it's it's quite a i mean it's it's still very difficult to self-host the answer might be making the answer might be a disruptive competitor that provides

the space and makes it really easy for you to get your own servers and install them and just removes a lot of the friction for it i mean for example we had to find our own vendors go through these sales processes to get these servers get them get them tested and all this stuff it's a lot of work it's not like a one click by my server set it up kind of thing and i mean the answer might actually just be like a company making it easier for people to do it and yeah it's just become more of a trend yeah it's just got to be a trend and i think i think it will flip back somewhat in that i think that there will be a subset of companies that realize that it's a mistake to go completely cloud only one because it's like in many ways less secure in some ways

it's more secure because you have this whole security apparatus of aws protecting your servers instead of your own maybe one guy if that right but um uh it's i think people are we're going to see in the next next few years more um more attacks from like potential insiders at these companies we already saw kind of one from aws with capital one i think a few months ago yeah and i think we're gonna see potentially there might be some like watershed thing that happens right that'll make people go wait maybe this isn't a good idea you can hope but then you like see things like equifax and all that shit and just comes and goes and nobody gives a fuck yeah it's tough i don't think it's i don't think it's gonna dramatically get better anytime soon frankly

i think but i do think that hopefully we'll see a transition to some some more hybrid stuff where some of these like cloud only companies and i think we're start we've actually i've seen rumblings of this happening in the cryptocurrency space at large is a more hybrid thing where people have some of their own servers and they outsource some of the stuff that needs to like be more elastic to the cloud, right? So for us even, like, we use some cloud services, but no core user data is on there. None of our core applications are running there, you know?

Our internet requests are proxied through G Cloud because they, you know, have some good DDoS protection. But we're not tied. Like, if G Cloud went down tomorrow, our company would still operate, right? We'd still be good. We'd lose a few little kind of tools here and there that we host on G Cloud, but, you know.

Not a deal breaker. Exactly. yeah now that's um it's interesting man do you are you interested in anything like urbit does that interest you at all i don't know much about urbit yeah all right post cut accidentally had to cut something out there yeah um but for good reason right is that good reason we're talking about uh meetups here bit dev socratic meetups you started one in san francisco yes accidentally mentioned somebody who was at one and uh these socratic meetups are big on privacy so we're not trying to dox people that are attending these meetups yeah yeah i accidentally let something

slip didn't want to make want to make sure that everyone's privacy was protected although i think you know they wouldn't have cared much but like to stick by my own rule yeah so i i didn't start the original bitcoin meetup in san francisco i'm more tagged along about a year year and a half ago to help bring this bit dev style meetup that is in new york to san francisco and it's been pretty big success i think yeah i mean i thought we were spoiled here in new york but you guys get like greg maxwell and peter showing up peter willis showing up we there's a lot of there's a lot of talent in san francisco yeah we're really lucky to to have so many very knowledgeable people so uh what was the most recent uh socratic meetup like what'd you guys talk about

so the most recent one we talked about some mining news a lot of bitcoin pull requests things like that uh the biggest thing that's been happening in bitcoin obviously has been this bit taproot stuff and peter's been doing a lot of work on bit taproot there's been this whole effort to have this big review process it was i think it was around six weeks eight weeks yeah started by andrew towns november 1st yeah it was so it's been about basically like a two-month process where hundreds of people from around the world uh basically created these sort of subcommittees or subgroups to review bp taproot try to build stuff on on it and just probe it basically and it uncovered a few very important things actually one of the things that uncovered

was this whole beck 32 malleability issue and and the fact that it potentially has some Implications of dip tap root and there needs to be some modifications. They're long story short the Beck 32 address Serialization that like segwit addresses use the one that starts with B1 B1 addresses at 16 versions though, right? 16 versions like you could drink a piece there man. I'll we'll talk about that later. Okay, go into this one Basically, it has these this sort of this error detection feature feature part of part of the standard and the goal there is you know let's say that I'm reading my my bitcoin address over the phone to you Marty and you write down a character wrong and you paste that in under in a and you send a bitcoin transaction to that address it will detect that

now it'll the the encoding will detect that you got a character wrong and potentially even give you the information necessary to fix it now one thing it actually fails to do in this weird edge case is, and let me just see if I remember this right, if the address ends in a queue, you can insert an arbitrary number of Ps before the queue, and no errors will be detected. No chain, no error detection will occur, and that's because of this constant that was chosen the equation in the formula to calculate this these the random string basically the string was was not an ideal choice and if it had been another any other choice other than i think it was one and if it had been anything other than one like would be fine but unfortunately because

it's one there's like this edge case and it's just kind of annoying it's not like it's not like a real it's not like a game it's not a showstopper but it just means that with taproot now there has to be this enforcement of the length of these addresses whereas the goal was hoping it could be like arbitrary but now it has to enforce that

it's either a pay to pub key or pay to witness script length exactly as opposed to arbitrary length and I don't I don't I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the deep implications of all this right now off the top of my head but anyways this was this was something that was

discovered in this review process and that's actually you know so it's really proven its value that this you know this was something that needed to be addressed uh the malleability was discovered earlier in the summer but the fact that it had implications on bit taproot was something that was uncovered and so stuff like that so it's been quite quite good i'm very hopeful that taproot will materialize next year and this harps back to complex systems right absolutely little small changes you have no idea how it can affect everything so i guess it's a good segue like do you hope for ossification at some point um at the protocol level yeah i mean that's a good question like how much how much tinkering like beck 32 like great upgrade segway's great we get

we get lightning and all that but like how many like is there a point at which we uh we fuck around too much and create like too much of a a weird externality that we don't know and can't control yeah now luckily things like beck 32 are in codings and so they're not at the protocol level directly um but like taproot is a very this is very clearly a protocol um a protocol update soft fork and it's hard to say you know these these upgrades are made with a lot of foresight put in in the sense that there are all sorts of version flags in different parts to make it extensible and upgradable down the road with a lot less effort and you could argue that's not a good thing because because it's easier to change it is more likely that more if it if it's easier to make

changes that means it's easier to introduce problems now the counter argument would be the changes that are being made easier are mostly soft fork changes so it does keep it backwards compatible and I would argue that the fact that there's no I like what you said there the fact that it can be changed will

lead people to make bad changes I think blockchains like Zcash and Decred that have like inherent governance mechanisms on this built in i don't know about zcash definitely dcrad but like you're just like leaving an achilles heel there zero day a social scalability zero day where somebody will just propose something because it can't be proposed and that may not be um advantageous in the long run right potentially yeah it's a tough it's a tough thing because you know satoshi left these upgrade paths for us and

And because of that, we've been able to make some of these changes that have been quite beneficial, SegWit and script updates. And so far, this extensibility has proven quite useful. And if there's any argument against ossification, it's the argument that cryptography is... is a is a cryptography is built on a foundation of sand basically

the fundamental idea behind cryptography is that there are these problems that we hope are hard yeah it's entropy at the end of the day entropy exists but one of the problems is that we can't prove that the problems that we think are hard

are actually hard and we've seen this over the last few decades and this is just my opinion and i'm sure if you ask a core dev they'll have much more insight into upgradability and paths like in paths to upgrades and things like that but one of the fundamental things that i think is important to acknowledge is that if we look at the last 30 years of cryptography the cryptography that was considered government standard in the 90s early 90s like des encryption is totally broken today they tried to upgrade it with 3des that's broken and and it's because these problems that we thought were hard became not hard because of either mathematical breakthroughs or computational

breakthroughs and with i don't want to get in the whole quantum computing debate but quantum computing aside we still can't prove that certain problems that secure bitcoin are hard and there might be a world someday where we need an upgrade path to keep bitcoin secure and the argument to keep that around uh or is the argument to keep a culture of upgradability is that you know we might need to someday for the sake of the existence of the system no i really like that explanation yeah um yeah as close to as ossification as possible but if if need be have an upgrade upgrade path right well that's my view yeah and but but i think if you compare bitcoin to everything else the conservative slow methodical approach to any change is key

to success and i think we're going to see this more and more over the next few years especially as all these chains that have been like the hot new thing constantly update change update and then I wonder why no one's using it. Imagine if everyone had to upgrade their TCP implementation every time there was an internet upgrade. How many people would... Would the internet be around right now?

Right, exactly. And we've seen this with, I think it was called Gopher, right? Gopher was this top-down designed network protocol that was better than http right more more uh more efficient and i think my understanding is there were like constant there were updates and versions and http was vanilla it was simple but it just worked and that's what won at the end of the day people it's hard for people to grasp that the bitcoin doesn't need to be and it's especially hard i think for for you know quote unquote smart

people because a lot of smart people in a dumb thing do good things right and a lot of smart people think that they can understand the complexity they think and that's where what Friedrich Hayek calls the fatal conceit oh dude slashing it's the next thing sharding slashing all that yeah you can you can manage all that complexity let's just add complexity it will get better yeah so going to the Hayek quote that you're going to go into yeah no I mean I think that that doesn't just apply to economics um this is economics but it's also technical systems and i think that there are a lot of people out there who still think that they they can reason about these insanely complex systems and it's going to work as they

they hope and especially in the cryptocurrency world where we see this approach with ethereum especially um i think it's very uh misguided and what we see with bitcoin is you know two years being spent on what on the surface looks like a relatively simple protocol upgrade right bip taproot but two years of intense you know dedication to this upgrade surfaces all these like little things that you know we didn't realize and and it's just a totally different approach whereas ethereum is like let's just rewrite it all and we're gonna you know if and this comes this is actually reminds me of this joel spolsky one of the founders of stack overflow he has this interesting blog post about why he's got he's got a great blog you should read joel's

blog he's got a great blog and that he always talks there's a famous blog post he has which is never rewrite software and one of the things he points out is one of the fundamental things people get wrong is if you couldn't write it right the first time what makes you think you're going to write it right the second time uh and as opposed to writing it in a way that is not perfect but works and then iterating and iterating and iterating smoothing out all the warts if you just throw that away and rewrite what you end up with is a completely new system with a whole new set of warts right and this is what uh elki turkle uh who did the chain code residency he uh brought this to my i never heard this phrase before the second system syndrome um basically uh talking

about ibm when they i guess they remade a a system uh from scratch as well and it failed miserably um but that's like e 2.0 it's second systems like what makes you think the world computer or the second time around, it's going to be A-OK. But at the end of the day, I think the market will determine. I think we'll see this play out in the market. I think we're already seeing this play out, especially on the Ethereum side of things. Companies are getting more and more frustrated with it.

We'll see these new Web 3.0 blockchains that have been hyped for the last three years roll out and deliver things that are kind of underwhelming but still compete with Ethereum and ETH 2.0. well that's a big question right like do we have another alt season like i think i think the sec i think the sec made it impossible to have a true another alt season yeah but like that like not even like sec enforcement like how is the market smarter than it was in 2013 and 2017 like is it like how many greater like if bitcoin wasn't flipping in 2013 and 2017

maybe one more alt cycle but if it's around for 15 years and yeah somebody's come at the throne for almost two decades and like it's very all right you're trying to spin up a new cryptocurrency all right get the fuck out of here it's hard to say i i don't think that let's let's sec aside i don't think that we'll ever see a world where people don't try to make new free money the allure is too tempting it's so easy to before it was a world where the every government would try to make its own money because why wouldn't the government try to make its own money right i mean it's basically free money to them so why wouldn't a person or a company try to make their own money if the if that gate's been open uh why would anyone not try you know

you could well obviously there's a whole principle approach there like this is the principle of it right but completely why would not why would a completely selfish without any sort of uh any sort of you know philosophy guiding them why wouldn't someone try to print their own money if they could well maybe they've seen others fail so many times like how many all coin bubbles do we need to see before people realize you're not going to take out bitcoin i think humans have short memories though there's always going to be new suckers right there's always a ponzi scheme being taken down there's always but maybe i mean i think it's i think the magnitude's gonna the frequencies and the number i think are going to be a lot fewer yeah and you know we might just see

it in we might just see it manifest itself in other ways i mean it morphed from this public crowd sale ico thing the sec clamped down on that it became sell to institutional investors and try to find and the dynamic became basically you had the smart money getting in before retail funding the initial idea getting a big cut and well and not even retail getting getting the dumber getting the dumber institutional money that wasn't as well connected bumping up the valuation and then uh eventually what happens is coinbase then lets the institutions dump on retail right because that's effectively what coinbase is now it's a pocket shop once all the public crowd sale icos are over have been on the market like all those are already inherently on the market day one

so what so now what's the path for any any ico that was only given to institutional investors when it when it started well eventually it gets listed on one of these exchanges like coinbase and where do you think those coins are coming from i mean everyone who owned it was some institution and people buying it are coinbase's customers and basically just letting like institutions dump on their customers coinbase is the lube for fucking retail but you know you now there's a counter argument here and that's well that's what an ipo is for for equities and that's not wrong right now this really just comes down to do you think these coins are going to be long term be worthless or not now coinbase obviously doesn't um but if someone like you

or i does think they're going to be worthless then the integrity of allowing institutions to dump them on their customers is disgusting it's questionable right but it's different different views different takes well let's get into why this is immoral right let's get into pre-mines i tweeted out earlier like i think pre-mines are zero days on social scalability pre-mines are from first principles if you do a pre-mine you are fucked from the beginning and from a first principle standpoint if it is not a nick carter actually just wrote a piece i skimmed through it haven't read haven't read as thoroughly as i should but i just saw that he posted a piece that like proof of work fair launches are the only fair launches that you'll see in cryptocurrency

and i very hardly agree with that and i very viscerally agree with that and he actually proposed a new uh way of launching coin which is doing pre-sale asics which makes sense to me again i haven't read it thoroughly enough but that is appeasing to me when you compare that to an ico and a pre-mine it's just completely like an ico pre-mine makes no fucking sense it's not fair at all it it from first principles it is bastardized it's funny how because in 2013 that was like if you did a pre-mined altcoin pow launch you were the fucking scum of bitcoin talk.org well it's funny i was about to say the exact same thing that and i think we see this in like just human in society is the the the line starts to slip right what used to be totally

abhorrent and unethical becomes the norm and i is that is that okay well you know i think there's two ways to view it and i i don't think i i fundamentally and i'm not i'm not saying pre mines are bad because we decided in 2013 they were bad i really do think from first principles the fairest way to distribute these types of digital assets sorry beauty on is via proof of work yeah that anybody can participate in yeah i agree i totally agree um there's i mean there's also the counter argument though there's the whole free market narrative right and that's like okay well if you believe in free markets then people can do whatever they want people can do whatever they want right now the counter argument to that is well there's just because you can do whatever

you want doesn't mean you should and i can i still have the right to say that i think it's unethical uh so i don't know i bet i think i mean i guess i'm a realist i think at the end of the day if people are allowed to do it they're going to yes and if we're just relying on shaming if we're just relying on shaming or like kind of this um or ethics to dictate like that people never do it that's not going to be realistic i think what we have to see play out is and what we have been seeing play out is that economically a pre-mine is relatively detrimental to the success of of the currency and with bitcoin its biggest one of its biggest advantages is that it has no one to go after it has no entity that has that got the initial capital it has no founder it it just

is and then on top of that it has no again it has no no founder only that can be pinpointed by a government or right somebody but it also has no founder i could dump on the market like we're finding this week with ethereum one of the co-founders is dumping 92 000 eath yeah to support his video game people are pissed at him but it's like fuck you guys like he he worked he got this you can't tell him not to sell those coins right what did you expect you made the initial offering such that he was going to get a large tranche and do whatever he wanted with it yep with it excuse me yep yeah and you know there's still i think probably a number of eth whales who just got free coins in the early days and didn't do much to contribute

at all to this to its success you know you know waiting on the sidelines to dump at some point yeah it's just like fascinating watching the the ethereans basically hope for altruism from these people like hey you should be investing in the system you should be giving that money back i thought that was silly yeah i i did think that that was odd that they would uh like i mean at the end of the day i mean i get where you're what you're saying but like you can't you can't expect that yeah like asking someone once it's their money to be like well why didn't you know it's like okay i don't know um yeah i'm just like a pragmatist yeah but for me what i think and i hope i hope plays out is that you know what we see is that this founderless kind of this founderless

coin without these pre-mines what that attracts development for its own that attracts developers because they're purely interested in working on it uh is what is going to win out is there uh is there a funding issue in the blockchain world is there a developer funding issue that's a great question i think that it's funny that there's this argument that if there isn't funding we're not going to be able to you know support the ecosystem and build this thing out but it that that line of thinking runs totally counter to the entire world of open source software like no one paid linus torvalds to build the linux kernel uh now you could argue that companies now sponsor developers to

contribute to it as it's become widely adopted but still you know it's just if people care about something they're going to work on it in the open source software world and it I think it's like it's they're putting the cart

before the horse like funding doesn't attract interest from open source developers interest attracts funding yeah we're seeing that with square crypto chain code block stream exactly exactly and you know massive i like i cannot begin to express how appreciative i am of of chain code and square crypto and things basically because there are you know some

deep-pocketed individuals who truly care about the success of bitcoin garage in japan digital garage yeah all over the world we're seeing this and we're and that is truly sustainable development uh in building a sustainable open source development environment i think what we're going to see with a lot of these um vc funded chains is there's nothing keeping these people around once they vest they don't really care about the success of you know you know dfinity or anything like that like maybe there's like a few people doesn't that fucking piss you also like i feel like me personally i am in this for liberty in the digital age i think it's an imperative that we fight this battle bitcoin has people who are ride or die and i don't think

anyone else really has that and doesn't it piss you off like being a ride or die like what like fuck you people yeah it does it does but at the end of the day like i also acknowledge that that's like counterproductive i mean we the only way we're going to win is if we win for merit like on our own merit the free market is going to be the free market and yeah like i see these people raising insane amounts of money for dumb ideas and it does piss me off totally absolutely on what i think is a lot of marketing nonsense uh and frankly sometimes lies about what their chains are capable of doing it definitely pisses me off and it pisses me off that they're suckering people into investing in that but at the end of the day the best way to beat that and shut it down

is to just outperform it and build build the proper build the proper system so what's the future of river financials product suite look like where are you now and where do you want to go you said you were talking about non-custodial options for your clients in the future that's appeasing to me let's talk about great question yeah so right now what we offer is uh buy sell deposit withdrawal uh on lightning on chain in eight us states we're launching across more of the united states next year you know thanks to regulations gotta go state by state but it's a grind but we're getting there and uh so and then on top of that you know we're trying to attract people who are you know interested in in responsibly

investing or buying bitcoin long term so we really try to encourage recurring dollar cost averaging buys we actually give you a discount if you set up a recurring purchase so um you know if you buy one one time it's the fee is a little higher than if you set up an automated an automated buy and then uh one idea we're toying with is not just an automated purchase but an automated withdrawal so uh you know something you can hook up your hardware wallet set it and forget it and it just gets deposited there on a regular basis yeah it'd be dope be pretty dope right yeah and then yeah so you know we're playing with some ideas there we and again this stuff is only because we this stuff is because we're focusing on bitcoin right because what you think about what does it require to do

this it requires us to be able to interface with your hardware wallet store your x pubs derive the addresses that you need for your wallet all with our back-end infrastructure and um you know we're prepared to do stuff like this now i can't promise a timeline on this you know definitely some work but we're working on designing it now and uh so so high level you know anything that touches the dollar system inherently has to be custodial we can't at some point you're trusting us to once you give us the dollars to let it be the bitcoin so there's there has to be trust and i do think that society i don't i don't think anyone wants to live in a society where you can't trust any institution right a society like that is is chaotic right right because that's the that's

basically what it means it's a total chaos because no one can trust anyone else yes you want trust in the world you don't want to you want to be able to verify right like trust is good at the end of the day absolutely yeah so we want people to trust us but i also want people to not have to trust us right that's kind of like the key thing for us is i want i want people to trust us i want to build a company people trust but i also want to build a company people don't have to trust and so uh you know so in terms in terms of products we built out down the road so there's the whole um there's the whole custodial side of things where we're offering you know people secure bitcoin accounts where they can store their bitcoin and then integrating with their own

self-custody you know uh down the road so i gave a little hint at one of the products which is you know, auto withdrawing with a recurring purchase. But if you think about what we, where we're going to be positioned is, um, you know, if our users have lightning nodes, for example, right. Uh, we could auto withdraw to their, um, to their lightning node, right. With a key send, for example, and then they'll have what they could have. We can open big channels with them so that they could easily, um, uh, pay through us, right. We can provide, we can provide convenient services for our users who have potentially you know casa hodl setups right where they have multi-sig bitcoin wallet they have a lightning node um but they need someone

to route with them right they need they need uh someone to buy bitcoin from they need someone somewhere to sell the bitcoin all that stuff or services all the core services that we provide that we provide now that we can earn revenue on are things we could provide if we don't hold someone's bitcoin and so that's how we're thinking about this now i think that's an awesome approach and focusing on dca particularly first one of the podcasts we're an hour and 24 minutes in i'm gonna give myself props for that um i matt and i actually got dinner with a friend uh a week ago and he was telling us how he had like as much as we've been shitting on coinbase that's probably the best feature they have is is easy dca and he told us and he forgot about his coinbase dca and he opened

up the app he's like yeah i fucking just passively accumulated more than a bitcoin yeah like so like these dca services are actually great for whether you like it or not for for not you particularly listener whether you like it or not for holding the price up and creating like passive buying demand right yeah exactly and we think that we actually as of we think we have the best product here one not because we offer just the vanilla dca but we offer you know a discount if you do set that up and then one thing we're also very focused on that pretty much from what i can tell most of their companies in the space aren't it's providing very insightful data around the performance of that so um on river.com you can log in and you can see exactly your unrealized

gains and losses relative to the dollar now some people don't care about that because they're just focused on the number of bitcoin but at the at the end of the day people have to pay taxes people have expenses and people need to know um their realized and unrealized gains and losses in dollar terms and we have give you a very clear picture into that and that's a huge service yeah i think why isn't that yeah like why isn't that a thing yeah i can show you after the podcast i can show you what it looks like yeah how'd you get river.com that's a good question is that hard we had to buy it that's for sure it wasn't free but we went through a big process we we had to rebrand a few months ago and we wanted we were at alto financial we were the domain was alto dot financial

we use that this rebranding process as an opportunity to buy to to acquire a brand and a domain that was more premium kind of delivered trust uh when a user kind of went there for the first time we also did a lot of user research and found like a lot of people don't understand anything other than a dot-com uh it's like confusing when people have to do especially for most companies it's not a big deal but if you're a consumer financial product not having a dot-com is can be a challenge and often even sometimes doesn't work in certain forms so we wanted a dot-com and we wanted a name we just loved where the trademark was available and just kind of symbolized things that we thought were important so with we had our we had a logo

already that we really loved and actually the um the logo so my co-founder and my parents are actually from west virginia and so there's a bridge there the new river gorge bridge this is a very beautiful bridge and that was actually part of the inspiration behind our logo and so river you know new river gorge kind of just all flowed together flowed together yeah there's also a lot of puns you can make with river you know we keep the money flowing and uh all sorts of stuff right yeah it's like a river flowing from fiat to bitcoin makes sense exactly very fluid we're a path talk about liquidity a lot in this uh this space exactly there's a lot you can do with it and so far the reception's been great people really love

our name well it's a dominant domain name to get river.com is pretty huge yeah yeah it's yeah i love it yeah i think do you think it'll be worth the investment along i think so and if you think about it actually from a company perspective um domain purchase especially with something like that it's an asset on your balance sheet you know it's not an expense either so it's not like we lost value as a company by spending the cash to acquire that it's it's it's valuable in and of itself just to own that but i think at the end of the day like years from now when we look back because it was a hard decision do we to acquire a premium domain like this but i've actually been through this before with a company that i helped start up a few years ago uh freewill.com we were

debating do we buy this domain because it wasn't cheap and in hindsight years later it's like of course we should have bought it like that's our brand it's like such a big brand and of course we want the dot com right and i think we're already we already feel that at the company like of course we should have bought river.com like it feels so good to be river.com right no so like it it does uh bring an aurora of uh legitimacy yeah or of legitimacy yeah not an aurora aurora aurora coin yeah aurora coin your history buff too man i love history i love history what do you like about history i think that it's fascinating that so many of the things that happen

today that cause people to freak out are so mellow compared to like the almost the exact same things that have happened in the past but to like much larger extents and i just think like and so i love studying history because i think one like truth is stranger than fiction you can't it's hard to find books that are as interesting as real things that have happened in human history um and i think also you know it's trite to say but history like i don't know where the saying came from history doesn't repeat itself it rhymes right but i think if you understand history you can very clearly much more understand the world today and also things that happen that are out of the ordinary don't throw you off as much and you have things to relate it to and like oh yeah

you know this kind of happened and you know like the mongol empire blah blah it's like for example like a specific example today is like you know a lot of people in the united states they go crazy about something that happens in politics or something the president says and you look at like leaders throughout history and there's been like so much crazier people than you know donald trump and it's like it just kind of puts things in perspective and that's what i like about it and especially in like the bitcoin world or the cryptocurrency space in general it's also funny to see all this stuff like people reinventing the wheel with like financial history um defy yeah like defy right revolutionizing it man yeah i mean what like my favorite example

actually i don't know if you've heard of this book called the history of money and banking in the united states by marie rothbard it's a pretty cool book i recommend anyone listening to check it out but uh one of the coolest it was actually a footnote i noticed in there just randomly i don't always read the footnotes um i'm not a total nerd but but uh i was reading a footnote on one of the pages and it mentioned how in maryland in the 1700s they the state issued this currency but you only got the currency if you burned an amount of tobacco to to earn it proof of burn baby it was from what i can tell the first proof of burn in history i thought it was like counterparty or something like that uh and i just like i love like learning that something that i thought was

new and novel and today was centuries old they tried it like hundreds of years ago and like kind of worked proof of burn baby yeah what's your favorite part of history yeah that's a good question you know i weirdly i really love mongol history yeah dan carlin's hardcore history do you that yeah so that got me really that got me hooked dan carlin his four-part series of the mongol empire is ridiculous absolutely i reckon that the way he describes how strong they are in horseback and how like strong their forearms were yeah it just makes you feel like it makes me feel like the lives we live are just so pussy really i feel like a pussy yeah like you know all of these people before were all of these you know men were doing these crazy things right you

know and i'm not saying it doesn't fit into my it doesn't fit into my ethical framework of how you should behave right like not saying like i want to go like conquer a country or you know destroy cities or anything like that but um it just like puts like my life into perspective and like how people used to live and i just find it fascinating that these guys would you know he taught i mean dan carlin talks about how you know these guys were before jengis united the mongols and invaded china they were they were so poor that they had to wear clothes made of the skins of field mice right and they're rotting off their bodies because they didn't really shower much or you know bathe and then by the time they invaded china and jengis had united the mongols they invaded china they

were like richer beyond their wilder wildest dreams and just like just just this story of this like nomadic horse people become like controlling half the world in a span of you know a couple decades is insane yeah there's something like 10 in the world is gang is yeah it's not really descendants of gang is kind of so yeah and then there's also an interesting i think uh and there's also so much crazy stuff we didn't learn about in school right i mean on on like kind of the females in history there's a lot of criticism of like females in history not being recognized but you know and i learned it turns out that the most powerful history woman in the history of the world was probably uh so jengis's son ogaday he was a drunk and

died early his wife took control after he died before and there were years years went by before they could find a new con uh because they have to have this whole ceremony and takes a long time to bringing together everybody but like this woman controlled the mongol empire for for quite a while and she was probably from what i can tell the most powerful history woman in the history of the world she controlled basically half the world at one point in time yeah no what was her name i don't even know i don't know exactly um i forgot there's like there's this book the secret history of the mongols that kind of goes through the the history starting with jengis and all this stuff is named in there but the mongol history also hasn't really come to the surface until recent years

because the soviet union heavily suppressed it and suppressed i didn't know this yeah so um actually in mongolia the capital is called ulan batar which means red hero like com like red like commies here and uh in mongolian and until kind of the fall of the soviet union people didn't really like learn about jengis they didn't learn about like these mongol heroes uh you know they're not heroes to other people but to the mongols they are and uh and also there because of that there wasn't as much kind of digging into the history of it all and so a lot but there's been a lot of work recently uncovering more yeah it's funny uh and then people complaining about hillary clinton writing about a book about powerful women leaving out margaret thatcher oh did she yeah

that's that's pretty nuts man there's yeah yeah it this comes back to just like you know these weird things like people just love to forget about history or i don't know it's crazy oh that's crazy it's crazy but yeah we live in a fuck time is it feel to you that like most people aren't paying attention i don't know we live at like the bottom of the barrel of i don't think we live in the bottom of the barrel are we in dark times like do you can you only tell dark times in retrospect can you can you proclaim them to be dark times while you're experiencing them or will this be something in 20 years like holy fuck how the assholes live like that it's a good question i don't know i'm not going to pretend to know the answer i think my personal opinion even though

i don't know is that things are actually i'm an optimist i am too i mean i think that if i've learned anything over the years i think especially in this space there's all this kind of people love to be doom and gloom right and that attracts me you know you know it was the gold bugs and and it's like you know the government's gonna collapse right we need to be prepared and yeah like being prepared is one thing for the for the worst case but pessimists have never changed history no you know and so like i don't i don't know like i don't really like to think we live in something terrible time i think we're actually pretty good i mean as far as i know everyone i know and i know people from a lot of walks of life i mean their lives

seem better than they were 10 years ago yeah i mean just think about what we're doing right now speaking through these metal devices that we're gonna yeah put on the internet later and i'm somebody who can be pointed at and be like oh you're doomsday or like uh you're pessimist and yes a lot of my content writing is like what the fuck's going on but i think it's from my perspective it's it's literally just an effort to get a different perspective out there because i don't think totally a lot of these perspectives are getting the the attention that they deserve i totally agree i mean i think it's like i i think bitcoin that the fact that bitcoin exists the fact that more people are learning the fact that social media exists even though

it's a double-edged sword i do think it'll be a net benefit in the long run even though there's some short-term terrible things that are happening i do think everything is getting better and going up to the right but i do think we are also at a very critical junction in human history and a lot of things that need to be paid attention to are not being paid attention to that's what i try to do here i totally agree i think if i had to sum it up in my own words it would be today things are going really well but if we don't solve some of the critical cracks that we that we see in our like foundation of freedom uh and especially in this country um you know some of the overreach of the government if we don't start to push back against

that harder than people have been already we're going to see some real problems and a lot of these issues are unfortunately bipartisan and hard to find support on either side of the aisle to help i mean for example you know in our own industry this whole financial surveillance thing you're going to be hard pressed to find a republican or a democrat who's going to help carry the flag on that one because all someone has to say is what about 9-11 and uh yeah well and exactly and that's my concern my concern actually isn't like the part my concern is i think partisanship in the u.s is like an issue um but my bigger concern is the issues that are bi-personally agreed on uh that that neither party is willing to to carry the flag on

why not i'm sorry i was just i don't want you to think i'm rude i just put a beer order in to get some beers delivered to the studio that sounds awesome um because we're running out here um i honestly think that some people have just i think some people have just like lost the message i don't know i think honestly also just like a lot of people just don't have balls balls these days you know it's just like people are so afraid to challenge the system and i i don't know if i'm being naive and thinking that they were any more likely to challenge it before but i don't know i mean it seems people are just much less willing to

really speak their minds well the system is designed in a way to incentivize people to do that right like you've heard about today like debt is good yeah do your job consume send your kids to daycare right complain about politics uh drink beer watch sports just live your life the way they want you to yeah exactly i mean i think i don't know if you've ever seen alex jones but he i think he's the guys i mean honestly i gotta i gotta be honest like i i think he's just i think he really does a good job that regardless of like what you think about you know politics i think he does a really good job at um highlighting the things that people take for granted in the way people think people shit on alex jones he's

called a lot of shit out that's happened throughout time and i gotta give him credit though he's not afraid to say what he thinks and that's one guy who's not afraid to say what he thinks he's not afraid and he will get shut down he will get kicked off of youtube and he will still say what he thinks and he will not give in and i think we need more people like that in the united states they're turning the frogs gay yeah putting chemicals in the water but then you but then you google atrazine and you go to the studies out of berkeley and other schools and you realize they actually are these chemicals actually no i'm not saying the government is you know necessarily putting atrazine in all of our water supply but on purpose but you know you you learn

about this stuff and you're like well atrazine is actually one of the most common pesticides in the united states and they do studies and it turns frogs from aphroditic and it's like oh that's interesting um i mean there's just all this stuff that yeah he called out like the cia spying on people in the nsa spying on people like decades ago oh you're crazy they're not they're not yeah they're not leaning in on us i mean him and joe rogan were arrested in texas back when george w was governor or was president for protesting the iraq war and you know we see today kind of the fallout of that um that big you know what i would categorize as a big mistake in u.s foreign policy the cost of it all and the second order consequences of intervening in this

part of the world you know this comes down to the complex system stuff right and you think it's but anyways um where are we getting oh you know yeah but it's like this whole like media industrial complex which is just like consume watch sports don't talk you know don't don't poke the bear don't cause problems you know just just fucking just just deal with it watch movies go see the actors and holly brad pitt has a new movie you want to see that right yeah and if you don't people might make fun of you you know what we put out 20 marvel movies last year we got a 20 second for you right now i mean you didn't watch the award ceremony last night where we gave ourselves awards what's wrong with you we gave ourselves awards and then we got up there we accepted them

and told you not to fly on a fucking flight don't you dare fly don't eat meat yeah yeah don't don't do what we just did all night we all flew in on private jets but don't you dare fucking fly you peasant yeah exactly yeah you know um you know we need to disarm the rabble we need to disarm the rabble peasants yeah you don't deserve guns think of the children yeah crazy crazy psychotic fucked up people don't kill people with guns just yeah yeah it's it's crazy i mean i i i do agree with you it's like i do think we're seeing what this i think we're seeing the and it's weird this wasn't the case i think like 15 years ago um where it seemed like we did have a healthier kind of political um are you kidding me do you remember post 9-11 with freedom fries and all that shit

i remember that's true actually i remember being forced to vote as a 12 year old whether or not i want to go to war in iraq that's true yeah like in my school really granted i went to yeah i was in south carolina at the time but okay but like it was literally we ate freedom fries and there was like a vote like there was rabble rousing at the elementary school i went to wow well maybe i mean maybe this is my own bias just being older now and being a kid then but yeah i don't know i don't i don't know the solution i mean but i think the weird thing that i've seen develop in this country and recently and maybe this was the case back then but there was a different flavor of it was there's almost this like self-righteous puritanism like this like class of like you know

self-righteous puritans who will punish you for sinning but sinning isn't like religious in nature anymore it's like you know it's questioning the yeah i guess like woke capital it's woke capital baby it's yeah woke are you woke yeah it's like questioning your wokeness it's like the bible thumpers aren't really like but thumping bibles anymore so instead it's these like woke people thumping bibles but they're not bibles it's like government rules or something like that i i don't know it's it's like they yeah no it's cool yeah it's kind of how i feel tell us how you really feel self-righteous i don't know i'm just like i just like any self-righteousness stuff just kind of really pisses me off people getting on their high horse about this that or another yeah well

you're speaking to somebody likes to get on their high horse about bitcoin a lot that's true that's okay that's one but that's one thing that's the acceptable one yeah but you have to be you have to be i've come to find especially as i've been shilling bitcoin more yeah it'd be aware of how you can come off as self-righteous self-awareness is gay be aware be aware yeah um what do you think i mean you know are we are we in worse worst case today than we were 50 years ago 50 years ago or i don't know 20 what's the right time frame to be comparing to i i've gone back to this story many times what spooked me out what really pushed me to bitcoin full blast was when i worked at uh when i worked in finance i worked at a fund my boss the cio who i worked under was born in soviet

russia raised in soviet russia immigrated to the u.s when he was in the mid 40s in the mid 90s and so i really focus on the change since 2001 since the patriot act and that's one thing he noticed he moved here in the mid 90s and i've said this many times on this podcast he he cried in the airport because he couldn't believe like the amount of freedom he felt when he yeah landed in the states and since the patriot act and what's going on with the tsa and all the screening in the airports he like warned me he was like marty like this is turning slowly into what i ran away from like be be wary of that and that's wow really what i've really just opened my eyes to be like all right alarm systems alert like we gotta figure out like i do

not want to end up like soviet russia i don't want gulags come to america yeah it's um and it comes back to the stockholm syndrome stuff i mean we're so desensitized to the tsa that existing now you know that south park it's like bend over let me wipe your asshole yeah you know it's like it's like okay i just want to get on my airplane i let's hurry this up my wife my wife hates this but anytime i have to go through the x-ray stand i stand up there and just give the double bird like in the thing while it's going around she like she's mortified by it she like waits like we're not allowed she pretends like we're not together we'll get through security sometimes i don't know because every time it's just like fuck this like you're radiating my body you might

start getting randomly pulled aside yeah that'll happen well see here's the thing i and i even feel it on myself right i used to travel a lot for work my first job out of college and i used to i used to try to you know how you can still opt out if you want but like they make you wait and you go through the metal detector and get like the full body pat down and you know um i used to do that i used to do that and then i just got worn down i was like this is just too much work it takes too much time and like and honestly you start to realize it's more complicated it's like because it's not that guy working there who's like the enemy oh it's the system it's like this system you're like i don't want to give this this dude's already had a long enough day at the tsa like

i don't like what am i doing like i'm just pissing this poor guy off who makes whatever 15 an hour or something and it's just like and you just feel helpless and you're like okay i'll comply that's why i think the double birds in the in the machine that helps because are very it's in the central database somewhere no and it's just effective everybody can see it like i fucking hate this thing and you should too yeah um i like that yeah do it join sending sending those messages is important right yeah you're like the small response version of this is you've been sitting at a meeting and something's not quite right and someone just says something that everyone else actually thinks and all of a sudden it just changes the dialogue yeah

like i think you know we just need more more of that in society yeah it's just like someone willing to do that thing that just lets people like unlock what was kind of locked in aside in their brain yeah if the tsa forces you into that radiation machine give them the double birds yeah put it loud and put it hey you've got free speech here hopefully still middle finger i don't think you can get arrested for that put it up yeah tell them send a message not even to the tsa but it's another like it goes on to like a lot of people like to blame the bankers i would blame the central banks a lot of people like to blame like all the commercial banks and yes they're definitely culpable for very bad stuff but at the end of the day they're working a system and incentivizes them

to work in a certain way like you need to change the system yeah you can't fault the individuals working within that system don't hate the player hate the game exactly i mean you can hate the players if you want but it's not going to change anything you got to change the rules of the game if you actually want to change how the players act and so yeah i mean that that's the that's the million dollar question how do we do that well you create a system where incentives align better yeah i think we would both argue that bitcoin is that system i agree we're almost two hours in i think we keep going let's do it you've got what i got time you gotta get out of by six gotta get out of here by like yeah 4 30 4 30 all right we got an hour and 15 minutes then

let's do it should we do a pee break let's do it all right and we're back after a pee break and whiskey run yes we're gonna close it out here i want to focus on flipping the narrative into not supporting bitcoin is anti-american and bitcoin is as american as you can get let's let's dive more into this absolutely that's what i think the narrative needs to be in the united states at least i mean i think every country around the world has needs to take its own approach but i think by and large a lot of developed countries follow the example of the u.s and this is the most important place to prevent things from going south for bitcoin and for this idea of people choosing what money they want to use.

So, I mean, and in my own personal opinion, I consider myself, you know, American through and through. The ideals of the United States, in my opinion, revolve around individual liberty and human freedom. Right, that's what, did you see what came out today from the court proceedings from the youth developer, Virgil? no in North Dakota well it's actually pretty pretty important distinction to draw here too like he the judge specifically cited text that he sent his parents about property owned in Puerto

Rico um being out of the U.S. and then like wanting to denounce his citizenship as reasons to deny him bail um and then also tying in the fact that he told his parents that he and this is again uh up to this point hearsay from the government and it has been proven with any hard hard data as far as i can tell but it's what the judge is saying that uh one renounced made it apparent that he had property outside the u.s wanted to renounce the citizenship and then was willing to help a state enemy facilitate uh around capital controls now that is not how i view bitcoin i mean yes it is definitely possible to do that but i view bitcoin as more as like an american ideal freedom enabling technology um for individuals in america like

i don't want to go uh i i i still have faith in the ideas of america and that we can make america a better country moving forward like i don't want to leave me to help help enemies or anything like that yeah and i and you know one of the things i love about bitcoin is that everyone loves bitcoin for their own reason, right? There's also, I think, you know, we both know the people who hate the idea of the nation state in general. I'm not one of those people.

I love my country. I think the nation state is probably the most stable situation for the world to have is a collection of nation states. And I love the United States. And I think Bitcoin can help make the United States a freer, more prosperous, more stable country. And that's why I, that's part of the reason I love it.

I don't want to say ironically, but Bitcoin would do that by making the nation-state smaller, right? Yeah, less powerful. Yeah, less powerful. Reign in its ability to be overbearing. Right, and that's what Bitcoin is, right? Like we've been discussing it. It's a tool to which if you want to, you can enter or exit as you wish. And if you do enter it, it is a sort of leverage stick against the incumbent system that is controlling you.

Yeah, and I think it's important to point out. I mean, what is Bitcoin, you know, the arguments in the Senate or, you know, in the House against Bitcoin have largely been around money laundering and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, I think that's secondary to one of the bigger arguments. and i forget the name of the of the congressman who's talking about this but you know he kind of got it right which is that bitcoin challenges the supremacy of the federal reserve right it challenges this idea that the government of the united states can control money and this is a debate going back all the way to the founding of the country with you know the the national bank and the first national bank and alexander hamilton and andrew jackson and and all the debates around

that and you know the debate's clearly not dead but uh has been pushed to the back ground the back burner for quite a while though it has because you know the central bank narrative won at least for the time being don't fuck up the money freaks history has taught us this yeah there are many lessons throughout history and look at what they're doing um you know after nixon there wasn't even gold behind the dollar and well in the system particularly number two um another hour uh the operations that the fed is embarking in the last three to four months uh it's hairy like they've had to increase the size of their balance sheet at a pace that has been seen since layman collapsed the head of

excuse me not the head of the bis but analysts at the bank of internet national settlements came out and said that the fed was on the brink of experiencing multiple long-term capital management systems or excuse me long-term capital management like uh explosions within the hedge fund world which is insane yeah i mean you can call me crazy i do think i do have this beyond just bitcoin logically making sense to me i feel like it's almost fulfilling this weird prophecy that has been kind of written in the stars for the United States but also for the world and I don't know why I believe that but it just feels right and one of the one of the charts that I show you know

investors or other people when I try to explain my company is the Federal Reserve balance sheet and an arrow pointing to where Bitcoin was launched and it's right at like this initial explosion inflection point right it's right at this inflection point on the federal reserve balance sheet and uh yeah you know it just feels like it's hard to describe to people who aren't in bitcoin but i think a lot of people like you and i share this it's just like it's just the right thing it just needs to exist and it needs to happen and you know with my own company my parents were like well why are you doing this i was like the company it just needs to be built right and i totally think i could tell this company you know

it's totally possible that it doesn't work out it fails but it's more than just like this logical thing there's almost this weird gravity gravity yeah this is exactly i think it's the best description there's this gravity just pulling this thing and making it grow and it's hard to explain why but like people in it just kind of know it needs to if you would have told 22 year old marty that he'd be hosting a podcast and writing a daily newsletter about bitcoin and be like oh fuck yourself yeah the fuck like what yeah i'm not i'm not trained to write as you can tell i there's a lot of typos in my newsletter i'm sorry i try to do the best i can it's truly from the hip write it once don't read it post it i'm not a journalist uh as you could tell too i

don't speak too good yeah sometimes like yeah somebody just put a mic in front of my face like it's just been this gravity i'm like ah all right if nobody's gonna produce this type of bitcoin content for me i'm gonna try and produce it the best to my ability exactly for other people and and but that's the mindset in bitcoin and that's what i love is that you know i think all of us at one point or another we're sitting around asking ourselves why isn't anyone doing x y or z and the answer was because i'm not doing it if not me then who exactly if not me then who and that you know that's just that's what i love that's what i love about it yeah and it's crazy the amount of crazy smart people it's gravitated towards it right yeah absolutely that's

what keeps me saying and i'm like all right maybe this makes sense talking to smart people like you i mean i i when i when i'm running these socratic seminars in san francisco i feel like the dumbest person in the room man it is you know there are some insanely smart people working on this stuff and yeah writing code for it every day and it just blows my mind the caliber of people who've decided to devote the majority of their life to this and especially these bit devs and so crowded the bit devs meetups like there's people that nobody knows about or fuck nobody knows about them they're not on twitter they're not on github there's like smart nerds and they like they are focusing on this and can provide crazy insight and people don't even know about them absolutely

there's the anonymous people there are these really talented anonymous people working on this stuff and it's i don't know of many things like that do you think we hit a tipping point where everybody's like ah why would i ever go work at a bank like i can i can work on building btc pay server out or something like that this is an interesting question so this is something that i chew on and especially relevant to my company is um this thought experiment let's say bitcoin becomes you know the biggest the most widely used money around the world right there's still probably going to be banks right and they're still probably to make a lot of money so i don't know So I think today what we're seeing is a lot of very smart people who, for a lot of very different reasons, really care about Bitcoin.

And they're willing to put their economic self-interest in a way over their own personal interests. Or sorry, they're willing to put their own personal belief in this and value that higher than their own economic self-interest. because the majority of people working on Bitcoin stuff could probably be making more money working either in big tech or finance. Because at the end of the day, Bitcoin, there's money in Bitcoin, but... There's not.

There's not that... I mean, you know, with the market cap of Bitcoins, what is it now? Like, what, $150 billion? I mean, okay. But, like, Apple, you know, has earned over a trillion dollars in the last 10 years, right?

Like, you know, there's a lot of money. There's more money elsewhere. So... Yeah. but that's also what gives you hope to stay around, right? Is that there's people, it just attracts something.

But I think that's what makes it so promising is that despite the lack of quote unquote funding, all these people are willing to dedicate their life to it. Dev incentives, man. We're the dev, we're the dev incentives. Yeah.

The dev incentives are philosophical and that's something that you can't replace. That's something you can't ever buy from somebody. And it pisses a lot of people off. Yeah. Like, that's how we explain it's like yeah it's just philosophically driven they're like what no and the most the most fascinating part of this is it's every from what i can tell a lot of devs

have very diverse philosophical reasons for caring about bitcoin and i think that's the most that if anything that makes it even more permanent because it's almost like all these people from different walks of life from different countries from different social backgrounds with totally different world views like have come together to care about this and it's at the intersection and that's what's so powerful about it it's like bitcoin is like this sits at the intersection of so many different world views um that people from everywhere tend to really care about it yeah no my uh my favorite funny uh dichotomy of world views that get along and bitcoin is the vegans versus the carnivores yeah it's hilarious i have multiple

you know vegan friends in the bitcoin space and multiple you know very carnivore maximal meet maximalist people and uh it's just funny that two polar opposites come together and digital money magic internet money the vegan account shout out to the vegan account yeah they they love tftc oh yeah they read yeah oh great yeah it's um yeah uh i'm not personally vegan but no to each their own yeah shout out to you freaks out there and then there's also the well the more fascinating thing for me is you get the socialist types of people who see bitcoin as a means of enabling you know the oppressed of society you see the libertarian anarcho-capitalist people who see bitcoin as a means of escaping the government oppression

of society and then you and then there's the technical people who just think it's really cool to work on technically and then you know there's then there's the traders right who just care about flipping it and then you have like sucked in and then you have the people backed in the corner who actually fucking need it and are using it absolutely yeah you have the people who straight up can't get a bank account and bitcoin they fell into bitcoin because that's the only option yeah and that's why i hate like the uh it's almost like a virtue signal to like hate against certain use cases of bitcoin versus another when yeah really they all sort of make the other one possible right like the the speculators are providing liquidity for the

people looking to skirt capital controls in certain countries absolutely and i think you know that's another sign that it's good money because what what money good money is something everyone wants every single person in the world pretty much wants that will take will accept that regardless of where they come from what they think any of that you know anyone in the world will accept a dollar basically uh or a hundred dollar bill you know they see that as valuable bitcoin's hopefully gonna be the same thing no but it's like it's funny to watch people like excuse me burping whiskey burp there watching people try to shame others for using bitcoin in certain ways like come on just let yeah let people do what they need to do the way they need

to do it and work again like we're saying like when you try to educate people about bitcoin you you try to first get a perspective from which they would understand it best. For people from Venezuela, they would escape hyperinflation. For people in America, or not even hyperinflation, cross-border capital controls. People in America escape just holding your money in a bank account that could be confiscated from. Use it as a store of value.

Just use it as a savings account. yep but all these use cases can work in in harmony and they are yeah i and i think kind of one of the silliest things that i've seen is like the shaming of people for one of the silliest things i've seen is the people shaming people for quote-unquote hoarding it and how you know rich people are using it now and and you know the thing i like to say is have you ever met a poor person who doesn't want the same money a rich person uses you know there's a lot of their projects out there that i think have been very naive in trying to you know build what i call it frankly you know they're trying to make money for poor people right it's like money these crypto projects

making money for you know people they think are you know the disenfranchised in society and i and i think it's so misguided because poor people don't want money rich people don't also want right like have you ever met a poor person who doesn't also want a dollar doesn't also want the same the same money bill gates has and that's it's silly it's totally silly it's it's it's incredibly silly because you have to view money as a tool like water it's like water like anybody in the world criminals straight people gay people black people white people can access water yeah And if they can access water, they can drink and hydrate themselves. Same goes for Bitcoin.

If you can download the blockchain, connect to the internet, you can access that too. It serves everybody. Socioeconomic, race, sexuality, gender, whatever it may be. And I think the end conclusion that a lot of people can fail to really understand is that if something is good money, people are going to use it for stuff you don't like. you know whether that's unsavory activities or whether it's just things like you're personally opposed to like hoarding it or spending it on um you know things you don't approve of or you know it's just no that's that's the other thing like who what is unsavory what is unsavory

today may not be unsavory tomorrow exactly it's like speech right you know there's free speech is important because everyone will always everyone has their own definition of what people should is what's okay to say and so we just say you know pretty much everything should be okay to say with some small caveats but like those caveats are pretty universally like agreed upon in the united states um and what are those small caveats like don't scream fire in a movie theater right yeah it's like stuff it's like the basic things that i i don't know i'm not so i'm not a legal I'm not going to pretend I'm a constitutional law scholar. Yeah, but it feels like people are, today, more than ever,

and again, I go, the optimist and the pessimist come and go. Yeah. Today, more than ever, it seems like people are willing to cede their freedom of speech in an attempt to be woke. That's what it feels like. In an attempt to virtue signal. I mean, I have some British friends who definitely just value it less. I mean, to them, you know, it's a very uniquely American thing.

Where'd you get these British friends? Oh, just, you know, school and things like that. But it's, you know, it's just interesting kind of debating these ideals with them. And then I realized how unique our country is and how much foresight the Founding Fathers had, you know, writing the First Amendment into the Constitution. Because that has saved us from so many government overreaches. what's the uh what's the conversation with the uh the bridge usually like it's usually like well why should you be allowed to say something that's hateful or bigoted or um you know offensive right you know and then i try to explain to them like

why trying to define offensive inherently creates this power structure that uses used to oppress people at the end of the day and you know they don't really like it doesn't really resonate with them because it hasn't happened to them yet like them personally right it's happened other people in the uk and in these other countries but not them and they you know you point to someone who said something like he was a dog that guy in scotland or his dog he had his dog do a nazi salute on youtube right and he ended up like having to pay some fine because he was like a comedian or something and his dog did a nazi salute and you kind of point to stuff like that and they're like well he deserved it because you know why should you do a you know

something like that and it's like well you know it's kind of we're just like you just end up kind of talking over each other you're not in the same wavelength and it always comes back it reduces to this like well he shouldn't have been allowed to do that should he you know and and then you're kind of stuck in this weird like it gets yeah it's just never very fruitful no it's totally different world views frankly right because i'm like how that like it's just yeah people are just if you can't hear the absurd like yeah people and again it's like not like we're trying to justify anything either it's just like or yeah that's where the whiskey kicks in here like have to think about uh regardless i think that in this country we're blessed to have the protections we

do have yeah it's like it's like again like the virtue signaling woke capital theme like it's just getting to a point where people aren't even critically thinking for themselves and they're is parroting stuff and yeah and uh trying to tell other people to shut up like don't don't say that and yeah it's it's a bad situation because like again like you said like who who decides what is right and what is wrong and the i think the i think the reason that this debate is feels like it's getting so out of whack is because of the internet and social media and what we're seeing is i think like personally i haven't personally experienced these issues in real life that much i haven't really experienced too many people in real life you know getting outraged

because i said something that you know offended them or something or things like that here and there it happens i haven't either yeah it's like it's this dynamic of this these i don't know how to solve it basically we have these web apps basically these very large web applications twitter facebook etc and they become these places where people talk but lots of people talk context is missed though context is missed through these digital mediums and then people say to these platforms hey why aren't you stopping this guy from saying this or why don't you stop like you don't think being a nazi is okay do you and they're like well no i don't think a nazi's being okay then why haven't you banned him and then and then that's where it starts right and like what's

it there's some like god what is it godwin's law like it always like every every conversation on the internet like devolves into hitler or something like i've heard this and it's really funny it's really funny because um i made a i made a reddit post uh announcing river like a week or two ago and then weirdly one of the threads devolved into into talking about hitler you know like really yeah yeah it was like i can't remember it was like it was like which it was like which countries are you available in uh or it was like why are you only available in the usa and i said um well because that's just where we're like allowed to operate right now we don't have the international like regulations or approvals from these other countries yet it takes time

and one of the guys and then one of the responses was uh are you available like well you should be available in other countries and i said well where are you he goes europe we don't really care about nation states too much though and then and then and then some other guy like responded well the uk does and then like they started devolving into like well america's better than the uk because we have guns and then like and then like that devolved into like hitler and it was like you know anyways so that's like what the you know internet conversations are but anyways then these like web apps you know people are like well why aren't you banning certain types of speech and then they go well maybe we should because well why should people be allowed to say this on our site that

kind of makes us culpable right i don't know solution no it's a slippery slope it's a hairy slope it's it's it's weird and it's again like going back to like we were born at this inflection point we are literally experiencing this stuff for the first time as a species as a social exactly like how to interact with these technologies and it's trial and error at this point but um fuck what the fuck was i gonna say it's something like profound not profound but i guess something good to say um attacking oh yes uh rockstar dev he uh i guess uh i forget what company they had a problem where like their slack communications got leaked no and like it was like oh they had a terrible uh company culture just because everything was on slack and rockstar

made a good point like you can't it's a suitcase company yeah right yeah yeah yeah um like that's a that's a problem when you just uh rely on that one uh medium of communication for your whole communication where you can't really hash out like hard or hard problems like via text like you need to hop on a one-on-one call and like have a conversation with people yeah like that is not happening uh in modern companies when it should be and that's why i'd like to do the podcast face to face like i think there's a lot more value in like looking somebody in the eye and and actually like getting the the feeling in the air and stuff like that and getting inflection and stuff like that to have a better conversation and actually get to the cores of the problem right and absolutely

it's like genuine communication is is getting abstracted in the digital age absolutely and the cost of saying something to someone that is incredibly you know i don't the word offensive but just incredibly like brash and just devoid of any sort of manners respect is so much higher in real life right on the internet there's no cost whatsoever you spend up on a non-account like you can say whatever you want to someone like hey you fuck her to your face yeah fuck you you know what dude yeah um but yeah yeah exactly someone says that to your face you know something might happen right you know if there's like physical consequences uh and it's just yeah i don't know how we're gonna what this is gonna turn into on the internet well i don't know the

solution either because i don't think this whole idea of like open source thing really solves the problem no no again there's tools right yeah they're just tools it's also like at the end of the day it's social right yeah at the end of the day we do live in meat space and it transcends organic beings like it transcends cultures too is the other issue like we you know day to day we interact with our own kind of people for lack of a better term people who kind of generally share our own views on the world in the united states at least and then you know you get people from any other country in the world also in the system and you know you say something on twitter about muhammad and all of a sudden pakistan government sending uh twitter a notification that you you

know you broke pakistani blasphemy law uh and uh you know twitter has to send that to you and you're like what the hell like what like what am i like what dystopia am i living in that i'm like subject to like islamic law right yeah it's it's kind of nuts yeah it's but again it's and and we are the guinea pigs for these technologies right that's the thing that freaks me out the the trends in social media with with uh kids in middle school is like particularly girls is like scary as fuck man like increased self-harm and suicide rates really i mean that didn't surprised me i've been following that like social media at the like somebody who has nieces and nephews and cousins who have children it's like fuck like yeah um we really don't know the full

repercussions of these technologies on psychology and there's definitely i mean like the price of bitcoin the volatility of the consequences of this technology i think it's going to be pretty high in the first few decades of this transition into the information age. It's a shock to the system, for sure. I wouldn't be surprised. I'd like to see a survey from these Silicon Valley executives about how many of them let their kids...

What ages do they let their kids have access to this stuff? The more I get... It fucks. It's like... You know, I mean, I think... As social beings, it's all about clout and all that, and what does social media incentivize? Yeah, but I mean, I don't know.

I think we're seeing understanding of this. I do Mark Zuckerberg's kids have access to iPads and iPhones. I'd be surprised if they do. I know Chamath Padapatia Padapatia, you know, he doesn't let his, I don't think he lets his kids at Facebook and he was an exec at Facebook for a long time.

And I personally probably won't let my kids have access to any of that stuff. And when I don't have kids, but once I do, I mean, cause I see it right when you're a kid, you don't understand and you don't, it's just too much.

i i don't know i think we are still learning to live with this yeah i had to delete i mean i deleted these apps from my phone i like i have twitter now because you know there's a lot of inbound business stuff on twitter but instagram facebook all that stuff i just deleted from my phone it just i knew it just i well i log into my desktop every now and then i i deleted my facebook i still need to get rid of this i like instagram because i get to keep in touch with my family i use it mainly for family yeah as a kind of way to keep in touch with like what my cousins and brother and sister are up to and stuff like that but yeah i'd rather not share that there but no it is there was a rogan episode i forget who it was with but they just walked through the

rates of self-harm and uh depression totally uh you're always comparing yourself yeah especially at a young age where you haven't really had time to build your own become your own person and kind of get to the point in life where you're like i am who i am other people are who they are i don't give a fuck like at a young age like everything's so important yeah like everything's the biggest thing in the world i mean can you imagine i mean we're probably i think we're about the same age right yeah i'm 29 i graduated college in 2013 okay yeah so you know i'm trying to imagine myself in middle i mean middle school and high school were hard of enough of the time like i just as like a teenager adolescent if i had and i remember when i was in middle school like a.i.m was like

the thing and i didn't really i kind of had a.m but i didn't really i wasn't like cool enough and but i just i'm just trying to think back like if if instagram was a thing when i was in middle school that would have just totally like been crazy dude i remember myspace like that's when when i was middle school tail in eighth grade so i was like yeah eighth grade i got myspace and like i remember being stressed out about my topic like who are my top eight friends like yeah i'm disappointed like oh fuck yeah like are they gonna include me if i don't include them yeah and that's stupid shit now i'm like who the fuck cares yeah i mean you're an adult now right but when you're a kid that can really mess up your life right like you post the wrong thing and

and like your brain doesn't forget either yeah and your brain's at such a point where it's so malleable and like yeah the impressions that that are had on your psychology at that point are much more impressionable than you have in later years in your life and you start getting like add from like just this constant like swiping and scrolling i mean i even kind of feel it now like i feel like oh i'm addicted to twitter i feel like i struggle to really just sit and concentrate now um i need that's something i'm like one of my goals for 2020 is like to try to improve that me too when i was a kid i could sit down and read a book you know i feel like it's kind of messed me up no me too no and as we're having this conversation i must say i'm not immune to

any of this either i am very much susceptible to this myself even as an adult like i am addicted to my name is marty bett i'm addicted to twitter like i i think that's the concern though is like the adults realized what's happening to them and it's happening to them what's happening to their kids right right but i don't know if bitcoin fixes this i don't think so no but yeah these are like are yeah are we just like a transition fucking generation do we have to fucking come to grips with that like we're just like the guinea pigs and are we gonna be the you know laughing stock of our grandkids you know we were that dumb generation that couldn't figure out how to really deal with all this stuff wow could you blame us though

in retrospect i don't think so look the fire hose of technology has been fucking thrown at us the last three decades it's totally it's crazy like i mean shout out to humans yeah we are very adaptable like shout out to us for adapting as quickly as we have it's pretty incredible we may not be handling it as uh as good as some people may like to think but considering the the uh degree of change the last three decades uh specifically uh i think we've done a pretty good job of keeping up with the pace i mean we're here talking about bitcoin right yeah i agree and then what are i mean and what's this younger generation gonna do i mean 10 year olds today were born in a world of bitcoin right 10 year olds are i mean they're not they're people

right they're like real like they they know what they're doing they've got their own opinions about stuff i'd be interested to hear what these kids are talking about and that's one one place because you know i'm part of at this phase in my family where we don't really have too many really young kids um you know so i don't really have access to like talking to too many you know too many young people and hearing what their thoughts are about things but i'd be curious to think hear about like what are high schoolers thinking about bitcoin or middle schoolers right what are these kids who grew up in a world with bitcoin thinking about it i don't know if you have any insights there but i'm curious about that stuff no i don't i don't i'm curious as well i i mean

i'm very grateful that like i have a very large extended irish catholic family uh and a lot of my cousins and uh extended family members have started to have kids have started to have kids over the last decade so we're getting to that point where yeah what's what we're gonna look like in 10 years bitcoin yeah that's good i mean yeah can bitcoin fail can't absolutely i think bitcoin can fail how i think it will definitely fail if we don't think if we stop thinking it can fail uh i think that's like the important that's one of the best parts about bitcoin is everyone is so adversary everyone is so don't ever get complacent don't ever get complacent never forget that the things you love can be taken away if you don't protect them in 10 years

i'm trying to think like when bitcoin came out 10 years ago what would i have thought 10 years would look like 11 years already 11 years what would i have thought that it would look like I don't know. I mean, I think that if there's any, you know, people have said this, if there's any, like, central bank that decides to hold some Bitcoin reserves publicly, I don't know if that's actually privately been the case at all. Like, that might just set, like, a whole other world of activity off. Like, I don't know what would happen then.

if we don't see that that's an admission right it's like an admission like that's like the system admitting that there's something here i think enterprise blockchain will hopefully completely die within a year or two i think it's like starting to like is our three still around um or our chain what is it i think it's still around although they've raised so much money these companies have raised so much money they've gotten so much revenue from clueless ceos who don't want to miss blockchain didn't ripple just raise 200 million dollars yeah like a series c 200 million dollar round yeah what the fuck who's giving them that money well it's access to the cash flows from selling ripple and they have

shit on a hundred billion they yeah ten percent of a trill they printed themselves i mean hey you gotta give it to them that's pretty genius from a cash perspective i mean how are they able to get away with that i don't know well i mean i'm not gonna name names but you go look at their board ben losky motherfucker i'll name the name fuck you ben um you know alex does not agree with me he's not co-signed that statement but i will say it myself fuck you ben losky you know i think if you like you know bill clinton speaks at their event i spoke at their event right um they have they have the the powerful people on their side and like how are you gonna how are you gonna compete with that right ideas we need to get more ideas out there

should bitcoin make some donation we need more since i've been we need brave foundation we need bravery we do we talk a lot about like we do need bravery well like do we live in a world of timid men like is there is there enough brave men in the world so i mean are there enough brave men in the world there's an interesting tie back to the mongols here the mongols after they conquered china and they were living the life of luxury in the cities of china would send their kids back to the step to grow up because you couldn't become a man if you grew up in a city living with the creature comforts you know of the chinese cities were tremendously wealthy you know you had to grow up on the step in the harsh weather riding horses and providing yourself short shooting bows riding

horse by the time you're old enough to walk and yeah do we live in a world of weak men i think that i think that there's a lot more than there were post-world war ii when most men had had to go fight for their lives and not most but a lot men had to go fight for lives they saw you know an existential crisis yeah the hardships of the world and i'm not saying that we should that's a good thing but hard times create good men you know i didn't create that saying but i think it's generally true and and we live we don't live in hard times we definitely we definitely don't live in hard times and we definitely have a lot of soft men walking around this world yeah and you know how far do you take that right um should people be willing to stand up and go to

prison well i don't think it's fair to ask anyone to do that because no one else has no one you know it's easy to say it's much easier said than done right um i and i don't think that's necessarily gonna move the needle either yeah yeah you know i mean uh you look at you know you look at the what happened with the silk road right and this guy you know made a website that other people sold drugs on and he ended up life in prison without parole and i think that you know regardless of what you think about drugs and drug law it is it does make everyone stop and think like fuck you know like the dude didn't even like kill anybody he didn't even kill anybody he didn't even like touch anybody that's what they'll try to make you think he did they're trying to make

you think he did with like you know and there were like straight up corrupt agents on this case and they made an example of this guy and how do you compete with like what do you do right um and i'm not saying like you know i'm not saying like i want to be i none of us want to be martyrs or anything no you know no one wants to be a martyr right like why we're we already live in a pretty good life um no one's like no one's starving in our country well there are people starving here well in the world but i don't know about the u.s there's people starving in the u.s really maybe not to death yeah that's true well i mean okay going hungry sure like you know having food insecurity sure i'm sorry i meant like literally

starving to death yes yes totally absolutely there's there are people who are definitely struggling for sure um but yeah anyways uh no i'm sorry i fucked that up no no it's totally fine it's like i guess it's a loaded word i suppose um but uh yeah i don't know i mean i really do have optimism that if enough people just push to change the narrative we can really make progress i really think narratives are very important memes are important right um just changing turning the narrative on its head i think it's almost a benefit that a lot of the stuff isn't a partisan issue um because that also means that there isn't a whole class of people really dedicated to fighting you either yeah right and what i put

is is like what do you think is the least amount of effort somebody could do to contribute to the conversation or contribute to like somebody who might be a little timid because they don't want to get on a list or something like that yeah i mean i think the biggest thing to do is just ask the questions you know if you're somewhere um talking with your friends talking with you know a politician talking with a congressman talking with a regulator like ask the questions respectfully and i think it's important to understand that respect is very important here Because I also truly think that regulators aren't out to get, like, to ruin America. They're not out to, like, ruin the world, right?

I've met regulators face-to-face, and it was actually very insightful and interesting conversations I've had with them. Because, and I walked away from that with a lot of, with a totally, like, changed perspective. And that was, these regulators actually, I mean, the ones I spoke with, you have to understand what they see every day, right? they they see literal criminals who are actually hurting people and their job is to make sure that that doesn't happen and right so they create these rules to try to make sure that doesn't happen now you can agree with like whether these rules are misguided or not but you have to understand like you have to put yourself in their shoes right a lot of these regulators see like for example at the state level they literally see companies stealing money from retirees and running away

with their money and they their job is to make sure that doesn't happen right and at the federal level you know a lot of these people they they literally see you know um terrorist people who are killing other people laundering money and their job is to make sure that these people can't be successful in what they want to do and it's important to understand where other people are coming from these conversations basically and i think that if we you know we we have to be able to We have to be able to have a dialogue if we're going to make any progress here, is what I'm saying. And I think that comes down to educating, engaging in dialogues with the higher-ups, with the regulators. I think the biggest mistake a lot of people in this space make, especially a lot of entrepreneurs,

is sitting around kind of just complaining about the regulators, complaining about the laws. But how many people who have sat around complaining about it have actually just called someone up? the phone numbers on the webpage of the.gov website for whoever the regulator is, how many of them called him up and be like, hey, I'd love to chat and like talk with you about, you know, some of this stuff. You're just aiding and abetting the state, bro.

Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, these people at the end of the day are people with families who, frankly, a lot of them, you know, their jobs aren't always that interesting. They'd love to talk about it. They'd love to hear your perspective, a lot of these people.

So I think it's important to remember that, you know. especially that there are people with families at the end of the day yeah behind this stuff yeah totally and a lot of whom actually find this stuff pretty cool well you know most people find bitcoin anything pretty cool a lot of these people also find bitcoin pretty cool they just need their whole their job is to make sure that people can't these companies like the bad actors aren't stealing people's money or bad actors aren't funneling money to terrorists and that's a reasonable goal yes and i believe that is the happy medium like we need to focus on is the trade-offs like uh how much information needs to be seeded by everybody to achieve that

goal totally right totally and i think that's the conversation that needs to be had um if you kind of come at them guns blazing with you know fuck the system you're not going to get anywhere you know it's just and honestly it doesn't even resonate with the majority of the country and so um i think it's just important to keep that in mind for people in the bitcoin space is that the dialogue is going to be much more productive if you understand where the other people are coming from you statist yeah you know a kid a kid i'm fucking no i agree yeah and not just i mean it's always important to see the other perspective right absolutely or at least try to very few of

these people are sitting around if only because you can strengthen your own case right yeah totally totally very few of these people are sitting around none of these people wake up every morning going how can i ruin the united states or how can i oppress or take away people's freedom today right that's not what they wake up saying that's not what these people like care about right these people wake up thinking either it's just their job right or like they wake up every day i think like okay my job today is to make sure that you know retirees don't get their money taken yeah and they're trying to do what's right they're trying to do what's right and if you if you voice that you think that like data collection and financial surveillance and

inflated money are not right maybe they'll try to protect those rights you just have to voice that opinion that hey that is where the the the public wants to be protected and they may have never even been exposed to these ideas or understand that like you know these a lot of regulators aren't necessarily spending all day reading hacker news or reddit or understanding the implications of computer systems with all this information and this and the second second can order implications of that right calmly explaining to them like the issues at play here is also very useful and i think we just need more of that yeah yeah at the end of the day i think everybody wants to just enjoy their lives to get to go about their lives yeah without having to

worry about any of this shit that's the thing like what when are we not gonna have to worry about this shit and i think you i mean you brought up a good point and it made me think of something is you know maybe the answer here is you know the real thing that they want is like an alternative right okay if we're not if the if the bank secrecy act isn't it right if if collecting all of your social security number your address and doing all this kyc and getting your id blah blah blah if that's not it if that doesn't if that doesn't solve our pro if that's overreach and we don't need to do all that to solve the problems we want to solve which is you know shutting down certain crimes then what what's an alternative that does protect the privacy of

people and maybe that's a solution right maybe we as an industry get together and like propose an alternative and i haven't really seen much work being done there and hey i mean you freaks listen out there if not you then who right if not you then who because we can't sit here and say fuck it all that's never gonna fly right come up with something better and put it out there yeah put it out there battle test it get you know work with coin center work with some of these non-profits put put together a memo or a law go talk to some legislators talk about this national security implications of having everyone's financial data in these databases that the chinese could access you know i mean spin the narrative right we talk about the actual downsides

of kyc aml the downsides far outweigh the upsides my my opinion yeah you're i mean equifax like all these hacks are everybody's financial data is on the black market and people are getting identity frauded left and right absolutely credit card frauded left and right i'm making up verbs right now but it's happening like no i mean the government you know opm the office of personnel management the government was hacked years ago at this point and basically anyone who has ever worked for the government had their social security number and personal information leaked that's not a national security issue i don't know what it is right like imagine imagine all the identity theft imagine identity theft of government employees well here this is a tweet i sent out

years ago at this point but it was like two years ago when equifax was hacked like so they have all that identifying information like imagine if somebody with the equifax hack data basically just quasi ddos the irs with fake tax returns yeah and it got to the point where it's like like like they have all that tax information you can literally file fake taxes on behalf of other people like say somebody like a hacker has my tax information they filed like a tax return where i gave back a bunch more money than i wanted to on my behalf and was like well i didn't file those taxes but like just because they had that information they weren't allowed to file that information like you could attack that system with that information if somebody was basically

dedicated to do that actually now that i think about this somebody came back and said that would not be possible so that was the thought experiment may not be possible interesting but i mean regardless i think there's still a lot of attacks that could be made right and i think the conclusion that we may have come to here is if you can't just be anti something right you have to be you have to propose an alternative and and why and give reasons why it's better yes and so i propose bitcoin because it's a push system and i would highly prefer that to the pull system that we live in today yeah we can talk about ach all right let's talk about what about ach what are your thoughts on ach well push versus pull is interesting right because pull does create a lot

of efficiencies um you don't have to think about stuff paying your bills right just pay it you don't have to auto approve every single payment uh but you know in the united states we have this automated clearinghouse um system ach which is how all the you know one of the ways that banks move money around and we we move money from our bank accounts to merchants and things like that it's and anyone who's a member of it can pull funds from any bank account in the country basically unless unless your financial institution has requires approval which it can add um but most most accounts don't have that most most individuals have a bank account where anyone can anyone any merchant in the ach system can pull funds from the bank account now the kind of saving grace here is

that if someone pulls money from your bank account and you didn't authorize it you just call up your bank and they reverse this and then the bank of the person who pulled the money is on the hook for it the person whoever whoever the merchant who pulled the money is on the hook for that money right so it's a weird system and it feels highly insecure but it kind of works but it doesn't really work that well it could be a lot better probably but yeah it's a weird system you have a system where like here in new york city like one company like because they had access to ach like he pulled like i'm pretty sure like a payment processor like pulled money from people's accounts or just like ran away with it really yeah wow yeah i mean and once it's pulled it's

pulled if if their if their bank uh didn't stop you know typically banks require some a merchant to have a um kind of like bond on hold with them but if you pull more than that right and you want run away with it then yeah who's responsible you just rely on the legal system at that point but at that point once it's in the legal system you're kind of fucked because i mean the lawyers to walk away with you lost out on the present value of that money you walk so well when you lost out on the present value too um the lawyers have probably walked away with a good half you know i don't know the lawyers walk end up walking away with a lot of it and then how much has already been spent you know who's it going to come from at the end of the day right uh right like you know

so it's fucked but yeah you know if you write me you know if you write a check to someone they have your account routing number right so if they have access to the ach system they can pull from your account if you don't notice which is the which is pretty likely honestly for people not to notice because people these days have so many bills things are automatically paid no one's going to notice ten dollars twenty dollars i mean not no one but a lot of people won't unless you're paying close attention because how many people willy-nilly sign up for spotify ten dollars uh netflix ten dollars you know and it's like oh yeah i'm sure whatever that's something you know and you just make it look legit they could even like make it look you

know right right and maybe spotify spotify you're like oh okay yeah looks legit spotify all capitalized the eyes just lowercase l yeah like that right exactly right so the else and now there's other countries with kind of alternative systems that are push-based and actually i used to work for bitcoin company that was in taiwan and the money moved instantly there and actually people but it's a different culture people had card readers at their computer um at home they would have they wanted to send money they could actually put their chip card with a chip they plug sorry plug this reader into usb in their computer put their card with a chip into that reader and pay and pay instantly yeah it's pretty cool and then also another way people would pay was i never knew

this yeah and um the way we would sell people bitcoin was uh another an alternative way was we uh say how did it work yeah so let's say you wanted to buy like a thousand taiwan dollars with bitcoin right so you enter a thousand taiwan dollars we give you a bill to pay this bill is like a thing you print out and you go to 7-eleven or family mart or one of the convenience stores and you pay them a thousand taiwan dollars in cash and they mark this thing as paid and it hooks back to our system and it tells us you paid it and they get the bitcoin they get the bitcoin and eventually the cash gets sent deposited to the company's account but um now there are things like that in the u.s kind of like moneygram western union or um i think the western union

didn't acquire them but they're a separate company moneygram and so you know moneygram is at cvs's and you can do that kind of stuff but good luck if they let you if they let a bitcoin company use their platform because they probably won't fuckers and most banks in the u.s won't let a bitcoin company even have an account well that's what makes me like a little pessimist like do you think they're going to attack bitcoin the incumbents like i don't know the nice thing is that there has been a niche of banks that have allowed bitcoin companies to use them and they have made a good amount of money on that like silver bank uh silver gate silver um yeah there's a number of them and sultan valley bank yeah svb i think i don't know if they still are they at least

were and as the space grows there's more and more incentive for banks to do this the reason banks are hesitant is because of the compliance risk basically you know a bank charter from the government is a privilege right not a right and uh they don't like you know they don't want problems from the fdic because if you look at the numbers right the cryptocurrency space is tiny compared to the economy right so why would bank of america risk regulatory action to service a pimple on their eyes a pimple yeah exactly right if you if you put yourself in their shoes it doesn't make any sense right so again this will cause us to come back to looking at the system that we've created yeah do you think we can slowly wean ourselves off

this is an interesting question because i don't know the answer there are two ways this could go right if bitcoin a good thought experiment is if bitcoin becomes a big a widely used money united states does the government just apply the same regulations and you just get absorbed into the regulatory state it's probably likely right the all but even if that happens i still argue we're better off because at least you can completely control your bitcoin whereas you can't really with cash i think we're it's strictly it's still strictly better right but the much better scenario would be to like as bitcoin grows we have as an industry collectively push the narrative of economic freedom of monetary freedom and more importantly time preference i think in time

preference um and this like the dream the unicorn dream would be that with the rise of bitcoin we have effectively convinced people to reduce consumption you know save have lower time preference and value um economic and monetary freedom and if we've you know if we've gotten people in the united states to care about that then hopefully that will manifest itself in our laws and regulations but it's it's not easy and it's going to be a lot of work and you know people like you and other content producers and it's on so it's on you it's on me as a company i mean it's on all of us to to push up to push this stuff and and bring the world that we want to see into existence well that's the beauty of it right like if not me

then who if not you then who exactly i mean it is it all it's all about effort skin in the game yeah like if you we can make this happen it's just having enough people step up to to make it happen it does take work it doesn't just happen it takes action action is needed absolutely and the thing that i would tell people and i think this is something that both of you you and i have internalized was if you've ever sat around and complained about something and never done anything about it you know what are you doing right like okay good for you you're a complainer now do something about it and so that's the like that's the conclusion follow through right follow through anyone could complain and and i'm not here to say like i'm not solving the world's

problems either i'm putting my best effort forward to yeah at least you're doing something to to bring awareness you know um that's and i mean what you're i feel what you're doing with the river is like way more leverageable right like you're getting you're creating the on-ramp right hopefully right you know i mean right now we're still small we're still a small company I think where the rubber meets the road is going to be like if we can be this big company that I really hope we can be, and it's by no means guaranteed, right? I mean, we're a small startup, and we have a long ways to go. But if we do reach that goal, what kind of company are we going to be? What values are we going to embody?

and you know if i'm still around which i hope i am then it's going to be you know pushing this narrative of economic freedom and trying to you know have a pair of balls frankly it's but it's tough when you're small man it is really tough because if you want to come out swinging when you don't have any clout you're not going to get anywhere because they're gatekeepers and the gatekeepers aren't going to let you through the gate uh you know you need a bank account right you need to like i said you need to sit down with the regulators and have the conversation and that's okay right it's okay to it's okay to play ball when you're young and even with your when you're older but when you're bigger it's not okay to try to push the system in your favor to

block out everyone else right it's not okay to to not try to improve things for the better and i think that's really kind of what i want to embody in my company is as if we're successful you know our goal is to try to improve things for the better and i hope we can do that maybe that's naive but i don't think so i think the the pie within bitcoin is big enough that there can be many many many successful people building on it i look up to square for example i mean yeah we're also selling you know we're a bitcoin on ramp they're a bitcoin on ramp i think though largely i think that there's there's room for definitely for both of us to exceed to succeed and we also just offer you know somewhat different products right there's room for fidelity there's room for

charles schwab right in the stock in the stock market game right there's room for cash app and i see cash as this like and square in general and jack dorsey is just these like shining examples of people who can really who are really putting their money where their mouth is i look up to those guys tremendously i think again disclaimer sponsor whatever but not a sponsor of me i can say it yeah but no like honestly like and jack gets shit on a lot but i think he's a fucking very very rare principled founder in today's day and age i think i agree and i think he's more critical of himself than a lot of other founders are yeah and i think he contemplates the impact he has on the world i totally agree and i i think it's not important i mean i don't

personally i'm not someone who turns everyone people into heroes i think people are human but at the end of the day like jack's someone i just really look up to i think he keeps a low personal profile so he doesn't really necessarily get a fair shake i think in the media you make it's very easy to criticize any social media ceo these days yeah and like to think that he has full control over twitter in particular yeah yeah exactly you know i think he had left twitter for years a lot of the people there are not anyone he's hired and what he did what he did two weeks ago announcing that uh open source team you can tell he's like yeah dude when i i think he's on our side i've said this on this podcast like when i spoke with him earlier this year

like that's one thing that's why i like to speak to people in person because you get to look them in the eyes and yeah people look that motherfucker in the eyes and i think he's earnest and like he he's for the cause of the digital again like we need leaders like that in the digital age we are again at a very critical juncture you know one or two one of two directions yep complete dystopia surveillance state or the hard way like open systems cryptography open source software and the battle is being fought right now we're in the midst of a war yeah the war for the future is here it's upon us freaks you're fighting whether you realize it or not no totally and i hope we get more jacks you know um he was able to convince this public company square

to create an entire you know division to just not doing anything that generates profit just works in bitcoin full-time and again the focus on bitcoin particularly yeah uh very telling very prescient yeah and i'm and the beautiful thing is bitcoin brings that out people right it it brings out the you know the chutzpah the chutzpah i'm not i'm probably saying that right i don't know for sure but it just feels like the right chutzpah yeah and you know and the one thing that i think the what i the men and the women who work on bitcoin stuff they have this fire and and that's what i hire for it at river too is is is the guys and the girls at at river and it's just bitcoin in general everyone's got this spark they're switched on that and and

that's it's just a sign like that we're on the right path what is that spark you look for i don't know how to describe it it's just it's just you just kind of feel it when you you know when you meet someone and it's in their eyes they're just switched on they're not we kind of joke about it's kind of a meme that we we joke about it's like kind of the fluoride stare we kind of joke where it's like i haven't heard the forehead yeah it's so it's like you know uh the fluoride stare it's like they're drinking it's kind of the meme it's like they're drinking too much fluoride in the water your eyes are crystallized yeah yeah you know it's like you know you try you know they're talking about football and you bring up the pentagon losing

a trillion dollars and all you get back is the fluoride stare um what oh what um bro like i don't know man i'm not really into politics but what about the cowboys you know um but you know it's like they don't get they don't have the fluoride stare right it's like they're just like they just have an energy and they're just present and they care about something that is important and i just you just feel it you kind of know it when you see it and that's that's what i look for and that's what i love about bitcoin is pretty much everyone's like that i can't say that about a lot of other industries i've worked at big companies i've worked at small companies um you know there's a lot of people at big companies making a lot of money and don't do shit and they don't have a fire

they don't care about life really i mean they care sorry i don't want to say they don't care about life that's not accurate they care about their life but they're not they don't care about anything you know that really gets them excited they don't wait a lot of these people who make a lot of money for something bigger for themselves yeah you know it's like bigger than i don't want pick on like companies but like you know let's say you're you're working on some you're working at facebook and you're working on optimizing some like part of the groups facebook groups app right it's like you know after a year or two you get over the shock of earning a great paycheck you know you're out of college you've been there a few years you get used to the creature comforts of it

all you'll lose the you know you lose the there's nothing else to keep you excited right the The luster of Silicon Valley is worn off. The luster of the paycheck is worn off. The luster of the perks have worn off. And you're stuck realizing that you're waking up every day just like optimizing this app that you don't really care about. Bitcoin, I've never lost my excitement after like six or seven years. I wake up every day excited to work on Bitcoin. And so does everyone else who works on it.

And I've never seen anything else like that before. um what is it i don't know it's hard to describe it's like a drug almost but people people i know i mean you've probably experienced this too but i don't want to say people are jealous but it's like people who don't really care about bitcoin aren't kind of they see that in you that you do and they're like i wish i could find that in my life i wish i could find something i cared about that much in my life outside of my friends of course outside of your friends and your family Everyone cares about their friends and their family more than they usually more than they care about, you know, anything else.

But people wish they could have found something professionally that they cared that much about. No, you sure. I mean, I, I totally feel that. And there's not, I don't want to say lost generation, lost generations of people living in the cube. Yeah. Doing stuff they do not want to do.

No. Stuff they do not like, stuff that does not fulfill the human need for growth and wonder of what could be. It's people working for other people, right? Absolutely. The periods of my life where I've earned the most money and had the biggest paychecks, I've actually been the least happiest. the happiest I've ever been has been when I moved to San Francisco and I slept on a yoga mat for two months trying to learn programming and focusing on trying to get a job in bitcoin and now when I I don't take much of a paycheck and building this company helping build this company with a ton of

other very talented folks and um it's just like do or die it's just like I'm just working and it's just like it's the hustle i'm working on bitcoin and i've never been those are the two times in my life where i've been the happiest yeah no and again i don't want to rub and tug each other here but like i feel like the same way too like i started marty's band out of necessity i was i've told this story before too like i was unemployed for two years almost i was unemployed for like 19 months as much as i wanted to be a product manager as confident as i was my abilities to fill that role i've never done jack shit in that role i never built a product i've ever done any of that and that's where marty's been started i was like all right i need to build something

i need to prove that i can talk about a product let alone manage a team that can build one and i've been reading and right or learning about bitcoin for so long i was like all right i'll start writing about this and just naturally it's turned into this now fucking like 10 000 of you freaks download this podcast every week and this is what i do now it just happened naturally that's awesome man no it's like it's when you found that fire right but it's like you you you don't know you need it till you have it yeah like yeah i was literally forced into this you didn't know what you like i was i was that i was i was i had gone i went to dozens of interviews turned down turned down and when i started writing about something that i knew

about that's when i started not getting turned down which is crazy but like to think that you can just and that's like talking about our generation like i fell into that trap i was like oh i'm smart i went to the schools to hit the credentials it's just gonna happen for me you're always just told you know yeah just follow the rules and you'll and you'll be content and you'll be comfortable yeah and i and then it doesn't work out that way and then no and then I mean for a lot of people it does and they get a paycheck and then they're still stuck in that like what what what else is out there right I know people who you know guaranteed to have millions of dollars you know by the time they're 30 years old and they're not happy they're like is this it

you know and then they realize like there's there's other stuff out there they could really care about i'm like shit that's life and that's what it's about well and freaks think about it because life comes with heavy opportunity costs yeah you can waste a lot of time doing shit you do not like and i've seen a lot of people waste a lot of time doing shit they do not like and they regret it yeah absolutely you know but everyone needs to make that decision for themselves there's something to be said for putting in some time building the skills at a big company seeing what big companies run that's very valuable completely agree i think the trick is to know when they get off that get off that hamster wheel exactly when to know when enough

is enough alex you gotta get going it's been an incredible three and a half hours it's been great man it's been an honor yeah well please honor it's been an honor having you here you're building products that are making bitcoin easier to access for the everyday layman and again going back to dca products like the set and forget it nature of uh dollar cost averaging yep like that's what the next time we speak hopefully probably midway through next year i want to hear stats about like people that like sign up for your your service and just like forget that they even signed up or just like buy bitcoin yeah i'll be sure to let you know i mean we've already surpassed our goal of you know people who have set up recurring recurring orders and i hope that trend continues

so yeah i hope also next year i can see you again and we're in as many states as possible but yeah river.com what are uh the parting notes you want to leave the freaks out here i think that the conclusion we've come to in this podcast is you're sitting around and you want something to be different ask yourself what have you done to make that happen and if you need help with that feel free to reach out to me feel free to reach out to marty and make that happen we're both on twitter we both have websites we're both pretty easy to get in touch with and if you want to make something happen for the better of bitcoin we're here to help you with that and help you get started if you don't know where to start yeah you actually locked down a great twitter name at

leishman at leishman yeah luckily my name isn't too common unfortunately there's a very famous golfer with my last name and i get his tweets sometimes so yeah that's okay good to mix up with the golfer yeah um i can't golf neither can i alex thank you for doing what you do thank you marty thank you for building the products that you do and uh thank you for joining us today we got uh really drunk yeah we're done all the good whiskey some good what I normally don't drink much whiskey But this was actually good This was good stuff

Shout out to Mama Bent She picked this up for Christmas Peace and love freaks Peace and love, Merry Christmas