The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Bitcoin Goes to Davos, Carney Cozies Up with China, Zhao Finally Leaves Core | The CBP 249 Pt 1

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

🚨 LIVE: The global game is changing — and Bitcoin is walking into Davos.Power is shifting. Institutions are repositioning. Markets are tense.From political moves in Canada to the growing influence of Davos and the World Economic Forum, from Bitcoin’s role in a transforming monetary system to Trump’s impact on markets and U.S.–Canada relations — something big is forming beneath the surface.Today we break down what actually matters, what’s just noise, and what could hit hardest next.Money is changing.Power is shifting.Bitcoin is in the middle of it.📡 Live discussion.We explore:Why Bitcoin is now part of the Davos conversationHow global institutions are adapting to a new monetary realityThe rise of digital control, CBDCs, and financial surveillanceThe pressure on national sovereignty and personal autonomyWhether we are witnessing the early stages of a new global orderThis conversation connects money, power, technology, and the future of individual freedom in a rapidly reorganizing global economy.Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to the channel!SponsorseasyDNShttps://easydns.comAnycast DNS, domain registration, web & email services — fast, reliable, privacy-focused.Pay with Bitcoin.Use coupon code CBPMEDIA for 50% off your first purchase.Bull Bitcoinhttps://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbpThe CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for buying Bitcoin simply and securely.Use the link above for 25% off fees for life.256Heathttps://256heat.com/Heat your home, garage, or office while earning more Bitcoin than it costs to run.Book a call with a hashrate heating consultant today.Listen to The Canadian Bitcoiners PodcastApple Podcastshttps://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast...Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.com/show/6WzoIyT...Fountainhttps://fountain.fm/show/VaB9E0KrXGqg...RSShttps://anchor.fm/s/538d43f4/podcast/rssSocialhttps://x.com/CanadianBTCPodhttps://x.com/JoeyTweeetshttps://x.com/TheBTCPriceBotDiscord  / discord  ⚠️ DisclaimerEverything in this episode reflects personal opinions only and should not be considered financial advice.#bitcoin #davos #wef #geopolitics #finance #macroeconomics #soundmoney #sovereignty #privacy #canada #cbdc #hardmoney #globaleconomy #power #institutions

Friends and enemies, welcome back to the CBP Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. My name is Joey That's Land. Tonight we are talking about Gloria Zao, Zhao, Zao, Zao, leaving the Bitcoin Project. Perhaps we'll find out. Brian Armstrong at Davos. Trump at Davos as well. Lots going on, man, changing global order.

Microsoft giving up your cloud keys. Should never put your keys in the cloud. And of course, listen to Hamilton Man, among other things. But first, as always, the intro, hang in. So, you know, the government can say whatever they want about this thing not competing. It's for black market only. It's for this for that.

But they're really treating it like a threat. And one of the things that can't be attacked is your self-custody Bitcoin. And one of the things that can be attacked is the ETF. Can't be exposed to that. That's my view. It's not a good idea. And by the way, that'll hit MSTR too. It'll probably hit other stuff as well.

Friends and enemies. Welcome back, Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. Friends and enemies, welcome to the CBP. Want to be better informed. Listen to Lenin Joe. We spotts is taking care off right off the top. Oh, Bitcoin and Easy DNS, the media is feeding the slop. Buddy, I am so sick that I don't even know what to do with myself.

I was saying to you before we went live, this is the worst day I had. We did the Access of Easy Show last week on Thursday, and I was starting to feel sick. With Mark, actually, the day before, during the podcast, they started to feel a little bit sick. And here I am now, five days later, still feel ill. But we're here. We're talking. We're in it. What's going on over in your neck of the woods?

You dig yourself out yet? You've been out with the blower? What's going on? Yeah. I do with old school shovel. Yeah, it wasn't too bad. Shovel. Yeah, twice.

That's it. It was easy. Yeah. How about you? I was out with the blower yesterday a bit and I went out today as well. I'm the guy in the neighborhood or at least the guy in my immediate vicinity with the snowblower. So I did my sidewalk, my neighbor's sidewalk, my daughter's daycare, two doors down, their sidewalk.

and then around the corner for me, it's an older guy and his wife going down the other street nearby. So I did theirs as well. Yeah, felt good, man. Happy to do that. And somebody came out with three beers at 4 o'clock when I was out there. So me and my two neighbors shared a beer and talked about the latest Lotus, I guess, is going EV now. So I don't know if it's the Esprit or something else, but their next car is going to be EV apparently. I didn't know that.

You're buying it? Someone told me at our place of work that when I was looking for a car years ago, that the Lotus line was not as expensive and not as expensive to maintain as everyone likes to say. So I did look at Lotus vehicles. I mean, this is like, hold by now. It'll be 39 this year. This is like 16 years ago now, something like that. But yeah, wow, 16 years ago. That's crazy.

Time is flying. But no, I didn't end up going with the Lotus. And I'm not going to go with one now. We talk, maybe we'll get Chinese EVs on this show and do a podcast while we're driving or being driven around by the car. What do you think? Would you trust that, Joey? It's going to, not only listen to us, but who knows, given what else is on the road, I'm not sure if it's able to adapt to the newly licensed drivers that are on Ontario. Oh, God, I know.

Yeah, you might get killed by a TFW. Yeah, hard to say. But anyway, yeah. Let's get into the usual stuff here. The sponsors of this podcast. Our easy DNS, Mark's been a friend of the show, sponsored for a long time and was a great guest for us last week on Wednesday talking about, we did a lot of stuff actually, but we talked a lot about Davos and the new global order, which obviously super weird that YouTube still plants a warning on your videos if you talk about the new world order, even though this is being like frequently repeated at Davos. I mean, I never was big on conspiracy and I don't think this is a conspiracy now. but maybe they do.

I don't know. Anyway, Mark runs Easy DNS, and that's sponsor of the show. If you need a website, you want to do any domain registration. You need a registrar. Mark is your guy. He's been in the game for decades at this point, taking Bitcoin for services along the way, of course, before it was cool.

And don't forget that if you also are into Bitcoin, he's got some stuff for you on offer that you may enjoy virtual private server stuff where you can do a Bitcoin node and Noster Relay, BTC Pay Server, if that's your jam. A lot of you guys are selling. stuff, so why not. And not to mention that if you have like a client list or a newsletter, protect all that data with domain share and easy mail, along other things, a couple extra

bucks. It will cost you an hour to leg. Nothing does over at Easy DNS. But you will get service like a rich man and like you paid big money for it because that's what he's about. If use our promo code, those CBP media, you get not only the best service, but 50% off your first round of buys over Easy DNS, which is great. Can't beat that. So shout to Mark in the team over there. Who's next? I like Bull Bitcoin. You like Bull Bitcoin. That's why they sponsor our show. That's where we make our Bitcoin buys. And if we were ever going to sell, that's not time to sell yet. I would use Bull Bitcoin to facilitate that sell. Either way, not custodial exchange.

This is what you want when you're doing any sort of transaction with Bitcoin because this way nobody's holding onto your Bitcoin. There's no way to get rugged. You have to provide a Bitcoin address in which to facilitate a buy. That's pretty darn cool. Not only that, On-chain fees are still low, but I'll also give you the option to buy in Lightning, if you want to use that. Not just that, you could do reoccurring buys. You could do auto buys, limit orders. This is from a non-custodial exchange. Typically, this is not the case with a non-custodial exchange.

Furthermore, you can pay bills. What's your Bitcoin? If you think the price of Bitcoin is high enough, I personally don't. But if you want, you can use your Bitcoin to pay some bills. Are we going to ever do this ad? And you're going to say, okay, the price is high enough. it's time to pay some bills pay yourself on bill bull bitcoin when is that is that ever going to happen in my life i don't think it's ever going to happen in my life i'm at the point i'm coming

to the point i think i'm going to just take this stuff and just pass it on to the next generation okay i'm really i'm at that point so show to you even if this goes to a trillion dollars i think i'm still going to be in that position doesn't always just pass it on but either way i want to talk about bull bitcoin you could if you have to pay your buds fiat cash or fiat currency you could do that you can send bull some bitcoin and they will facilitate the transaction to send some money to your bud through any transfer and it ends up in Canadian dollars in their bank account so check them out they're the best in the game if use our referral code below if you do that and sign up all your buys and sales in perpetuity are going to be slightly cheaper and they're available Canada

Mexico I think Colombia Columbia does a recent one by the way that that promo code is 25% off the fees so it's like you know there's some podcast to get like, I think shitty promo codes, but 25% off your fees is pretty good. You get half off with Mark and a quarter off with the Bull Boys for life. I mean, I don't know what else to say. You can't really beat that. Well, the reality is if you think Bitcoin's on sale, any code is going to be a beautiful code. But these are the guys that are the best because like I say, not custodial.

And they mix it before they send you. Like, come on. Yeah. Also, great group, great group chats. Yeah. Yeah, they hate the Leafs more than they hate the government. So interesting stuff there. Where do you want to go next?

Boost, I guess. Sure. Mo BTC Dick, 500 sats. And he writes in love when Mark's on. Let's fucking go. People love Mark. Someone told me that Mark is, like, he is one of the most humble, like, one of the most humble, smart slash rich guys around.

And I will live. agree with that 100%. You know, talking to Mark, he's been to my house a couple of times. My wife knows him. And everyone I know who just knows Mark through me says the same thing. Like super down-to-earth guy. But when you start talking to him about stuff like we were talking about on Wednesday, he's obviously been doing a lot of thinking. And by the way, Len, that was the second conversation we had in a week. And so we talked for two hours at lunch on Monday and then another, you know, hour and change on Wednesday night. There's tons to stay. And there's no one better to say it than Mark.

So yeah, definitely one of our favorite guests. I mean, he was a guest before he was a sponsor, right? I think we had him on a couple of times. People may not know. The lore was that Mark wrote this article about I think it was about the Canadian political map on bond thrower. And I read it and I liked that.

I reached out to him. I said, hey, I'm going to mention this on the show tonight. Is there a place I can, you know, link you? And so I did. And then he ended up coming on maybe a couple of weeks later, week later. And before we knew it, who's sponsoring and helping us with a lot of different things. And he's been a great resource, you know,

both personally and professionally, which has been fantastic. Hard to find guys like that these days. Jare 2000, no, I don't want to go to Jerry just yet. Business cat. I don't want to forget you,

business cat. You're the guy I want to talk about right now. Luke gets priority in the, in the, well, this is by amount. And he boosted us 1,337 sats. And same guest,

powerful Mark and he does a flex. So he too liked your interview with Mark. Mark's the man. Mark's the man. Luke might have met Mark in Montreal. I don't know if he did or not. Next conference. So if you guys come down again, Fundies and Business Cat, we'll set something up. We'll have a nice meal together.

Jer, now I'm coming to you. 2006 Sats. And he writes in, Mark is such a well-read and versatile guest. Truly, truly. I mean, I couldn't say it better myself. So, Jare also, by the way, in another group chat that I'm in called Sound Coffee, I think, with Otis Bitmire. And it's another podcast that Fundamentals does with Otis talking about, you guessed it, coffee. And I don't know anything about coffee.

I drink K-cups, like a total pleb, but I listen to the show, actually. So there you go. It's good. Jared, thanks for the boost, buddy. I appreciate you. Hammertown OG writes in twice. 2,500 sets. This is his first message.

Anyone who wasted their hard-earned money on Adams NYC token deserved exactly what they got. Just a shit coin from a crooked politician. You'll find no sympathy here. It's Bitcoin or it's nothing. Keep up the great work, guys. Tough one for the Eric Adams community. What's the Discord look like after the Rogue Pole, the Eric Adams coin? I don't know.

Probably not great. Probably not great. I want to see if there is one. There's got to be. It might not be official, but there's got to be one, right? There's one for everything now. So Hammertown OG, like I said, wrote twice. This time 10,000 sats.

And he writes in making up for missed boosts. Keep up the great work. Bless you guys. Bless you, sir. Appreciate you. Are we going to get a... Hammertown is in, Sammertown is in my area, I think. I think we talked about this before.

Yeah. When the summertime comes, man, it's definitely hit me up somehow. And we'll link up for a point. I can't find a Discord by searching Google. Yeah. So there may be one for a telegram maybe. Is that where they usually are, telegram or Discord?

I forget. I'm not a big alt-coin community seeker. So I can't really say. But there must be a group for this somewhere, right? If there's a group for anti-ice militias in Minnesota, there's got to be a group for Eric Adams going. You know what? I can't find.

one through like searching just initially. There might be one that's kind of hidden so don't shoot me if I'm wrong. Sure. Whatever. But are we going to get a message on our YouTube page today for a disclaimer or something? You're saying that

you and Mark got a disclaimer. We got a disclaimer about New World Order in our last show. And I think that they've been doing this for 25 years. At least on we brought on, so I'll level with people. We brought on some young talent here to do thumbnails for us.

And the instructions I gave this young fellow were make it something enticing without going to clickbait. Today is pretty good. It says World Reset and it's Trump screaming, some WF stuff, some Bitcoin stuff. I feel like we could get a strike, not a strike, but like a note on our show for this. But the other part of me is like what part of this is sort of like underground conspiracy at this point? Everyone is talking about it.

Like why are we pretending? Why don't we just, why don't we just lean into it? You know? It's essential. Are we not, are we not just a lean into it kind of show? I thought that everyone was, you know, everyone should be like this. No, it's essentialized. And every time you're dealing with somebody, they could do what they want, right?

I know that, but like, I mean, come on, give me a break on on new world order. Come on, I'll give you a freaking break. I'm trying not to swear, give me a freaking break. I'll give you one that's worst. I decided to say, what the hell? I'm going to make an NHL 94 Facebook page to expand it to reach for that. Sure enough, Joe. Joey, sure fucking enough.

I'm going to swear for it because I'm fucking pissed about this. Two weeks in, all I'm doing is posting NHL 94 pictures, not even videos. Fucking ban. Fucking ban. On Instagram, same fucking guys that own it. No fucking problem. But on Facebook. Were you posting like tips and tricks that are illegal in the community?

People are playing online. They don't want to see your content. It's been an interesting week in the 94 community, to say the least. And that was one of the interesting. Like, it's just, it's, the fucking get banned for just posting 94 pictures. How ghetto is that? And I appealed it. The appeal was fucking denied.

I love it. Nothing. So, like I say, when you're dealing with a centralized platform, they own it. They set it up. They could do whatever they want. We could bitch and moan, but really, it's theirs to play. It's their playground.

And we're just honored guests. Totally. Okay. Should we talk about some stuff here? What do you want to talk about first? Gloria Zhao? Yeah. Another hack to a Bitcoin developer, right?

Not too long ago, we had Luke that he lost some Bitcoin because his PGP was compromised, right? It wasn't not too long ago we had this. I guess two and a half years ago, give or take. Luke, by the way, has become a reply guy for me. He's in my replies telling people about BIP 110. Thank you for what it's worth. Are you going to support him? I might ask him to come on the show and talk to me about it.

He denies the 55% approval thing. So I thought, okay, well, pretty sure we all. What is the approval? That's the last, we're going into the weeds. Yeah. I mean, that was what we talked about last week. BIP 110. He wants it to be a 55% yes rate, basically, to have it merged.

But it seems to see, it's going to be a pushback to that. Anyway, we'll go back to that other episode if you want to listen to that. Let's talk about Gloria. Well, her ex account has been hacked. And it was done this past week, right? she posted information on GitHub to alert us that her account is no longer under her control. That was the way she was able to communicate this information to everybody. Email address, passwords, and 2FA settings on the account were all changed.

This was on January 20th. So just last week, Tuesday, the day after we did our show. Look, we're talking about a Bitcoin developer here, somebody that's supposed to be putting stuff in, adding stuff to Bitcoin. whatever, but security standards. What does she have? High? Maybe.

I'm not going to... Not high enough. It looks like people are saying this could have been a social engineering attack that was somebody got in touch with in X, somebody inside X and able to get control of her account. So if that's the case, it's not... How likely is that? How likely is that in your opinion? I don't know.

X, by the way. You've seen the picture. You've seen the pictures of the X staff at this point, right? There's like 20 people, 30 people work in there or whatever, these pictures of all the programmers. Like, how many people have that kind of access now at X? It cannot be that long a list. We've had other people lose their account because of social engineering attacks. And even people are going to in the past couple of years, even see people that wrote a book that's sitting on there too.

Before Elon or after you're after? After. After. Okay. Yeah. So, like, I'm not going to say this isn't the case. It may, it may not. If it's certainly something that is social engineering,

and I'm not trying to defend this person. Let's be honest. This person doesn't need any defending whatsoever. There's some actions that are questionable, I guess, at least to what she's said in the past. But still, you have to give the individual, if they did nothing wrong, they don't have to be crucified for that particular action.

So the problem with this is the optics are bad. You have a Bitcoin developer that lost their ex account. And if something like this happened to a prominent shit coiner, right? Like say it happened to the developer of Eath or Salana, Bitcoiners would be dunking on this left and right. Happened to Bitcoin. Yeah. Here we go.

Is this something that Zhao did? I don't know. It could be next problem. Who the fuck knows? If she has bad security practices, it's on her. But isn't, don't you think there's like a competency crisis broadly everywhere? We've talked about this before in other silos. But why should she be any different?

She doesn't understand the project on which she is, you know, pretending to work. So why are we surprised that she doesn't understand stuff like 2FA and other security? I mean, this is all sort of speculation on my part. But if the implication from her reaction is that it was an ex-social hack, then that's pretty significant, you know. And also if it was an ex-social engineering hack, why would they go for her account? There's a million other accounts you'd go for before hers, you know? I don't buy it. I don't buy it.

I just know other people that were exposed to this and not, my pathology is not as prominent as this person. Who the fuck knows? This wasn't like it's the Federal Reserve. No, the SEC. Remember they got their ex-c account? That was done because of poor security in their party. Somebody had access to a phone and fucked up like that.

That's right. We don't have the total story here. just have some possibilities. And I'd love to know exactly what happened. Because again, the optics for this, it does not look good for Bitcoin core. And then it also leads into Bitcoin as a whole. But in the end, like, whatever. I don't really give a fuck, to be honest.

So it was a big story for a lot of people. A lot of people made fun of this. But I really don't get a shit, to be honest. Interesting comment in the chat. I won't read the whole thing. But basically, Zhao was courted. university for her skills. And John is saying that there's at least some reasonable expectation we should be screening

for political leaning as well. Is that something you've given any thought to? What kind of like, there's a thin line here, and it's very blurry as well, between Bitcoin's quote-unquote like governance-free structure and now at the current price, and I would say the sort of modern-day importance of the project, expecting the people who are recruited to work on core are come from a certain cloth. And Gloria is clearly not, by the way. Like, you could say whatever you want about her political leanings and all this other stuff.

But I think that the reason she's not cut out for it is because there's just no rational, there's no rational outcome or excuse me, no rational explanation for taking stances on certain things in the political sphere when you're working on a project like Bitcoin. And you're not, that's not good for you and it's not good for the project. And it looks to me like it was an attempt to, you know, add a little bit of luster to her personal brand more than it was to support core. And now here we are with this issue, you know, her security practices, maybe not up to snuff. And it just tells me that her priorities are misplaced. As an aside, you know, again, very much speculation on my part.

But are we sure that Chinese are not putting people into positions where they can be doing damage to stuff like Bitcoin? They are, after all, putting people into positions where they can do damage to basically everything else. So why would they not be doing it here? I have no answer for that. You're correct. That's certainly a possibility. It's within the realm of possibility. But is that the case with this one?

It's impossible to know. But at some point, you won't know it's too late. That's exactly right. And so at some point, the risk mitigation standards have to have to meet the, like, there's always an asymmetry between risk and damage, right? So the damage, for example, you know, I'll use quantum as an example, okay? So hold your tomatoes, everybody. If you think quantum is a big risk if it happens, okay? If quantum happens, it's a huge risk to the network.

But there's only a 5% chance of it happening. What is the amount of resources you should dedicate to fixing that? problem before it becomes a problem. It's high. It's like a high amount of your resources because the outcome, even at a low probability, is catastrophic. So when you're talking about recruiting core developers or working on core, yeah, there's a, 10% chance you recruit someone like this or someone like this comes into the project

who seems to only care about personal brand and not about the actual outputs. But the thing is you have to put more resources into guarding against that. 10% chance because the damage is catastrophic if you pick the wrong person. And, you know, if you have, again, one person, one person a Git merge does not make. But if you have four of these people that are, you know, I don't want to say high powered, but you mentioned earlier, notable people, then what do you do with the project at that point? We've already seen that, and I made this point last week before, governance and Bitcoin has become less technical and more political now.

So if you think that that's going to continue, you need people in here that are politically aligned with you. And it's not just a matter of red and blue. It's a matter of certain principles of money, certain principles about core, certain principles about the future expectations for Bitcoin and data transfer and all these different things. And so she didn't, I don't think meet that standard. And I think the core people and every Bitcoin has to start thinking about, okay, what are we doing here? Are we going to just recruit anybody who shows technical promise? It's not enough anymore. In fact, I don't think it's even 50% of the pie.

I think the other pieces are more important at this stage, especially as you move into an era where, you know, anyone can code. The language of code is going to become English, not Python. And so, you know, what do you do with these talented developers? Well, you vet them for politics and for, you know, fit and finish, I guess, to put it diplomatically. You get what I'm saying. Let's jettison the garbage.

Yeah. Let's get it right of it. And let's talk about the story in Netherlands. It's floating around. Netherland tax laws may change. Not yet. Looks like that capital gains could be taxed annually starting 2028. This is both realized and unrealized gains.

So you're simply holding on to something, right? You can hold on to something and it goes up in value. And a lot of things go up and value quite a bit, like a gold and silver, for instance. You're just holding onto it just because of anything that happens globally something can make it go up. So you can be triggered for a payment and tax just for having it.

These type of stories, they make my blood boil, Joey, because you never hear anybody talk about getting refunds on unrealized losses. It's only gains, never losses. If you're going to do one, let's do the other as well, right? Let's give people the opportunity

to fucking shoot for the moon something and they lose everything, at least they could then apply that for taxes going forward. That's never going to happen. You know why they can't do that, right? Because it's bullshit. This whole thing is fucking bullshit. Part of it, but most of it is because marking to market losses for individuals means

marking to market losses for governments and institutions. And governments and institutions, for example, if you were a real estate holder in Canada over the last of a while, marking to market your portfolio would have been disastrous. And so if they're going to mark to market the gains for people without selling, then you have to do the same thing for liabilities. And that causes big time ripples in, you know, domestic. And Netherlands is too small to matter on a global stage, but domestically, that would cause chaos.

Only makes sense. If you're going to do one side, do the other. If you're going to give people the shaft in one, give them the benefit on the other, right? I don't know. All this is doing, people invest money in something. They buy stocks. They buy commodity. They buy something because they're sacrificing today, right?

They could easily spend that money. They could get a newer car. They can go out and eat. They could do whatever to fuck they want with that money. But they're choosing, you know what? I'm going to put that money aside so my future self could get a benefit of that. And that's what you're penalizing. You're penalizing people that are thinking of their future and you're having them pay a tax on that.

I don't fucking get it. It's certainly the wrong way. It's going to encourage people to start spending more today. Maybe that's the intention. But then what's the long-term remification? from this, then people don't have enough potentially when they are retired and they're going to have to rely more so on the

government. And you know what? Maybe this is going to, if I have to spend more today, maybe then I'm going to buy a boat. Right? Maybe I'll just buy that. And then the inevitable boating accident is going to take place as a result. Right? Like, I can't afford a boat. I'm going to have to buy a boat that has been patched up and had a hole at one time and that hole could fucking reoccur.

But if it happens, hey, there goes my keys. Right. So you got, it's absolute fucking bullshit. I can't believe they're even thinking about this, but this is going to happen more globally. If it does happen in Netherlands, I can see this shit happening everywhere else, right? It's just free money. California's trying to do this now, right? They're trying to do this now, the wealth tax.

So a couple of things we'll talk about. This is a pet topic of mine. I really find this stuff fascinating because I think we talked about it. You and me talked about a lot of stuff early. When I was looking through the episodes for which ones to post around Christmas time, there's some good stuff from like 2021 and early 22, where we talked

a lot about unrealized capital gains tax and how it would look and when it would start and what would the you know what the cause would be the thing is that governments only think in in these terms right so for example when government takes out debt you know what money are they spending people's money future money yeah people people in the future's money when they want to tax unrealized gains what are they taking people savings future earnings they're taking future earnings yeah so these are the these are the these are the they think it. These kind of, you know.

But what's going to happen for a future somebody that doesn't have in the future? This will eliminate wealth accumulation for retail, basically, is probably what the end effect will be. And it creates a new group of individuals that are reliant on an entity to supply it to give them food, shelter, health, everything. Yes. When they could have done it themselves.

So there's that. But also, you know, this is why when people get mad about like the tinfoil hat stuff, they look at programs and as the old saying goes, the outcome is the intention. Okay. The outcome of the program, the outcome of the policy is the intention of the policy. There's no other way to debate about this stuff. There's a couple other like sort of noteworthy contextual points to put around something like this. One is that governments continue to think that they know better than the market.

And this is especially egregious in unrealized capital gains because Because unrealized capital gains are, by their very nature, unpriced. And when I say unpriced, it means that they haven't gone to market to reach equilibrium between demand and supply. So if I want to sell my house, I can go on House Sigma and take a guess of what my house is worth. And I can look at the price that I bought it for and how long ago I bought it. I can run some different models that show, okay, well, single family in this area with this

many bedrooms and these improvements, what's it go for? Okay, well, what about this and tax rate and all this stuff? How much has income gone up around here? What, what is this place worth? Models are great, but how do you know what the house is worth then? You know what it's worth when you sell it. Whatever you sell it for is what it's worth, because then you find out really what it's worth to you, what the pain of holding it is worth, what the weight is worth, what staging it is worth, what the inconvenience of having to listen or else while it's being shown is worth, all these different things. That's when you find out what something is worth when it goes to market. And government, yet again, is pretending here with unrealized gains that they know

what something is worth before you do. And you could say, well, it's not happening to primary real estate. Yeah, but it's actually happening to stuff that's even more weirdly priced and dynamically priced, stuff like vacation homes, stuff like Bitcoin, stuff like cars or art or any of that stuff, all reported. And what this opens the door to, and one of you guys said this in the child, I don't know which one of you guys said it, but what opens the door to is basically asset confiscation. You become, it's like a forced disposition element to this. If I wind up with a $100,000 tax bill on all my accumulated wealth growth over five years,

okay, how am I going to pay that bill? You either sell or borrow. You got to sell or borrow. So you either become indebted or you part with some. of your assets. And again, like when people talk about the conspiracy theories, own nothing and be happy, everything I look at is own nothing and be happy now, whether it's the Adobe design suite of programs or unrealized gains on Bitcoin. These people just don't want you to have any money. And by the way, Len, as we've talked about many times, as many prominent people in the

media have pointed out, what happens to stuff like debt and deficit at the government level, start taxing every single billionaire at 100% tax rate. You get enough money to run the government for like six weeks. Like the problem is not on the receipt side. It's on the expenditure side. And until we start realizing this, until someone does something about this and makes this a commonly held and maybe more importantly understood position, that tax receipts are much closer to just being able to maintain sewer grates than they are

to being able to maintain the social safety net. Once you start to get there, then you realize that everything else is just a humiliation ritual. You're working more. They're taking more. You don't sell. They force you to sell anyways. It's not right.

It's like it's demoralizing for people to have to go through something like this. And you wonder why kids are not getting married, not having kids, why people are fleeing countries to go to low tax rates, why people are doing stuff like a million different side hustles and betting on crypto and all this other shit. Like, it's crazy, man. It's crazy. And it's like, why are we doing this? And yeah, Darren, Honeycet in the chat saying we use the term life as a service.

Like, life as a service is where you're headed. You're not going to own anything. And so what's going to happen, you know, is when it comes time to pay your unrealized gains, some institution's going to go, well, I'll tell you what, we'll buy your house off of you and you can rent it at the same price you're paying for the mortgage and you won't have to move or do anything, you just won't own the house. And people will be like, uh, okay, sure, I'll do that. And then they don't own the house anymore. It's going to happen more and more. It's going to happen more and more and more. People make stupid financial decisions.

But they did, but the thing is that even if you make a good financial decision, you're going to be, you're going to get put into a corner here. Because no one's, no one's making enough money to cover the tax bill on their unrealized gains. No one. And, and you know what's one thing turns out to be a saving grace for a lot of folks. I, and I, I, I, you know, if it's going to be K. Y.C. Free Bitcoin. Yeah.

Something like that that is never tracked. If theoretically, you know, if one wanted to and they had a lot of that, they, they have then something that they could spend. And regardless of the price of it, and if there are unrealized tax that are applicable to your your stack. Yeah. That's not, you know, if you don't report it, right? Yeah.

You know, if CRA is listening, of course. But you have, but you have the option. There's optionality there. Right. So, and, you know, I, when you were. talking, I just wanted to take a quick peek. Of all the people you would think that would be able to maintain control of spending, the image is Donald Trump should be able to do that, right? And I'm going to ask you that. He's not going to. Yeah. Not only he's not going to, he's not doing

it. So 2024, the U.S., their deficit, he was the president for three quarters of the year. What was their deficit that was reported in 2024, Joey? What do you think it was? I don't know. their deficit for the year? Yeah. What is the GDP over there for the same period? I didn't look at that. I just look at simply the deficit. Yeah, it's hard to say.

Let's say the ratio is, I don't know, is it 15%. I don't know. I could tell you it was $1.8 trillion. Okay, I was going to say like $4. So it's a little lower than I thought, but still super high. So the next year, well, this upcoming fiscal year, that's ending end of September, they're estimating it's going to be $1.7 trillion. So $100 billion less.

Now granted inflation, it makes it even a larger number. But still, this is now a full year under Trump. And it's marginally gone down. So like I say, if anybody that you would say would have the image of taking this and maintaining control of the deficit and not adding to the debt. But he built the image for himself. Like we didn't we didn't assign him that quality. This is his fucking image, right? And it's turning up to not be the case.

He's got time to change this and bring that number to zero and make it a surplus. But, you know, another 1.7 trillion that's estimated that's going to be added to the deficit, sorry, to the debt this year. It's a lot of money, man. So nobody gives a shit. Yeah. But you know who does give a shit is stake and shake. Sure. They do give a shit because it's a story that would probably bring a smile to a few Bitcoiners face.

Maybe. You got to dig deep here. Remember it's stake and shake. They said they were going to start accepting Bitcoin not too long ago. May 2025 you could pay over there with Lightning Network. and well, this week they announced that they're going to be starting to give hourly employees a quote-unquote Bitcoin bonus. And they're going to be getting around or up to 21 cents per hour that they work. And that's going to be paid out in Bitcoin.

I love this. This is so cool. It's an interesting story. The bonus starts March 1st. The 21 cents is definitely symbolic, the number 21, right? The number, secondly, it shows off that Bitcoin is a medium of exchange. if you're adding it to somebody's pain. But there's a catch to all this, Joey.

There is a catch. The employees are able to collect the Bitcoin pay after a two-year vesting period. So you have a way two fucking years to see. I'll go with that. It's fucking lightning. You can just add it simply to every fucking paycheck. Two weeks.

Give me your lightning address. Boom. Where you go, right? Why does that two years? Like, come on. Like, let's get this done instantly. Is that, should make it four years?

She's making a fucking two years? Have you got to flip burgers for a whole having cycle? That's bullshit. That's why I say it's a good story, but there's a catch to this. I wish it was done in such a way that every paycheck that they get their Fiat, they get alongside that some Bitcoin that they earn 20 money. So bring it on. I got a yacht here. I can't believe I'm here. Anyway, listen, the steak and shake thing is great because number one, we talked just a second ago about how retail is being priced out of wealth accumulation.

assuming you keep a job at stake and shake for two years, you know, there's probably some metrics somewhere that shows that stake and shake starts to recoup their costs in terms of training and inefficiency after X amount of time and you become a sort of a quote-unquote quality employee, a quality investment for the company after two years.

So after two years, if you do your time, then you can do whatever you want, but then they get the best out of you and you get in exchange, like all caps saying in the chat a forced hoddle for two years and it helps bail some of these retail people out of maybe not destitution but you know if you make a dollar a day in Bitcoin

that's that's not bad right and then if you start making let's see you work eight hours 40 hours a week like you're doing alright by the end of the month right and then you know that accumulates over time and that that Bitcoin starts to look good and you also I hope you know I didn't look and see if steak and shape did this, but I'm sure they did. They've been actually really good on Twitter and seem to be into the Bitcoin thing more than most of these companies. You just do it for the clout. I would like to see them have a dashboard along with this. If you started working at steak

and shake and this time, that time. The Bitcoin that you pay, if I recall correctly, the ones that they collect for payments, they're not liquidating that. I think they're just toddling that. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, whatever. I just want to know, like, what is the, like, if Joey started working at stake and shake, you know, what is it, the 26th of January, 2026, and I worked there for two years and I work 40 hours a week or 30 hours a week or whatever, how much would I have after two years? And what if I did that, what if I started two years ago, right, with the, with the accumulation you can expect every two years or whatever, like some kind of dashboard model, someone could build a form.

I want it to be in a Bitcoin yield thing with like the way micro strategy does it. Yeah. I want Bitcoin flip. We'll call it Bitcoin flip because of the burgers. Yeah. How many, how much Bitcoin flip did you get. In such a way that it's so fucking bloody useless to anybody, but it sounds good to somebody that just doesn't understand. Yeah. God bless them.

All right. Let's talk about why you want to store stuff only on special places. Never online. Huge. Never fucking online because according to Forbes, there was an article that they wrote, Microsoft gave FBI keys to unlock encrypted data. Absolutely nuts.

This is creating. a huge hole for privacy over there. Forbes said that Microsoft provided the FBI with BitLocker recovery keys. And that was to help get into encrypted laptops that were seized in fraud investigation, in Guam of all places. And BitLocker is supposed to provide full disk encryption.

But Windows allows users to back up their recovery keys in Microsoft cloud accounts. Who keeps that fucking information? Obviously, I said the name is Microsoft. Some people do, yeah, they use that. So Microsoft, as a result, they have this information and they can then be legally forced to give up that over to the police.

And Microsoft received approximately 20 requests for Bit Locker Keys annually. And they fulfill them only because the user opted to store the keys in a cloud. If you didn't do it, all those requests would have gone right away side. But the ones that did that were lazy, they figured, you know what? I'm going to store to somewhere where?

Oh, the Microsoft Cloud. Well, you got rugged as a result. And they say Microsoft says that cloud backups offer convenience for users who forgot their passwords and also who want to get rugged at the same time. That's the reality. If you're going to fucking store something, don't rely on somebody else and a cloud system at that. is if you do, they have access to it unless it is encrypted by you in such a way that it's going to take a lot of resources to unencrypt that.

If you don't, you're fucked. What is the best password manager, if not something like BitLocker? Your own. The answer's none. Yeah, the answer is none. It feels like at this point. I mean, we do this on Access of Easy, the other show that we do for Mark. You should be listening to that show, too, by the way, because you would know about,

this stuff way earlier than the Bitcoiners otherwise do. You cannot use any of these cloud services. Not because they're not secure. They may be secure, Bitward and BitLocker or whatever, could all be secure. But if you are putting your keys or any data in a position where it can be targeted by law enforcement, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, they will cooperate 100 times out of 100. There's no precedent for any of those guys ever making it difficult for the business. badge ever. You have to store this stuff on your own in a way that's secure. I saw all caps

talking about PGP. Learn how to use PGP. Get a PGP key made for yourself. You can do it online, I think. You can download all the stuff off Git. Absolutely. Yeah. Super easy. And, you know, if you're not doing that, that's fine, but you're putting yourself at risk. We talked about on Access of Easy a couple weeks ago, and we've talked about it on this show too, how it's starting to become more commonplace and more acceptable that government target people who are quote unquote, you know, damaging societal harmoniousness and harmony with their words, not just related to stuff like, you know, criticizing immigration or religion, but also casting dispersions over the state of the economy or talking about the value of money or the

legitimacy of money. And if you're a Bitcoiner, naturally you may have this target. target on you. So what do you do? Well, you certainly do not put your keys in the cloud, your passwords in the cloud. You know, you have these millions of password managers that you're not keeping track of. But on the other side of those managers are people who can get into to see the data because it's probably laws around that. If you haven't figured this out by now, I don't know how you're going to figure it out. But chances are it's going to get hairy over the next few years. As we talk about these guys looking for unrealized capital gains, They want to know what you have.

How do you find out what someone has? You get their keys. It's not that, like, the lines are not difficult to draw. And you're seeing these lines start popping up more and more in places that you wouldn't expect. This isn't third world stuff. This is happening in America, in the Netherlands, in the UK, in Ireland, in wherever. It's your private chats.

It's your private data storage. It's everything that you don't have bolted down, metaphorically speaking, in your digital life. They will come and try and pry it. from you. This is a warning shot, man. You know, got to figure it out. And I see Boomer saying it's black pill stuff. I agree it's kind of like disappointing and can be, you know, upsetting. But there's a couple things you should think about. One is it didn't happen to you for sure, which is great. So you have a chance to learn from it. But also that you're, you know, you're,

you're, a lot of us are feeling, although black pill, like vindicated. I've been saying this stuff, Glenn's been saying this stuff. You guys, you know, in the chat, on Twitter, Twitter, I've been saying this stuff for years at this point. And everyone called you crazy. And now the time is coming where the stuff that was crazy even a year ago is coming faster and faster. The algorithm ghetto, as Hervoy calls it. I think it's actually someone else's, to someone else's credit that term.

But it's coming faster and faster, man. You got to be aware of these things. Don't worry about black pill. Worry about preparedness. Make sure that you understand. The sovereign individual, right? Yeah. Who could you rely on the most as yourself?

That's right. And if you could take away stuff that you're storing elsewhere and do it yourself, you're sovereign. Yeah. Brian Armstrong. I love this. Love this, man. Yes.

Do you? I mean, with the Davos and he was pumping Bitcoin. The reason why I get the message, I get it. But at every opportunity, the company that he spearheads, they're doing everything that's not Bitcoin, between submitting or shilling NFTs or yield or doing the ICO drops and bumping those. They do that. They do this because, well, it's their business and they want to increase their wealth. But let's be honest, a lot of this is Bitcoin driven.

And that should be their main focus. It should be none of this garbage. And if he's going to go there and talk about Bitcoin as being something that could be something that is going to replace the existing monetary system. he should back his words up with actions. And he's the CEO of a company. He's able to do some actions there. But every time there's an opportunity to make some money on shitcoining,

they'll do it. Yeah. So I hear what he's saying. I see those words coming in it. Or I hear those words coming in his mouth. But I see something else being done. That's bullshit. I love the.

So he did two notable media hits. One with the Central Bank. like talking about central banks and the legitimacy of central banks and currencies and stuff and talking about a Bitcoin is a check and balance on deficits and debt spending

and all this stuff and was laughed at by a guy who, you know, he was probably sitting on a classroom floor watching the American shuttle go to the moon. Like that's how fucking old the guy is. And he's, you know, he laughs at Armstrong. Yeah, he's fucking old.

He laughs at Armstrong and he's like, well, I think most people would prefer the democratic way instead where people vote and then the central bank, you know, retains currency from that vote. I just like, like just a big fuck you to that guy, you know? Like you're living in a fake economic zone where everyone fucking hates every policy you run out.

It's against free speech. They don't want to see more immigration. You don't care. They want free speech. You don't care. They don't want to be enemies with America. You don't care. They don't want to go to the Russia, Ukraine meat grinder.

You don't care. Like, fuck you. You don't have any legitimacy. Okay, number one. Number two. I think these guys five years ago were laughing saying we're never going to have to have this kind of conversation at Davos. There's no way Bitcoin will ever get to the point where it's in the debate with central banks and other reserve assets in terms of its place and legitimacy as a check and balance against deficit spending, which is at the core of the Fiat game. Talk about a wake-up call for that guy.

Now, on the Armstrong thing, I will say this, okay? This is a call I'm going to make now. In 10 years, when Arshan leaves Coinbase, he will leave in the next 10 years, let's say. He will become like Jack Dorsey did. Dorsey ran Twitter in a way that none of us agree with, but the pressures of that job and the pressures of the shareholders and the pressures from the government, from NGOs, from everyone else, just too great for him to do what he really wanted to do and say the things he really wanted to say.

And since he's left Twitter, he's a different guy. He's going to 50-person conferences in the middle of South America, wherever the fuck he's going, and talking about Bitcoin and Noster and all these different things. He's still running cash apps, still running square, and has his head on straight. And seems that he always had his head on straight, but couldn't talk about it. I think Armstrong is going to wind up being the same kind of guy. I think Armstrong understands the game. I think he's under a lot of pressure from his shareholders, certainly from the government,

because stable coins are going to play a huge part in treasury demand. as treasury demand is falling, we mentioned this, I think, a year ago almost when it first happened. And people talking about it now, like, it just occurred for the first time gold outpacing treasuries as the reserve asset of choice in central banks around the world. They're under a ton of pressure, like an unbelievable amount of pressure from all angles. And I think at some point he'll just say, yeah, it was good run. I started.

I'm going to hand it off to whoever now. And everyone, you know, have a good one, take care, blah, blah, blah. And he will wind up being an evangelist for Bitcoin, much like Dorsey is now. I really do believe that. And it seems to me that when he speaks, he gets it, even if he can't say certain things, he doesn't want to say certain things. I don't think it's because he doesn't understand. I think it's because he's under a lot of pressure.

And I think that pressure will eventually disappear, dissipate, or he'll step away from it. And you'll see exactly what he actually thinks. And it'll be a pleasant surprise, I'm pretty sure. How much do you think he owns of Coinbase? percent of it. 35 percent. So I got 19 according to Forbes.

I'm not sure if that's true or not. Yeah, but are they 19% of what? Not of the voting shares. Probably owns more of the coinbase shares it says. Yeah. I'm going to go with that. So I presume that he's,

I mean, I've been reading articles as you're talking that he's been selling. So I presume that that 19% has been dwindling over time. And they went public 2021 March, I believe it was. It was right. It was the local top, the local top. And even before that,

even like, remember in 2017, when we started, 2018, they were heavily in the shit coin, long before they went public. And I wonder how much of the oil. Coinbase was selling Bitcoin, Ether, and Lycoin. And then they were listing everything and anything that they could. Started with Bitcoin cash and then just got worse from there. So the argument I'm trying to make here is that before he presumably had the pressures of all this other thing,

I think he had a much more, much more tight grip of the company because he owned a larger percentage than he does even right now. 19% is a lot. But back then, before he won public, even five years before that, when we started getting into this, did he have control of the company? I don't know, maybe close to it. But still at that time, they were still shit coin like crazy. All the actions of Coinbase has just been fucking with shit coins. And you know what? the guy he could leave

Coinbase and turn around and become a quote unquote Bitcoin saying but you know what I'm not going to fucking to forgive him for what he's done Coinbase could have been a Bitcoin only company pushed the narrative of Bitcoin push the message of Bitcoin it chose not to and here they are

fuck Brian Armstrong fuck Coinbase I hear what he's saying but I don't fucking believe what I'm saying and you know what he's saying this to a bunch of people let's be honest the people at Davos they do not want to hear this why would they want to give up any power whatsoever If they do, if they give up the control of money, they give up a lot of power. I get it.

I get where they're standing from. I wouldn't want to give up that power either. But he's saying this to a bunch of people that just, that message is just rolling off their back. It's good to hear, but I don't know. Yeah. Fuck it all. I think I think I will be proven right here over time. But we'll see.

I don't give a shit about proven right because like I say, I'm never going to forgive him for just the fact what's been done to coin. over the years. I don't forget about these things. Never forget. Fuck you. What's next, Joy? Do you any one more? Do you want to switch over?

I want to talk quickly about brains. Yeah, okay, sure. Maybe two more. We'll see. I got to look at my thing here. We covered Armstrong. We covered Gloria. We covered steak and shake.

We covered Microsoft. Yeah, we can do brains. Then we'll go over the other side. They're offering up a new service. It's something called instant hash where you could buy hash rate that is being sold on the market. And you could purchase this. hash rate directly through brains and you can use that to mine Bitcoin, of course.

And it's an interesting idea. It's not the first of this kind, but it's the first that they're allowing the market to decide the price. And I'm wondering how successful this is going to be. If you look at the Bitcoin hash rate, it's dropped, I believe, 40% since it's all-time high, especially now during the cold. It's, you know, a lot of miners, the energy, it's being redirected from mining to enabling people to stay warm.

so less mining pools or mining farms are using the energy. So you can see that mining is, you know, the hash rate is going down. What this enables, though, is enable somebody to mine essentially without any equipment whatsoever. It's having somebody mine on your behalf. You're just renting the equipment. Interesting. No KYC as well, the whole process of buying and the whole thing is no KYC. Interesting.

I like to see new. ideas given to the market, people could decide if they want it. I don't think people will really flock to this. How long will it last? Before they have to do stuff like KIC, how long will this last? Why would they have to do KYC? God, at some point you'll have to, man. You don't think?

They operate at Bitcoin mining pool and the mining pool you could sign up with, you know, an email address is not tied to you and that's KYC free. Yeah, I guess. The whole operating business they have is KYC. Y C free. I don't know. Where are they domiciled? Europe.

They are somewhere in Europe. Are they? Okay, that's good. Prague, if I specifically, I, I remember interviewing, oh man, it's a long time. I'm pretty sure it was from Czech Republic. Yeah, okay. Okay. Interesting.

Let's do one last story really quick. Some guy wrote an article for the daily economy. I never heard of this website. before GW economy. Anyways, the story is very applicable to Bitcoiners though. The story reads that my bank froze my account is

permission access still money. And I don't have to get into specifics for this story. It is interesting that essentially services are rendered he got paid, the people that paid them, they disputed it and that caused this whole problem here. But every time a bank does this as somebody. And this

happens more and more frequently, they potentially mint a brand new Bitcoiner as result. Not all the time, but there's a potential that a new Bitcoiner. And once it happens, they never unsee what they've learned. You don't have access to your funds once it's to give it to the bank. It's the money you fucking earned. You went out, you fucking work for it. You're giving it to the bank, presumably that you can get into future. And then, well, no, it's not yours. When that happens, when they say you don't have it, people look for alternatives. And you know, one alternative that's always there is Bitcoin. I love hearing stories like this. People need to read it.

This guy paid a tuition to learn about Bitcoin. Other people don't have to pay a tuition. They can just simply learn off this guy's cheat notes. Do it, man. Buy Bitcoin. I'm starting to come to this conclusion, this realization that even the money you earn is not actually your money, whether it's in the bank or not, especially if it's in the bank, but whether it's in the bank or not.

Because the government can just change the value of that money at any given time. They can either make it a zero by canceling you some way or they can make it last. by debasement or they can do any number of different things and just wreck your economic freedom. And then, you know, as you mentioned in the story, permission to access is a total scam, but it's become the norm because it, you know, what does permission to access do? It keeps people in line. It's an electric fence, right? You got to keep people in line somehow and the restrictions around money and different things

like that. For example, if you were a bank and you wanted to really give someone a whip to stop saying things on the internet, for example, right? Let's say one guy and his buddy every Monday night, they're talking about this shit and you decide, I don't want to hear these guys anymore. You know how you could really scare them? Tell them you're calling in their mortgage. And that would really scare those guys. And whether they decide to change their tune or not, you could still just say, yeah, sorry, you're not, you know, what was the term, Dukka credit union used on us, the Luka, the Djuka, whatever that?

We're not, you guys are too risky for us, right? You guys are too risky for us, joining them to do the podcast. What do you fucking fuck him over? Yeah. Like, okay. Yeah. I don't know. I kind of, you know, in a way, I wish I still had my old fucking car.

You know, I missed that fucking thing. Let's go over to the notable stories. Thanks for tuning in everyone. If you're on video, stay with us. We're not going anywhere. If you're on audio, come back tomorrow for the back half of the show. Until next time, we'll see you. Don't leave your money to bank.