The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Francis Pouliot - Bitcoin in 2025, Fatherhood, White Pills | The CBP (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com ⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠www.easydns.com⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer. D-Central Technologies - https://d-central.tech/ Your home for all things mining! Whether you need a new unit, a unit repaired, some support with software, or you want to start your own wife-friendly home mining operation, the guys at D-Central Tech are ready to help. With industry leading knowledge and expertise, let the D-Central team help you get started mining the hardest money on Earth.

Hey everybody, just a quick note about the audio. I was trying to figure out how to use my new wireless mics with the SLR camera here at the CBP studio. I've tried a couple of different times now, once on a Monday show, once with Francis tonight, and I got to be honest with you, I just don't think the quality is up to snuff. So we're going to go back to the old mics. I'm going to put up some floor stands here or something so that it's easy for the guests to speak and the quality of the production remains high. One of the things I take the most pride in is the post-production and audio quality at CBP.

I think a lot about how their shows, I wish I could just speak to the hosts of and give them some advice on how to set up a proper home audio studio and proper sound, proper post-production stuff, everything. And I hold myself to a higher standard than that, and I just want to apologize because I really think the Francis interview is really good. I think it's good anyways, honestly, by most podcast standards, but it's not up to snuff

for CBP. So we're going to go back to the old mics starting, uh, with the next episode on the feed, just a heads up. Um, but I appreciate your patience. You know, one of the things about having a podcast that you have to mess around with stuff that's a little easier for the guests and try and decide where the, uh, the right line is between convenience and quality. And I think the wireless mic's just a bit too far to the side of the former.

So anyway, with that, enjoy this interview with Francis Pouillat, Bull Bitcoin. Friends and enemies, welcome back. Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. I'm working on getting the timing right here when we start without doing the intro. We've got to find a new intro video because I don't like that one anymore. So I'm just not doing anything at all. My name is Joey. I'm here tonight with Francis, CEO, co-founder, Bull Bitcoin, show sponsor.

Bull's been up to a lot of stuff. We're going to talk about what Bull's been up to in terms of their platform, their service, and the tech that they're building out over there. We're going to talk a bit about content that they're doing they just started a shouldn't say just started it's been going for i think a few months now uh sort of a francophone content farm and i don't speak french well enough certainly not like uh parisian french well enough to know exactly what's being said but i still tune in once in a while and i try and catch it because i know the bull guys are really doing their best over there to spread the message about Bitcoin. All sorts of different places around the world, as you guys

know. We'll talk about all that. We'll get into it. First, as always, the sponsor is EasyDNS. You guys know Mark. You love Mark. Start a website. Start a business. EasyDNS is the best place to do that. And don't forget, you can always count on Mark for a few things. One, your content will never be taken down. Very valuable these days, as you know. Two, your content will always be secure. DomainShare over there and a suite of security products to make sure that you guys don't have your emails spoofed, your website spoofed,

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Use our code CBPMedia. You get 50% off the first round of buys. Not to mention, of course, I say this every week, the Nostra relay, Bitcoin node stuff, all the VPS, virtual private server options, tons of stuff going on EasyDNS. So check them out. Second sponsor, Bull Bitcoin. I should have made Francis do it now that I think about it, but it's too late. These guys are best in silo when it comes to Bitcoin exchanges. Why? A couple of reasons. One, the team. You guys know Francis well, but the team working behind the scenes is really just as great.

Francis has done a great job hiring and these guys talk with Len and I every day. And I have to say, we open chats with our sponsors to talk business and talk podcasts and talk stuff like that. But in our case, anyway, I don't know if other shows are like this. The chat has completely changed into just a bunch of guys chopping it up, which is fantastic. You don't see that a lot these days. And those guys are some of the most base guys out there. So we like that.

Number two, no shit coins. You buy Bitcoin, you sell Bitcoin, that's it. Not to mention that it's self-custody only. I actually have the latest Bull Bitcoin shirt on underneath this, but it is covered in nearly fresh baby puke. So I had to throw a sweatshirt on before we started the show. All that said, self-custody, never worry about getting rugged. Never worry about someone coming and hacking into your account, stealing your coins. Ain't going to happen. Not with Bull.

And then finally, the bill system. If you want to live on a Bitcoin standard, you only have one choice. I mean, you got to pay your bill somehow. A lot of places sell gift cards. Okay. These guys do that too, but even more places need to be doing the bills payment system where you can buy, uh, you know, whether it's gift cards, pay your property tax, pay your mortgage, pay your university tuition. If you're still into that scam. A number of different ways for you to interact with, use, and I guess like Donald Trump says in the spirit of the inauguration next week, play with your Bitcoins.

So go there, use the promo code, sign up, you get $20 or $21. And I can see that you guys are signing up and using the service. That's all we want. Decentral Tech, Decentral Technologies out of Montreal is the third sponsor. Len is not here, so he's not going to pull up his bid axe, but my bid axe is just off to the side. You can't hear it. And the thing is running all the time, playing the lottery, join brains, whatever you want. There's tons of pools. You want to join brains, you want to join ocean, you want to run lottery on CK Solo, whatever you like, these guys help you do it. If you don't just want to do

lottery mining and you want to do something a little more serious, rack some stuff in your garage. Like I always say, Decentral Tech has all the stuff you need to do mining at a level where your wife will want to divorce you and do mining at a level where your wife won't even know you're doing it. Perfect in both cases. There's no promo code. Go there. Talk to the guys. Talk to the team. Like I said, best around. They have what many people are calling the best board repair guy on the planet working there. So make of that what you will. I'm not 100% sure, but I wouldn't bet against them.

Decentral Technologies. Francis is here. Francis is coming to us today, and that's got to be 4K. I mean, you just look great, man. One of the most handsome guys in Bitcoin. Never had a camera until a couple of days ago. And now look at him. He's like a new man.

I love it. I got my little podcasting set up. So it's been great. Yeah. I've been using very, very shitty technology over the past years for podcasting. It looks good, man. It looks good. We have a lot to talk about. I reached out to you a couple of weeks back, and you've been outspoken on a number of topics over the years, you. But I want to first, you know,

maybe before we get into the weeds a little bit, you guys have just rolled out some new stuff at Bold Bitcoin. What have you been working on? Well, we've been working on a self-custodial Bitcoin wallet for about a year and a half now. It's kind of still a little bit beta. We're not really promoting it super hard because we're working on some pretty advanced features.

But we just rolled out PayJoin. So we are the first ever mobile Bitcoin wallet to allow users to receive PayJoin payments. As far as I know, we are not just the first mobile wallet. Might be the first wallet in the world to allow users to receive PayJoin payments joins a little bit it's it's a it's a hard it's it's a hard thing to explain um but pay join essentially so you know when satoshi wrote the white paper there's like a quote in the white paper where he uh identifies one of the privacy problems with bitcoin which is if you look at the blockchain obviously everybody knows all the transactions are traceable, but there's a heuristic that you can use on the blockchain, which is that every input, every coin used in a transaction must necessarily belong to the same person, right? So let's say I

receive three Bitcoin payments of like 0.1 Bitcoin, and I send you, Joey, 0.3 Bitcoins. When on the blockchain, you're going to see three coins of 0.1, and then an output of 0.3 bitcoins. On the blockchain, you're going to see three coins of 0.1 and then an output of 0.3 that goes to you. And when thieves and hackers are using chain analysis tools to trace your coins

or otherwise malicious entities are trying to track you on the blockchain, they use strategies to figure out which coins belong to whom. And one of those is this rule, this heuristic that all the coins inbound that are in the transaction, like on the input side, must belong to the same person. And pay join completely destroys this heuristic, right? So when you do a pay join transaction with someone,

the receiver is actually putting some of his Bitcoin in the input side. And the way that this is done is a little bit of, a little bit of dark magic. The other thing on the blockchain, let's say that I send you 0.3 Bitcoins on the blockchain, we're gonna see that there's the amount is 0.3. So you can track the amount that was sent and received

on the blockchain. And that's also another heuristic that the chain analysis companies and the hackers and thieves and malicious entities are using to track you, which is they're they're they're looking at the amount and they're trying to figure reverse and Jerry stuff that can that can happen. And in a page on transaction, this is so mind blowing that when I show this to people in person, even like Bitcoin experts, even though intellectually, like they know that this is possible, they're like, whoa, basically the amount that appears on the blockchain

is not the amount that was transacted. So I'm sending you 0.3 Bitcoins and on the blockchain, it might be like 0.1162111. There's going to be a bunch of numbers there. And that 0.3 amount is not going to be there. So when you're sending and receiving a pay join payment, the amount on the blockchain is not the same amount that you actually receive. So like you gain a lot of privacy there. And another really awesome feature with that is like a lot of people are

receiving small UTXOs. And I can see by your, your, your name handle there that you, you, you are above average UTXO size. And typically you're telling newbies, hey, don't forget to consolidate your UTXOs once in a while. And the way that you consolidate UTXOs is basically you send a bunch of, you send a Bitcoin to yourself, right? And it's going to take all those little coins and it's going to aggregate them into one output, which you send to yourself. But it requires the user to send in order to consolidate. When you're receiving a pay join payment, you are passively opportunistically

consolidating your Bitcoin without even knowing it. So let's say that you had a bunch of little coins in your wallet and I send you money, you're actually going to be consolidating Bitcoin without even knowing it in a privacy preserving transaction. So that's super dope. So generally speaking, we have started, by the way, for people who use the bull Bitcoin wallet, which is not a lot like a few thousand people, it's still better testers. We're redesigning it. It's going to look absolute fire. The design of the wallet is something that I did personally.

I am not a designer, but i i just wanted to ship the product so i designed it myself with the colors and everything and then and it doesn't look amazing but the new one is going to look absolutely fire and we're investing heavily in the open source software so we got like i don't know maybe like four four or five guys that are now working full-time on the on the bull bitcoin wallet um i want the bull bitcoin wallets to become the ultimate sovereign individual tool so we're actually going to have nostre in this bull bitcoin wallet as well encrypted uncensorable uh direct messages between people um we're working on uh we're working on something actually we're working on a lot of like little like unique r&d

projects um one of them i think i think we are going to solve the problem of creating backups for users. So like users losing their backups or having insecure passwords. Again, another rabbit hole. But I've been focused on solving four problems in Bitcoin that are related to self-custody. How to buy Bitcoin securely,

how to cash Bitcoin out securely, how to convert fiat to Bitcoin, Bitcoin to fiat, whether that's in Canada, Costa Rica or Europe. We've pretty much kind of like solved this problem quite successfully. Obviously, we are 30 something employees, no VC funding. So you can imagine like we're doing this pretty successfully. The other problem was I want to use Bitcoin for payments. I use Bitcoin. I've been using Bitcoin for payments for 90 years. I got debanked in 2015. And after getting debanked by a few banks in 2015 for doing, you know, pure, pure Bitcoin trading and stuff like that, I decided like I'm going to try to

live on a Bitcoin standard as much as possible. So that's why, you know, we develop like the bills feature that you mentioned in the intro. In Costa Rica, we have this feature to spend Bitcoin payments, to spend Bitcoin and like pay people with fiat, same thing in Europe. But I want people to be able to download an app and make and buy coffee with Bitcoin without custody. You know, there is a huge kind of like shift towards custodial wallets because self-custodial lightning is not, You know, there is a huge kind of like shift towards custodial wallets because self-custodial lightning is not, you know, it's not great for like end users.

It's not super scalable. So with the Bull Bitcoin wallet, we came up with this strategy, which was, you know, also employed by Aqua Wallet. I think we both independently came up with the same idea at the same time. But to have a liquid network wallet, which is not self-custodial, it's not exactly self-custodial, that is also a huge rabbit hole. But the liquid network is not fully fully decentralized it's not fully censorship

resistant as bitcoin is but it's orders of magnitude better than the alternative which is a custodial wallet whether that's an e-cash mint i think cashew is great it's cool um but it's it's custodial whether that's like just a wallet of satoshi uh or whether that's like a coinbase um this is like people are going either full custodial with like well satoshi or um you know they're not using bitcoin for payments so i think i think we we've we've definitely achieved a level where you can use bitcoin for payments in a self-sovereign way um with the bitcoin wallet and then the the fourth part so like cheap cheap payments was the third one that i wanted to solve and the fourth one i want to solve is people not losing their backups, not losing their keys.

So, you know, when Bitcoin Jungle, the project that I also collaborate with in Costa Rica, was founded, the idea was like the kind of people that we're onboarding, they are sovereign in their minds, but they're not tech savvy. So we're afraid that they're going to lose their keys, right? So of course there's a custodial wallet that you recover with a phone number. And, you know, that's, that's how we prevent people from losing their money is like if they lose their phone, you know, we can, we can recover for them.

But, but I want to solve this problem with technology, which allows the users to remain fully 100% self-sovereign without like a third party holding your key, without a complicated multi-sig, without you needing to buy hardware. This is something that you should be able to download and set up within 30 seconds. You should be able to orange build your drunk friend at a bar at 2 a.m. You know, you're drunk. You're sending him $200 worth the bitcoin because he racked the credit

card during the night and the next morning he's not you know he's not gonna up you know he doesn't have to write down his seat on a piece of paper like in the middle of the night so that's that's the problems that i'm trying to solve and we are solving them through open source software um it's the the absolute joy of my life is to work on these open source sovereign individual tools you know as a as a guy who runs a bitcoin exchange um a lot of my life is to work on these open source, sovereign individual tools. You know, as a guy who runs a Bitcoin exchange, a lot of my life fucking sucks because I have to deal with regulators. I have to deal with banks. I have to deal with all sorts of nonsense.

So to keep my sanity and to keep my soul pure, I also devote a lot of my time to like open source, open source projects whose goals are to help people regain their sovereignty. So that's some of the stuff that I've been working on, kind of like on the wallet side and on the Bitcoin exchange side. The big news, obviously, since I met you, since we last spoke, is like, well, Bitcoin launched in Europe. That was the size of the headache that I was in terms of banking and regulation is incomprehensible to the average person.

Somehow I made it out alive. Thanks to, as you mentioned also earlier, like a really insanely awesome group of Bitcoiners in France. So a guy called Théo Mochenet, a guy called Gégé Géraud, awesome funny shit poster, a guy called Gilles Cadignan, and a guy called Gé Cadignan and a guy called Jeannie Chambrade. So we launched Bull Bacon in Europe, huge success so far.

And yeah, the other thing that we're working on generally, so, you know, I always thought that Bull Bacon was going to be just a Canada only business because, you know, I'm from Canada and like, I just, I just just didn't i just didn't really want to complicate my life too much um but then i moved to costa rica and i was like i would love bull bitcoin in costa rica for myself and for my friends so we did bull bitcoin in costa rica bull bitcoin in costa rica by the way is a is an enormous success enormous uh the amount of volume that we're doing here is uh way higher than uh than what we expected um there's just no other good solution for costa ricans whether that's people you know

buying their coffees or like foreigners like myself that move here they need to like buy a car we haven't sold a house yet for bitcoin but it's coming pretty soon i'm that's the number one thing that people are asking me it's like can i can i off from canada and move to costa rica and like buy a house with bitcoin like these kinds of amounts are little you know we're still about a year in costa rica so not necessarily ready to do that but but very close so you know that kind of like opened my mind to like all right bull bitcoin is now international that's why like you know medics andex and I were like, we're going to just put Bull Bitcoin International on all of our merch.

We're an international company. So, all right. And then we went to Europe. So now we have like a huge market and then we're like, what's next? So we are definitely going to launch in Mexico. You heard it first. We're launching in Mexico relatively soon.

So Mexico has also been a very large bureaucratic headache. We've been working on that for over two years, but we finally, finally made it happen. So Mexico's a done deal. Looking at another major country in Latin America where we're, we're pretty, pretty close to Mexico's done. It's just not live. Another country in South America. And then from there, who knows? We'll see.

But never the United States, right? I've heard you talk about the just logistical slash regulatory nightmare in the States because of the sovereign borders in that country, right? Is that still the case? Well, again, in order to protect my sanity and my personal security i i i thought i thought that the us was just you know it's and it's not it's not just like the financial regulator it's like the cia the fbi the department of homeland security

the national security agency um department of justice like you got all sorts of big guns that are looking at what you're doing and you know the US doesn't really fuck around that much with, you know, financial stuff. So I thought, I don't want to ever expose myself to that. But guess what, Europe is actually worse. Europe is worse. So Europe, their European governments and regulations are very strict, very severe, very aggressive. I didn't think it was going to be that hard to be perfectly honest with you when I, when I, when we first met you into Europe. So after dealing with Europe, I'm like, I don't think it can be that bad. And what's actually pretty funny is I've been pitched full Bitcoin us by a lot of

people that want to bring bull Bitcoin to the U S so, and a lot of people that I've been talking to are telling me, I don't know, you know, how, how much of it is true, how much of it is true, how much of it is posturing. But a lot of people seem to have connections with the Trump administration. And a lot of people seem to think that it's not just the strategic Bitcoin reserve that they're interested in. There is apparently an actual, like, hands-off approach to Bitcoin at a regulatory level and at an enforcement level.

Not to say that they're going to tolerate financial crime, obviously, or like terrorist financing or anything like that. Not to say that they're going to remove KYC or anything, you know, that we would, that we would like, but apparently the mood has actually truly shifted in terms of like

enforcement. So who knows? Like I've got other stuff to deal with right now, but I used to say never the United States. And now I'm thinking, you know, open mind. Do you think when I, like you mentioned earlier, that one of the problems you wanted to solve was this payments problem with Bitcoin, that it's not easy to make payments.

We talk sometimes on the show about the nature of the messaging around Bitcoin from governments. Trump's administration is a great example of this. These guys are, as you mentioned, hands-off, or at least as hands-off as any government probably will be your husband to date. And part of me says that's really good. But then the other part of me says that these guys are pushing either on purpose or just by coincidence, this store of value narrative that keeps everyone away from the payment side. It allows fiat to continue to rue the day there while everyone else is sort of holding their Bitcoin in their basement and not using it while Inc and the boys load up for the

ETFs and the government loads up for the reserve and all this stuff. Is that a concern for you? Like, like when you say solving the payments problem, do you, do you have that in the equation somewhere or no? Yeah. Um, so obviously, um, you know, people want to get rich, right. And, uh, there's, it's, it's very hard to, like, let's say you look at the, look at the you look at like establishment people, whether that's Michael Saylor, whether that's Larry Fink or, you know, all of these like Wall Street or Silicon Valley people. You you can't push back against Bitcoin if it's costing all these people an insane amount of opportunity costs like imagine the us was to like ban investing in bitcoin like they would be you know publicly hung probably because um you can't you can't prevent people from making a thousand percent gains over you know just just a few years that's just not feasible um so i think they've they've identified like okay you know like people

want to have exposure to the bitcoin price and we need to let that happen. So that's micro micro strategy went all in on that. And like BlackRock went all in on that. And that's obviously not you know, I'm obviously not against number go up. That's number go up is something that makes Bitcoin more secure over the long term, because if the price of Bitcoin is higher, there more economic activity there's more hash rate it becomes harder and harder to quote unquote take over bitcoin like with a hostile start fork or something like that so i'm not necessarily against number go up um both for philosophical reasons and for obvious personal reasons like i want to be more wealthy very

obviously um and it does it does make me cringe a little bit. You know what I mean? I don't like this. I'm not a fan of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve personally. And I've been very consistent with that. I don't want the US government to own Bitcoin. I don't want the Canadian government to own Bitcoin because I see them as being my enemies, right? So, you know, if I look about which group of people and which institutions are causing me the most damage in my day-to-day life, just trying to live my life like I want, it's obviously the governments, you know? So I don't want them to have leverage,

more leverage over me than they already have. You know, I believe Bitcoin is a tool for a sovereign individual, so I don't think it's a good idea to own MicroStrategy stock when you could just as easily own Bitcoin in your own hardware wallet and it's not that hard. So that does make me cringe, but I don't really think that that causes me harm as someone who wants to post Bitcoin for payments. Unless they, unless it's some kind of a ploy to, to seem like they're Bitcoin friendly, to promote this like corporate NGO narrative, while at the same time, they were cracking down on payments, then I would be suspicious, but I don't think it's that much of a harm, you know, and even if, you know, it can be frightening to think that a bunch of ETFs and a bunch of governments

own somewhere around like 3 million Bitcoins. I don't know what the number is, you know, two to three million Bitcoins. Yeah, it's like very, very high. And there is a case to be made that you know if if all the bitcoins are held by a bunch of small institutions then they can theoretically take over the network um but uh but it's it's much harder in practice than than it is in theory so i i don't think i i don't see it as a as a huge uh threat and uh you know bitcoin Bitcoin for payments is outside of the bubble of Twitter. It's huge. You know, like Bitcoin Jungle did 130,000 payments last year. Right. That's how many payments per day, Joey? Math. A lot. It's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of payments. It's all Bitcoin payments. Bitcoin payments are happening in places that are,

you know, Venezuela, you know, it's not a meme. Like it's not a meme that Venezuelans are using Bitcoin. It's not like a LARP. You know, there's a bunch of LARPs in Bitcoin that certain people or countries might be using Bitcoin.

Venezuela is not a LARP. I know human rights activists in Bolivia that have been using Bitcoin. In Togo, they're using Bitcoin. Kenya has huge Bitcoin adoption. And another thing about Bitcoin is also like payments. It's not just coffee that you're that you're spending. There's like legitimate commercial transactions are happening in Bitcoin real

estate, there's definitely real estate transactions happening with Bitcoin. People are selling their businesses and selling them for Bitcoin. People are settling international import and export with Bitcoin. People are selling their businesses and selling them for Bitcoin. People are settling international import and export with Bitcoin. And I know this for a fact because some of them use Bitcoin on one end of that commercial transaction. So, you know, if you're a Canadian company and you're dealing with an importer, an exporter, you're an importer, and maybe there's something in another country that you need and maybe somehow it's cheaper and faster to go through Bitcoin and then maybe Tether or something than to go through the fiat banking system. That definitely happens. And so I'm personally quite

bullish on Bitcoin payments. I don't see the cringe SBR narrative as being an impediment. Although I definitely prefer that Bitcoin culture stays to its cypherpunk sovereign individual roots. But the thing is, there definitely is a lot of cypherpunk Bitcoiners out there that are building tangible solutions for sovereignty and payments,

even though the Michael Saylors, Larry Finks, and all that, they're on MSNBC, they're on TV, you know? So I think they're on MSNBC, they're on TV, you know, so, so I think they are, they're, they're like overrepresented or represented in the media and their, their media darlings, like, you know, Bitcoin payments have a bad rap, obviously. Um, NGU has a great rap because Michael Saylor has been a really, did a really good job at legitimizing NGU and, um, and Bitcoin as, as sound money safety and also a great job.

Like these guys have done a great job at convincing the establishment that like, you know, we have a problem with central banking and then Bitcoin is a great alternative. Payments have always been a little bit, you know, the dark side of Bitcoin because of the Silk Road, because of, you know, terrorist financing,

which doesn't happen. Let's be frank. It just doesn't happen on Bitcoin. But, you know, the Silk Road, because of, you know, terrorist financing, which doesn't happen. Let's be frank, it just doesn't happen on Bitcoin. But, you know, the Silk Road did happen. And there is definitely a lot of, you know, drugs being sold and bought with Bitcoin and all sorts of nasty stuff. So that gets a bad rap. But I don't see that payments use case

going away anytime soon. Yeah, I think, you know, if I think about people who have their own businesses, for example, much the same way as you're starting to see transactions on the real estate side or on the, you know, little payment side, soon people who have real skills are not going to accept currencies like the dollar, like the loonie for their services. I have a guy, you know, news on air here. I have a guy coming to my house tomorrow giving me a quote on a bathroom reno. And I plan on asking the guy, like, I want to pay you at least half of this in Bitcoin.

And it'll increase the value of the renovation for you and the value of the renovation that I'm willing to sort of give my wealth to. But you got to find a way. And I think more people are going to start to see that because, as you mentioned, Bitcoiners are going to make up the bulk of the sort of wealth in most of these, I think, in the developed nations for sure. I'm not you know, I can't speak on a lot of the countries you mentioned there, Costa Rica and others. But my guess is that in a country where there's not a ton of wealth to begin with, and the economy's, you know, rather circular sort of by nature, the Bitcoin will rise to the top there even faster than it's going to here, because the currency just isn't that strong. You're already talking about countries where, you know, the dollar reigns supreme over whatever local currency is sort of, you know, milling around or milling about in these banks. We should talk a bit about what's going on here in Canada. I don't know if you remember how to get here,

if you need me to point you on a map or something, but we're in the middle of a bit of a conundrum here, depending on who you ask. Trudeau obviously giving an almost teary eyed speech the other day in front of a cottage. I don't know where that cottage is, somewhere in Ottawa probably. He's stepping down. I see guys like Carney, people like Freeland, trying to get in front of the media, trying to get in front of mics and cameras. And I wonder if you think it matters who leads us next,

Polyev, Freeland, Carney, whoever it ends up being. And I wonder if you think that matters who leads us next, Pauliev, Freeland, Carney, whoever it ends up being. And I wonder if you think that there's a chance that whoever takes the reins could turn around some of the, I think, objectively poor policies that the Trudeau government made, especially in the last four or five years. Do you think about Canadian politics at all these days or not really?

Yeah, I mean, I do. Obviously, I still follow Canadian political, you know, shenanigans. And I follow Canadian media, despite my best intention to stay away from it. I'm still, you know, I'm still Canadian, you know, even though I left. So obviously, I'm very happy that Trudeau is stepping down. I'm happy that Pierre is going to be the next prime minister, you know, unless the global cabal gets in the way somehow, you know, I wouldn't put it past them. I wouldn't, you know, if I have to put the odds, you know, I don't think the odds are 95%. I think the odds are close to 80%. So Pierre is obviously a Bitcoiner.

How much of a Bitcoiner is he? That's the question. We've all seen him buy, you know, a shawarma with Bitcoin. We've all seen him mention Bitcoin in passing once or twice. But, you know, he's not like a Bitcoin promoter. You know what I mean? There's like a one or two soundbites when he talks about Bitcoin. But I have it on good authority by different people that have different interactions with Pierre, like at least three different people that, you know, he's generally, you know,

like he's generally more pro Bitcoin and anti Bitcoin. I don't I don't think our data. So, you know, there's a lot of things that the conservatives need to do. There's like energy policy. There's like health care, there's social security, there's immigration, there's, you know, housing, there's central bank policy. There's a lot of things on their plate that are like macro level stuff that they need to reverse that are going to have not a huge effect on us in the short term, like more in the long term. I don't think Bitcoin is a huge priority for them. The idea of a strategic Bitcoin reserve in Canada, it's just not going to happen. Are they going to roll? And the Trudeau government

did actually. So, you know, the KYC regulations on Bitcoin went into effect under the Trudeau government. There's a new regulation in place. Central Bank of Canada is getting a lot more power than you used to. It's kind of a long technical story, but Central Bank of Canada is asserting more power over payments technologies. There's a lot of stuff that they're just not going to be able to unravel because it's just been entrenched in the Ottawa swamp. And it's really easy to pass a regulation, but it's really hard to remove a regulation. You need a lot of like political capital and political will. So, you know, imagine yourself into your new elected government. Like you need to focus all of your energy on unraveling policies that have been done for the last 10 years.

I think energy is obviously going to be the most important one. And, you know, like the size of the bureaucracy. So I don't think it's going to have a huge impact on Bitcoiners. It's not like, for example, if Maxime Bernier was to get elected from one day to the next, or he's more of a Millet-type character. He's more like a Vivek Ramaswamy-type character. Polyev is more of a kind of a… He's a fence-sitter a little bit when it comes to some of these things.

He's a big-time conservative a little bit, you know, when it comes to some of these things. He's a big-tenth conservative, and he wants to win elections. So I'm not, you know, I don't see this at all as, like, a Trump-win-level stuff or a Millet-level stuff. But, you know, it's good to know that at least what's really heartwarming is that, like, a lot of young people are voting conservative, right? And I think that more than just Polyev and the Canadian Tories, being conservative is becoming cool. Being base is becoming cool. Being a vegan antifa is cringe for a young TikToker. I mean, it's kind of like both. It's kind of very polarized, but definitely being...

You can just see it by the kind of like both you know it's kind of like very polarized but like definitely being uh uh you can just see it by like you know the kind of content on instagram you know now you get hot chicks talking about raw milk and you know like uh about like having having many babies is super dope you know and it's like the counterculture it's like uh it's uh it's pretty good um but nothing you know the one policy the one thing that i'm happy is like i uh i can't wait i don't know who is the the minister responsible for canada post i think it's like it's like some really low level minister of like public services or whatever uh i wish they would force canada post to turn the no KYC Bitcoin purchases back on because that was obviously a political decision. That was a decision that came from, we don't know where, but it came from

somewhere at the top. So that's my single voter issue is force Canada Post to sell Bitcoin for no KYC again. Have you given any thought to expanding? You know, I don't even know what else you could do with Bitcoin, but I know, you know, there was a time there where you guys were really under attack by the federal government, right? The no KYC thing was sort of the public facing element to that, but I'm sure there was more. Have you considered what it would look like to expand the services

now that you have a friendly government for maybe four or eight years? As you mentioned, even if you don't think that the next government will enjoy or embrace or support that level of service from you guys it's hard to unravel things once they're entrenched so have you thought about what it might look like over the next four or eight years are you guys thinking okay we got like you know 48 months here to give it as much as we can in canada and try and get some new services out that are going to be impossible to get rid of i i don't think so you know um as i said like this the central bank of canada has basically given itself the authority to regulate

payments companies um there's a new and nobody knows about this like how that's the crazy thing about about um politics it's like there's never been a vote. There's never been a political party talking about this thing called the RPAA, which I don't even know what the acronym means. But basically, like the Bank of Canada is, you know, the bills use case is it's not in like jeopardy, but it might make our life harder, right? That we're doing third party bill payments with Bitcoin because of this new thing, which we're like negotiating and like kind of like, but that just came into effect. Like they're not going to unravel that. They're not going to lower the KYC thresholds or anything of that sort. So no. And part of the logic also of Bol Beconin's standing in many other countries is,

God forbid, somehow Mark Carney becomes prime minister. And Mark Carney, by the way, is, if you look on my Twitter feed and you search for Mark Carney, you're going to see that I'm somehow obsessed with the guy. Not a lot of people know who he is other than he's a globalist. Everybody kind of knows he's a globalist, but he is the only person that I know that was the president of the Central Bank of Canada and also England.

He was also on, I believe the chairman or definitely on the chair committee of the Bank of International Settlement, which is another three letter organization that controls the world and that nobody knows about. Essentially, the Bank of International Settlement is the central bank of central banks. It is the ultimate boss. He was one of the architects of the Great Reset narrative. He's a climate hysteric.

He's all for mandatory vaccines, like all the bad things. Mark Carney somehow got his fucking finger in some organization that is pushing that. So if Carney had been elected prime minister, I think there would be a very, very real risk that a company like Bitcoin would have been taken out. So part of the international expansion is like, all right, well, you know, what happens if, and they would never do it in a way which is overtly Marxist. They would do it in a very subtle way through grinding us down or putting pressure on our banking partners to kick us out. Thankfully, there are financial institutions in Canada that are based, and we're very fortunate

to have found some people in Canada that are willing to go to the bat for bull bitcoin, which is great. And also we do a lot of volume, so it's good for them. And it's funny because, so we moved from Quebec to Alberta a few years ago. We moved our head office. And technically speaking, every Bitcoin that we sell is like revenue.

And it's kind of weird. You'd think like, no, you know, our commission is revenue. But like if I sell you one Bitcoin, like my company makes 150 grand in revenue. Like even though my profit margin is tiny. So like the amount of gdp that we increased to alberta is fucking insane because basically all of our transaction volume is now part of the alberta gdp which is which is really funny um so you know i think that like that doesn't go unnoticed so uh you know being being like there's, there's a really awesome quote from a book, Altered Carbon, you know, which is like, you know, the establishment, you need to become a player.

You need to become big for them to take you seriously. So, you know, the bigger we are, you know, the bigger we are, the more protected we are, for sure. And yeah, so that's part of the reason, you know, expanding in Europe, expanding in Latin America. If something happens in Canada, like we still have stuff to do. And, you know, I always have I don't I don't think Bitcoin is a direct risk of more regulatory scrutiny. I think like the service, the services that people have now are definitely there to stay. Unfortunately, I thought the same thing about the Nokia YCF Canada post. I actually thought that we were gonna pull that off

for many, many years. So I, dude, and we sold a lot of Bitcoin. I bet. A lot, a lot. An amount that warms my heart when I go to bed at night to know that all these Bitcoins are in self custody by some Canadians out there. And obviously since we added KYC,

like the volumes dropped by like 95%. You know, and to some day, I welcome the day where they shut down Bull Bitcoin Exchange with great relief, because as I mentioned earlier in the call, it's really a pain in the ass to run a Bitcoin exchange. It's not a fun job. And if someone is thinking about launching a Bitcoin exchange,

I would say don't. And if you do uh you're going to be very very tempted to sell out your principles really quick because sticking to your principles running a bitcoin exchange a regulated financial institution is really really difficult um you know you were there i had this talk in montreal about like the hard path you know and like taking the hard path is important the hard path is is actually it's actually quite quite hard um but i'm fortunate enough to be like in a position in my life where if uh something went wrong with bull bitcoin i would just double down on the wallet like super super hard you know um and uh even as i get like older i'm thinking about like um this

this this quote uh by by Aaron Schwartz which I posted today on Twitter I think I saw that great quote yeah which is like what's the most important thing you could be working on in the world right now and if you're not doing that like why aren't you and you know I often think about like what's the legacy that I'm gonna live on this earth you know other than my kids and my family and you know my friends and all that like what's the legacy that I'm going to live on this earth, other than my kids and my family and my friends and all that? What's my legacy as a member of our civilization, as a member of the human race generally? And something that I realized is open source software is immortal. It never goes away. A Bitcoin exchange service is temporary. Bitcoin open source software is immortal.

So if anything ever happened to Bitcoin, I would just double down on the open source software. And as I said, it's like my main passion is collaborating on these tools and on these technologies. And even now I kind of fell into the rabbit hole of Nostr. And I'm really, Nostr was just definitely tempting to see Nostr as kind of like a novelty, you know, like Blue Sky or like Social or like another place where you can, you know, shitpost. But the more I interact with Nostra and I talk to Nostra developers and I talk to, like, I've had the chance to discuss with quite a good number of pretty hardcore human rights activists and people who are repressed, actually repressed, whether they are in Syria, Iran, or Bolivia, or Venezuela,

almost always fighting against a communist dictatorship somewhere in the world. I'm really seeing the liberating power and just the insanity of freedom that Nasser brings so um like I'm I'm very very I'm very bullish on on individual freedom and sovereignty I think not only we have the cultural movement behind us we've got you know Trump being you know kind of a an avid like a caricature of like the based freedom movement even though we all know that he's, he's, he might not believe, you know, but they can't, like you said. Yeah. But you know, he, he is at least, um, talking about those, those topics. So very, very bullish on that. I don't believe in the black

pill at all, to be honest. Um, the more I'm in Bitcoin, the less cynical I become about Bitcoin. I've had phases of cynicism. Um, and, uh, you know, you talk about, okay, SBR, microstrategy, you know, Wasabi collapsed, the Samurai guys went to jail. Is it over for Bitcoin privacy? No, there's definitely a lot of stuff being worked on. So I'm very, very positive about that. As the space grows, as the asset gains traction, you know, we will get more minds looking at this thing than we ever had before. And if our biggest problems are – if we're able to overcome them through software development and through the focused efforts of a few people, as the quote goes, we will overcome.

It's hard sometimes. I mean, the Black Pill thing is something we sort of tango with on the show quite a bit, because it's easy to get lost in just the complete insanity, whether it's, you know, Toronto raising property taxes another 7%, so you can die in an ER hallway, or, you know, a lesbian firefighter telling you that your husband's too big for her to carry out, and it's his fault, you know, while the city burns or the state burns, basically, at this point. It's easy to get carried away in the black pill stuff. But, you know, you city burns or the state burns basically at this point it's easy to get carried away in the blackball stuff but you know you mentioned something there it's a thread i want to pull on because i know you have i think one or two kids and i just had my first kid and i think about now more and more this idea of the hard path and what it means to leave a legacy and what it means to raise a little one

in a world where you mentioned the culture is shifting a bit, but I think broadening the space of the things that you're not doing in public is difficult. You are inviting looks. You are inviting conflict. You are inviting meetings with the principal. You are inviting any number of things. And it's funny, you know, my wife and I joke about this all the time that the likelihood

that I spend more time in the principal's office as a parent than I did as a student is basically 100 percent. I would guess that's the case for a lot of Bitcoiners. So I'll ask you straight up, you know, maybe to start the conversation about this stuff. How do you think about being a sort of Bitcoin father, a legacy father, someone who's got to push against the grain, who's made a living really pushing against the grain? You know, when I was still living in Canada during the lockdown,

I, and I got, you know, not arrested, but, you know, I got in a pretty heated confrontation with the cops over the lockdowns. I started to started to really think like if i have a kid here they're gonna take my kid away you know i and uh crazy story also a true story there's there's a guy that contacted me on twitter um during the lockdown that uh had had his kid taken away because uh i can't remember exactly the story but he was talking about you know russia and he was talking about uh contact tracing and you know obviously he was like talking about it where online you mean no with his kids okay okay with with his kids and

then the kids told the mom and they were you know separated and then you know the school got involved and then the kids were talking about contact tracing and globalism and you know conspiracy stuff but the same kind of conspiracy stuff that i talk about and that i would talk about to my kids like dad why don't we have the qr code you know because the qr code is a way for the government to control you you know and and i wouldn't lie to my kids you know um and uh this guy contacted me because he was like dude i need i need to talk to you i need your help you know i need to talk about this with someone like what do i do like i'm freaking out blah blah and uh obviously was uh was in it was in a state of like uh a state of distress you know and i was trying to um make sure that you

know he uh he doesn't do something retarded and he plays the game as much as possible, like repent. He had to go through counseling and he had to do all sorts of shit and I might just fucking go pretend you are reformed and you no longer believe in all that shit. Your And like in my case, of course, it's tricky because there's also a great quote. Madex has this on a bunch of his paintings about the man that only wants to be left alone. And the man that really wants to be left alone, he's willing to take a lot of crap because he knows that the day he starts to fight back, they're going to come after him and he might lose his family. So, uh, um, but the day that the man who, uh, once just wants to be left alone is forced to fight back and knows that in essence, his life is destroyed because, uh, he might go to jail or he might

become a human, you know, political descendants, dissidents that I've met, um, just, just a couple of last weeks ago, they're on the run from their governments because they were advocating for free markets, free speech, and freedom of association, and they don't see their families anymore. Their former lives is effectively destroyed, and their families are effectively destroyed. So it's tough to balance your willingness to die on the hill and your willingness to, you know, to be a good dad. Fortunately, I think I've been a big fan of like the sovereign individual thesis and like creating tools and systems for my particular life, which allowed me to retain my sovereignty

and to become mobile. So I'm not, I think I've done a pretty good job at, for, for, for preparing for living in a, in a world of tyranny. And having, having a kid is, it's, it's really, it's really something because like, even before I had a kid, I knew somehow, you know, I knew in advance that I wanted to have kids. So it's not, It's not like I just had a kid and then my entire belief system changed. I always thought about having kids. I think about my ancestors

all the time. I think about myself being part of a long legacy of very badass individuals. I want that legacy to continue for a really long time. You don't have a choice but to be optimistic when you have kids. Like you can't be blackmailed because like your kids, you know, you want to be optimistic.

Like you want to create something better for your kids. You want to like you see, you know, my kid is like a year and a half now, you know, and it's all smiles. You know, she's not a newborn anymore. You know, she's like she loves the world. The world is amazing. The world is fantastic and uh i i definitely want to want to create like a better a better world and i can't i can't just be black people and be like you know black rock one and it's over and you know let's go uh let's go live on a farm somewhere in the middle

of nowhere no like and um you know i've been having this conversation with a lot of big corners you know and uh having a kid is one thing I'll say. It's great for business. It's great. Great for business. It's it's not it's not if you're an entrepreneur, it's not a bad thing to have a kid. Actually, it's way, way better because when you have a kid, you become ruthless in business and you become a lot more shrewd and a lot more, let's say, efficient with your time, efficient with your money. Everything that you spend is legacy that's being taken away from your kid. And it's like, I know, you know, if I buy something or if I, you know, Paul Bricon makes the wrong investment, I'm going to, you know,

it's going to be worth like 10x more in the next few years. And that really stinks. But when you think about like, oh, fuck, that's going to be worth 10,000x more. I just literally spent an entire private island that my child could have owned. It's a very good experience. Another thing also that I've learned is that

it's never the right time to have a kid. It's never the wrong time to have a kid. People are overthinking about planning and stuff like that. And consistently, what I've seen is people who have kids, they will fucking make the money. Like, I don't get it. Kids are expensive. Well, it's true, but they're actually not that expensive.

You can have a very healthy- You have to pay it all up front. Everyone talks about it's $500,000 to raise a kid. It's not $500,000 a day they're born. You don't have to pay it all up front. Everyone talks about it's 500,000 to raise a kid. It's not 500,000 a day they're born. You have 25 years to pay that out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, of course, having a kid is a natural course of, it's the natural thing for a BitCorner to do

because the possibilities that Bitcoin will have in a far future are something that we will never get to experience. We will never get to experience what it's like to have tens of billions of dollars worth of purchasing power and being able to affect insanely massive change in the world without requiring outside funding. And honestly, a lot of people are like, oh, but you don't want to spoil your kids. I mean, we're not talking about spoiling your kids, but like I know what it's like

to be able to do because I'm an early Bitcoin adopter. So, you know, I've I had Bitcoin from from a while back, like the ability to be an entrepreneur and not depend on external funding allows you to do things that you otherwise could never do, you know, taking that you otherwise could never do you know taking that hard path that i'm talking about it's very hard to do when you're uh when you're getting vc funding this is a recurring conversation that i have with with a bunch of people you know a bunch of other bitcoin entrepreneurs which uh are you know technically that they might be competitors

of bull bitcoin or they might become we might become their competitors in like in like the future and you know we talk about you know it's so cool what you guys are doing at bull bitcoin like i really wish i could you know do that but you know i gotta you know have investors you know we gotta we gotta work on the shit coins man like we don't have a choice you know shit coin pays their rent like you know we gotta go into this uh cbdc or this tether stuff or um we can't afford to like uh work on self-custody uh you know i wish i could be self-custodial but then i would lose roi and that kind of stuff and like um this is because they have investors and which is totally normal it's capitalist society so you know you want to

have investors but like the ability to to be self-financed and like what are my kids going to be able to do with that money in the future and now also when you're leaving when you plan on leaving bitcoins to your kids even though it might not be like an insane amount of wealth today you know whether it's like you know a couple of bitcoins or maybe a little more than a bitcoin uh maybe a little less than a bitcoin but you know we can imagine bitcoin's going to be you know obviously 10 10 tell them in 10 million bucks you know worth you worth at some point, then it becomes very, very important for you to create a family culture and to raise your kids properly so that they understand when you will be older, you will have responsibility.

You will have the responsibility of the wealth that you inherit. And after we're dead, we're going to be able to control what what they do with the money so we need to we need for them to be prepared and to raise them right um so i'm i'm a big big advocate for having for having kids and uh whenever uh i meet like you know young or young-ish entrepreneurs that are kind of crushing it in like the startup scene and they don't want to have kids because they think it's going to be bad for their business. I'm like, you have no idea the motivation you'll get when you have a kid.

And you have no idea the innate desire of domination and conquest that you have when you get a kid. It's great. It's been one of the most eye-opening experiences in my life, for sure. And one of the most eye-opening experiences in my life, for sure. And one of the things I think about often is the sort of villainization of, I don't want to call them the trust fund baby, but the kid who's got a successful lineage. And I look at the way that successful lineages are represented and sort of demonized in the media.

And I see the same thing all the time. I see a kid who had his university tuition paid for, her university tuition paid for, right? This is sort of the, I think, the sort of middle standard for something like this. And people in the press, people on Twitter, people who are not part of successful lineages will say the same thing all the time. This was handed to you and it's an unfair advantage. It's an unfair advantage. And that line of thinking translates to stuff like inheritance taxes that are 100%, translates to stuff like you shouldn't be able to stay in the house that you bought once you don't

need every single room for your kids or whatever. You shouldn't be able to have a car that you didn't pay for or whatever, right? All these things. And the consequences of punishing and villainizing that kind of good decision-making over generations is cancerous to a society because what you're really doing there is punishing the kind of dynastic thinking that we're talking about this kind of urge to conquer and destroy and accumulate and grow and succeed not just for you not just for your wife but for someone you're never going to meet it's you know planting the seed for a tree whose shade you will never enjoy and that's the only thing that separates us from the apes, man. And when I see this kind of stuff, I think about my daughter,

I think about my wife, and it's almost like an out-of-body experience. For people who haven't had a kid, if you want to have a true out-of-body experience, go to a delivery room, go to a birthing center with your wife, a woman you love, and watch the birth of your child. There's nothing like it. The way that your mind operates in that moment is incredible. I'm not a nervous guy at all. I'm pretty sure I blacked out for seven or eight minutes before you know it. You're cutting the cord. They're weighing your baby. The baby's on your chest. And all of a

sudden, all the stuff you cared about a day ago, two days ago, and all the stuff you thought you were going to care about when the baby was born, it's gone. And you don't, you don't understand all the things. It's like in that moment is the only time you understand all the things your parents did for you, the sacrifices they were willing to make, the things they were willing to give up. You know, I don't talk about this at all on the show, but I'll mention it. My parents are divorced and it wasn't a pretty divorce. And, you know, talking to them now,

the only reason they stayed together, they sacrificed great, what would have probably been great years for both of them apart. They sacrificed it for my brother and I. And like, I could never imagine making that kind of sacrifice until you have a kid. And to that end, it's not just about what you sacrifice for the kid. It's what you're saying

too. It's you don't know the lengths and the greatness of which you are capable as a human until there's this kid in your life. That is something that you cannot replicate. You cannot get that anywhere else, nowhere else that's available to you as a human. Yeah, and one thing that you said about the cancer of inherited wealth and the unfairness of it. Generational thinking is prosecuted by people whose lineage was not as successful

as yours or mine or anyone's. That's like late stage fiat thinking. I recommend two very good books. One of them is Taipan and Noble House by James Cabell. So the same guy who wrote Shogun. So a lot of people know Shogun from the Netflix series. But it talks about a dynasty of merchants from England that basically created Hong Kong.

And the guy, the protagonist of the first book who through sheer, how to say that, just power of personality and ambition and wit and wisdom and strength basically creates Hong Kong. And his family becomes a dynastic merchant family in Hong Kong until the late 80s you know so you kind of like go through that that Journey and uh a very and his family uh he passes down an insane amount of gold you know of wealth from generation to generation and uh very interesting also i had this discussion with bitcoiners years ago and when i read that book i was like wow this is exactly what we were talking about so he creates a constitution for the family almost like a state right when when you become the

new head of the family you have to swear like a blood oath to respect the original constitution and the vision of the company the company and the family are one and the same, can never be diluted. And you can never break this oath, you know? So it's really dope. The other one is a book called When the Lion Feeds. I forget the name of the author. Just finished reading it. That's also a dynasty of, again, British in South Africa,

basically building a mining and financial empire in South Africa, which follows the origin story of these settlers, like, I don't know, 17th century or 18th century, all the way up to apartheid. And so these are obviously fictional stories. But if you look at the history of Rome, the history of the Medici, why do we have the greatest beauty and human achievement in Florence, in Italy, from the Renaissance?

It's because these dynastic families wanted to leave a legacy for themselves and for their descendants they wanted to create um and you know like all all the the paintings of you know bocelli and like michelangelo um it looks like it's just random people in you know random characters but it's actually the face the models are actually like his daughters his sons and all that and uh you know if you think about you know the creation a cathedral, which you will never see the completion of because it takes 100 years. And then a great also great series of novel called The Pillars of the Earth. It's following the building of a cathedral in England, which takes 100 years, you know, and it's like the character and that he's training his son to continue working on the cathedral after his death. And, you know, it's only the grandson that gets to see the finished cathedral. It's like this long-term thinking is why we have great things. It's why we have amazing things. And the people who think that inheriting wealth is unfair,

they are destroyers and they are looters. And there is no worse tax in the world. There's no greater evil than inheritance tax. And the crazy thing about inheritance taxes like i have also like you know personal i'm not going to name but like their personal stories with inheritance tax but imagine imagine a young person um who's who's uh whose grandparents died whose parents parents die and you know they inherit um let's say they inherit like you know a big building and they inherit a bunch of physical assets and then um the income tax on that is 65 percent

yeah and then you have to sell it you have to sell every you have to sell your parents estates you have to sell your parents stuff and then you have uh 35 percent left but also the lawyers and legal fees and everything that has to do with paying those taxes, you know, you end up with like 20, 25% of, and then you're, you're, you're left all alone. Like that inheritance tax is, is possibly the most, the most evil thing you can do. It, you know, it incentivizes people to throw away their wealth and consume all the way to the end. And I've seen I've seen both. I've seen families who's who's where the parents are very conservative about their wealth because they are very pro inheritance. And I've seen other

families close up where the parents are like i'm gonna fucking burn everything um yeah you know before i die and uh and yeah obviously the uh the greater the greater family culture and the greater outcomes i think are our parents that are that are uh pro-inheritance and that's another thing also um which as a bitcoiner uh is interesting you know when i before i had a kid i was thinking like so what am i going to do with the what happens to the bitcoins after I die? You know, like my parents are like well off. So, you know, I can give I can give them the bitcoin. But, you know, you don't you don't need bitcoin. You know, they don't, you know, not going to talk to my parents, but they're fine.

You know, they're fine. They're living their life and they don't they don't need that. You know, I have a brother, you know, you know, he could get some bitcoin get some bitcoin but you know if you don't have any kids like what am i gonna do with all those bitcoins and uh and that that leads you also to like take care of your you know your your securing your private keys becomes a lot easier when you don't have kids when you have kids it becomes a lot harder to secure private keys because then you have to uh you have to add the trade-off of you know my my my that's a whole other rabbit hole, but it's easy to secure private keys if you don't need to pass them on after you die. Once you have to handle a transition,

like an estate planning transition for your private keys, it becomes a lot harder. So that's the final problem with self-custody that I want to fix. I want to fix inheritance and I want to fix inheritance in a way which achieves what I want to achieve, which is that I want, you know, I've been, I haven't seriously spent like, you know, weeks and months like focusing on this idea because I have other shit to do. But I know that somehow I want the Bitcoins to be released programmatically over a long period of time. Certain amounts of Bitcoin accessible right away, but definitely a long tail of Bitcoins that are released over time. I think about it also like, Bitcoins that may not be accessible for a hundred years.

That way I can guarantee that my kids will not inherit those Bitcoins. I don't want, these Bitcoins are for your grandkids, right? And if you die, then nobody's gonna get them. I can guarantee that my kids will not inherit those bitcoins. These bitcoins are for your grandkids, right? And if you die, then nobody's going to get them. You know, if you die without kids, nobody's going to get them, right? And I also want to have, you know, a method and a culture and a system and a ritual and some kind of thing where the keys are passed down from generation to generation

for an extended period of time. And that also idea is linked to this book like Taipan and Noble House, where, you know, this founder creates this like foundation for the family. And like, you know, there's these kind of cult, you know, almost around the founder and his vision for the dynasty that we have to respect and that we have to pass on. And I believe that we are on the cusp of achieving this from a technological perspective,

something that we've never been able to do before, because if, you know, throughout human history, you're lucky if you're able to pass on your wealth to your kids. There's all sorts of things that can happen during inheritance, whether it gets seized, taxed, robbed or something like that. It's just like a logistical, practical aspect of wealth transfer to the next generation. It's really hard. Forget even inflation, just physical security of the assets being transferred. And planning for three or two generations down the line like that is you know kind of ridiculous just focus on giving it to your kids

and and you know if that if that's good enough like that that's fine but imagine if we can secure wealth that is locked for multiple generations like 100 years, 150 years. What is that going to have as an effect on, you know, your family, your dynasty, on the world, I wonder? It's not hard to conceptualize it. Like I think as you're talking, I'm kind of picturing like the Mandelbrot, Mandelbrot, Mandelblot, I can't remember what it is, the repeating sort of mathematical pattern, right? So as you kind of drill down into what looks like a leaf pattern, there's another leaf pattern, another leaf pattern.

And the thing I think when I think about that is, you know, it looks small now at, you know, year 2025. But as you drill down to 2050, it's going to be greater. The power is going to be greater. The growth that the family is going to see is going to be more significant. And the decision making, you have 50 more years of information, more years of compounding good decisions, 50 more years of adherence to the contract, adherence to the bloodline, adherence to the company code, all these things. And there's just no reward right now for a lot of families who want to do this because, as you mentioned,

there's just this perverse tax. And by the way, I'm not necessarily anti every tax. In a small community, you would be expected to give some of your wealth or your time or whatever services, and that's fine. My big beef is that at scale what we're seeing is this perverted theft to and and just you know this this money goes to all the worst causes there's nothing productive about the outcomes there's nothing productive about the people taking the money from you and it's just it's, it stings so much more and worse. You know, when, when you see companies like, or you see these guys like, uh, you know, Warren Buffett, who's a quote unquote philanthropist, you know, the same companies who, who villainized dynastic

thinking, these guys are also running these pseudo philanthropic outfits. They'll take your money. They're not give that money to someone else. That money is for them, their foundation, their family, their company, whatever. The same things they tell you not to do, they are doing at a level that was unimaginable only 100 years ago. These guys are experts at wealth preservation. They're experts in dynasty. And they're experts in making sure that you never join the club. And Bitcoin ends that. And it can end it in a generation or two. And I think that scares a lot of people. Amen, man. Amen.

And I'm also currently reading the biography of Cicero, reading about the Roman Empire and about... There was not a lot of tax in Rome. Pretty much everything was built by dynastic families, you know, that for the purpose of achieving immortal glory, and as kind of like crazy as it sounds like that is, and that that seems to have been the driving factor for public service in ancient Rome, you know, other than corruption. But, you know, you would have like, you know, the Colosseum, like these colonnades, these amphitheaters, like aqueducts. You know, a lot of these posts, by the way,

like to be responsible for managing the aqueducts of Rome was a post that you had to pay for, that you were not paid for. You had to pay for the privilege of being the guy who manages the city's garbage because that gave you prestige and that gave you a chance of achieving higher posts and maybe becoming a general one day and maybe becoming a consul and once you become a consul and it becomes legal for your statue to be erected in the cities of rome and then your family becomes immortalized and your family name and then your kids and then once you become a console and once you have your fucking statue in the street

it becomes way easier for your kids to become consoles and like all of that you know and it's so funny also who will build the roads? I will build the roads by the way I love building roads one of the guys who orange-pilled me who's like my Bitcoin mentor

so obviously he's more than me, taught me a lot about Bitcoin. He builds roads, so he lives also in a developing country, and he physically builds infrastructure. That's his new thing. He loves it. bulldozers and uh what do you call them excavators and uh he's building roads for free uh in the jungle because he wants to get to point a to point b faster and he's building them you know we were just talking about that today to be like uh this specific road that he's building to go to the beach faster and i'm like uh what are we gonna do like are you gonna are you gonna have like a gate you know like and then how are we gonna open the gate and like maybe

we just charge a bitcoin payment to open the gate you know so there's like a selection in order to go through this road like it's not gonna be a lot but but you know you have to be a bit corner and you know a lot of bitcoiners that i know um are into a lot of like me personally like what do what do i want to do with my wealth like if if I had to spend the money, what would I spend it on? I think I would definitely, most definitely buy a fucking lot of jungle. I love the jungle. Obviously, as you can tell, I'm a big fan of the jungle. I like the chaos, the anarchy, the beauty, the danger.

There's just something about the jungle that I just, I just derive, you know, and I'm not, I'm not that much of a hippie, although, you know, I live in a hippie place, but I do derive some kind of energy. I'm a Christian, I'm not a pagan, but you know, still, but still, I do derive some kind of some kind of energy from the jungle. And like, what better legacy than to buy fucking 10,000 acres of jungle and to prevent it from being ever destroyed? Like to conserve it. Like these are living monuments to my glory, you know? And that's the thing that the commies don't see.

Like when you get the state to do a national park, you know, like, oh, there will never be a national park. That's not true. In the south of Costa Rica, actually, where I used to live in Santa Teresa, there's this gigantic, awesome national park, which was literally founded by these Swedish rich people, like, in the 60s. You know, like, if we have more wealth, like, we will do that. What is more baller, having a Lamborghini or having Jaguars? Jaguars are way cooler. Like, i have jaguars on my land what do you have fuck you man i think there's something to this idea of like you know you mentioned it there that the jungle

and preserving it it's beautiful it's this this you know living thing that the one thing i i think about sometimes with uh my daughter and having a kid is a good example of this. And, you know, I'll preface this with this idea that you can teach a kid, like an infant, perfect pitch. And pitch is something a lot of people think they have, but they don't actually have. This ability to name a note when you hear it without comparing it in your mind, the same way that you and me can look at the background of the podcast and say, that's red. I don't need to know that it's not blue or not green. I just know that it's red. This is only, it's only possible through a certain kind of like classic jazz or some John Coltrane songs will have it or Miles Davis songs will have it. This idea of intentional entropy to force adaptation. And it's something that you don't

see a lot of now, but kids do it. You're kind of talking about it. And you see this in the jungle, like I want to preserve this. This is beautiful chaos. There's something here that can't be replicated, should not be destroyed. And we should not give this up under any circumstances. And if it's the Francis Pouillat jungle, even better. If it's a jungle in which a friend of mine built some roads with a fleet of excavators, even better. And it's something Bitcoiners don't... We're taking entropy, I think, out of our lives in a lot of way in Bitcoin, but there is room for forced adaptation through intentional moments of randomness and chaos. And that's something we can't forget.

Do you want to, do you want to cover anything else? We can leave it there. What do you think? I don't know, man. We've definitely talked a lot. We talked about Canada. We talked about bull Bitcoin, shield, shield, my stuff. No, man, I'm pretty, I'm pretty, I'm pretty satisfied.

And I, yeah, I just had a big team meeting with the whole team, you know, and just this whole conversation we had about the black pill, the white pill, and we need to remain uncorrupted and we need to remain very optimistic and very hopeful. And the last thing I'd say, it's like, you know, there's a lot of FUD coming from within the Bitcoin community. Some of the guys at Bitcoin magazines, everybody's like Tether's controlling everything, BlackRock's controlling everything. Bitcoin has been co-opted, whether that's coming from Roger Ver, recently came from Anir Taki,

which was an early, you know, Bitcoin developer coming from, I'll do respect, Shinobi and all those kinds of guys. I have Mark Goodwin's book is behind me here. Mark Goodwin and Whitney Webb, professional black pillars. And I like the guys also because I like them because they're trying to shift the Overton window on the other side away from the cringe. So they're being extremely – they're trying to paint a dark picture because everyone is dick-sucking euphoria around Michael Saylor and all of that. So they're trying to create the opposite camp for people to come into middle ground. So I kind of respect that.

But I am extremely optimistic, and not about the Bitcoin price, which I am, but about our ability to become sovereign individuals and our ability to take back our freedom and liberty. And I think that we, our civilization came to a fork in the last 10 years where there's two paths where it could have gone. And COVID is kind of like the catharsis of this path, you know, where we are either going to this totalitarian dystopia,

where we are living in the pods and where we are, it's essentially just a gigantic hive at some point that's ruled by an oligarchy in which we are completely unable to extricate ourselves in the future. Right. Because there, there, there, there is a path also where, you know, if the tyranny becomes so, so severe and so hard that like 1984, right. Is the best, the best example of that. And then there's the, the, the other path, which is deliberate, you know, how Finney has this great quote, which is like deliberate, the computer can, can, can can can liberate mankind instead of uh oppress it um so we're kind of like at this fork in the road now where on one side you have

bitcoin you have noster you have um peer-to-peer distributed system you have uh radical decentralization so like homesteading small families uh uh tribal mentality coming back um return to the roots you know and on the other side you have globalism fiat oppression uh big state and you're like like by the way like x is not a victory like elon buying x is it's uh it's just a different shade of uh elon is just like pure poliev you know it's like it's like, it's like, yeah, it's good that like, I'd rather have like a little less censorship of my friends on X then, you know, I'd rather have like my guy in power that is like more based than the guy who's not based.

Like that's obviously a net win, you know, for sure. But you know, you have this totalitarian, loosely held conspiracy of patricians, essentially, that believe that they can micromanage the entire universe and that we are all living in their simulation. And perhaps we're not even real in their minds. Perhaps they are actually the only person that's a real person.

And I think a lot of these people are like sociopathic, like they actually might consider realistically, like I might actually be the only person in the world. And maybe everyone around me is like fake, you know, and this is my simulation. People think that this like is a cool thing about Elon that he might actually think, you know, it's his simulation. No, fuck you, man. I fucking exist. I'm not in your fucking simulation. I'm not an NPC. So we're at this fork and it's like, it could go either way. It could go either way. If Bitcoin had not existed, definitely the fork would have gone in one direction. Right. So Bitcoin is like the rock solid foundation of the resistance of everything else, everything else, because Bitcoin is private without private property, without freedom of commerce and the ability to express your your your exit,

you know, financially by being able to move your wealth and like to protect your wealth without that as like a rock solid foundation we are essentially all slaves we are all slaves or most of us are are are slaves um some of us are slightly uh or radically less enslaved than others um i like to think that i'm i'm less enslaved than others. I like to think that I'm less enslaved than most people, but I still have to show my fucking passport. I still have to show my little fucking driver's license if I want to take my car on my road.

I still have to have the permission slip from Daddy JD or from whatever authority. Some of us are a bit less enslaved than the others, but we're still slaves to some degree. But without Bitcoin, we'd be absolute slaves. So it's normal that people are concerned and worried

because we could go either way. And I get that. But I think, however, I think that even though we could go either way i think i think like the work that we're doing and by we and like the great we of uh the nostre and bitcoin and cypherpunk kind of like freedom fighting individuals and it doesn't take a lot of us by the way and that's that's that's another thing that's important that um you know if uh if there was like the cypherpunk toxic maximalist political party uh we would get the same amount of votes that the ppc does you know which is like two percent and we would lose and we would be fucked uh but this is not that's not how how it works right um a radically motivated and skilled

uh minority of individuals with tight bonds. And another thing is also like the Bitcoin tribe and the Nostra tribe and like that whole thing, which is like loosely held group, like a loosely held tribe. And we have our own culture and our own language and our own institutions and rituals, which is very vague, but also it's very vague, but also it's very vague, but also it's very tangible.

And it's tangible more for other people than others. Like for me, it's very tangible because, you know, I interact with other Bitcoin builders from all over the world. And like, I can see that there is a, there's a very strong, like gravitational force around us where it only takes, it only takes a small amount of us to say no. Right. For we don't need the majority of people. Right. So that's why people are kind of like black bit because you're still thinking

about democracy and you're like, Oh, at least, you know, 50% of people are retarded, you know, and it's fine. It's okay to be retarded, man. It's like, you know, it's like the average IQ is 100. That means that half of the people are under 100 IQ, like, it's fine. And like, not everybody, you know, it's don't despair, because everyone around you is like retarded. We only only despair about that. Because, you know, the way that it works currently, you know, is that these people vote vote and then the politicians have dominion over our lives and we're fucked. It's mob rule. Effectively, we're living under mob rule.

And in order to convince the majority of people to leave you alone is just never going to happen. The majority of people are always going to want to take your stuff. They're always going to want to just literally just take your stuff and put you down. But these technologies and these systems and these processes and these structures that we're building are resistant to mob rule. So even though we may feel like we are alone, it only takes a small amount of us. And like, it's just the gravitational pull of Bitcoin. It's so hilarious. There's this guy who is

an internet legend. He's been working on decentralized protocols for quite a bit. I'm not going to name him, but he's a really famous guy. And he's got purple hair and he's Berkeley, San Francisco, California, you know, Antifa type guy.

And I was chatting with him and he was like, aesthetically and culturally, like I still see more with Ethereum, you know. But, you know, it's like, but Bitcoin is just that it's the one, it's the one that works, it's the one that works is the one that's actually decentralized and it's like he's almost like a bitcorner despite himself he's a bitcoin maxi even though um he he he identifies aesthetically with ethereum more and you know with the you know ethereum's like the the the social justice side of you know you have crypto but you know the the pull of bitcoin as like a true activist, like as a true revolutionary is so strong that we're able to pull this guy and bring him on our side. And also, I think a few of these guys, I met another dude actually who worked at Truth Social. So he was an engineer who works at Truth Social true social but he's not but he's not based actually he's like super not based he's like the opposite of based and then i know it's very ironic but you know he's like the total total other other side uh even though he was he's like an

engineer of true social and like bit and now he's working on bitcoin and nostril you know he works on bitcoin and nostril and he actually contributes to create tools that we're going to be using. So we have like, and, and it's like, it's not, it's not, it's not like Bitcoin, that Bitcoin is an open tent that is welcoming everyone, which it is, but not actively, you know, we're not seeking out these individuals, but like Bitcoin is like the gravity well of revolutionaries. And then we have this common thing that keeps us together, both ideologically and both financially and structurally and institutionally. We all speak the kind of same language of Bitcoin and we're able to collaborate using Bitcoin as the medium of collaboration. And that's also why Noster, noster can have existed i think without bitcoin right so um uh and there's a reason why noster was seeded

originally with bitcoiners um and there's a reason i think why like blue sky and uh all these other um non you know alternative decentralized social networks are are not emerging is because it was seeded with Bitcoin and Bitcoin, like the Bitcoin culture became the culture of Nostra. And no matter how, you know, and there's like the founding, the foundational principles of like self-sovereignty and privacy and decentralization and censorship resistance that are core to Bitcoin and this idea of like uncompromise, know on these principles that is now part of master like that's why nasser is so solid you know um so very very long way to say that i'm super bullish and super optimistic i've never been so optimistic bitcoin is so good like you know on a privacy level also there's tons of stuff there's you know um i think the

biggest the biggest like black bill of the last year was like samurai getting arrested that was a huge black bill for a lot of people and then wasabi just imploding from the inside and just collapsing which is really sad you know i had a lot of beef with samurai very well publicized a personal enmity to samurai uh because to be know, T-Dev is a fucking psycho, you know? And like the founder and leader of Samurai, even though obviously he's a great man, like he is a great man. He's a great person. But, you know, funny enough, I actually, after they got arrested,

like I, you know, kind of like became friends with all the samurai guys. Because the language of Bitcoin is ideological. And whether you agree with someone technically or on the fringes, the ideological slant, the ideological bent of Bitcoiners is the same and getting arrested will calcify that bead for you in a way that not many other things will. Yeah, well, I think there is no greater motivation

for a Bitcoin builder to be arrested or to have your friends arrested. More on that topic another time. But it is actually a very real threat and it's not talked about enough. Like there's definitely personal security risk for a lot of Bitcoiners. Not for the average person, but like for people who are building like, you know, payments related things.

There's, yeah, there's definitely concerns. But yeah, so these were like huge black bills. And obviously like MicroStrategy now has half a million Bitcoin. How the fuck did that happen? And, you know, obviously they are not, they're not friends of our ideology. Although I don't think they, they might not be enemies, right? I have, I have very no, I have, I don't have opinions on.

They're an unknown quantity. Mike Saylor is an unknown quantity. So is MicroStrategy. Anyone who says otherwise is not, not being honest with themselves. I've never met the guy. I've never talked to him, not invited to the party, by the way. I can't, I cannot judge. I have, I have a very little opinion on that topic. But yeah, I mean, and, you know, just another thing,

you know, like, so my dad, you know, he's like part of a golf club and, you know, all of his, his, you know, his friends are, you know, like not turbo normies, but like normie entrepreneurs, right? So like, you know,

like probably like a little conservative leaning, but just like, you know, and then now the big thing is so funny it's like blackrock blackrock is taking over bitcoin like what do you think about blackrock thinking and i read in the newspaper that blackrock is going to change bitcoin and maybe they're going to double the size of bitcoin and something like that and like you know secretly i like i think you know if like imaginative coinbases loses the keys of of blackrock MicroStrategy and then like they think they're going to be able to revert that or to like unlock those Bitcoins. And they're going to be doing a.

Oh, my battery is almost dead, bro. Almost, almost dead. I'm going to try to plug it in. OK, hold on. Hold on. So this is good content. Shit. Okay, we'll give them a we'll give them a minute. It's funny. We talked about sailor a lot on the show. And yeah, I don't know where I come down on the guy. Having a pizza party for 100, 150 of your closest friends

and inviting, I think, a lot of what, you know, what some people online would say are podconf approved podcasters, media outlets, all these things. There he is. He's back now. He made it. Yeah. And, like, so, but unfortunately my, for some reason, There he is. He's back now. He made it. Yeah. But unfortunately, my...

For some reason... Is this going to... I don't know what this is going to do. You're the only guy I know who does podcasts without his stuff plugged in. There he goes. He left again. Francis is the most technologically savvy guy we have on the show from a Bitcoin side, but doesn't plug his laptop in. Make of that what you will.

A savant, a savant. We'll give him a second here. I just want to get, you know, usual stuff, right? It's fair to say Francis should get the closing comment here. Critical level. Battery critical level. It's going to die. Okay.

Anyway, I am not Pod podconf approved by the way um i'm gonna try to say not podconf approved um but yeah my my general message again white pails only no more black pails joey i don't know if you can hear me but my screen just went dark so i can hear you good night good night for me god bless you having me man my pleasure take care everyone we'll see you next time all right take it easy guys