The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - Matthew - The Laurier Bitcoin Club

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Joining the CBP this week is Matthew, a second year student at Laurier University, who is the Founder and President of the Laurier Bitcoin Club. As young people get further behind the 8-ball thanks to a devalued currency, it is up to people like Matthew to help educate them and provide them with knowledge on to start their Bitcoin journey. You can find Matthew on X at https://x.com/laurier_bitcoin 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   #Bitcoin #BTC #Economy A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠https://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.

Friends and enemies, welcome to another edition of the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. Filming this one on Sunday night, so it's not going to be live by the time it goes to air. I think it's going to be probably Wednesday. It'll be a few days after recording, so apologies. But this is just the reality of it because I'm going to be talking to Matthew. He's the president and founder of the Laurier Bitcoin Club, and he goes to school over there. And for people who are unaware where Laurier is, it's in Waterloo. So probably about an hour and a half-ish from Toronto,

if you're trying to drive there with no traffic. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. But either way, that's how far it is from Toronto. So because he goes to school during the week, I can't do the normal evening rip with him. So here we are Sunday night and doing it and hope you enjoy it. But either way, before we go any further to talk about him and the Laurier Bitcoin Club, which I really want to talk to him about quite a bit, but have some ad reads.

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of this show. You are a second year undergraduate in Laurier. You're attending in Waterloo. And just curious, what are you studying over there at Laurier? So my major is a double major in accounting and economics. Very fiat, isn't it? Well, the economics is fiat. The accounting is universal, especially like I'm taking managerial accounting right now. And a big misconception people have about accounting is that they just think of tax accounting. And in reality, like any business, even on a Bitcoin standard, we'll have to do accounting because you know, through accounting,

you discover is my business profitable or not? Like if you want to run a business at scale, there is so much internal accounting that you have to do to you know, to know what's going on. And I think that when you combine together accounting and economics, you come to a lot of realizations. And it's actually the same major as Peter Schiff's father. You know, the story of Erwin Schiff. Joy has enlightened me on that. And I hope you don't end up with the same face as he does as well. No, no. But you know, I can see how he studied economics and accounting together so what happened was is that he knew

economics and he knew accounting and you know when when I listen to the guy like I can relate to him because he just seems like someone similar to me in the way that he thinks that like he realized this okay in accounting you take an accounting class, you have revenue, and then the business has revenue, and then the business has costs. And then if you subtract the cost from the revenue, you get something called net income. So if the business makes a million dollars, and then it has $750,000 in cost, your income is $250,000. So Erwin Schiff, knowing this information said, well, now I have to file my income tax form. And I made $100,000. And I have here that my costs for the year, you know, cost of living, you know, mortgage payment, cost expenses, that equals $100,000. So my net income is zero. And he's right he's right like like if you look at it that way

that actually the income tax is not an income tax it's actually a revenue tax and you're taxed on the total of your revenue not your net income and you'll catch this if you're in like a like an accounting class you'll notice this so then what he did is he tried to challenge this in court because how could it be that corporations are able to deduct all of their operating expenses from their revenues and then only get taxed on the difference but we as individuals you know we have a job and we're taxed on the entirety of all the money that we made and then more and more and more as you start to try and invest them you get more taxed so it's like it never ends so he went to court to challenge this and the court did not accept his

argument of, you know, revenue versus income and how there's different definitions of income within the IRS. And he fought it in court and he lost. And apparently like his argument was that he was not even in a lawful court that he was like, if the court that the tax court that he was in was basically part of the

IRS and it was not a court in itself. And then he went to prison and then he died in prison on this hill of saying, well, just look at the definitions in the accounting textbook. It says that's what income is. It doesn't say revenue that's income. So,

and then his son, it becomes the most famous, you know, Bitcoin fudder probably over the last decade, you know, but interesting his grandson to has been he's gotten in and out of Bitcoin as well in the past. So it could be all fate, you know, Peter Schiff could have gotten into Bitcoin well under a dollar and like maybe him

claiming that he doesn't own any as part of his own elaborate tax protest right i have always theorized that peter schiff is a bitcoin or a heart he knows too much about it and every opportunity he has he talks about bitcoin even when he's been called on a show to talk about gold every once in a while like all the time he just diverts and talking about Bitcoin. Why would he talk about it? I think he's trying to pump his bags. And if you look at, at shift gold,

they accept Bitcoin for purchasing gold. Where does that Bitcoin go? Does he, does he sell it immediately? I'm assuming no. I mean, this is my guess. I could be wrong,

but I think he's a truly a Bitcoiner and he's, he understands what it's all about. You know, gold is the same thing in a way. This is just a digital version of it, but gives additional properties that gold doesn't have. Well, I would say the difference between them that, you know, he's not really addressing is that he's trying to present it as if there is some type of magical intrinsic property about the precious metals that Bitcoin does not have. But if he's really like an Austrian school economist, like he would see that it's the subjective value of the gold, it's the subjective value of that of gold that brought it to where it is today that people desire gold, and it's the will of the people to acquire gold that makes it special, not because gold has a special magical property of being a physical object as a commodity and that that's like where i think the disconnect is so i can't

tell maybe it's a charade maybe that's his way of staying relevant i i don't know i mean he's been into this field like been talking since when occupy wall street that's when i think he really became well known and when he went on the streets and he says, I'm the 1% and you can interview me and debate me on the 1%. I have to give him credit. He went into the lion's den. He could have easily got his ass whipped.

He was surrounded by people that were adversarial to him. If he said the wrong thing, which he did, I think, a few times. If things got to worse and you know if he said the wrong thing which he did i think a few times like if he if you know if things got to worse and the fists were thrown he was only just one guy maybe his camera guy that's it yeah there's a but whatever that's i have to give him credit there but whatever it is what it is i i did want to talk to you though i mean i brought you on here not

to talk about shift like i said i love talking about him he here not to talk about Schiff. Like I said, I love talking about him. He's great to talk about. But there's something you've done in Laurier. And something that's unique, because I don't think a lot of universities have done it. You have founded something called the Laurier Bitcoin Club. Is it correct? That's correct. That's the correct name. And you're the founder and president of said club. Yes.

Okay. Let's tell me what is the Laurier Bitcoin Club? I want to hear all about it. Well, the Laurier Bitcoin Club is a student club. And we are Bitcoin maximalists. And we bridge students at the university to learning about Bitcoin. Every school almost has a crypto club of some sort. There's always some type of blockchain club or a crypto club at every university.

But very, very, very few schools have a Bitcoin only club. And as far as I know, the only other one in Canada is the University of Victoria Crypto Club, where they call themselves a crypto club, but they still urge everyone towards Bitcoin, but they still allow to give a platform to these other coins. And I was actually just there and met with all the amazing members of the team of the University of Victoria Bitcoin Club when I was at the conference last week and learning Bitcoin in Victoria. And it was really amazing to see them and their initiatives. And then in the United States, there's a bunch more. The initiative is led from Cornell University. And then there's people all over the University of Wyoming, UCLA, UC Boulder,

and so many more that I'm just not mentioning right now. And there's a network across the world. It's called the Bitcoin Students Network. And I plug in every possibility I can because it's so brilliant. Because when you join your local Bitcoin club at your university, you could be anywhere in the world. You're not just joining that club, but you get access to a group chat where you can meet all these other students who are Bitcoin maximalists all over the world in every continent. And I'm talking to people in Europe, Asia, Africa, and they're all so brilliant. Like I cannot believe like the insights and the conversations I'm having with these people.

So I give a lot of credit to Ella and Arsh who started the Bitcoin Students Network. And that's what really allows these clubs to flourish. And I'll talk about the Bitcoin Student Network in depth later on, because I see that's on your timeline. You're very active, at least at the Twitter account, the Laurier Bitcoin, Laurier underscore Bitcoin is the

specific one. It's very active with communicating with the Bitcoin Students Network. But in terms of starting up the club, when was it done? When did you start it? What was the idea behind it? So Laurier had a blockchain club in the past. And this was several years ago. And the club was inactive for many years. And I managed to get in touch with the great people who ran that club. And that guy who used to run that club, now he actually works in Bitcoin mining. And he's a Bitcoiner himself.

His name is Lucas. He's done a lot of excellent work. And then last year, I said, I really want to revive the blockchain club as a Bitcoin club so that a platform can be given to, you know, the teachings of Bitcoin, give a platform to what Bitcoin really is all about. So people can stop calling it a crypto, stop lumping it in with all these other blockchains. So I went through all of the requirements of the school, in total compliance of filing the paperwork and reactivating the club. And then this past summer, we reactivated it. And we just had our first meeting of the year

a couple of weeks ago with 10 solid members. And we have a whole bunch more events scheduled for the next couple of months. And I really look forward to seeing how the club grows. And, you know, a lot of people come to the club because they hear about crypto. Like, I can't believe all the stories I have of the conceptions in the mind of all the students of what Bitcoin and crypto are all about. But the number one thing that people say is they say, I like Bitcoin, but there's more money to be made in crypto and there's no opportunities in Bitcoin. And they say that. And then I say, well, let me show you elsewise at the club. And you can see how many opportunities there are in Bitcoin.

There's jobs in Bitcoin. You can have a career in Bitcoin. There's Bitcoin programming, Bitcoin finance, Bitcoin accounting. If you're a young person and you want a career, there is so much you can do in Bitcoin. And Tuesday night, this coming Tuesday,

is our first Bitcoin careers night where we're inviting over a Laurier alumni, Matthew Black. I think you know him. You know Matthew Black? What does he work for? He's the chief technology officer of atomic finance in Toronto.

No, I don't know. Anyway, he went to Laurier many years. And we actually have a couple Laurier alumni. I can't believe how many Laurier alumni are actually Bitcoiners. And they're reaching out to me. There's a guy in Ottawa, in the tropical island of Curaçao in the Caribbean. There's another guy named John who's a Bitcoin accountant. And he's going to be our presence next month at Learning Bitcoin in El Salvador conference.

So there's all these Laurier representatives who appear out of nowhere and it's in the title of the school, Golden Hawks. Digital gold for Golden Hawks where the Bitcoin is. It's obvious. I'm curious,

when you set up, when you started getting that inactive blockchain club and you converted it over to the Bitcoin club, what was the process of it? You said you had to file paperwork, I'm assuming.

Was there any... Because you're dealing with Bitcoin, I'm wondering, do the people that you're trying to get approval to get this opened up and get this restarted, were they looking at you with a strange eye and wondering, were they giving you some hard time? Or was it an easy process to get it going? No, it was a a very easy process the more difficult process is about getting bull bitcoin approved as an official sponsor that's the difficult part is like you know and then i even wrote to the you know i wrote in the administration it's not even about us making money the problem is is that a student comes to the club and they learn about bitcoin now they want to buy how do they buy well you know buying sell in a self-custodial way with bull bitcoin is the only way that i can recommend i do not recommend that anybody goes to i forget

the other names newton is one of them bit yeah there's a bunch in canada yeah don't use those other ones you have to use bull bitcoin because only bull bitcoin is 100 self-custodial and at no point is bull bitcoin holding your money and i told this to the administration because only bull Bitcoin is 100% self custodial. And at no point is bull Bitcoin holding your money. And I told this to the administration that only bull Bitcoin is the one that, you know, the students will always be in self custody. And I sent them links like what is self custody and Bitcoin? Why is self custody important? And then, you know, get a student to have their own wallet, and then they hold their own private keys. And then that's the Bitcoin that they own. And I don't endorse them using any type of online custodian for layer one. Layer two, I can understand if you want to use a custodial lightning service or e-cash or something like that.

But for layer one Bitcoin, it only makes sense to use Bitcoin. And I tell that to every student because they don't know. They don't understand. They think like I go to a website and sign up for a bitcoin account like the the knowledge of private like we take for granted when you get so deep down the bitcoin rabbit hole at what level is a new person especially a 18 19 20 year old at this i like i mean you not only the bull bitcoin we're very fond of them they sponsor our show as well yeah you are talking the talk here like walking the walk or you you're mentioning self-custody don't let anybody deal with it like this i love i mean personally i'm a big fan of that so i'm i'm very i'm satisfied

to hear that you're talking about this to your to your members you say 10 people showed up to your first meeting last week right um is that the totality of the club right now is it 10 members or people just not show up and they're members but they just didn't show up to your first meeting last week right um is that the totality of the club right now is it 10 members or people just not show up and they're members but they just didn't show up at the first meeting so right now we have 10 people who came to the meeting but we have way more people in our group chat and also on instagram on instagram i i post the daily bitcoin news to the students and this is like when bitcoin people, they're on Twitter and Noster, and they don't see. Young people are all on Instagram. They have an X account, but they don't really use it the same way. So I take the screenshots of what happened on Twitter and X,

I put on Instagram, and we have over 100 people a day come back every single day, liking, commenting, et cetera, seeing all the latest news of what's happening in el salvador what's happening in all these different places and so people are very engaged even if they can't come out to every meeting so if somebody hears about this and they want to join up what's the process to becoming a member of the club well you just show up to the club and then we give you a qr code to scan and if you're a student then there's a link on the QR code that says, join the club. And then you're in, you know, and then we're going to be, yeah, it's very, very simple. And, you know, people can come from the public too. This is also allowed from the schools that you have public events and then

people can come to the, uh, to the club and we want to have, you know, as many speakers, you know, get Bitcoin speakers in, in person and remote. There's so much that can be done. That's great because, in fact, the Waterloo area has quite a few Bitcoiners. For Capit, I don't know what it is, the water over there, maybe because of the schools, both at University of Waterloo and also Lurie, but for whatever reason, there's a lot of Bitcoiners that come from Waterloo. So I know you're not from there per se, but you're going to school there. And so in terms of the event, sorry, the club, what events are you going to be holding to try to

grow it and try to expose more people to it? So we want to keep things very, very simple. Actually, our next event is in partnership with Blockstream. If you've heard of this company, Blockstream. Yeah. And we're partnering with Blockstream to offer a Bitcoin liquid workshop. And my vice president, his name is Spencer. He is our expert on everything Bitcoin liquid. You know, he got the Blockstream Jade.

We have a great working relationship with the QuickBit Crypto Boutique in Regina, Saskatchewan. And he was able to supply us with a Blockstream Jade for demonstration purposes. And we're working. So that's Spencer's role. He's learning everything about how Bitcoin liquid works, you know, all the different how they're doing real world assets on there. There's the CMSTR. They have like the digital assets on there i'm not a super expert on on that area but you can stay tuned we're actually going to be live streaming the event so we're going to post links that people can actually watch online some of our presentations very cool so it sounds like it's going to be because you know it's only october everything is still

relatively new in the school year this thing thing is going to leap some downs, especially if Bitcoin tends to grow in terms of price. It seems like every day there's another company that buys in. It seems to be good news here. This is going to spill over into the university side of things. You're at the very

beginning of this. Be ready for a tsunami. We're launching the club in the increase of the next cycle so the having happened like six seven months ago so you know that the next cycle is coming so the people's interest will accelerate when the number goes up there's going to be you know if you remember the last cycle there's bitcoin mania when it goes to the peak you know we're already pushing on all-time highs and people are feeling kind neutral about it. Like imagine when the price of Bitcoin goes way up, people will be lined up at the door. That's why we're not in a rush to try and bring too many people in. It's just people who are interested and they feel called. I find it's very difficult to invite

people to Bitcoin. It's very, you cannot go like a preacher on the street in Waterloo. We got so many because of the German heritage. We have all of the different like Protestants and evangelical groups with their Bible tracts. I feel like all the time I'm getting more and more people handing me Bible tracts in the streets, you know, evangelizing. And it's very difficult to evangelize for Bitcoin because people come to Bitcoin,

not because somebody invited them to Bitcoin, but because there's something inside of them that resonates with Bitcoin. There's always something on like a soul level that says, yeah, I am skeptical about, you know, whatever, you know, I am interested in this other thing. I, oh, these ideas and themes that I'm hearing about, like that occur in the Bitcoin community. These are things that resonate with me and I want to be part of it. And even for me, when I first came to Bitcoin, I didn't care about the price at all.

It had nothing to do with the price to me. I remember there was this website called weusecoins.com. And like, like 10 years ago, it was the only Bitcoin website. They didn't have like a lot of websites that explain what Bitcoin was easily. And I remember we use coins. Who's we? You know, the people who love liberty. You know, the people who want to transact with each other,

you know, without dollars. Like we are using the coins to make transactions with each other. It's so self-explanatory. So I had no idea what the price was even when I first bought Bitcoin. I want Bitcoin because it resonates with me. And, you know, I think that that is a huge portion of

the Bitcoin people, especially a lot of the people who've come to Bitcoin the last couple years, I talked to people who say I came during the lockdowns, I came during when COVID was and so many people say, Yeah, well, you know, I like Bitcoin, because I like being part of this movement. I like being part of the Bitcoin subculture, and it resonates with me. And my favorite Bitcoiners are the people who don't actually understand the technology. Like we had one Bitcoin meetup in Waterloo outside of the school and I met some local people there. And these people were not technical, all of them, you know, but like they just said, no, I like Bitcoin because I believe with the underlying philosophy of what Bitcoin is about. I want to retain my savings.

This is an investment for my children. And, you know, I work a job and then I put my savings and I save in Bitcoin. And for me, like that is something that really resonates with me. That is something to me that feels very in line with what Bitcoin is about. And, you know, it's always at the school some person comes to me like, I want to trade. Don't do it. Don't trade.

Like there's no, it's not going. Don't do it. Don't trade. It's not going to work out for you. Don't long or short or anything. Don't even try. It's not worth it. And yeah, the trading is, people are unaware about the tax laws in Canada. When you convert one digital asset to something else, anything else, that's a taxable event. And then you have to, you know, capital gains is going to be applicable to that so it really doesn't make sense and you know just buy hold like you're saying that's the best way to do it um i'm curious though what is the ultimate goal

of the club itself do you have like a defined goal that you want to achieve yeah i actually there's seven goals i don't know where my paper went. But I had them written down. I actually wrote them out with arts from he's a contract project manager at chain collabs from the Bitcoin dev project. I give a special shout out to him because they have this amazing initiative for having all of the the Bitcoin developer resources available to everybody for the first time ever. Bitcoin development was very, very, very difficult to get into and break into up until very recently. And partially in thanks to him and the work of his team, they make it very accessible. And him and I, we sat down together,

we plotted out the seven goals of the club. I'll just give it to you shortly. First of all, to teach what Bitcoin is about, teach the technology aspect of Bitcoin, explain the monetary policy of Bitcoin, explain how Bitcoin is different from dollars, explain how it has a fixed supply, explain how transacting with custody, but also to meet like minded individuals who are interested in this type of thing and to build a network so that you can advance yourself in a Bitcoin career. And also, you know, you don't have you can work a regular fiat job, but still to have exposure to the Bitcoin community. And that's something Bitcoiners really take for granted is that when you're not in the little Bitcoin social bubble on the outside, it is invisible. And there's a lot of people out there who resonate with Bitcoin and they would love to hear even this episode of this podcast, but they don't have exposure to it because you go on the internet and you type in like Bitcoin and then you're presented with like BitBoy on YouTube. You know what I i mean like these like silly videos

they're like it's gonna go exploit you know like trading videos meme coins and it's really hard to like penetrate in the algorithm to find the bitcoiners and the way that i i came to rediscover you know the whole bitcoin community was through following all the bitcoin developers and just going on twitter and looking up all the profiles of everybody who's a Bitcoin core developer. And then I was able to filter out all the noise. That's like when they say high signal, you know, there's the signal to like, okay, here's the people are actually programming Bitcoin. Now let's go from there and start building the personal relationships. But if somebody does not have exposure to that, they don't know who the Bitcoin core developer, they don't know where to check. You know, it's very easy to be presented with a lot of lies and deceptions even around what wallet do i buy what what do i get you

know it's difficult i think that it's improving now because the bitcoin conferences seem to be going at a much larger scale and you have a lot more content coming out on youtube that's bitcoin only but you know i it's the crypto fatigue everybody has crypto fatigue because it's just been bombarded the entire last cycle was all ethereum metaverse and i think you know that turned a lot of people off so it's hard to to find the bitcoiners so you don't have any nfts i guess so i mean if he's no i don't know you a disaster. No. You're right. Like when people start just looking for information on the same old sources, like on Google or YouTube or whatever, and they try typing in Bitcoin, they get all this flashy stuff. Like, as you mentioned, the BitBoys and stuff like that.

Over here at the CBP, we like to take a grounded approach. And it sounds like you like to do the same thing over there, where we try to educate people with what we perceive to be the right way of learning how to use Bitcoin through self-cost and so forth, not trading it. But one thing I just want to just touch upon is the meetings you've had so far. You've had one already on campus, but you said you had another one outside, too. The energy after these meetings like you're just simply energized after meeting bitcoiners and that happens to me every time i go and i meet just just a few bitcoiners and just i come away from that it's like holy cow we are gonna win not only that we've already won it's just a matter of time before everybody else figures that out but just

the energy from it man it's it's it's just it's mind-blowing isn't it it's very inspiring yeah like i just i absolutely love that you said conferences have you been to the any of the conferences in canada because there was a canadian bitcoin conference in toronto last year one in montreal this year did you attend any of those two conferences i actually did not attend either of those conferences uh in the past the learning Learning Bitcoin was my first large scale conference. And other than that, I've just attended Bitcoin meetups. So smaller scale meetups. And my first ever Bitcoin meetup was actually a Bitcoin core developer meetup in Toronto at the old Decentral. And it was hosted by Peter Todd. And it was going through all different Bitcoin

core stuff. And I was pretty young. It was went way over my head. It was too much for me at the time, but my exposure always been into like smaller. I never been a fan of like really big, large scale events. So yeah, I'm happy to support and do my best, but that was my first large scale Bitcoin conference. What year was that? It was 2014. That was a long time ago. Yeah. Considering your second year, people kind of feel the gap.

I was very young. I was a child. And I was just on the internet. And then I found Bitcoin. I said, this resonates with me. As children on the internet tend to do, discover things on the internet. And then I had no idea. And I just said, well, here's a Bitcoin meetup in Toronto.

I'll just go on the GoTrain. And then I went. And then I was like, here's the bitcoin core developer who happens to live in toronto and we're going to talk through all like the really difficult technical details but it was too much for me at the time i left and i didn't come back at the time and many years later i was able to return with a much greater context you were way before your time if you were just a few years older you probably would have comprehended a lot more and my gosh like it's very good for you for learning and acknowledging bitcoin at a young age think of all the people doing stupid things that just you know well it's also about you know standing up when everybody else tells you you're wrong because when i told

people about bitcoin i did tell people about bitcoin at school and everybody mocked me and attacked me and criticized me and naturally you know it's like oh i'm doing something outside of the regular scope of what normal people do like oh no no no don't do that don't interact with people on the internet be like us you know just use dollars don't talk about things like that and what what really matters in life, like the times that you're right and everybody else is wrong, is like when is a huge gap. Like to wake up and believe in yourself. Because so many people, they live their life looking to say, here's what other people's expectations are of me. Here's how I can make other people happy. Here's what I do to just keep the peace and make everything seem fine.

And being able to believe in yourself to stand up and say actually everybody else is wrong and i'm right about this and i believe in myself that takes a lot of bravery and personal development and it's not even like a like a one-two thing that's something that grows gradually over time as to how much you believe in yourself do you throw out the uh the memes like have fun staying poor and shit like that to people or are you kind of quiet? I try actually to not talk about how early I got into Bitcoin. And the reason why is because I feel I get a lot of animosity from people. And people have negative things to say and say like, oh, well, it's too late for me.

But you are the lucky one. And then they assume that I'm rich which i'm not i'm not i don't actually have like i'm not i'm not a wealthy bitcoin person i actually have a very small amount like whatever it is you you're rich in knowledge yeah well but you know people hold it against you so i i think that that is a difficult thing so just never tell people how much bitcoin you have that's like a huge thing yeah and it's it's not about making for me it was never about making money in the beginning it was about we use coins if you're one of these people it doesn't matter how much money you have just go buy the bitcoin and become one of the people who use the coins it has nothing to do with how early you are

how late you are with the prices is the right time of the cycle or not you know it's impossible to advise people on ideas like that and usable bitcoin that's a great place to buy for your bitcoin as well i can't imagine using anybody else the bitcoin career night i want to hear more about that what is this all about and what are you trying to achieve with it so what we're trying to achieve with it is to inspire the students so the first guest we have on Bitcoin careers night, he went to the school. So he was a student there and then he graduated or he dropped out.

We'll ask him on Tuesday. Right. And then he built a Bitcoin application and now he is raising money from venture capitalists. And he's the chief technology officer of a Bitcoin app. You can look up atomic dot finance. It's like instead of.com is dot finance. And so we're having him at the school to like tell his story to the students and explain like, okay, I was just like you, I was in the same business classes that you were in, we were all here at the Laurie school

doing whatever together. And then here I am today. And that is just a short and simple explanation. And then I'm gonna talk about from my section of the talk about getting Bitcoin open source grants. So if you wanna work in Bitcoin open source, what are the different grants that are available to you? And how can you be paid in Bitcoin in exchange for doing work in the Bitcoin open source community?

And then we're gonna have another Bitcoin careers night in the future to bring another person as one guy who's a lawyer alumni and a Bitcoin accountant. And then even have people, you know, some people remotely over Zoom. There's one guy who lives in Texas and I'm very inspired by his story because he was a pizza delivery guy, you know, at the bottom rung of like what is an acceptable career in society. And then he says, well, Bitcoin resonates with me, I'm going to learn to be a Bitcoin developer. And now he works at Voltage, one of the like lightning cloud providers. And it's just so

inspiring. And when students hear stories like that, I think that that is something very powerful. So I just want people to have exposure people, that's the number one thing is give exposure to the Bitcoin community of the Bitcoin community, of the Bitcoin community, the Bitcoin subculture to the students. And then they realize, okay, I'm not alone in buying Bitcoin. There's a bigger Bitcoin ecosystem and community.

And if you live in separation from that, you are not getting the full Bitcoin experience. The full Bitcoin experience is when you are going in person to meetups and meeting people face-to-face, is when you're on a podcast or talking to somebody, you have a call, then you are fully in the Bitcoin world. But if you're just kind of like, oh, I hodl in the background, you know, people can choose to do that. I can't tell anybody else how to be a Bitcoiner. But I can just say that in my experience, only through community engagement did it all open up to me and when we're together it's much easier to be strong and solidarity and when we're alone is

when we make mistakes and it's more easy to screw up and you know be taken advantage of the pizza delivery dude guy probably has other stories too that might also jive with the uh only fans uh hit club at the lower i'm just curious to like the uh the bitcoin career night um so you have one coming up on this uh this tuesday you said right yeah tuesday october 8th it might be the day before the air date of the show what time is it just curious it. It's 7.30 p.m. And so do you typically hold them on Tuesdays? I know you said you'll have another one in the future, but we'll do that. We often do Tuesdays or Thursday nights.

And then October 22nd is our block stream night. And we're going to live stream that one. It's the block stream workshop. And then on October 29th, I'm going to be doing a Bitcoin 101 where I try to explain very, very simply how does Bitcoin actually work? How does the transaction get sent? What is a Bitcoin node? What is a wallet? How does the wallet interface to the node?

And that's coming on October 29th. So what times on the 22nd and 29th are you holding these? 7.30 p.m. is our standard start time. And location? They're at the university. If you check on our Twitter page and the Instagram page, we always post the specific classroom that it's going to be at. We always put a picture up of the poster.

Perfect. Now, I'm curious, has any other Canadian universities reached out to you? I know you mentioned at the top of the show, Victoria University. Yeah. And they have more of a crypto club, but it's Bitcoin focused. But I'm wondering if,

because the fact you just started this and there seems to be a lot of hoopla surrounding Bitcoin, have you been contacted at all by any other universities in Canada? Yeah. Well, first of all, I will say that Western University, there's a really intelligent guy named Ethan from there.

And he's also studying accounting. And he's creating the Western Bitcoin Club, which will probably be the second official Bitcoin club in Canada. And it's really a fateful encounter, actually, because Western and Laurier used to be one university. And then they divided in half. So what happened was, is that Western was the Anglican school, and they had an Anglican seminary, and then Waterloo here, we had the Waterloo Lutheran University, which is where WLU comes from, because it's a German city. So they had a Lutheran seminary. And then at one point, the schools split. That's why we're both the color purple. And then they renamed the Waterloo

Lutheran University to Wilfrid Laurier University. And then Laurier became its own school. And then now we're reunited again, the two divided schools under Bitcoin. Yeah. Back together. Love how Bitcoin's uniting this. The club itself that you run, does it? I mean, I'm not sure if you could answer this, but does it own any Bitcoin because there's a membership fee or anything? And does the club itself actually have Bitcoin itself? No, the club itself does not have any bitcoin and whenever we do demonstrations uh then

it's always using a testnet bitcoin if we're ever doing a demo so yeah the school wants us to use a bank account actually as part of the rules and regulations that you must use fiat currency so very very normal experience i think yeah we Yeah. We have to change. Now, that's interesting. So if the rules state you have to use a bank, theoretically, if a bank were to offer Bitcoin custodial services, I guess that is an option. If the club itself had Bitcoin, am I right or wrong? Well, I think that that sounds like a huge headache for the school. And, you know, if they'd be interested in it,, I think that that sounds like a huge headache for the school. And, you know, if they'd be interested in it, like I would recommend that. But, you know, it's up to them how

they wish to manage their finances. I just follow the rules and regulations of what is asked of us at the club. And I follow that and I can inform people about Bitcoin. I actually don't tell anyone to buy. I'll clarify that. I never tell anyone to buy bitcoin i could tell you about bitcoin and if you want to ask me you know how to buy like i can point you in the right direction but i'm not there's no point trying to convince anybody because i said earlier you know they have to ask you first you know we don't really invite you know people they come because of something inside and then there you go now they will come to Bitcoin naturally. That's a good approach. Now I'm curious, then on that note, does the club itself run a node? No, because we don't have a dedicated space at the university to do so.

But if we had like a classroom or a club hall where we had like a, an ethernet port and a little computer, I would love to do that. I would love to have a you know not only a bitcoin node but maybe even a lightning node that we could connect our uh you know our phones to then we have you know manage like the liquidity for the lightning channel there and then go buy things around campus but no that's that's too futuristic actually that's you know maybe in the future but uh well who do we talk to? We at the CBP will flex our muscles to make this happen. Who is it that we got to talk to to make you guys have and gals have an actual

dedicated room and everything. I'm kidding. It'd be awesome if you can, if you can ever get a note because that would be an awesome something you could show to people. Here it is, a piece of computer, could be an old laptop, whatever it is but as it runs um you're verifying every transaction and it has every transaction since the dawn of bitcoin yeah just showing that off that could be a very

powerful tool and not only that it's just showing like the modest hardware you need to run it you don't need some exotic computer it doesn't have the storage yeah a lot of computers could do it that's the beauty of bitcoin that's that's the whole reason that bitcoin decided to not increase the block size right is that we could have things like this bang on uh yeah yeah now my node right here is a 14 year computer laptop, and it runs it. You know, it's slowish, but it runs. Every transaction on there, I verify, I broadcast, I do everything I need to do with it. And yeah, it's modest hardware, but it works.

Everybody should do the same. If you listen to this, you got to do it. I'm talking to my co-host. I always give him a heck of a time because he has yet to run a node. What are you doing, Joey? What are you doing? Anyways, I think it's a good time to talk about the Bitcoin Students Network because you're a part of it.

I'd like to know what it is about. What is the Bitcoin Students Network? The Bitcoin Students Network is an organization that all the different Bitcoin student clubs, I don't even think you have to have a club. You can just be a Bitcoiner student and also join the network. But having a network worldwide of everybody in the post-secondary education system, who's a Bitcoiner.

And then we all learn together and we all grow from each other. And I've been so inspired by the people that I've met there. The intelligence and the specialization that each person has is very impressive to me. And that's the best way to organize a social movement is that everybody specializes in their own thing. And then we all come together and collaborate. It's not everybody trying to be everything at the same time.

But this person is an expert on mining. This person is a Bitcoin developer. This person is an expert on mining. This person is a Bitcoin developer. This person is an expert on Austrian economics. This person is an expert in accounting and so on and so on. And I think that that is something really special. You guys should get a minor for your club. Yeah. Actually, I did apply because the school gives us

a budget so i did apply actually and i put on the schedule that i'm going to get it from the d tech yeah decentral tech that yeah yeah and i said i want to buy a bit axe from them and then we could show like how mining works and lottery so i'm going to show the the cbp branded bidax it came out just week and a half ago too really yeah so there's one that's out there only 75 are in existence okay so if you want to order one do it it's a beauty it's the bitcoin bidax gamma i believe yeah um yeah check it out because those things are cool i mean if it's's CBP printed or not. The fact that you could just run it in any setting. It's quiet. It's non-intrusive.

Like, it's small. It doesn't take a lot of power. It checks a lot of boxes. Granted, you know, it's not very much hash rate. But the reality is you're mining. You're part of the network. If you have your node and you're mining, you're covering the the whole thing so it'd be awesome if you could get one you know there'd be another thing you could show off we have our node we have a miner look at this yeah anybody could do this

i was wondering have you gotten a lot of feedback from like fellow peers, or even a school administrator? The school administration has not said much. Alumni, I've gotten a couple really overwhelmingly positive messages from some people that I was very inspired by people who said they graduated from Laurier many years ago, and they are Bitcoiners, and they're really happy that we're doing it. And then also some very negative messages some hate mail but i try not to let it get to me you know it's either you know crypto people or no coiners and then you know they hate to see a bunch of smiling children around a bitcoin flag

so they write hateful messages to us but you know just don't let it bother you that's the way to do it i'm curious now 12 months from now say october 2025 yeah where would you want to be in terms of the club but what would be the ideal place it's at uh the ideal place it's at i would say that the people who are coming to the club who okay i would say the ideal place is that is that the students at wilford laurie university who this resonates with, come to the club, and they have 100% self custody of their Bitcoin. So nobody, even people today who are keeping it on an exchange, they get it off, they get their own wallets. And they learn a bit about Bitcoin, and they are connected so that if they so choose and decide to connect to the bigger

Bitcoin community, they can be part of it. I'm not in a rush to onboard a ton of people. I'm not looking at numbers to say we need to get like a metric, like we need to get 1000 students onboard into Bitcoin. No way, you know, because that's not that's not real. It's real is that somebody comes to the club and says, I'm interested, I want to buy. And then I say, here you go. I have these really nice cards made, actually, that we offer Bitcoin concierge service. And we say, do you need help? We're here for you. Send us a DM and we can meet you on campus to help you safely buy your Bitcoin and store it on a secure wallet. So that the real, the mission is, is to just help people who are interested in this. It's not a marketing scheme. I'm not trying to sell anybody anything.

I'm not trying to personally benefit in any way. None of us members of the club get paid any money. Anything we ever make off of a commission gets immediately back into the community. And yeah, that's the main goal is just to get the people who are interested that this resonates with them. Because Bitcoin, maybe it isn't for everybody.

I used to like the saying, Bitcoin is for everybody, but not everybody is for Bitcoin. But somebody in the BSN keeps correcting me and says, no, Bitcoin is not for this person. Right. Because, you know, maybe people, many people are against Bitcoin and they're against the entire concept. And they just love central banking. They just love fiat currency. They love John Maynard Keynes. They're like, I'm like, OK, well, you know what? I respect you.

I respect your decision. You're entitled to your belief. I'm not going to criticize anybody for having a different economic belief than me. And if they don't want to buy bitcoin then you know well that's your decision you know it isn't for you it's okay i'm not going to criticize you in any way i can't believe anybody would say i support this type of like i don't support bitcoin because i like this and you point to something centralized we all have 50 years worth of data of going to a fiat currency and why it is pointing in the wrong direction.

It's not like this is going to self-correct. It's going to implode. It's not just a matter of if. It's when. And every day, everybody's feeling the pinch. You see more people that are on the streets living in homeless camps or going to food banks and shit like that. I don't know. Anybody could support it. Any Keynesian out there is going to say, yeah, this is the I don't know. Anybody could support any Keynesian out there

and say, yeah, this is the way to do it. Come on, man. This is not the way to do it. Have you encountered these people face-to-face? I haven't, but, I mean, clearly there's enough out there. Yeah. Well, I think indirectly we've had a UBI guy on the show. There are people out there that believe in UBI.

You can't have UBI in a hard money system. It has to be somehow generated a thin air. There's just no way to tax people enough in a closed loop system to pay out a UBI. So there are people that like that type of idea, which, you know, all the more power to them. They're wrong. But I guess you have to have both sides of the bell curve. Well, another really important aspect that I think about because, you know, the university, if you take economics classes, they teach you central banking in the school. They teach you all of these things like, oh, income tax is good.

You know, you need a central bank. The central bank should be increasing the money supply and setting the interest rates below the equilibrium manually. And they teach you this as part of the school. But part of a genuine academic inquiry is to inquire, well, what are the alternatives? And the number one thing that I think people overlook is that you're presented some type of information in a classroom setting or on TV or somewhere, and they don't tell you the origin of that idea. So for example, in Laurier, like every student in the business program, you take these introductory economics courses, and then they give you in the class a definition of what money is. Obviously, this is

a definition that excludes Bitcoin, that if you follow what this definition is, you must say Bitcoin is not money. And even on the exam, I had to write an exam in first year. And the question on the exam talked about is Bitcoin money or not? And the answer is no, if you want to get the right mark.

I can't believe that. Yeah, well, the reason why is that they have their very rigid definition of what money is. And they don't tell you who came up with that definition. They just present the idea as if, welcome to economics. Here, we're going to tell you the definition of money. This is the definition of money according to economics. Well, actually, there's different lines of economics.

There's different denominations and different understandings of this. So it is true that if you are looking at everything through the modern mainstream economics, you cannot comprehend Bitcoin. You say, this Bitcoin must be a bubble. It must be a bubble waiting to burst and it is not money and I can't wait to never hear about this thing again. And I really sympathize with people because they say, well, yeah, well, if this is the frame of mind that you see it in, then I understand that. But then you have to look at, OK, let's forget anything about even I agree with you or disagree with you or about anybody's opinions.

Michael Saylor, he's like a rich guy. He's a billionaire with his Fortune 500 company, and he's hiring economic advisors for people to advise him on bitcoin you know so he has people like safa dean you know advising him he on sailor academy safa dean even has i think he has like an online program where he teaches you like other economics like the austrian school and you it has now become so big that it is not something that can be denied or ignored anymore people have to explore these other understandings of economics and And actually, a fun fact is, remember, I told you how they have this definition of economics in the school that excludes Bitcoin. The guy who created this definition of what money is, his name was Samuel Jevons. And he was an economist from the

1800s. And this guy believed that the business cycle is caused by solar flares. So where do recessions come from? Why does it seem that we have a period of economic expansion, and then there's a recession and a depression? Where does this come from? So he says, well, actually, this is caused by solar flares, and the sun is pulsing energy out towards the earth. and then there's a butterfly effect and that's what causes recessions and depressions but now i know i'm i'm aware now yeah well but they don't mention that part of the book so this guy he said a lot of things but they kind of like pick and choose what goes in the book and then they don't tell you who said it

but you know we i think we should explore other ideas of other definitions of what money is i think we should come to greater understandings of what the difference is between commodity money and from what fiat currency is and how they derive their value differently from each other. I think that these are topics of inquiry that I'm interested in exploring at the Bitcoin Club, because no crypto club out there gives a platform to these things. And I know that there are crypto clubs in Canada who are making tons of money. Like the students who run the crypto clubs are personally benefiting, getting like paychecks from the altcoin companies. And they have these hackathons where they're giving away tons and tons of money and prizes. But there's not an inquiry in any of these clubs as to what is the nature of money.

The whole thing is that the people who run the club are kind of like pulling a fast one on the new people. So the new kids come to the club, we don't really know anything about cryptocurrency or Bitcoin. And then somebody at the club says, ah, sign up for this wallet and mint this NFT and do this and that. And then you can sign up at Coinbase with our code and so on and so on. But you don't realize that those people are personally benefiting financially from you doing this. And what you're actually doing is that you're overlooking what I think is the most brilliant part of Bitcoin of all is coming to understand like, what actually is money? How does a commodity

evolve from being like it's originally used to commodity into being money? What will money look like in the future? These types of topics, I think are the most interesting things to explore. And you'll never find that in the crypto world, because, you know, it would all start to fall apart. Yeah. They're looking, a lot of these people are looking at new people coming in and onboarding. I'm talking with the shitcoiner crowd. And even, I'm going to go into the professors there that were bringing up trying to exclude Bitcoin as money and saying that it can't be money. These people, they are truly no-coiners, and they are there. They're looking at people like everybody else's exit liquidity.

They want to make sure that they're able to pump their bags. Whatever bag they have, they want it fucking pumped. And as a result, they're looking at somebody else to be exit liquidity. In academia, you should propose an argument against this status quo, and it either holds up or it doesn't. That's the way it should be. So I can't believe they're not even accepting the idea of Bitcoin as money. It's just an idea.

You bring it to the, if it's not, okay, let's challenge it and shoot it down. This is academia. This is the way it should be. The reason why I would say that they don't do that is because, you know, they have a different understanding of their entire approach to economics as what a Bitcoiner would. And actually somebody from the BSN, Kevin, who I attribute to be really a genius in economics, this guy, he went there every summer in Alabama. They have something called Mises U, where you go to the Mises Institute and you study Austrian economics. And at the end, they have an exam, like an oral exam. And less than 10% of the people pass this exam.

This guy passed the exam. And any student who's interested in learning this other school of economics, they can go register and apply for Mises U. I plan on doing so as well. And then you can learn from the seminars to understand, like go deeper into the nature of commodity money. And there's something called methodological dualism. And what this is, so what happens is, is that when you approach economics in mainstream economics in the university, economics is treated like a hard

science. It is treated something like physics or chemistry or math. And in the economics classes, we're doing lots of calculus. And you come to class and there's no narrative there's like charts and dimensions and then we draw calculus on the board and then we get these homework questions like bob and sally can multiple can model their desire for popcorn with but and it gives you like a calculus and then tom comes along but he has a preference for this other good according to this equation and then they give you like an calculus and then tom comes along but he has a preference for this other good according to this equation and then they give you like an equation and then you have to like find the derivative to like this is like i when i go to the store and decide what to buy i'm not using calculus my behavior is not something that could be modeled so what happens in the austrian school

is that they say no human behavior is not something that can be modeled through calculus. These mathematical models, it's not just that they are incorrect or that they're lacking, but they undermine human free will. And, you know, you have things in the world that are acts of man, like, you know, human history, psychology, social dynamics, economics, people's purchasing decisions, you know, what happens in the world these are things that are acts of man and then you have a different category of things that are like physics how do the particles come together these are acts of god and it's very important to draw a distinguishing line between them because that way you can put economics and

ethics together so that you have an economical system that respects us that respects my sovereignty and my individuality and my ability to make decisions but what happens is is that when you lump economics in with these other hard sciences then you're over you're overruling man's autonomy you're you're in a, you're even denying God. Our fate is not decided. We have the ability to choose. Yes, I am governed by natural law. There is a natural law in the world

and I am free to act in the world. It is not something deterministic. At least, I don't believe so. When you start developing all these economic systems and models that are based on math and modeling my behavior and telling me what decision I'm going to make in case a new truck comes along with 50 more units of popcorn, I'm going to act this way. And it starts to build an economic system that can disrespect people and people feel upset. People feel disrespected. And I think that that is something to highlight of the two different approaches to economics that these things have.

Yeah. That's interesting. Now, I'm curious. I mean, because we're past an hour now. I just want to, I guess, one last question. I want to go over to you. At the end of your career, your university career, what's your goal? What do you plan to get into? I plan on becoming a Bitcoin developer.

So I'm studying accounting. So I'm interested in accounting. I think accounting is a very useful skill that I am going to have for the rest of my life. I am interested in also working in accounting. I think that it's a very respectable, honest career. I really like accounting a lot. And actually, we had this chart at the school that apparently 35% of new job postings

when you graduate the university are in accounting. Yet you talk to people and they say, oh, I'm not interested in accounting. No, no, no, I don't see myself. Anyway, but I'm very inspired to become a Bitcoin developer and to build out the infrastructure for Bitcoin payments throughout the world. And something that I think is a bit of an uncomfortable truth that Bitcoiners must face is that if in theory, just in theory, let's say tomorrow, they said like the whoever is running Canada, like all the politicians came together and said, you know what? Starting today, no more dollars's going to be all Bitcoin. Unfortunately, there would not be the

infrastructural capacity to make that change over. There are not enough Bitcoin developers to program all the POS systems. There are not enough implementation consultants in order to get all of the people onboarded to Bitcoin. There are not enough Bitcoin accountants who can do Bitcoin accounting and know how to query and work around with all these different things, not just tax accounting, but the whole Bitcoin accounting system. So we have to face the fact that, well, you know what, we're very optimistic about Bitcoin, but being able to actually onboard the entire world into Bitcoin, it takes technical skill and technical ability. And I think that if people who are young are feeling inspired,

they should rise to the challenge of, you know, contributing and giving back to this. So I can't imagine anything else to do with my life at this point, other than being a Bitcoin developer to build out wallets, payment services, POS pos machines things like that to accelerate and make it realistic and feasible that people can do bitcoin payments at scale so that's my career goal yeah i mean we understand like a lot of people don't seem to grasp it's only 15 years old i mean 15 almost 16 years old yeah that's really lightning very young. And really, Lightning is only usable four years. I think in 2020, 2021 is when you start having realistic Lightning payments that you can use. For me, CoinOS, if you're familiar with this wallet from Vancouver.

Yeah, Cole has been on our show. Yeah, Cole and Adam on this app. I think it's phenomenal. And like, that has been the first really, really seamless Bitcoin wallet experience, because it can do layer one Bitcoin, it can do lightning, it can do eCash. And it does it all in such a way where it like obfuscates from the user if they're on layer one or layer two. And I remember watching these videos of people in El Salvador, and they were these Westerners, they're there on vacation and they couldn't figure out what the difference was between Bitcoin and lightning. And they had the wallets and they're in a country where Bitcoin is legal tender and the person is there and they have layer one Bitcoin and the merchant is accepting lightning and they have no idea what to do.

And you can see in their faces how upset they are. I thought this was like Bitcoin bitcoin what is lightning something different is lightning not bitcoin i don't get it and coinos is the first time where i've ever seen that entire thing like abstracted and pushed away from you so i think that that is a huge contribution that they've made and there's a that's very recent that coinos has gotten to this incredible level so there's so many more applications like that that have to be built out. And if you're interested in doing that, send me a DM. I'll send you all the developer resources we can learn together, please, with the Bitcoin Dev Project. I would love to have more people learning Bitcoin development.

And I think CoinOS is the one that indirectly got me in touch with you. I think they tweeted out some picture. And when I saw that and I saw, laurie bitcoin's like this is interesting that's and that's i realized how you know i gotta talk with these guys over here and i reached out to you essentially and this is where we are so that's how it happened i think it was just a simple tweet by coinos that started it all so that's the uh genesis of it are you going to be a cpa when you graduate uh we'll see you know i'm open to it but if i'm working as a bitcoin developer then that job would not necessarily qualify as the cpa hours but i'm interested in becoming a cpa you know i'm

very open and we're going to see where the next couple years takes me but you know i'm all in on accounting and i'm all in on Bitcoin dev and we'll see where we can meet in the middle. Are you a coder as well? Yes. Yes. Like computer programming coder. I'm currently learning Rust. I recently did the Bitcoiners introduction to Rust course, and I'm currently working on building my first web wallet. So like a Bitcoin wallet that you can access in a web browser,

because I was so inspired by CoinOS and eCash, because, you know, the app stores, they create a walled garden of allowing and banning certain applications that they like and dislike. And in that way, you're at the mercy of Google and Apple to decide what software you can run on your phone. And for me, this goes against what computing is all about. I'm really into GNU, Linux. This is something I was very passionate as a user early on. I got into Ubuntu early, Debian. It's really important to me. I'm running Debian right now. Good. Excellent. Great job. This is something very important to me. So having the ability that even people who are running proprietary operating systems, like if you have a Windows laptop and

let's say Windows bans Bitcoin, just hypothetically, that anybody who has a web browser or an NOS can go in and access, type in their 12-word mnemonic phrase, and then start making transactions. That's my first demo project that I'm working on, and I'm doing it with a Rust backend and Axum. And then, yeah. Are you a Richard Stallman guy? Yeah, I'm a big and I'm doing it with a rust back end and axum and then yeah are you a Richard Stallman guy yeah I'm a big fan of Richard Stallman I don't agree with everything he says

obviously and the more the time goes on the more I seem to distance myself from him and the things that he says like he took a like a really surprising yeah I know where you're going and I don't want to touch on it yeah Yeah. Well, I really appreciate him in principle because, you know, and I see it very analogous that, you know, there was a time when all the operating systems were proprietary and Richard Stallman sat down and he wrote the GNU project so that people can run their own system and know what programs are running. And in the same way, all the money was locked up in all these different central banks. And then Satoshi Nakamoto comes and releases Bitcoin. So it's very, very similar to me.

It seems very aligned. And but, you know, Richard Stallman, he didn't endorse Bitcoin at the beginning because he didn't like the fact that there was no trusted custodians. That's what I remember the reason being. So I think that, you know, I like and some people, they say, no, only self-custody, no matter what. I think that there are times and places where using a trusted custodian is acceptable. And also, you know, Bitcoin certificates like eCash, where, you know, you can transact a single sat back and forth and then redeem that back later on for layer one Bitcoin or Lightning. I see a use case for these things.

And yeah, because it accelerates and helps the usability so much i'm a big fan of the um custody only custody model but i'm not gonna i understand i it makes sense but i heard this guy on this other bitcoin podcast and he says bitcoin self custody is for the one percent it is it probably is not one percent of the richest people but the one percent of people who care enough to run Debian. Think about how far removed you are from the average person running Debian. I'm well aware. But I'm trying very hard to get as many people to look at it.

Yeah, I really don't want to butt heads on this topic. We'll just leave it at that because it's past an hour or two. I want to respect your time as well. Before we sign off, is there anything that you want to show? Any last thing you wanted to talk about before we wrap this up? You could show your bags, you can do whatever you want, man. This is where people can reach you, anything, whatever you want to say. You know, I don't have anything in particular to share. Let me think. Well, there was one really interesting thing that I heard this morning. And actually, it was about Hayek. Do you know this guy? He's an economist called Friedrich Hayek. I've heard the name. what he proposed that he was one of these people who supported separation of money and state. So he was a student of Mises, but he's not like in the same line as like Murray Rothbard and Ron

Paul, you know, I don't think he directly worked with with Mises, or I think he did. Yeah, because they work together on the Austrian business cycle theory. But anyway, he supported this model of separation of money and state. But he did not support this as a commodity money. And he theorized some type of system where everybody can be a private issuer of their own paper money. And he was talking about this decades and decades and decades ago. So the idea is like, I have Matthew money, you have Len money, and that we have this like economic zone that like, you know, like, I can have my own paper money, you have your own paper money, and then we can all come together at the marketplace. And then I listened this morning to a video on YouTube from 2005 of Hans Hermann Hoppe, another economist.

And he would criticize this model because he says, in a situation that you have a commodity money, and then you have all of these different paper currencies competing with each other, the destiny is that all of these different paper currencies competing with each other, the destiny is that all of the paper currencies are going to go to zero against the single commodity money. And the commodity money cannot be a bundle of commodities represented by a currency. It must be the actual commodity itself. And I said, that's the difference between crypto and

Bitcoin that you have in crypto. You have all of these people on proof of stake issuing their own paper currencies. And the way that they create demand for it is in the same way for a country. A country says in the bounds of Canada, you use Canadian dollars. In the bounds of America, you use US dollars. So in Ethereum, we use Ethereum here for Ethereum apps, Solani of that. And then on like the Cosmos network, they have an app chain. So each application has its own coin. The destiny of all these coins is that they're going to go to zero. But it was the first time I'd actually heard economists talking about this. And this critique was made in 2005 before Bitcoin.

So I just, I just, that, that's something that I remember. I learned that like six hours ago and I just wanted to share that. That's awesome. All right. So with that, People say, Oh, to share that that's awesome that was a good all right so with that one last one people say um oh all the different shit coins are going to go to zero against bitcoin but that's not just a bitcoin thing there's actually like economic theory that underlines that even if people are not able to

articulate it all the time that's all well it's just i mean bitcoin if you really think about it it's backed by energy because now you know it's also it's always been you need to expend energy in order to mine it so there to make more of it to to build the next block it requires energy so there is that's what it's tied to now what's the cost of that or how it's obtained or different argument altogether but there is it that is its connection to the physical world yes is it certainly proof of stake it's lost it's just simply well you know here's some code it creates it stake it blah blah and it's the same for extracting gold and silver out of the earth that it expends a lot of energy to take gold and silver out of the earth and there was another economist named milton fried, and he criticized this.

And he says, oh, we should have paper money because it's a waste of energy to extract gold and silver from the earth. And then later, and he said this like early in his career, and later on it proved that central banking actually consumes more energy in total of maintaining the system of all of these central banks actually consumes more money than mining gold and silver out of the ground.

And then he ate his words later in his life and admitted that he was wrong. But, you know, Bitcoin uses energy. Yeah, that's the whole point. And it actually uses less energy than the human infrastructure. Netflix uses four times more electricity than Bitcoin does.

And if you talk to anybody that's against Bitcoin, they'll say it consumes 8% of the global electricity reserve or whatever it is. Nobody talks about these other industries that take enormous amounts of electricity. Like you mentioned Netflix, Google, Amazon, all these do as well. Not only that, a lot of the energy that Bitcoin uses,

it's stranded energy. It's energy that either would have never been used or it's energy that had to have been somehow consumed and wasted in one one way shape or another so you know like not all energy is created equally so i mean there's so many no-coiners out there they could fuck themselves that's the reality so with that matthew um i want to thank you for coming on if anybody has any questions or they want to reach out to them it's lori underscore bitcoin that's on twitter on instagram it's the same lori underscore bitcoin on twitter and instagram awesome i appreciate you coming on this has been an awesome chat

thank you very much for having me take care goodbye