The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - Prof. Stefano Di Domenico and Carlo Campisi - The Importance of Bitcoin Research

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES This week we welcome Professor Stefano Di Domenico and Carlo Campisi for a wide-ranging discussion centered around the psychological characteristics of Bitcoiners, research into the mean Bitcoiner, and why these types of studies are important both for academia and Bitcoin policy. 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: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX 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.

The Canadian Bitcoiners podcast is just two guys and maybe a guest or two discussing Bitcoin, Bitcoin equities, and the related macroeconomic space. It's not meant to be financial advice, so please, if you're doing any investing, after listening to our program, do your own research, do your own due diligence, and understand that any money you invest can be lost. The show is meant for entertainment purposes only, and we hope you enjoy the program. Friends and enemies, welcome back to the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. Recording today at four o'clock. I just got home from work not long ago. I rode my bike. It's, honest to God, fucking really hot today. So if I look a little disheveled, I don't actually. I look pretty good if I don't say so myself.

Anyway, the reason we're recording earlier than normal today is because I have two guests who have stuff to do. And actually, I have stuff to do tonight too. So we're going to rip this four o'clock show here. We're going to talk about researching Bitcoiners. I'm not going to say anything more than that. We're going to let the guests talk about the exact nature of the title and why we chose that and some of the stuff that they're up to. Some of you may know, some of you may not know. It's Carlo Campisi,

Stefano DiDomenico today. So looking forward to that. First though, as always, the sponsors, two great sponsors of this show, EasyDNS, the Friendly Neighborhood Registrar. We have our website there, canadianbitcoiners.com, where we post... Man, what's the most generous term? Sporadically, when we have time? I don't know. It's going to be less and less. I mean, Len's already got a kid. I got one on the way. So probably I'm going to be doing a lot of posting. But maybe you want to post something on your website that you haven't started yet. You can go buy your domain from Mark or transfer your domain with Mark. Set up a website there. Start doing a shop. If you want to get some BTC pay server going, he'll help you. Lots of other virtual private server options. If

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It's the default setting for that team. So we're happy to be a partner with them. Go over, use our promo code. I don't remember what it is, but it's going to be in the links to the show. It's going to be in the description of the show. You get $21 when you start up an account and provide the necessary info. What else can I say? You know, it's a great platform. We're happy to be partnered with them as well. Let's bring on the boys here. Stefano, Carlo.

Well, where should we start? Good to see you both. Too bad we couldn't set this up in person mostly because when i booked my hotel for the conference it seems like i was the only person smart enough to not book next to that theater and all you guys were down near that theater the whole weekend even though all the fun stuff after the conference was like ostensibly you know always going to be far away from that theater there's nothing there unless you want like a hot dog but you know i'm glad we got it done anyway it's finally uh finally got

this on the docket what are you guys uh what are you up to how are you feeling what's going on stefano maybe introduce yourself you're the you're the new face carlo once upon a time was uh our first our first sponsor and regular guest yeah but this is your first time the professor so tell us a bit about yourself uh yeah so I'm an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough. My expertise is personality and motivation. I teach courses on personality, motivation, but I also teach courses on introduction to behavioral neuroscience, forensic psychology, which is really the way I teach it. It's applying personality psychology in the forensic domain. And I've recently launched a course called

psychology and money. And that's related to my passions, I guess, some of which we'll talk about today. I suspect we will. Yeah. I mean, it's the intersection of psychology and money basically is where you see some of the most extreme memes on Twitter. So I'm wondering, you know, have we have we had. So we're looking forward to talking with that. Carlo, what are you doing these days? You're like the head of policy. I think I'm looking at the email signature you got now. It's it's a made upup title i'm positive you came yeah i'm not allowed i'm allowed to use that title when i when i email people that are important joey uh uh no hey when's the last time uh you had three italians on your on your podcast is that was with me you and len probably probably we should talk about a zur today. I mean, it's not pleasant, but I think.

It's a sad truth. Yeah, it's a very sad situation, state of affairs over there at the national level. Anyway, what are you doing? What are you like? Are you the head of public? No. What are you, the head of policy? What are you?

We're a small fiery team, you know, working on how we position Bitcoin and Shakepay for government and the bureaucracy and getting in rooms and going to do education and understanding of what the landscape is like and presenting different, I guess, fundamentally understanding that not all crypto are created equal, how you could evaluate risk across a series of sort of like measurable vectors so that when you know, this is one component. how government or regulators can consider Bitcoin as being less risky than other crypto assets. And if you're going to attribute a risk score within crypto and for investors to be educated on what they're investing in, it's not like, you know, this one bucket. So that's, you know, that's some of the work that we do. A lot of it is around positioning ShakePay as a thought leader in digital assets and specifically Bitcoin as a non-partisan, non-taboo topic. There are friendly faces working in Canada, in fintech that are trying to do good work and how we help Canadians onboard, you know,

million plus accounts and how, you know, we're very like easy to use and customers are getting a bunch of rewards and how much, I think we've given out since 2018, something like 35 or $40 million worth of sats to, you know everyday canadians and so like which which bank has done that right who's who who's who's helping canadians towards more like sort of this financial freedom idea of like self-sovereignty and um you know digital property

rights and yeah so we believe in these things and we work on getting government and the bureaucracy to feel like it's a more friendly industry for them to start to learn about and so that's kind of my work is sort of very much on the outside of the you know product and consumer relationship uh yeah so that's that's day to day so how did you guys meet and get involved then? I mean, I never really thought to myself before like two days ago, like why is this a package deal? Like if these guys on the surface don't really have that much in common, you got one guy who works for ShapeA, another guy who works for a university. I mean, I don't know why we're all on the same email thread. It should just be like me and Stefano and Carlo, I'll grill you about policy some other time. How did you guys get involved in this whole thing?

Well, maybe I'll let... Yeah, I was going to say, you go ahead, Steph, and I'll chime in with the truth afterwards. Well, I mean, so here's my perspective, okay? I got into Bitcoin around mid-2020. And as you know, once you begin learning about it, you know, you become astonished. You fall down the rabbit hole and then you can't stop thinking about it, can't stop talking about it. And I wanted to pivot my research interests and my academic interests into Bitcoin. And I have some colleagues and we do a lot of work together very

closely. And I was trying to convince them that we should do a study because we had some funds that some research funds that needed to be spent. And after like months of cajoling and like, guys, this is important, we should study this. They finally came around. But the challenge was like, how do you get a decent sample of Bitcoiners? Right. It's it's really difficult. Like if you recruit a general sample from the population, like from the Internet, right, maybe 10 percent, if you're lucky, are going to be adequately familiar with Bitcoin. So you got to get a real sample. And that means so naturally, I thought, okay, we'll approach some some platforms. And ShakePay was one of those platforms. And I think Carlo is going to tell you that I wrote a very lengthy email,

that it was miraculous that they even read the whole thing. But I was really pleased when I got Carlo's response. And then maybe I'll let Carlo take it away. Yeah, yeah, that's 100% accurate stuff. You knew I was going to go there, so you went there. Smart move. No, yeah, Jean forwards me this email and says, hey, Carlo, you're interested. And then, you know, it's this like non-conventional sales pitch, right? Usually

it's, you know, two sentences and you want to just pique interest. Steph went all the way, explained the entire research. No, no, no, no, not quite, but almost. Anyway, I thought it was fascinating. And part of the work I was doing then was more partnerships and sort of growth strategy. And and I thought that this was on the sort of like coattails of the New York Times article that said Bitcoiners are psychopaths. And I think that was the part that intrigued me the most, which was here we had a researcher at one of Canada's most reputable universities that wanted to go up against that. And I know that us Bitcoiners have kind of taken the moniker of psychopaths quite proudly of late, I guess since then.

But ultimately, we know that that is not true. And so when he approached us with this opportunity, I thought, well, you know what? What Bitcoin and what the industry is lacking is credibility outside of, you know, the, I guess, traditional medium, which is, you know, Bitcoin Twitter, right at that point, right? And so how do we get out from underneath that reputation, if not with partnering and giving a voice to more credible institutions, I guess, at least within mainstream audiences. And so that for me was like a no-brainer instantly. I told John, yeah, we got to do this and see how we could help. And it took a long time, right? This was mid-2021 stuff, if I'm not mistaken, end of fall 2021.

And by the time the study actually got sent out, we were a year and a half, it took a year and a half. And this was, there was some failures, ups and downs, agreements of, you know, how do we get this done without, in the right way, both from a research standpoint and from an ethics standpoint. And so we can get into some of those details. But that's really what drew us in was this sort of bigger picture mission, which is like CheckPay is not just about, you know, how do we get the next million customers, right? And the language that we use to describe new technologies, it really does shape the way, not only the public, but policymakers, the way they think about those technologies and how they understand those technologies. And similarly, or maybe by extension, the way we talk about the users of those technologies informs us, shapes the way we think about how it's used, what it's for, what would happen if it gets mass adopted.

And so, you know, the media hasn't always, or I should say maybe isn't always charitable to Bitcoiners, right? And so it's important to conduct high quality research on this to elevate the discussion because we need to have a constructive discussion. And to do that, you need to have good data, have an informed point of view. And so I was so happy that Carlo and ShakePay got behind this. So let's talk a bit about the study. We'll get into some of the definitions here.

By the way, great throwback to my university days. If there's one thing I know about filling the word count, it's that you have to give a lot of definitions. And so when I saw that we're going to be defining things today, I said, fucking right, let's go. I'll get the Molson cold shots out and we can throw it right back to 2005. No questions asked. So let's start with the study. Tell me a bit about what you found as much as you can. We were talking before we went live about how there's some gray area, but what you should say, shouldn't say before a study is officially released. I know you presented some of the findings in Montreal. So some of this will be rehashed for people,

but tell me a bit about what you found. Yeah. So we, we did a few things. The first thing we did is we tried to examine the beliefs and attitudes that Bitcoiners have. Right. And so how do we do that? We created this questionnaire and it contained these sentences that people had to rate their agreement with. Right. Sentences like Bitcoin consumes too much electricity. Right. Or sentences like Bitcoin will usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Right. And what we did was we examined how those sentences clumped together into like the main factors, the main components of what people think and feel about Bitcoin.

And what we found there was that there's there's three dimensions. I'm going to pull it up here because I forgot exactly how I labeled them. Yeah. So first and foremost, Bitcoiners are optimistic, right? They're optimistic not only in terms of the price appreciation, like we all know, Bitcoiners expected to go parabolic. Right. But they're optimistic about the technology for human rights. They're optimistic about it for prosperity. Right. The idea that through deflationary money, deflationary money means prosperity for more and more people. So that's one component. The other component is nonconformity.

Bitcoiners, we found, this is not a surprise to many people, right? But Bitcoiners hold views about how the economy works and how money works that are not typical, right? And views about how energy works. And so, you know, mainstream media articles like to bash Bitcoin, although that's changing for its energy usage. Well, Bitcoiners have a non-conforming attitude toward that. They disagree with a lot of what gets said about money

and economics in the mainstream. And so yeah, those were yeah, and then finally, they're heterodox. So this is the idea that, you know, Bitcoiners don't believe that inflation is captured by the CPI, that the monetary expansion is a better measure of inflation. And so there's these three components. There's heterodoxy, there's optimism, and then there's nonconformity. And that was the first thing we were able to do. And that was really important. It's probably boring from a layperson's perspective.

But for us, we wanted to measure something deeper than nearly like do you own bitcoin or not right how long have you held it right is it is it worth asking stuff like if i think about those questions you asked the three sort of pillars there is it worth asking when i think about the response we get from traditional media traditional finance and maybe like maybe more broadly the reaction like i get in my own friend group i we joke in the chat and there's people joking in the chat right now about how you know we're not psycho we're just extremists if i if i took this if i took those three you know pillars and applied them to like my views on how society worked or my views on uh crime and punishment like what like it seems

to me like the likely outcome would be yeah we interviewed a bunch of people and the likelihood of these people landing in jail is much higher than otherwise might be the case if they didn't hold these views about how things should work or are not working it makes me wonder and you can maybe go into some detail here when you share these results with your peers do they say yeah all you're describing here are people who don't get how the world works and they're just using Bitcoin as a veil? The same way that you'd say, yeah, a criminal doesn't understand what he should and shouldn't be doing and is using

X as a veil. Is that a rational kind of feedback loop in academia or no? So, I mean, it could be. I get where you're going. But usually, the first thing you want to do when you isolate components like this, right, is you want to see how they correlate with other psychological variables. And that's what we had in our study, right? So we measured personality traits. We measured people's goals. And there's different types of goals. We measured people's financial literacy. three components have with both other variables. The constellation of relationships tells a very different story. So the people who score high in these attitudes and beliefs, they tend to be more intellectually curious, right? They're more open to experience. They tend to be less neurotic. They have less.

Less neurotic? Less neurotic. Oh, my God. I got to tell my wife this. She's going to be less neurotic they have less less less neurotic less neurotic oh my god i gotta tell my wife this she's gonna be in disbelief oh my goodness carlo's laughing he's probably in the same boat well well i'm just i'm just laughing at the the thought of your wife being like well this totally delegitimizes this study altogether she's like nothing tracks my empirical knowledge. Sorry, Steph, continue. So they're less neurotic, which means that like, although Bitcoin's price might be volatile in the short term, right? Their emotions are not, right? Which probably helps explain why Bitcoin hodlers are able to hodl.

Right. Because they're not as affected by crazy price movements. Their goals, the types of goals that we found to be associated with these beliefs, their goals that emphasize what most people would say are really good things in life. So there's two classes of goals. There's intrinsic goals and what we call extrinsic goals. So the extrinsic goals are becoming rich, becoming powerful, having a high status image. That's extrinsic. The intrinsic goals are having high quality relationships with people you love, personal growth, making a contribution to your community, right? These are intrinsic goals. The reason why we say they're intrinsic is because they allow for the direct satisfaction of psychological needs. So people have these psychological needs that research shows

need to be experienced for you to have what we call a good life, to consider a satisfying, fulfilling life. And those needs are feeling competent, feeling related to others, and feeling autonomous or volitional and free, doing what you think is meaningful and important. The extrinsic goals, you know, they don't directly satisfy the psychological needs. They might be instrumental to satisfying those needs, but they can also be harmful, especially if someone prioritizes the extrinsic goals to the neglect of the intrinsic goals and so what we find is that bitcoiners people scoring higher in these attitudes um they prioritize intrinsic goals and not the extrinsic goals so when you take the beliefs that we found and put them into a table and look at their

associations with all these other variables, the picture is not negative at all. It's actually, you know, we talk about time preference in Bitcoin a lot. A lower time preference allows you to zero in on what's truly important in life. And, well, I don't want to go into too much detail here because that's for the publication. But, yeah, I mean, it looks like a lower time preference. Adopting a Bitcoin standard and having a lower time preference really does conduce people toward these more fulfilling types of aspirations. And that's not negative. That's positive. So we get a good question in the chat here from Mike. How does your study of Bitcoiners compare to the mean? I assume he means like the sort of mean person in society.

That's a great question. I mean, I think we all kind of have our own experiences. If you're the Bit bitcoin or in your friend group and i don't know what i don't know what the mean is like for you guys but it's it's definitely a little further for me than i thought with people that i'm otherwise very tightly aligned with uh talk to me about that where did you come down on that do you know where you came down on that yeah yeah so so um i'll talk about this with respect to financial literacy because that's what I spoke about at the conference. Yeah. So the good thing about financial literacy assessments is that they're used all over the world. Right. And there's a quasi standard set of questions that get asked and they're asked in nationally representative samples. And so what that means is we have population norms for financial literacy.

And we ask those same questions in our study. And so we could compare Bitcoiners to the general population. And long story short, Bitcoiners score a lot higher on financial literacy than the general population. In fact, I should say, it's not just Bitcoiners, it's, it's people who, it's crypto asset investors in general, score higher on financial literacy. Now, I know that like in the literature, like there's been a few studies that, you know, one study might show, oh, their financial literacy is lower. And some other study might show it's higher. In our study, it was higher, it was like 50% higher than the population mean. Let me ask you something. Is there a causation correlation issue? I mean, I'm playing devil's advocate here.

I agree that Bitcoiners and crypto asset investors generally have a higher financial IQ. But the thing I'm curious about, when I think about the Bitcoin crowd, and Carlo, you can probably speak to this because I'm assuming in the sample, you can see in an ethical way, of course, what is the net income of this participant? They have to report that to you for FinTrack or whatever the case is. And so you can see this stuff. I think a lot of Bitcoiners are net producers. And so is it really just that the net producers are better financially and so they have this sort of extra cash to pump into Bitcoin or whatever else? Or is there another correlative relationship there that's Bitcoin specific? Is there a chicken and egg thing there? Am I on the right track? Talk to me a bit about that. Well, yeah. So our study was conducted at one time point. It's a cross section in time. So we have a correlation and both of

those possibilities that you laid out are possible, right? We're not going to isolate that without what's called a longitudinal study where you, you know, track people over time. And, you know, maybe you examine as they fall further down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, what happens to their finances, what happens to their time preference, what happens to their financial literacy, right? So, yeah, I can't really answer that question with the data that we have. But that's okay. I think there's – it's hard to say, you know, you can draw some kind of parallel or correlation between, in your example, Joey, income and appetite to go into Bitcoin in the first place. I do think that there is,

if you look at what Bitcoin adopters in North America or in jurisdictions in the world where there's like a quote unquote stable monetary policy, of use case and understanding when you go into other jurisdictions that have way less stability in their monetary systems. of wealth here in North America per se. But we have at ShakePay, there's people of all shapes and sizes that come into our platform. And there are people that prefer trading that make a lot of money, right? And they prefer day trading and high frequency stuff. And that's not necessarily the ethos of Bitcoin. It's more of like an investor preference.

I think going down the rabbit hole, maybe it's some of those psychological traits or that people want to lean into and they have a disposition to care more about those things that ends up getting them into Bitcoin philosophy and ideology. So, you know, this is obviously just my opinion, but I think you're kind of interested in and lean into those intrinsic values first, and that takes you into Bitcoin afterwards. And, you know, we see that because people with a lot of money are not necessarily hodlers by default.

Yeah, that's 100% true. It's interesting, right? The Bitcoin as a philosophy thing is big. I think, you know, if I think about my own kind of journey into Bitcoin, you don't really know much about it when you first buy it. And so I would say that as far as the correlation between buyers and these people who care about time preference and care about intrinsic values and things like this, when you buy Bitcoin, you may not care about any of that. But after six months, if you still have it, if you're still buying, you're a different kind of person. I can't wait to see the sort of data set and sample you guys got because I don't know if you report on this number of people buy monthly, this number of people buy weekly, this number of people have held for two years or one year or five years. There's going to be some stratification there, I think, in the responses you got.

I can't wait to see that. One of the things I do want to talk about as far as the study goes is the relationship it has to these other studies that have not been so favorable to Bitcoiners. You mentioned the psychopath one. I think it's a good idea to discuss where those studies fell short. And the problem that I think you guys have going forward is that you're competing with not only these sort of monster publications that push this nonsense, in my opinion anyway, nonsense narrative. I won't speak for you guys. But also that, man, there's definitely a sort of budding they hate us because they ain't us population out there as the price goes up. And so you're fighting uphill, sort of pushing sand up a hill all the time where do you think you can you know enlighten some people about some of the stuff that was said in the past that maybe wasn't accurate why it wasn't accurate and how do

you how do you get your you know your study out into the the world in a more prominent way than they were able to. Yeah, well, so I guess I should say two things. There's a small literature looking at crypto asset investors and more than half of that literature is not useful for understanding Bitcoiners. And the reason is, like it's just plainly not. The reason is, is they those studies treat crypto assets as one homogeneous singular asset class. It's all the same thing.

In fact, the publication, that publication, Bitcoiners are psychopaths. Right. Like they never mentioned he never measured anything specific about Bitcoin. Like nothing. Like if you actually look at what they measured, they measured people's intentions to buy crypto assets. You know, and there's a big difference between Bitcoin and an NFT, between Bitcoin and a stable coin, between Bitcoin and like Solana, right? Huge difference.

And so even though those studies get trotted out and described as measuring Bitcoiners, they just simply don't, right? And the thing is, it's an opportunity for education, right? That paper, again, that psychopath paper, if you read the title, like it says Bitcoin with the restricted copyright, the trademark symbol above it. And it's like they're using Bitcoin, like the word Bitcoin, to describe like all crypto. Yeah. Right. So there's an opportunity for education. And in our paper, what we do is we differentiate the

different classes of crypto assets. So that's going to be an educational, hopefully an educational moment for people. The subset of studies that do measure Bitcoiners that were focused on Bitcoin, they're like consumer psychology type studies that really are focusing on ownership um without delving really into the psychology so it's like you own you're a bitcoin or if you own bitcoin that's it well we know there's a lot of people who own bitcoin that are are not like what you call a bitcoiner right so for sure at that, you have to go deeper, which is exactly why we measure those attitudes and beliefs, to dig deeper, right?

We asked about whether or not they run a node, right? So we wanted to really get at who the Bitcoiners are in the sample. And so I don't know if we're going to be successful, but I think the approach we're adopting is we're going to just explain what the lay of the land is. There's multiple types of crypto assets and that Bitcoiners, it's more than just owning an asset. It's being a participant in a network and everything that comes with that. And I'll add from a policy standpoint, because I got to, I have to fulfill my duty.

Your quota? Publicly, I have to talk about policy stuff in Bitcoin seven times a month. So sorry, guys, I didn't do any this month. No, jokes aside, there's something, you know, to circle back to what you were talking about, Steph, before around the financial literacy stuff. Like, this is a legit financial literacy, like, quantifiable bit of research, right? And so we're one of the main, like, red flags for regulators in this space is we need to ensure consumer protection at every single junction of their investment journey. And this is from traditional assets, all the way, you the way through until penny stocks and crypto, digital assets and whatever.

So when the idea that this is the average Canadian is YOLOing their life savings into something that's incredibly risky and that they know nothing about and that they're not, you know, financially, like intellectually equipped to make these decisions. And they're just going based off of FOMO sort of, you know, meme culture when this is the prevailing. And I am telling you that it is the prevailing narrative that exists within the regulatory ecosystem. Then all the guardrails that exists within the regulatory ecosystem, then all the guardrails that they could potentially conjure up, like are put into force.

And so it's important to get this kind of research out there, not because we want to say you don't need to put guardrails up for people who are not careful with their money. And maybe that's a separate discussion. But it's more to say that there is a level of sophistication that people investing or investing into Bitcoin typically tend to have. And, you know, like it's funny that you have to go through to like. Relatively new, by the way, right? You know, five years ago, you didn't have any. You didn't have to do that.

And those are like sort of risk assessments that you have to acknowledge that you have this sort of appetite for risk or not risk in your in your investor sort of profile. And, and these suitability, like, they don't, like accredited investors don't go through the same suitability exams when they're about to join a platform to trade for, you know, $10 million, because the assumption is that these people, you know, know more than you and I, right, the three of us. And so they're more adequately one prepared to absorb downside risks and are more informed to be able to make better bets. And so this is a long, really like long process. But I think the motivation here is to say, you know, we're not all just YOLOing our life savings into an asset because, you know, Elon told us to. It's quite, in fact, the opposite. And this, in a quantifiable way, as much as possible, based on this research and hopefully others to come, is going to help sort of identify that.

And maybe we start to get a little bit more favorable sort of regulatory environment for the asset. What is the pathway to a more favorable regulatory environment i know you outlined some of it there you know the counterpoint to that i've been critical of like you know the bitcoin coalition canada whatever on this show uh i don't know a lot about what you guys are doing but i assume you're you know potentially um you know in the same crosshairs let's say that i've put them from time to time. I just don't have a lot of faith that governments will engage on equal footing and will be square dealers. And one of my big concerns is that, as you mentioned there, there's more and more controls and reporting coming into the space as the asset, by any metric, becomes more accepted, more secure, and less volatile.

And so my concern is that there's not really a willingness to engage on equal footing with whether it be academia or sort of private company policy groups. Where do you guys come down on that? Do you think there's another pathway? I don't know really what goes into, for example, other know, other, uh, psychology studies that end up, end up influencing public policy. If you guys could give me some, you know, some color there, I would appreciate it. Cause I really don't know. It's, it's a, it's a tough question, Joey. And like, I'll, I'll say this, you know, if, if you, um, if you wanted to put, and I've said this before, right, if you wanted to put gold under your mattress and then you lost it,

it's in your right to hold gold in your house. But if you lost it, it's not gold that's dangerous. It's you that's a bad custodian of the gold, right? Yeah, yeah. And so we're right now having those discussions because it's a little bit idealistic to think that every single person on the planet or the vast majority even of people on earth are going to adopt this sort of self-sovereign you know p2p off chain uh offline sort of um

decentralized payments uh payments network and so i think the idea here is to get to a place where our governments realize that it's important for Canadians, in our case, to have choice. And if you want to put that gold under your mattress, know what the risks are and go ahead and pull the trigger. And it started off as an adversarial relationship between Bitcoin, Bitcoiners and the institutions, right? And the man, so to speak. And part of the work that we're doing and working with, you know, Stefano and University of Toronto and hopefully other institutions that are going to shed some like more positive and truthful light into the topic is going to be to get to that place there.

Even if, you know, 10% of Canadians want to hold Bitcoin as, you know, under their mattress, so to speak, and assume that risk, then it should be OK and Canada should be supportive of that. And so, like, I don't know, it's a roundabout way to answer your question that I don't know if they're going to be amenable to, you know, tearing down, like, all the guardrails for Bitcoin in this case. But I think what we want to get to a point at least in the, in the, in the interim or as a next step where, you know what, like, it's important for Canadians to have choice and let's be the kind of country and the kind of place that embraces that. And so putting a face to it and having support from institutions and academia for us, at least at Shake Bay is a, ShakeBait is a path to that. Is it going to hit? We'll see.

Steph? Yeah, I like I'm also going to indirectly try to answer your question. So I've been like wondering why academics haven't taken a stronger interest in Bitcoin. Right. And I think it's because it's talked about as a currency, cryptocurrency. Right.

And then, oh, it's a cryptocurrency. They look around and no one's really using it as a currency. Right. And so they miss the whole store value part. And they don't see how it can help Canadians protect their purchasing power into the future. They miss that part, which is really interesting and important and good for society. And then they write it off because, oh, it's a currency that no one uses. And so, we're in Canada and we're not really, you know, the people in our sample are not using it as a currency. They're using it as a store of value. And so I think just highlighting that particular use case

might be enough to help the conversation in a more productive direction. Because if it's a currency, then if you read the Bank of Canada, and by the way, the Bank of Canada, they've produced, they might be the best producer of Bitcoin research. They have that Bitcoin omnibus survey.

It's done every year. Yeah. Right? I see. Specific to Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. It's very superficial, right?

Like, you know, but again, like how many people are aware of Bitcoin? How many own it? Right? But if you read the way the research is couched, they're concerned about it as a payment system. Because if it's a payment system, then Canada, it loses its sovereignty, they can enact monetary policy the way they want to. And then there's the issue of taxes and all that stuff. So their approach has also been kind of conditioned by this focus on the currency aspect and the medium of exchange aspect. And if we allow that to

dominate the discussion, I think, yeah, I think it's going to be a tough road. But if we say, hey, Bitcoin is way more than you think, there's all these other aspects to it. And part of getting to that is by highlighting the store of value component. Is there a rational way to engage with non-Bitcoin friendly people or enemies of Bitcoin? Because I don't think that's true. But in academia, I would imagine you have some of your colleagues, Steph, who are like, it's not important research. And I would make the case that much like you guys, it is important research for a number of reasons. You kind of get a feeling for a number of different trends, right? Whether it's where currencies and value are going to sort of find their footing over the next generation. I think in a lot of cases,

this is a study that indirectly also shows you what the next several decades of wealth will look like. These people are going to be the big capital players, if things play out the way we think it will with the price, over the next 50, 60 years and even further into the future, as you guys said, if you're a competent custodianian i see the value there does does academia agree with you did you get a lot of pushback when you decided that you wanted to go ahead with this i know you said earlier there was you know some foot dragging and whatnot but i've never seen anything else like this from a canadian university and you know i don't have a foot in academia but i do have two feet in bitcoin if if there was ever

a story like this we would have seen it. And there just hasn't been. Is it because there's a sort of pointed disagreement from your colleagues? Or is it just that people just don't care? Is it apathy that's really causing the problem? I haven't gotten any kind of pointed disagreement. It's usually like it's usually that mean like hey man that's crazy see the game last night that's the

reaction I most often get it's like oh that's pretty interesting what about something you know this other study but also but also the money, right, Steph? Oh, yeah. Not to call it out, but Bitcoin is not a corporation, right? So you don't have a thousand shakepays that are sending thousands of dollars to the universities to say, hey, like research this at arm's length. Like we're willing to live or die by the results. But just like here's a grant to the Department of, you know, finance at Smith School of Business, at Psychology at University of Toronto Scarborough, like you name it, right?

So, I mean, there's politics in that stuff. And maybe you want to talk about the reality of like, you know, grant money and appetite to research for, you know, getting your PhD and doing stuff. Carlo's leaning toward the camera. So I know he wants you to talk about it. No, I mean, I'm getting, I'm old, Joe. My hips, I got to shift. Oh, absolutely. Right.

You need money to conduct high quality research. And where does that money come from? It comes from grants. And if it wasn't for ShakePay, we wouldn't have been able to do this study. So there's that. Right. So absolutely. I think Bitcoin companies can have a huge impact here by advertising grants. We're going to fund the three best research projects this year. Apply and we'll help you conduct the next best study on Bitcoin. I think that would be so helpful. And yeah, Bitcoin is not a corporation. It's decentralized money. So that support's not there. And unfortunately, it's hard to move the needle without that kind of support. So what studies do you want to see done? Is that a taboo question? I don't want to have you reveal things you're thinking about doing in the future.

But, you know, there's clearly an appetite here from the Bitcoin crowd to see studies like this, right? Like whether I want to trash it or celebrate it, every podcast talked about that psychopath story. You know, I know people are going to talk about this study when it comes out. What other studies should we be thinking about doing? Like, what can I tell Francis to give, you know, $50,000 to sponsor, you know, for whatever the cost is, as far as like the next study that's going to move the needle, as you said, I think for Bitcoin, for policy, for all that stuff. Where do you want to see the research money going?

Yeah, well, so a few directions, right? So like now that we have a set of results with this study, we can follow up, like measure people across time, as I was describing earlier. It'd be really interesting to see how Bitcoin changes people. We often say you don't change Bitcoin, but Bitcoin changes you. Well, let's measure that. Let's see if it's true. If it's true, it should be measurable.

So, yeah, I would love to conduct a study examining how time preference changes with Bitcoin adoption and then how that results in positivity in other domains of life not directly related to Bitcoin. So that's one direction. Um, I was glad to see Cornell get that grant to research, um, circular economies. That was pretty cool. And I think that's the direction for the developing world. Um, but in, you know, back to North Americaica it would be we've learned something about what bitcoiners are like it would be really interesting to delve into why people why some people reject bitcoin like what's the factor there right the saltiness index no it is it is the saltiness index honestly that's exactly what it is

i i think i mean there's probably a technical academic term for that but that is uh that is harvard harvard approved jargon yeah it might be the saltiness index it might be right but like it might just be fear like it's it's new i i can't make sense of it i don't have the time to look into it that's a big one but there's like psychological measures that we can use to like be really exacting about that and i think that's really important i think it's important for financial advisors because like at some point like a financial advisor is going to say to his or her client, we should have some exposure here. And their client's going to be like, no, no, no. And it'll be helpful to have some clue about how to have that conversation

in a way that's empirically informed. What's the concern? What's the anxiety? Right. I think financial literacy is a big one because that can get you, right? It's almost like teach a person to fish analogy. And so when you equip from the bottom up, then you give people sort of the wherewithal to start digging further and asking the right questions because i think the biggest challenge here is you know there is a very like you know uh ingrained or cemented relationship that people have with money and this is uh this is calcified now. And Bitcoin, like going down sort of the proverbial rabbit hole, forces you to decouple from that, like understanding and that relationship and start to ask it and ask questions in a different way.

And you're going to come out on the other side with a whole new sort of perspective and not just about money, but what money represents for you in multiple different facets of your life. So where does academia land in its responsibility and in its role? What is the role that it has to play in terms of getting people to start asking the questions around what money is and their relationship to it in their life for themselves and, you know, the people that they love. So, you know, we don't, there's not a lot of research and a lot of course material out there, Steph. And that's like, you know,

the money Mego program and the finance, the psychology of money course, like these are the types of things that ShakePay wants to back. And like, because Like these are the types of things that ShakePay wants to back. And like, because if you can get, you know, a cohort of students every year, every semester going through a course like this and start asking those questions. And then, you know, Bitcoin is just like a part of it. It is not the course or the material, but it is a compliment to a bigger picture understanding of what money is. Then you start to create, you know, slowly, I guess, a generation of people that are not, what is the pillar there? They're not, they're more counter, not, no, what's the word?

Controversial or? Heterodox. No, heterodox. Yeah. So, so yeah, that, that, that would be, that would be my, my take on what, what research or where funding should go towards in academia for, for us to get, you know, a little bit closer to a more amenable sort of attitude towards bitcoin yeah financial literacy is a really big one right like more and more you're seeing school boards come out

in favor of financial education and absolutely carlo yeah you're right like bitcoin for it occasions you to think maybe for the first time you ask the question what is money and what better way to begin financial education with than with that question right so yeah absolutely carlo couldn't agree more it's it's spot on right i think you know you guys touched on it a couple of times but this idea that people are using this to store value and maybe one of the reasons they haven't looked into it is because they just don't have the bandwidth or the time. It's funny, the sort of worst things get in society as far as people's ability to maintain a lifestyle they think is appropriate for their place in life. The more likely people find themselves looking for ways to overcome these policy hurdles, right?

I'll call them policy hurdles because really they're sort of driven by government. And at some level, the inertia is already too great to turn them around. And so the worst things get people drive. People are driven to Bitcoin and other stuff too. I mean, equities or real estate, whatever, right? Everyone's got their bag. But I think it's important that when the light goes off for people, there's a resource from a trusted, quote unquote, trusted institution, U of T Scarborough, or some stuff that ShakePay does, Saylor University, whatever he's got going on there, podcasts and whatnot, where you can go

and get some digestible stuff that has credibility, that has the sort of stamp of approval. Now, maybe we can close on this. The study not out yet, you're still wrapping things up. When can we expect to see it? Are you going to be doing some more content? I would actually prefer, as much as I like doing the podcast, I would love for you to come back and do the study here. I would would prefer to see you do like a live stream or something where you just like go through the thing page by page or whatever and like talk with some of the details because i think a lot of bitcoins would tune in for would tune in for that i look at the quality of the questions in the chat today and i think you know if if we could get some of these high quality questions from other academics or from people in the in the space who care about this stuff it'd be great so what when are you planning on

sharing like what is the timeline here we're looking at? We're going to set up a debate with him and the guy who published the New York Times piece. And you're going to be the moderator, Joe. How do you like that? Yeah, sure. Sign me up, man. Sign me up. Yeah, so finishing up a draft now, it's not yet submitted for publication.

It'll take several months to get published. And that depends on the journal that we pick to submit it to. And we're still figuring that out, trying to find the right outlet. But I might share a draft of the submitted article as part of an online repository of the study, right? We made our hypotheses public and pre-registered them and they're visible to the public now. So I, I might upload a version of the paper there so people can read it. Yeah. I mean, I, I'd be up for that a little bit of a mini presentation sure why not you should do it like i mean why not right who better to talk about the ideas than you and you know if you really want

to spur a conversation the petri dish that is you know online live chats will will deliver i think quality feedback and you know i know carlo we're going to use our comms work to get Stefano to do a little bit of a media tour. You know, not just Bitcoin content creators, but even traditional media. So hopefully it's not... You know, the goal here is we don't want this to be hidden, right? We believe in the...

We believe that, you know, whether the results would have been positive or negative that's kind of a risk that shake pay took right we assumed we assumed that you know it would be positive so so gladly it's pointing towards that yeah and I think I think anything that we can do and I guess the community at large can do to get more to get to get to give Stefano and the research team a little bit of a platform to, to promote this. It will help spur on the next wave of interest for future research at different institutions, at least in this country, if anything. That would be, that would be a huge win for, for, for, for Stef, you, us, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

this is the first step right right the canadian bitcoin podcast being on this well listen we we are the first step for so many people okay i'm happy to be the first step well i mean like this but also the paper itself first study yeah yeah and that's outstanding okay boys i want to thank you again for your time i know it's uh almost dinner i hear my wife stomping around upstairs which means that uh it's fine i got i gotta make something for dinner here i gotta play football at seven you think you're old buddy i gotta stretch for an hour like i'm i'm on like a couple of replaced parts here so yeah yeah but you're playing a semi-pro league dude yeah right okay sure listen tell me uh and tell the listeners

viewers where they can find out more about what you guys are doing individually in case they want to uh follow up with, all that good stuff. The floor is yours, maybe, Steph, if you want to go first. Sure. So I don't really have a web presence. That's something that Carlo was giving me shit about before. But I did get Twitter, so maybe I'll start posting on that. And when I have a website, it'll be available through twitter um but in the

meantime i guess just sit tight and wait outstanding steph steph's first time sharing his uh online presence so he doesn't know that you're supposed to actually say your twitter handle it's in the tweet that i put out about half an hour ago or an hour ago before we started the show i think it's uh stephano ddmx so i have that right yeah yeah yeah okay okay stuff at stefano ddmx on twitter so make sure you follow him carlo what about you yeah at carlo uh underscore campisi uh on twitter and or x and uh yeah you know you find me uh you know carlo at shakepay.com if you want to reach out and uh and about what it is that we're doing or how we're advancing some of our policy goals to get Bitcoin more favorably received at our lovely bureaucratic and government levels.

That's it, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you later. Thank you, Joey. All right. Are you a fan of the old school NHL 94 game on the Genesis or SNES? Why not check out my show, the NHL 94 podcast from tournaments and tactics to the people who make up this community. Check it out wherever you listen to podcasts or find it on YouTube.