The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The Space Denver and Working with Bitcoiners with Zach W. (@BTCBap) | The CBP (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. This week we welcome Zach W, co-founder of The Space Denver - a local, open-source, member run Citadel for Bitcoiners. The Space is the premier place to collaborate, network, educate, work and support creative development in the bitcoin space. https://denver.space/about https://x.com/BTCBap From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com ⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠www.easydns.com⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

Friends and enemies. Hopefully that was not too much of a delay between the time we went live and the time I said that. I'm still working on the timing. My name is Joey. You know that. Tonight we have a very special guest, Zach, who goes by Zach W. on the board of directors page on the Denver Bitcoin space, the space Denver, I think it's called. So I don't know his name's Warcher Shuster Sauce or who knows, but his name's not important.

What's important is what he's doing. And Zach was one of the co-founders of this space in Denver. And we've talked a bit on the show in the past about what it means to be around Bitcoiners, work with Bitcoiners, collaborate, cooperate, and support Bitcoiners. And oftentimes, for Len and I, it means having them on the show. It means going to events. It means going on other podcasts when we're invited. And we love doing all those things, but it's kind of all in the digital space.

It's in your ears as opposed to in front of you. And Zach is taking on a different kind of project here, one that we're going to talk about tonight. This in-person shared, I don't want to call it a co-working space because I think, to be honest, I think it cheapens the brand and cheapens what this is, where Bitcoiners can be around each other. And as we were talking about before we went live here, kind of get away from the fiat nonsense of your day-to-day life. God knows there's more and more of that, but let's, uh, let's talk first about, uh, the sponsors. Easy DNS is our flagship sponsor, Mark, Jeff to Vic. What can you say

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here, lots of nefarious actors, domain sure over at EasyDNS, always protected. No one's ever going to grab your website suffix. There's a better name for that, but spoof your domain, let's say, and email your client list, grab some coin off of them, grab some info off of them, and act otherwise with ill intent on the back of your data. It doesn't happen at EasyDNS. So go there, start your website today, sell pictures of your feet, sell, I don't know, methylene blue. I have a buddy who just started selling methylene blue. Maybe you want to do that too.

I'm not convinced that stuff works. But if you are, or if you can convince other people that it works, go to EZDNS and start your website. CBP Media is the code, 50% off. You can't beat it. Second sponsor, Bold Bitcoin. You guys know them. Francis and the team. Extreme in both official languages. They do longs officiel here in Canada. The best place to buy Bitcoin in the world. And it is global now, by the way. So I feel better saying that than I did a year ago. You can also sell there. You can sell, but if you have to, you can use their bills platform, pay your bills. It's in the

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come under fire as the platform has proliferated and as Bitcoin has become more and more popular, a target for the powers that be. Well, Bitcoin is also non-custodial, so you don't have to worry about getting rugged. You don't have to worry about shotgun KYC. Don't worry about any of that shit. That is a thing of the past. No more. We're not doing that.

Go sign up. Give a little bit of your information to these guys so they can comply with the laws of the land and you get $21 in your account. You can't beat that. I was just on there this morning actually making a buy and I'm happy to report that it took less than an hour to be in my wallet. Privacy enabled, all these things. I'm about to put Zach on the screen. Here he is. I told him before, good background. We don't get a lot of backgrounds here. I used to get, when we first started the podcast, people literally, like Mike Green came on the show and I think was literally fucking barbecuing asparagus the entire time with his camera off.

So I appreciate that you're not manning a grill, but let's a little bar. We can set the bar higher than that. First of all, how the heck are you? I haven't talked to you since the Green Candle Friday happy hour spaces years ago. Brandon now obviously tweeting every day that Bitcoin is going to a trillion and another central bank is adopting it. Not sure any of that's true, but all the same, no one has time for the spaces anymore.

So it's good to see you. Good to talk to you. What the fuck is going on over there? Good to see you, Jerry. That was a heck of an ad read, man. That was skillful. Funny you mentioned Brandon because we're going on Brandon's podcast next week.

Love it. Having a nice reunion with him pretty soon too. That's great. That's great. So I want to talk about the Denver space, the Space Denver. What do you call it? I'm always unsure looking at websites and logos.

Like some letters are bigger than others. They're, you know, this one is easy. It's just says the space, but then other places I see it, the space Denver. What am I supposed to call this thing? It's the space. The space. Everyone's talking about it. You know, what do you do in the space?

I've been in this space for a while that's fucking good i hadn't even thought about that i really like that okay let's we're gonna get to that tell people first who you are like what where where did zach come from why does that care about bitcoin what is all this stuff where did you where'd you get your start yeah so i uh have a background in financial planning left that industry in 2020 to start working in Bitcoin. I've been working at Casa for four years and running the Denver Bitcoin, Denver BitDevs meetup for the last couple. We basically grew from a meetup to a community. We're like, hey, we want to start opening our doors to more than just once a month, but really events all the time and so you know my love of bitcoin comes from the uh the sovereignty aspect the permissionless aspect

the uh i don't have to ask you uh i can do what i want it's my money my time right so i think the uh that resonates with me quite well and the fact that it's for everyone too is another big part. I think that you guys in Canada have an even worse currency than we've got. And it's cool that Bitcoin has brought me to meet

so many awesome people all over the world. And the space is no exception to that. It's even better because people are constantly finding out about it, coming through and making these new relationships so um yeah man it's uh we can kind of go in whatever direction you want but essentially the space is the the hub the mind share uh the place where bitcoiners should be it's the space if you know about it you know and if you don't you probably should uh for for us in the west

i okay first of all you came from traditional finance you claim to have left that world and yet i see you got the patagucci uh sweatshirt on do you want to comment on whether or not you are like fully recovered from your time in trad fi are you ready to part with all your patagonia gear when you're going to start wearing satoshi Nakamoto t-shirts that are oversized? What are we doing here? Yeah, so this is actually some Casa swag. So still a little in both worlds, right? Because although we're self-custody and we're helping people who are maybe just like kind

of really into Bitcoin and it is very much that like white glove kind of TradFi financial advisor world. So, you know, you still got to look the parts on the sales calls and put your best foot forward. You know, first impressions are everything. But you won't catch me wearing like a collared shirt ever again. I wore one for the space soiree that we had, the fundraiser that we did last year. And that was it, man. Once a year, it's all I do. So this is as far as I get to my old world. That's probably a good idea, man. I used to be a C&E college shirt guy, Christmas and Easter, and now I don't even do that. So it's for the best. The Bitcoiners, listen, we don't think a

lot about what other people are wearing. I care more about what you're saying and what you're thinking. And you have been busy. You have been a busy guy. This space thing, you started this on the back, like you said, of a meetup that became a bigger community, that became something you want to do more frequently. Tell me about it. I don't know anything about this except what I see on the website. I know nothing else about it. So I am a blank slate. Just tell me, man, what is this thing all about? Yeah. I mean, it's a, I mean, it's like you guys have a meetup in your local community, like in your, in your region. Yeah. So, you know, depending on how often you do that, I mean, you've, you've been going around

to that meetup for months or years, like a lot of us. It's your friends, right? And the more you get in the Bitcoin rabbit hole, the less you want to associate with normies on a daily basis. And so it's sort of like this echo chamber that we intentionally put ourselves in because we're like, these are the people who I feel understand what's going on in the world based on what I think is going on in the world, right? So we naturally want to gravitate towards people who are like us. And the more our Bitcoin attendance, our BitDevs meetups started growing, we're like, we're out, you know, we're outgrowing this, we can do more. And, you know, we had a lot of individual community members who were like working on specific projects who were like, hey, I'd love to do a presentation at BitDeads for this. Or,

hey, I'm working on this hash rate heating, which Tyler Stevens, one of our co-founders, is doing. And so we have all of these people in our community in Denver where we really have a lot of special skills. And we wanted a place, a space, and a platform to really showcase our community but also help put bitcoin on the map right because we felt at the same time that we sort of have something special here in denver because there is a huge crypto community here like eat denver is like the biggest ethereum conference in the world and there's a lot of tech. And there's a lot of tech people and there's a lot of people like millennials, like our age,

people who are inclined to look into Bitcoin, right? And so we're like, well, we have this passionate, skilled community. We've already somewhat got an organization together. Like we have a process of getting organized. We started pooling money together in a multi-sig to buy pizza and beer, you know, that kind of thing. So we had already kind of like proved ourselves that we could execute on it. And we were like, well, let's just like, let's just figure it out. Let's like start doing it. And, you know,

I think it was Eric Yakes and I were sat by the pool about a year and a half ago and we were just LARPing like Tyler loves to say like we were literally selling vaporware and you know I mean that is part of our mission is to make sure that if you want to have something like this in your community you don't have to go through all those like vaporware stages that we did because you've got a roadmap right so early on Eric and I were like, well, how do we actually accomplish this? We have the people, we have the enthusiasm, but what is our goals? We looked at what's out there. We said, okay, well, Pleb Lab is a hacker space for developers and bitcoin commons is sort of a co-working space and bitcoin park is sort of a blend of all of the above and so we reached out to all of them and said hey what's

working what's not and can you share your struggle share your successes and all of them were we're super excited and happy to give us advice and the the first thing he said was, you probably shouldn't do this, man. It's going to be a huge time sink and you're going to lose money. So we said, okay, well, if it's going to take a lot of time, let's distribute it out amongst our community. And if it's going to take a lot of money, let's not have anyone, a lot of money, let's not bankroll it by any one person. Let's control it from the community let's actually like fundraise this and do this kind of like in the ethos of bitcoin and at that same time since we're doing it this way let's build a framework let's build a a roadmap a template so

that in toronto or in la or wherever you are uh you can say, hey, this is how they did this in Denver. Maybe we don't have quite as many people or maybe we have just a skilled of a member, you know, group of members who are in our local meetup. Let's figure out how they did it and maybe shortcut that a little bit. Let's not go through all the hassles that they did. And so we are a nonprofit and we open source in all of our documents and we're still working on that because there's a million things that are growing to do list, you know. But, you know, really the space is, I'd say in a sentence, it's a community hub for Bitcoiners.

It's a place where you can go to learn about sovereignty, to learn about financial education, to learn and meet like-minded people, to exchange values and services with others. So, you know, we have people who are helping each other, like, do various things around the house, or skills, or babysitting, or helping people fix minors. I mean, I've got a space heater right behind me that was donated to me just so I could learn how to tinker with an S9. And so just having that physical venue to be able to gravitate towards, you'd be surprised how much that changes things, right? For Bitcoin to be this digital decentralized protocol that's everywhere, it's amazing how effective having an actual physical space can be in that success.

Okay. Do you have a weight room in there? Yeah. Work out. You are. That's great. I'm glad to hear that. Okay.

So let's talk a bit about this. I'm a sucker for a good weight room. What I want to know is what is the sort of average day like at this place? Because when I think about these co-working spaces, collaborative spaces, and I think that's a good way to put it. It's a place where you go to be around Bitcoiners. It's simple, but it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of us want to do it.

What's an average day like? Is it something like you have planned events every day? Or if I go to, for example, the membership page, there's like two tiers of membership. As you said, it's nonprofit, but it's basically a co-op. Unlimited guest passes, conference room booking, quiet daytime call space. I assume these things are sort of limited, but also unlimited in a sense. So you have sort of a part there that's play it by ear and then is there another part of the park where you guys are scheduling events you're expecting certain

things to happen every day give me a breakdown yeah so there's two sides to the building let's see if i can uh yeah if you put your screen up i think i'll be able to see it at the bottom and i'll add it to the uh there we go we go. So we've got two sides here. And on the one side is what we call the main room, the social lounge area. So this is nice. Look at that. So you can see,

we've got a big kitchen. This is where most of our, a lot of our events, we have food and, uh, we've got some kegerators with drinks. And so we, you know, we usually open our kitchen up when we have events.

Uh, so this side, it's kind of like where you do the mingling and you know we do like before like before the presentations and after we'll do on that side and then you'll see the stage view on the left here this example of Denver bit dev so we have a few different layouts that we can set this room up but this is on the other side so it's a kind of like a shotgun style layout building where it's just a straight shot back so two different sides of the main room and the event room and then in the back we've got an area where we're building a bitcoin medium of exchange area so that you can actually spend bitcoin and buy things in person really uh use bitcoin for its intended purpose so of course we've also got all of the bitcoin paraphernalia that you would imagine

uh no shortage of that and we're working with a few different individuals i don't know if i can say just yet who it is but we're uh working on building building out an art gallery so is it made i can't say who it is so that's probably telling you i hope i hope it's made x if i can say somebody uh shoot me a message so i can but we are uh we're launching an art gallery soon and we're gonna have curated freedom art all throughout these walls so you can see all the brick walls and all the potential this place has. Again, we want it to be – I mean, there's actually a reason why we didn't call it just like a Bitcoin X, like Bitcoin Mountain or these other names. It's because we didn't really want to pigeonhole ourselves into just Bitcoin specifically, although it is foundational to our core principles. Of course, we run a Bitcoin treasury as a Bitcoin organization.

We wanted to really expand what we could talk about. And so we have events that are health focused or sovereignty focused that aren't necessarily just you know bitcoin protocol but we've also got all kinds of events that we're doing education for bitcoin it's specific so just tomorrow for example we've got one uh tomorrow it's a bitcoin wallet workshop so there's about 40 people or 30 something people ours who peed here and we're going to go through basics of wallets and you know got deep dive into q a and we're going to go through basics of wallets and you know got deep dive into q a and we're going to do like a interactive session where we're doing test net so you know having a place like this to be able to do that type of workshops and

co-work in the middle of the day uh it's just like you know it's kind of like make it what you're make it your own uh you know we've got this area in the event room you can this is all set up as co-working during the day so all of these kind of tables that you see in a circle they're more set up like individual co-working uh seating there and we can usually co-work about 20 people uh on a normal day and we have uh you know about 75 members today so about a third of them are co-working. So no issues with capacity yet, but that'll be a good problem to have when we get there and we've got room to expand.

You have somebody in the chat here saying this puts the Austin Bitcoin Commons to shame. I have not seen the Austin Bitcoin Commons. I've had Matt on and afterwards, Odell, I should say, talking about Nashville Bitcoin Park. And some of my friends have been there. Matt speaks highly about it, but I've not actually seen it. And so when I look at this space, Zach, a couple of things stick out to me, right?

The first thing is that you guys have done a good job making that an inviting space for people to just come and hang out and work, like you mentioned. And one of the things we preach on this show, and I'm sure you guys have considered this in your strategy as well, is Bitcoin can't always be the top of the funnel, right? It's hard to get people to come under the auspices of, we're going to absolutely drill into you how important 21 million of something is as soon as you walk in the fucking door. And if you don't like it, it's not the place for you. That doesn't work. What works is, like you mentioned, can we talk to people about health? Can we talk to people about sovereignty? Can we talk to people about firearms? Can we talk to

people about Austrian economics? Things that are interesting to people who then wind up in Bitcoin. Those are the gateways, right? No one wakes up one day and says, man, it'd be nice if there was digital scarce money that I could use that was verifiably, or the supply was verifiable and it was mined with commodity energy. No one thinks that, but they do understand these other things. So I want to applaud you guys for that. Maybe the next place we should go in terms of this space is how is this thing funded? That does not look cheap. I said to you before the show, that building looks nice on the outside. I could see somebody shilling that as an Airbnb, like come have your bachelor party here. It's $5,000 for a night, split it with 20 people.

That place cannot be cheap. I'm not going to ask you how much it costs to run because that's not a fair question. These things change all the time. uh you guys have a right to keep that private at least a little bit how is the funding set up for this place i see the memberships where does that money go what sort of thing can what sort of things can people who contribute today expect to get back tomorrow uh when they when they participate in this operation. Yeah, so it is an undertaking to run, to organize, to operate. And you can see we've got, you know, we do our best to put out there what we are doing. Like I said, the struggles, the successes. So we have our treasury reserve policy that we're transparent about how our

dues are spent. We have committees and monthly budgets. We have a Bitcoin treasury, but we have a very disciplined policy of selling every month as our treasurer or CFO says, it's the worst day of the month for him. Cause he has to sell sats for rent. But our goal is not to stack sats.

Our goal is to run a successful Bitcoin and Freedom Hub for our region. So yeah, I mean, we were funded from a lot of generosity in our community. We had, I believe it was 50, I should know this number as chairman, but 50 something founding members. And these were the individuals who, I think it was 55,

people who paid monthly contributions, donations to the organization, basically got nothing in return. It was like an altruistic thing. And yeah, and so like I said, I mean, we had to do this all in the open to encourage people to continue to support us. And we knew that if we didn't do it that way,

we were going to have to take a large lump sum of money from one individual or one company and there and potentially be controlled by them right sort of lose our autonomy of what we're wanting to do and maybe the the ability to give a framework for how to do this in your community at the same time. So we really felt it was important to raise money from our community. And we did like member social events every month and just like tapped our community. And every single Bitcoin event in Denver, in Colorado, we were like, do you know about the space? And we were telling people about it.

And we're like, you got to be a member. Your name will be on a plaque in the building if you're on're on it some people like i don't want my name on the plaque bad op sec bro and uh yeah and so i mean i think you know we started to hit a critical mass with about 20 or 30 people where we had like a founding night that was actually where we created our non-profit and became legit and that's when we really started to attract members and start looking for a venue. And we were sort of in this virality of building through word of mouth and online. We were introduced to a Bitcoiner who was inspired by what we were doing. And we had a couple meetings with him,

and he was like, well, I think I've found a venue that'll be perfect for this. And fast forward a few months, and the space is it, right? And so we were able to accomplish this in a way that maintained our ethos and still be able to accomplish something amazing. Like we were talking about much, much less impressive venues in our initial founding. And, you know, a big part of it was these four companies, Casa, Compass, Unchained, and Fetty,

they all gave us initial grants to help us get off the ground. And those were significant, really helping us bootstrap our runway and therefore our ability to actually afford what we're doing. So, you know, we're still figuring it out as we go. And we're throwing events all the time and we're we have like operational budgets that we're learning how to uh where can we like manage it a little more effectively and that's part of like what was so exciting about this is like hey we're gonna we're gonna show you how like you know don't buy pizza at every event or like that's an unnecessary expense that you might wind up coming up you know later or uh you know don't buy canned drinks you know get something on tap because it winds up like lasting a lot longer so uh little things like

that running a venue but at the same time running a successful event hub so bitcoin education is not just in person but we record almost all of our events so we're building a big content library online presence too so that we can actually push this out there and really live by our educational mission content thing is huge i i continue to be surprised that some of these conferences co-working spaces there's just no excuse at this point not to have a proper studio setup where you can talk to people, record it. Cameras cost like a thousand bucks. Get two cameras, a video switcher, some guy to press the button when someone's talking. It's not that hard to do. And I'm glad to hear you guys are doing that because when I think about what would make a lot of this stuff,

not only better on the ground, but more popular outside of the area, outside of the space, the space, is being able to see it and enjoy some of the stuff, right? It's hard for me to imagine people want to make the trip to Denver or Nashville or wherever to see something like this without having, quote unquote, seen it already. So kudos to you guys for that. I want to talk a bit about your board. You have what looks to me like a nine person board ish. Yeah. Nine person board. How did you come up with these? Yeah. Well, I don't know. Like sometimes people don't think the chairman is a board member. It's like a separate entity. Depends on how you view like Robert's rules of, you know, anyway, that's a story for another time. Yeah follow this yeah so like do you do you want to talk a bit about how you pick these folks you know a couple of them are

familiar to me you yikes um you just mentioned tyler who uh what is his background was um uh geez i forget you just said you just said a little while ago but a couple of these faces i don't recognize so how did you guys come up with the board did the board approach you guys were these people who were financial contributors or helped you get leads to financial contributions? Give me a little bit about the makeup of your board here. These were the people who put in the proof of work. I mean, that's simple as that. I mean, we, in our early days, we were like, hey, we're going to, like I said, first it was Eric and I, and within a few weeks, it was four or five other people.

And from the beginning, there was a core group of people who really were inspired to make this happen. And so when we formed in April or in March last year, we had a founding night and we did elections so anyone who had paid or you know did donations up to that point was chose for the board of directors and so everybody got up there and and he was interested and said hey here's like why this mission you know why this organization is really inspiring to me and like how i think i can help move it forward and help it accomplish and again that didn't exist like it's literally just like a people in a room talking about an idea at this point with a multi-sig from with other people's bitcoin yet and still i mean i look back on it's like it's amazing that it happened and uh

yeah so the board was uh chosen by the uh by the crew who made it happen some of the roles were unopposed and uh a few weren't and we have annual elections at the current governance model where coming up in just a few months actually we'll be potentially selecting a new board i'm sure some will get reselected done a great job we went from concept to this implementation so uh there's definitely some success that our our team has done but uh yeah and it's a lot of work tyler as uh says you know it's the hardest full-time job that doesn't pay anything and uh he's right because it's uh it is a full-time job and i don't think any of us like we were drafting like our like

we were drafting like the call like the do you board the terms of reference you'd probably like how much you need to like the do the duties I keep saying dues duties I'm like we need

money to survive please donate right there I keep saying dues, duties. I'm like, we need money to survive. Please, dumb it. Right there. But the duties, like, hey, like, chairman's going to do this. CEO's going to do this. CFO's going to do this. I'm kind of like, first we need to know, we got to figure all that out. We were estimating like a couple, like four or five hours a week.

Literally, it's like that per day joey so uh it's a incredible okay do you do you think like one of the things i was thinking about when you because i'm looking at the website and talking to you in the lead up to the interview it's like this thing is open source and you said it a couple times tonight it's we will help you the same way that we were helped. And all I hear from you, Zach, is that it's fucking hard. Okay. It's like a lot of work. You have no money. The guys you called for help were like, don't do it. It's not worth it.

So maybe we should talk a little bit about the beginning of the process for you guys and some of the difficulties you hit. So let's take a space for the obvious one. You guys, it seems to me, got really lucky. You're very fortunate to know a guy who thought this was a good space. You locked it down over the course of a few months by the sounds of things. I'm thinking about myself here in Hamilton, Ontario. Real estate is expensive. Coworking space is expensive. I remember this was a few years ago now, but even trying to book a wedding venue, places that looked honestly, Zach, a lot like the spot you got, you know, it's 15 grand for a night, you know, like it ain't cheap. And you guys are getting this for a month or month over month. So, so like, maybe let's go back to the beginning of this. When you're thinking about the physical location, owning versus mortgaging, renting, whatever, right? Then there's also the considerations about stuff like, you know, what are we near?

Are we near anything else that'll help us grow? Are we near anything else that'll cannibalize this business from us? What are some of the challenges you guys thought about in those early days that people who are considering doing something like this will probably also have to get through and experience? Yeah. Well, I'll say that it is a lot of work, but the moment you set foot in there,

you attend an event. We had 80 people last night at our event and two nights before, or a week before, we had another 70, 80, 90 person event. Outstanding. You're in there and it's just like, oh, it's worth it. The people who come up to us and talk about how freaking cool it is to be in a Bitcoin venue and for it to be in their town.

You know, it's like people who were envious of Nashville are like, I could stay here now. I don't need to go to Nashville. That's great. It's very rewarding and i think that's the payment that we uh that we get as the ones who've really put a lot of sweat equity into it though there's no real equity because uh it's a non-profit but uh yeah i mean we have we like to say the chicken and the egg problem we had it all the time we're still running into it all the time, to be honest. The biggest one was we're Bitcoiners, so we want to hold Bitcoin.

Especially because when we were starting to plan this out, Bitcoin was like 25K. So we're like, I mean, come on. We're not going to hold dollars. However, as you may believe, you know, landlords, they don't like Bitcoin or, you know, at least two years ago, they didn't, maybe things are starting to change. And so they're looking at us like we're crazy coming as a Bitcoin organization when Bitcoin's 25, 30K saying we want to pay our monthly dues and we have an organization that's going to do events and have people that work in the Bitcoin industry. And we're going to work here in the daytime and we're going to do events at night and on the weekends, we're going to have social things and community building, the marketplace where you can buy Bitcoin. And they're like, you're nuts. And also, Bitcoin's risky and I'm not going to lease my building to your organization.

You also have no established track record of any of that. So we ran into this chicken and egg problem for a while. And all the while, we continued to, through our social events in town and continue to collect donations and try to fundraise and say, you know what? Well, the more Bitcoin we've got and the longer it takes, the more Bitcoin is going to go up, we'll have more pull in time. And honestly, man, that's what it really was. I love the saying, success is where luck and preparation meet. And you got to have both.

So my tip to any community out there who's got some semblance of organization amongst their community already, like if you're pulling 30 40 50 people to your meetup about bitcoin development regularly that that's where we were and you know if that's the case then you got to start preparing you got to put the put the roadmap together you got to start putting the irons in the fire so that when the right opportunity does come into play,

and that's really part of the key is that we, I mean, we weren't going to accomplish this without finding the right landlord who was willing to understand what our organization was going to do and was inspired by it. So the more we prepared for this, the more eventually longer it went, we found the right person who was like, I want you to hold a

Bitcoin treasury because I know fiat's a melting ice cube. And I love the fact that we can build a Bitcoin hub and this sort of development mindshare, you know, somewhat like of a Silicon Valley type of feeling in Denver in the Bitcoin world. So, you know, once he was inspired by what we're doing and we really showed him how the sausage was made and the transparency of our organization. And I was like, OK, like, you know, you guys, it's as good as it's going to be. I mean, we're going to you know, we're going to make mistakes as we go. But, you know, that's part of it is figuring it out. So let's say you got to prepare, got to raise buying companies that also have a presence like

employees in your area because that was big key. All these companies here have some sort of tie to Denver and therefore it was good for them to be a part of this, having a hub like this in their region. Preston Pyshke It's funny, someone in the chat mentioned Unchained shares an office at the Commons, right? So they're behind the Commons, behind you guys. This is the thing I think people don't understand about Bitcoin. In other industries, there's a lot more zero-sum thinking. And Unchained or a company like Unchained may say,

we're going to sponsor one of these co-working spaces, one of these community hubs, and try and make it the best one out of all the community hubs. In Bitcoin, and we see this a lot in the podcast space, and we see this a lot in the meetup space, Bull Bitcoin will sponsor the same meetup that Shakepay might sponsor, two exchanges up here, or two different wallet manufacturers may sponsor. You might see CoinKite plus Ledger sponsoring the same conference. It's us against everyone else

thinking in Bitcoin. And there's companies that are willing to sponsor in more than one place, for more than one effort, for more than one sort of project, even if it means that they're spreading themselves a little thinner, that those projects may be intentionally or unintentionally, explicitly or implicitly competing with each other, stuff like the two common areas, the hub and the space, these different things, right? Or the commons in the space, I should say.

People have to keep that in mind. And I think a lot of times when I see people talking about planning meetups and some of the group chats I'm in, it's always, well, we can't get this company to sponsor because they're already sponsoring this other meetup. You'd be surprised. Those companies want to be associated with good people. And it takes a good person. It takes a producer to get behind and start something like this, where there's almost zero inertia at the beginning of something like this where there's almost zero inertia at the beginning of something like this. There's nothing, right?

No one really wants to do it. You said you and Yakes are LARPing by the pool or whatever and off you go now. A year later, you're running this thing. So I think people should be aware of that. That's an important consideration. You should be asking everybody. Now, one of the things I want to ask,

given that you guys are not doing events every day, can't be expected of you. We are doing a lot of events, Joe. Are you doing events every day, can't be expected of you. We are doing a lot of events, Joe. Are you doing them every day, Zach? Not every day. It feels like it lately, man. You have like eight events. You're not doing them every day.

Not every day. People are coming there and they're helping you pay your bills. They're working. Now, are the people coming there to work during the day, they can't all be Bitcoiners. They may just like the space they may they may just want to come hang out are they all bitcoiners they may not all identify themselves as bitcoiners but uh yeah i mean we have an application we have an application process and one of the questions is like how far down the bitcoin rabbit hole are you wait a minute wait a

minute to go you have to go there with a laptop and spend the day, you have to apply? No. So good clarification. So we have... You can screen share our prior membership page in a moment.

So we have a couple different tiers. So we have a social membership tier. Or actually, let me start. Keep talking. I'm going to pull it up. I'm going to pull it up. We have a supporter tier you joey you want to love what we're doing at the space you want to support us with five canadian dollars worth of bitcoin per month i won't go very far joey but we'll take it and it will be greatly appreciated so if you go down to the bottom you can be a monthly supporter

so uh gets you access to our newsletter and basically our good good graces we appreciate your support wouldn't happen without our support supporting members uh the public so we have a lot of free public events so if you're in the denver area or you're in the Denver area during any weekend or week, we've usually got something going on. So denver.space slash events. You find out what's going on at the space and come to one of our free public educational events. If you want to come and co-work during the day, so you're in town maybe or maybe you live here, but just don't want a full membership. You can purchase a day pass which

goes to keeping the lights on basically. We have amenities like coffee and drinks and all that snacks that you can. There's a bunch of Bitcoiners there that you can talk to and shoot the show with. It's hard to find a co-working

place that you can have that with. Now if you want, there's a hard to find a coworking place that you can have that with. Now, if you want, you know, the way we are running our operations, we have two different tiers of actual members. So we have a 210 member cap and we currently have 75. About a third of our members are coworking and the rest are social. So social members are going to be $150 a month and you get five co-working days per month. So you have a code you can get in with and you're able to bring your guests with you during those co-working days if you'd like.

So if you've got a spouse, they would come with you during those days, they're welcome to. But you also get access to the building after 4 p.m. So anytime in the evenings, usually we have events going on, but not every day. And also on weekends. So we have full access to our members, all members on the weekends. And then we've got our co-working tier where that's for someone who really wants to be in there a lot more often, more than just a couple days a month.

And this gives you 24-7 building access. So you drop by any time you also have unlimited guest passes and these are really our core members who a lot of work in the bitcoin industry and work here in denver probably like remote workers and want to work around other bitcoiners but maybe they aren't even working at the same company right so as a uh a great example like rocky at unchained and mia casa like we both you know co-work in the same building and you know we keep a friendly rivalry in between sales calls and so so we have a couple different ways to support the organization

but uh if there's one message i want to get across is that if you would like to support the organization, there is a way for you to do it. It's right here. Make sure you look at this. Okay. So I guess the other question I would have for you, you guys are obviously looking for members now. Is there a cap on the membership? There must be,

right? Because you guys have a limited space there and you want the experience to be pleasant for everyone who's paying. So what, like how many members do you have if you're comfortable sharing that i don't know and then how many can you have if you if you you know is there is there on this roadmap that you know you're still working on is there uh here's what happens when you get to a thousand members you gotta get another fucking building yeah so we uh we have in our bylaws our

cap is 210 and so we have 75 today. So we're about a third of the way to our membership cap. And if a member drops, their membership number is retired. A new member can take their place, but that membership number is going to be theirs. So it will work. It works in an NFT. I know. I see you smiling.

I see you smiling we're not or see you joey at least not on the maybe on a layer two someday but on a bitcoin only on bitcoin uh and we are focused on bitcoin it's uh you know it is a freedom hub but uh bitcoin's the only cryptocurrency that really affords uh the freedom that our organization cares about so totally totally no that's that's good to know and when you guys do events zach like you know that really supports the freedom that our organization cares about. Totally, totally. No, that's good to know. And when you guys do events, Zach, you mentioned some of the stuff you've had.

Have you turned people down? If you're someone who wants to have an event there, what are sort of the requirements? I'm sure you have to talk to the board. You have to come to some agreement on what you can and can't present. Doesn't that, I mean, I don't want to say it flies in the face of the freedom ethos.

You, of course, as the proprietor, CEO, are free to do what you want with the space. Who do you say no to? Do you say no to anybody? Would you say no to anybody? So we have an application process for membership. And one of the questions is, how far are you down the Bitcoin rabbit hole? And most of our members' replies, I lost it all in a boating accident. So we do want to have our membership be really aligned with the value that our organization cares about. And those are on our website the um the for those who want to come to the space but

really aren't a fit for membership maybe they're either into alt coins and want to promote those it's a big one uh or maybe they just overall like aren't someone who our community really gets along with though i'll say that hasn't really been hasn't really been there's one case where someone wants to promote altcoins no this is a place where if you are into altcoins and you want to keep that to yourself and not promote them in our walls potentially would be allowed to be a member accessible there. But, you know, if you're going to be promoting things that are antithetical to our values, that's not going to fly.

So the event side is a little different, but it is also in the same guideline so we have we're in the neighborhood of each denver we are literally dead there's on your website it looks like you're gonna be at each denver for bitcoin week right that's your trojan horse bitcoin behind the eth walls walls in the neighborhood. I mean, when you search crypto venue in Denver, you know, we come up. Hey.

And then, you know, we've had a lot of organizations reach out to us, interest in the venue. Varying degrees of tolerance to what they're doing. You know, I think one of the hard lines that we're going to draw is if your organization is issuing a token, first off, it's likely to be an unregistered security as a nonprofit. We don't really want to get involved in things like that. We're trying to do everything above board. Second is that the reason we didn't take money from a single person was so that we're not

beholden to any one individual or any one organization. And we're not going to take money from organizations that we, you know, really don't agree with what they're doing. So, you know, we've had some, you know, I don't want to like blast any specific organizations that have reached out to us. You can't. You're free to do so. I'm not going to do that. We have turned down more than we've accepted, put it that way, significantly more. But when we're talking about things like ETH Denver, for example, I mean, it's all Ethereum stuff.

So what we're really focusing on in ETH Denver is the Bitcoin Layer 2 ecosystem because this is what really fills... We don't want to alienate those who are stuck in altcoin land. Like those, we feel bad for them. I totally agree. Right? Like we, we're apologetic for, for that.

We feel sorry for them that they are going to miss out on the world's biggest innovation in financial history. All they had to do was buy Bitcoin instead. And hopefully the space is that beacon of shining light in the darkness. And the darkness of the space, this venue is going to be a place where people can say, oh, wait, I've been wrong all along. So we are very much about meeting people where they're at.

So we have educational events of all different degrees. So we have a beginner, intermediate, and advanced BitDevs. We're going to be doing special Bitcoin week events during ETH Denver. So excited to like, I think it's going to be the hotspot. There was a huge Bitcoin scene in ETH Denver last year, and we knew that you know could we if we were to pull this off by this eithember it's gonna be something special so we're still making it up as we go but i think it's gonna be it's gonna be it's gonna be cool it's exciting i'm i'm actually happy to hear you say that you don't try and alienate the shit coiners my co-host len who

is a lot more militant than me uh takes the opposite viewpoint that we should laugh and dance and do other things on the graves of these people as their bags. I'm sure. I'm sure. There's a case to be made for that set of sentiments, but I think I'm more closely aligned with you in that there's going to be, especially from the Ethereum camp, over the next year or two, a lot of people who are looking for a new home who have most of the same values and just missed on the one or two things that Bitcoin. And that's it. let the Vitalik potion get to them. And now that really has worn off and sort of proven itself, especially over the last week or so, a week or two to be a fraudulent token, a fraudulent ecosystem.

But we don't talk about that. What the one thing maybe we can close on, because it's interesting, you know, I don't often get to talk to people who are at the start of a project. I talked to a lot of people who are maybe hitting maturity in their projects or are now at the point where they're done the base layer of their project and they're innovating some other way. They're extending their tentacles to some new thing and they want to talk about that or talk about culture or narratives. You're still in your infancy here. And I'm curious, for something like this, something like the Bitcoin

Commons or Bitcoin Park in Nashville, I don't hear a lot about what those things are going to look like in five years. And we talk a lot in Bitcoin about what the price is going to be in five years. What's layer two going to look like in five years? What's the transaction layer going to look like? What is the macro environment? The macro birds are always chirping. What is the space going to look like in five years? What is the plan? I suppose you could actually just remain like a hub and keep doing one or two or three things and do them really well. There's value in that. But I get the feeling that this is not going to be a place like that because you got a board here who looks, if I kind of hover over their

names, a lot of innovators and different disciplines and expertise sets. I get this feeling that they're not going to want to sit still. So what's it going to look like in five years? Man, way bigger than it is now. I mean, we might have a whole block. I mean, Bitcoin's going to be like $10 million a coin. We'll be able to buy out every single alum in the area. But we'll orange pill them all first so that they'll all come up first. And that's actually, we have been teaching the,

like we had some neighbors come over because we're in a mix. Like you guys and the jehovah's going door to door asking if i've heard the good news is that what you're telling me no they come to our door they see the bitcoin accepted here sign through the all glass window door and they're like oh the people we we're working on orange pill and because we're in a mixed residential area so it's like the only commercial building i think it's great yeah there's like houses across the street from us and they see 80 people in here and they're like what mixed residential area. It looks like it. I think it's great. There's houses across the street from us and they see

80 people in here and they're like, what is going on with these Bitcoin people all of a sudden? Way bigger than it is now. It's going to be able to live on without any of those innovative board people because

we all might be gone. We all might have turned over completely. That's exactly why we set it up this way. This is an idea. This is a movement just like Bitcoin itself. That's why we didn't want it to be tied to any one person. That's why there's nine people on the board. We have so much democratic process, we're tripping over each other. And it's why we elect a new board every year so that we make sure we're not getting stuck in our own echo chamber of what's working and hasn't been. So, yeah, I mean, it's definitely going to be bigger. Our treasury is going to be the size of a you know king kong and hopefully we are throwing some you know the most balling events in the rocky mount region the governor is going to be there cynthia lummis

coming from wyoming she's going to be there you know everyone who's everyone in money because bitcoin is just money and it'll be everyone's money pretty soon we'll know about the space it would be the place where like the future of denver's finances came came about and uh and uh yeah i'm pretty excited to have been a part of the awesome uh eight other people uh who who are making that happen and uh man it's really like i'd say that's like the biggest biggest thing for me is like the the community aspect like you know we already all were orange pilt like we all know it's going up forever but you know honestly man like if you're only focused on the money you've kind of missed the point even if it is about bitcoin and so to me this is a really stark reminder for everyone in our physical community not the bitcoin community

at large but in the denver community but also in the Bitcoin community at large, because we have people coming in, flying in from all over the country, all over the world, just to check out the space. So it is a worldwide thing, but it's about the community, right? Money is for people. At the end of the day, Bitcoin is for people. Maybe end of the day bitcoin is for people maybe it's going to be for computers and machines and ai autonomous agents and all that too but it's still right now for people to trade together to live their lives to plan for the future it's so much of what the space is is really connecting reconnecting that money with the people it's that community aspect that was missing for the last several years with post-COVID and all that that we were so glad to freaking have again, man.

It's what makes this like hell of a ride towards monetization like stomachable. Like we can get rich and get poor with friends together. And so if you're coming through Denver, you got to check out the space. You just take the A line straight from the airport. You can walk to the train station. No excuses. This is an impassioned man making an impassioned plea here for everyone to go check out the space. I think you should.

I think if you're in the area, you should. I think if you're not in the area, you should. Zach, you've been a great guest. Tell people if they have questions, comments, if they want to buy a t-shirt, which you don't make. I can't believe with a logo like that, you don't have a t-shirt. That is a sin. Your board needs to give their heads a shake on that.

Dylan, you hear that? Merch company? Yeah, give your head a shake. You need a t-shirt. And by the way, it should have a small logo on the front, chest emblazoned over the heart big logo on the back that's what the kids like put it on an american we're going euro euro team and we're going the no v-neck space on none of the space on the collar dude that's it yakes came

back from a uh a conference in europe and he was wearing like one those Euro tees. That's it, dude. That's the face merch. No, that can't be it. That can't be it. We'll have the member jersey, your member number. Yeah, that's the kind of shit people like. If people want to contact

you, if they want to donate, Zach's got a QR code behind him there. He's out of the way. Look at the QR code. Send these guys a couple of bucks. Every little bit helps. You don't get anything except a warm feeling. But having listened to Zach for the last hour, you should appreciate by now that this is something he's passionate about and something these other guys are passionate about. And we need hubs everywhere because there are people who are going to be looking for answers.

And if we don't corral them, they will go to the wrong place and spend another five years wandering the desert wondering why they can't put food on the table. And so places like the space, that's fantastic. Now tell people they want to find out more. They want to contact you. How do they do it? Yeah. I say like Bitcoin is the most important thing that's happening in our life or one of the most important things i think uh because of that you need to learn about it and everyone in your area needs to learn about it if currencies

hyper inflate and the people living next door to you don't have any bitcoin you're in danger so it behooves everyone to enrich and empower their community that's why we don't alienate the normies we encourage them we empower them we educate them right none of us were bitcoiners no at all i get the very beginning we maybe were bitcoiners at heart and we didn't know yet but we had to go through that same rabbit hole that same hundred or thousand or ten thousand hours depending on how fast you read and what what speed you listen to podcasts on but uh yeah man it's uh i will say that like this is going to be such an important place an idea for communities it's been talked about all over the country since the moment we launch

it's being talked about all over the world we've had people reach out in europe we've had people reach out in san francisco that people reach out in Florida. So how can we get this same type of thing in our community? We've been open four months. So this movement is, I mean, we're in the beginning phases, like you said, and five years from now, if you want, I think a long-term vision could be there are spaces all over and you have a pass that gets you into any of them depending on what city in the world you're at. And they're all run with the same values similar to Bitcoin. So you got to learn about getting your community involved. And

if there's not someone that's doing that, you be that person. Just be that person. This is the most rewarding thing I've done that any of the people on the board of directors, I would say, would also say they've done. So, yeah, man. Space to the moon. That's why we got a rocket ship. That's our alternate logo. That's it. Thanks for watching and listening, everyone.

We'll see you next time.