We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC044: Bitcoin Privacy w/ Matt Odell (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 08:12 - How Matt initially got into Bitcoin. 17:21 - Why large social media companies threaten one's own sovereignty. 18:51 - Matt's thoughts on Bitcoin's privacy versus other digital assets. 33:53 - Matt's thoughts on the Bitcoin Lightning Networks privacy. 42:15 - Matt's thoughts on lightning wallets and their overall utility. 52:29 - His thoughts on mining and how the sector is progressing with potential supply chain impacts. 01:00:07 - The biggest threats to Bitcoin's success. 01:06:15 - Individuals who have influenced or shaped Matt. *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Matt Odell's Twitter. Read the 9 Key Steps to Effective Personal Financial Management. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Fundrise 7-Eleven The Bitcoin Way Onramp Public Vanta ReMarkable Connect Invest SimpleMining Miro Shopify Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where I'm talking about Bitcoin. Today's guest is Mr. Matt O'Dell, who's a longtime Bitcoin investor and privacy advocate. On the show, Matt and I cover a range of topics where I think he provides a different point of you compared to many of the previous guests is in the realm of protecting your online identity, why it's so important, and where Bitcoin fits into the future of your digital footprint. Matt comes with a very technical background, and he's great at making many of the different ideas in Bitcoin more accessible.

So without further delay, here's my chat with Matt O'Dell. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone. So like I said in the introduction, I'm here with Matt O'Dell. And Matt, like we said before we started recording, this has been a long time coming. We've been following each other for years at this point. I'm excited we're finally sitting down and recording a conversation together.

Yeah, I'm very excited as well. I think was Bit Black Boom the first time we've ever actually met in person? Yeah. That was a long time coming as well. That was my second event, Bitcoin event ever. I mean, it's pathetic. Well, now you're probably addicted. I don't get out much.

Kind of pathetic. Anyway, I'm curious, just to kind of like get this thing going, what are your thoughts on the 2021 cycle? the bull market that we're experiencing and in comparison to previous cycles because I was just having a conversation with a person today about like my opinions on the differences between the previous cycle. I don't want to tell you what I said. I want to hear what your thoughts are. I try and check my bias, but it feels like 2013. So like I'm kind of just working on a like a 2013 mental model. I wasn't around in that bull market. I came in the last one. But tell us.

That's why I say I need to check my bias a little bit because that was my first, like I got in in 2013 and there was that first run up to like 250. And then we dropped down to like $70. It was like a half a year bear market. And then when we hit the fall, we went to like 1,100. It was like it was barely. It was like we went to like 150 for one day, one hour and one day and then collapsed back down to or even lower maybe, like 180 or something like that. So that's kind of what I'm working off of, something similar to that. And I kind of feel like, you know, we talk a lot about cycles.

I know you talk a lot about cycles as well. I feel like maybe 2017 would have been similar, but the Ethereum dynamic changed things because there was a real belief by a lot of industry players that there was going to be a flippinging. That was legit because back then, I mean, they were pretty much at parity as far as market cap there for a split second. and then it went back to Bitcoin kind of dominating. Yeah, and we also had the whole B-Cash stuff.

So it was maybe that spring was more muted than it would have been otherwise because it was hanging over everyone's head. I mean, I remember there was a lot of industry players that thought B-cash might win, that thought Segwood 2X was going to be like the end of Bitcoin and then Ethereum was going to take over. So there was a lot of uncertainty hanging over people's heads until whenever that was in the fall, when Segwa 2X, you know, finally officially failed. That was like October or November or something.

And then we had the really sharp run. So maybe 2017 was the anomaly. Yeah. And you know what was weird about the 2017? So I got in in 2015 at around 220. And it just seemed like the price just kept going up. People talk about like, when did you enter the market? I know in stock investing, they'd be like, well, what year did you enter the market?

people that were first entered to market in 1987. Like I talked to Grant Williams. He got into the stock market in 87 and he experienced that crash. And it just kind of like warped his perspective on how he views markets. Depending on where these people enter a market cycle, it kind of warps the way that they view things. So I got in in 2015 and the price, there was tons of volatility. It was crazy. I remember buying at 220 and it felt like it went to 300 in literally like the same month that I bought it.

And I was like, what in the world is this? This is crazy. But anyway, that cycle, that 2017 cycle, it seemed like there was all these narratives that were taking place with the Bitcoin Cash, the Segwit 2 piece. But the price just kept kind of going up. Like there was definitely like big contractions, but it would bounce back like within the month and it would just keep running. It just kept going and going.

This cycle, for me, at least price-wise, seems like there's just so much more volatility. And maybe it's because of the derivatives that are now part of it because back then we We really weren't dealing with the derivatives market until like December of 17, I want to say, is when that started. We had Bitmax. We had like, like, the OK coin wood chipper. Yeah, but it wasn't like at the scale. Like now it's like, I mean, it's everywhere.

And I think that you might have one of the reasons you're seeing like this, this really pronounced volatility. And it's just kind of lingering in these spots for longer. Maybe might be because of that. It might be because of whatever else. but I think people that this is like their first cycle, this for me is like much more harder to kind of manage emotionally, not that it's like freak me out or anything, but it's different than the 2017 cycle for sure.

And that's funny because I don't know, I kind of feel the opposite. I feel like the market in a lot of ways is healthier. But in terms of like 2017, there was this, there was more of a culture of like D-Gen trading and leverage trading, maybe because it was a little bit more fresh. We didn't have like this whole like stack culture. There was obviously like the hoddle guys like people saying, you know, hoddle, hoddle, hoddle. But like this idea that, you know, you just every week, you're mining fiat.

You just take your paycheck and you stack it into Bitcoin for the long term. There was no culture around it. You know, and maybe it's because I'm in my own little Bitcoin Twitter bubble, but it wasn't cool. You know, like I remember in 2017, I would do really long threads about dollar cost averaging, you know, and I would get like 25 likes on them. It wasn't exciting. You also had the whole blockchain narrative, I think, was way stronger back then. Now, I think you're a lot of people, especially people that have done their research are

kind of seeing like, hey, I don't know how you're really going to outpace this as far as sound money goes. But the DGEN, like, traders, I mean, look at the NFTs and some of the stuff that you're seeing right now. It's very much like 2017 with respect to just like the ICO booms and whatnot. Anyway, I was just kind of curious to get your take. Before we move on, I mean, you made an interesting point about when you enter the cycle, right? So, like, I personally, and this is going to be my bias again, I mean, I think the best

time for someone to enter a cycle is if they get burned immediately. I think the most dangerous situation for someone is like you, you enter in 2015 at 230 and you watch, you know, you watch over the next two years, it go up all the way to near 20K. You don't really get burned maybe that hard. You didn't get to experience a bear market at all. Yeah, I mean, you had to wait like three years for a bear market, right? Like when I got in, I was like immediately underwater.

I was like underwater within like three months. And it really like humbled me and was like, okay, you have to expect like these 85% drawdowns. And I think I was better for it. I think people tend to get if they come in like even if we're talking about this cycle, right, If they came in this time last year, what we were probably trading around like $6,000 or $7,000, maybe we were a little bit higher at that point. And they just watched their money go up, you know, a little under 10x. And they're feeling really proud of themselves.

You know, they're feeling really cocky. And, you know, that's when you get into trouble when you're not humble. It's funny that you say that because on the equity side of the house, the 2008 crash was very early in my investing timeline and had a tremendous impact on just how I viewed markets and how like, cautious I was because of that humbling, deeply humbling experience early on in your investing career. And you're exactly right. Like it polarizes kind of the way that you view things. And anyway, I want to just capture your Bitcoin story. So you, you came into this in 2013. Is that correct? So I had two friends tell me about in 2012. In order to the second friend,

told me about it. And then I basically came in as, I liked the concept, but I thought it couldn't work. So I just started working through all the different scenarios of it going to zero. And as I did that, I started to grow conviction. And then 2013 was when I started really believing in it and realizing it was not only a good, it could be a great investment, but that like it was actually our hope that it was something that we could actually rely on, you know, to have a better future. Because, I mean, you talk about things that shape you. When I was growing up, I first had September 11th in 2001. And, you know, that was, I was a New Yorker at the time. You know, I had friends, I had friends whose parents were in the towers and died in the towers. And it really, it made me very nationalistic.

And I had a lot of pride in our country. And then 2008 happened. And I was becoming a young man. And I was, it was like a rugpole of, I thought experts existed. Like, I thought, you know, that people, that knew what they were talking about and knew what they were doing. And it was kind of a huge eye-opener that, you know, maybe most of us are just winging it and just trying our best. And I saw that there was really no kind of people made out like bandits that were culpable for 2008. And I was like, okay, so it's like every man for himself. And I leaned in. I became like more of like a mainstream tech nerd. I, you know, I thought like maybe the Googles of the world, the apples of the world were our hope and like they could make the American dream come true again.

And then in 2013, the Snowden leaks happened. And I was like, they were complicit as well. So all of that came together at the same time when I was trying to learn about Bitcoin. So to me, at that point, Bitcoin was hope and could be a massive investment opportunity. It was like a combination of the two things. Are either one of your friends still in Bitcoin today? No, neither of them are. One was, one of them was spent an ungodly amount of Bitcoin on the Silk Road. He was the first one who introduced me to it. And then the other one, he was using his Bitcoin for online poker. And he has some, but he doesn't have that much.

How many Bitcoin are we talking back in the day? But the Silk Road guy, I don't even, I didn't see any of the transactions or anything. But you know, your mind runs wild, right? Everyone just assumes it's more than it is. Are we talking a thousand Bitcoin? Probably. You know, the early 2012, it was, I don't know, it was like $2 or $3 or $3.000. $3 or something like that. Like 2012 was a ridiculous year. Like the entry to 2012 into, maybe it was like $20.

I wasn't really interested in it. He kind of said in passing and he wasn't a credible source, you know, because he was using it to buy drugs. I didn't, you know, I didn't think, I was like, the government's just going to squash it. The other guy was like, he was playing like 10 Bitcoin hands, you know, like, I don't know like this. You know what's funny is as I think back to when I first got into it, I heard all the different arguments just like you where people would say, you know,

someday, if this thing actually does what it has, what it's attempting to try to do, this thing could be worth $100,000 a Bitcoin or maybe even a million, right? And I remember hearing that when the price was like low 200s. I thought, my God, that would be, if it even got back to the thousand that it, that it hit, like this would be crazy, like crazy. And here we are today, $45,000 a Bitcoin. And I look at price targets like $10,000 that would have literally blew my mind back then. And I'm thinking, wow, that would be unbelievable if you could buy it at those prices today. $10,000 was moon math to me. It was like, it was like almost a joke. It was like a joke prediction. I was, you know, just multiply it by 10,000. I was like

that, you know, maybe we'll get there. It'd be like 10 people hearing 10 million today. It was the equivalent of what those numbers like meant back then. So here we are. You're a big thing when I think of Matt O'Dell, I think privacy. And I think everybody else would probably agree with that in the space. When I think of the common person, especially on Twitter, and they think about privacy, I think this is kind of how your common person thinks about it. Well, I'm not going to get rid of my smartphone. Google, I've got to use it.

Facebook or Twitter or whatever. I've got a social media account. They're tracking me everywhere I go. If I'm standing next to a person at a bar, these companies know through proximity. Then they start showing up his friend recommendations. And, you know, Matt, it's just really not that bad. It just kind of makes my life a little bit easier. They're showing me things that I probably need the buyer that I'm kind of interested in buying. I didn't even realize that I might need these things. You know, it's really just not that bad. It's kind of helping me out.

I think you're a common person. That's how they think. So now tell us why that's dangerous. What I hear all the time is I exactly what you just said. I'm too far gone. there is, there's nothing I can do. What point is it for me to try and prove my situation? I'm already a lost cause. And most people, what they think is that the common response is, I have nothing to hide. But that's not the common response. The common response is I'm already a lost cause. There's nothing to do now. That's major fallacy, in my opinion. We can improve in steps. You can improve slowly and steadily different parts of your life. At the end of the day, what happens is we make has tradeoffs. That tradeoff,

balance is usually a tradeoff between convenience versus privacy and security. And most people choose the more convenient, cheap option. We have those tradeoffs in every aspect of our lives, whether you decide to spend with a credit card versus spending with cash, whether you decide to use Google Maps instead of using like a dedicated Garmin GPS, whether you decide to use Gmail. And it just comes down to whether or not you think it's worth it. But I think it's absolutely worth it. And if you do little improvements over time, they will add up. It's important not to get overwhelmed. Everyone gets overwhelmed. And at the end of the day, what I expect is that most people will learn the less and the hard way. We have never been in this situation before. There are

companies that are literally designed around the business model of collecting as much information as possible from you. They keep that in databases. They sell it to third parties. That data gets leaked. It gets shared. It gets sold. It gets compromised by governments that might not have your best interest at heart. It gets compromised by malicious individuals that might be out to get you for some reason. And as people get burned, they're going to learn the lesson the hard way and they're going to seek out ways to improve their setup. What I hope is that it's not as messy as it could be. When I look at the outlook here, I see people getting burned at scale and it's going to be very dark for a period. And I would prefer if people slowly improve their whole lives in terms

of that tradeoff balance, that convenience versus privacy and security tradeoff balance now. So it's a softer blow when we start to see these massive leaks. All right. So, Matt, somebody who's hearing this, they're going to say, okay, what you're saying is important. I want to improve my privacy, but I'm not like going off the grid. So what are like just the easy 80% of the value for 20% of the effort type activities that a person can take with respect to privacy? Preston, when you start going down this rabbit hole, we're so exposed, the average person is extremely exposed.

Social media, try and limit you use to social media. I know I'm a little bit hypocritical. I use Twitter, but I don't use any other social media. I just use Twitter. And I should use it less. I admit I should use it less. DNA tests. Don't send your DNA to some random corporation that's just going to hold it and bundle and send it out to other people and store it insecurely.

They might even have the best intentions at heart. and they just can't even store the data securely. It's just sitting out there. The home assistance, if I go into your house and I say, okay, Google or hey, Alexa, and it responds to me, you're doing it wrong. You can eliminate that. I know it's more convenient to have it, but you can eliminate that if it's important to you. Limiting Google.

There's a website called privacyguides.org. I think it's run by my friend TechLore. At least he's heavily involved with it. And it gives you alternatives to a lot of the things we use on our daily basis. You know, instead of Gmail, use like a more privacy focused email. That's probably one of the harder ones for people to kick is the Google addiction. I admit that. And you know, just slow and steady.

Like don't get overwhelmed. Use your credit card less. If you see someone's credit card statement, you know their whole lives. I don't know if you've ever looked at someone else's credit card statement, but if you look at someone else's credit card statement, you know everything they've ever done. So what are you saying? Pay with cash? Yeah.

I mean, you're not going to be, unless you're in El Salvador, you're not going to be able to you don't have to pay with cash everywhere. I know, like, if you're booking a hotel, it's very difficult. You know, you're going to probably have to give them a credit card at least to do the reservation. But you go out to dinner with friends, you know, choose to pay with cash more often. If it's an option, right? It's not going to be an option for much longer. But as long as it's an option, you know, you should consider using that option.

Once you start thinking about it, you should think about it from your own perspective. Just as you're living your life, just think about things and think about it from a privacy first mindset. and don't get overwhelmed about it because it's very easy to just fall into this hole where you're just discouraged and you're like, there's no shot. We're just all screwed. But if anything, that feeling is exactly why you should be trying to improve yourself. And I think there's a particularly strong incentive for Bitcoiners because we talk about sovereignty all the time.

And I know for my mind frame, when I got into Bitcoin, I quickly got into the mind frame that I don't have enough Bitcoin. I will never have enough Bitcoin and I need to have more. And you start to come to the inclusion is like, how will I lose my Bitcoin? Key aspect of the whole sovereignty question and being a sovereign individual and holding your own wealth and being your own man is that you don't have all these prying eyes on every little thing you do in your life. So I think there's like a direct financial incentive there for Bitcoiners specifically. Matt, when people think about privacy, there's a lot of arguments for privacy advocacy in other protocols outside of Bitcoin. People are saying, hey, this thing has a public ledger. You can clearly see this.

I know that there's people that are taking steps within Bitcoin with respect to like taproot and other things to improve the privacy. But I think your hardcore privacy folks are going to say, yeah, there's other protocols to do this. So how would you counter to that? I think people fall victim to their biases and they go really deep and they don't see the bigger picture. And ultimately, you know, Bitcoin is a freedom technology. It's freedom money. And if you compare Bitcoin to a Venmo or a PayPal or a credit card, we're already off to a good start in comparison to the complete lack of privacy that those offer. Now, if you use Bitcoin in a default way, you can expose a lot of financial information about yourself, which is why

I'm so vocal about it. And I think it's ultimately, it's really important for us to make privacy easier so that when people feel the need for privacy, when they get burned or when they realize that they want to improve their privacy, they need to have convenient, easy tools that are not too expensive for them to use to try and be more private. So they don't have to, you know, read a whole textbook on it. But ultimately, I think specifically what the alt corners don't realize, is whether you like it or not, it's not our choice whether or not Bitcoin takes over the world. I think Bitcoin is going to be the reserve money of the world. So if Bitcoin is the reserve money of the world, regardless, our focus should be improving

Bitcoin, improving the tools on Bitcoin, improving the education around Bitcoin, rather than trying to build completely separate systems. I think ultimately Bitcoin will be the best privacy coin if you want to use that terminology. It's a terminology that gets thrown around a lot. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord,

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Back to the show. Is this because Bitcoin's won the decent? centralization race against these other protocols. And because of that, you got to take what privacy kind of comes with it. Is that the argument? I think that it's basically like a short versus long-term kind of thinking, a high-time preference versus low-time preference type of thinking. I think that short-term, some of these other projects, specifically Minero, I mean, that's the elephant in the room. specifically Minero can be useful for transactional privacy today in a way easier fashion than it is to use Bitcoin privacy tools.

But I think ultimately that means nothing. It's short term. And I think short term, if Bitcoiners absolutely need privacy, they can swap spending cash into Monaro and spend it. But that doesn't mean that Monaro is going to overtake Bitcoin. I think long term, what we see is, first of all, a key aspect of these protocols and the key aspect of Bitcoin specifically is that we have a native token to pay miners. And this token has to be native because if it's not a native token, then you have third party risk. If we're trying to

pay a miner in a stable coin peg to Fiat, then someone's got to be holding the Fiat in a bank account somewhere, right? And you have this middleman and that middleman can get pressed, right? We had Nick Zabo, you know, trusted third parties are security holes. So you need to have a native token. And that native token needs to be at least stable, but it should be accruing in value. This is the issue that I get into on both sides because a lot of people like to frame people into two camps, right? You have like value investment camp and then you have the transactional cash camp, like privacy first, and number go up is doesn't matter to them. Really, you need both. You need a native token that accrues purchasing power and you need to be able to spend it at will without permission. And whether

we have better privacy tools today, which I honestly, I think it's been improving way quicker than I expected, at least on the app level. And stuff like lightning, lightning still has a ton of holes. But on the app levels and with lightning and better wallets and whatnot, we've improved tremendously over the last two years. I think what happens is we have basically, as people get burned, the need for transactional privacy on Bitcoin, easier transactional privacy. If you know what you're doing, you can use Bitcoin relatively private today. But easier transactional privacy will be something that basically the market will demand. And whether it's projects on the side of Bitcoin, wallet's app on the app level that bring most of it, or whether that's certain protocol

improvements that help enable the app level to do better, ultimately we will get it. It goes back to what I was saying earlier is that, you know, there could be a messy period in between when we're getting all, when we're all getting burned and learning our lesson that we need to improve quickly, or we can get ahead of it and not have, you know, such a dark period where individual bit corners are getting. The way I view it is very, very censorship resistant at this, at the state level, at the protocol level. It's extremely robust.

It's really hard to attack the protocol. A lot of our worst case scenarios are kind of behind us now, but it's super vulnerable still at the individual Bitcoiner level, especially if you're targeted. If you have like an authoritarian or a specific malicious individual that decides to target you, corners are very vulnerable right now. As we get burned, as people get burned, we will learn and we will improve everything around Bitcoin, including in transactional privacy. So Matt, when I think about just the distribution of the coins, and let's say that we go through this scenario, the hyper-bitquinization scenario, we're in this world where a lot of countries are starting to look like El Salvador. When I think about where a majority of

those coins are going to dwell, a significant portion of them are going to sit on the balance sheet of a corporation. Those corporations are going to play by whatever rules and regulations the states are going to force upon them because at the end of the day, you have employees that are working, the managerial piece of this, the accounting of this, the regs, the policies that they have to uphold. So you're going to have such a significant portion of coins in circulation that are held by those entities and not individuals. At the individual level, I get it. I understand why this is so important for people to have their own self-sovereignty. I guess the question that I toy with is how do these two different worlds, one that is trying to obey whatever policies and regulations

are there that control a enormous amount of coins or tokens of the amount of units that are in circulation versus this other group of individuals that are maybe not so inclined to act that way. I think a lot of people still will, whatever the policy or whatever the tax laws are, they're going to obey that because they don't want to go to jail and all those reasons. So at the end of the day is, I guess what I'm trying to get at. I understand the fight, and I understand the fight that the individual person's trying to have. But are they going to win that fight when you have so many entities and other individuals that are just going to comply with whatever the states publish or demand?

We have a couple of things going for us. First of all, Bitcoin is for enemies, right? We had Segma 2X, it proved that. This is not a proof of stake system. If you have more coins, it does not give you more power over the network. Very grateful for that, right? And I think the proof of stake systems, they're going to learn that less than the hard way. Like imagine if the majority of your validators is an ETF or something.

Or exchanges, regulated exchanges and an ETF product. Like that is a horrible situation to be in, and they will force changes through. On Bitcoin, we don't have that issue. The second thing is, you know, I think it was kind of genius of how the supply distribution happened in the beginning where it was very quick. It was not too quick, but it was quick enough that a large portion of coins are held by ideologically-minded, ideologically driven bit corners that believe in sovereignty that are individuals, not corporations. Even when you see micro-strategy holding 100,000 Bitcoin, you know,

there's anonymous whales out there that none of us know who their name is, you know, who control that much, right? The third thing is, I think you mentioned some, you mentioned El Salvador, right? And El Salvador is like a perfect example bridge of my last point. We have had a very Western-driven base of Bicorners, basically, who have mostly looked at it as an investment, especially over the last five, six years. You have this buy-and-hold strategy where you don't spend. Part of that is driven by the tax laws, right? Like, when you spend is when you have to pay taxes. So the government has kind of forced the hand of law-abiding Bidconers who they don't want to do that so they just buy and hold and then they're making their money in fiat anyway, so they spend their

fiat. El Salvador is a very interesting test case because we have people living paycheck to paycheck. They don't have much savings. And they're going to be spending Bitcoin on the regular because all of these different merchants except Bitcoin, they have to accept Bitcoin down there. And as they do that, they're going to be hitting pain points. Pain points that we haven't experienced because we haven't had this real spending culture. And as we hit those pain points, there'll be a market-driven approach to basically solve those pain points. Because if you can solve those pain points, your wallet will be used more. So I kind of come at it from this, we've never really had a proper free market before

because you've always had these centralized third parties that get captured and control the different markets. So you never really have a proper free market. The Bitcoin development, especially on the app side, is a true free market. you can permissionlessly innovate on the side of Bitcoin integrating with Bitcoin. And we will see massive improvement happen basically as people hit these pain points. We don't even know the pain points exist yet. People don't realize, like, if you're living on $30 a week and you need to spend that $30

in that week, like, how does that work? And how do you do that without, you know, the merchant knowing how much you're making? That is going to get solved as people hit that pain point. And as far as the institutions go, it doesn't matter. They will learn their lesson. Hopefully, you know, some of them will stop custodying with regulated custodians. I think it's actually, it's bad form for their shareholders. They're exposing their shareholders allowing someone else to hold their keys.

So I think they have a fiduciary responsibility to at least use like some kind of collaborative custody option. But at the end of the day, Bitcoin's designed in a way that what's the worst that could happen? If they have a lot of coin, they can dump it on us. They can lower the market price for how long? Not that long. A short period of time. And then afterwards, they can have fun staying for it. So, Matt, what are your thoughts just in general on lightning and kind of its development

in the past year? I think lightning has beaten all my expectations. I went from a lightning bear to a lightning, massive lightning bowl. to like a cautious lightning bowl. And now I'm like inching back up again. I think lightning has a lot of pain points, specifically on the privacy side. There's a lot of privacy benefits that it could gain us,

but they're not really in focus right now. And I think that ultimately we basically are just, we're doing it live. Like people said to me, like, are we ready for El Salvador? Like, no, we were never going to be ready until it happened because we basically need the market pressure to spur the development.

If we don't have, if the use case isn't existing, then no one's going to gear towards the use case. So I think what's going to happen is there'll be some messy periods in lightning development. Some users will get burned. We haven't really seen any kind of massive funds loss, which I think is like the number one thing. I mean, they kept saying reckless, reckless.

And basically what I did is my learning strategy is I just, you know, I just dive into things. So I was like reckless on lightning. And I really didn't lose much Bitcoin. Like, I lost some, but I didn't really lose much. And it was, it was because of fees and stuff. It wasn't because, you know, it was because I was experimenting. And we were in a high fee environment at the same time.

But I never actually had, like, catastrophic fun loss. So I think the main pain point is probably privacy on lightning. It seems like if you don't care about privacy, it works really well today, as is. So I think as we use it, it'll push it. And I want to reiterate, though, that lightning can fail. I don't think it's going to fail. But it could fail, and I would still be bullish on Bitcoin. There are other, no one uses liquid, but liquid is interesting.

There's also this other concept called state chains that I find really interesting that has a completely different trust model, but is more private. And there's probably all these different things that there's wizards out there that I can't even conceive of, that if they see a market need, they will bring it to market and we can permissionlessly use it. So ultimately, to me, the bullish thing, basically when I came out of the B-Cast, The popular opinion is a lot of people thought that meant no forks could ever work on Bitcoin. What it meant to me was if there was ever actually a need, if there was ever actually

something that Bitcoin absolutely needed to survive, that Bitcoiners actually needed to use their better money, then the market will will it and it won't be catastrophic. B-Cast wasn't catastrophic to us. It was a horrible idea. It was led by inept people and there was no market fit for it. So it failed. But if there's a market fit for something and there's an over, it's hard to measure, but if there's an overwhelming demand for something, then ultimately it will, users will decide how

they want to proceed by their own choice. That's the beauty of Bitcoin. Buy your own choice. No one's forcing your hand. So Matt, when you say that you think that there's privacy concerns on lightning. So I just look at my own full node. I know it I'm running tour on my lightning node. I have some SATs on my Lightning node, and I can send those to you over, you know, over Lightning.

How would that be a privacy issue? Help us understand the technical side of where there's a privacy concern if I'm doing those things with my node. Well, first of all, a lot of people are just using custodial lightning. They're using somebody else is running the node on their behalf. They're using Blue Wallet, right? A lot of people are using Blue Wallet or Wallet of Satoshi. We see the screenshots, you know, the Bitcoin. makes his El Salvador pilgrimage and he goes, oh, I just bought, I just bought coffee with the Lightning Network and I paid no fees. I paid very little fees, right? Yeah. And he used, you know, he was

using a custodial wallet and maybe the merchant was using a custodial wallet. So if you're in that situation, you're basically like kind of privacy-wise, you're like in a better version of the current like Venmo, PayPal, cash app because at least it's interoperable. You're trusting the app with your privacy, right? Whoever's ruining the app with your privacy. And what have we seen throughout history? If you trust the third party, they're going to be a security hole. They might get compelled to add KYC. You know, maybe we're in like kind of a honeymoon period.

Usually Bitcoin custodians have to add KYC. We, you know, they all end up bending the knee eventually at some point. So I think a lot of the pain points have kind of been hidden from view because we have these easy to use custodial wallets. What I want to see is, and so then if you're, if you're seeking better privacy, you can use your own node. You can keep it in your office, you know, keep it on 24-7. You can hopefully be funding it with, you could hopefully be funding it with coin joint outputs. But those are all options, Matt. And you could use it more privately. But ultimately, what, for like an El Salvador

used Lightning Network privately, what they really need is very user-friendly mobile wallets. Most people don't have computers. Most people aren't going to have, the beauty of Bitcoin is that anyone can run a node and that it's low cost and it's accessible. And we need to keep it that way so that anyone who wants to use their own node can use their own node. That is absolutely important. But we also have to come to the realization that the overwhelming majority of people are just going to be using mobile wallets. Mobile is the future. If you check like any kind of analytics on any kind of website, the majority of people that are hitting your website are doing it from their phone. Most people don't have computers. Most people aren't going to be running a server

at their home 24-7. I mean, we're talking about privacy in your everyday life. Right? Why are you using the Google Cloud? Because it's less convenient because very few people will do that. So the main pain point is for those types of users, we've seen massive gains there. We've seen wallets like Moonwall, with two users. We've seen wallets like Phoenix wallet. We've seen wallets like Breeze wallet that operate in a less custodial fashion.

There's still some trust elements, but it's not custodial technically. There's been massive development there in a short period of time. And I think that improves. But I also think there's an element here that, and we've seen really good progress there by ideological bit corners. There's a group called Plebnet, and there's another one called Rings of Fire, where basically the idea is that ideologically minded bit corners are running their own node on tour, and they're providing liquidity for the network between other ideologically minded Bitcoiners,

because one of the concerns is that the major liquidity providers, when you're talking about lightning at a high level, there's all these gotchas with privacy. And that's the thing. It's like, we want to remove as many gotchas as possible because people aren't going to be thinking about gotchas. That's where they shoot themselves in the foot. One of the gotchas is basically when you're visualizing lightning, you're like hopping between nodes to get to, like, me and you don't have to be directly connected. We can hop between a couple nodes to get there, right? We can't have all those nodes be KYC'd regulated companies.

They can't be bit refills, strike, bit finx. You know, we need to have individuals that no one knows where they live. that are running tour nodes that are providing liquidity. And Plebnet has been doing massive work there, which is really good to see. And I mean, I just mentioned strike. Strike is a perfect example, right? Like how many lightning payments are strike? I love Strike.

I love Jack Mahler's, but it's a bridge. It's almost a stopgap until we're in like a fully Bitcoin world. And until then, if you're using Strike, obviously you're sacrificing your privacy to that company and they're going to store all that information and hopefully secure it properly. And I think Jack would agree with you. That's a stopgap. Yeah, no doubt. Hey, so I just have to say this because you were talking about using Lightning and El Salvador. This was the coolest thing. And I mean, I know it's possible. I've seen like why this is possible. It was just so neat to see. Somebody posted a picture of their QR code

to pay for a hamburger at Burger King. And they tweeted out the QR code of like the invoice that Burger King provided them to pay for their burger. And the person tweeted out the QR code and said, hey, can somebody buy me a burger? And then this person tweeted underneath of them, yeah, I just paid it. Enjoy. All they did is they just took their, they took their lightning wallet and they scanned the QR code. They paid for the invoice at Burger King in El Salvador via a Twitter picture. And this was paid for. And And as far as Burger King is concerned, they have no idea who just paid them. They know that they got paid and they're like, hey, dude, here's your hamburger.

I don't know. I don't know where that came from, but we were paid. That's what I was talking about in terms of privacy people tend to have a one-track mind with privacy, right? And that's why you have, you know, diehard people who will say, I will never use Bitcoin. I will only use Minero, right? But the reality of the situation is, is Bitcoin as it is right now, is that's, is a massive step-up improvement over our legacy finance system from a privacy perspective. Yeah.

That transaction, if you were trying to pay Burger King, what, you're going to like give them your credit card information over Twitter and then it's shared by however many companies in the chain are getting all that information, your billing address, your full name, your full credit card information, maybe all that history gets sold to marketers and stuff like that, it's already a massive improvement. And then the second thing you mentioned there is they were sending, they were sending to Burger King. Yes. So with Lightning, the privacy guarantees are way better on the sender side. So if I was sending to you a payment on Lightning, you don't really, it wouldn't be easy for you to tell if I sent you to payment or if someone

else sent you. Yeah, if I provided you the invoice, you could have one of your friends. Right. But your invoice gives me your fixed node public key. It gives me your IP address if you're not running through tour. That's why everyone should be running through tour. Fortunately, all these node packages just to fault through tour. I would be able to tell your public channel capacity, how much Bitcoin you have in your channels, just from the invoice, right? I could tell your public channel capacity.

And if I was a sophisticated actor, I could probably figure out your private channel capacity, too, through something called probing, where I basically send, I keep sending bogus payments through your node to see, you know, where your channels are and how you're connected to things. So the receiver side, we still have a lot of work to do. The sender side, we're way closer and it already gives you a major privacy improvement over using on-chain. This is the thing that I think is also crazy. And I think few understand this. If Burger King wanted to receive dollars through that lightning invoice, through a service like what strike is providing, they could receive dollars, right? So like they could prompt the invoice, hey, here pay this lightning invoice, and they want to receive U.S. dollars on their end.

The person paid it with Bitcoin. They have an immediate swap of whatever the exchange rate was with no fee, straight into dollars. And as far as they know, they just receive dollars and they're going to hand you a hamburger. We already see that today. So Burger King, I'm pretty sure he's using Open Node. Pretty sure Starbucks is using Open Node in El Salvador. So OpenNote has like a little slider, right? You can choose how you want to receive it.

If you want to receive 100% automatically switch back into U.S. dollars or you want a portion in Bitcoin. The majority of them are probably just automatically converting into U.S. dollars, right? And then on the sender side, if you're sending from something like Strike or even Chivo wallet, right? Chiva wallet supposedly USD to Bitcoin easy conversion in the government wallet, then you can just send a U.S. payment that instantly gets converted into Lightning, get sent to them, and then instantly gets converted back to U.S. dollars.

for minimal fee, very fast, way more private than another, like a normal fiat transaction. And like I said, that's the stopgap, basically. It's the bridge. It's the bridge to a fully Bitcoin world. It's the training wheels. And if Visa and MasterCard is charging you 2.9% previously, now you have removed that expense completely for every transaction that comes through in the way that we just described. I think what you're going to find with a lot of these international type companies is,

as they learn more, as they're forced to learn more through situations like the one we're describing, now you've got the Ukraine that seems to be taking a similar path to El Salvador. But I think you're going to actually find is, hey, if they're free cash flows of the business is 10% after tax of every dollar of revenue that comes through the door, well, all of a sudden, any type of payment that comes through is going to be immediately converted. 90% of it's going to be converted it into dollars. The other 10% is going to be kept as Bitcoin as savings. And whatever that free cash flow, after tax free cash flow is for these companies, they're just going to retain it into Bitcoin and the rest will stay in dollars because that's what most of their expenses are still

denominated in. And then once the expenses, the electrical expenses and all these other things start getting denominated in Bitcoin, that's when it changes. That's the thing that people are missing about El Salvador. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of complaints on Bitcoin Twitter about the fact that it's a legal tender law that they're forcing, you know, all, all businesses in El Salvador to accept Bitcoin. But the big chicken in the egg with a circular Bitcoin economy is the merchant doesn't want to hold all Bitcoin because they can't pay their suppliers in Bitcoin. Yeah. But in El Salvador, they can now. And El Salvador, all their local suppliers are forced to accept it.

They have no choice. So you take away basically the last real good reason to need to have some kind of U.S. dollar exposure. because you're able to just directly pay your suppliers in the Bitcoin you receive. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer.

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It's going to be really interesting to see how it continues to evolve. But I think just getting them accustomed to dealing with it and then seeing the benefits, especially on a transactional level as far as the fee reduction in removing of these, these, I call them Rube Goldberg machine fees because of all the clearance that has to take place. All of those are gone and you're getting this instant settlement. And it's just something that I don't think anybody who's not intimately, familiar with it, really fully understood what was there. And now they're seeing it firsthand. It's

extremely exciting to see. I want to transition gears here with you. I want to talk about mining. One of the questions that I just was curious about somebody had, how in the world did you meet Marty Bent? And then talk to us about just some of your general thoughts on mining in general for where we're at right now in this particular cycle. I met Marty because I was episode 23 of Tales in the crypt before Rabbit Hole Recap existed. He saw me on Bitcoin Twitter and I was very privacy focused and I had a no podcast rule and he seduced the hell out of me. And on his like, on his like fourth time requesting for me to come on, I was like, okay, I was like, let's do it. And we had a great time. We found out that we lived very close to each other

and we became Bitcoin buddies. And I think like a month or two months later, the idea for Rabbit Hole Recap was born. And then the rest of the rest of the history. Then I was automatically chatted with him once a week about Bitcoin. And at that point, we were doing it all in person. I would go over to his apartment and we would just rip it in his, his little studio apartment. We used to say live from the studio, but it wasn't like our podcast studio. It was like his bedroom. And yeah, now he's a brother. So on the mining front, because I know Marty's heavily involved in mining. How about some of your thoughts on where we're at? One of the things that I'm particularly interested in is just the supply chain impacts. And what this might

mean for mining as we're growing, not in a linear kind of way, but kind of in a more of an exponential and kind of like in a volume kind of way. We're going outwards in many different directions. And to keep pace with the demand for this seems to be kind of hard for hardware suppliers to do. So what are some of your thoughts on those ideas? So, the funny thing about mining, proof of work in general, is that it's one of the most fascinating aspects of the whole network. It is what allows you to validate all these transactions, secure the chain, that the nodes are validating, but the miners are securing the chain, and it allows you to do it without

a trusted third party in a permissionless way, combined with the difficulty adjustment, this idea of distributed proof of work with the automatic difficulty adjustment is absolutely mind-blowing. That's a rabbit hole in itself. And the funny thing is like, there's a large portion of this industry that believes that's a problem with Bitcoin that needs to be solved. And then they even go further, there's some people that believe in proof of work, but think that ASICs are an issue and that, you know, you should be able to mine on your computer. This is a regular computer. ASICs are featured not a bug, right? The fact that we have these purpose-built machines that are super expensive and that are bricks if Bitcoin fails is a massive incentive by miners. It aligns incentives

with miners and the rest of stakeholders on the network. So I think, but the one issue with A6 is that it seems, I mean, this is the first time it's ever happened. There's like a, it's only been really theorized, but we're watching it play out. There's an adoption phase, right? And during that adoption phase, we were pretty vulnerable. You know, we had one or two companies were producing the A6. They were also the major miners. They were also mainly located in China. They were all buddies with each other.

They'd have like eight person meetings or they were like controlled like 60% of the hash rate, 70% of the hash rate. We were very vulnerable, especially in 2017 with Bitmey. And Ji Han Wu of Bitmay knew that, right? That's why he was trying to flex with B-Cash. And really- He still failed. Well, I think we dodged a bullet. I think he didn't have the balls in November 2017.

December 2017, he never flipped his hash. He was only mining a certain portion of his hash was actually mining on B-cash. He kept the majority on Bitcoin. If he had just flipped all of his hash to B-cash, we might have had to switch proof of work. We might have had to switch our Algo and brick all existing A6. And fortunately, you know, he was just too scared to kill his golden goose, which is the incentive, right? That's the incentive that kept him at bay. So I was like a little bit concerned at that point. And you can go back. I don't delete any of my tweets. You can go back. There's threads on threads and Threats about Jihon and Bitmain. So we dodged that bullet. And I think that was like the major, the major bullet. And then to a lesser extent, this recent

migration out of China, this distribution of hash kind of really, to me, is extremely bullish fundamental. And a lot of people conflate that with, you know, the hash is moving to the United States. If all the hash was moving to the United States, it wouldn't be bullish. The beauty is, is that it's really distributing globally. And it's also distributing between smaller miners. And that's one of the cool things that Marty's doing is that they're doing these off-grid sites. That's not like a major warehouse, like Marathon or a riot where they're a major regulated company and they're holding all this hash and this large holding coin that you talked about earlier.

That large regulated institutions, the majority of hash holding a large amount of coin. So right now, the market is not fully pricing in that phenomenon, what we've seen go down. And when people start to realize, like, we basically crossed the Rubicon is like kind of how I feel about it. But ultimately, what I want to see is I want to see more home miners. I want to see, you know, building, supplementing their heat with ASICs in their water heat. I think there's actually, in the adoption phase of, in the adoption phase of A6, there was an economies of scale. Bitmain produced the A6.

They had cheap power. They had them first. They can mine with them really quickly. And, you know, all their labor costs were lower because they were doing mass scale mining. So there was massive economies of scale. Because the major issue was the A6 would obsolete. The A6 would obsolete super quickly. So you'd have a major hardware investment.

You were in a rush. You needed to know exactly what you were doing. Now we're already seeing with the S-9s, they've been profitable for like four or five years now. So I think as we start to see these life cycles kind of plateau, you know, you don't have these like exponential increases in ASIC power or ASIC efficiency. It really comes down to efficiency. It becomes more practical for someone to install a water heater that they want there for 10 years and not worry about the ACEs. basic becoming obsolete. And when you have that situation, you're able to take the waste heat, you're able to get KYC free coin. So all of a sudden, the smaller miner has the advantage

that has two or three ASICs compared to the big regulated miner that has 100,000 ASICs in a warehouse. And when we hit that point and we're getting closer and closer to that point, that is extremely bullish. That is something that I've been hoping for for a very long time now. just because of the distribution, right? So you don't have any one entity that's controlling anything. It's just distributed at that point so well. We have like three stakeholders in Bitcoin. We have like the node, the people using their own nodes and holding their own keys. And there's some overlap, right? And then you have the miners and then you have the exchanges. And they all kind of keep each other in check. And so for the same reason, we don't just want like a couple nodes on AWS. is the same reason we don't want minus centralization, right? So as it distributes, the network becomes more robust. Here's a question I like, Matt. From where you're sitting right now, what are one or two

risks that really kind of make you cringe a little bit? Like, if somebody knew this, not that we want to put this out on the air, but like, we've got to be reasonable about, like, where the risks lie. What would you say those are today? Like, you said back in 2017, like the the bit main piece was a concern for you. Do you see a risk like that existing right now? So risks. So first of all, I like to say that there's certain things I talk about publicly on air. There's certain things I talk about on my NIMs online. And then there's certain things that only get discussed, you know, at 2 a.m. in a dark pub, you know? With bourbon. With bourbon. So I'm not going to talk about the dark pub things. No, I think, I think the biggest risk.

I think I said earlier, I think that Bitcoin is extremely censorship resistant at the protocol level. And that's what it comes down to. At the end of the day, the censorship resistance is the value prop of Bitcoin. It's hard to seize and you can spend it, you can spend or save at will without anybody's permission. That's the value prop. Otherwise, we could just use traditional finance methods. So ultimately, what we're looking at here is you want to preserve censorship resistance. You want to preserve the ability for people to spend and save at will without permission. And on a network level, we're extremely robust. But at an individual level, we're still very vulnerable.

And the major vulnerability there is, there's two major vulnerabilities. It's holding your own keys, which I think we've gotten a lot better about. The tools have gotten way easier to use. I think five years ago, if you told people that whatever, probably like 50 to 100 million people holding their own keys would be completely unimaginable. Who could secure their keys? How could that many people secure their keys? I don't know if we're at those numbers yet, because seed security is still kind of a little bit primitive. But the privacy risk, if we have, the overwhelming majority people are coming into KY seed exchanges and on-ramps,

they are getting their full identity, all that information is being taken by the exchange. And an important thing when we talk about KYC is they say it's, you know, governments say that they're putting this in place to stop crime. The criminals are all using fake KYC data. They're fine. They're, you know, they're doing whatever they want to do with impunity. It's the law-abiding citizens that are getting burned by this. It's not actually stopping crime.

But if you have all these people coming in through KYC and then they're not using privacy best practices. There's basically, you know, maybe I'm being a little bit hyperbolic, there's databases of Bitcoiners. There's databases of Bitcoiners and how much Bitcoin they own and every single transaction they make because there's change in surveillance companies that make a profit doing, you know, the forward looking stuff after you withdraw. So when those databases leak or if a government, it might not be, you know, Americans tend to be very American-centric. If a major government in Europe, let's say, decides that they want to crack down on Bitcoin, They have all these databases available.

They can crack down individual bitcorners. They can criminalize private Bitcoin usage if they want to. Is it going to be hard to enforce? Yes. Are they going to have to go individual by individual? Yes. But they can make our lives really difficult if they wanted to make our lives really difficult. So I think that is my biggest concern.

I think it starts with education. If you look at gun rights in America, gun rights in America, the gun lobby has been super successful about trying to push back on any kind of lists that are of gun owners. In Bitcoin land, for the last three or four years, most people in the industry have been cheering on these kind of KYC regulations. We want regulatory clarity. We want these large exchanges to exist, and we're fine with giving up that privacy. And that's very short-sighted.

We need to realize the risk at play here and how it makes us all vulnerable as a whole. and at least start pushing back, at least with education, that there is a risk there. We had, you know, I'm getting a little bit long-winded. We had Coinbase in 2015, 2016. They fought the U.S. government. The U.S. government wanted the information on every single user. Instead, they gave information on 20,000 Americans, every withdrawal address, every deposit address, full Bitcoin buys and sells.

And if you use all that information with the chain surveillance company, any transaction they made outside of Coinbase. That's scary. Maybe we trust the U.S. government. I'm not going to make a comment on that. But what if it's another government? What if it's an authoritarian that decides that he wants to use that information in the wrong kind of way? So we're very vulnerable on the individual level. But I think the network is, I mean, it keeps just beating my expectations. It's really robust. So you're obviously a well-read person. What is for you a must-read book and feel free to, if you want to just say one or three or whatever, it's totally up to you. The number one book that Bitcoin should read is a sovereign individual.

It's like reading a fortune-telling book from 20 years ago. It's crazy that they wrote it in 95. Yeah, it's nuts. The only thing they got wrong was Y2K. That's true. Anything else? I'm a big sci-fi guy. A lot of my thinking was shaped by sci-fi.

like Brave New World, Snow Crash. That's one of Adam Backs big books. He likes Snow Crash. Yeah, Snow Crash is kind of like a dystopian, free market kind of thing. It doesn't have Bitcoin in it, which makes it unrealistic. That was like my biggest complaint about now it's like if I read new sci-fi, like if you don't have Bitcoin in it, like you're the least forward-thinking author there is. Like, what's going on there?

How about influencers, people that you just admire, that you look up to, that just kind of shaped who you are? I don't know. First of all, I hate the term influencers. I think people with platforms of trying to influence people. I think the goal in Bitcoin should be the dynamic that I think of when I think of an influencer is you try and basically get people to need you. You're like, you're their crutch. And my goal has over. always been to help them find their independence. You know, Andreas, he was very early on for me, like very big. I was like Zabo, Andreas Zabo, Snowden was a big one for me. I mean, he's not, he's not Bitcoin. He's recently come around to Bitcoin. How about you? People will be surprised to hear, like, I was highly influenced by Warren Buffett. And it wasn't really, you know, people might look at it and say, oh, you were influenced because he made a bunch of money and you were just kind of looking at that. But to be quite honest with you is more just kind of his moral,

ethical, like whenever he said something, I just knew that he was kind of coming from, or at least I felt like he was saying it from a place of trying to help people and educate people on his thinking and how he valued different companies and whatnot. I think people in the Bitcoin space might look at that and really kind of like raise an eyebrow. Like he's the king of feet. He's the King of Fiat and like that doesn't make any sense. Bradford Poison Square. Yeah, Rat Poison Square, him and Charlie Munger. But to be honest with you, the thing that they taught me, both Charlie and Warren,

taught me, was just the importance of education and the importance of just like reading everything you can get your hands on, question everything. If you can't argue both sides of something, well, then it's, you probably have a biased point of view on it. Try to like extract the emotion out of what you're doing and just really do. dig into all the facts and circumstances that kind of lead you to a conclusion. And so for me, that was really influential early on in my life, even though I completely disagree with them on Bitcoin, obviously. But I would argue that the foundation and the educational background that

they kind of instilled in me allowed me and encouraged me to disagree with their point of view. That was one of the first things I learned from Buffett is like, he went into this discussion with like the CEO of GEICO at the time. The guy said that, you know, he just had recently bought more stock or something. I can't remember the exact nuances of the conversation. But he told Buffett, yeah, I own the stock. I'm buying more or whatever. And so Buffett was like, well, I'm going to, I guess I know what I'm going to buy.

And the guy was like, that's the exact wrong reason to buy it. Like if you're buying it because I'm buying it, then you're totally missing my point of what I'm trying to tell you here. And so like that lesson really kind of instilled in me like, I shouldn't be buying something because Warren Buffett likes it or doesn't like it. The process of trying to understand why you value something is really kind of what's important and was a huge impact on me in general. My Bitcoin journey in the beginning was heavily, heavily, you know, NIM focused. It was, you know, random strangers on the internet that had names they made up. And we were in IRC. We were on Bitcoin Talk. We were on Reddit. No filter. Basically, everyone

learning together. And for a lot of the years, Bitcoin Twitter also evolved in kind of that way. And I think one of the cool things about Bitcoin is not the influencers. You know, there are a lot of people that have very good writing, that give us great content that we can consume and think about things. But to me, the most powerful thing is the community. And it's basically, you have all these peers that are, we're all on the same level, learning together and bouncing ideas off of each other, even though sometimes it can be very aggressive. To me, that's really cool, but there's, there's no leaders. There's no Vitalik that you're looking up to to, to tell you how to think. No, I love that. I will be honest with you, Matt. One of the things that I like the

most that you put out there is this idea of just being humble. This is what I've learned in financial markets before I came to Bitcoin. As soon as you think you are not going to mess something up, you're about to fall on your face, like just flat on your face. And so the message of just staying humble, stack, sats, question everything, educate yourself to the infth degree. And when you get there, then study some more and learn some more and challenge those thoughts. All of those things just totally resonate with me. And I think that when you get around people in this community that are Bitcoiners through and through, they just have that in spades where they don't know they're right.

They think they are. They like to think they are. And they're very open to somebody providing, you know, a counter argument. And they want to hear the counter argument. and they want to dissect the counter argument. And maybe on Twitter, we don't necessarily demonstrate that because maybe it's our 50th time arguing a topic that might be new to the other person, but we've heard it for five years. We've been through it many of times.

Hey, give people a handoff. If there's anything you want to highlight, an article you want to highlight, I know you're active on Twitter, but you're also trying to keep your privacy as low profile as possible. but give people a handoff. Don't get overwhelmed. People shouldn't get overwhelmed. Hold your own keys. Use your own note. Be humble enough to realize that you don't know everything with Bitcoin and it's a constant learning process and constantly seek to improve.

Be humble enough to realize that Bitcoin isn't perfect and that we can do things to improve the experience for everybody. Help your fellow Bitcoiners, help your fellow man and humble stack stats. Love it. Odell, thank you so much for coming on the show and we've got to do it again. Thank you, Preston. Hey, so thanks for everybody listening to the show. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you're using.

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