What Bitcoin Did - BITCOIN IS WINNING w/ Matt Odell

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Matt Odell is host of Citadel Dispatch, co-host of Rabbit Hole Recap, managing partner at Ten31 and co-founder of OpenSats and Bitcoin Park. In this episode, we discuss the risks of Bitcoin’s increa...sing financialisation, why only a small minority may ever use it as true “freedom money,” and whether Bitcoin is on track to become a global reserve currency. We also get into the rise of stablecoins and their impact on adoption, MicroStrategy’s role in reshaping public market exposure to Bitcoin, and a potential quantum computing threat. Plus, we cover why sats should be the standard, the Gamestop pivot to Bitcoin, and the ways Nostr and censorship resistance might shape the future of speech. FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles & https://primal.net/danny Matt Odell: https://primal.net/odell THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd CASA: https://casa.io/ LEDGER: https://www.ledger.com/ ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:02 The identity and control and surveillance of centralized systems, whether that's money or speech or everything else, will trend worse over time. And the way we solve that is by building alternatives that don't have centralized control that can't be corrupted by humans inherently. What Bitcoin did is brought to you by our lead sponsor, a massive legend, Iron, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network, they also provide cutting-edge computing resources for AI all backed by renewable energy. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visitiron.com to learn more, which is iri-n.com. I fucked up. So a couple of days ago, I went out to record with O'Dell. It was a conversation I'd really been looking forward to.
Starting point is 00:00:59 It's one of my favorite conversations I've had on what Bitcoin did so far. It was an absolute banger, but about an hour into the show, I realized that the audio had failed once we started recording and it basically got nothing. So we didn't even have time to run it back because I had to rush off to get a flight as soon as we were finished. We've done everything we could to recover it from the video cameras. So we do have some audio. It's not as good as it should be, but the conversation makes up for it. It's totally worth it. So please bear with it.
Starting point is 00:01:26 About an hour in, you'll see me realize that I've fucked up. And from there on, it's fixed. but it is a decent chunk of the show that's going to sound a lot worse than normal, but the conversation makes up for it. So bear with us, and I'm very sorry. Oh, yeah, how are you doing? It's a pleasure of joining it. Thank you for having me here, man.
Starting point is 00:01:45 It's been a good, we've spent like 20 hours together now, and done everything I want to do in the podcast just in private. The last tapes, the last tape. So I don't know what we're going to talk about. But I think the place I want to start is one of the big, concerns I have with Bitcoin is that I think since I learned Bitcoin, Bitcoin's changed a lot in terms of the way that people talk about Bitcoin. And it's gone from being like very much a freedom-focused thing to now being totally financialized. And do you think that we're going
Starting point is 00:02:15 going to risk losing something in Bitcoin? And do you think Bitcoin will actually use this really in the future? It's a loaded question. Do you remember the rip we did with Peter and we did a lot of it would have been in Nashville probably and we talked about the we talked about the capture of Bitcoin I remember actually that was really well
Starting point is 00:02:52 I think it was 21 or maybe 22 okay I can't remember what you said in the show about and I think that's playing out basically basically what we're seeing happen is
Starting point is 00:03:06 there's a scenario where Bitcoin is widely successful whereas the reserve currency of the world it's the base of a global decentralized financial system but the overwhelming majority of usage of it is surveilled and controlled and captured and you do it in kind of like
Starting point is 00:03:27 fraud boiling type of way right and we're already we've seen it for years you know every regulated Bitcoin Exchange requires identification information. Every transaction is trapped, and every amount that you purchase is Tadji your identity.
Starting point is 00:03:46 And most people will likely use it in that way. Now, the key difference of Bitcoin versus traditional systems is you always have the ability to use it in a freedom marketplace way. So what does success of Bitcoin as freedom money look like in a realistic sense, it's probably less than 5% people are using in a food focus way. But I think there's also a difference there where, like, even when, like, it's been a long time you can only buy Bitcoin easily on KIC exchanges. But for a long time, that was something that everyone kind of pushed back in.
Starting point is 00:04:24 People didn't like the fact they have to do it. They just kind of knew you have to do it. Whereas I feel like now, people are cheering on this, like, incoming financialization of Bitcoin in a different way. They're embracing it way more. I mean, I think it's a time thing, right? It becomes normalized and then people start to just accept it as the status quo. Right?
Starting point is 00:04:46 I mean, we basically, if you look back, maybe it was like 2015, for sure, even 2016, most didn't have ID requirements for most Bitcoin services and tools. Then within like one or two years, it became pretty much status quo. And then the normalization has gone into effect since then. So like 2017, you had pretty much every major on-rap and off-ranked was requiring ID. And that was eight years ago. So then eight years ago by a lot of new entrants come in, they don't know anything other than that. And this is the result. But I think what's important to realize here is yes, in absolutely,
Starting point is 00:05:36 terms, there's probably more people that interact with Bitcoin now, like, and definitely more people that interact with Bitcoin now like, but also like in absolute terms, there's more people focus on using it as freedom money. Like the percentage, the percentage of people that are using it as freedom money has fallen. But in terms of actual individuals, the absolute number of them has increased dramatically. Yeah. As more on the transcendent space, right? But if you think, so you think around 5% is kind of the number that we've
Starting point is 00:06:11 looking at for people who actually use Bitcoin in a freedom money way. Is that success then? I just want to just say for the record, we were recording on my house here. Danny is a guest of my family. And so you might hear giggles from my son. We've got awesome family ways of it. Yeah, you might hear giggles from my son outside. I think he's mesmerized by the locked door
Starting point is 00:06:36 with us on the other side. What was the question? Is, like, if you think the number is 5%, oh, I think 5% could be overly optimistic. But so is that success to Bitcoin, do you think? I think Bitcoin will probably win.
Starting point is 00:06:57 So that's my expectation. So I, I think, the most productive way to go about it, if your goal is as many people using Bitcoin's freedom money as possible, is to understand the reality of the situation and try and get that number as high as possible. And I thought about this a lot in that conversation,
Starting point is 00:07:21 a lot of people, 5% might be overly optimistic. But whatever that number is, try and get it as high as possible, I want to be clearer that when I say that number, I'm talking about a number of individuals. So one of the cool parts about Bitcoin is the supply distribution was incredibly fair and based on proof of work. Anyone who has Bitcoin today is put in work to obtain that Bitcoin, whether that was through energy expenditure, through mining or through exchange new goods and services or currency for Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:08:04 But that supply distribution was very front-loaded. Yeah. So if you do about percent of Bitcoin held, it'll be a significantly higher number in terms of being used as free of money because there's a lot of people that have large stacks from the early days that use of them are freedom oriented by.
Starting point is 00:08:27 So maybe that number is like 40, 50%. And that's promising because they're going to get incredibly wealthy and where do they spend their money and what they're doing to the world. Which is what input Bitcoin can have in the real world, like very, very decently. I think this is, I don't know if it's the only reason. It's definitely not the only reason, but it's a big reason that Trump is now the president, I think, is because of Bitcoin. Yeah, the first Bitcoin president. Yeah. Is he a Bitcoin president?
Starting point is 00:08:50 Well, he's the first president that, except the word Bitcoin. But he's definitely, he's definitely the first president that a, he's definitely the first president that a, active Bitcoin political lobby helped relax. Yeah, that's for sure. I don't want to like later this point too much, but you said before, like, Bitcoin will win. Yeah. Like, I just want to know what you mean by win.
Starting point is 00:09:12 Because I assume what you're saying there is it comes to reserve currency below. Yeah, I think so. That's winning. I mean, it depends on your definition of winning. And I think there's a strong argument that you would want to, winning is not just that winning would be that anyone could use it as free of money if they wanted to
Starting point is 00:09:35 which we probably already are that I think it will always be the less convenient option but if people actually have the need it's more it's easier than ever to use bitcoin and freedom money yes it hasn't gotten more difficult even though the normalization has been surveilled and controlled bitcoin yeah uh if you
Starting point is 00:09:57 are an average American, obviously the most convenient way to get a Bitcoin probably is to just like open your brokerage account, get Bitcoin exposure. It's not even really Bitcoin and, you know, buy an ETF, right? But if you actually want to obtain Bitcoin and then use it without permission, it is less convenient than that, but it's more convenient than it was two years ago, four years ago, six years ago. And then you're seeing places, and I say, I'm touching use America as an example, were a relatively stable constitutional republic. But, you see, I use the technical. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:10:38 But if you look at other parts of the world, you look at places like Turkey or Venezuela or Argentina. I guess Argentina is doing better now, but Bolivia, Russia, like, these places that don't have stable government or stable carnival. or stable financial systems, people are using it in way greater percentages as free of money because they have no other option, right?
Starting point is 00:11:08 So this is, I had a bit of a back and forth with the Junset on the show that just put out today. Because he was saying Bitcoin's not done anything yet. And I think those examples, like basically everything Alex passing talked about, I think there's an example of Bitcoin actually begins with it. What is, I mean, obviously I haven't listened to that episode yet because you released this morning.
Starting point is 00:11:27 So he was basically saying It needs to do something at scale So one of the examples I brought up in show Was when it helped the Russian protesters And he was like, no, it's not big enough Like did it help one person? Like he was classic sunset Yeah
Starting point is 00:11:43 But he was saying like If Bitcoin is how it funded the Ukrainian war Then that would have been doing something Things that needs to be at that kind of scale I mean there were a lot of Bitcoin donations That funded Bitcoin There were And there were a lot of individual Ukrainians
Starting point is 00:11:56 that relied on Bitcoin to get more money out of the country or money into the country. Yeah. I think that's just Jonesette being contrary. I mean, I think the scale needs to, the scale naturally increases over time. I think another example was the Canadian truckers. Like, it was not, there was a lot of disappointment in terms of maybe it's ineffectiveness or it's lack of adoption.
Starting point is 00:12:24 But some people did rely on it. Yeah. Right. and it's going to take, it's going to, I mean, as Parker Rose says, it's going to be gradual and then suddenly, yeah. I think the suddenly part might be around the corner, I think. We're on the tail end of Greiford.
Starting point is 00:12:42 I think we're on the tail end of the ground. I don't think suddenly has the gun yet. No, I agree with that. One thing that is interesting, we spoke about last night after a few days, and I think you specifically said, let's not talk about this on the show. So I'm going to bring a...
Starting point is 00:12:53 Great topic. was there was a couple things that I'm going to bring up this one was about so it kind of ties into you saying Bitcoin winning is because the global reserve currency
Starting point is 00:13:04 and do you think Bitcoin is going to be gold? So for years what we heard in the Bitcoin community is from Shink corners and crypto people
Starting point is 00:13:17 is that Ethereum doesn't compete with Bitcoin Ethereum offer something different, Salam offer something different. There's going to be like this diverse crypto ecosystem. And the Bitcoin response was, oh, is these are competing monies. And one, it's going to be a winner takes most.
Starting point is 00:13:37 Yeah, right? Most of these things you never go completely to zero, but it's going to be a winner takes most because they're competing money. So at the end of the day, everything has the, has competing opportunity costs, right? If you're holding Ethereum, you're not holding Bitcoin. You're holding dollars, you're not holding Bitcoin. If you're holding salami, you're not holding Bitcoin and vice versa. And by that same logic, gold is competing money.
Starting point is 00:14:04 Gold is competing money, and U.S. dollars are competing money. And U.S. dollars as stable coins, or I don't like calling them stable, as U.S.D tokens are competing money because they're inherently not stable. They're designed a trend to zero over time, and they're a high and trust in their price. So I think gold is the final boss, and gold is having its moment right now. because you're going. And I think one will win, right? And gold has Lundy and has been around for thousands of years and used as a money for thousands of years and has a head start. But if you look historically at the gold Bitcoin ratio, Bitcoin has been absolutely crushing it over the last
Starting point is 00:14:42 15 years. I think that trend will continue. I think we're in a short-term dead cat-poms for gold. I think there's probably some horse mucks out. out there that are rotating a portion of their Bitcoin sat into gold right now and panicking and probably will be a horrible decision. But yeah, I mean, I think if you're thinking about Bitcoin as a reserve currency and Bitcoin as global base, like this basic global financial system, you have to be thinking about it in comparison to gold. And that's basically the chart and ratio to lots right now because gold is having its
Starting point is 00:15:21 moment. It's an all-time eyes and keeps trying to. be higher. Yeah. I like the analogy of like gold runs first but Bitcoin runs basket. But you were making the point
Starting point is 00:15:32 to me last night that we've never seen gold do this before in our life run. Yeah, I mean, my lot of time and this is a historical first really.
Starting point is 00:15:41 Yeah. Like everything down and gold up. Also, Bitcoin just hasn't been around long enough for real, I think, historical accuracy.
Starting point is 00:15:51 I'm like, you can't really judge past behavior there. Do I think that might be the case? Well, first of all, gold is running. So if Bitcoin is going to run, it will be running second. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:16:05 But, yeah, I think, look, in times of chaos or particularly uncertainty, right, maybe chaos is too strong a word. At times an uncertainty in the market, people go to what they know. And historically, that has been U.S. debt. treasuries. And there's concerns about the creditworthiness of America. So that hasn't been the case as much this time. And what else do they have? They have gold. So they go to gold. They know gold. You probably won't lose all your money if you convert your assets to gold because it has in the D. And Bitcoin is on, you know, is new. It's the new kid on the block. Particularly if you If you look at large capital allocators, like people that control billions of dollars,
Starting point is 00:17:03 hundreds of millions of dollars, Bitcoin is brand new to them. They basically have no exposure to Bitcoin as asset allocators. So it's going to take some time. Yeah. It was super interesting to me seeing the treasury market not behave very well when like the tariff scale and everything went to shit. And the other thing that I find fascinating is that the kind of term sovereign debt crisis It's now a term that everyone uses.
Starting point is 00:17:28 Like, in just in the last, like, four months. What about the Fiat currency, when I first got on in Bitcoin was, like, an edge thing that our niche online community talked about. Yeah, when I go into Bitcoin, I saw it was a car. Like, I had no idea what this is. Now people just not show on this. This is the normalization of new technology and new perspectives. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I think we are seeing a global sovereign debt crisis.
Starting point is 00:17:52 I think we have been seeing it for five years. down, maybe more. And, you know, those kind of status quo-changing phenomenon take a while to become like common parlance. Yeah, for sure. And so if gold, like, the final boss, obviously the US dollar is like under massive pressure. Maybe they're equal final boss. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:19 Yeah, I was good. I don't know where that kind of fits, but it's under massive pressure. But like, stable points kind of offer them a bit of a way out in some ways. Yeah. And when we were in DC a few weeks ago, Powell was on the time. Jack. Yeah. And I, like, whenever people talk about the scale of stable coins, it's always about, like,
Starting point is 00:18:33 how much, how many treasuries are buying. Right. I'd never heard the metrics on how many people are onboard, and it blew my mind. Like, 250,000 people a day being on board. And the real man. Yeah. That's wild. But do you think there's a big threat there?
Starting point is 00:18:47 I know you call it, like, the private bank digital currency. Like, private bank digital currency. How big a threat do you think state of coins actually kind of offer? I think it's not a real threat to Bitcoin long term. It definitely slows down Bitcoin adoption. But I'm also really in free markets, right? So there's a real demand for dollars around the world. I did a trip to Argentina to see the country and the Bitcoin community down there.
Starting point is 00:19:17 And one of the things we did was we went to the currency black market. So Argentina has a long, long history of just poorly run government currency. Yeah. And as a result, they have very established currency black markets. They're very sophisticated. And to the point where, like, it's almost not even a black market. It's just, like, how people interact with money. And you go to, like, this place and so you're in an office building, like, it's not in the slum.
Starting point is 00:19:44 It's in an office building. They, like, buzz you in. So I'm very legit. They accept Bitcoin there. They don't accept Bitcoin on Lightning. I don't even know what lightning is. That's interesting. But the number one exchange they do is Ted or on Trump.
Starting point is 00:20:05 By far, it's like 99 to 1 when I was asking the brokers. So, by the way, though, to our earlier conversation about freedom money, they don't do any identification checks or anything like that, right? He's saying Trump's freedom. No, but I'm saying from Bitcoin, like, my point is, is, is if you are in, a place that really needs access to censorship resistant or permissionless money, people find a way, people figure out a way. But yeah, the overall majority was trauma and tether.
Starting point is 00:20:42 Now, what's the issues there? The first issue is obviously dollars are controlled by a centralized third party with the U.S. government and the federal reserve. but then also you have Tether who is a trusted third party so you can get rugged by the U.S. and you can get rubbed by Tether. Now there's a common
Starting point is 00:21:02 misconception you actually can't really, you're not really trusting Justin Sond and Trom because if something have, Tron is incredibly centralized but if Tron goes down like Palo and Tether will just like send out a tweet and be like, we took a snapshot and now you slum. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:21:19 You're trusting Tether is who you're trusting. But people demand dollars, they want dollars, and as a result, it's slowing down the adoption of Bitcoin. Because they're not... That's their exit rather than Bitcoin. Yeah, they have a different option. Right. But I think long term, like, it just can't compete with Bitcoin because, first of all, the value is designed to go down.
Starting point is 00:21:42 Because dollars are printed. And because you have trust in this third party, which is Tether, and Tether has frozen. funds. They've blocked funds. And there's always the black swan risk that the whole thing just goes belly up, whether through malintent or government action or something like that. All tether can just be wiped out and it can just lose access to all your money. Bitcoin offers, Bitcoin fixes that. Bitcoin offers a superior alternative. It's going to take a while for people to realize that. Now, usually how they will unfortunately realize that is through painful lessons.
Starting point is 00:22:22 And so, yeah, one example we saw in Argentina, actually, was we had Terra Luna, which was Luna was the ship coin, and Terra was the stable coin. The algorithmic stable coin.
Starting point is 00:22:38 Based on Luna. And that whole thing got rugged. And a lot of Argentinians got rugged in that situation. And they lost their life savings. Yeah. And at that point, they realized, like, oh, like, this is what, why Bitcoin exists, right? So that's it. And the unfortunate reality is going to take time and, and that's going to happen.
Starting point is 00:22:59 But it kind of is what it is. Like, you don't really, and you see similar, you see similarities in places like America, right? It's like, okay, so, like, most people, like, keep their money in, like, city bankers. Well, you know, Citibank is effectively, it's all done because of the, and as long as that convenience is there that people can relatively easily use a traditional financial system, they probably want to seek out an alternative. This episode is brought to you by AnchorWatch. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin called storage. This is where Anchor Watch comes in.
Starting point is 00:23:40 With Anchor Watch, you're protected by their time-locked multi-sig vault and with your own A-plus rated Lloyds of London backed insurance policy. You get to hold your keys, Anchor Watch the risk. Whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or your own mistakes, you're protected by Anchor Watch. Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55% and are available for individual and commercial customers located in the US. Speak to Anchor Watch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage. Visit anchorwatch.com today, which is anchorwatch.com. This episode is brought to you by River, the best place for bitcoins and businesses to buy Bitcoin. With River,
Starting point is 00:24:20 River, you can set up zero-fee recurring buys, making stacking sats effortless. And while you're waiting for the perfect buying opportunity, River lets you earn daily interest on your cash balance paid in Bitcoin, which outperforms most high-yield savings accounts. What really sets River apart is their unmatched dedication to security. You have peace of mind knowing the River has monthly proof of reserves and holds all Bitcoin in multi-sid-cold storage. And with US-based phone support, you'll always have someone ready to help. To open an account, go to river.com
Starting point is 00:24:48 forward slash WBD and earn up to $100 in Bitcoin when you buy. That's rivir.com slash WBD. I also want to give a quick shout out to the Human Rights Foundation's Financial Freedom Report. This is their weekly newsletter that drops every Thursday
Starting point is 00:25:04 and it covers how authoritarian regimes use money as a tool for control and how people are pushing back against that using privacy tools and of course Bitcoin. It's an amazing newsletter, it's Pure Signal, and you can subscribe for at Financial Freedom Report.org.
Starting point is 00:25:19 Yeah, I do want to talk about how Bitcoin may own threat to the banks, but I want to come back to that because when you say that everyone's using Tehron's one, like that's just like Imperial, which really, you know that's the bank. But they're now trying to put Tehran or Lightning on the Tapper assets. Yeah. Do you think they'll actually gain any traction doing them? And really, do you think it even matters what Tehran is on because you're still just using Tehran?
Starting point is 00:25:42 Well, let me just... So, I know the current administration, Tether, sees... The biggest threat that Tether has had for years is in the U.S. government. Yeah. Specifically the U.S. government action. I always call that cruise missile risk. It's a bit provocative. Like, it probably won't get hit by a cruise missile.
Starting point is 00:25:57 But you get the idea, right? Like they get raided or put in jail or something like that. And now because of the current administration is, it's friendly towards Bitcoin and friendly towards the greater quote-unquote crypto industry. And Lutnik's there. And Lutnik's there who, you know, Cantor holds their treasuries for them. Tether sees an opportunity to solidify that relationship and take away that major risk. And so that's why Powell is in the United States with the first time ever.
Starting point is 00:26:24 That conversation you were talking about was the first time we ever saw him in the U.S. And he specifically said, I think I might miss quoted slightly, but he's like, Tether is the front lines of expanding and strengthening the U.S. dollar hegemony. And so they've released a bunch of stats. So they have public stats now as part of this initiative. And just for people to understand the scale, card tether and circulation is $144 billion. Okay, they estimate 400 million total estimated users.
Starting point is 00:26:57 They're the 19th largest holder of U.S. treasuries, mostly competing with governments in that regard. They hold $113 billion in U.S. treasuries. Now, they have a breakdown in the different chains they support because they support as many chains as possible. There's $73 billion on Ethereum, $67 billion on Tron, and then it drops off the cliff after that. They support a bunch of other chains.
Starting point is 00:27:23 It just drops off the cliff. The daily transfer volume is way higher on Tron. So $16 billion for the Tether is transferred on Tron every day. $7 billion on Ethereum. Just wherever the cheapest, most centralized thing is where you're going to see the most transfers. So, like, the stats are staggering. Like, there's clearly demand for it.
Starting point is 00:27:46 Now, Tether has, Tether has desires to basically support as many ways of transferring Tether as possible, and one of them is lightning. I do wonder, I kind of question if there's going to be real product can't be fit on that, unless something happens to Tron or Solana. I don't actually know how much it costs a transaction in Tron, but I would imagine it would be comparative if not cheaper.
Starting point is 00:28:22 Tron has actually gone up in transaction fees as a result mostly of Tether adoption. Now, because it's centralized, they could reduce that and maybe if there's real competition, they will reduce that. I've never actually used Tether on Tron or Tren at all.
Starting point is 00:28:38 But my understanding is like in the $2 to $3 range. But it should be better on. Yeah, but lighting adds complexity. Yeah. It adds a level of complexity both on the wallet layer and on the user layer. It's a completely different flow than using on-chain, whether that's Bitcoin or Tron. But I assume people that are using this wouldn't be using it like running their own line and know they'd be using it through some centralized service. So my point is, there's network effect, right?
Starting point is 00:29:07 There's already real network already. Yeah, like it's hard to break network effect. And I think specifically Tether on Lightning
Starting point is 00:29:21 is an easy hype thing to sell to investors. And the real questionable, the real question that should be on investor funds,
Starting point is 00:29:33 is it just hype or is there actually the possibility of product market fit there is the possibility of real usage breaking that network effect. And if that does happen, how long does that take? And if by the time you even start to see any real breaks in that network effect, are people just going to be moving to Bitcoin at that point? Because if you see it, if you actually see a global dollar crisis and lack of faith
Starting point is 00:30:02 in the credit of the United States, there should be a movement towards Bitcoin and gold. from dollar and dollar denominated things so the question that you're like you're trying to break this network effect
Starting point is 00:30:22 but you need to break it quick enough that Bitcoin isn't breaking the network effect yeah that means as investors do you invest this no
Starting point is 00:30:29 we don't at all attempt to anyone we attempt to any we have first of all zero USD token place and
Starting point is 00:30:39 specifically from an investor perspective, bearish on tether on lightning. You know, I think if it's successful, it's probably a net benefit for Bitcoin because people will be
Starting point is 00:30:58 that much closer to using Bitcoin and it'll be easier to swap between the two. But from a practical point of view, I guess the one thing we've seen is so strike this is our largest investment by far is available in 101 countries
Starting point is 00:31:17 and in America you know we have all the traditional financial rails right ACH real-time payments wires everything that people in the West are used to but abroad people really want Tether support and they didn't want lightning on Tether support So we added to the Rundtron support for that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:42 And the numbers don't mind. Like the usage is massive. People wanted to get away from Binance, and finance was the only way that they could interact with it. And it puts them one step away from Bitcoin without adopting a whole new technology stack for that usage. And for the end user, like at the end of the day, like for the end user,
Starting point is 00:32:05 what they want is to be able to deposit and withdraw to have their own heightening at some point in the future, then strike a lot of that. But I think we're pretty far away from that. Yeah, I think getting as many people on something like strike as possible makes out of sense. And they're crushing how to the team. Yeah. And it's been completely organic.
Starting point is 00:32:22 There's been no marketing or anything. People just need it so they've figured out. One of the things is interesting is if this stable coins, which I think I saw some news on this in the last couple of days, if they're able to pay the users a percentage of the interest they make, do you think that actually? we strengthens it and makes like the US dollar token thing less likely be broken by Bitcoin in the shorter term. Do you think kind of strengthens that network for a little longer?
Starting point is 00:32:51 Well, I think one of the beautiful scans of the US banking system is that banks have gotten away with underpaying interest to account holders. Yeah. Right. Like people see it all the time, right? You know, treasuries are at four and a half percent or whatever, and the bank is giving you a 1% or less. You know, a quote-unquote high-evaled savings account, you know, is like 3%. Um, Tether took that a whole other level, and Tether pays no interest whatsoever.
Starting point is 00:33:27 And that's why Tethers so properly. And Tether's on track right now to make $24 billion or something this year. Yeah, it's wild. But be a bulletin in the black car, actually like $100 and I, and I, pretty sure that doesn't even factor in growth potential. Yeah. And that's because... They're not factoring their gains on their Bitcoin, because they're all the
Starting point is 00:33:45 Bitcoin. I don't think it factors in that either. Crazy. Yeah, they're 100,000 Bitcoin, too. And so that's because they're holding treasures and they're not passing on that interest to users. So I think Tether has no incentive. They have an network effect.
Starting point is 00:34:01 They're the overall majority of the U.S. token market, U.S.D. token market. They have zero need to do that because users are using it regardless. They just want access to dollars so they can send and receive relatively easily. So who will do it? We've seen challengers try and do it as an edge, right? It's like, oh, well, if you use us. It's like Bitcoin, there's no step invest in the sale over a market.
Starting point is 00:34:28 It's just the network effect is too real. I just, I think you don't have to be a tether promoter to realize reality on the ground, which is barring some, you know, massive misstep or mistake by tether or some kind of government action or something, no one's going to be able to repeat with them. I do think it's interesting in the way that it does open a competition. So like, I know you've said a few times you think, say, well, my issue of stable, I think he will. If he came out and was like sharing interest,
Starting point is 00:35:09 so you're getting to an opposite interest or whatever it is. Like that's a huge incentive to you that rather than Tether. Yeah. So the reason I think people will continue to try to compete with Tether is because they're making so much money. Yeah. So they see it, they're like, ah, you know, they do the common thing. We're like, oh, if I can get 5% of the market, that's billions of dollars. And it doesn't even matter if a realistic,
Starting point is 00:35:36 analysis says that they probably can't actually compete. All that matters is that the person who's going to attempt to compete thinks they could compete. So I do think more likely than not, Sailor will be involved in some kind of stable coin launch to try and capture some of that market. Is this one of your prediction going to hide outside knowledge? No. It's just based on his public appearances and
Starting point is 00:36:04 his public comments. But he has a whole digital asset framework and he's talked about and he's actually been very deluded and careful, but he's oftentimes mentioning how like Tether is offshore and we need like a
Starting point is 00:36:23 U.S. Brandon Bourne, Seat one. I think a lot of these guys realized I think a lot of these guys realize that the best way for them to compete with if Tether is unfairly, which is used the U.S. government as a tool to hamper their growth. But I think Tether's kind of a cause of the U.S. government in a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean, and I think that window is probably closed.
Starting point is 00:36:47 And I think Tether realizes that and seetting the opportunity. But there's a reason why you see the, you know, the circles, the U.S. D.C.s of the world. Their number one attempt to try and take down Tether has been not offering interest. it's been trying to take regulatory moats set up so that Tether can't compute with them. So do you think, that do you think, I mean, just real quick, like, I don't think someone in Argentina who's used to using asserted wallet that supports Tether is going to switch to a U.S. suit-based one that offers them 1%. I think the way they wouldn't do that is it like, if strike, then up with both.
Starting point is 00:37:29 Right. And you have one and gave you to an odd percent interest. That's an easy switch. But I agree that they're probably not going to down. and you all then like go through the room for your really... That's the network effect. Yeah. Network effect's a bit of brick. Yeah, but it's interesting that maybe that network affected actually on the
Starting point is 00:37:42 strike level rather than the stable plan level. I think specifically right now it's mostly on it's, it's yeah, it's it's mostly on the specifically trauma and tether level. Yeah. Do you think, so you say the
Starting point is 00:38:02 stable points, potentially sort of that big coin option, which is like seems obvious. Um, do you think about to say that it's micro strategy does what slow down Bitcoin adoption in the sense of what we would consider like real Bitcoin adoption not
Starting point is 00:38:16 showing you to root it yeah I think so I mean it's definitely not a competing money for sure I mean you can look at it both ways right because micro strategy is accelerating like first of all
Starting point is 00:38:36 strategy and I kind of respect the name dead name dead name strategy strategy. Like, strategy is clear, like, they're doing a speculative attack on the dollar. They're taking out debt, and then they're buying Bitcoin with it.
Starting point is 00:38:53 They're taking a debt on something that goes down over time. Yeah. The dollar. And then it's all dominated in dollars, and then they're buying Bitcoin with it. And then it's amplifying other companies to do the same thing, right? We're seeing a bunch of copycats and people trying to compete, like many. And it's also providing cover for a lot of private companies that are doing the same but different kind of strategies. So in that way, it accelerates at the very least, Bitcoin purchasing power because there's less Bitcoin in supply.
Starting point is 00:39:32 As that happens, you see scarcity kick in and you see Bitcoin purchasing power increase, which helps everyone close Bitcoin. right? Like this, there's like this weird phenomenon where, you know, edgewater Bitcoiners are like, oh, I don't want Bitcoin price to go up. It's like, Bitcoin price, if you're a self-servant Bitcoin and your family relies on Bitcoin, like you want your person who's probably bought, right? You want to be able to buy more things with less Bitcoin over time. But do you think it's like the people that don't want it to go out at the expense of everything? Yeah, but there's two things here, right? So in that regard, it is, it, maybe it's very, helpful to Bitcoin. Where I think it's not helpful for is individuals that are coming into Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:40:17 for the first time. Where they're going into the alternative, right? They're going, they're never making the leap into self-custy Bitcoin. They're never making leap into learning how Bitcoin works and understanding the tools and trying to improve their skills. Instead, they're just aping into micro strategy or other stuff. And that's happening so much. There's obviously, Obviously, like, gladiates it's huge on Twitter. You don't see it really because you're not on Twitter. I'm aware of it. And like, I don't post on Twitter anymore, but I'm aware of what happens there.
Starting point is 00:40:50 Jeff Walton. And to be fair, Jeff, I think, probably does actually get Bitcoin. He seems pretty switched on. But there's so many people now that are just coming, either coming to Bitcoin through micro strategy or like I say, just coming to micro strategy. And it's really strange that I don't feel like we've had a real inputs of people coming just into Bitcoin. This cycle has been very little new research.
Starting point is 00:41:10 new retail that has come into big real bitcoin why actually bitcoin because there's all it's so i think it might have been safe a dean who popularized it among bitcoin but like the marshmallow test you know the marshmallow test i think i could is this like if you offer a kid one marshmallow i think stanford did it it was like if you give if you give a kid a marshmallow and you put it in front of him you say if you wait 30 minutes i'd give you two marshmallows but you can't eat it many kids will just eat the first marshmallow. And it kind of embodies this idea of there's all these distractions around us, and it's hard to focus on long-term thinking and long-term improvement.
Starting point is 00:41:52 And today there's more distractions than ever entering Bitcoin. So people get, you know, they get caught up in that, and instead they never actually learn how to use Bitcoin. I think also there's two things to it where people think they missed the boat of Bitcoin. And they still, I mean, I did not go into Bitcoin. And they still think that microStraity is going to go to like 10x nav or whatever, which personally seems crazy to me because Sayers going to die with the fuck out of you before. Right.
Starting point is 00:42:26 And then secondly, like, I think it's such a lower barrier to entry to just be able to go to your brokerage account by MicroStraising rather than to figure out Bitcoin. Yeah. But do you think Univice play part of this as the Satsman? With the Bitcoin being too expensive? Yeah, people seeing it. And that's what they do. They've not got a tenant to know. I mean, I think probably, yeah, partially.
Starting point is 00:42:56 I mean, this is one of the reasons why I think Sats should be the standard and we should go to the full extreme and go to the lowest union of Bitcoin. I mean, to those listening that don't know what Sats are, there's 100 million stats in the Bitcoin, they're little bits of Bitcoin. But they're no bits. They're not bits. 100 stats is a bit. It could be a little bit confusing, but
Starting point is 00:43:18 the point is I think people shouldn't get caught up in the top level price of Bitcoin, but it's definitely real. The bigger, the more interesting thing to me is the ETFs. So the ETS all chose different units. It's really hard to understand
Starting point is 00:43:39 like why iBid is trading at one price and B is trading at a different price. But they all chose fractions of the Bitcoin. Completely arbitrary numbers and none of those are sets. Yeah, I mean, like I think you don't want your ETF to be a penny stock. Yeah. Right? So there's like a balancing act there. But they clearly were playing into unit bias and how they chose which fraction.
Starting point is 00:44:07 It's hard to figure out which fraction is, too. You have to, like, do reverse math. I don't even know off the top of my head what those fractions are. And, I mean, MSTR is a similar situation, right? Like, it's the share price is way less than one Bitcoin. I would just say to people that no matter when you got into Bitcoin, you thought you were late, there's a, there's a meme that's not really a mean. It was a post in, like, 2011 on Bitcoin Talk, which was like one of the original
Starting point is 00:44:36 in Bitcoin forums. And they said, like, it was a guy complaining that he missed the vote in 21. Like, I started getting active in Bitcoin in like 2013. I thought I missed the boat. Everyone thinks they're late. And I think the overall majority of people, if they just focus on staying home with stacking sets, like this idea of just lowering your expenses and accumulating of much Bitcoin long term, slow and steady, will outperform pretty much.
Starting point is 00:45:06 99% in people that are trying to actively trade. I think it was Francis who said newcomers often think that leverage is a way to magically become an OG. And usually if you use leverage, it's the opposite. You're going to lose everything. And you just need to think long term. But back to the gold Bitcoin conversation. I mean, two days ago, gold went up an entire Bitcoin market cap.
Starting point is 00:45:36 So just in the scheme of things, there's a lot of growth that can happen with Bitcoin. Most people haven't adopted it. Most capital allocators haven't allocated to it. And I think we're still pretty far from anyone being quote quote late to Bitcoin. I think probably the turn is when most people are spending and receiving Bitcoin versus buying and selling Bitcoin is when that changes. And we're still pretty far away. We're a landlordier than that. Yeah, I mean, I think there's not only did gold go on entire Bitcoin market cap,
Starting point is 00:46:13 I saw a Charlie over the day, which was like value of assets traded throughout the year, and Bitcoin's up less than times. Like there's a long way to go. I want to go back a little bit. So you were talking before, you said like many companies that follow this much strategy thing. I've actually been surprised that it's been as few as it has been. Like there's not many that have done it at least the same degree as micro strategy. Like Metaplanic would be the obvious example.
Starting point is 00:46:37 but they were tiny. They've done amazing, but they were very, very small. But now GameStop's coming in, and I think this is actually really interesting, because I think people have kind of faded the GameStop narrative from a sense of, like, these people are so primed to be Bitcoins, the people that are into GameStop. Like, the entire GameStop movement a few years ago was all about fucking walls through. How big do you think that has a ton of benefit? And I also wanted to tell me the thing you told me last night, because that's funny. Well, I don't know if that's real on that.
Starting point is 00:47:07 I'll just say that anyway. With Kaliathu, we don't... So GameStop is... It's kind of a bittersweet one, right? Because I was rooting for the Wall Street betters on the GameStopper run when they were going after the shorts with Roaring Kitty and Shia.
Starting point is 00:47:27 It was like two years ago, years ago. And then, like, the Wall Street, Cabal and Robin Hood, like, turned off the vibe on it. and they just fucked them. They completely fucked them. And I was hoping that was going to be a wake-up call for a lot of people
Starting point is 00:47:44 where Bitcoin legit fixes that. You can't turn off a buy button of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a 24-7, 365 global market. Yeah, you could turn off, you know, maybe strike gets pressure,
Starting point is 00:47:56 maybe Coinbase's pressure, you turn off a vibe button there, but you can't turn off the global buy-button of Bitcoin. You can't stop people from trading a P-to-P or using a different exchange or something like that. So Bitcoin, legitimately fix it that. And we did get a bunch of people from that movement came over
Starting point is 00:48:12 in Bitcoin after that. Some of them are even using Nasser. Like they've gone full deep down their out hole. But most of them we didn't get. So this seems like act too. And maybe this will get more of those people interested in Bitcoin. But it goes both ways. It's like it also is kind of another distraction from them getting real Bitcoin and figuring out the skills. Because Bitcoin is a paradigm shift in how you think about money and use money and for sure. And so it takes some time to get comfortable with it. And so as a result, the sooner people start getting comfortable with it, the more prepared
Starting point is 00:49:01 than be if they actually really need Bitcoin. So I do think times of the essence in terms of individuals learning the tools and learning how to use Bitcoin. So this could be a distraction to them. Just one point. I do think, I understand what you're saying. I think he might be right. But at the same time, Roaring-Kitty is like the Demingold and this in the circles. And if he starts talking about Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:49:25 I agree. I think a lot of people are going to go down the road. I think it will strictly be a net benefit. And it's cool to see Act 2 happening. I would say to people, like, I think when they first announced it, they had like $4 billion in cash. Then they did a convert. They took out a convertible note, the micro strategies, the strategy strategy. And I think they raised another $1.5 billion.
Starting point is 00:49:49 So they have like $5 billion in change in cash that they could put into Bitcoin, which is substantially higher than strategy originally had. Like strategy was 90 in the time. So it's definitely a big. bigger magnitude at Stark. And then what I was saying you earlier was it's a heavily, heavily shorted stock. So someone on someone online was saying, and I, Danny is putting me on the spot here, but I have not verified it. I don't really understand exactly how it works, but someone was saying that if they
Starting point is 00:50:25 couple of Bitcoin purchases with a Bitcoin dividend, which no one does, no one's ever done, that's actually really fascinating to me. You see that in private markets, Bitcoin dividends, that the shorts would have to then buy Bitcoin for the dividends, which would then add Bitcoin buy pressure, which would then increase GameStop stock, which would then pressure the shorts more. And you kind of have this. That's the real way to that would have we show. You have this very aggressive self-fulfilling prophecy, which kind of sounds badass and exciting to me. Yeah. I don't know
Starting point is 00:51:01 I don't understand like the knock on facts or how that plays out. I don't think any of it really does. But there's definitely something interesting there. I don't think you can state it. I do think it goes with this trend of what
Starting point is 00:51:17 we're seeing is mostly Bitcoin is being adopted by in the public markets by failing businesses. Yeah. That have nowhere option. I guess I saw Best Buy was floated because they have a bunch of Cash. Metaplan was like a failed hotel business, is my understanding. Any strategy.
Starting point is 00:51:36 Is that a good tech company? Yeah, that business is pretty consequential. The real game changer is when, to me, like, this is all a little, you know, this is all slight variations on what has happened to strategy already. The real game change is when we start seeing hyper-successful companies with large cash or things start transitioning to Bitcoin. companies like Apple or meta. I really thought meta were going to be. I wouldn't be surprised that Zuck is one of the first movers in that regard. They have a massive cash position.
Starting point is 00:52:14 He's clearly interested in Bitcoin. I think one of his dogs is named. He's goat. He's got a name Bitcoin. He obviously has an axe to grind with a Wingle Boss Twins for him. So sure. And he has control over a business, right? That's another thing that you see with a lot of these companies, including strategy,
Starting point is 00:52:30 is that they have founder control so that they can move quickly. We're seeing men on the government side too, right? Like Bhutan or El Salvador can move way quicker than the US government. Because they have very concentrated control. So it would be surprised at Meta moves. Look, we live in the best timeline.
Starting point is 00:52:51 Like, I think, like, this timeline is absolutely crazy. I think if you go back Cuban a year, particularly for American Bitcorners, there was a lot of, concern to be had. And there's still some concern, but we're trying to get in an amazing direction. If you go back three years, four years, five years, I think younger Matt would not be able to imagine how positive situation we could be in at this current juncture. So it's important to realize that. And I'm kind of just, you know, you got to kind of go with
Starting point is 00:53:25 the flow. You kind of, you're like running down a river. You can't oversteer. You just don't sink. Yeah. And we've been kind of talking about these things as it they probably has rich to Bitcoin. And really everything we've gone through so far, I don't think it's like a real extent. I don't think so. I think they could be risked individuals. Yeah, I agree with that. But then the one thing that has become more and more of a talking point that potentially would be an actual risk of the Bitcoin imponson. Yeah. First of all, where to stand on that whole thing? Do you think this is real and you think it's going to happen? Look, it's way above my favorite. I will just say that people have been saying quantum is going to break Bitcoin since, like, the very early... Yeah. It's something I've heard. Maybe it was true, yeah.
Starting point is 00:54:12 I mean, Vitalik's original scam before Ethereum was a quantum-based mining company that was supposed to just, like, absolutely destroy Bitcoin group work and just mine all the Bitcoin. I didn't actually know that. That goes way back. Yeah. So I take all of this with a grain of salt. whenever people say this. The second piece is quantum would break, like true quantum would break a lot of our existing
Starting point is 00:54:45 financial system and security systems and how we do all digital-based things, right, in terms of encryption. Now, the Bitcoin community has, as a result of being so adversarial, particular a developer community, has been thinking about this for quite some time. And there's ways for us to do basically opt-in protections to protect Bitcoin holdings. Some kind of quantum attack. Now, the question is like, what is the timeline? When does this actually become a threat?
Starting point is 00:55:21 Is it five years? Is it 10 years? Is it 20 years? Does it never happen? That's a little bit harder to put your finger on. I was talking to someone about like something that I deeply respect and older individual. And we were talking about like the rise of LLMs and AI. And he was saying that in his many years of investment experience,
Starting point is 00:55:48 if you're putting like potential future timelines on a dot plot and you're like plodding out where we potentially go because of, the growth and improvement in LLMs, it's a wider, it's a wider possibility set than ever, for sure. And I think that probably adds to the question marks about what potential timeline we'll see with quantum.
Starting point is 00:56:14 But the cool part about opt-in is we can do it on the sooner side and people can choose their own risk level. Yeah, the interesting part of it to me is, like, if quantum became a thing in five years time and say, this was a real thing that was a threat to Bitcoin. Like, we already have Bitcoin 360. I know it's not like a perfect bit by any means. But there's a way that we can actually
Starting point is 00:56:35 on the proof addresses and you can make sure your coins aren't and get stolen. But it's opt in. Like the person would have to then move to the new address format. And then it would be more expensive for them. Yes. But they would have the assurance that, yeah, if there was a quantum attack,
Starting point is 00:56:47 other people's Bitcoin would get so on. But the interesting part is like, especially with the changing dynamics of who Bitcoin is are, like strategy being a perfect example, like these people, like, do you then choose to freeze everyone's funds who maybe have lost the keys or like Satoshi's buns or whatever, whoever, like, do you choose to freeze them or just let me be stolen? And I think that's where the conversation gets quite interesting. Because to me, but I think the only solution is you let them be stolen. But I'm almost certain that Saylor who wants
Starting point is 00:57:16 to like time off his own Bitcoin indefinitely would want to freeze those funds. And so then what happens? So, I mean, this is a tricky one because And Lopp has read a really good article about this. I think his website is lott.net. Yeah, it's. And he was making the case for freezing the funds, his argument. Now, from my, like, base principles of free markets
Starting point is 00:57:48 and permissionless technology, I lean towards letting it play out. Because I don't know when you were, would decide to do it. I've watched someone was just choosing not to be. Now, but the key difference here is what I think a lot of people don't realize in this scenario is there is, I got to put this on. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:58:17 There is, I think some people think in that scenario, like different people would steal different people's Bitcoin. Well, yeah, because that probably wouldn't be the case. what would probably happen is someone would secretly obtain the capability. And here's the thing. If that capability happened where you could break standard encryption, basically if you could reverse engineer a private key from a public key, which is not possible right now,
Starting point is 00:58:50 you could secretly spy on the world's encrypted communications, and nobody would know. And your advantage in that situation would be not to tell anybody. and it'd be hard for anyone to prove that you're able to do that without you telling them. You could break the way encryption works for the traditional baking system, and nobody would know that you were doing it. Now, if you did it on Bitcoin, you started stealing Bitcoin, people would know really quickly. So your incentive would be to keep it quiet,
Starting point is 00:59:23 and then when you go for it, steal a lot of Bitcoin. So you could end up in a situation where, I don't know, like how much hasn't moved into, like maybe it's 4 million Bitcoin, maybe it's 10 million Bitcoin, hasn't moved into the opt-in protected addresses. And in that situation, do we want a potentially malicious actor or one person or one entity to control that much Bitcoin could be a major issue? Now, I think probably if that were to happen, And this is like major, major theoretical.
Starting point is 01:00:03 And it's not something that keeps me up in that. It's just interesting in the third. Yeah, probably what you would see happen is you'd see two forks, right? So anyone, anyone can fork Bitcoin if they want to. This is a counter misconception. Like me and you today, you can just your computer, we can, how can say, 22 million Bitcoin. Yeah, we can, yeah, we can just change the consensus rules.
Starting point is 01:00:25 And then all of a sudden, we have the same historical record of Bitcoin, but then going forward, it's two to, in the past. Now, even though everyone can fork Bitcoin, most people will not go along with your fork, right? Like me and you are like, we created a new Bitcoin. And we go a million. No one's going to go along with that. That would be ridiculous. But in these types of situations, it's as a free market proponent is like the, is the last defense of Bitcoin. It's this beautiful free market mechanism. And so what you would see is, is in any kind of threatening situation to Bitcoin, chaotic threatening situation of Bitcoin,
Starting point is 01:01:08 I think what you would see is you would see effectively two chains emerge. And if you had Bitcoin at the time before that happened, you'd have an equivalent amount of Bitcoin on both sides. And people would decide which way they wanted to go. And we saw this play out in 2017 with Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin. And Bitcoin cash is effectively worthless now. But for a time, it wasn't. They were, you know, they were trading against each other.
Starting point is 01:01:38 And the market spoke. And the market clearly resoundly said, you know, we're not going to go along with the fork and we're going to stay on the existing chain. And so what does that impact on someone who relies on Bitcoin? The impact is a short-term volatility, purchasing power impact. But at the end of the day, like, you could have slept the roll of 2017 and not lost any money.
Starting point is 01:02:01 You don't actually have more money. You'd have significantly more money today in terms of prudgeoning power. But even at the same amount of Bitcoin. But you'd also have, I know Bitcoin cash isn't worth a lot, but you'd also have that on top of them in Bitcoin. Right. But the interesting part there is like, so in 2017, basically worthless. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:02:17 But it's, you could slack a few more steps. Yeah. In 2017, Bitfinex did that futures market, which I think was really cool. So they allowed the markets kind of built on what they thought was going to be ahead of time. ahead of time, yes. The interesting part, if this happened, assuming that, like, say,
Starting point is 01:02:32 when a black rocket on the side of freezes of funds because it would be in their interest. Yeah. That's not really a very free market to, like, decide on, because they have so much money they could play in the futures market. Right. This is not the wrong thing.
Starting point is 01:02:43 And even though it's not a perfect analogy, it feels like a bit of a down moment for Bitcoin in that scenario. I mean, it's a completely, it's a horrible analogy. Well, first of all, the future markets are interesting for taking temperature. Yeah. But it's similar to prediction markets leading up to an election. Yes. It's providing you a data point on how things might go, but it's not absolutely certain.
Starting point is 01:03:08 And then the other piece is they are effectively centralized and controlled, right? So in that instance, you know, BitFinex is the one that is managing that market. And you don't know that BitFinex is playing gates either. Right? What a strategy has like a, they launch a futures market, right? It's like, are the trade's real? Like, you don't even know. The beauty of an actual fork war is that it's real on-chain signed assets that are moving back and forth that can't be paid.
Starting point is 01:03:46 Now, the problem is, is there's no way to know for third until after it happens. And it will be messy. and if one party has deeper pockets, they can make it messier in the short term, but I think long term that party will probably get wrecked. And there was a game theory there where they need to, they might not be willing to risk that much. In 2017, there were deep pockets on the Bitcoin cash side.
Starting point is 01:04:26 I think Roger Rear was a supporter of Eon, Bitcoin.com. He had tons and tons of Bitcoin. And Gian was the founder of Bitmain, and they made the majority of A6s, and they had the majority of mining Hachfower. And even the Hashpower, they didn't control. They were selling the A62, so they got that control over there.
Starting point is 01:04:48 And they tried to tip the scales, right? And they failed, ultimately, to do that. In the short term, there was, I mean, I don't know if you remember, you go back on Twitter back in the day. And like, there was major players like Ryan Selkis. I'll just call out by name. I guess it's like now a Christian influencer and not a Bitcoin. I don't know. It's weird.
Starting point is 01:05:14 But he was like, Ethereum is way more certain than the future of Bitcoin. You know, there's someone's uncertainty here. Bitcoin Cash could probably win. Coinbase was was pro Bitcoin Cash for it there. one of the largest entities in the industry at the time. And they failed. And a lot of it also was, I think not only was it market participates, you know, expressing their interest through selling Bitcoin cash for Bitcoin. But I think it also was they didn't fully tip the skills, right?
Starting point is 01:05:50 Like I think there is, like, Gihon never. for instance, moved the majority of tax rate to Bitcoin Catch. Why didn't mean? But the reason he didn't do that was because he didn't want to destroy everything. You don't want to kill his golden goose. You know, regardless of the perception or the individual perception of sailors' motives or intent, at the end of the day, his company controls 500,000 Bitcoin. If that ever became worthless,
Starting point is 01:06:31 he's nothing. Yeah. He's absolutely nothing. He has skin in the game. And the last piece I would just add here is the coolest part about Bitcoin is if you own more Bitcoin, you don't have
Starting point is 01:06:44 more direct control over changing Bitcoin. You have that market dynamic where you could crash a price. You could sell. But besides that, you don't have more control. If you have more shares of a company, you have more voting control over that company.
Starting point is 01:07:00 That's not how Bitcoin works. That's fundamentally different. That's hard for people to wrap their heads around. This episode is also brought to you by Ledger. If you're serious about protecting your Bitcoin, Ledger has the solution you need. Their hardware wallets give you complete control over your private keys, ensuring that your Bitcoin stays safe from hacks, fishing, and malware.
Starting point is 01:07:19 With Ledger's easy-to-use devices and the Ledger Live app, managing your Bitcoin has never been more convenient. Whether you're a long-time holder or new to the world of Bitcoin, Ledger makes it simple to keep your assets protected. If you want to find out more, visit ledger.com and secure your Bitcoin today. That's L-E-D-G-R.com. This episode is brought to you by CASA, the leading Bitcoin self-custody solution. I've been using CASA since 2019 and I can't recommend them enough.
Starting point is 01:07:46 CASA have options for all Bitcoiners from a 2-3 multisig to a 3-5 and a private client option for absolute best in class security. CASA also do inheritance which are very recently set up and it really couldn't be easier. My inheritance plan has gone from a vague treasure map for my wife to a rock-solid security plan that I have total confidence in. To find out more about CASA, go to CASA.io, which is c-a-sa-o. It's funny as well that after 2017, how few people actually came back
Starting point is 01:08:15 from being on the Beacash side of that argument. There's obviously some like whence was one of them. Marshall Wong, who I really be like, he was on the wrong side of that and not coming back. Big go. Yeah. But I won't move on from this, but kind of Brian Armstrong. Kind of.
Starting point is 01:08:32 Before we move on from this, though, I want to know why I think the Tao hack analogy is a horrible analogy. Because to me it seems like relatively similar. So why don't you explain to the new listeners what the Dow hype was? I will try on best. So in 2016, Ethereum had a bug which meant this Dow's, like basically took control of a ton of Bitcoin. Sorry, it took part of Ethereum. They didn't break consensus rules. And so Ethereum more quite the change.
Starting point is 01:08:55 reissue that Ethereum to all the people that write for the quote unquote highly. Okay, so the Dow. Ethereum, all the major Ethereum stakeholders and promoters that were heavily involved in the pre-mine and that controlled a large portion of the Ethereum supply, we're promoting this concept of a decentralized autonomous organization that was going to invest in things. And a bunch of the Ethereum supply got pushed into this smart contract
Starting point is 01:09:24 that then got compromised. and they all lost a lot of their Ethereum to the hacker. And at that point, they forked the chain and created a new chain that is now known as Ethereum that returned all that money to the previous holders. The existing chain continued as Ethereum Procic and basically lost them against the market. I think it would be very hard
Starting point is 01:09:55 for a Bitcoin fork that changed the history to... So I don't mean that it changed the history but what I mean is if... Basically what it did. No, in the Ethereum
Starting point is 01:10:06 for sure did that. But with Bitcoin in this analogy, like if half the people, how many people want to change it so that all those coins... Oh, with the quantum stuff. Yeah, with the quantum stuff.
Starting point is 01:10:18 If all of those coins are now frozen essentially, how is that not the same and just preempting a hack of stealing the coins? I think probably what matters is it just matters what the threshold like how much how much Bitcoin is
Starting point is 01:10:34 at risk versus how much Bitcoin is in the new opt-in addresses so with the Dow like it was a large portion of major stakeholders funds yeah percentage less I just
Starting point is 01:10:51 yeah I mean and it was also easier they kind of pulled a fast phone It was like kind of easy. There was less stakeholders involved, very concentrated community. Most people weren't paying attention. It was a very different time. I don't know. I can see the similarities as an analogy.
Starting point is 01:11:11 Maybe I was wanted to say it. Absolutely not. But what people don't realize is that Bitcoin is incredibly hard to change by default, and that's actually the fundamental feature of the value crop, for sure. while Ethereum at the time was incredibly easy to change. Because if Atalic and Jolie then. Yeah. There was like a group of 10.
Starting point is 01:11:32 Yeah. All right, let's move on from that. I want to talk a bit about Noster. But before we talk about Noster, let's talk about X a little bit. Which is real quick, just going back to that thing. There's a famous screenshot of Vitalik saying, pause all trading on exchanges in the IRC shot. Like, I can't imagine that scenario.
Starting point is 01:11:55 on Bitcoin today. No. We're all exchanges just stop trading and then switch assets. Yeah, no, that would matter.
Starting point is 01:12:01 And he was able to do that for like 90% of the volume like, try that. It's more the dynamics are rather than how they're actually.
Starting point is 01:12:08 Very good. But so we, I won't talk about also, but I interrupt you. So that's okay. But I want to, our first one of your opinion
Starting point is 01:12:15 on X, because you were super critical over your money came and did that ever X. And how do you think he's done now, like through the half wheels on when we are?
Starting point is 01:12:23 I mean, I think he's grushing it. I think the market obviously thinks he's crushing and the reasons with his decisions. It seems like X is having its moment. I think it's hard to verify, but it seems like it's having more activity than it's ever had before. my general concerns still exist which is
Starting point is 01:12:57 global communication is too important to have centralized control over and it doesn't matter if you think the controller is benevolent or not the fact that there is a controller is the problem itself I think that there are a lot of issues simmering under the surface
Starting point is 01:13:23 I mean, we've seen widespread censorship in Turkey, for instance. We've seen censorship in Brazil, even though Elon claimed that he was going to fight for the people. He ultimately would buy the overall whatever went to end. We've seen a significant amount of censorship in we've seen a significant amount of censorship
Starting point is 01:13:47 in India in compliance with Modi. It's important to realize that these are large markets and Elon has multiple business interests that he wants to have access to and succeed there. You want to start like that because he wants to be able to sell Tesla's. And we also saw there was like a mini censorship crisis when what was it exactly about? But Elon started going after a subset of the political right. Oh, I think it was over the age of the age of. one B visas.
Starting point is 01:14:24 Okay. The immigration is the A left. And so, like, you're seeing these simrooms. And, like, the thing is, like, at the end of the day, having a single individual or entity in control over speech should be concerned. And as a society, we should be trying to improve that status quo. And we've never really had a reasonable alternative to that before a Nostra existed.
Starting point is 01:14:52 So I have been. continuing to focus much of my time on Nostr. The other piece, there is not just censorship, but it's also the verifiability of information and the spread of, like, fake manipulated news. There's no way for you to verify what is happening on X. If a tweet goes out by the prime minister of the UK, I don't know if the prime minister of UK, I should send that. I think it's been change. If you see a screenshot, there's no way to verify that that was real. I think as we start to see the growth and iteration of AI, that's going to become even more of an issue. And Nasser has everything signed by default, which allows you to verify that something was posted by someone,
Starting point is 01:15:42 and then hasn't been changed since then without trusting anybody, which I think is going to become more and more important. But yeah, I mean, look, I am not your typical, I by no means have Elon derangement syndrome. A part of my concern is that I have so much respect for his ability to execute, yeah, that it's more of a concern than if he was incompetent. So it's kind of the opposite of your class.
Starting point is 01:16:20 classic, Elon's an evil idiot. Yeah. It's interesting because one of the things that you were always really vocal about was like the K-Y-C side of Blue Jets. I've actually been surprised that that's not got worse in the sense that I wouldn't have been shocked. You sat here today being like NIMS and now I'm not allowed on X and you have to have like... You know, he's fine of NIMS. See, this is, he's very savvy, right? you can have a NIM,
Starting point is 01:16:52 but he's going to know who you are. You have to trust him with the vector Pops through a phone number, rather than like... Well, right now it's just phone number base. Unless you're getting the payoffs, which I think we haven't really seen... We've started to see, like,
Starting point is 01:17:06 a really negative knockout effects of paying there's no worse enough. A bad revenue. How do the payouts work? Do you have to have like Pover ID? Yeah, you do like a full KOC with strike to get paid out. Okay.
Starting point is 01:17:17 So everyone who's getting paid out, it's like bag intact. So we've seen that get worse. I mean, I think part of it is he's a bit distracted. Are we not been recording? Am I recording now? You are now recording. I just did the most schoolboy error.
Starting point is 01:17:37 We recorded for an hour and 20 minutes without audio on Matt. So I'm very sorry, Matt. I'm sorry to the listeners. I fucked up. It's okay. I mean, it happens to the best of us. It's happened to me before. Do you want to tell a story of when it happened to you before that you're just telling me?
Starting point is 01:17:54 This happened to us many times, but when Jack Mallor's launched Strike, he came to Brooklyn to launch it on our podcast. Rabbit All Recap. Since Danny fucked us up, I won't feel bad about chilling the podcast. Search Raggle recap and your favorite podcast and click subscribe. And he launched Strike on the show and we didn't record the first 40 minutes. so we had to retry to record it. And so it always comes out worse. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:18:27 We were just talking before we clicked record again. And I actually clicked record this time about whether we should try and go back and do the whole hour 20. But you can never recapture it. Yeah. Danny's just going to try to do his best and salvage the audio from the camera audio. So it's going to sound shit. But now it will sound good. So I forget where we were.
Starting point is 01:18:46 We were talk about Elon. Yeah, Elon wouldn't have fucked that up. No, he wouldn't have. I need a Danny. anyone wants to be an intern on what bitcoin did please email me at danny at what bitcoin did dot yeah you need a producer i uh look i feel your pain because my other show still dispatch i've always just produced myself so we've had bad audio quality good audio quality missed audio it happens to the best of us um but anyway my my general thesis is is that
Starting point is 01:19:17 the identity and control and surveillance of centralized systems whether that's money or speech or everything else will trend worse over time. And the way we solve that is by building alternatives that don't have centralized control that can't be corrupted by humans inherently. And I think Noster shows a lot of promise for that in terms of identity and communications. And Bitcoin shows incredible promise in terms of money. You mix the two together. They're incredibly complex.
Starting point is 01:19:53 complementary and very powerful. And I would just say that in all my years, there's basically been three projects that I've seen massive, organic developer interest. And that has been Bitcoin, Nostra and Kashu. And that definitely has not changed. So that's almost like a report card on X for the last two years. When we first spoke about Nostra on the show, which was a pretty long time ago, you were super bullish on Nostr. I know you're still very bullish on that. Master. Does it perform how you expect it to? I mean, to our earlier conversation, depending on how good the quality comes out, fighting network effects is a bitch. And it's going to be a long grind.
Starting point is 01:20:38 Look, I think most people will not use Noster because of censorship resistance or verifiability. Those will be side effects that they get as a result. It needs to be a convenient usable, positive experience. And that's going to take longer than most people realize. And the grind is real, but I think it's a worthy grind. Because more and more of our lives are digital, it's more and more important that the systems we rely on are robust and corruption-resistant.
Starting point is 01:21:19 Yeah. I think the interesting thing there is like when Twitter, did it ban Brazil for a little bit? So the Brazil example is a perfect case study because it shows the vulnerabilities of centralized systems
Starting point is 01:21:39 and it shows the savviness of Elon in terms of messaging and communication. So the Brazilian government wanted to stifle the voices of opposition in Brazil So they went to Elon and they said, okay, ban these accounts. And he's like, no, I'm not going to ban these accounts. So then they seized his bank accounts and including any bank accounts he had in the country
Starting point is 01:22:06 and blocked X on the app stores in the country. So they went to Apple, another centralized party. And they went to Google, another centralized party. They said, you can't have it on the app stores. They seized bank accounts, another centralized parties, both Starlink and X, in the country. And they passed a law that said, if we catch you posting, so like if you use a VPN or something and it's your real name account, right?
Starting point is 01:22:34 Like major opposition voice if you post on this platform, we'll also arrest you and find you. So they made it illegal. So Elon responded by saying, okay, I'm not going to comply. He had no way of billing people for Starlink so they couldn't pay him. So that's where Bitcoin can come in, by the way. But there was no way for him to accept payment. So he said anyone who was using Starlink in the country could use it for free.
Starting point is 01:23:00 And they had a very public loud fight. And then ultimately, and a bunch of people were like, Elon's our savior. He's here to save us. He's going to protect freedom of speech around the entire world. And then he quietly complied and he came back to the app store. He got his bank accounts back. And he ended up complying with the request to block those accounts. Always the way.
Starting point is 01:23:23 But when that happened, did you see a lot of people from Brazil move across the Noste? Not as many as you'd expect. First of all, there were other alternatives. Like it didn't go full extreme. Blue sky and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, or even like TikTok or threads. Does anyone use threads? I mean, look, Facebook is the juggernaut.
Starting point is 01:23:52 I think it's important not to get too caught up on Elon. I use Elon an example because as, well, first of all, the only social network I ever had in my life for the last 10 years was Twitter. Like I deleted all social. I had no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no TikTok, no LinkedIn. And I was just using Twitter and then X. And I was mostly using it just to talk about Bitcoin. Like I wasn't using it to share baby photos or other things that social media people use. So I had a very direct connection with that platform, but also Elon himself represents the most positive freedom of speech tech CEO that we have.
Starting point is 01:24:42 It's a low bar. But he's in that regard, he does the best out of anyone. It's like very obvious. But Zuckerberg is big boss man. You know, the only thing that limits Facebook user growth, meta user growth across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook is birth rate. Like, they need more children to be born because they're at like 5 billion people or something. The internet connected population is estimated at like 5.5 billion. And meta's user base is like 5 billion.
Starting point is 01:25:11 That's insane. So they're the real big boss. So, yeah, I assume people use threads. I've never used it. But I assume people use threads. I assume people use Instagram. It's important to realize that it's impossible for us to verify. verify those user numbers when the centralized platform,
Starting point is 01:25:26 say how many users they have, you just completely take them at face value. But if you ballpark that he's not completely lying, they're by far the highest. So if Facebook's at five, five billion, I think TikTok is at 1.8 billion. I don't remember like the Wii chat Chinese numbers off the top of my head, but X is at like 600 million.
Starting point is 01:25:48 It's like five billion versus 600 million. It's completely different scale. And I think Noster can provide a better path for all of those users. So yeah, I don't really know, Rose. But the point is, is like, I think, I just, I think these things are too important to rely on the status quo. And just because that's the way that we did things when the Internet first got created doesn't mean there isn't a better path. And I think it's important for our children, our children's children. the future of society that we have more systems that are corruption resistant.
Starting point is 01:26:27 And Nostra represents that and Bitcoin represents that. Yeah, I mean, I think Nosta is really cool. It's obviously more than just social media. Like social media is where it's found its initial product market fit. But the weird thing I have with it is I want less social media, not more. So I've never actually used Nostr that much. Is there other stuff being built that's actually looking promising? I mean, I sympathize with that.
Starting point is 01:26:54 Like I said, my only social was Twitter and the next, and now my only social is Noster. And I do think one of the biggest concerns I have as a new father is social media, digital connectiveness, addiction with my kids. And it's something that's going to be very, it's going to be a challenge to have them not be disconnected from society but also use tools in a healthy way. And I think that's something that the entire Noster ecosystem struggles with. I think because it's weird where like a social comms identity protocol that's being bootstrapped by people that are mostly skeptical of social, which is unique, I think that that argument is completely valid if you don't,
Starting point is 01:27:48 use any other social, but most of the time I hear that argument from people that are like tweeting like 20, 40 times a day and just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. So I think it's like a little bit of a cop out. Yeah. But I do agree that it's hard to focus on multiple platforms. Like Noster is not a platform. It's a protocol by design. But usually when you see people successfully leveraging these things, they like focus on just one, which I respect and people, the network effect is there with X so I understand why people don't do it. I do think Bitcoiners specifically should have a stronger incentive to use Noster and try and improve the ecosystem just because of our earlier conversation that was in
Starting point is 01:28:33 poor quality. That like if if someone is coming into Bitcoin for the first time through an ETF or MSTR, it's a completely different scenario than if they come in through primal and are getting paid sets for shitpost. Like if you get at the first time you ever interact with Bitcoin is someone enjoying your content and sending you Bitcoin, a whole different perspective and journey that that user has. And if you want users to use Bitcoin in a more freedom oriented way, that path is the most effective. And even not starting its infancy right now is by far the largest Bitcoin circular economy in the world.
Starting point is 01:29:12 And it's growing quite fast because it's digital. Yeah, just to one of your earlier points there, I struggle with Noster in a sense, like, I don't use Twitzer very much. Like, I use it to, because it's like a good news feed. And then in terms of actually posting, I post the shows, and then every now and again, I'll post a tweet. I started off posting the shows to Noster, and I've actually not been doing it as much because it feels like the wrong place to do it. Like, when I go out and like just post a video, like, promote the show, it feels like that's not what Nost is about. Do you know what I mean? No, I think it's just right now it's a different audience.
Starting point is 01:29:48 I mean, I think the audience is more, is less mainstream and more. It feels like I'm promoting a show in like a group chat. And that doesn't sit quite right. I mean, I would probably add its current state, I would compare it to like a newsletter. Yeah. So like your newsletter is like your most ride or die dedicated. audience, right? Like they subscribe and want to know every time you post something. But you're not going to get any new people from a newsletter because they're not already subscribed.
Starting point is 01:30:29 And that is going to change as Noster adoption increases. But I like to kind of think of it at this point as like many newsletters that are compounding on top of each other because it's my newsletter and your newsletter and Pablo's newsletter. And they're all in the same interoperable format. And so audiences of each can spill over to each other. I will say, you know, rabbit hole recap, which we've been doing for seven years and has been largely Twitter and then X focused, gets posted to both. And we get more real comments and engagement on Nostr already today. Like we'll get retweets and stuff on X, but like actual comment.
Starting point is 01:31:17 on if they enjoyed the conversation or you bully all the live streamers to go to the Noste one that's why I mean yeah I'm insistent about it but like that's also not something that is rare right I mean the people that are most successful on YouTube are the people that are saying like and subscribe as much as I hate it it's like like and subscribe and press the thumbs up button yeah do all those things by the way yeah so why is that any different than being like oh if you want to interact with the show you should download primal and interact with the show over there. And if it's interesting, we'll zap you and you can zap us and send us Bitcoin. We'll send you Bitcoin.
Starting point is 01:31:55 But it's actually, it's real hard. And so then you do the math, right? And so the cool thing about Noster is because it's an open protocol, everyone can make their own estimates on what the active user basis, right? while with something like Telegram or X, you have to just trust what the centralized provider says. So if X's public numbers are, let's give them the high end of 700 million,
Starting point is 01:32:27 which I think it was like 650 or something was the last public number I saw. 700 million active users of X. And then Noster is probably not more than 100,000 users, active users. it is kind of fascinating if we did Rabbit Hole Recap yesterday
Starting point is 01:32:50 last time I checked there was retweets but there was no actual comments on the Rabbit Hole Recap on X but on on Noster there was like 12 like that's a pretty interesting disconnect if it's 100,000 users versus 700 million. Yeah totally
Starting point is 01:33:10 that's interesting. So I my point is is at this point, look, if Nostra is successful, just like if Bitcoin is successful, then nearly everyone in the world will be using it. But in the meantime, I think from a, from someone who creates shows and creates content perspective, the way you should look at it is, these are like your most dedicated, uh, ride or die audience members. And then the mainstream is on YouTube or X or TikTok or whatever. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:33:43 All right. Well, are you on TikTok? No, I'm my fuck. Well, so you're missing out on 1.8 billion users. Yeah. I'm happy to take that loss there. But if we, so I'll post this show there. You post on Instagram or Facebook or Facebook?
Starting point is 01:33:56 I don't have Instagram or Facebook. You're missing out five billion users. No, I've not had anything apart from Twitter for a long time. And at some point, I would love to get rid of every social media. Yeah. same. But the, you kind of missed the question that. I don't think it was intentional. But so obviously with open sites, you do tons of Noster grants. Like, what else is being built on Nostra that's interesting? Um, so I think there's a disconnect where people are, say, um, I'm interested in
Starting point is 01:34:30 Noster, but not the social aspects. I'm interested in the other things, right? So Noster is an open protocol and stands for notes and other stuff transmitted by relay. Like most things named by nerds, it wasn't necessarily the best name. I love Fiat Jaffe, the original creator of the protocol. Kind of a weak name. But that's what it stands for. And so the idea is that you can have infinite cryptographic identities, public key, private key pair.
Starting point is 01:34:58 And then you can do, you can broadcast to the world any different thing you want to. We call them events and they're signed. So you know that that, that, that, that identity did this thing or said this thing. It hasn't been changed and you can verify that without trusting
Starting point is 01:35:17 anybody. And the good apps will just verify that for you and then you can do manual verification if you want to. So all this is happening in the background so people don't really realize what's going on. And the key aspect there is that you can make as many identities as you want without permission. Go out and try and make multiple X
Starting point is 01:35:33 accounts. It's very difficult. Yeah. Like they make it very difficult for you. Um, you need like a fresh phone number for each one. It's that whole thing. And that's just the current state where it currently is. So the, the dream of something like Noster is maybe you're using an app like primal or using an app like amethyst, which is like a social feed and then you're able to switch to a different app that's in the same ecosystem, use the same identity, use the same people,
Starting point is 01:36:01 you know, your your social graph, the same people you follow, the same people that follow you and move it across apps. And the example I always like to use is something like Airbnb. So I've used Airbnb for years. I have a really good reputation on Airbnb as a guest. It'd be nice if I could use that reputation in other places. And I can't because Airbnb locks that down. It's, it's their proprietary asset, right?
Starting point is 01:36:27 Is that trust, that verifiable reputation that's happening? They don't want a competitor to launch it. So people, you know, our, our nascent Noster think voice space will be like, all of these things are going to be on Noster. But then you look and you're like, they're not there yet. So I'm kind of, it's kind of long-winded. But my point is, is that people say the social, they're not interested in the social, the interest in the other stuff. The social is the bootstrapping mechanism. It has the largest addressable market.
Starting point is 01:36:58 As we said earlier, nearly the entire internet connected population is using Facebook. People are addicted to social. They use social every day. It's viral in nature because it's inherently social and you want to interact with friends and bring other people in. And so as far as I'm concerned, there's an order of operations. First, we see the social happen. And that's not just a Twitter-like experience, which is what we see with Primal and Amethyst. But it's also like an Instagram-like experience.
Starting point is 01:37:28 There's an app called Olas that is purely focused on an Instagram-like, experience. There will be Reddit clients and all these different things compound on each other. But I think it starts with social. So with all that said, early days start with social. We are seeing some nascent projects that are in the other stuff realm. And the best example I like is ZapStore, which is trying to solve the app story issue we have. And the app store centralization issue we have is that the overwhelming majority of the population relies on either the Google Play Store or the iOS App Store. And those are centralized walled gardens that are permissioned. And if you ask any developer trying to deal with Apple and Apple's approval process
Starting point is 01:38:20 and paying Apple 30% or whatever of the cut of revenue, it's a pain in the ass. It's really difficult. Apps get banned all the time. We were just talking about the Brazil situation where they targeted the app stores. They wanted X removed from the app stores. So the app stores are a centralization problem, but they solve a very real problem. And the real problem they solve is twofold. It's discovery, which app do I want to download?
Starting point is 01:38:46 I need an app to book a hotel room. Where do you go? You go to the app store. You search hotels and you try and figure out which app you want to download. And you see reviews and whatnot on if that app is good, does it have five stars or whatnot? And the second piece, just real quick, the second piece is, am I downloading the real app? So if I want to download the Airbnb app, I want to make sure I'm not downloading a malicious Airbnb app. And the way they solve that is Apple is basically attesting that this is the real Airbnb app.
Starting point is 01:39:21 This is not a scam Airbnb app. Google does the same thing. The problem is it has trust and centralization that does that. So Zabstor tries to solve both of those problems for you in a permissionless way, using the Noster identity system, using the Noster verifiable reputation system, where a developer can go, release their app without permission, sign it with their Nostr identity, say, this is my real app. And then people that you follow can tell you reviews and then can also tell you,
Starting point is 01:39:53 I also trust the person who sign this app. I think on the social graph side of the App Store, one of the really interesting things it's like Bitcoin-specific is if you follow a bunch of Bitcoiners on Noster, and you go, like, I assume what most people who are new to Bitcoin, if they want to download a Bitcoin wallet, they'll just type in Bitcoin wallet in the app store. And then, like, number one is probably like Trust Wallet or something like that. It's all shitty wallets. And so if you then have the social graph attached that and you know what other people are using,
Starting point is 01:40:19 that's a cool way of actually finding signal amongst the noise. Yeah, it's like which Bitcoin wallet does Odell and these other Bitcorners, I respect, recommend the most. Exactly. That's very cool. I think one of the my favorite examples of someone using Nostr in, it's obviously still using like the social side of it, but in a slightly different way as Fountain. I really like what they've done. And then on top of that, I think the other cool thing that's come out in Noster is I think it's also helping bootstrap e-cash.
Starting point is 01:40:50 Yeah, so what does Fountain? Why don't you explain to your listen? So Fountain is a podcast app where you can like pay the podcast creator. You can just zap them. You can send Bitcoin if you've enjoyed the show. But they've also brought in now the Noster feed so you can see what people are listening to, what people are zapping. So it's just like a nice mix of two.
Starting point is 01:41:08 And the coolest part is if you comment in the Fountain Podcast app and say, I really enjoyed the show except Danny really messed up the audio, that goes out to every Noster app. And so then if I'm in primal, I see that post. And I can, I can press repost on that and I can or I can comment on it. I can then send it out. And all of a sudden, you start to see how things are compounding on top of each other. Yeah. So that's very cool.
Starting point is 01:41:35 I love what those guys are doing. But why don't you explain how like eCash is kind of playing into the Nostra ecosystem as well? So eCash is another open protocol that allows from a developer point of view is a programmable, interoperable way to do Bitcoin banks and Bitcoin. custodial wallets from a user focused way it's a way to easily send and receive bitcoin that is that is cheap fast and private and offline can be offline if you want it to be and the main trade-off is that you have to trust a custodian but the cool part is because it's an interoperable protocol you can load a cash you app up maybe you you like a certain cash you wallet
Starting point is 01:42:26 the best and then you can choose which mint which is your custodian is on the back end so it breaks it breaks the conventional um not between a custodian and an app so like right now like if you strike for instance you have to use strike as your custodian but if you use a cashew wallet you can choose which custodians on the back end so it's it it separates the front end developer from the back end custodian which i think is really powerful and will result in better competition between these custodians. But yeah, it's just an easy way to send Bitcoin with the tradeoff that it requires some trust. I think there's the cool element of it as well.
Starting point is 01:43:03 Like if you're new to Nosser, you know nothing about Bitcoin. Like I think there's UX that needs to be done on this. But if you could receive like both online and offline payments, it's in a custodian, but there's like tradeoffs there. It's better than trusting like a single Coinbase or whoever. And you have privacy. That seems like such a great entryway for people coming into Bitcoin. It's the first time we've seen in Bitcoin that the cheapest, easiest way to use Bitcoin is also private.
Starting point is 01:43:28 Yeah. And like what's been really interesting to me is like a few years ago, whenever this really started like getting traction, it was very much like Feddy Mint was seen as like the one that was going to be the biggest. And there's obviously been complications with that. And now Cashew seems like, like I basically think everything Kelly touches the man is turning to gold. Do you think for something like this? this, the trade-off of it being slightly more centralized is actually just going to mean that the UX seizure and that's going to be the winner.
Starting point is 01:44:00 Yeah. So Fetamint and Casu are both Charming eCash protocols. So at the base level, they're capable of similar things and they're based on the same principles. The major difference is with Fetamint, instead of having a single custodian, you have a multi-state custodian effectively. So it's like me, you, and. Ben are managing a mint and two of the three of us would need to come together to steal the money.
Starting point is 01:44:29 So Federmint is strictly better from a trust perspective. But that multi-sig aspect, that federation aspect, makes it much more complicated. And so it's innovating much slower. So cash use moving a lot faster. I think it's still early days. I wouldn't be surprised that we still see widespread fetamine usage. I don't think it's an either or kind of thing. But cash use definitely seen faster organic growth, way easier to implement because you don't have to deal with that federated aspect.
Starting point is 01:45:02 One last piece I would add is that's another piece that we're seeing with the other stuff of Noster from a Bitcoin perspective. So like I follow nearly 1800 accounts on Noster. If I load up a Bitcoin wallet or cash you wallet that is Nostr compatible, It means that even though I just downloaded that wallet today, I can easily send Bitcoin to those 1,800 people without rebootstrapping a network effect. And then all of a sudden you start to see like freedom focused Venmo or PayPal that's interoperable and open. This whole idea of just permissionless innovation of just open protocols that are not controlled, whether that's cash you, Noster or Bitcoin, starts to get really fascinating in this whole vibe coding. renaissance we're having where people are leveraging LLMs to develop easier because you don't need open APIs. You don't need APIs. They're basically open APIs for the world. I don't have to go ask,
Starting point is 01:46:05 if I'm going to build an app, I don't have to ask X permission to get your followers chart or your tweets. I don't have to ask banks permission in order to send money. You can mix all those pieces together and you can quickly and easily iterate apps without asking anybody for permission or trust, which is quite fascinating. And I think we'll start to compound in a real way very quickly. It's just, you know, everything just takes time. This is almost like full circle to, we started off with what's happening in terms of freedom money. I think this is the freedom money side of Bitcoin. It's been very cool. I almost feel like we need more to talk about because we've only got 20 minutes of actual good audio.
Starting point is 01:46:47 The good quality audio. If you look at where the internet is trending or like the popular big tech web apps, is there they're trending to this Walt Garden, this siloed system. It's very hard to, for instance, to browse X or Instagram or LinkedIn or Reddit, if not impossible without an account now. And you don't have this open database, this open nature that the internet was originally built on. One of the coolest parts about Twitter in its early days was like, I knew it didn't matter who you were in the world. If you didn't have an account, you could still view my stuff.
Starting point is 01:47:35 And that's just not the case anymore. So I think as we start to like enter this next chapter, this idea of just open interoperable databases, protocols. does not disturb enabled becomes even more important. And I think people are going to start to see that value and they'll build it out. And I think that you have two different pieces here. And we haven't really talked about what I've been focusing on, which is trying to use money to hypercharge it. speed it up and i do that from two sides i do that from the open set side which is a 5-1c3
Starting point is 01:48:22 charity that is uh we take no cut of donations it runs on a full bitcoin standard and we send out open source grants every month sending out to 40 plus countries um and those people are working on non mostly non monetizable open source product protocols and and projects that are like the base layer um and then 1031 which is We started an venture, but we're just a capital allocator now at this point to the Bitcoin and broader freedom tech space. I think sometimes people think that there is a almost like a rival breed between those two kind of concepts, like monetizable projects versus open source non-monetizable projects. And you can have open source monetizable projects as well. But I think if you look at the internet and you think about the internet, the internet, you have two open protocols.
Starting point is 01:49:25 You have the internet as open protocol, but then you also have email, which is an open protocol. And if you look at both email and the internet, they were heavily bootstrapped and scaled up by for-profit businesses. And capitalism is a beautiful thing. So I think you need both. And I think if you think about it, if these protocols are successful, some of the most profitable businesses in the world will be Bitcoin. Noster businesses and cashy businesses. The hard part is figuring out where those winners rely and how that value is captured. But it just goes to reason that you will see very, very profitable businesses that are built on these open protocols and expand them.
Starting point is 01:50:09 I love that. Last important question, it's Good Friday. Good Friday. Happy Good Friday. Lent is nearly up. Is all caps O'Dell coming back? well I gave up caps and punctuation for lunch so we'll see what happens. This got to come back. This will happen after you have to speak clearly.
Starting point is 01:50:27 This will be post-easter. Yeah, this will go on Monday or Tuesday. Yeah, I mean, people are just going to have to wait and see what happens on that front. People take, so just for the listeners that might not be aware, I, I like to post in caps. I think it's a interesting exercise in being concise and I say speaking clearly. And also, yeah, I mean, you actually really think about what you're going to post. I will say that people take it the wrong way and think it's very aggressive. And there's a lot of anti-caps rhetoric.
Starting point is 01:51:23 out there. So it's been a, it's hard to give up, but it's been a bit of a change is good. And it was a nice change of pace to post an all lowercase for the last month or so. The first hour 20 of this was in lowercase. And then it's been on all caps. Yes. I'm surprised, like I thought one of the first, I'm surprised more Noster apps don't let the user choose how they view posts. Like, you know, a Nostra app could presumably switch everything to lowercase if they wanted to. Yeah, but it hits different if everything's all caps.
Starting point is 01:52:02 That could have been a great way for people to monetize Noster apps early on. You could offer a premium feature that lowercase is me. But no one did that. I don't know. It's fun. People should just have fun with it. Life's too short. I have to have fun.
Starting point is 01:52:18 Yeah. Well, I appreciate it, O'Dell. Thank you. Thank you for let me stay. Thank you for coming. It's always a pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show. And I know hard feelings on the audio that happens to the best of us.
Starting point is 01:52:30 Well, I don't think the listeners will share that, but we'll see. Thank you, mate. Cheers.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.