What Bitcoin Did - Rebuilding the World’s Financial System with Bitcoin | Obi Nwosu

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Obi Nwosu is the CEO and co-founder of Fedi. In this episode, Obi explains how Bitcoin can uplift billions by creating new forms of community-based finance, why privacy is the dividing line between freedom and surveillance, and how tools like Fedimint and Fedi are re-engineering what custody means for the world. Obi also warns that if Bitcoin drifts toward convenience at the cost of freedom, it could become the surveillance system it was designed to escape. The only way to protect financial liberty is to build systems that are decentralized and private. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Obi Nwosu: https://x.com/obi or https://primal.net/obi

If it's three times faster and a further the cost, that's 10x better than what I have. That's the thing that will cause people to switch. Uplifting vast swathes of people out of poverty, if we can help towards that. I'm not saying we're going to solve that. If we can help towards that in any tiny way, that's priceless. If you give up the ability to transact privately, then effectively, Bitcoin goes from being one of the most empowering freedom technologies in the world to being actually a tool for mass surveillance on a level that we have never seen.

Welcome to Bali. I mean, you've been here for a while. Yeah, I've been finishing off my, this is maybe TMI, but finishing off my honeymoon. And it's merging into a project that we're doing. with HRF, yeah. But it was a good end to the honeymoon, yeah. It's hot, though. This is probably the hottest podcast I've ever done. Really? Yeah. Outside in Bali, it's pretty warm. Having spent a big part of the year in Kenya, I would say this. Like my wife, it's weird to say that now, but my wife is constantly wearing jumpers here. Really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's not good with me.

Very different level of heat and temperature acclimatization. So, I mean, I live in Australia. I've still never got used to it. I've got like three fans pointing out me right now. But I think the place to start, Obi, you just asked Eric, who's sat in the background, what he's excited about and what he's concerned about in Bitcoin at the moment. I think there's a lot to be excited about. The concerns I have are the ones around privacy devs being put in jail. I think that's one of the scariest things happening in Bitcoin at the moment. But like for you, what are you excited about and what are you concerned about? Excited and concerned. I'm actually very excited. about the fact how people are perceiving and just how boring things are.

Bitcoin has an incredible amount of development happening. If you went back one or two years ago, you had lots of detractors saying nothing interesting is happening in the development side. Yeah. But now we have a ton of stuff happening. Obviously in e-cash and in communities, not just with Feddy, but with chorus and so on, but also other technologies where we have whatever your views are on them, things like BitVM, it's really interesting. I agree.

We're seeing, that's exciting. Arc is exciting. Spark is really interesting as well. Even seeing, there's drama. There's debates between knots and core. And you have the Bitcoin Treasury companies and ETFs. And with all of this, it's still, relatively speaking,

there's not that many people in the general public talking about Bitcoin. It's become, and I think that's not that we're early or that we're late, it's just that we've arrived. We are here, we're now part of the woodwork. It's part of the norm. Going back to a world pre-bitcoin, I don't think it's anybody's mind. It's anybody's sort of psyche or perception anymore. It's like mobile phones or smartphones. They're no longer than you knew they're just part of life. Yeah, I totally agree. And there's a lot to talk about on the Knott's core debate, but this show is not going to go out for another six weeks or something. so we better not talk about that because things will have changed.

But you brought up kind of the adoption of Bitcoin, and that's one of the things that I wanted to really talk to you about is, is global Bitcoin adoption actually happening yet? Because so we were in Africa nearly two years ago. We went to Ghana and Malawi and Kenya, and I didn't see that much Bitcoin usage. Like it was still very niche then, I think. I don't know how it's changed since then.

We're here in Bali. I'm pretty excited to see what people are doing with Bitcoin in Indonesia. But wherever I go, it still tends to be like a niche group of us nerdy Bitcoiners doing cool Bitcoin things. But like I don't feel like it's spread out of that yet. So first of all, what do you define as adoption? I want to see people using Bitcoin, like actually using Bitcoin for things like payments, which I know is what you're working on at Feddy.

But when we were in those three African countries, I know it's just a small like microcosm. but I didn't really see people using it. And I don't know why that is. So I think you, your perception is and was correct. We have spent a long time in multiple countries. So in Africa, multiple countries across east, west, and southern Africa, all across Latin, America all across Southeast Asia and actually East Asia, South Asia, and so on. And in Europe, and to a less extent, Europe and the Western world, working on the ground

to understand communities, understand their perception around Bitcoin. And when we started, we had this view that if you just make the technology easy enough and powerful enough, people will start using Bitcoin for payments. I think what we've found over the last few years is that still Bitcoin is being adopted. It's been adopted worldwide, but it is being adopted as a store of value in the greatest extent. And that could be a store of value from the point, and it could even be before that, it could be adopt to this a speculative assets to a way to build wealth. Because if you're starting from a position of not having that much wealth,

the first thing you want to do is gain more wealth, because that gives you more freedom. Our objective is to give people financial freedom, and part of that is having disposable income. And then using that disposable income to build more wealth, which you can then invest for your children, your family, your health, et cetera. So that still is the predominant use case.

We do see it being used for payments in various circumstances, but they tend to be at scenarios when other things just are not able to work. So you saw this happen not for payments, but for store of value and wealth for even large institutions. Famously, you had Michael Saylor as the last resort decide, you know, okay, damn this,

I'm gonna go off and try and buy Bitcoin instead of see my money sort of lose value. Yeah. And over time, then he started to understand and he's, and he focus on now micro strategy, strategy and so on. The same thing happens at a micro level in people's minds around the world. There are scenarios where you have no other option other than to use a tool like Bitcoin. And then you use it.

And at that point, when you use it, you then start to slowly understand. other aspects about the technology and about the money and then you you eventually move over more and more to a Bitcoin standard where more of your wealth is in Bitcoin you you initially don't want to spend it but once you run out with all other options then you have to spend it because beyond the acquisition of Bitcoin is the desire for a roof over my head and food in my belly and yeah you know good quality medicine etc etc etc etc so It is a progression. We're seeing store of value, a medium of exchange, and then at that point, and people who are big, big Bitcoiners, they start thinking about Bitcoin and how many Bitcoin I own

or how many SATs they own. At that point, you're effectively using it as a unit of account. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack Bitcoin at the same time? Well, by mining Bitcoin with Blockware, you can. New tax guidelines from the Big Beautiful Bill allow American miners to write off 100% of the cost of their mining hardware in a single tax year. That's right, 100% write off. So if you have $100,000 in capital gains or income, you can purchase $100,000 of miners and offset it entirely. Blockware's mining as a service enables you to start mining Bitcoin right now without lifting a finger. Blockware handles everything from securing the miners to sourcing low-cost power to configuring the pool, they do it all. You get to stack Bitcoin at a discount

every single day while also saving big come tax season. Get started today by going to mining.blockware solutions.com forward slash WBD. Of course, none of this is tax advice, speak to your accountant or tax advisor to understand how these rules apply to you, and then head over to mining.com blockware solutions.com forward slash WBD and you'll get one week of free hosting and electricity with each hosted miner purchased. What Bitcoin did is brought to you by the massive legends, Iron. the largest Nasdict listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network.

They're also providing cutting-edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. We've been working with their founders Dan and Will for quite some time now and have been really impressed with their values, especially their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visit irin.com to learn more, which is iriR-E-N-com. If you already self-custody of Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets,

complex setups, clumsy interfaces, and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen or forgotten. Well, BitKee fixes that. BitKee's a multi-sig hardware wallet built by the team behind Square and Cash App. It packs a cryptographic recovery system and built-in inheritance feature into an intuitive, easy-to-use wallet with no seed phrase to sweat over. It's simple, secure self-custody without the stress. And Time named BitKee one of the best inventions of 2024. Get 20% off at bitkey.world when you use the code WBD.

That's B-I-T-K-E-Y.world and use the code W-B-D. It's funny because that is the progression that everyone talks about, going store-of-value, medium-exchange unit of account. I think for me, it's gone store-of-value, and it is my unit of account. Like, if I'm spending money on something, I do think in Bitcoin terms, medium-exchange has been harder because you just don't have the option

to pay in Bitcoin in that many places yet. Like when you go to a Bitcoin conference, obviously, things are easy. But outside of that in just normal day-to-day life, I can very rarely spend Bitcoin. So is this just like a chicken and egg problem with making this an actual currency rather than just a store of value? Yeah, I think it is. It's simply it is that. And so that's why there are different, we've tried many different experiments with different organizations, ranging from human rights defenders to humanitarian organizations to communities, to communities.

disempowered communities and actually two quite affluent communities as well to compare and some i would say there were 14 different types of experiments we had initially then they whittled down to four and now we have and those are our biggest focus and we i would say that the interesting ones have an element of solving the chicken and the egg and then once you see sold the chicken eggs so that people view, view Bitcoin as the mechanism for a medium of exchange. And they start using it every day as a medium of exchange. You can have a different order where it starts with a medium of exchange. I'm using this thing Bitcoin or SATs, actually, because the numbers that we're talking about

it's Sats. Yeah. Using this thing called Sats to pay for things and use things. But I don't know what it is, but it's giving me something I value. And after a while, I start realizing, wait a minute, this thing is going to. going up in value, it's going, and then I start thinking about it as a store of value. So it is possible to go medium of exchange, store a value, and then unit of account as well. But you have to solve the chicken egg. I can give you some examples of that.

Yeah, please do. So this one is actually, actually really exciting. We have created a, a Satellite internet service. Okay. Starting in Kenya. And we're calling it satay net, S-A-N-E-T, like satellite internet, satanet. And you pay for it in SATs. So satellite internet pay for in-sats.

Internet penetration, most of the world is actually pretty good. South East Asia is pretty good and so on. The only source spot is Africa. There's still three, 400 million people who don't have access to good quality, or at an affordable price. And what is the internet, like when these people do have internet, is it like 4G type internet? No, 4G sometimes 5G is over your mobile phone.

Okay. But it's really, really expensive. And so it may be three, four, five, six, seven times the cost of the cost here. For example, in Bali or in the West. And the quality is lower at way higher cost with people whose disposable income is less. The average middle class is sort of start on FT, the other. a day the average middle-class family or person in in Africa has a monthly income according to the FD so I haven't verified this but but this was this is this is that of 200 to 300 dollars a month

equivalent that's the average so if you're paying more for your internet yeah and you think about what you pay for your internet bill right now it's a much much higher percentage of your salary just to get into and even then people still want it because it's so valuable I mean in US dollars I think my internet is something like $50 a month. Yeah, but I don't want you to say your salary, but as a percentage of its salary, it's not the same as someone who says, $200 a month. Yeah.

It starts becoming 10, 20, 30 percent of your salary to spend on internet. But they still do, which proves that it's so valuable, people are willing to spend that. Yeah. So what we do, and the reason why is that people can, the telecoms companies can charge that, they can get away with it. It's hard to set up their infrastructure, so they do. What we experimented with SatyNet is instead of trying to teach people about Bitcoin directly, why don't we solve the chicken egg and give them something that we know a large percentage of people will want?

In this case, it's internet. And then we will, but you can only, the point is you can only pay for this in e-cash is SATs. So you can only pay for your satellite internet in SATs. And that's the only way. And we set up the Starlink like, services in different places. And we've tried in one of the, some of the biggest slums in in Nairobi and also in rural Africa. And we set these set these up. And we've been observing to see how it goes. And it's still very early days. But the feedback has been really, really

interesting. One, people started using it. We didn't explain what SATs were. Their assumption probably is just the token for satellite internet. How do they get SATs? So to get the Sats, there's multiple mechanisms. So, for example, there is, within the Feddi app, we have these things called mini apps. And mini apps are just websites. It's got a built-in web browser in the app. And there are apps you can see now for almost every service in the Bitcoin ecosystem. But they're all over the place.

So you have to have Chrome. You have to find them. We have this sort of mini app store, which allows you to find the mini app that you want. and use it to your service for your benefit. I can quickly show you on a screen. This is a really ignorant question, Ovi. But if you see here, I've got the app open. If I have an app cftelog, this is, this goes to, this takes you to a page where I can

see some of the Feddy mini apps, which are available. And many of the popular ones allow you to swap from your local currency to Bitcoin. So if we go to or to spend Bitcoin, to earn Bitcoin, et cetera, one of them in Kenya, there are mini apps that allow you to take M-Pesa, which is the mobile money, which is incredibly popular in Kenya. And you can, you can send that to a phone number and in return gets Sats and e-cash directly into the Feddy mode. That's very.

So most of the people would use in these rural areas, we also have, the, the, you know, the There's also local brokers who effectively are trusted and so on, and we try to vet them and introduce them to these communities. So people locally can take cash. Can take cash as well. But you'll find that very quickly, most people, when in a service like this exists in your area, they will use that because just within the app,

they click a couple of buttons and they've just got sets in their pocket and they can send it directly using the tools they're already. aware of. Can you do, I don't know if this is impossible, but can you make Feddy work even if they don't have like internet minutes of Starling? Like because you're providing the internet service through this product, can you allow them to still use Feddy if they don't have any internet? Yeah. So when you connect to, and we do, when you connect to the service, you can use aspects of FEDEE, it can recognize that and you can use aspects of FEDE for a period of time. So if you want to top up, you can still get online to top up. Yeah, you can still get online to. And also,

eCache redemonstrated it's like a couple of years ago, but you can send ECHRAV offline. Offline. So if you already have received, you already have a balance, even if your data runs out, you can still use that balance to top up your internet, even without internet connection and then get more internet. And that's one of the powers of eCash.

So again, within the same app, you can see your balance, pay for your internet, you can use certain limited services without paying for the internet as well. And when you pay for energy, you have now full, high speed, high quality internet. That's faster than the internet you get locally at a third of the cost. That's amazing.

So that's compelling. That solves the 10x better. If it's three times faster and a third of the cost, that's 10x better than what I have. That's the thing that will cause people to switch. And so people take, and we put them in busy areas like the equivalent of the high street, the town square, as it were, where communities congregate.

And people will come. come there and hang around there so that they can access this high quality internet they're like doing gig work from there they're starting to study for um for um for um for more more qualifications because they have these and they now have these ambitions to be able to um receive qualifications that will allow them to earn more money and more value most people want to best their life and because of that they're willing to go through because it is go through the hoops needed to because why i mean There's why not I just pay in with impasse directly for this internet? Yeah.

Because well, no, because that's that's that's the price you have to pay. You have to pay in SATs for satellite internet. Sats for satellite internet. He goes, okay. And then they start paying. But then what happens is just like you're now in Bali, your unit of account beyond Bitcoin is the Aussie dollar. Yes.

But you have, I guess you have a few Bali, Balinese, Indonesian Rupia. Yep. With you. Why? Because it doesn't make sense every time you want to buy a cup of coffee to go to a bureau of exchange and withdraw exactly what you need for that cup of coffee. Of course. You start forming, you start holding another balance in that currency.

It's just convenient. And the same thing happens here. You start holding a balance. But then you start holding a balance in sets. And you'll say, well, internet costs you this much Kenyan shillings, which is this many sets. The price stays the same in Kenya shillings. But the amount of sets for it changes.

As Bitcoin's price starts to move, you start to notice over time that, wait a minute, I need less sats each time to start buying this internet. Why don't I put more money in Sats? So then you start thinking this Sats thing, if I hold it for a period of time and hold a balance, I'm able to buy more sets than I expect it to be able to buy. And that's when you start thinking maybe, well, this was the hypothesis. And this was the hope that people start thinking maybe I put more money in, as you said, to use it to. to save in it. And that's what we're seeing. We just, again, very early numbers, very early stages, but we've seen two things. One, large demand for more of these spots to set up. So people want to see it in more regions and more, which is a good point. And two, based on the latest numbers,

we're expecting it to take a lot longer. 25% of the people who are using it are now depositing money for the purposes of holding the Sats. Oh, that's cool. And saving. So, but they didn't start with that. We didn't suggest it. We didn't educate about that. We educated about using it for internet.

And they're still using it for internet as well, but they're holding a little bit extra. That's 25% and that's after only a few weeks. So I really excited to see that because we're seeing there's a different path, not, because the store of value followed by medium exchange, followed by unit account is only possible for people who have disposable income.

If you start with store of value, that must mean that you have value to start Yeah, that was going to be one of my questions. And so therefore, only the world, the majority of people in the world who have no disposable income cannot take that path. Yeah. That was going to be one of my questions because back to the idea of like Bitcoin at the moment is really just a store of value.

Like there's tools being worked on that are amazing and we are moving in the right direction. But for most of the world, people just see this as a store of value. And like in the US, in Europe, in the UK and Australia, like that use case is really clear and really prevalent. But is there like a capital issue in the rest of the world that makes that a hard leap because like you were saying just before we started recording you've got an employee in every continent now um like how are these how are these other places other than the antarctic you did the clever thing and maybe i'm sorry admit that i don't have one continent yeah but like

is there a capital problem that stops these people adopting bitcoin as a store of value because they don't have value to store you mean are employees or no i mean the people in the global south who just don't like some of these won't have enough money to even think about store if you have no value to store, then you can't store value. Yeah. You can't. If you need $10 a month to live and have a roof over your head and not die. Yeah.

You're not going to put in $10 a month. You can't spend $1 into Bitcoin because then you will die. So yes, if you have, and that's the majority of people. They have no, do they live hand to mouth. So, but if we can provide them a service that saves them money. So, so they're now their monthly expenditure goes from 10 to nine and it's providing them a better quality service so they start using that service because otherwise people are living busy lives they're not got time to understand the thing that you wanted to understand yeah so even if something

better is their life if it requires time to understand a lot of people are just surviving um so but if you just tell them you know i know you need um internet i know you need electricity you know you need that i don't have to explain why that's useful and i'm giving you electricity that's cheaper than you have before i'm giving you internet that's better than you have before oh and by the way it's power by, and I'm not even explaining how it's powered to begin with, you start, they will switch because it's better, it's significantly better. But because it, the kicker is, because it requires or it involves Bitcoin in some way, that permeates across the psyche of the group. We're only a stones pro away from gridless. Yeah. It's one of the communities is, in the same community that gridless works.

And what prompted this was actually a tweet I did. I don't tweet much these days because it's just generally a minefield to tweet. And I prefer proof of work over proof of talk. But one of the last tweets I did a couple of years ago was about this idea of a Bitcoin frontier town. And this was a picture. It was me, Eric Hirschman and the guys from Block, Jack and Miles and others. And it was one of the first Bitcoin mining huts, literally a hut in Kenya, in the outback

of Kenya effectively that was helping make the electrical the renewable energy production there affordable is this the one on the lake is on the lake yes but a year before we went there i'd i'd been and there was this vision and and i said welcome to the first bitcoin front of town and it says like the frontier towns in the u.s of old but instead of powered by old age old technology it's powered by bitcoin so instead of um having coal and mining and oil and oil mining, an oil production, you're having renewables, hydro and solar. Instead of gold mining, you have Bitcoin mining.

Instead of having these local outbacked banks, that the local village banks, you have Fedi Mints and Fedi. And instead of roads and railways connecting, these different communities cover, you use the internet to connect with the other. And that was the idea. And that's stuck with me ever since. I love that. Now, on the, on the, um, energy and mining side, you've got gridless working away with that and they're doing great stuff on mining

and they're also now expanding into energy production as well. Um, because they work really health. And, but what, what we're seeing is this really strong tie between the banking and, um, and internet. And that's what we're providing with satay net. It's effective. the other side so that we provide internet which is you get connecting you to the rest of the world and we're seeing this where people are talking about they're now studying on these with remote universities because of the internet screen it wasn't affordable with the old internet now it's affordable we've improved the the infrastructure for transportation because we've just dematerialized

it effectively and brought it a lower cost but we've also the key thing is we can do this at at costs because you don't need to make money from that. We just use that as a mechanism for people to start spending in SATs with e-cash. And if they start spending in sets of e-cash, we earn transaction fees on land as well. We also earn when people custody as well. So we earn custody fees. We earn transaction fees. And as time goes by, they start building wealth.

And as they start building wealth, they start storing that in Bitcoin. And the more they store over time, the more we earn from custody fees and transaction fees. So we don't have to, and unlike a telecoms company who has to make money directly from the internet, we don't. We just have to use that as the chickeny egg to move them over to Bitcoin because as they gain wealth, we gain wealth. And that allows us to be disrupt, always disruptively cheaper than an internet company because we don't need to make profit from that. So why, I know you're not solely focused on Africa, Fetty, you're focused all over the world. But personally, you obviously have a focus on Africa. I know your family from Nigeria.

And now from Kenya. And now from Kenya. So why have you chosen to focus there? Do you think there's an opportunity for, like, I know Charlene Federipo, who's amazing, has written a book about like the leap that Africa can take here. Like, do you think there's a massive opportunity for people in Africa to benefit from Bitcoin in a way that the rest of the world maybe doesn't have? So just to be clear, your first statement was correct. Fed is a company is global.

And I talked about one initiative. And that's really exciting, but there's a second one that's actually the bigger one, which is a global initiative, but we'll talk about in a bit. But what makes Africa interesting, and I think there's three groups I'm particularly interested in. One are the humanitarian groups. And we've worked with organizations that Save the Children, Ref Unite, and they're global. organizations and they help people who who need humanitarian assistance. Another big thing which is the reason why we set up FEDE in the first place and the

reason why we're here on this trek is human rights defenders and we have worked with human rights offenders around the world some in very challenging scenarios. Many of those we can't always talk about so publicly but behind the scenes we're we're helping them where it's important for them to have tools that are very easy to use, but provide them privacy on the ground. And that's again, literally Feddy was set up after an event in Norway, in fact, where we met some incredible human rights defenders. And the idea came about that we can provide them tools.

They have the need for privacy and a real valid need for privacy, because if their privacy is lost, they can be arrested, tortured, and killed. All their family and friends can be. So they have the need. And they are very, very strong communities with very high trust. So it was a perfect fit. And then finally, there are disempowered communities around the world. And a large percentage of those happen to be in Africa.

And then combine that with my historical, you know, my family was from Nigeria or is from Nigeria. my wife now is from Kenya. You see that the number of disempowered communities there is, they're all over the world, but it's large than many other parts. And so therefore the opportunity to uplift them by giving them the superpower of having disposable income, having savings. Having some savings is the beginning of everything. You know, you can't have a house without savings.

You can't have a car. And then with the car, you can then go off and earn more money and so on and so forth. You can't even think about the future. You just have to think about today. And that requires you, if to do that en masse, I think Bitcoin is the most asymmetric opportunity to en masse give people who are currently living in hand to mouth the opportunity to have savings. And once you give them an opportunity, even though in terms of revenue, the other projects that are much more globally focused that benefit people around the world will generate more in money.

but in terms of impact and value to the world, I think uplifting vast swaves of people out of poverty, if we can help towards that. I'm not saying we're going to solve that, but if we can help towards that in any tiny way, that's priceless. The other thing that is really interesting, and this is maybe not so obvious,

but this is for all three of those groups, is that even though they have, don't necessarily make the most money they are by far the most challenging to help and service why is that because they have real privacy needs it's not just i want privacy philosophically i want privacy or i die yeah i get tortured or um i have i have mobile phones that are not the latest and greatest you know two thousand dollar iPhone but they're like really you know fifty dollar um um just about called smartphones, which are way slower than what you expect. Yeah.

I have one of those, even now, that's actually quite a medium range is phone. And it's just super frustrating to use. You have that just to test that the software actually works. Just to test that it works and have the experience. And that's a big thing. I want more people to start thinking about going from aware. Well, first of all, there's a lack of awareness of how outside of people's personal bubbles. The next phase is to have awareness.

And I think there are, a lot of you and others are working to get awareness. But the real phase, and this is something I have to work on every day, is to get experience, understanding it, not just going somewhere, but living that life for a period of time. And trust me, if you tried to live it for a week, you'd probably run away screaming. It'll feel like being in the worst sort of goo-like prison compared to the life of the average westerner.

Yeah. So that's one of the reasons why I have that mobile phone. But for us at Fedi, because we're dealing with these communities, people who are under the Okoforoten regimes, people who have been ravaged by environmental disaster or people who are at the end of the socio-economic scale, you have to deal with spotty, bad internet. You have to deal with really, underpowered devices, you have to deal with real security concerns. And you have to deal with sometimes literacy levels are lower in these countries, issues with eyesight, all these things because, you know, cataracts and so on and undiagnosed eyesight issues and all of the sort of stuff that other people don't have to think about.

And as a result, the app that you end up building, is like this sort of battle, it's this honey badger type app effectively. Because honey badgers are formed in the furnace of challenge. And what often you can see if you don't have that is you have lots of apps that are interesting and they show interesting ideas, but they're not really commercially or operationally viable. They're always sort of science projects. And what we've got here is, and it's still, again, we've got years or just like taking the iPhone or the Android or iOS,

it's years of development to get it to be what we won and you'll probably never achieve it. They've been working up for two decades. But it is, and there's still a long list of things we're going to do, but it's just this battle-hardened device. So now when you take it to a larger audience, it's going to be way more polished than and way more able to handle scenarios that other apps can't. Perfect example is WhatsApp. WhatsApp is incredibly popular app, and it just works almost everywhere. Why? Because they put a lot of effort getting it to work in the global self. So spot the internet, it just works because a big part of the market had that.

But if you just built in the West where everybody has almost always on internet, you wouldn't have built all these features that actually benefit everybody. So those are the reasons why actually one helps the other. What Bitcoin did is brought to you by the massive legends, Iron. the largest Nasdaq listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network. They're also providing cutting-edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. We've been working with their founders, Dan and Will, for quite some time now and have been really impressed with their values,

especially their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visit irin.com to learn more, which is ira-e-en.com. If you already self-custody of Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets, complex setups, clumsy interfaces, and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen or forgotten. Well, BitKee fixes that. BitKee is a multi-sig hardware wallet built by the team behind Square and Cash App. It packs a cryptographic recovery system and built-in inheritance feature into an intuitive, easy-to-use wallet with no seed phrase to sweat over.

It's simple, secure self-custody without the stress, and Time named BitKee one of the best inventions of 2024. Get 20% off at bitkey.world when you use the code WBD. That's B-I-T-K-E-Y.world and use the code WBD. This episode is brought to you by Anchor Watch. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage. And this is where Anchor Watch comes in.

With Anchor Watch, your Bitcoin is insured with your own A-plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy and all Bitcoin is held in their time-locked multi-sig volts. So you have the peace of mind knowing your Bitcoin is insured, while not giving up custody. So whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own silly 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 Anchwatch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage. Visit anchorwatch.com today. That is anchorwatch.com. It's funny because I've never really thought

about that challenge in app development. Like so the thing that came to mind is my probably favorite lightning wallet, the one that I use all the time is Phoenix. But that's useless to people in the global south who don't have enough money because like the first thing you have to do is lock money up for liquidity. Yeah, like that instantly not interesting to the people. I mean, and again, when you say the global self, we're making abroad. There's a there's a middle class. There's a working class. There's an upper class in all countries. Even in America who says that it doesn't have a class.

There's still a car system. It becomes college, which college you went to or who you worked for and so on, but it's an alternative. But so this is the case. The issue is just the percentages. And so in somewhere like Africa, the wealthy class would by Western standards be considered incredibly wealthy. They have servants and they have drivers and multiple cars and redundant power supplies and and a lot of things that the average wealthy person in the West would not have. Yeah.

And they can be, and yeah. And so, so when we're talking about this, we're talking about the people in the lower middle class to, to the working class area. And it's just a larger percentage. But the same problem will exist in the United States as well, but just for a smaller percentage. So we're more talking globally, but for the people who are disempowered. Yes, totally. And so when it comes to, to Bitcoin in this kind of store of value phase, if it doesn't manage to get to be a real usable meaning of exchange, do you see that as failure for Bitcoin, as freedom money? So I think that yes, it would be. And it would be failure in the long run. It will seem like

it's not failure. And it can seem like it's not failure for a long period of time. Because people who have Bitcoin are getting rich while it's still not being free. but they don't realize what they are giving up yeah if you if you give up the ability to transact privately then effectively Bitcoin goes from being one of the most empowering freedom technologies in the world to being actually a tool for mass surveillance on a level that we have never seen yeah and in fact it would actually be worse than the current state of affairs. Current state of affairs you have, you still have cash,

and governments are trying to get rid of cash, but you still have cash to some degree. You have disjointed systems, et cetera. It's not great, but it is the current system. Bitcoin has the option for being free the money, where you have a scenario where you are able to transact privately. You may not want to, you may want to hold it, but you have that ability.

If that goes, and every transaction is surveilled and tracked, then literally that is panopticon yeah and you're Australian almost you will know a bit of history lesson there was um in London there's a place called millbank and it's it's right next to the House of Parliament and it's famous because he's got these very yellow these very red bricks sorry those bricks were all built from a prison and it was it was knocked down and and the bricks were used to make the millbank estate after or many of the bricks were and that's why it's got its unique color but those it the millbank estate was actually i think it was benton who made it it was the world's first panopticon

it's a prison where all of the prisoners can be seen from a central from a central point and they could see every single person so if you live in millbank you're living in you're already in the panopticon the prisoners of millbank and then and off on the river thames you have this uh you have this mooring points for the ships that would take people to the new world to Australia from there. So that would be the wherever you were, you know, you're near do well, you know, good for nothing. You would from around, well, that's defined by the state, from around the United Kingdom, you would be sent to Mill Bank is your last port of call. And then the prisons of Mill Gant would be sent to the long multi-week, multi-month journey to Australia.

By the time they get to Australia, they got scurvy, they're really depressed, they're whining, complaining. And so people see these people arrive. And he goes, here come those new whinging, whinging prisons of Milbank. Prisons of Milbank is Poms. I did not know it was Milbaugh. I thought it was Her Majesty. I thought it was like Prisons of Her Majesty. I didn't know prison of Milbank.

Yeah. There's a history lesson. I did not know that. Well, anyway, it could be Prisons of Maggiary, but I think it's Prison of Milbank. That was the one I had. I used to live in the middle, I could say. Yeah, right. But, yeah.

So getting back to like the, so you were talking there about this, like, potential Panopticom. And, like, I understand what you're saying with Bitcoin. The other potential Panopticon that we go into is like this CBDC world. And I know they tried that in Nigeria. Maybe you can fill me in on what actually happened there. Because I think there was a lot of pushback, right? I think there's been, I mean, there was a lot of pushback.

There were demonstrations, people were, and it was also related to demonstrations around police brutality. They were closely aligned things, but it was a tried. Adoption for it has been basically non-existent, and we've seen it around the world. So, but I think the mistake people make is they think that governments will just try once and stop and goes, okay, well, it's a fair cop, they stop.

No, they'll just try more subtle words. Yeah. they will go and say, well, let's just people are for some reason psychologically do not like CBCCs, but they're comfortable with stable coins. So let's just let them use stable coins and make sure that we're regulating the stable coins to the same level that we would regulate CBDCs. And that works for a period of time. That might work for a very long period of time. But if that does, then again, you're now living in a Pernopticon. you do not have monetary freedom.

And we're also doing a similar thing with AI. We are giving the level of information that we're sharing with AI. This scares me. Yeah, but it's the same with what you spend and what you think. These are both technologies are examples of technologies that can be freedom technologies.

Yeah. Because you can have the ability to have everybody to have super intelligence in their pockets or on their face with glasses in future, leveling everybody up everywhere. so that they take the best actions for their health, their family, their education. It could be an incredibly freeing technology. Having the ability to freely hold and transact privately money

and a money that's hard money that doesn't inflate. Again, it's incredibly powerful. But if you lose privacy on either of those, that's the difference between it being this tool for mass oppression and disempowerment. or a tool for empowerment. But it will be, it'll be very much like, because these organizations think in decades, it'll be like the boiling of the frog.

You put the frog in the water and it'll be a slow process and it will seem fine until it's too late. Yeah. And this is how people accept regimes that end up becoming incredibly impressive. It happens, oppressive. They happen a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, and every single small steps seems small and it's accepted

until you have no choice and you realize that you were part of the problem by not by not stopping it at every step he's gradually so i think we will eventually if we and again you there might be an ability for subgroups of people to maintain freedom because they and it might be that it could be a subset of people around the world choose to go this sort of bitcoin path and use it as a a medium of exchange and make sure they are able to transact privately. And they effectively have this Noah's Ark-like scenario. And they'll be living amongst the other people who don't have that same level of freedom. But what I hope is that that group is as big as it possibly can be.

Because you're really literally talking about the difference between night and day here between freedom and oppression. If you had to put like a probability on which path we actually go down, whether it's oppression or freedom, where do you think we're falling at the moment? 100% of both. So it'll just be people who can live their free life amongst the oppressed.

Yeah, I can say, and I mean, now you've got people like Bellagia giving it names and labels like network states and so on. But I just think it's common sense that right now, we have our communities and tribes. And more and more because of the internet, the tribes are not, the change now from the past is not that the tribes stop existing,

but they've stopped becoming geographic in nature. And they're more philosophical in nature. So we're both part of the Bitcoin court. Well, we're part of the privileged set of Bitcoin, even with Bitcoin, a privileged set of Bitcoin is who are able to travel freely. And I've experienced that now. My wife's passport is Kenyan,

and it's just incredibly difficult and expensive now to travel, whereas before I was without a fort. But as such, I'm able to experience Bitcoin communities from around the world. And cultures are very different, but we have this instant connection because we have a similar philosophy around, and it goes beyond money.

And so I would say that we're part of the same community. Even if I've never met the person before, I can immediately find things to talk about and compare. Totally, I probably have more in common with a random Bitcoin in Argentina than I do my neighbor. Yeah, and it will be the same for footballers, for billion into football, people are into pottery or whatever it may be or anime I'm a big fan of anime again I went to an

anime you're such an episode we did the whole thing the whole cosplay thing it was a lot of fun I love it but um in japan but I again a lot of people couldn't even speak well I couldn't even know in Japan of course I shouldn't expect to speak English but they couldn't speak English and I can't my Japanese is very rusty non-existent I but we had a lot in connection that was a one the guy on the taxi driving us over and we were just saying names of anime um um um periodicals that re-read and that was all he's he couldn't say much more in english but we still could share good good bad bad and so on so it's almost like the end of monoculture in a lot of ways yeah it's it's this multi i don't faceted set of cultures that are and and you every time you join in different

WhatsApp group or telegram or signal group or fredi community you're part of a different non-geographically bound but philosophically bound community and some of those communities will have philosophies around healthy living around low time preference around the need to have the importance of privacy and they will exist is a guarantee the question is is that are those communities in total 1% of the population of that the planet or 99% of the population of the planet. And that's the question. And I think at this point, so if you ask that question, I think at the moment, the majority of the planet will be in the disempowered without realizing it, oppressed, no privacy, part of the world. And I find myself as well without realizing it.

And I'm someone who's very focused on trying to to private life, to the extent that I can. And I'm openly using things like Gemini and chat GPT. I do the same thing. Giving very sensitive information away. And I think, well, but for me, if someone made a tool that was in the same order of magnitude as useful, I would switch. What other potential people would switch for that?

That's the question right now. I think maybe 5, 10% would. I'm hoping we can get that to 30, 40, 50, 60%. And I think you're right there. The tools just need to be as good or close to as good as the chat GPTs of the world. And for the five to 10% who understand... Go to the effort. Who understand the importance of maintaining privacy or having the ability to have a private life.

Yeah. I do think that is showing potential of getting better. I think the stuff that Open Secrets are doing with Maple AI, that's very cool. And Proton have just released their private AI. I don't know if you've seen that. I started playing around with it. I only saw it yesterday, but hopefully the signs of improvement there. No, yeah, yeah. There's improvement. But again, as I said, it's only going to affect the people who care enough. And caring more comes from culture. And so, and culture is passed along through community. Yeah. So again, we saw this in Japan. Kids there hardly ever act up, are very polite, very

quiet. When they finish, they clean up their table after them. Then you go next door to China, to Hong Kong, and kids that are like shouting and screaming and so on. And again, these are generalizations, but it's differences in culture. Yeah. And so if there's a culture, and this is where education is actually, I'm greater and greater understanding of why the importance ultimately to get that from 10% to 60, 70%, percent are thousands, hundreds of thousands of educators around the world by their own actions, demonstrating the, what happens if you take an attitude of trying to look after your body, trying to look off to your mind, trying to question information and don't blindly follow it,

trying to take a low time preference to things and not try to rush, we have to make a million tomorrow but and rush out poor quality or coin like software but try to maintain the low time preference step by step approach the more we have maintained that then the people that will see us will start to ape that behavior yeah kids behave the behavior of the parents of the parents are low time preference then their kids are going to be low time preference and that's a hiding towards towards disaster that's one of the things i'm very bullish on like bitcoiners love uh love to see other bitcoiners having kids i think like the next generation of bitcoin is going to be strong we do i agree we need to lean into and push the bitcoin culture as

much as we possibly can yeah um we should talk about fetti because we've barely spoken about it yet it's come up a couple of times but it's been i don't know two three years since you're on the show when we did the yeah the demonstration there'll be people who didn't listen to that show who've come along since then do you want to just start by giving an explanation of what fettie and fettie Yeah. So let's start with, let's start with FETI, because actually there are two separate things. The names are very similar, but they're very separate. So Fetty is both a company, company called FETI, and it's a technology, it's an app. You should think about this. It's like this is super wallet. So it's chat and money and more. We call them mini apps all in one place. So from one app, I can, And not directly from the app, but using these mini apps, I can augment the capability of the app to be able to accept payments or act like a point of sale or ask an AI questions or whatever I may want to do, all powered by Bitcoin and e-cash.

The second thing I can do in the most core is it's a wallet. So I can hold money and value with it. I can spend. I can see my balance. I can hold value both in Bitcoin and I can have Bitcoin back to USD as well. So it can be Bitcoin and USD, but it's still behind the scenes. It's all Bitcoin. How did you do that, by the way?

Is that like stable channels or something that you're doing? It's like stable channels. We built it before stable channels. It's been around for the first version of it was two and a half years ago. And so we had two and a half years worth of development of that. But effectively, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it does something like stable channels. It's just a market maker taking the other side of the trade essentially.

Exactly. We have people who want the value of their Bitcoin stabilize the USD, called them stability seekers. They want the price to be stable to something that they want, something like USD. And then you have stability providers who provide additional Bitcoin to effectively cover the scenario where the value of Bitcoin goes down to a certain extent. The default is 50%.

So as long as Bitcoin's price doesn't go down 50% in 10 minutes, which is unlikely yeah um then but they then take the upside but if it goes up they take the upside and historically over the last year or so of running it they've taken upside but the other people have got what they wanted if i'm living if i'm if i'm if i'm if this is my this don't have disposable income and i receive um some aid from a from an aid agency and it and i've received twenty dollars worth of bitcoin i don't want that 20 to become 16 dollars and It would be nice if it's 24, but I'm more concerned about the downside because I need $20 to live. So what I would do is I was stabilise it to $20 and I now have $20.

Eight times out of 10 over the last year, that meant that the people have done the other side, they're up. But if it's gone down, they lose. And they're more sophisticated on the other side. They can hedge that risk and so on. They could do lots of things. But fundamentally, from a user's point of view, I see a Bitcoin balance. I see a USD balance and I can switch between the two. But I'm not actually using any stable coin in the background.

I'm not actually using any bank. I'm still just using, it's backed by Bitcoin that's held on the Bitcoin network. So we do that and it's all in a simple package. And then finally we have chat as well because we very, very early on discovered that integrating money with communication, it works really, really well. So from within chat, you initially, you could have conversations and you could also send money, you could send e-cash, you could You could instant message money effectively.

But since then we've added more and more to that. So now you can, within chat, you have all the features that we have, or not all, but many of the features now you expect from a modern-day chat app. So you can set up groups and subgroups, you can do replies to people, you can add attachments and videos and documents because people want to be able to do this. But we can also now do two big new things. that we can set up what we call multi-spend groups. So if in chat, you can just take a group that you've set up in chat,

but you can convert that into a multi-spend group. So everybody in that chat is able to deposit to the money, to the conversation, to the Fred, and it's now collectively owned by that chat group. And then a subset of people, think of almost like the administrators. We have the concept of a group administrator, like in any other instant message,

but we also have a concept of, of a group voter. And if you're, if you identified as a voter, then you are able to vote on the expenditure of any of the money that was sent to that group. That's cool. Yeah. And so, and it can be up to 21 voters, and you can set the ratio.

It might be one of, any one of the 21 or 15 of the 21 or three of nine or two or three or whatever. Yeah. And any, so you set up five, 10 different groups and one could be called picnic, picnic and budget. and or another group could be Scott college tuition or whatever. Lads weekend away. Lads weekend away and then people and all the people who are going get added to that group and maybe two or three

of the responsible people who don't get drunk from the lads become the voters and you make it a two or three. Yeah. And then people just send their money. And in the conversation you could be chatting, but you also can be seeing messages, system messages saying this person is now added this much in and you can vote and expend on that.

So that's multi-spend but it's all a chat conversation because we're seeing that ux is becoming really intuitive and then the last one as well is um and i think this is where it comes on to fediment is something we call um um um federation federation set up service um but i'll and that is a service to make it incredibly easy it's just a chat conversation to set up a full federation oh that's cool and and that's the big one so we're making it and you'll talk to what we call the G bot, which is the Guardian bot. And it's this AI that you talk to and you just say, I want to set a federation, here are the terms, you agree.

And it will locate. That will have to have a whole conversation on because that's a real big feature. And that's part of what I told that the second thing that we're working on, which is to make it incredibly easy for people to set up and run federations so that we see this feature where there are thousands, of thousands of federations or each one are private custody services effectively because we don't want five or six or ten we have maybe 50 60 100 right now but we want there to be 100,000 and for that to be happening it has to be something that people can do while they're just you know

walking to their car you know it should be very very easy to set up and very robust and work reliably and that's something we've worked on that's that's pretty because when you were on the show previously we went through how you set up a federation yeah and it was no way near as intuitive as that is just you know to have a chat i definitely want to show you how that's come a look i want to see yeah um and just quickly before i do that um you asked about feddiment yeah oh yeah let's do that so because so feddiment um for the money side of things uh we use um a protocol called FeddyMint. It was invented by my co-founder five years ago now. And it is the robust the most robust e-cash custodial mechanism. It allows you to hold value, spend and transact,

but the key thing is no single person is in charge of the money held in it. Yeah. And so it means that this is, technically we say that means it's federated. You think like multi-sig is, if you have a multi-sig custody of Bitcoin, that's federated as well. But that's what it allows you to do. And then when you, all the money that's added in to the system was sent to the Fedd-Mint Federation,

causes the issuance of e-cash, which is sent back to the person who issued, who provided the Bitcoin. And that e-cash can be transacted in lieu of the Bitcoin, but the transactions with e-cash have incredible levels of privacy. Yeah. And when you want to withdraw, you don't have to rely on one person for, to respond. It's a federation of people will respond as well. So behind the scenes, Fedi, all of the different federations that are set up are all running these federated

Feddy Mint's services. But from a user point of view, they just look like a wallet. And you can be a member of one, you can be a member of two, you can be of 20. So when like obviously the other eCash protocol that's gained some traction, Kashi, did a show with Kali recently, he's great. And I think these are both amazing products. Like there's tradeoffs to each and like they're both going to exist. But with Kashu, there's obviously just one person in charge of the min. So the risk there is that that person who's running them in rugs everyone and takes the Bitcoin.

Yeah, that's the small risk. I mean, that's the small risk. Lots of people in Bitcoin focus on that. But that's not the real risk of any one of these services, arc or spark or or cashew or liquid. The big risk is that the person messes up and loses their keys. Or their machine blows up. I don't have a proper backup.

If you think about it, how often do people forget their password versus how often do they get hacked by the North Korean hacker? It's a thousand times. It's a thousand times more likely. And we've even seen it in we worked with communities around the world. And we have guardians who are the most trusted people in the communities, the most reliable, most technically capable, and their federations. And still, someone after a few months forgets their password.

And they can't remember it and they can't remember where I saw it. And that happens for those. Luckily, because it's a federation, you can still, the federation is impaired, because it's not fully someone's machine is no longer working but you can still withdraw but if it was only one you lose your money that that is the 99% risk that you should worry about that what am i am i what is my um protection against just mistakes because mistakes are way more common which is why for example i think it's um another thing that we have to think about as bitcoin as we should come about this at the end is um

the insistence that we should try to get everybody to self-custody. I think we're doing Bitcoin a disservice by focusing on that. Oh, that's spicy. But we're coming down there, yeah. I'm making a note because I definitely want to talk about that. And that's just come from hard-earned experience for the last 14 years now in this space. So anyway, we'll come back to that. Yeah, I'm definitely going to come back to that.

But you, like, so understand the risk there of cashew is that it's a single mint operator. With Fettie Mint, there's multiple. Yes. So it protects you against the risk of someone being just making a mistake. But there's still, again, I agree that this is a small risk, but the risk is that there's collusion between the people running the Federation and they run off with the Bitcoin. Yeah. And another thing about the service that we are just announcing now, effectively, which is the Federation setup service, is that we think of every way, to I don't want to be hyperbolic, but massively reduced that risk as well.

Okay. That's interesting. Can you talk about how you reduce that risk? Yeah. So what happens is to set up a federation, historically, a number of people need to come together. We call them guardians. And let's say you find four people. It could be seven, it could be 10, but let's just say four people. They come together and they decide, okay, we're going to set up a federation later and sell up the federation they all download the feddy min software it's downloaded yeah I'm just looking sorry about to sting you by flies yeah looked like a mosquito but you but they all come together and they run the feddy min software they enter each other's credentials

they share them around in a in a chat conversation and it's not me and the server coordinates and the federation is set up and as long as their machines are running and connected to the internet it continues to run if one goes offline or the person makes a mistake or forgets their keys which is the 99% risk just to remember that we're good still you can still use this system but for them to collude they have to know each other fundamentally and they can and collude. So with Fediment, because we have this system where we have both money and chat all in one place, we have the ability to allow people within chat, and actually I'm mods. So you can use, you can have a mini app, which is the Feddy Mint set up service mini app. You can say, I want to set up FedEx. You enter, you confirm that you want to set it up and it will

you pass it your fredi mint identity which is your which is actually a NOSTA NPUB we automatically create your NOSTA identity for your ID and in fact whenever you

open a mini app we can automatically log you in by a NOSTA again without you having to do anything so it will know who you are and it will be able to start a conversation with you in chat in the same app with Gbot. Gbot will contact you saying,

okay, we know that you want to set up. Let's start the conversation. That conversation is, our chat is using Matrix, which is something that's tested by the German military, it's security tested and so on. If a better technology, white noise comes up and it becomes bulletproof and reliable enough in X years, we'll switch.

But right now, Matrix is the best open standard for encrypted, chat that we've seen. So you're having this, you're now having this chat conversation, which you know is encrypted in private, and you start answering some questions. And I can show you on a video, but you start answering some questions. And it's like explaining that we're going to help you set up a federation. You're good with that. We explain, do you want to, you, it's going to be hosted on some hosting service. Are you okay?

With this, what we give you the cost of that, it's incredibly inexpensive because you're going to have to pay for four different servers. Your server and the other Guardian servers as well. And even about it's like $20 a month or $21 a month, which is really cheap for four servers. We then ask you other questions. do you want to charge fees for your federation? Because some people charge, many people don't charge,

but we've now enabled people if they want to, to charge a small percentage on back of transactions to cover the costs of running the infrastructure and it becomes a profit center, not a cost center. And many other questions, do you want to recurring pay? Do you want to, so on and so forth? But it's just a series of yes, no questions which take, I know, one minute to fill in.

It's like six questions. Once that's done, we have separately, spent a number of several months actually approaching year now, finding a number of very, very reliable, very trustworthy, hardcore values aligned Bitcoin is in the Bitcoin space. We call them other guardians, OGs. And they are very, very private, anonymous, but we know that they are dedicated to

And their very values aligned with providing the service. It's sort of people, if you knew where they were, you're like, yeah, I really would love them to be a fellow guardian. And so they have set up a, they've also got to set up on their own servers that they're responsible for. And it's set up in such a way that they can, they have their own G-bots running. And they can, the G-Bot system can then contact others and automatically choose a subset of those, three of those, randomly, and show them to the person who wants to set up this federation. You call that person the lead guardian, the person who's activating it. In future, we'll have, we're going to have the ability for you to see different

guardians by their pseudonyms, and you can decide based on how many federations they've set up, you might want one more less, you might want more. They can also have like a reputation. Yeah, and we're going to make, we have a, we have, we will be put forward a NIP proposal. So it will be all done through Noster. In the same way, you call Bitcoin Mintz for rating mince in general. Yeah. This is to rate guardians effectively. It's a, it's a guardian specific one.

Like looking at things like uptime and. Yeah, and uptime and responsiveness and so on and so forth and rating by other people, et cetera, et cetera. How long they've been around these, all these different metrics and so on. But right now, we just randomly choose and we could out of, out of, out of these. And then once that's done, the different bots negotiate with each other. And then they do all the backwards and forwards that you, we did, we demonstrated a couple of years ago. Yeah. Of passing the credentials around and so on.

All you see is a little of an hourglass for about five, six seconds where it says negotiating, selling up, finding, locating the other guardians. Because there's always a challenge for someone when they set of a federation. Okay, I need to find three other people that I can trust. Well, we've got a set of really, really, really, really trustworthy, reliable people. And that set will grow over time as well because it's a profit center. They earn a few dollars a month for each one that they run. And so if they're supporting many, that's a revenue earner for them. And it sets up a federation.

Because of the fact that all the communications handled automatically by software, none of the guardians actually know, they know that they're now a guardian for new federation, but they don't know who any of the other people are. Because each time they set up a new federation, they always assign themselves. a new random name for each one. So you can't let's out the collusion risk. You don't know the people, you don't have the, and there's no ability to communicate with the others,

other than through the protocol of just running the software. There's no way to, you could be in the same group as someone who you are guardian with, but you won't know. You won't know. And so you would have to have some way to find out that you're a guardian, but the only way to do that would be you have to go to some public forum somewhere and say, Hey, I'm a guardian and so on.

I'd love to rug everyone. Who else is? Yeah, but then you have to out yourself as saying you want to do that. To be able to it, there's no other way because you don't know who the other guardians are. And therefore there's no ability to collude because it's all integrated and coordinated through this, so the G-bot. That's very cool. Is it a potential scenario where you could actually have AI running the Fedomints? This, you're the, this, this has come up a number of times.

And yes, it is possible. The question is who's running. There's still an element of who's running the AI. So, because I was thinking you could give it like a very, we're getting close to that because effectively the setting up and coordinating of, of it is all handled by the G-Bots. Yeah. And even on voting, the OGs effectively can. decide on this type of issue and this type of issue just automatically they can delegate the

action to the gbot they don't actually need to interface with the admin interface if they don't want to they can just give it instructions in general if there are if if if these messages are going out or this stuff or stuff going out i'll just you can you can say yes on my behalf yeah for example so you it's the gbot is not an a i but it is effectively your executive assistant for for for each guardian as effect as this bot which is doing the heavy lifting of the setup running and maintenance upgrading or that sort of stuff because essentially like if the risk of collusion is you put it at 1% if this takes it down to like 0.001%. Yeah. Like that's obviously a huge improvement. But it doesn't remove the risk of losing

credentials to access them in. Is that correct? No, it doesn't remove that. But you have to also remember though if you lose the credentials as long as the machine's still running you're still fine because if you stop the machine then then the credentials come go out of memory yeah and then to restart it you have to add the credentials so you'd have to lose your credentials and the machine you have to crash which is why um a lot of people use hosting services because they're more reliable they have five lines up time and so on etc so the two you see you'd have to lose the credentials and the machine will have to turn off and on and it will have to happen to a number of people, not just to one.

Yeah. I just wonder if you somehow gave an AI a very strict remit of what it can and what it can't do, if you take that risk down to literally zero. I think getting AIs to run it could be interesting, but I don't think you ever get things down to zero. Okay. Because the reality is that you're still the software. Yeah, the software is being run by someone on some computer.

computer somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. You, unless you had the ability to have a fully AGI, autonomous AI, which was able to buy and pay for its own internet, move its software from the original computers that it was launched onto other computers. Give it three years. We'll be there.

Yeah. Maybe give it three months of the way it's going. But then in which case, they will, it will be transparent for us. They would just be, they will sign up as one of, us one or more of the OGs, and they'll also sign up as one of the users and just do things. And just do things. And they wouldn't, we wouldn't need to do any particular programming to make that happen

because they could use the existing, as long as they can operate with a computer and control the screen and keyboard and mouse, and then if a human can do it. They'll do everything. If a human could do it, they'll be able to do it. Yeah. But then the question is, what happens if the AIs collude? Because your assumption is the AIs are trustworthy and they won't collude. And I think that assumption comes from the idea of this being AI, not AGI.

And if you gave like an AI follows rules and AGI might not follow rules. Yeah. I mean, that may be wrong, but that would be my answer. Yeah, yeah. But we've also seen AIs, they can follow rules. But if you don't detail the rules correctly, there's still a risk of unintended consequences. So you say, yeah, so you have to,

the assumption is that it's an AI and the person who prompted it, prompted it perfectly without ever put in an unintended error. Yeah. So are you still, are you still pretty deep in the AI rabbit hole? I know you were really following it closely. I follow it closely, but, yeah, I'm now just, I'm just following it and looking with interest and wonder like everybody else, but it's one of these things where I've realized that it's like a singularity in the sense that once we have AGI,

it's really hard to intuit what will happen after that point. And I'm someone who normally thinks hundreds of years, dozens of years into the future. And I find it quite cathartic, quite humbling. So you can't anymore. You can't anymore. You can't. So it's better to just to focus on on what you can do right now.

Yeah. I was talking to brought up. And hope that, and hope that, hope that it ends up well. Yeah. But also realizing that it learns from us. So again, what we can do to instill cultural elements as Bitcoiners into the general cycle of the world

and the data stream that it's learning from could move the needle in what we end up with. Do we end up with this thing being very sure? short time horizon and very selfish and so on. You probably don't want your AGI to be like that. Absolutely. You know, but you want it to be more holistic in thinking and understanding the benefit of having variety and optionality in the world and thinking in long terms and

win-win scenarios. And then we've got a really good future ahead of us. You were saying you were talking to... I was talking to Rod on the show about this. And I was saying, I'd be terrified to be a 14-year-old right now because you've gone through the very traditional schooling up until now. And you're going into a world that who knows what it looked like in five years time when you're actually

going out into the world and doing things. It's, I think so much is going to change very quickly. Yeah. But let's show me. I think though if you're just born now, it's great. Well, that's exactly why it's right. It's like just born, because after 20 years, it's going to be settled and it's probably all the sort of the messiness

is probably the next 10 years. Yeah. And then after that it's all, well, Ivo it doesn't matter. It's all. Or it's a Nirvana, yeah. Yeah, right, let's go through these videos. So which ones do you want to show me? So, I mean, there's so many things we've done,

but you wanted to talk, let's talk about the thing that we just discussed last, which is the OG supportive federations. So what you're seeing happening here is you basically said, I wanted to sell up a federation with a mini app. You clicked, you added your, and it would have. started up a chat with you with we call it gbot and you're just you're going to your chat session and you'll see that you've got a chat session with gbot and it will say welcome we're going to help you set up a federation here are the terms you accept agree and then you say do you want

six months or 12 months in terms of payment you select and then it will send you a And then you go off. So this is now being sent. And in the background, you go into any lightning-enabled wallet, including Feddi, but it doesn't have to be because you may not have a Feddy account then. And the payment is received in the backgrounds, and it carries on. And then it just starts you a couple more questions. It starts creating your, it deploys and sets up in the cloud a federation for you.

And then it's now set up. And again, I only took a few seconds. And now I asked you what things in your particular flavor, what do you want to, what name do you want to give the Federation? You type in the name in the chat, it's just a chat conversation. What percentage of commission do you want to take for transactions for running the Federation? 0.05%, 0.1% are the options at the moment and you just select.

A couple of it, do you want recurring payments or not? So that, because it's now a federation, you may just want to have it automatically run. Yeah. And then once you've done that, it says, okay, I'm setting up the federation in progress. Now, what's really interesting here is in the background, this bot is communicating to the bots of all the other OGs

who are just running as well. And they could be like having a cup of coffee and so on, their bots running. And it says, okay, I've randomly selected, randomly six free and and do you want to be and then they get alerted because it's chats they get alerted as a chat notification they click in and he goes someone wants to sort of a federation and has asked you to be one of the guardians are you okay to be the guardian and you can say yes or no if you say no it'll go and find someone else until enough but if you say yes it will it will move on to the next

it will say okay i've got one i found three others and then all of them will separately like we'll set up a new hosted Fettie Mint Federation, start it up, run it, and then they will all coordinate with each other to set up for a range, while you're all having a cup of coffee. You won't have enough time for a cup of coffee because the whole process takes about 20 seconds. From the point of you just saying how it fees,

it's gone off, found your other guardians, who are all trusted people from the Bitcoin space. They've all, each one of you has gone off and set up one server each running purposely just for this federation. And then they've coordinated each other and they form a federation. So this whole process here continues on. And I think on the last screen, this is where it's like coordinating, finalizing, and that's it's done.

And what you've ended up with here is the invite code. You can take that, paste that into your Feddy and you've got a new federation set up. And then you can share that with everybody. And from your point, you're seeing updates of what's going on, but basically you have to give it a name, you have to agree to the terms, you have to, and you have to say, you know, how much fees you want to charge and whether you want recurring payments and stuff like that.

In future, also, whether you want to make it public or private, because by default, you make it private, it's just for you and your family and friends, but you may want it to, some of the federations want to be public because they want to allow people from around the world, especially if they're charging fees now, then they might want to open it to a larger set of people. because they effectively become a mini private custodian effectively. And that's the whole process.

But it's all running. It's all federated. In future, we will probably add bits where you can go off and choose who the guardians are. Also, on top of this, once it's set up, you can go back to Gbot. If you want to change the description of your federation or so on, you can go into the admin interface if you want. Or you can just say to Gbot, change the description to this. go off and do that or whatever you want to do, you can do it all by a chat because we find that the chat interface is very magical. It's just, it's the future of UX.

A hundred percent. Moving to being just chat. That's a huge improvement. It's a huge improvement. And we're still going to go a long way further, but with this, we're going to be aggressively going and getting multiple people setting up federations. Even with the other thing we've been, been doing as well within the app is integrating a lot more of Nostra. So we only recently allowed people to start rating their experience of using a federation, which uses there's a nip that allows you to see ratings of different mints, bickramins and kashi mints. And within like a week, we became like number one, two and five are all fredi mints in terms of reviews because there's a lot of people using these but we just haven't been spent a lot of time publicizing actual usage yeah so um so you can go to

bitcoin mince.com and you can see that um the reviews for that are are are growing and and and usage is increasing as well so now that we have this tool and now we've had two years of battle testing in the hardest environments the next phase is um is really pushing to get us many people setting up federations everywhere so anybody wants to set a federation in any country can now do it and here's the other thing behind the scenes there's even more to this because not only the federation set up you need to connect to the lightning network and anybody's tried to connect up to a lightning network and to do it properly realize it's really difficult to have a reliable connection to the internet yeah even so even if the federation is fine the light you know if it's not good it's still a bad experience

so whenever you set a federation it also um immediately provisions you with liquidity for lightning connectivity as well and that's also set up for you as well so you have connections to the light network and also if you want to have stable who locks up that liquidity so we are locking up the liquidity but we uh so effectively become a mini lsp effectively and we can earn um um lightning routing fees on that you don't have to use us but if you want to just be a click then it's with us but you can always after the fact change it and the in going to see Amazon and change to it. Everything can be changed.

You can, in future, you'll be able to migrate a Guardian and you can run it, run it separately on a different infrastructure. You can host it at home. Faddy minutes now being updated so you can operate 30 minutes from start nine, soon umbrella, and you can replace any of the elements. But if you just want to be able to click in a chat and have a robust setup with good lightning connectivity and with stable balance as well, where we provide stable balance so you can decide, do I want to offer my users, not just a bit of my users, not just a stable balance,

it's just a click. And then we set it all up and provision into your federation, the Bitcoin liquidity needed to set that all up. All we've just say yes or no and then it's done. That is very cool. So yeah, we're excited about that. It's just launched. Well, it's actually been, we've actually been working

with communities for this. since the beginning of August. Just testing? No, no, real users. We've been testing for like several months, but we have actual real users paying monthly fees for it since the beginning of August. And that's ramping up.

There's a long waiting list of communities we're working with. But going into late October, early November, we want to then just open it up. So anybody will see it in the app store and you in the, not the app store, the mini app catalog, you'll be able to just select, sell up a federation, anybody anywhere in the world. And one minute later, you can have a federation that's federated by people who are multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries who have been invested to be very reliable people. They're all anonymous as well.

And they all don't know each other. So they have no ability to collude. And they have no way to contact each other without publicly saying and out themselves at which place we would know and they've asked themselves and that would prevent them. So that's very excited about it. That is excited. Is there anything else in here? Yeah, we talked about a lot of this, I think. Yeah, so let's see.

You should close it here. Is it a different tab or is it? I know, it's if you go. Yeah, so the other thing we talked about, I think one thing, one key thing that we've had, but now we've spruce up the interface because it's we think it's going to be really important coming forward is social backup and recovery and this is a very very quick feature but really powerful if you want to if you want to back up your keys a lot of people talk about self-custody but then they take their keys and give it to a

friend or family in which case it's no longer self-custody it's federated custody because you and your friend or family have the same have access to the Bitcoin. And you're now having to trust them. So it's become federated custody. But people do it in an ad hoc way. What we have here is, and we allow you to do the 12 words and backup if you want to.

But instead, you can take your keys and give it to, you can take your keys and give it to the Federation. And it's split into parts and backed up and recovered. And so we have the recovery. Very quick process, you click, you click, save Betty and you save and it saves it and done the backup without ever having to save the 12 words you're able to back up your keys but what's very interesting is though um just go here oh yeah what's interesting is then the recovery um the process is this is so again you have the

ability to you're returning you've you've just bought a new phone off after losing your one in a boating accident. And you can go off and do the whole 12 words, or you can say, I want to go to social recovery. And you now find that file that was created as part of the original backup. And then is the key thing, you go to each one of the guardians. So let's say there's three or four guardians.

One might have said, I don't know you. I'm going to reject it. And other one says, yes, as long as you've got the majority to say yes, then you will, it will immediately recover your keys but none of the guardians ever knew your full key they only had an encrypted even if they colluded with each other they can't recover your key and also remember they can't collude with each other because they have no way to communicate with each other there's the g-bop prevents them from communicating each other anyway um so um so that's again a feature that's

only possible because you have a community of guardians um and yet we've i've already and i've mentioned a balance and i'll just that's probably the last one because there's so many features i already discussed multi-spend but um yeah but on the stable balance you have the ability to see um your bickum balance but if and all federations that are set up with ogee can have stable balance you can also have a stable balance as well and that stable balance behind the scenes is um is effectively using an idea similar to stable channels where you're entering the amount of the amount of the same that you want to be stabilized, you confirm, and then it says, you're depositing this not from the outside world into USD,

but from Bitcoin to USD. You agree, and once agreed, within 10 minutes, it's locked in, because contracts happen every 10 minutes, it's locked into Bitcoin. So if you go to your balance, you'll see that it says still zero, but 10 minutes pending, and then a few moments later, you have 10, in. And so it's a way to convert in and out of USD and have the stability if you want it. That's very cool. Yeah. So there's some big upgrades over. There's some big upgrades. We've been very busy. All these features actually, many of them have been around for well over a year, some of them over two. But taking something from an idea to being a polished thing that works in all

edge cases on sloppy internet and old devices, that is 95% of the work. showing a demonstration in a, like that, in a five-minute video, a five-second video is one percent of the work. 99% of the work is actually making it so it works every day, everywhere. Yeah. And it doesn't work every day, everywhere, but it works almost every day, almost everywhere. And that's now we think we're ready to share this to the world. So we're going to be a little bit more noisy, but more in the focus on just allowing people to set this up really easily and be everywhere, and whoever wants to have their own, have their own private custody managed privately by communities

for the benefit of communities, which, and I think that was the point that we wanted to cover, they can do that. Because I think private custody is what we as Bitcoin is to be focusing on, not self-custody at the expense of private custody. I mean, that is the point that I want to finish on. But earlier you said you don't think as Bitcoin is we should be pushing people to self-custody. I want your take on that because Alex Leachman runs River,

unbelievable Bitcoin had done very, very cool things. And he would, I think, I've not heard your take yet, but be in the same camp as you where he does not think everyone should be self-custarding Bitcoin. He said this publicly a few times. Why do you think, is it the technical hurdles to self-custody safely or is it to do with this private custody? So just as background, I've been trying to get people to self-custody for 12 years now.

I mean, I've been Bitcoin a bit longer than that, but I'm running in exchange right from the beginning. I've been trying to get people to self-custody. I self-custody and or before my loss all my Bitcoin in a Boeing accident, I self-custody. And that's part of the problem, that you can lose your business. Bitcoin in a voting accident. The problem when you come to Bali, isn't it? You can lose your Bitcoin in a boating accident. And so if you can do it, and I've stated it before, but I don't, but I think it's important,

there are free key caveats. You have to be wealthier enough to self-custody because it's more expensive than to do other ways. So it just is more expensive. If I want to store money on what else's a to-she, it's basically free. free. Yeah. If I want to store money in our hardware, if I want to do it correctly, it's expensive. If I want to do it badly so I lose the money, then it's pretty cheap. See, this is why they're a sponsor of the show, so this always sounds like a show when you talk about the sponsor, but this is why I think Bitkey's really interesting. Because, like, sure, there's a cost to get a Bitkey.

Well, then it's the cost straight away. For sure. But I think you can do it relatively cheaply in a pretty redundant way, especially if you're technically not super inclined, because it's essentially multi-sig managed for you, you don't need to worry about seed words. Yeah, I mean, it is. My only concern about that, that it's, so I, the distinction I, and by the way, I think Bikki is a great product for where the world is today, but, and it's, it's better than many of the other options out there, but it's still, still the areas that we have to think about. So let me, if I show you the, the philosophy and then you can see, then it'll be sort of clear

why there's still some way to go we're a bit key from my point of view. First of all, so there's three things. You have to be wealthy enough. And it might seem it's only 50 quid, but then, you know, about to see Alex, Gladstein from HRF, you have to check your financial privilege. Because many people, 50 quid is more than, more than two months salary. So for you, it's nothing. But for many, many people out there, it is something.

So that's one. You're excluding all those people. And you might feel, well, that's, enough that they have fun staying poor they don't deserve it because just by virtual being not poor not more than enough one the second thing is you have to be technically capable of and you because it's only 12 words it's easy easy to store but again check your technical acumen privilege because there are many people who will find it very difficult to secure 12 words and find it just they just will we i i've and and this took me a while to see but after doing it again again

and again with people and people forgetting 12 words again again and again after being told and after carefully storing it you realize that actually is not an easy task for many people to do so it doesn't matter how fancy and simple to use your horror what it is the 12 words just by itself is not an easy thing to do i i oversaw training sessions in el salvador by ibex micado and as one of the people who are grading people where they trained these college students i mean um um you secondary school children and teenagers supposed to be the most tech savvy on how to back up and recover 12 words and we did a final exam and still after going through the training i'll say 10 to 20 percent got it wrong on the backup and recovery of 12 words and that's teenagers who are the most technically advanced

and were trained in a literally an academy for this so there's a big percent of people who just find that technically complicated and it just is what it is there's no commentary on them it's just that's not the way they're wired. So that's the second risk. And the third is it's just scary. It's taking risk. The history of business and commerce is people are willing to give, buy convenience and sell their risk or give away risk or give away risk or reduce their risk for money.

almost all commences, things that make my life easier and I'm paying for it or things that reduce my risk and I pay for it. And we spent hundreds of years inventing concepts like banks because people wants to give away the, they want to, this is what the consumer wants. If you actually look at the consumer, they want to give away the risk of custody to someone else.

And they're willing to pay for it. They want to give away the risk of, and the complexity of custody to someone else. and they're willing to pay for it. And why? Because, and this was something that really hit home for me, when I was running the Bitcoin exchange I ran in the UK for nearly a decade, where one of the people who was trying to get to self-custody for a long time said,

look, I understand the need to self-custy, but I trust you more than I trust myself. And because now, the other side of the coin, though, no pun intended, is... Just on that, that could be their miscalculating risk. Like, they, because you were a private business in the UK. Like, they don't know the risk profile that you were taking. Obviously, you ran a good business and maybe there wasn't very much risk there at all. But, like, they have no way of accurately calculating the risk of leaving Bitcoin with you. It doesn't matter whether they are able to accurately calculate the risk or not.

It's their perception is, and the perception of most people, is that it's safer to hold their money in, a bank than to hold their money underneath their pillow in the house. That's the general perception of most people. And that was a perception 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, people have that general perception. Is that accurate or not, we can discuss it that the cows come home. But it doesn't really matter. What matters is what motivates their action.

And their action, people are voting. They're holding their money. They're going the opposite direction. Right now, they're holding not only are they holding it on a coin. base or a cash app or a strike or so on, they're going further. They're holding on ETFs and they're going further. They're actually giving up titles of their Bitcoin. They're not even buying a Bitcoin.

They're holding strategy or whatever. Things like strategy, which have some relation to Bitcoin. So they're going way up the curve. Their actions are telling you what they're doing. And you see that happening in the global self as well. So we don't need to debate. We can look at this is what users are. asking for why is the question because they perceive the risk and they want to and risk is something

that people are willing to and wants to reduce in their life and so there's a risk around custody and the risk is if i make a mistake i go from 100% ownership of my money to zero instantly now there's another risk and bitcoin and the internet and social media have have increased in the social awareness of the average person and this is the really new new thing the percept the risk of of slowly having your money the base of a time you went back 10 20 years ago no did not talk about it didn't understand it 10 years ago a few crazies so that five more now and it's even governments didn't understand this really they thought well our money's bad but the u.s dollar's good yeah and now you're seeing as over a few months ago a month ago um gold's um

amount of gold being held by nation states has overtaken him out of US treasuries being held for the first time since 1996. Yeah. So that means governments are moving to their government level, um, um, hard money. Problem is you need tanks and bank bolts and so on to custody that. Governments can do that. The average person can't. Yeah. But the average person is obviously going to go to Bitcoin. And why? Because we're all understanding the zeitgeisters move, the over to windows move, then people are all understanding that there is this risk around inflation, which is the risk, a different risk,

the risk of slowly using two, five, ten, twenty percent of your money every year. But that's a different risk, which now that people understand for the first time, they want to reduce that risk as well. But what you're telling them is you've got a choice. Either take this risk of losing five, ten percent of your money every year, or you must self-custody, in which case, you must take the other risk of losing 100% overnight from a mistake. And anything in the middle is not a good option, therefore it's the same as taking, and I'm educating it's the same as taking the 10, 20% risk.

Now, let's put it into a different technology. Instead of the technology of moving value, the technology of moving humans. Transportation. Yeah. Now, there is mass corporate-owned, government-owned transportation, equivalent to mass corporate-owned, government-owned custody, which is trains and buses. And then there is true self-determined transportation,

which would be not just the ownership of a car, but it would be the repair, the building and repair and fixing, of the car yourself, not relying on any third party. So that is true self-ownership of transportation. Then you can have community ownership where you own the car, but when you need to fix something or service something, you don't do it yourself, you use your local mechanic. If you were to translate the self-consultive mindset or Bitcoin,

as you'll say, that form of holding a car is no difference to using trains and buses. And if you're not fixing it yourself and running yourself, it's bullshit and it's basically, you're relying on a third party, therefore it is basically the same. So you might as well do the other thing. There is no difference.

If you had that mindset, how many people on the road do you think would be driving right now? Very few. Very few. It will always remain a niche because it's way more expensive. Actually.

I will not trust my car to go at 80 miles an hour if I fix it myself. The average person won't trust that. Do you know what? I do think there's something else in that, though. Like if we did have to do this and we had to fix our own cars, you would learn to fix your own car. No, you'll be dead, most likely.

Because you'll be going around 80 miles an hour. We'll come off and you will die. Because, I mean, maybe it won't. But your perception is that for many people, the perception is that that will be a big, big risk for me. I'm not handy. I don't feel comfortable repairing my own car. Because if I get it wrong, I die.

So that perception of risk will make me go off and stick to use buses. If you're telling me that this other one isn't a real option, which is, by the way, the biggest market for transportation, most people believe that they have private ownership of a car, but they use their community of insurance companies and mechanics to make it viable, and they've outsourced that. But they don't, they don't conceptually, and they're not lambasted for saying that doesn't really count as private ownership of a car. See, I, and I think we'll never get to a point where that niche of people who fix and repair themselves, whatever being anything more than niche.

It should be allowed to exist, and it's great that it exists. But it will not be the norm for most people. And there will never be a point that it's a norm. And no one's stopping you from doing it. But people just don't want it because it's risky, expensive, and it's technically complex. See, I would never lambast anyone for using something like Federmint to hold their Bitcoin. But many people do.

But at the same time, I would never put all my money into like the Federman because like I don't know these tools have been proven out yet to handle larger. Yeah, but you will, but people will and people do. Potentially. But this is the difference because we've been building over two, three, four years and we've tested and battle hard on it, there are people who are storing millions of dollars in these things. That's a difference because it's not like a project where people are working on. It's a, it's being worked on in very, very difficult environments and this is not just hyperbole.

People are storing millions of dollars on these things right now. and they're relying on it, and they're holding all of their wealth or a big percentage right now, because the alternative will be, for them, not self-custody, the alternative would be to hold it all with a corporate custody. And that's also trusting a fair party that you don't know. And look at the history of corporate custody.

Many have lost all, if you ask corporate custody, why would you trust Cracken or Coinbase? When Mount Gox was just as trustworthy at the time, Quadriga CX was incredibly trusted. at the time, the history of very trustworthy sites at the time, they then lost everything, but the users thought they were trustworthy is very, very long. I don't want to like... But people will put all of large percent of wealth in those right now.

So there are few things. I don't think that Quadriga or Mount Gox were as trusted as things like Coinbase and Cracken today. I still don't think people should trust them. But I do, like, maybe it's because I'm a Bitcoiner, like I would feel way more uncomfortable having a large amount of my money in a Federman at this point. And like maybe my perception will change over time, I don't know, then me self-custody in that Bitcoin. Yeah, no, of course you would.

And if there's like three, the three things you went through are like cost, technical ability and risk. Risk. Risk being the biggest. Like, I think those three things are being vastly improved upon. Like cost, I think you can kind of ignore cost in a lot of ways because if you do have the money, then cost isn't a prohibitive thing. So, like, I understand maybe people who have $50 a Bitcoin, they're not going to go out by a hardware wallet. But I think for $50 a Bitcoin, you don't really need a hardware wallet. But if you have multiple thousands, like maybe it's worth paying attention to.

And then when it comes down to like, what was the second one, technical ability, I think things like Bitkey are doing a really good job. Like, cold cards are amazing and people should use them and people should learn about them and you should continue to learn on this trajectory. But like as an entry point, Bitkey takes away so much of that headache in the sense that it's just a fingerprint. It's on your app. It's really easy to set up.

You don't need to worry about seed words. And then on the wrist side, like if you want to go further out, and again, you have to have a certain amount of money to do this. But like if you want to use something like Anchor Watch where you have insured collaborative custody, like that then removes risk. Because, you know, even if you and Anchorage fuck up some magical way, or there's a wrench attack and you need to send Bitcoin to someone so you authorize a transaction, you are then backed by the Lloyds of London insurance.

Yeah. So I think these tools are being built out. And I think FedExi will be one of these tools. No, no. These tools are being built up. If you look at those tools, all those tools are available to people with a service. a certain amount of wealth and as the tools get better, the wealth levels have to increase.

Yeah. So yes, they will exist, but they will not get down to the price where an anchor watch is available to a billion people in the global south. It's just not going to happen. And that's why I think... And you also said $50, but $50 excludes billions of people. I mean, so you're so... And Bikis are more expensive than that.

But like... Yeah, but it excludes billions of people, straight at $50. Totally. So, so you're saying these things, but you're talking from a position of being the minority. So for the minority, and that's what I said, the minority will only always be the minority who's able to self-custody purely for monetary reasons, technical reasons, and risk reasons. It will always be the minority. Those things won't get down to the point where

8 billion people will be able to have insurance with Anchor Watch and we'll be able to afford a hardware wallet. It's just, maybe we can get to half a billion. And that's great. And I have no problem with if we get to there. But the reality is we will not get to, the other seven and a half billion will, then we'll have to have some sort of collaborative, shared custody model, that shared custody model to share the costs and also it shares the technical complexity

because more technical people within that group of people can take on the technical burden, maybe for compensation for capital. And then finally, it shares the risks because the risk can be shared around as well. And that is, that is going to be the situation for most people. Now we have a choice. Are those people going to do that using public or governmental public custody, which puts them at the risk of the other risk that they become aware of,

which is inflation, capture, etc. Or are they going to use private custody? And that's my point. I'm not going, the market of, the market for people who want to fix the kick car market for for um bitcoin and that's that market will always exist i used to actually have a kick car before and i and i was like fixing and and thinking around with computers with cars back in the day when i had a car car addiction um so that market will always exist and it should be allowed to exist but if the kit car um market dictated the world market for cars then we would all be either using

using kit cars and probably twice as many of you be using kit cars. Yeah. And then everyone else would be using public transportation. Yeah. And it wouldn't be normal cars. And what I'm saying is, but we don't live in that world. And so in our world, the kit car market is still healthy and it's still going strong. But the majority of people

are driving cars or motorbikes. Yeah. And they are getting them serviced by third parties. And they still see it as private custody because it's still owned in a private way or amongst a private seller people versus corporate custody. And the risk here is, and this comes back to your original question, I don't know, but in a scenario where the control of money starts being weakened, money starts being weakened, more people are talking about the risk that at some point, corporates will be impelled or compelled

to close access to money. And then the question is, would something like a bit key still be able to operate in that environment if the device because they could be asked to add functionality to that device for example they could the third key is owned by a corporate institution so they could be compelled to do something as well but they couldn't do anything with your bitcoin like with that single key but they could it could stop operating and that could be very painful for people who have no place to move it to if you if if the if no updates could happen for the software if it can be remotely if the hardware could be remotely bricked etc. If the service that provides the third key had to be taken offline, then where are you?

Well, the third key doesn't matter. If they could remotely break the device, I mean, I wholeheartedly believe that that will not be a function. I mean, well, they could, well, it needs to have software updates. They could stop at the very least. Why doesn't you need to have software updates? Because software, because all systems have bugs. Yeah, but what I'm saying is like in this like disaster scenario where they crack down on block and say you have to do something. Like, I don't think it can continue to operate. And that's what's good about it. You can get your Bitcoin off it.

Potentially, yes. You should be able to get your Bitcoin off it if you haven't taken too long. But as a corporate entity that's public, not private, it can be attacked. And that's the point. The line should not, the line should be between public corporate and private. So, for example, if even these layer two solutions, if those layer two solutions are backed by large public corporates and they're the ones running infrastructure that still becomes a risk because they're public corporates as opposed to private so the line should be private custody held privately

with privacy built in as opposed to it held publicly without any privacy by public corporates because in in that scenario it's public corporate it has to it can be to maintain the ability to have money that you can you have self-determination from you need two things you need it to be decentralized and you need it to be private you need to have privacy you need it to if i have privacy but it's not decentralized okay i don't know what you're doing but i can just turn you off yeah so and if it's if i if i have no privacy but i have decentralization i i can't turn you off but i know exactly what you're doing so if you do something i don't like i can still so you need the two and a public or a cannot offer privacy.

They cannot offer privacy. No, no. So therefore, it fails in that, in the initial objective of getting to a medium of exchange. But the thing that I struggle with is this kind of like pushing the idea of self-custody being in any way a negative thing. Like, I like the idea of this all being a progression. I've never said that, no misunderstanding. Okay.

Well, I take that back. But like, I like the idea of this being a progression where it's, so a little bit like what mutiny did, where if you had a small amount of Bitcoin in the mutiny wallet, rip, it was Fettie Mint, and then as it got more, you could tweak that into like a lightning balance. And I think that kind of thing is nice where it can go from Fettiment to like self-custody to then maybe you buy a hardware wallet, maybe upgrade your hardware security and do multi-sig, and then maybe you want to trust someone like a Hanker Watch. I don't know.

But like I don't think it has to be one or the other. And I agree that having money anywhere that is not a Coinbase type corporate exchange, I think that is going to be a step in the right direction. I just think there's going to be, oh, it's not like a one-size-fits-all. it's just going to be a thing, almost like a category. Yeah, and I 100% agree of everything you've said there. And if anything I've said suggests, I think, otherwise, then need to correct that.

And it's good. The fact that you have that view suggests that you've got that impression for what I've said. And that's not the case. It's definitely not an I-vro. And as I said, we could have a word with half a billion people using it. It doesn't sound like an I- it's a bad thing. Yeah. And also I said that just like with cars, I used to tinker with kit cars, I self-custody myself.

So why would I do that if I think it's a net bad thing? I don't. But I'm also just being realistic. And I don't. And again, for the people who want to go through the progression and have built up enough wealth for it to make sense and are comfortable with the risk of losing their Bitcoin and that they feel that they are, that they are. just mentally and emotionally and just their personality is they are considered and careful people. Yeah.

Because many people in the world are not careful people. Yeah. But if they determine that they are a careful person who measures twice, cuts once, and that sort of person. And they also have determined that they're technically comfortable enough to upgrade software and so on. And if necessary, move over to open source software in the worst case.

And if also they, it makes monetary sense to that. they should definitely do it. I'm just saying that that will always be a minority of people. Yeah. Unless wholesale people change to be all very reliable, very considered people. They all change to be not messy and so on. They all change to be all apt enough to be able to spend $50 without thinking about it. And they all change to be technically competent. And I just don't think that's a realistic it.

So there will always be a number of people will never make it. the majority to that to that navana state that's fair that's the point i'm trying to say i agree with but i actually agree with everything you're saying i think i just think i do think it's important to push people to self-custody and i think doing it in a careful measured way is always going to be the right decision there and maybe that starts with eddyman maybe it moves on but one of the things that i do have a slight skepticism about is um the idea of pushing people to multi-sig too soon because like i I think multi-sig is great. I use multi-sig, but, like, DIY multi-sig is adding complexity and risk to people.

I don't know if they fully acknowledge how much additional complexity there is in that. Like, I think single-sig hardware wallets are still, for the vast majority of people, probably the way to custody Bitcoin. And I mean, specifically, like, you're talking about personal, yeah, personally. And I mean very specifically, like, DIY multi-sig. Yeah, I think for personal custody, DIY multi-sig can be done wrong because it's technically complex, as I said. And but to your point before, I do think that suggesting that it's a good end state if you can do it,

which is self-custody, is a great way to go. But then if you take that logically further, you should say then the good, the best end state which should be self-custody with multisig. Yeah. That is the best end state. But just like you have an uncomfortable because you've just hit your,

what you're basically saying is, I've hit my technical wall and therefore now I feel uncomfortable to go further. This isn't like, I'm not necessarily talking about me specifically here. I'm talking about... But what is the fear? The fear is that people will make mistakes and lose their money. Yeah.

But the same thing will happen in self-custody. But people, it's the same line. You've just, you've just drawn a line at a different place saying, this is good enough, but further, because you can go further again, it's DIY multi-sig using your own hardware, using your own hardware, where you've taken the parts and built your own machines yourself and don't use hardware wallets because how do I trust them? That could be another line, or it could be,

I only use machines that are older than 15 years old before Bitcoin was invented, and I build my, you can take it even further. Yeah. So, but I'm, I'm just thinking. No, that's what I mean. I am agreeing with you there that I do think it's very easy to jump into a very technical setup that like if push game to shove and you needed to recover that Bitcoin, like, are you going to be technically competent enough to do it?

And I think for the majority of view that that line is not self-custody. The technical setup is just the beginning of self-custody, even a big key. You're at the point where it's beyond most people. That's, I guess, my point. But yes, you're right. Multi-Sig, of the niche, of the minority of people who can comfortably self-custodity. And by the way, that's a much smaller set than the people who are self-custoding. This is the thing.

This is what I mean by pushing too much. Right now, I would say, from my experience, from talking to people in coin floor and looking at it more recently, I would say the majority, again, I can't know this for sure. My gut thing is that the majority of people who are self-custoding single-sig with hard-air wallets should not be self-custoding because they're not doing it safely and they are a huge risk of losing their money. We need to do more poor podcast. Because they were pushed. No, but they were pushed too early to self-custody before they were actually ready. And they just got the thing and they were given a one one tutorial. They've now got a hardware wallet.

And their private key is, their 12 words is, they don't. test it regularly they don't they they their private key are they checking that the backup has been compromised regularly um are they doing um are they doing any of this stuff i can guarantee you the majority of people aren't doing the things they need to maintain sanity yeah with a car it's like having a car because i like to put it into things like um cars because people can have a intuitive understanding of this imagine you at a car that you never did an am i t you never checked it yearly after 10 20 years you then use it.

What do you think is the chance that it's going to break down or have a crash and put you and your family in danger? Very high. How many people do you think now with self-custody, how many people do you think are regularly every three months checking their their wallets to make sure the transaction still work and the SSD card on the SD card on their hardware wallet hasn't been corrupted and and their backups haven't been waterlogged because they've kept it under the sink? How many people are doing that? Yeah, very few. So that means they don't they're not they're not yet responsible enough right now to custody and and by being forced and And convinced to do it now you've put them at risk if you haven't done it properly My my father used to say if it's worth doing a job is worth doing it properly

Yeah just giving people a quick training and then not following through and checking on them every day afterwards when it's storing all their world's value is doing them a disservice so we are not so most people are not self-custaining properly right now My camera has overheated in Bali, so we're down to two. But interestingly, I was talking to Checkmate about this this morning. You were talking to a mate from Czech Republic. He's actually called Checkman. I know. Okay. It's a terrible joke.

Terrible joke. But we were talking about a number of people that actually hold self-custody Bitcoin. And he sent me a chart that's like he puts out, which is the number is just under 25 million in, like, individual addresses that hold more than. and $100 of Bitcoin. And like, obviously we know that between me and you, we've probably got 100 addresses. Like, so the actual number of people self-custody in Bitcoin might be like less than two million, three million. Yeah.

I really don't think that number is very high. And I would say out of those, probably 80% aren't doing it properly and securely. So they're putting their value at risk. We've seen it with people, the number of people, I just came from Hong Kong, Bitcoin. Asia and it was actually surprised for me because last year it was basically an an orcoyne casino this year was actually a Bitcoin conference that was very a big change but still the vast majority there must store the number of people who were just like here's my mobile phone with all of my you know with like a hundred thousand dollars worth for Bitcoin on it don't do

that no but this is what this was the norm yeah so this is what most people are doing yeah this is what most people doing because they've been told to self-custody without being told properly it's like teaching to drive a car without giving them driving lessons. So you should, and it's, so you're doing it. That's why I mean by, yes, we should aim for it. But aiming for it isn't just throwing as many people, here's a car and getting people in, that ends in disaster. It's, you have to then do it properly.

If it's worth doing a job, it's worth doing it properly. And when you realize that what it needs to really train someone to properly do it and then test them regularly to make sure, because you're talking about holding your value, then you realize it's going to always be a niche. Yeah. Yeah, public service announcement, don't keep $100,000 on a phone and go and watch Bitcoin Sessions videos. Yeah, but that doesn't stop people doing it. Saying that, you now need to go off and train them and check.

And you can be committed to do that and run courses and check back in them for every year. I mean, personal responsibility at some point, though. But. Yeah, and that's, that's not, I don't like that. I've trained you, told you to do something. And then when you go and crash, you go, that is personal responsibility. Yeah, but I mean, it's your money. You go and look after it properly.

Okay, so you're a kid. You'll just say, here, just be careful. knives and that's it but then then they cut themselves oh personal responsibility no it's different because that's a kid like we're talking about adults here no no but that's the way there's a difference of you i think that everybody's a kid when it comes to something they don't know if it comes to driving a flying a plane and i'm a kid i don't know it i need to to be able to fly a plane i need to be trained and if i'm told by the teacher and so i go to a pilot school and if the pilot school just says just get in the plane it's really important to do and then i crash there

then I didn't have the tools to know if the experts are telling me that that's what I should have done and then I crash, the experts should take some responsibility then. Well, yeah, I mean, you would be arrested as a pilot trainer if that's the way you taught people. It comes down to messaging maybe. It's like people should learn to do this thing. I'm not saying you should go and set up a hardware wallet, put all your money on it and like as in from scratch today do that. But like go learn about it, get comfortable with it, put some money in. like backup. I go through all the steps you need to go through, know that you can actually do it properly. And then when you're comfortable,

you should be putting it in your mind. But is that how most people are taught? Do you think that's how most people learn how to use a hard or whatever? Or there's a someone who's really busy, they call a friend, he goes, use treasur, use ledger, use Bitcoin, and yeah, yeah, yeah, just to go off and do it. And you should do it. And that's it.

They're not really taught when this is something that you're effectively becoming your own bank, you're becoming your own coin base, you're becoming your own JPMorgan. And the education is some friend hurriedly tells you in a second, oh yeah, yeah, go off and do it. Yeah. And that's putting them at risk. And it's not intentional. No, it's not intentional.

But that's the end result. Most people are not, having been someone who's helped people custody millions of dollars, over a billion dollars of Bitcoin over the last 12 years, most people have no idea how to do it really properly. Yeah. Well, that's an issue. Maybe we need to do more podcasts. More podcasts, more education, and serious education.

I love what people like BTC sessions are doing, where they have these universities. And people, because if you really want to do it, you pay money because to do it properly is not just something you do quickly over a phone. You have to be trained to do this, just like you have to be trained to fly a plane or drive a car. No, I think the stuff BTC sessions does is great.

Yeah, and others are doing that. Of course. Yeah. But we've run out of cameras. It's getting too hot here. We'll leave it there for now, Oby. The pool and reflexo. I'm going to get in that pool right now.

Then go for a massage. I appreciate you, man. That was a lot of fun. Thanks very much. Thank you. See you.