You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 34: Brandon Green - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

My guest today is Brandon Green, Chief of Staff to the CEO and Head of Events at BTC Inc. He started as an intern in May 2017 directly out of college and has been promoted up through the company. He now leads the conference arm of the business, while also serving on the Board of Advisors for the University of Alabama. In this episode Brandon shares his journey into the world of Bitcoin, the growth of BTC Inc, the impact of the US elections on the Bitcoin market and the importance of privacy. We also discuss ETFs and their potential risks and benefits, the importance of smart people joining the Bitcoin community, the impact of Bitcoin on the US economy, the role of stablecoins in the digital monetary system, and the upcoming conference in Nashville. The conversation ends with a message of hope derived from the power of the people to create constructive systems. ►► Join me at Bitcoin Nashville with 10% off tickets (use code BTCIL): ⁠https://glnk.io/lr8q9/btcil⁠   ► If you got value, please like, comment, share, subscribe and support my work. Thank you! -- CHAPTERS – 00:00 - Coming Up... 01:25 - Intro & Background 05:25 - Ads Break: Trezor, BTC Inc. 07:45 - The Growth of Bitcoin Conferences 16:15 - US Elections' Impact on the Bitcoin Market 21:15 - Tightening Regulation on Bitcoin Privacy 27:00 - Brandon's Take on ETFs 32:05 - The Role of Financial Institutions in the Bitcoin Market 34:10 - Smart People & Their Job Choices 39:20 - Bitcoin's Adoption & Perception 43:10 - The Role of Stablecoins in the Digital Monetary System 53:40 - The Audience, Speakers & Experiences at Bitcoin Nashville 1:01:35 - A Message of Hope: The Power of People in Creating Constructive Systems -- SPONSORS – ►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn  ►► Join me at Bitcoin Nashville with 10% off tickets (use code BTCIL): ⁠⁠https://glnk.io/lr8q9/btcil⁠⁠   -- LINKS – Brandon’s Twitter: https://x.com/BranBTC Bitcoin Nashville Twitter: https://x.com/TheBitcoinConf Bitcoin Nashville website: https://b.tc/conference Edward Snowden’s talk from Bitcoin Amsterdam (Oct. 2023): ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fQ7i8q5C8⁠  Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigson Efrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigson Watch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoice Support Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson⁠ Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson

At the end of the conference, we had Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, announce that he was making Bitcoin legal tender in the country. And so then that just kicked off the domination of Bitcoin in the global conversation of money. You can ignore it when it's just some hobby. But when you have a sovereign nation using Bitcoin as legal tender, we're in a different ballgame now. So that event, we had like, let's say 12,000 people. The next year, we had 26,000 people in Miami. Last year, we were a little bit smaller, but we still had 15,000 people. It was a great event.

And now this year, we've moved it to Nashville. And, you know, we're working on some pretty crazy things. You know, I can't reveal everything that we have cooking yet. But let's just say that if we play our cards right, 2024 will be a bigger, crazier event in terms of its impact on Bitcoin than Bukele announcing legal tender in El Salvador. We've got some big things in store. Yeah.

So, you know, it may not happen, but it's looking really likely that it may happen. You know, we're really excited about it. Hello and welcome to another episode of You're the Voice. I've got the biggest honor of sitting here with Brandon Green from BTC Inc., the Chief of Staff and Head of Events. Brandon, thanks for being with me. It's an honor to be here. All the way from the other side of the world, huh?

Yeah, you know, sunny. It's actually now a little bit cloudy in Puerto Rico, but still beautiful, still warm. Thanks for being with me. So just a quick intro for my audience that may not know you. So Brandon Green serves as the chief of staff to the CEO and head of events at BTC Inc., which is the company that is organizing all the most amazing Bitcoin conferences around the world. We'll talk about them later. And also the Bitcoin magazine.

Brandon started as an intern in May 2017, directly out of college, and has been promoted up through the company, managing internal operations as well as media, ticket sales, and programming for the Bitcoin Conference Series. He now leads the conference arm of the business, and he serves also on the board of advisors for the University of Alabama. Wow. Well tied. That's a nice detail. So very nice. So you want to add a bit more about your background, about your journey, Brandon, how you got to Bitcoin and BTC, how you got to where you are today, what led you there? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I started out in chemical engineering at Alabama and knew nothing about Bitcoin, was graduating college, working for, planning to work for Anheuser-Busch to brew beer. and one of my last days in college there was this uh uh fireside and it was between uh david bailey

who you've had on your show and is the ceo of our company um and this guy who was a writer for the new york times and it was a fireside about like how uh trump had just been elected in the united states right uh we were fresh off of that and i being like a very progressive liberal person you know uh it it it really uh affected my worldview let's say and and made me question a lot of what i thought was real and and true and the trend of history and society etc etc and so i found this conversation to be fascinating here's this guy who just like runs a startup media company about this bitcoin thing talking with the guy from the new york times about like truth and uh and so i was like okay i'm gonna tune into this and i was ready to hear this new york times guy just oh you

guys have lost the plot like we need these institutions to fact find and uh it's so important to have the new york times and thank god for the new york times and i listened to him get absolutely dismantled by david bailey uh around like hey your business model is dead media is dying uh the future of media is decentralized uh new voices are going to spring up you guys have not been stewards of of truth everything that you do is a slant and uh you know you're involved in these hit pieces and your job is to tear people down and um and that's because you guys lack uh uh cohesion of your narrative and an understanding of the world around you and so you're going to be replaced by people who have that uh and i was like holy cow

like this guy is on another level and and the thing was is uh whereas i wanted everything from this new york times the guy to be true in the in reality everything that david was saying was was demonstrably true with great pleasure i'd like to introduce my sponsors They helped me fulfill my mission of spreading truth, freedom, and sovereignty. You're the Voice is brought to you by Trezor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013, empowering individuals with an open-source device, enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins. I find my Trezor super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family. Enjoy my 5% discount on Trezor product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code FLAT.

Next up is Bitcoin Nashville. If you're like me, sick of the globalists and central banks robbing you blind through excessive money printing, you need to be at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville. This July, the largest Bitcoin conference in the world will shed light on monetary freedom with a glimmer of hope among a darkening reality of centralized power and control. Top speakers and companies will gather in Nashville to take part in building a new reality. I'll be there too, speaking and interviewing. Head over to my link in the notes for a 10% discount using the code PCIL.

And so it was like, okay, well, he's on to something. I need to go talk to him. And I basically had a free summer until I started brewing beer. And I was like, I don't know anything about Bitcoin. You want me to move boxes for you or something and just help out around the office? I live in Nashville and this is where, you know, the company was based. So I was like, you know, just let me know. And he said, sure, come move boxes.

We got to, you know, we got work to do. And so I did. And so I started out at the company reorganizing the supply closet full of old magazines and cataloging, you know, what we had there. And, you know, kind of the rest is history. I put in my two weeks two weeks before I started with Anheuser-Busch and never looked back and have been in Bitcoin ever since so and learned quite a lot about it since then so it's been a fun ride yeah it's been what seven years now eight years six six plus years we're on our seventh year yeah yeah and so much has happened in those six years yeah I mean it's been crazy like you know

there will be a history of bitcoin because bitcoin is is on this trajectory to you know become the global currency uh so there's a lot to learn about bitcoin like once people start adopting it they have to understand the history of it they have to understand how it got to this point what decisions were made how governance was created how the absence of governance was reconciled and all of that happened uh since 2017 basically you know with with some of it being before then but a lot of the the major kind of things that happened have been since 2017 so yeah we've gone through quite a bit uh it's been it's been a wild ride so far it has and you are serving as the head of events as well in btc inc and i think it has grown

significantly in the past few years right you tell us a little bit about that but apart from the bitcoin magazine btc inc has uh bitcoin nashville now which is coming up on july 25th which used to be miami right it was the biggest uh bitcoin conference in in the u.s and i think around the world right it was one of yep the biggest show still is yeah you know uh so you know it's it's the same conference we've just moved it from miami to nashville this year uh And you had Amsterdam as well. And recently, you did one in Hong Kong for the first time. And I mean, I've heard amazing things about the previous shows in the US. And I'll be speaking there this year. and let me plug in that my audience can use my code for a discount if they want to come and meet me and hang out

and see all these amazing speakers this year. But can you tell us a bit about the previous shows and the expansion to Hong Kong? Yeah, absolutely. So we started the event series in 2019 and there was kind of a fundamental thesis, which was towards the end of 2018, Kind of like I alluded to, there was this massive fork war in Bitcoin where there were different forks that were created that believed that Bitcoin should scale via on-chain big blocks.

And to bore you with the details, that side lost. And so this different ideology or a different kind of path forward was what was adopted into Bitcoin, which was like, hey, let's do layered scaling. Let's keep the blockchain itself maximally decentralized, maximally censorship resistant, and then create tooling in order to allow people to anchor to the main chain and leverage its security without necessarily needing every single transaction to be on that main chain when they're using it around the world. It was decided in 2017, 2018. And it left the community fractured because like this group worked off and, you know, they were trying to build this Bitcoin cash thing and Bitcoin SV and all this other stuff. And especially those groups, this is an interesting tie in, were in Asia. So the Chinese Bitcoin community especially was, I would say, kind of not dominated by, but certainly the main character, one of the main characters of the Chinese Bitcoin community was a guy named Jihan Wu, who was the creator of Bitmain. And Jihan, because he was a Bitcoin miner and he wanted to collect all the transaction fees on Bitcoin blocks, was like, let's make bigger Bitcoin blocks so I can get more transaction fees. You know, I'm very much in this camp. And so it led much of the Asia and Chinese Bitcoin community to fork off of Bitcoin onto Bitcoin Cash.

There had not really been a reconciling of all of that in Asia. But, you know, in 2019, there hadn't been a reconciling in the US. and so we started this conference in 2019 uh and we had 2 000 people in san francisco uh the next year was going to be bitcoin 2020 covid hit so we had to uh literally like we weren't allowed to do it uh we had to like it's a long story but we had a battle with the city of san francisco then we had a battle with the city of los angeles and then finally we moved it to miami where the mayor uh mayor suarez was like bring it on like let's do it we were the first event back from COVID in the world, period. We're the first public event. Uh, uh, and there was a

really special sort of feeling around that, uh, uh, being, you know, the first place where people were allowed to gather in person again and, and party and have fun and be together. And so, uh, that happened in 21 at the end of that conference. Uh, and this was a conference that, that I programmed and I did all the speakers and everything. And so, uh, you know, it holds a special place in my heart too but uh at the end of the conference we had naib bukele the president of el salvador announced that he was making bitcoin legal tender in the country and so then that just kicked off the uh domination of bitcoin in the like global conversation of money and uh you know it's like you can ignore it when it's just some hobby but when you have a a sovereign

nation uh using bitcoin as legal tender we're in a different ball game now so uh uh you know that event we had like let's say 12 000 people the next year we had 26 000 people in miami last year we were a little bit smaller because the price had collapsed and we were at you know like 15k bitcoin prices 20k bitcoin prices and uh uh you know half the industry had been wiped out through the bear market, but we still have 15,000 people. It was a great event. Uh, and now this year we've moved it to Nashville and, uh, you know, we're working on some pretty crazy things. You know, I can't reveal everything that we have cooking yet, but, uh, let's just say that if we play our cards, right. Uh, 2024 will be a bigger, crazier event in terms of its impact on Bitcoin

than uh bukele announcing legal tender in el salvador so uh we've got some big things in store yeah so you know it may not happen but it's looking really likely that it may happen so you know we're really excited about it um and and yeah as part of just the strategy in general we were like okay well what we did here in the u.s is we created this place where people can come talk about bitcoin and they don't have to listen to other cryptos and what i would consider to be wasted time you know we're not anti the rest of crypto we don't hate it it's just like it takes up too much uh air people talk about it too much and we needed to create a place where we could just talk about bitcoin and leave all that other crap out of the conversation like not like this

is not the place for it and so that's always been the way that we viewed it and that's what created this like special uh dynamic and an atmosphere where you could truly come talk about bitcoin and the ideas that underpin it without having to you know every five steps here's someone else's new coin that they're launching that they're trying to scam you with right so uh it's it's like an obvious concept in hindsight but i'm telling you no one had done this before when we And so it's just like, it's funny. So to your point earlier, we just last this past month, and this is May, we launched the Bitcoin Asia event in Hong Kong. And that was the first time that the Asia and Chinese Bitcoin community had been gathered back together to talk about Bitcoin. like sure there had been events around like crypto and blockchain and web3 and you know all these other things that uh surround the the bitcoin conversation but no one had gone there

and cleared all out all that crap and just said let's come talk about bitcoin and certainly no one had done it talking about bitcoin btc you know like they were all talking about bitcoin cash or bitcoin sv or like these other forks and so uh it was a really special event it brought back together the the chinese bitcoin market and um i think it's the start of something really incredible for the region and you know it may end up growing to be bigger than the u.s event uh we'll see but i think that like there's there's some energy there and there's a lot of growth in that region and so i'm very bullish on it and um you know you spoke about maybe in 2024 we're gonna see something bigger i mean in july we're gonna see something bigger than bukele announced

announcing uh el salvador adopting bitcoin as a legal tender i have my guess i don't know what it is i have my guess since the election is coming and since last year you had robert f kennedy so you know i can i can imagine i can guess what it would be and if it's what i'm thinking it's gonna be massive oh my god yeah so uh can neither confirm nor deny but i will say that it is an election year and i expect bitcoin to take a major uh role in how the candidates distinguish themselves from each other so uh so let's talk about that you know there are it's part of my bigger question but let's focus for a second just about the elections and where you think um what the influence of the elections on the bitcoin market is going to be and vice versa what's the

influence of Bitcoin on the election is going to be? It's a trillion dollar question, I would say. I can tell you that in 2020, the crypto industry broadly voted 60-40 in favor of Biden in the election. And what we've seen over the past four years is the Biden administration become increasingly hostile towards the industry, to the point where many companies have had to move out, go overseas. Ironically, the biggest scam of our entire industry, FTX, cozied right up with the administration and tried to guide a lot of their policymaking and decision-making. Once they collapsed, it only emboldened the Biden administration to further prosecute and persecute the industry. And so I don't believe the industry is going

to vote 60-40 in favor of Biden this election. And the thing is, this is paired with, let's say, between 50 and 100 million Americans own Bitcoin today. It's hard to place that number, you know, between Kraken and Coinbase, they said that they have 50 million American users owning Bitcoin. And, you know, you factor in the ETFs, and you've got to think that, okay, that number is massively bigger so not only is is that number bigger but the percentage of their net worth that bitcoin is is only increasing i mean today we're sitting at 71k bitcoin prices tomorrow we could be sitting at 100k bitcoin prices if we hit 140k bitcoin prices which is very much in reason over the next few months whatever percentage that it held if they just do nothing it's now doubled their

percentage of their net worth okay so so we're talking about an asset that is quickly becoming a major portion of people's uh uh net worths they're not going to vote for an administration that is hostile to their own pocketbook like to that's trying to ban the very asset that they're trying to own and and you know preserve their wealth through and so because of that uh i think it's very likely that um these people are not going to be favorable to a hostile administration And so the simple kind of statement is, would you like to oppose that? You know, would you like to maybe signal to the hundred million so Americans that own a lot of Bitcoin and want to see the number go up and adoption go up? Would you like to be aligned with them?

And if so, that may deliver you the whole freaking elections. There have been conversations that have been going on and those conversations have been, you know, very positive. And, you know, there could be more to come. So, you know, the only question then becomes, like, what does it mean to be aligned? And, you know, that's a big question. Like, what does good policy in the United States look like for Bitcoin? You know, certainly protecting the mining industry, removing a lot of regulatory uncertainty and burden from exchanges and custodians and service providers and lightning wallets and privacy enhancements. All of that is super important if you want to keep the industry in the United States. And so trying to map out what that looks like from a executive branch level, let's say, is a very important conversation. So it's one that we're talking through right now. And, you know, there's a lot of opportunity out there to kind of craft really healthy policy and, you know, maybe make some headlines with it. And this is happening while we're seeing tighter regulation forming around taking away privacy from users and by locking up founders of companies, by shutting down certain technologies or just scaring off different companies that are doing business in the U.S.

And all of a sudden they they announced that they no longer are going to be serving U.S. population because of the policies and the regulations. So do you think that the that the candidates, the presidential candidates are aware and taking that to heart? Like, do you think they're actually going to try and win some votes by making promises around that to the Bitcoiners base? I would say that it's a spectrum. So I think that certainly a goal will be to protect privacy rights. I mean, that's such a simple thing to advocate for when you're on our side of the conversation. Now, when you're up there and you get to kind of steer the car and control the policy apparatus, it's much harder to try and relinquish some of those controls that they have on the financial system. And so, you know, in the spectrum of ways that we would want to see, you know, progressive policy around Bitcoin, things like allowing Bitcoin mixers in the U.S., like that's incredibly important, but it's not going to be where we start. You know, like it's not going to we can't we can't launch off with that because that's going to take a little bit more conversation and, you know, understanding of what the goal is here. But ultimately, it's super important, because these people need to understand that the Bitcoin blockchain is transparent. And it's pseudonymous, but it's not anonymous. And if you have de-anonymization of wallets, that's dangerous for people like, you know, people can track exactly how much money you have exactly how you're holding it. And they can come after you and they'll know whether or not they got every last stat from you.

And so you don't want that. It's not healthy for a society. And so you need like better anonymity and better, you know, privacy tools in order to protect users. So it's something that ultimately, like, I'm confident that we can push for. And I think it's going to be important for the use of Bitcoin to push for it. And, you know, at Amsterdam last year, we heard Ed Snowden talk about, like, the importance of preserving privacy. And, you know, I fundamentally agree that democracy and freedom cannot exist without privacy. They are synonymous. Because if you don't have the ability to have privacy, then you don't have the ability to protect yourself from majority opinion. When that majority opinion seeks to coerce you into agreement. So, you know, that's what I'll end on that with. And I definitely recommend people to go watch the 30 Minutes keynote of Ed Snowden in Amsterdam.

It was amazing. And I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes. This year he's talking again in Nashville. He's talking in Nashville. So this will be the first time he's talked to the Bitcoin conference in the U.S. since 2019. In 2019, he was one of our original headliners. And that was the place where he actually announced that he used Bitcoin to purchase the servers that he stored all of the NSA data on as he was whistleblowing that the NSA was spying on Americans. I mean, this is, you know, if you want to talk about, like, issues and fundamental understandings of the world that, like, divide people, like, one half understands this and one half doesn't, the Edward Snowden conversation is a fascinating one.

Uh, you know, ignoring the, the, uh, intelligence apparatus that, you know, has a better understanding of what he leaked and what is, what was the sensitive information and, you know, all that kind of, you know, what was the damage done by him, you know, going through the mechanism by which he whistle blew the fact that he fundamentally made Americans understand that their own government was violating their fundamental rights, like the, the bill of rights, like the most fundamental rights that our constitution guarantees to us it was violating that uh and spying on us that is such an important thing to explain to the population and uh most of the people my age and younger don't even understand that that's what he did you know he's just like

some dude who got in trouble for leaking NSA documents uh and so it's it's very much a thing where like one of the battles one of the challenges of our generation is going to be uh enshrining the values of privacy and freedom and individualism and some of the fundamental tenets that just like democracy and humanism make up into the population once again because otherwise you you get this collectivist kind of mindset that kind of removes all agency from human beings and cycles freedoms and innovations so uh it's important so the other influence that is very interesting is the introduction of etfs and the massive inflows into this market what do you what's your take on that where do you think we're we're gonna see that going my suspicion is

that through um through educating educating the market the public that is a non-coiner to join the bitcoin game through etfs it's it's in an indirect or implicit way to control bitcoin like i know it cannot be controlled technologically so i think what they're trying to do is get as many people who are interested on board um an etf rather than holding the actual asset and then controlling ETFs when they need to, whether it's going to be a proper rug pull or just pumping, dumping. What do you think? What's your take on the ETFs? Yeah, so I have maybe a different take from a lot of people. But also, I feel like if you hear me out, my take is not that controversial. I think first and foremost, that the ETFs are a great

thing uh for bitcoin because uh we're on the path to hyper bitcoinization and hyper bitcoinization means every person in the world using bitcoin in their everyday lives that has to include financial institutions like there is no path that we get to global complete adoption of bitcoin where all of the major financial institutions in the world aren't touching it like it doesn't make any sense uh and so fundamentally like the etf stepping stone was inevitable it was going to happen otherwise bitcoin was going to fail uh like you you had to be able to be adopted there that being said they will rug the etfs 100 it's going to be an attack vector it's going to be a way to control bitcoin uh that's also inevitable and uh you know maybe they'll do it intentionally

maybe they'll do it through government coercion uh maybe they'll do it through just sheer incompetence and like poor key management and they lose a bunch of bitcoin and they try and force a fork where they unloose that bitcoin you know like there's so many ways that they will likely rug bitcoin but the fact that you get like all these financial institutions who are not bitcoin native holding billions of dollars worth of bitcoin tens of thousands of btc like it's gonna rug like uh it's inevitable in my mind and the most interesting data point i have that maybe a lot of people don't have is i've talked to a lot of these etfs and i've talked to the etfs in hong kong and uh one of the things that was important for both the u.s etfs and the hong

kong etfs is that the keys of those bitcoin in those etfs are in the jurisdiction of those countries. So the Hong Kong ETF was not happy with those ETF issuers having their keys be at Coinbase in the US. And what does that tell me? It's like, okay, well, Hong Kong wants all their ETF Bitcoin keys that they have clearly marked and know exactly how much they own in their jurisdiction that they can be at any point seized by courts or police or whatever. Like, gee, I wonder what they're protecting against, let's say. So it's very obvious to me. But all that being said, I think that the important onus on us is now to educate people like, what is an ETF? How is that different from owning Bitcoin? What are the risks? Who are you trusting? What are you trusting

them for? And ultimately, why is it better for you to hold your own keys and not just buy an ETF and be done with it? And that's not to say like, you know, there are some people out there, they're going to own the etf and they're going to be happy you know it's like the the wef image like you'll own nothing and you'll be happy right like they'll own a bitcoin etf and they'll be happy that's great it is owning nothing and being happy yeah exactly exactly and so so like uh uh we have to accept that like some people just don't want the responsibility of owning keys i i get that but those people are ultimately going to be at the whims of of you know other people and other entities and other governments and you know all the other risks that come with it so that's that's

my ultimate take we're going to get rugged by them it's going to cause carnage and chaos it's inevitable uh but from that like bitcoin's going to wreck some of these institutions that try and rug it and uh they will be just further you know gravestones on bitcoin's relentless march towards hyper Bitcoinization. And it'll be a great story to tell. So that's my take. I like your take. It's a very good take. And it's quite realistic, I think. And so your hope or your vision is that we can we as the Bitcoin community should onboard as many of those ETF holders from holding ETFs to holding the actual coin. Exactly. And, and by that, maybe minimizing the damage and increasing the base of Bitcoiners.

Exactly, exactly. And, you know, you have the added benefit of every single one of those financial institutions is going to be learning about Bitcoin. They're not just buying, you know, they're not just creating an ETF and moving on. Like, you know, you are going to be seeping some of the natural sort of ideologies of Bitcoin

into those institutions. And that'll be a net good. You know, even though they will rug, You know, and even though, like, they're never going to authentically be a vehicle for Bitcoin adoption in the same way that, you know, our decentralized movement is, they'll still be a net good for Bitcoin in the end. And it's going to convert a lot of those people that work for those institutions, which is quite amazing in my eyes. I see it a little bit similar to, do you know of Ed Dowd, Edward Dowd? He's an ex-BlackRock analyst. He's quite a guy. You should follow him. And he probably would never call himself that, but in a way, a bit of a whistleblower, because what he did during COVID, when he saw everything that's happening around the States and around the world with the ongoing campaign of the injections,

is that he took his skills from analyzing trends in financial markets and applied them to analyzing data related to the vaccines that were rolled out everywhere and started to follow different adverse reactions and things like that. And he pulled out of BlackRock, obviously. And this guy is serving good today. He's ringing the alarm. He's going to the Senate and giving testimonies and really trying to help humanity understand the damages and create awareness for people who are injured from the different types of products that Big Pharma put out there in the market. And so if people in the financial institutions are starting to learn Bitcoin more closely and understand the values of it, the properties of it, the vision, what it enables in the world, and by that they take their skills and get out of the fiat financial system into the Bitcoin system, we need people like that. So, yeah, hopefully we'll convert some of them just like a doubt to become Bitcoiners.

That would be fucking unreal. One hundred percent. You know, one of my like, I know Prince about it. Sorry, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. I'll just finish by saying I spoke to Daniel Prince about it the other day. And we both agreed on how much the Bitcoin community needs really smart people that come from the corporate world, the finance world, the economists, salespeople, marketeers, because we're one big company, right? We don't have that headquarters and that office and that CEO and that money that is flowing to get that company rolling. We have to do it all ourselves. So every talented person that is joining the team, that is joining the community is actually serving the greater good, which is quite unreal.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, one of my fringier takes, right, is so you look at U.S. percentages of like the overall market in terms of employment and GDP and all these things. and uh you look let's let's just measure from 1971 to to make it like very clean uh in terms of what i'm trying to say here uh before then manufacturing was the the lifeblood of the u.s economy and uh it was all about like building things and making things and post 1971 but then especially it accelerated through the nineties and then post great financial crisis, there was a massive brain drain from all other industries into banking and financial institutions and, uh, uh, the,

the U S dollar industry we'll call it. And that's because due to the Cantillion effect, like the best way to make money, the clearest signal that the market could tell you was position yourself and you're the money printer. and like that's what our society values and so it meant all the smartest people all the harvard grads all the you know all these people they all uh uh left college and went to work on wall street and the reality is wall street moves money around that's all they're doing

they're taking it from one place they're putting it in another place and those are all like jobs that exist because the U.S. dollar is the global currency. And if you really wanted to reform the U.S. economy and make the U.S. like a powerhouse and a valuable ad for the world again, you crush the U.S. dollar and you force people to go do productive things in society again. And in some ways, that could be one of the biggest benefits that Bitcoin brings is, hey, let's say that these ETFs rug. Let's say there's a massive economic financial crisis in Wall Street because Bitcoin's gotten so big and then it crashes Wall Street. Force all of these brilliant people out of the financial world to go do something new. These are the most capable, smart, hardworking,

brilliant minds, and they're all just moving money around. Go do something else. Go build something. Go be productive to society. Go build rockets. Go get us to the moon. Go us to mars you know go build robotics figure out you know how to create a healthier pharma uh uh create better you know spiritual experiences for people help them connect help people be happy help them be healthy you know like all of these things that we could be doing right now instead all these brilliant people are working in money and so you know my final point on that is that right now there's an industry around bitcoin and it's amazing and it's needed but my ultimate metric for Bitcoin success is when there is no Bitcoin industry because Bitcoin doesn't need an industry.

Bitcoin works. It's game theory. You can use it. You don't need permission to use it. You don't need a wrapper to use it. You can just use it every day. And you don't like, there is no company that's required. And so the way I know Bitcoin has succeeded is when no one works on Bitcoin anymore, or, you know, a few like core maintainers and people who are, you know, but basically no one works on it and everyone leaves the money industry and starts working on things that are productive to society again i'm waiting for that day okay we gotta make sure this thing succeeds so uh you know there's a lot of work to do yes yes of course adoption and perception brendan i'm speaking to you on both of your hats uh as a bitcoiner but also as the uh a member of

the Board of Advisors for the University of Alabama. We've seen recently the Ohio State Uni speech by Christopher Penn. He was booed completely when he started talking about Bitcoin. What's your take on this? Where do you think we're at at the adoption and perception scale? Yeah, so I would say that's more than anything like just a market indicator of where we were in that moment. uh you know bitcoin was down a little bit it had just hit all-time highs it came back down

like people were sick of hearing about it and i will say that uh he maybe framed it in the most conducive to be booed way possible you know he was like i know this is unpopular but hear me out you know and everyone's like ready to move before they even know what he's gonna say they're like okay let's let's do this guy so like i think that he brought that on himself a little bit but that being said like there are plenty of people who are sick of hearing about bitcoin from the lens of crypto there are so many people who uh just get pitched bitcoin's going up and so is dogecoin and so is solana and so is a theory like uh bitcoin's cool and now let me tell you about my shitcoin that i'm building over here kind of thing that is how most people interact with

bitcoin and so many like fewer people began with the fundamental statement our money is broken here's why here's how it affects you here's how it's changing the world around you okay it seems hopeless like this is a major issue with humanity and society around the world the good news is there is a solution you know like there is something being built and it's happening before our eyes. And all you have to do is question, what would it look like if a global decentralized currency were being monetized in real time? Like, what would that look like? And then you kind of benchmark those things you'd be looking for and then compare them to Bitcoin. It's that simple. And, you know, if people can kind of do that in their own minds,

many more of them will arrive at the okay maybe i shouldn't ignore bitcoin uh standpoint and sure tons of them are going to uh find out that bitcoin's gone up 150 in the past three months and they're going to be like okay i guess i should buy some and then they'll buy the top and they'll get wrecked and they'll be upset and then you know they'll sell it all at the bottom and then they'll wait and wait and wait and then they'll start hearing about it again And they'll be like, oh, my God, it's up 3x from when I sold. Why did I sell? And then they'll buy again.

And then this time they're going to learn a little bit about it. And this time they're going to be like, okay, what did I actually buy? And then this time it'll go up another 2 or 3x from where they bought it. And they'll be like, okay, I really believe some of these things. That's always going to be a natural way that people enter into Bitcoin. But, you know, in the absence of that, you know, our job is to, my job anyways, like to get as many people to learn about, like, fundamentally why it's important and why it's different before, you know, the market top happens, you know, outside of the conversation of price so that, you know, it doesn't just become a roller coaster they get on, but a mission and a view and a lens of how the world works. Gotcha. okay i wanted to ask you about stable coins so we've seen i think it was this week the former

speaker paul ryan do you know this guy he commented on stable coins he basically was saying how they're good for boosting the u.s economy and the dollar and um your colleague mark goodwin the The editor of Bitcoin Magazine was discussing this too in his recent videos and articles with Whitney Webb that it is how stable coins could be the actual base for the new digital monetary system rather than CBDCs. And maybe it's just being used as a red herring. I wrote about it as well in Bitcoin Magazine. I believe it will be both CBDCs and stable coins. I mean, stable coins will have their role. I'm not sure exactly yet how they're going to frame it, but I'm interested in your take on it, because to me, it looks like the institution is the sugar daddy of stable coins.

And and and I think there it's it's a little bit of a slippery slope. So how do you see that? What's your take on stable coins? Yeah, I mean, I'll try and take off my tinfoil hat as much as possible on them. What I will say is that if I were a government institution, especially one that is interested in spreading U.S. geopolitical influence abroad, I would be very pro any stablecoin that I can exert my influence over. So, you know, what are these people like? What are stablecoins ultimately offering? stable coins are offering a u.s bank account for people around the world uh that they don't have without having a bank account with they don't want to have in their own name yeah exactly and uh

the those people have some level of uh increased privacy over their day-to-day transactions than a regular bank account holder would have uh and that's basically it you know and so it's like this this uh agreement this like unspoken agreement that we're going to allow people to circumvent the very like bank secrecy act like patriot act like the very things that we put in place to surveil uh the entire world we will allow these like these these groups to operate outside of that regulatory environment because it's like fundamentally bringing u.s dollar adoption to new markets where those kind of sensor surveillance regimes like wouldn't be really worth installing in the first place and then whatever happens like you know that allows

for terrorist financing or major money laundering or you know if they start interacting with people we don't like we can just freeze that transaction and not worry about it like that's that's the game they're playing and so you know i see that as like a very valuable arm for uh uh the government And now, like, I want to maybe draw a distinction between the government and America, let's say, where America has ideals and ideas and beliefs about entity and freedom, democracy, you know, those kind of things. like uh it's not maybe great for america because what it's great for is the american empire and um and i think that those two things are very much at odds with each other a lot of the time and so you know if i were to contrast that with bitcoin i would say like bitcoin is actually a much better uh geopolitical tool for the u.s because our goal as a nation shouldn't be to spread u.s dollar

adoption around the world that's a strange goal to have our goal should be to spread like freedom democracy capitalism individualism the the core tenets of american uh uh you know governance that has allowed us to create like so much wealth so much good for humanity so like so many great things that have come out of america like help that system of ideas and governance be adopted around the world but don't be the the single point of control over it like that's not the business that america should be in and so bitcoin allows that bitcoin is a decentralized tool that no one controls uh but that also means that your adversaries don't control it and that means that the the governments or the populations that are adopting bitcoin don't control it uh and so it's

a much freer, fairer, easier to maintain system that adopts the same ideals that ultimately Americans want to spread around the world. And so it's a much better vehicle in that way. So that would be my argument or my conversation around stablecoins. I think that they're ultimately in competition with Bitcoin. I agree with you on that. It's going to be very interesting to see the number of stable coins that are going to be popping in the next year or two around the world. Israel is now working on one. I mean, there is a project for it, an official stable coin pegged to the shekel. Nigeria has a new one, NGN it's called. I think we're going to see more and more nation states experimenting with their own national stable coin. What's going to be funny

or interesting to watch is the like i don't know how much you followed the stable coin wars that have existed with the u.s dollar stable coins but it's not so easy to launch your own stable coin and compete in the free market let's just take tether for example so in the past quarter tether made let's say four billion dollars uh off of just like their u.s uh you know assuming that they're telling the truth which you know i don't even want to get into but uh let's say that they made $4 billion in one quarter. That's $4 billion that they can use to attack other stablecoins. And so the simplest thing to do would be to go to, let's take Kraken, for example. Okay. So Kraken is an exchange. And as an exchange, I'm pretty sure they have both a Bitcoin USDT,

a bitcoin usd and a bitcoin usdc pair okay so uh what they can ultimately do is they can take their dollars they can buy bitcoin in the usd pair all right uh they can then go to the usdc pair and sell the bitcoin or i guess maybe they would do this in the usdt pair but like you know there's this whole mechanism where they can tank the price uh which would strengthen tether over here which would incentivize market makers to uh stabilize the price and the way that they stabilize the price is by selling into uh usdc and then go and deposit the usdc back with circle and redeem the dollars and so they can basically go get uh four billion dollars worth of usdc and uh redeem it and then they've removed four billion dollars in market cap from usdc and then

they can just rinse and repeat uh and so like there have been you can always kind of see like these games are being played all the time and what's especially interesting is for circle at least until recently there was a zero percent charge on redemptions and minting of usdc whereas tether it's like basically impossible like unless you're a uh condoned member of their like minting and redemption process uh you can't even be involved in the minting and redemption of tether uh and so uh they play these games where they will like devalue tether up to four billion dollars because that's their profit that they made where they can kind of like you know absorb that devaluation um and then use that to go attack circle and redeem uh money out of it and shrink

it uh and so that's why there aren't any other major stable coins in the u.s market because all of them are little dogs like they can be eaten in one fell swoop by tether at this point uh uh if tether chooses to attack them so it's it's a fascinating dynamic so you know like i don't know how easy it'll be for them to just do that to another stable coin like a you know a shekel stable coin yeah but it's possible like uh it's possible they just go attack them be like we're not allowing that you know get that out of here so like i don't know it feels to me almost like bringing the fiat war culture into into the crypto space yeah it is but but you know just think about it on its face it's a very easy and simple way to print money like it is it is it

on its face it seems like such a like amazing business model hey i'll go open a bank account in your name without you have like me knowing who you are and i'll just hold treasuries and i'll just take the five percent annual yield on it on all this money that you guys are depositing here uh like there should be thousands of stablecoin companies doing that so why aren't there it's because they're all battling with each other for supremacy in uh the actual crypto space and like tether is ruthless in the way they go after all these other stable coins so fun fact thank you for teaching me that i wasn't aware of that yeah okay i botched the mechanism a little bit but but yeah it's it's out there you can go read about like exactly how it works

super interesting brendan should people who are not bitcoiners yet come to nashville and to your conferences in general like people who are no coiners who are interested or curious some of my audience is like that absolutely you know the the short of it is first of all the bitcoin conference is fun it's a good time uh people are there partying like there's side events you know we're in nashville like nashville is one of the most fun cities in the entire world you got broadway live music honky tonk bars cowboy boots you know like it's fun it's it's like there's a reason we went to nashville and one of the main reasons is like it is one of the most simple fun towns you can go to period uh so have you ever been to nashville

never and i want cowboy boots yeah okay we'll get you some for sure and you'll love it like nashville is so fun so uh that's first and foremost but then second of all you know a lot of our audience every year is in that what we call like curious uh group they're people who have heard about bitcoin uh they're not really sure much about it they're wanting to come check it out maybe learn a little bit of 101 content uh see what see what all the hype's about you know uh and i would say that that's anywhere from like 30 to 50 percent in a given year and it you know it correlates with like how big the market is in that year it's like 2022 50 of our attendees were in that curious group that were just five zero yeah yeah wow and i'm not saying like the curious

group didn't own some bitcoin but it was like they don't know like you know they don't know what bitcoin is they're just owning it because like they knew the numbers going up and so like that is is a massive audience segment and like that's our goal right like we want to teach people about bitcoin we want to take people you know when i tell our team uh our goal every year is to take every single person at our conference and take them one step further along their bitcoin journey so that's someone who has never heard about bitcoin to understanding a little bit about bitcoin it's someone who understands a little to being like okay i can talk about this with my friends. It's someone who is the most advanced technical mind in Bitcoin. And they learn about

something new in their own field, you know, they get challenged on something, they learn about a new thing that's happening, you know, in an adjacent, you know, a lightning developer learns about something on a layer two, or a core developer, you know, learns about this issue on, you know, node infrastructure for lightning that we know, like, all of that, we want to take every single person one step further along their Bitcoin journey. So yeah, it's great for people who don't know anything about Bitcoin or only know a little bit. Awesome. So I encourage people to come. And from this really impressive speakers list that you're seeing on the website, who are some of your favorites? Who do you think is going to give some really interesting talks or information

this year that's a good question so you know there's i would put a like a few kind of threads of especially interesting information you know like call me an industry insider all right i know a lot about bitcoin right so it's like okay well what am i paying attention to and it may be different from like you know someone in your audience and what they would be interested in it's like uh uh you know from my perspective i'm very interested in a lot of the technical conversations around uh bitvm which is this new kind of decentralized computer that can be built inside of like a bitcoin uh um transaction knowledge and language and uh you can potentially build uh permissionless side chains and permissionless layer twos uh outside of like

the lightning network using this kind of on-chain computer called bitvm and so like that is a fascinating technical advancement that was just figured out like in the past year ish, maybe a little bit more than a year now. And there's so many people working on solutions around it. So I'm interested to see all of them. But I would say someone who is, you know, just curious about like, well, what is Bitcoin? I mean, certainly Michael Saylor is a fascinating guy. He talks a lot about like how to view Bitcoin from the lens of investment. And and just, you know, the community Tim Draper is one of the original famous investors in Bitcoin, like one of the first investors outside of Bitcoin, who was well known, who became a Bitcoiner. And, you know, he's famous for buying the Silk Road coins from the US government. You know, after they seized the Silk Road, they auctioned off a bunch of the coins, and Tim Draper was the one that bought them. And so, uh, you know, it was a big statement, uh, and, and, you know, he's been investing

in Bitcoin companies for over a decade now, like well over a decade. Uh, so excited about him. We have Kathy Wood, who owns one of the bigger Bitcoin ETFs, uh, ARK, and a couple more folks that are going to come in over the next couple of months that will show up on that website and maybe create some headlines around it. So much more to come there too. so make sure you're you're plugged into that website make sure you're following us on twitter we're building this event in real time and it's going to be massive it's going to be crazy

oh i can't wait and i'm there too of course of course we cannot wait to have you uh and and do you know what you're going to be talking about yet not yet no i'm actually thinking about different things and uh speaking to your team it's gonna be fun i'm gonna have uh until i get there i'm gonna have my keynote at prague as well about cbdc's versus bitcoin so we'll see if i'm gonna speak about that yeah so we'll see maybe noster as well it's it's something that i'm really passionate about absolutely i'm still tinkering with Noster, it's a very interesting development. It definitely has a great vision. For those who don't know, Noster is, it's implicitly, I will say it's a social network, but it's not really

a social network. It's another protocol where you can develop things like social media networks that are already built in with payments into them, which is amazing. So for people like me or content creators who have a profile on almost any social media platform uh there is one called nostrid where i cannot be censored because it's built on top of bitcoin and bitcoin cannot be censored which is amazing so i can say whatever i want there is a downside though that if i put something up there it cannot be deleted it cannot be edited maybe in the future that will change somehow but at the moment yeah i gotta be very careful with what i put up there so no it's it's Absolutely right. Nostra is a fascinating development continuing to be built, like truly a decentralized movement there. There is no leader. There is no like one person who is the definitive voice on what Nostra is and what it isn't. So it's like it's a very interesting experiment. And there's tons of great Bitcoiners that are fully building on Nostra, fully, you know, communicating on Nostra. And it's a powerful tool.

if you're there uh and you want to follow me or follow brandon i'll put our nostre public keys in the show notes i only have 500 followers on nostre so i need uh more get that number up let's go and i gotta get that number up after the 92k on twitter i have to get to more more impressive of numbers on Noster. Absolutely. Brandon, I normally end with a message of hope for my audience. Where do you see us going, whether it's in the next few months or in the next few years? Where do you draw your hope from? Yeah, I mean, I would draw my hope from people. I think that people can create systems and those systems can be destructive and they can be I see Bitcoin, I see Noster, I see some of the things that are being built by our community

as some of the most constructive systems that have been built in recent memory. And so you can never underestimate the capability of people and creating things that benefit us. uh i'm actually very bullish on the next let's say five years uh especially i think that there uh is enough chaos there is enough negative development that's happened over the past you know two years four years etc uh that like people are reacting to it and and you know those reactions while some can go out of control some can be a bad reactions the reactions are necessary and there's gonna be a lot of good systems and a lot

of good ideas that are born out of those reactions and and you know thanks to what we're building those ideas are not going to be censored they're not going to be stopped and you know the I'll leave it with the old Ron Paul saying which is an idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army, any man. And, you know, we've got some fun ideas to work on. Amen. Thank you so much, dear. Thanks so much for speaking with me, for educating me, for exchanging ideas.

You guys don't know, but we had like a fascinating conversation about half an hour, 40 minutes before we started recording about where the world's going. So thank you so much for that, Brandon. It was really a pleasure to have you on. Absolutely. I appreciate you taking the time with me and really value, you know, the friendship that we've been able to kind of build since we met, you know, a little less than a year ago. So what a period of time it's been.

And it's been an honor to get to know you. Same here. and I'm looking forward to seeing you in Nashville. Can't wait. We'll get you some cowboy boots. You and your mom. I'm going to see your mom as well. She can't wait too.

I'm excited to tell her that she'll need to host you and be ready to show you around. I hope she watches this episode. Hey, mom. Yeah, hi, mom. I'm sure she will. All right, dear. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thanks for watching!