You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 83: Marty Bent - Freedom Tech vs. The State

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

My guest today is Marty Bent, a writer, investor, and one of the most influential voices in the Bitcoin media ecosystem. As the founder of the popular podcast and newsletter TFTC (Truth for the Commoner) and managing partner at Ten31, a venture firm investing exclusively in Bitcoin infrastructure, Marty has helped shape the conversation around Bitcoin’s future for nearly a decade. In this episode, Marty walks us through his journey from unemployed blogger to leading Bitcoin commentator and how he's leveraging AI to scale his media output across platforms. We explore the impact of open protocols like Nostr, the potential of podcasting 2.0, and the need for content authentication in the age of deepfakes. Marty also shares how Bitcoin is solving real-world energy problems, from stranded power to nuclear buildouts, and why self-custody and decentralization remain essential to Bitcoin’s resilience.► This episode is part of the "Bitcoin Vegas 2025 Special" in collaboration with Ben Samocha, Founder of Israel’s CryptoJungle and Crypto Talks podcast.► If you got value, please like, comment, share, follow and support my work. Thank you!-- SPONSORS & AFFILIATES --►► 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 ►► Get 10% off on Augmented NAC, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (Note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD)►► Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat ►► Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat ►► Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events -- LINKS –Marty’s Twitter: https://x.com/MartyBent TFTC Twitter: https://x.com/TFTC21 TFTC Website: https://www.tftc.io/ Ten31’s Website: https://ten31.vc/ Efrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigsonBen's Twitter: https://x.com/bensamocha Ben's LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-samocha-728147153/ Watch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson   ⁠Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson-- CHAPTERS –00:00 Coming Up...01:10 Welcome from Bitcoin Vegas01:58 Introducing Marty Bent03:19 Vegas, gambling, and societal decay04:50 The origins of TFTC and Marty's media journey09:00 Using AI to grow and streamline content14:22 Onboarding newcomers through relatable content15:56 Open-source media, Podcasting 2.0, and Nostr20:36 Content authenticity in the AI age25:05 Most influential podcast guests for Marty30:08 Why Ten31 invests only in Bitcoin infrastructure35:24 Bitcoin mining, climate realism, and energy use43:53 Biggest threats to Bitcoin: apathy and custody risks49:15 What trends will accelerate Bitcoin adoption54:29 Bitcoin gifting stories and early advocacy56:17 What gives Marty hope

Bitcoin is magical to people the first time they use it. Obviously, there are some times, depending on what app you use, where it's not magical, but the potential for the first experience to be magical is way higher than it was four years ago. The problems of inflation and the affordability crisis are going to continue to rise, which could lead to massive disruptions to the job market, which could make people even more desperate and seeking answers. Bitcoin truly is the best money that man has ever come into contact with. Everybody's going to use it, including institutions, including governments. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think it's

important for people to make sure they do the work to make sure they're holding their keys and understanding what's going on at the very least. Don't cater to ESG because they don't really care about energy or any of that. That's not their intention. That's their facade behind the power they would like to exert over you. You can't be against Bitcoin. It's like being against the cell phone or the internet. Hello and welcome from Bitcoin Vegas 2025. I'm Efrat with You're The Voice.

And I'm Ben from CryptoTalks. And we're here today at a collaboration. We're going to interview a series of guests here in Vegas, and we'll introduce each one of them for you, and then we'll roll with the episodes. The episodes are going to be released on both Your The Voice and Cripple Talk, so make sure you're subscribed to both. Our next guest is Marty Bent.

Marty is a Bitcoin investor, writer, and media entrepreneur, best known as the managing partner of 1031, a venture capital firm focused on Bitcoin infrastructure. He is also the founder of TFTC, where he publishes widely read Bitcoin newsletter and hosts the TFTC podcast. Marty Bent, thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you for having me.

Off the plane into the suite here. Into the suite, into the dream world of Vegas. First time here. Very excited this is the way I get to start my trip though. Unbelievable. We are too. We are ecstatic to have you on. Thanks for agreeing.

Like this is a dream come true. Yeah, this is really a great opportunity to say it on record as well. Thank you so much for your content, even though it should be in the end of the podcast. We'll say it in the beginning. We'll say it in the beginning. Thank you. We really appreciate you and your work. And we're happy to be in a place where we get to ask you some questions about it as well.

You're an inspiration and we'll stop embarrassing you for now. Okay, so we're in Vegas, Sin City, where people gamble and play to earn fiat. what a place to do a bitcoin conference moronic isn't it yes so that makes me like wonder how this contrast is representing the state of society today like the the milking of energy time and fiat from people on all those slot machines like what does it make you feel that contrast between the way humanity is today and what we're seeing here in vegas i like to be optimistic and hope that having a bitcoin conference in the heart of the degenerate high block beam of light yeah it's like a hey here's uh here's maybe where you should go but

no i mean i was i should have expected it but i hopped off the airplane there's like slots and machines and it's uh they literally try to grab your attention as soon as you get off and like come over here and spend your money and gamble and i know i do think it is poetic and a very interesting way of the sense of like bitcoin is a way for people to get away from that and exactly when i worry about those that here in the united states particularly like we were just talking about philadelphia philadelphia legalized gambling the last 10 or 15 years and there has been this culture of gambling by the uh by the sports arenas which are all congregated together down in south philly and i don't know just this whole culture of downloading a sports

app or going to a sports book in person and trying to make it all back a parlay or a bet seems to be increasing and i think that's a sign of a a broader and deeper rot in society which is people feel like they can't make enough money going to work and doing something honest and something with integrity and they're forced to go try and gamble um to make it all back or to actually get ahead which is sad yeah absolutely yeah i totally agree with you too so So I want to start with you, or we want to start with the genesis of Tales from the Crypt. Why did it start? How did it start? Tell us more about the content creation process and your role.

So it started almost a year. We're coming out, we're two weeks away from the eight-year anniversary, the first ever newsletter that I sent out. So that's how it started. It started as a newsletter. It was June of 2017. and at that point in that bitcoin cycle the price had gone up it had gone up above a thousand dollars right below and was getting ready to go back up again and my friends and family knew that

i was the bitcoin guy uh i'd been talking obsessively about bitcoin for about four years at that point and i was getting an influx of emails and texts and calls and i was like you let's stop reaching out to me via these avenues i'll reach out to you via this newsletter so i started the newsletter i can have 15 to 20 emails on it of friends and family sent it out on june 8th 2017 then started sharing it on twitter i think i had like 400 followers or something like that but got the attention of people in the space and they started retweeting the links and the list started growing and over the course of that summer I met somebody at Barstool Sports in New York where I was living at the time and had the opportunity to get a drink with him and he had

read the newsletter was interested about Bitcoin and tweeting about it and so I said let's meet up and I was sort of I think subconsciously vying for like a writing a blogging job at Barstool at the fine but i met the guy and i was like hey bar still interested in somebody to write about bitcoin while the price is going up and he's like no we're okay blogging sort of going uh by the wayside but you should start a podcast i was like that sounds like a great idea i have no idea how to do that can you help me and he said yes he was gracious enough to say yes so over the course of the summer we sort of brainstormed uh the first episode which is funny looking back we literally spent a month thinking our first episode literally scripted it and and i believe in september we

recorded it and then launched in the world and at that point it was a history of bitcoin up to that point in 2017 and then shortly thereafter sort of interviewing people like pierre richard matt corralo james o'burn a bunch of developers in space and just kept chugging over the course eight years now doing both of those but along the way obviously um really leaned in started wrapping a recap of matt odell um together we joined 1031 to help invest in the space and help bitcoin focus companies grow and scale it's been a crazy ride to think uh 2017 at that point i was i was unemployed when i started the newsletter so if you would have told me right that first day when i started marty's bent that eight years later i'd be in a uh in a beautiful suite in

las vegas talking about bitcoin getting my read about i thought you're crazy but it was it's been a fun journey but to your point about the content how i make it i think it's just whatever marty's bent the tagline for the first four years before we moved off a mail chip and the ghost was uh the definition of bent or one definition of bent which is inclination or what one's interest is and so the tagline was marty's been is my inclination is a representation of my inclination towards the information i found interesting in bitcoin over the last 24 hours so for the newsletter i try to write it five days a week and the content process is like all right what's been sticking in my head the most over the last day and is it good enough to write about it

So I'd sit down and get these dots in my head in the paper and send them out to them. I saw you recently doing a talk in, I think it was in Austin, where you were telling your story. You did a presentation about TFTC and the origins and everything. And you were sharing about the newsletter, going into podcasting, not knowing where this is going to go. I mean, looking at your legacy and what you've done until today is quite unique in this space like literally a one-man show pulling a media company out of nothing and you were talking about ai there and that was very interesting i mean i heard you say that you reached a level of automation that allows you to be a lot more

efficient sophisticated i think ben will be interested in that as well please yeah he's looking for his media company like how do i get even more efficient with my content so what are some tips you can give about ai and your media yeah well it's i think at some point recently in like the last six months i realized that there was uh a disconnect between people who read the newsletter and people listen to the podcast or even watch us on youtube there's like three buckets of people who consumed our content in different ways and shame on me one man show didn't realize i just always assumed that everybody had not at all people have their preferences and they're very different in how they so i understood if you read that i i assumed if you read the newsletter

you knew the podcast exists and likewise you knew the youtube exists but that became pretty clear to me six months ago this is not the case so what we've been working on in an attempt to basically create a flywheel that lets people know that we have all these different sort of media uh media through which we're putting the media through. We've been leveraging AI to sort of repurpose podcast content, particularly to put it in the newsletter to let people know, like, hey, we did a podcast. We talked about this.

Here's a link to the podcast. As text? Yes. Transcribing it? Mm-hmm. So that's what we've set up in Automated Flow. So whenever we record a podcast, we'll take that audio file, send it to an AI transcription, like Assembly AI,

or Riverside's AI, depending on the particular episode. Sometimes assembly is better than Riverside, but then we'll take that. We've been working on prompts, specifically iterating on them for months now that really try to not only bring our voice, but hone in on very specific topics and sections of a particular conversation

and pull out a summary that is human readable makes sense and it's interesting so that's one way we've been leveraging it so every day in the newsletter now you'll see that we have parties bent and then we have another section which is essentially what we believe to be like a high piece of a high value piece of content from a conversation we've had on the podcast just put it right in forum and link back to the podcast and that process is literally dump an audio file triggers transcription like it's automatically sent to claude which produces a number of outputs that we pick the ones that make the most sense that dump it into the newsletter 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 treasure super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family enjoy my five percent discount on treasure product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code flat and that's just the tip of the iceberg it's very cool yeah what we think we could do in terms of automating a lot of these processes yeah you're right we should go so much more uh sophisticated on the kind of automation you can do with calm and i assume you already see the results right like i guess yeah the uh the newsletter growth has been substantial last

six months that's partly because we've been mentioning on the podcast more but likewise podcast has been growing uh pretty long and anecdotally outside of the numbers we can see a number of people been emailing like i wish you would have told me you had a podcast i was at a meetup last night with somebody uh somebody who's well known in the bitcoin space who became friends in Austin. His brother, I've known his brother now for four years and we've seen each other many times a year over the last four years. What, you have a podcast?

He's literally like, I have no idea. Really? What? Brother's best friend. I thought you didn't know that. That's hilarious. I guess I'm left in and don't make assumptions. Seriously. So AI is definitely another tool to

make sure we content creators reach more people. But when we reach them, we do want to ensure that the content is tailored towards what we want them to get from us how do you do that with individuals that are new to bitcoin like what kind of funnels do you have or what do you see as uh the right process to get to them that's i think twitter or x formally twitter is a great i've been using that and it's funny i uh i sort of the content the creative process sort of dynamic with the price of bitcoin so during bear markets i'll get

highly technical because i know there's no newcomers coming so i'll focus to an audience that's hanging around and wants to really lean into what's happening on the technical side of bitcoin so you'll you can probably go back and read bear market newsletters are more technical get into the weeds but now as the bull market's rearing up i've been doing this on x and in the newsletter which is like getting back to basics of like very simple high level topics so like today on the plane right before i came here i wrote about monetary premium and real estate what is that how does bitcoin fix it sort of trying to highlight a problem that exists in the fiat world that people um may not understand what the core of that problem is and sort of identified like i

you have this problem because i have it too real estate is extremely expensive in the united states it's only going up but there's an affordability crisis in many parts of the country why is that and explain why that is and oh by the way like bitcoin helps solve this i think in terms of converting newcomers it's always identify a problem say hey i have that problem too present a solution All right. Let's talk a bit about decentralized protocols, open source protocols. How do you see open source code and everything? How do you see the future of media, independent media, podcasting, Noster and all that? Is that the future in your opinion? I mean, I think independent media is the present,

whether or not that independent media will be distributed and operate on these open protocols, I think is yet to be determined. But I'm very optimistic that it can. And I mean, Podcasting 2.0, I've said this very publicly, it's awesome. I've been using it since 2021 when it first launched, or 2020. I think TFTC was one of the first three podcasts

on Podcasting 2.0. So we've had a lightning address with payment splits in RSS feed for four years now. And over the course of that four years, we've accumulated a lot of stats. But if we're being honest, the amount of people using podcasting 2.0 compatible apps with Bitcoin wallets in them is a very small percentage. Actually, it was a very small percentage of our overall listener base on the podcast of the RSS feed has grown over time. right now i checked the stats yesterday i think 14 percent of people that listen to our podcast listen via fountain um so that's a pretty high yeah but that's probably like one of the most successful podcasts on that platform yeah and so we've got 14 percent of our listeners listen

via podcasting 2.0 app at least one that we know of um and we do have people streaming stats to us pretty much every minute of every day but can that scale to run a business i think that's yet to be determined but in terms of get it getting it out there and make it possible to monetize that way has never been easier and the fact that it exists is incredible now when you get to censorship resistance i think that's where a lot of the actual staying power of independent media distributivity of these protocols is going to be things like noster and even rss for that matter i think that is the future in the sense especially in the world of ai where uh i think that's this is an area where many in silicon valley and other tech forward people who aren't really

focused on bitcoin or noster specifically are not seeing what's happening and i think google's release a video three or four whatever they launched last week and i'm sure you've seen the videos online and people just the ai yeah it's crazy it's very crazy and it's getting to the point where what was it three years ago they had this uh really creepy videos of will smith trying to eat spaghetti and that was yeah that was the cutting edge of video generated ai or ai generated video at that point and to see how fast it's progressed since then is insane if you just project that forward like we're not too far from a situation where you could have like i have so much uh i have such a big corpus of content video audio

and somebody's going to literally be able to prompt google and create of me doing something yeah um and optimistically me doing something funny pessimistically realistically me doing something weird that i would not ever do but people won't be able to tell the difference so i think the process of normalizing a content creator signing a piece content with a private key um is going to be a necessity at some point in the next decade as those ai generated videos become more and more mature and more human-like um and so something like monster makes that very easy and i wouldn't be surprised if we get to a point in the next five years where if it's you if you don't sign a private key before you post a message or sign

a private key with your message i don't yeah i don't trust that video at all so i think open protocols like master are going to be necessary very interesting and do you see like a trend on that end to discuss that further like to bring other than your podcast as well like how would you recommend other content creators to bring attention to this kind of problem and how master solves it So we had Nostriga at the end of last year, right before the Baltic Honey Badger Conference, and that was a big topic. And I think the first step to do is to just produce content there.

Literally, that's what Nostra needs right now is more content. And the lowest hanging fruit to drive awareness and to support open protocols like Nostra is just simply cross-post. If you're posting on X, if you're posting on YouTube, that's the beauty of it. You can post both content types on Nostr via many different clients that exist. And so I think that's what Nostr needs is a bigger, wider, more diverse type of content. Right now, I've been begging for Fintwit on Nostr.

That's why I'm there. And that's why I'm begging for automation from the developers. Just help me. Like, I want to put all my short clips there, but it's just too much work to do it manually. That's what we're working on. Please help me with automating this. AI flows that are automating this. So the combination.

But that's that's where it gets tricky with Nasser specifically because you have a private key nature. Like, do you want to give the AI a private key? Right. True, true. That's that's a problem. Can you give the AI the ability to just get there and set things up for you to sign? I think that that would be ideal where it's not you having a copy paste upload. That does all that.

I'm happy to go once a day and tell the AI, do that. Like I do today with my Chrome add-on, like give permission for the next five hours. Yeah, that would be great. Happy to do that. Yeah. And the devs are working on it. I hear they're working on it. I'm happy to hear that.

Awesome, that's happy. Tired of feeling like your freedom and future are fading away? Do you live in a country with growing inflation, crazy housing prices, weird culture, and a chaotic economy? You're not alone, and my friend Mikel Thorpe and his team at Expat Money can help. Mikel is the world's leading expat consultant on a mission to free you from broken systems. He's been an expat for 25 years, lived in nine different countries, and has helped hundreds of people with second residencies and passports, offshore banking, international investing, and many other essential tools.

if you're serious about protecting your wealth and your family it's not enough to hope things will get better you need a plan b in another country the team at expat money can help you build it legally safely and without wasting years of research visit expatmoney.com and leave your details for a follow-up in a world hypnotized and sleepwalking towards totalitarian control and digital enforcement awakened voices rise to inspire change and radiate hope in december 2024 i had the honor of hosting professor matthias desmet at a conference i produced called new totalitarian order this master class is now recorded and available to watch the conference explores the psychology behind global mass processes offering a behind-the-scenes look

at science economics and human potential it addresses challenging global agendas mass formation transhumanism consciousness societal change and the path to transformation click the link in the show notes to access three and a half hours of exclusive presentations in-depth content and my fireside chat with professor desmic use my code afrat for 10 off i hope you find great value So last question in terms of the content creation aspect of things. I follow many, many podcasts and there's a theme that I see with people that hosted many, many people is that they have their own inspiration of regular guests or maybe guests that their concept just stuck with you. that they create a process for you to formulate your own opinions and narratives and then set the stage for others as well.

So who would be your top three, top five kind of guests that inspired you and educated you on how to do things yourself, how to learn things yourself, so you can do your work better? yeah the uh it's a tough one i know it's a tough one for so many good ones out there but i think uh top of mind in terms of doing what like people are so like whitney webb has been on the show five or six times maybe even seven times at this point but i think she's an incredibly thorough journalist and i think her commitment to the beat is something i really respect i just love having conversations with whitney and i think most importantly with her she's an incredible like

keep a modest force where she's highly skeptical of many things and bitcoin included to a certain degree or some of the ways people are using bitcoin so i love that in terms of keeping me honest and just of thinking about the world completely differently i think my conversations with tom malongo oh yeah and his thesis on what the fed is doing and the sort of the federal preservers the european bankers was something that the last one you had was awesome yeah it was it was a line of thinking i wasn't privy to until i started having conversations with him and he makes a very compelling case so i think in terms of looking out at the macroeconomic landscape and different policy decisions conversations with him have definitely brought a different lens of

perspective on how to read all those um matthew mazingtious from crypto voices we've been doing a quarterly monetary base update global monetary base update and just tracking how bitcoin is um is uh how bitcoin is compared to other monetary base currencies like the dollar the yuan that's been incredible because i think it's really helped me hone in on like what statistics and data to actually look at to get a signal of how bitcoin is doing in terms of its actual competition as a as a monetary base currency um and so those have been great uh developers like maccarallo and um james o'burn have been on a bunch pierre rochard um was the first ever guest he's been on a few times since then and i just think pierre is an incredible uh unabashed bull who is actually

funny, articulate, and convincing, which are, yeah, three, the three combined is incredibly

powerful. So the way he approaches everything from analytics, humor, and persuasion is something that has definitely

made me think about how I write and how I set up questions and explain Bitcoin to people as well.

Speaking of explaining Bitcoin to people, there was one time where you were a guest on tom's podcast i think and he was acknowledging you for being one of those people that he can actually talk about bitcoin without becoming uh too upset or too like anti about it because you know he he described most bitcoiners as being assholes and not really easy to talk about because they all go like have fun staying poor and don't really care

about him and he brings all all of his claims which some of them are really interesting some of them i think he was like either misinformed or like uninformed about certain things and i loved how you had the patience to really like you were being very humble with him and and speaking eye level to him and and that goes a long way to people that are outside of the bitcoin community and want to come in, but on their own terms. You know what I mean? So I really like that. You have a way to really understand how to speak to people

without making them too scared or run away from this cult called Bitcoin. Well, I think it's very important, particularly as somebody interviewing others. Right. You need to be able to. i am trying to educate the audience but at the end of the day i have a guest on and i'm very curious to hear their thoughts and so not trying to like inject my bias or yeah i think coming in with the humility to be like maybe i could be wrong let's hear them out and uh i'm just like very chill uh slow i talk very slow which triggers a lot of people most of you probably that's great

but uh i just got i think that's the way i approach life is i have very strong opinions and i think the world works in particular ways and like to think i have a good sense and good grasp on reality and what bitcoin is and how it can affect everything but um i'm not going to be an asshole about it i think and to your point it's a great way to create like an olive ranch like all right wasn't up my ass and he's talking slow i'm pretty chill like maybe all right so um let's talk about 1031 you invest um exclusively in bitcoin infrastructure is that right yes why is that choice and like what's your criteria to choosing companies how how do you guys build that so to answer the first question uh why

is because I've been in Bitcoin for 12 years now. I've been in 1031 for four years, so about a third of the time I've been in Bitcoin. And for the longest time, between 2017 and 2021, running TFTC, running Rabbit Hole Recap with Matt, particularly with Rabbit Hole Recap, we would go over the news items of the week, a lot of which pertain to companies and what they were launching and products that were coming to

market. And it blew our mind just getting to know all the founders, really understanding the products, understanding the gravity of Bitcoin and where it's going and looking out at the investment landscape of where money was actually being deployed and noticing that it was extremely hard for founders that were focused on Bitcoin only and building companies around Bitcoin specifically actually raised money to build what they wanted to build and if you look at the amount of venture capital that has been raised for broader crypto versus bitcoin specifically bitcoin companies specifically over the course of the last 10-15 years it's orders of magnitude literally 100 200 to 1 dollars for broader crypto versus bitcoin um and so part of the reason 1031

one exists is to notice that there is this sort of imbalance and over indexing towards a part of the market that may be more hype than actual um an actual substance and not only viewing that as an opportunity from an investment perspective but um an opportunity for bitcoin is like there are people focused on bitcoin building companies around that are having trouble getting funding because everybody's distracted with broader crypto so it's incumbent on us to go out with the thesis that we're going to invest in bitcoin companies um not because we're ideologues but because there's an incredible opportunity bitcoin becomes the reserve currency of the world the company is building the the infrastructure that makes that transition

possible are going to certainly benefit from that um and so we went out and raised uh a fund in 2021 and 2022 um we we just made the first close on our third fund and we're very happy to have supported 35 companies in the space to date and plan on continuing to do that and scaling that up over time as it becomes clear that there is a difference between Bitcoin and crypto. So I think the thesis has only been validated as getting stronger year on year. But in terms of the companies that we invest in across the landscape, so mining infrastructure companies like Giga and upstream data, which are building infrastructure for people to utilize stranded or underutilized energy to mine Bitcoin.

Companies like Strike are the largest investors. And Strike, basically building a Bitcoin company on-ramp, on-off-ramp, lightning infrastructure globally, available around the globe. companies like Unchained building on Bitcoin's multi-sig primitives to bring financial services and custody solutions to market. Battery

Finance which we're really excited about which is at this intersection of structured credit and Bitcoin and then hardware companies like CoinKite which builds the cold card and Start9 which builds basically an at-home server they can run Bitcoin nodes

and other stuff on. So So I guess broadly speaking, our thesis is we want to invest in companies that make it easier for people to utilize Bitcoin. Or that's people in the oil field who want to turn methane into electricity, into hashes, into Bitcoin. People who simply don't want to hold their Bitcoin in exchange, so they need a hardware wallet. People that don't have Bitcoin but need to buy some from an exchange. people that have a good amount of bitcoin and want to do something with it without selling so using as collateral um and then moving out i think companies like battery really bringing bitcoin into bitcoinizing the traditional financial system by recolateralizing all the bad that that

exists out there all the value chain yeah it's incredible why 1031 and 31 is an homage to the white paper uh october 31st we did not think of the 1031 real estate tax treatment that exists here in the united states but it is our goal to make sure that when people hear 1031 is synonymous with bitcoin and not uh real estate tax arbitrage a lot of uh aiseo is gonna need to do that cool um okay let's talk um more about uh bitcoin mining and energy and sustainability so uh you talked about giga and uh the other company and that that's part of your focus um we know that there's this intersection between bitcoin mining and climate change and uh Basically, using this narrative of climate crisis and drawing the picture that Bitcoin energy consumption is essentially ruining the planet and polluting the planet and all of that.

And it's a topic that the three of us are very aligned as to, is it actually true and how essentially it is used to justify things and justify more taxes and more control, et cetera. But in the Bitcoin space, we see it as something different. So we wanted for you to elaborate a bit more than that. How do you see this intersection between Bitcoin energy consumption, climate change, and actually releasing energy or utilizing energy in the space? And we talk about climate realism, right? Not really climate change. I mean, that's the pervasive narrative that we want to stay away. I think you've seen one of my tweets about this.

Like, I hate people simping to that narrative just to get into the mainstream conversation about climate change and get some budgets or attention. I don't think the Bitcoin community needs to do that. But for some reason, it happens a lot. It does. And that was on stage here at this conference, I believe in 2021 or 2022, talking about ESG. and I was on stage with a bunch of publicly traded minor CEOs who were tweeting the drum about we're going to lean into ESG and I was just saying

don't cater to ESG because they don't really care about energy or any of that. That's not their intention, that's their facade behind the power they would like to exert over you. And I think luckily ever since then the tide around ESG and climate, cataclysmic climate change has changed dramatically. But even if you wanted to accept the assumptions that there is, like Bitcoin mining is inarguably a benefit for people that care about that because Bitcoin miners are a buyer of first and last resort.

Last resort being if you have energy that you're producing that's not being utilized either because there's no demand from the grid or no ability to get that energy to market because it's stuck on a well pad upstream bitcoin miners can come in as a last resort soak up that energy make sure it's being utilized so again going back to i'm a surfer i grew up and i'm very passionate about clean the beach if you go to the beach and you bring stuff and you don't clean up after yourself i get very pissed off that was one thing i was the the hall monitor of the beach like pick up your trash uh and so like i am an environmentalist at the end of the day in the sense that like i want to leave the world better than um than i i want

to leave it better than when it was when i came in and bitcoin allows you to do this if you're going to produce energy if you're going to drill for oil and gas if you're going to create nuclear facilities and hydro facilities wind and solar farms like you want to make sure you're utilizing every molecule every electron um for the benefit of humanity and bitcoin makes that very simple because it is location agnostic and since it's a distributed market um a distributed network you can have miners of many different scales from a bid axe all the way up to a gigalot facility utilizing um waste energy as a provider of last resort by our first resort um here in the united states a big thing in the last couple of weeks has been the nuclear executive orders that are

sort of ripping off the red tape and allowing companies building small modular reactors and bigger facilities to um giving them some breathing room to go out and do their thing but they do have this problem which is extremely capital intensive and if you're going to build all this new nuclear generation you have a problem you can build it but then you need transmission and considering how capital-intensive nuclear energy is in its current form, it's very expensive to build something that has to wait for transmission so you can begin making revenue off of it. In this case, Bitcoin miners act as a buyer of first resort, where you can put down an SMR or build a large facility, and while you're waiting 18 to 24 months for transmission lines

to get built out to grids, Bitcoin miners can operate what's called behind the meter, and you can monetize that that nuclear facility via bitcoin mining almost immediately and so you don't have that time delay of when you actually set up to when you start making revenue it can be automatic and so it helps if you believe that if you're a strong believer that uh cataclysmic climate change exists and is being driven predominantly by hydrocarbons you should probably also believe that they should be replaced by something like nuclear and if you believe that when mining helps with that um and even wind and solar which not a massive fan of but we can make the argument that it helps there too yeah um i remember there was an article back then in canada

about this uh water boiler that uh used to have a miner uh do you remember that yep do you are you aware of how it's going for them right now and are you familiar with also this kind of funny small solutions that might be revolutionary when you think of it i mean i think um a lot of bad activity is happening in sort of the uh what would you call it indie mining space where you have a lot of people particularly interested in the bidx project like um engaged in open source sort of uh experiments of tinkering with their own machines with their own home sharing it on on the internet and sort of giving feedback and iterating on it but there are uh shout out to tyler um and his team uh they work out of denver at space there i think they're highly focused on

and he wrote a book with brains about pick when heat reuse and i was at a conference with him earlier this year and he was explaining that if you were to get two percent of hvac systems in the world um and convince them to keep the water to a certain point with bitcoin miners you would i believe like two or three x bitcoins hash rate as it's did today so there's a lot of inefficiency out there people are using hvac systems water boilers uh and it's essentially just a drain or draining energy from the system you're getting nothing back but imagine if you could use a hashing board of a miner to heat the water to a certain degree or to um to create waste that you can blow this around a house

and actually make money while doing that. It's fascinating. And there are, I think it's very early days. Very cool. We've talked about this for a while, Bitcoin mining. The market for ASICs needs to be commoditized to a certain degree,

where it makes it very easy to sort of get these ASIC chips and plug them in the hash boards and different form factors. And they need to be cheap enough to do this at scale. And I think we're approaching that point. So Tyler and companies like Heatbit are really beginning to put pen to paper and think seriously about solving this problem at scale.

I think that's another area that could definitely explode in the next decade in a good way. Especially as energy becomes more and more expensive. All right. What are the trends or trajectories that pose the biggest threats on Bitcoin today? who's the biggest threats on bitcoin i think apathy um people not caring about what gives bitcoin value in the first place which is the fact that it's distributed decentralized network dependent uh on individuals you know there's a lot of institutions and publicly traded companies and very wealthy individuals involved in bitcoin but i think in the long term

if bitcoin's going to survive individuals that are just common everyday men need to care about what makes bitcoin valuable in the first place and ensure that it's sufficiently distributed and robust and so like running nodes running nodes but i think at the very least it's holding your own keys in some capacity even if it's in a collaborative custody model just keeping everything honest because i don't know if it's materialized yet but if you get too apathetic and you hold your bitcoin with trusted third parties you have no visibility into what bitcoin you actually own in terms of having visibility into an on-chain public address that you know is allocated to you you could get into the same problems that led to the the downfall of the gold

standard which was rehype application and paper bills um uh i think there's a lot of focus on the institutions today and i don't think the institutions are bad um at all it makes sense we've been talking about this game theory for well over a decade of bitcoin truly is the best money that man has ever come into contact with everybody's going to use it including institutions including governments and there's nothing wrong with that but i think it's important for people if they care to make sure they do the work to make sure they're holding their keys and understanding what's going on at the very least.

What other trends? Yeah. It's interesting that you chose apathy, right? But when you look at other things like quantum computing or other things that you would say that the community, be it the developers or the miners or the individuals, need to be much more alert on, including governments, right?

So that's also somewhat of a threat when you have executive orders, 6102 examples. Yeah, quantum I'm not as worried about as any other people are. I've been going to a lot of bit devs in Austin recently, and that's been a hot topic.

And if you go on the Bitcoin dev mailing list, there's been a lot of really interesting sort of discussions around or quantum-resistant cryptographic libraries that could be ported into Bitcoin. I think we have enough time to have those discussions and figure out what the best solution is to that particular problem, if and when it arises.

Bitcoin mining pool is very centralized right now, and this is due to the nature of their payout schemes. Full pay-per-share payout schemes, I think, are acting as this centralizing force at the mining pool layer which is certainly not ideal but i don't think a systemic risk to the network because we've seen this in bitcoin before in 2015 when g hash got 55 of the network hash rate miners sort of recognized like oh my gosh this one pool has 55 we got to move our hash rate off and that was an example of miners sort of perceiving a potential threat to the network and

acting rather quickly to ensure that the network wasn't at threat and so if that were to arise again i wouldn't be surprised if the market reacted very similarly um going back to like self-custody i think i've had recent conversations with a bunch of developers and something i sort of stayed away from the last two years because it's very controversial but i think this idea of covenants, specifically covenants like CTV, check template, verify, may be necessary to ensure that you have a sufficient number of people properly securing their own keys and giving them the ability to self-custody. And if that's what I want to see, if I'm worried about people getting apathetic about that,

I think conversations around are covenants worthy or are they necessary? If so, which covenants proposal is most worthy of getting into Bitcoin? I think it may be time to begin having those conversations more seriously than we have in the last two years. Yeah, I'm honestly not that worried about Bitcoin. i say all this but i think um i think the incentives of the system are just they're such that whenever there's a perceived threat or it seems like bitcoin's at risk of going in a wrong direction the market of bitcoiners like stands up reacts and says no this is too important to mess up and so the left side of the bell curve caveman to me is like if something arises we'll

figure it out because it's too important not to figure it out of course so um we spoke about the negative sides like the the things we should be wary about but uh what about uh the new monetary order right so we have many trends that are going up at the moment right now be it gold and its adoption or price rise prices rising uh be it the geopolitical aspects and the wars and the tariff and all of that um what do you see in the coming years are the trends that will be more beneficial to bitcoin bitcoin connects better with them and therefore increases adoption and obviously what comes with that i think go back to what we were saying earlier i think the the problems of inflation and the affordability crisis are going to continue to rise and then that's going to smash

headfirst potentially with this ai explosion which could lead to massive disruptions to the job market which could make people even more desperate and seeking answers so i think one thing is and i and i think that's been a big admission of the trump administration over the last two weeks is hey we're gonna sign this big beautiful um tax bill but it looks like a massive spending bill and scott the cent has been out there publicly basically implicitly saying like yeah we're going to issue more debts and we're going to choose to default via debasement implicitly not explicitly but through read between the lines that's where he says he had elon come out last week and tweet that we're just going to turn the account and we're going to turn it on

turbo um basically we're going to run the debt up and try to just be just increase productivity and gdp at a faster rate and hope that we can thread that needle and so i think that's happening and if you just look at what's happened from 2020 to 2025 in terms of inflation and the affordability crisis it's only accelerated and so if that continues more people are going to be asking questions and um i think they'll turn to bitcoin and then in terms of what's happening in bitcoin But I think just if you compare it to cycles past, I think it's always interesting to go back and think about how easy it is to buy and send Bitcoin

for somebody going from like zero to one. Like I remember when I first got in, it was like the tail end of Mt. Gox failing and Coinbase was around. And it wasn't hard to download Coinbase and buy Bitcoin, but then like getting it off Coinbase was hard. It's like, I've got to buy this wallet. It's not really clear to me.

And then you go to 2017, and you just think of all the volatility that existed there in terms of infrastructure was probably about the same, but now you go to 2025 and this cycle specifically, I think 2021 was a little bit suppressed because of the FTX stuff. And so I think we have like a true cycle here now when you look at the proliferation of the Lightning Network, all the wallets that have enabled that,

and the ability to get on Nostr and set up an mPub and have people send you Bitcoin immediately without even having to set up an account, without even having to set up a wallet with the way they've implemented eCash. It's much easier to go from zero to one to receive Bitcoin. So I think the infrastructure and the tooling is at a mature point where Bitcoin is magical to people

the first time they use it in some senses. Obviously, there are some times, depending on what app you use, where it's not magical, but the potential for the first experience to be magical is way higher than it was only four years ago. And then, like, I think, like, what's happening here with the institutions and the corporations getting in, whether we like it or not, us humans are susceptible to the herd mentality and are very social. Do you like it or not?

I mean, I don't like it or not. Like, it can be frustrating at times. I do feel like the man in the corner wanted to shake people. I've been saying this for 12 years. But whether we like it or not, people allocate trust to third parties and particular individuals.

If you have Larry Fink and the Trumps and even liberal politicians like Ro Khanna beginning to say Bitcoin is... It's exactly what Mark said. You can't be against Bitcoin. It's like being against the cell phone or the internet. And I think we're reaching a social tipping point, too, where there's too many people that are well-respected by the masses that are saying, no, this is real, this is happening, that it's going to be like, okay, Bitcoin, I'm not going to fight my crazy brother-in-law at the dinner table anymore because it turns out he's not crazy. it's actually quite interesting that you said at the beginning that so many members of your family

and friends right at the beginning were asking you questions it's like statistically i think that's normally not the way it is that you have so many people interested around you most people just dismissed it so early on so how go you have this pocket of i don't know maybe more based people individuals or more suspicious or i don't know where it comes from but that or interesting i was very uh or you were very vocal about it very particularly in college so i found bitcoin in college and whenever we would go out to the bars or just sitting around talking about it like guys bitcoin bitcoin bitcoin okay then after college i'd go out in new york and i'd force people i have a buddy who i i used to force people to download coinbase and i'd make them pay for the tab

with a credit card and then i would send them bitcoin um or just like i have one friend who i see every christmas when i get home to philadelphia and he comes up to me i think in 2015 like in the depths of the bear market i paid for for he paid for the the tip and or the he paid the tab and i sent him my half of it he holds his coinbase up to me every christmas he's like look look at this what happened to it but he still didn't buy no no no more he kept the one he kept what i gave him i don't know if he's like i don't know but it's a fun tradition that we have where like and it's a material amount of money now for him and it's like yeah like this is what bitcoin does i try to do it in weddings and uh when my friends give birth so i give them uh

only bitcoin as the present and this way they they come to me the same way after a year or two three years look how much my present is worth now of course and it's being it's getting easier to gift like exactly just launched the bitcoin gift card there's been many in the past but you you could sats card from cold coin kite that's typically what i do i load up a sats card and yeah put it in the envelope and so much fun just leave a note just call me when you're ready exactly exactly santa came to visit all right santa what gives you hope um where do you draw your hope from uh and these conferences give me a lot of hope i mean just been hearing your story And I'm always reminded when I get together at conferences and events like this that there's people literally all over the world with the same mindset that I have, which is Bitcoin is a solution to a lot of the problems we have.

I'm going to dedicate my life to ensuring that I do my best to make sure it succeeds. And that gives me a ton of hope. And then, yeah, I just think humans are, the human spirit is very strong. And despite the times I've grown up in and the overarching surveillance states and the war machine, I do think humans, broadly speaking, just are good people who want to just have a life of dignity. and respect and grow a family mind their own business and live in peace and we just need ways to manifest incentive systems that make that easier for people want to live like that and i think bitcoin is a solution so i think the human spirit definitely gives me hope and then my my

family my wife my boys and uh my extended family and friends i think uh looking as my children are getting older looking at that one like oh wow you're extremely um extremely they're like my oldest it's it's crazy in the last six months he's becoming crazy inquisitive and curious and like seeing him once learn and then actually going and learning things and doing it without my help i'm like oh wow like it's amazing it's uh that gives me a lot of hope it's like oh before uh that's just gonna make sure you don't get you don't get sucked into the high time preference algo of of tick tock and and other things oh yeah exactly or if you do just understand how powerful it is it is yeah beautiful yeah couldn't agree more with uh the

whole part right so uh we're living in a tricky world and it's important to have people like us like what we're trying to do and uh people in this conference uh ex extending the world bringing bringing it to other people that they can understand that it all starts with money and the moment you understand what money is supposed to be uh it helps you understand life better you appreciate things more we were talking uh with alex and corian the producer is about when you sit on the plane and i had that comment too when i came here uh people told me you're a a bitcoiner you should be in first class because i was because i was in economy yeah and i was like why that means that i can't i can buy less bitcoin i want to buy more big i want to use my time

better uh and uh it starts with that for me yeah i flew here southwest group c awesome awesome marty kick ass at the conference enjoy thank you i'm sure i'll see you guys around the next few days you will absolutely do i have to do it of course peace and love freaks thanks for being with us please take a minute to give this episode a like a comment and subscribe or follow and please share it with your friends so they can also get value and choose to take some positive action in their lives till next time Thanks for watching!