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- [00:03]
David
Bankless Nation. I'm here with Dan Held. Dan is probably one of the most OG bitcoiners that we've had on the show in the past. Dan, welcome back to Bankless.
- [00:11]
Dan Held
Thanks for having me.
- [00:12]
David
I just kind of want to have a pretty broad zoomed out discussion. Dan, you and I have been both in crypto Twitter, you're in bitcoin Twitter, I'm in Ethereum Twitter.
- [00:21]
Dan Held
Whatever for?
- [00:23]
David
It feels like a decade now. It kind of is approaching a decade, at least for me. I think you got into bitcoin before I came into crypto.
- [00:29]
Dan Held
I mean, crypto is kind of like dog years, right? Like every year that passes is like seven years. So we've been in the space for effectively about 100 years, you know.
- [00:35]
David
Right. It has certainly how it feels. And so I kind of just want to ask, ask you like, if we go back and put ourselves in the shoes of our younger selves, like the 2018, the 2020 era. Is Bitcoin going according to plan is kind of the broad premise I want to investigate in this episode. So I'll ask that question to you.
- [00:56]
Dan Held
Yeah, you know, the reason why I said yes to this is I think it's a pretty fun one, both from my perspective as a kind of a bitcoin maxi who's been in this space for 15 years. So I'd be curious to get your side of this. But I think. Let me, let me kind of zoom back all the way to the beginning because I got in in 2011, started purchasing in 2012, but I created my Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox account in December 2011. Back then, Bitcoin is a very rebellious, anti government sort of mechanism. Right. You had people were who were into Silk Road, peer to peer file sharing, so torrenting, those sort of online gambling. The origins of bitcoin came from a pretty, I would say, rugged place. It wasn't. This wasn't clean, nice, institutionalized, anything like that. So bitcoin's core ethos, I used to joke, is, you know, 3D printed guns, drugs and bitcoin. You know, that's what it originally was. You know, it came from the cipher, punk slash extropian communities which were very libertarian leaning. What's interesting about that is, you know, both that was the cultural values around the bitcoin code itself, right? So you've got the code of bitcoin which represents what bitcoin is. It's essentially just the code that runs right across every bitcoin node. And that's what we all agree upon. Is the bitcoin network. That is what bitcoin is. Then there's the community and culture around it. So that's the old culture. Today the culture is much more institutionalized. You have Bitcoin and ETFs, you've got top investment banks, you've got, you know, Fed chairmans, you have presidents talking about bitcoin, you have them referencing it in a positive and negative manner. You know, bitcoin has largely been institutionalized. And so I think there's a lot of hand wringing around the idea that bitcoin has been captured, that the original bitcoin cultural ethos has changed. I do think that's true. So, you know, I'm not going to deny that bitcoin's cultural ethos has changed a bit. I think a lot of people view it as just another asset in their portfolio rather than truly understanding it. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. People buy a lot of assets that don't really understand them. When people buy gold or The S&P 500, you know, with the S&P 500, I often joke, can you tell me one of the quarterly earnings of any company, the S&P 500? Most people can't, but that's fine, you know, so Bitcoin, in terms of the obfuscation of understanding how it works, culturally, of course, I wish everyone understood how it works and would keep all their bitcoin on a treasure or ledger. But that's just not how mainstream adoption works now when it comes to bitcoin's core code, because that's ultimately representative of what bitcoin is. You know, did we see institutions have any sort of capture of how bitcoin's core code functions, or do they push any changes that were implemented? And we don't see any of those. So from bitcoin's code perspective, it didn't bend the knee. The institutions bent the knee to bring bitcoin into it. So I don't think bitcoin has compromised on its core code values. But the community certainly has changed. And as an og, I don't mind that. I think this is how institutionalized and mainstream adoption works. I'm a weird libertarian guy who studied finance during the 2008 financial crisis, got radicalized from that. Grew up in Texas. I own seven guns. I'm not a normal person. This is not normal person behavior. I'm a weird libertarian. Formerly Gold bug got into bitcoin. So I don't expect everyone to have my same cultural values. So, you know, bitcoin's culture has certainly changed, but that doesn't mean that bitcoin itself has changed at all. And certainly we would have seen that in the code.
- [04:30]
David
Yeah. And I think the purpose or the point of the question, like, is bitcoin going according to plan? Is not really to answer, like, yes or no, but it's more to, like, understand the nature of the question itself, I think. And a little bit what I was thinking about hearing you talk just now is like, the measuring stick of what success is, is really important. And, you know, we could just like, talk naively, is like, oh, it's the price of bitcoin. Like, that's the measure of success. And to some. To some degree, that's true. And I kind of enjoy that, the fact that that's true. But I also. I was. I was thinking about Burning man as an example where if you talk to people who go to. Who went to Burning man In, like, the 90s and the 2000, like, the early 2000s, they look at Burning man today and be like. Like, we've lost the plot. What are we doing here? These influencers are everywhere. Like, we have starlings. Like, the ethos and spirit of Burning man is gone. It's. It's failed. But then you look at Burning man, it's like, there's a 80,000 people there, and it's. It's growing in energy and it's shifted. And. And this is all always what revolutions do. I think, like, revolutions moderate as they grow up. And so I don't. I don't want to, like, say that, like, oh, the fact that, like, we are all looking at Michael Saylor and the bitcoin ets and we've, like, lost the plot of not your keys, not your Bitcoin. I don't think that's a fair measuring stick. But I also don't want to lose sight of that either. And I have a hard time doing both. I don't know if you have. If you have any reflections on that.
- [06:02]
Dan Held
Yeah, this is a. I think this is. I. I think what you're referencing is what are the KPIs that we would have initially set up to determine and KPIs for those who don't understand what that means. It's a tech to stand for key performance indicators. What KPIs would we have set up to represent the success of the bitcoin network? Now, having done this both at Kraken Uber, and since leaving Kraken, I've had 15 fractional CMO clients. So, like, I've had To do this OKR KPI process more times than almost probably anyone my age. Setting proper KPIs is really difficult, right? It's not just measuring every single metric we could, right? Because it could be hardware wallet ownership, it could be a private key management like how many people are self custody in their assets. Usually what we try to do when we create KPIs is we try to distill them down to the really core key metrics that represent success. That's why it's called E performance indicator. It's not a measurement of all metrics. I would say first and foremost a nice compression of all of those metrics together is Bitcoin's price. Because the price represents the aggregate belief that it is a new digital gold or sound money. So the price is a one way hash function of all of the collective belief in it. And that's what the price represents. So that I think is the number one KPI because price also loops into everything else. It's adoption, it's liquidity, it's resilience, it's narrative, it's all these things combined. So price first and foremost would be probably the top KPI from there. You know, obviously self custody is a hugely important issue. So self custody would be how many people manage their own private key. Whether that be, you know, you have a dedicated hardware wallet which would be ideal, or other setup, which there's a pretty low percentage and it's not too unsurprising. I mean I've managed my own private key for 15 years and honestly it's, it's pretty stressful. You know, I don't have a multi 6 setup. I do single key because you know, setting up a two out of three has its own issues. But I don't, I, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. You know, private key management, I would say liquidity is also a function of price. Now how deep is the market? Like the price could be high, but there's no liquidity. And you know, if you look across those KPIs, you know, even with private key management like self custody, we've seen that improve. But as a percentage of total Hodlers, it's still lower than what I'd want. You know, from there it gets a little fuzzier, right? Like if you measure changes to Bitcoin's core code, you know, that would be a function of, it's really subjective, like you don't want to be like, oh, we should change it all the time. But certainly it needs to improve so that's a really fuzzy one. I'm not sure how we exactly measure that, but yeah, that's kind of my initial foray into how would we measure success? Probably price is the simplest answer just because it reflects everything else combined.
- [08:51]
David
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- [09:26]
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- [09:28]
David
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- [09:39]
Michael Naito
advice Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle. How to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Naito. He runs the Defi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 10:10 price drop happen. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years and this year we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and ether and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes, they're short, they're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most. So let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast Search the Defi Report Wherever you get your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, sports, Spotify, or find a link in the show Notes There's a new episode waiting for you now.
- [10:27]
David
I think a lot of people who come into crypto on the earlier side of things like the pre 20002020 21, you have to have come in it for like the ideology. Like it's, it's. You're not just there for the money. Like the, you were crazy to be there before 2020 and that's because you were like ideologically motivated, like, or like some emotional motivation to like be in the crypto space either in bitcoin or Ethereum. And I think a lot of it was like you cited your radicalization because of 2008. 2008. And so I think a lot of early bitcoiners and like people, for me believing in Ethereum, it's like I, I want to change culture, like I want to change the world. And now we have this like financial tool to do that. And like what, what more powerful of a tool to change culture and change, change the world than with money and finance. And I think that's kind of like the, a potential measuring stick. And I want an old article that I really liked from Nick Carter. He wrote about how bitcoin is a peaceful revolution.
- [11:25]
Michael Naito
Right?
- [11:25]
David
Like you're just demonetizing the nation state's ability to engage in warfare. Or like that was like one angle or another angle is like it's just like a check on power of central governments, like inflating their currencies. I don't know if we've been impactful on those fronts. And I know it's early. Like Bitcoin is 15, 16 years old. So it's early to say that like, yo, we're like, bitcoin is going to defund violence. But still, I don't know if, I don't know if there's any hints of success on those like big macroscopic ideas that we once had as an industry.
- [12:03]
Dan Held
Look, we memes. When I first got into bitcoin, it was largely associated with drugs and money laundering. Right. This is early, early days. I mean, I even went on a date in San Francisco and she said, are you a drug dealer? When she asked what I did. So like bitcoin's improved somewhat from there.
- [12:18]
David
Sure.
- [12:18]
Dan Held
Now it's largely perceived as a speculative asset, I would say, which is still a pretty negative connotation rather than a positive one. And it's like freedom money, you know, culture wise. Like we memed bitcoin, which is a fucking random ass magic Internet money, largely perceived as dirty and filthy and bullshit. We beamed that into what was a tiny obscure community. I mean, in San Francisco. You know, I went to the bitcoin meetups there in early 2013. It was just Brian and Fred from Coinbase, Charlie Lee, Jed McCaleb, Jesse Powell, Jared Kenna who hosted it at 20 Mission. I mean there was a dozen of us in a cooler full of PBRs. Like from that into the President is talking about it and there's a bill in Congress about it, and Goldman, JP Morgan are all like, yeah, this is legitimate. And same with the Fed. I mean, I think we memed it into an existence where people believe it's digital gold. For me, since that was my original thesis, I think we largely succeeded. You know, does the everyday person see it that way? You know, I think market. Last time I checked the surveys around market penetration in terms of what percentage of the US owns Bitcoin, I think it's under 10%, but I. I might be making numbers up, but I'm pretty sure it's like 5 to 10%. That's not bad. I mean, we convinced. What is the population of the U.S. like, 400 million. You know, we convinced 40 million people to buy Bitcoin. And that's just the U.S. numbers. Globally, it might be bigger. From obscurity of this crazy magic Internet money into being semi relevant, I consider that from a marketing standpoint, that's a huge success. Fifteen years, people don't wake up and wonder, should I shake my core foundations of understanding what money is like? That's. You wake up and you wonder if you should buy Chick Fil A or Burger King. You don't want to wake up and be like, let me question the nature of reality, both my money, God, family, and purpose in life. You don't want to go down that rabbit hole. You know, so the fact that 40 million people in the US alone, let's say the 10% number is true. 40 million people woke up and decided to go down the rabbit hole of questioning the nature of the reality. So core to them, like, what is money? I think that's success. But, yeah, you know, it's still a battle to be won. I think this is a gener. You know, I realized a long time ago that this is going to be a generational thing. I don't think the boomers. Most boomers, I think, are kind of too far gone. They're too set in their ways. And so as the famous quote goes, science progresses at the death of every scientist. You know, I think like, bitcoin adoption will.
- [14:58]
David
Oh, my. I understand that quote slightly differently. The quote that I have in my head is science progress one grave at a time time.
- [15:05]
Dan Held
Same, same. I think.
- [15:06]
David
Same, same. Yeah.
- [15:07]
Dan Held
Basically the old.
- [15:08]
David
We need the old people to die so the new people can take over. But that's not a revolution. That's just time passing.
- [15:15]
Dan Held
Well, I guess every invention before, though, had the same same effect. You know, after going through this myself with bitcoin and then, you know, six years ago, I invested in SpaceX, which had a lot of similar. I, I would say like very like a lot of intense feelings in a negative manner towards the concept of. After going through this experience myself, I, I really have this empathy for every single inventor or artist before us. Like, can you imagine, most people were never recognized for their contributions, whether it be science or art, until after they died. Imagine living a whole life like this. At least we were validated that we were right. But imagine living a whole life and everyone is just ridiculing you all the time. Like, it's like bitcoin and eth being at super low prices your entire life. Right.
- [16:00]
David
Yeah.
- [16:00]
Dan Held
You know, at least we had moments where like we definitely had our victory lapse where everyone who was a critic was coming back and saying, hey, you guys were right. So. Yeah. And again, like I said, I have deep sympathy for every inventor or critical thinker or contrarian thinker before us. Yeah.
- [16:18]
David
What do you think about Michael Saylor's influence or just role in, in bitcoin? Like, I think it's pretty easy to say. Like obviously he's been good for it. If our measuring stick is price because he bought $60 billion, he just piled $60 billion into Bitcoin. So how is that not good? But there's also, there's definitely a double edged sword and we can talk about that. What do you think just overall about like Michael Saylor and his relationship to bitcoin?
- [16:42]
Dan Held
Yeah, first and foremost, I think he's played a really good critical role in advocating for bitcoin. I've had a lot of time I've spent with him at his place in Miami. We've gone out to dinner quite a few times. You know, I. There's some funny things as well where, you know, his proof of work, his whole energy memes, you know, he's mentioned before that like, oh, you know, a lot of what I learned about bitcoin is from Dan. So I've seen some weird after effects of like, I think is his take on energy is a little too cosmic, a little bit esoteric, let's put it that way. And so, you know, whereas I feel like mine was a bit esoteric but more for an easy concept for people to digest. But I didn't go a little, I didn't go Chris crazy with the energy meme. I think he's taken some narratives and I think gotten a little too esoteric with them. So overall I think he's a net positive. At the same time, you know, he is advocating ultimately he represents microstrategy and so at the end of the day, he's sort of not recommending but advocating for microstrategy. And as you know, I never got involved in any of the DATs. I got offered to be CEO of three of them. Actually, no, I think it's four of them. You know, I could have participated in them by buying it early. I didn't do that either. You call me old fashioned, but if you want to buy bitcoin, just buy bitcoin. And I think a lot of people had this whole concept around like, oh, well, what if we get like a leverage play on bitcoin and whatnot? You know, I don't think that, I think Stretch and microstrategy, I don't think we're represented in the, you know, most accurate way possible. I don't think there was malicious intent behind it. But, you know, so tldr, I'm kind of waxing poetically here. Tldr, I think he's a net positive for bitcoin. However, I would not have Recommended Bitcoiners by MicroStrategy or Stretch or any of those products.
- [18:37]
David
Yeah, my concern is about the role of Datsun and the success of that is just like the centralization of the supply. Like if you, if you tell me, like, okay, what if strategy owned half a percent of Bitcoin? Be like, that's great. 1% of Bitcoin.
- [18:54]
David (Ad reads)
That's great.
- [18:55]
David
2% of Bitcoin. I was like, wow, that's a lot of Bitcoin. So 4% of Bitcoin, dude. And at some point, like, just like as a thought experiment, like, what if strategy owned 50%, half of the Bitcoin supply? I'd be like, that's too much, that's bad. That's a bad thing. And I bet you price can't really move too much if One entity owns 50%. Now we're, we're at 4%. So very far off. But still like, it starts to be a little worrisome that there's just this like one dude. Like the, the whole like Metcalfe law interpretation of like networks depends on the bitcoin supply being diffuse. And so I do kind of worry, like, at what point is there just like too much attention? Not like there's no risk to bitcoin because bitcoin code doesn't care about Michael Strategy. So like, whatever, but just like the attention and the branding can be like captured a little bit. And that kind of worries me. What do you think about that?
- [19:55]
Dan Held
Yeah, I don't think you're wrong that there could be a narrative that would impact price around concentration risk being like, oh, this people just inherently believe more concentration means wealth inequality, censorships, centralization. So you're not wrong narrative wise. As you mentioned before though, the bitcoin code doesn't really care. Right. Like Bitcoin's proof of work function isn't a proof of stake function. Thinking a proof of stake protocol, that'd be very worrisome. And a proof work protocol, it's a little less worrisome. Granted, with someone with that much capital, they could also buy a lot of miners. But you know, proof of work basically functions. You, you have all this capex, you buy these machines and the only thing these machines can do is print money, which is Bitcoin. So if you buy too many of them and then people perceive the network as being centralized, you would. And then you act in a bad MANNER, like doing 51% attacks. You would essentially destroy the machines that print the money. And you've already spent upfront capital. Proof of work is provably burning capital to purchase machines up, upfront. And so anyways, even if they had a concentration of the miners, they would have to be willing to burn the money and be willing to destroy their, all of their invested capital if they wanted to manipulate the network in their favor. Yeah, yeah.
- [21:09]
David
I don't really, I don't really think it's a, it's a technical thing though. It's more of like a, it's a, it's back to just like it's an, it's a sociological thing and it's kind of similar in the sense that, you know, the United States has really planted their flag on bitcoin and cryptos. Like bitcoin is, we have a strategic asset reserve, strategic bitcoin reserve. And like Donald Trump wants to make crypto the capital of, of the, of the world. Crypto capital of the world. And I see like, well, China doesn't give a fuck about bitcoin. What's China buying but gold? And so there's like a branding. It's like, it's not as credibly neutral. It's not as like permissionless and balanced and harmonious across the globe as it once was. And so it's kind of the same thing with the United States planting the flag. Like Bitcoin is just US coded, which works for me. I'm in the US Bitcoin's also kind of Michael Saylor coded. And that's kind of like, that's part where I go back that wasn't the plan. That was not the plan. What do you think about that?
- [22:04]
Dan Held
Yeah, I mean, first, I'm actually quite surprised that China and other like Russia and China didn't try to buy as much bitcoin as they could.
- [22:11]
Michael Naito
Right.
- [22:12]
Dan Held
I mean, Russia right now is dealing with the consequences of that. With the Ukraine war, they've had a lot of their assets frozen. So the fact that they didn't perceive bitcoin as kind of a safe store value is quite bizarre, especially with how fluid they could pay their partners with it. You know, I'm not exactly sure why adoption didn't occur there. Granted, you know, bitcoin is pseudonymous, so we don't know exactly how much the Russian government could own. And they could make a very concentrated effort to keep it semi private. Ish. And just, you know, have it in a bunch of different wallets and distribute it in a way where we wouldn't know true ownership. But yeah, I mean, for me, bitcoin is an incredibly neutral asset. There is a potential negative narrative being associated with both the United States and a certain party. I think the party is more troublesome than the United States being associated with it. The United States has the largest gold reserves in the world. So much so that it's larger than I believe. I believe it's larger than every other gold reserve combined, but it's huge. So the US has the largest gold reserves out there. Just because the US Believes in gold doesn't make gold any less valuable. And also, the US Is perceived as still the world reserve asset. The dollar is perceived as a world reserve asset. So them adopting bitcoin, I think is a positive. I think it being Republican, you know, I'm libertarian, so I dislike both parties equally. But I think that could be a negative narrative here in two years or. Yeah, when Trump would come. Yeah, about two years from now years.
- [23:40]
David
Yeah.
- [23:40]
Dan Held
You know, that, that could come back to where, especially since Trump and I find this very distasteful, where he, you know, leaned into largely pump and dump schemes like Trump Coin and all sorts of stuff where I'm like, you know, man, all you had to do is just be a little classy about it. You could have set up, that's asking too much partnerships, a venture firm, you get a preferred terms, you get all sorts of different deals. You could have made your billions in a nice ethical, clean way. And instead it's just really grimy with how we did it. So I think that's going to really come back and bite us. There's probably going to be some investigations after he comes out, after he leaves office. So, yeah, tldr, we can't really control how bitcoin gets adopted. Like who, who adopts it, where. Who buys it. So I think the U.S. association is okay, Trump, not so much when it comes down to concentration. And to answer your first question of concentration in the narratives around that, I think 4%'s fine. I mean, it's pretty hard to accumulate a 4% position. It's taken them years, years of constant buying. So I'm not too worried about that. Even if it gets to 10%, I still think said 10% in most people's minds would sound low, you know, 40%. I agree with you at those numbers. It just sounds bad. So, theoretically, yes, I agree. You know, practically someone has been trying to do this. I don't know when he began, was it five, five, six years ago?
- [25:07]
David
It was right around Covid. It's right around Covid, Yeah. So five years. Yeah.
- [25:12]
Dan Held
So he's taking him a long time to get to 4%.
- [25:15]
David
It doesn't seem like he's going to be buying a lot of bitcoin in the short term either.
- [25:19]
Dan Held
That's on pause with the trading below par. Not par, they're not really a par in the stretch, but trading below the $100 sort of target price I don't think is a good omen.
- [25:29]
David
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to ask about scaling in bitcoin Lightning network. I don't know what's up with that, but I don't see it anywhere on my feeds at all. Has like bitcoin kind of just like become indifferent to scaling?
- [25:42]
Dan Held
Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's this one. I'd like to go back to the block size wars, basically. For those who aren't familiar, there's bitcoin and bitcoin Cash Civil war. Bitcoin broke in half, essentially in terms of cultural and community values. The small blockers, which was myself, and basically what bitcoin is today, we believe that you can't scale bitcoin completely on the layer one, so you have to scale it in layers. So you have to build these other layers that eventually net settle on the bitcoin based layer for those who don't know what we're talking about here. For the L2s, basically the community made a promise that we would push all this economic activity to L2s and that we would foster a healthy L2 to L1 relationship. I do think bitcoin, the bitcoin community has failed in that regard, we could have implemented things like op, CAT or other very basic scripting functions in the Bitcoin based layer that would enable trustless L2s. Most of Bitcoin L2s have different security assumptions that basically make the process of using your Bitcoin on an L2 less secure than Bitcoin's L1 and we could have made it almost equivalently secure. So I do think that that is a promise that was made back then in the block size wars that we have not fulfilled. And so I would say that's a big miss because we could have had a. And I think the rise of different other smart contract platforms like Ethereum, Solana and others represent that missed opportunity. I think that the lack thereof of really capable L2s that are anchored really well into Bitcoin's L1. I think because we haven't made those changes happen in the community. I do think, like I said, those protocols represent that missed opportunity.
- [27:26]
David
Interesting, interesting. How do you think what, what could have. What could have that looked like if, like say if some of the things that you talked about like op, CAT and some of the other technical things actually worked out, what would Bitcoin look like?
- [27:40]
Dan Held
Yeah, it's a good question. It's all hypothetical. Right. Can't replay what would happen. But you know, if you have trustless bridging, which means you can take your bitcoin from an L1 and bring it to an L2 and you don't have to trust the bridge, that changes a lot of things. I feel like that security would change a lot of user behavior around when they operate with this L2. If they trust, they wouldn't have to trust it as much. There's of course zero day exploits and other functions with an L2 that you need to be aware of. You know, protocol, risk. You know, I was saying this five years ago, you know, just because it's defi doesn't reduce its risk. A lot of people are marketing defi as, yeah, I've reduced my counterparty risk to zero. Like yeah, you did, but you also.
- [28:16]
David
Yeah, your counterparty risk. Yeah, yeah.
- [28:19]
Dan Held
Which isn't a bad or good thing. It just. You just need to be aware of it. Right. So I think that, you know, with, with Bitcoin L2s, I think it would have captured a lot of that DeFi demand. Bitcoin's L1 basically, that the community is like, well look, we're not going to do all the fancy cool stuff that Ethereum and Solana can do on the L1. And so, you know, we didn't have really robust L2s. And so I think that, you know, we would have seen Bitcoin's market share in terms of like market Bitcoin dominance metric. I think we would have seen that higher. I think we would have seen Bitcoin absorb a lot of those positive narratives that Ethereum and Solana got around Defi. Smart contracts that could have flowed into Bitcoin, which would, I think would have been value accretive to the store of value narrative, like a more useful store of value or a digital gold that's more productive. Those narratives, I think would have amplified the digital gold. It wouldn't have been distracting from it. So, yeah, I think that it was definitely a missed opportunity. And, and that's where I think the market capitalizations of both Solana and Ethereum represent that missed opportunity. Granted, those protocols are still a very small percentage of Bitcoin's market cap. So how much of an opportunity did we miss? I'm not sure, but I do think Defi is the future. Like seeing Ethereum defi summer was interesting. Like, as a bitcoin maxi, I still appreciate it and, and spent a lot of time exploring why Ethereum defi summer occurred and because A, users want it. B, there's a lot of very basic primitive financial types of financial transactions that people want. Lending, borrowing, you know, staking lending, you know, different types of smart other smart contracts or options derivatives. These are all productive things. You know, there's, there's a whole host of like, do we need millions of tokens? I don't think so. I don't think that's exactly useful. But taking an asset like digital gold and being able to borrow against it in a trustless manner, there's a massive amount of demand for that. Being able to lend it out in a way that's semi trustless, you know, I think is useful.
- [30:26]
David
What about privacy? I can't actually remember if Bitcoin had like a commitment to privacy in its culture. I don't think it did. But nonetheless, privacy has always been interesting to bitcoiners. What, what is kind of like the idea, the relationship that Bitcoin and Bitcoiners believe about privacy with regards to the Bitcoin protocol.
- [30:45]
Dan Held
Yeah, that's a good question. Because the early community, the word cash actually means that. So when the Bitcoin white paper was written, Satoshi wrote it for the cipher punks, which are on the cryptographer mailing list. The cipher punks don't use the word cash to mean everyday transactions. That's a huge misconception.
- [31:04]
David
Interesting. I've never realized that. That's, that's crazy. Yeah.
- [31:08]
Dan Held
Because you know like you had like e. Cash hash cash. Like what. Why are they using this word cash?
- [31:13]
David
Right.
- [31:13]
Dan Held
It means a couple different things. It means a one way function that means once I make a payment it can't be reversed so it's irreversible. That's what a cash transaction is like. If I pay you cash for your plant in the background.
- [31:25]
Michael Naito
Yeah.
- [31:26]
Dan Held
Can't ask for that back unless you want to give it back.
- [31:28]
David
Yeah.
- [31:28]
Dan Held
So it means it's, it's irreversible and usually means that it's private between the two parties.
- [31:34]
David
Yeah, yeah.
- [31:35]
Dan Held
That was a big component that the cypherpunks really cared about. Now bitcoin is pseudonymous. We don't know which bitcoin address, who owns which address. But if we ever de anonymize if you've owned an address then we can trace through the blockchain and probably figure out some of your ownership. But it is still difficult, it's not easy and you can do coin joins, you can do all sorts of other obfuscation. No lightning which is a Bitcoin L2, you know that channel activity is largely anonymous but for the cipher punks and Satoshi that was actually a critical component with the idea that bitcoin would be semi, semi private or fully private. That's what the word cash means. Not cash in your pocket, not that pay for everyday stuff. Now Satoshi of course does reference merchants and paying for things but the word cash does not represent that because he's writing this to the cipher punks. The privacy issue though very early on, you know Satoshi and his writing both on the forums, the peer to peer foundation forums rather than bitcoin talk forums. But also there you know, he mentions that privacy is a good thing. They want to explore adding more privacy. He talks about zk. You know, Satoshi also had a lot of mistakes that he made with bitcoin. People forget that too. And there's a, there's actually a few things that I would consider Satoshi actually missed on significantly. One would be the units Y21 million versus 21 billion. I think he was quite bearish.
- [32:55]
David
So he said why 21? I actually never figured out why 21.
- [32:57]
Dan Held
Supposedly that's like a computer science thing. The 21 just makes it easier from like sort of like floating point number or something like that. A little beyond my, my, my plebeian marketing understanding of tech. Okay, so 21 is like, I guess a more elegant way to do it, but 21 million versus 21 billion versus 21 trillion. I think he wanted to break the dollar parity sooner. And this is an experiment. He didn't know if it was going to work. I think he was a little too bearish. And that unit bias problem I do think is an issue.
- [33:26]
David
Oh, wow. That's novel to me.
- [33:29]
Dan Held
Right.
- [33:30]
David
Bitcoin is just too expensive.
- [33:32]
Dan Held
Yeah, everyone thinks bitcoin is too expensive. So I think Satoshi did make a mistake on that where he put the decimal.
- [33:37]
David
You think bitcoin should be like $65? Yeah.
- [33:40]
Dan Held
I mean, you probably would have got a more adoption, but maybe it wouldn't have. We don't know. We can't replay time.
- [33:46]
David
Yeah.
- [33:46]
Dan Held
And then he also had a very aggressive issuance schedule, you know, like to produce that many bitcoin. In the beginning it was very aggressive. It could have been a much flatter trajectory. So.
- [33:56]
David
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Yeah, yeah.
- [33:59]
Dan Held
And you and I have talked about this extensively, but yeah, yeah, it's.
- [34:03]
David
I mean, outside of the security budget, I. I'll. I'll talk about the security budget in a second. But just like, yeah, just like having like so many coins be mined so early, like ima. Imagine how you could have just stretched the security budget like four times, ten times further.
- [34:18]
Dan Held
Totally, totally. Yeah, we'll touch on that if we want to go into that a little bit later. But there's a. There's a very clear trade off between auditability and transparency. So if it's private, we can't audit it as easily. Which we just saw on zcash literally a month ago. That's not the first time it's happened in zcash. It's also not the first time it happened in bitcoin. It happened in Bitcoin in 2010. However, it was before bitcoin was worth a penny. It was immediately fixed. And bitcoin was a very rough. Bitcoin was rough code in 2010. It wasn't like a real protocol. Not tested. Not really. It was very basic. Again, it was before bitcoin was worth a penny. I think a lot of zcash people will bring that up, but it's a false equivalency.
- [35:03]
David
Ethereum people bring it up when bitcoiners fud Ethereum about the Dow hack and they're like, well, you guys did it too.
- [35:09]
Dan Held
Yeah, exactly, exactly. But yeah, I mean, one was a consensus change. One wasn't like, yeah, yeah, the Ethereum Dow hack was like saying, oh, this theft is bad. The Bitcoin was like this broke consensus, that's 21 billion.
- [35:24]
David
I take that point. I take that point.
- [35:25]
Dan Held
Yeah. So, you know, I would say privacy, of course, is something I strive for. Like, I think that's a great value to have, but you cannot have perfect privacy on an L1. And auditability and Bitcoin's core value prop is around the 21 million hard cap being a credible monetary policy. That's why good, that's why it makes for a good sound money. Not its rate of inflation or deflation, but the fact that we can trust that 21 million won't be changed or has a high, credible, credible chance that it won't be changed. Yeah.
- [35:53]
David
So privacy is like an application layer thing, not a, not a protocol thing.
- [35:56]
Dan Held
Totally. And you know, we look at the market cap as he cash these other coins and they're tiny. So like, how much do users truly value privacy? I think it's quite low. Even though I wish from a libertarian perspective that people would more and more people valued it. Don't. You know. And so I also wrote about this in 2020. It's called Bitcoin privacy. Is it? The article I wrote on my blog. Let's say we had perfect privacy on zcash or Bitcoin and we didn't have any auditability flaws. Okay. So I spend it on various activities and I buy a house. But houses has a title, and that title is in my name. And you know, the IRS and various other entities, anyone in public can walk by my house and see how big my house is or small or whatever it is. The IRS can ask me where I got that money from, because they can see that I bought a house. And so the idea that you could live in this perfect level of privacy if we just had a perfect private money, I think is a little bit, a little bit ridiculous. Like, I think you can't have perfect privacy if you buy any big items. You know, it's kind of impossible, right?
- [37:02]
David
Yeah, yeah. If you buy any big items, you're kind of like filling in some numbers on a sudoku puzzle for other people to kind of like figure out. Yeah, yeah. And like, yeah. And, and also, yeah, I think what we're saying and what I, what I understand is like, we enjoy privacy. We enjoy technically strong privacy, but there's a limit as to how safe it is to put it deep into the protocol and we can get privacy elsewhere. I take that point.
- [37:28]
Dan Held
In a perfect world, if with no trade offs, absolutely and that's where I find the zcash folks just so dishonest, where they act like we could just snap it with our finger. We could have privacy on Bitcoin's L1. Obviously we thought about that. This isn't like, oh yeah, we're just being curmudgeons. And we're like, no, we don't want privacy because we, we're all institutional now. No, it's not that at all. It's. It's basically there's a huge trade off. And we're like, the trade off doesn't make sense for us. But you guys go on and do that. Cool. I mean, and then zcash had that, you know, the flaw in it with the inflation bug and we were kind of largely validated by our concerns.
- [38:03]
David
Not. Not an inflation bug. An inflation bug inside of the privacy pool. And so not. Not a actual unit inflation bug. Kind of an inflation bug, but not. Not. Yeah, ultimately the. The number of zcash remains the same.
- [38:18]
Dan Held
Appreciate. Appreciate it.
- [38:19]
David
But yeah, nuances is hard with privacy. And that's kind of the point, actually.
- [38:22]
David (Ad reads)
Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry. Questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feedback instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium and there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.
- [39:04]
David
I want to talk about bips. What is what. What's the current bips being talked about? And bips are Bitcoin improvement protocols. So this is like for Ethereum people. This is eips. The. The bitcoin improvements. What's being discussed in the modern day and age around Bitcoin?
- [39:18]
Dan Held
Yeah, so you know, bitcoin bit. The BIP is basically in a bitcoin improvement to the protocol that's proposed. You know There's a couple floating around, I think bip360s around quantum, like improving bitcoin to be quantum post quantum cryptography. Basically solving some of the, you know, with, with quantum. The current issue with bitcoin is that, you know, when you sign a transaction with your private key that the private key can get exposed and if that gets exposed, steal your bitcoin. And so we have to upgrade bitcoin signatures to post quantum secure signatures.
- [39:49]
David
Yeah. And we have to pick which signature is the best one. And there's a bunch of trade offs to each one.
- [39:54]
Dan Held
A bunch of trade offs from potential zero day exploits to large bite sizes. Overall, anything post quantum is going to be a little much larger in bytes, AKA data size. So that'll make bitcoin transactions more expensive. Certainly opens up another conversation around bitcoin block size though.
- [40:11]
David
Yeah, I'm kind of okay with that actually. I think I was having this debate with Ryan where Ryan was like, oh yeah, bitcoiners like are going to need to increase the block size. I'm like, I don't know if they do. I think they can just pay the fees. Do you have an opinion on that?
- [40:23]
Dan Held
Well, block space currently isn't super busy, so you could probably do the fees. But you know, in a theoretical world where like a lot of people are trying to do it at once, block size increase may be necessary. But that's a, that's a whole can of worms. But anyways, any, any post quantum secure anything, any post quantum encryption that we select will likely be larger in bytes. There is some improvements that are like magnitude shifts and I think that's some of the criticism that some folks have is that, you know, we shouldn't make these changes until we, you know, basically have much more data dense transaction types, or not data dense, but just. And more efficient. So that's BIP 360. There's a couple other proposals as well. There's also kind of a one called BIP 110 which I don't know if you've seen those voices. I don't even know if you even see those people on crypto Twitter because the Twitter, the nature of Twitter has changed a lot.
- [41:13]
David
Like yeah, it's very bubbly these days.
- [41:16]
Dan Held
Yeah, that and like I feel like we were all part of the same conversation before and now, now kind of gets a bit more convoluted. So yeah, I would say bip110 basically a bunch of these moronic plebs believe that, you know, we should censor bitcoin
- [41:33]
David
Because I was wondering if this is still relevant. Yeah, okay, so this is, this is the arbitrary data. Do we allow arbitrary data in Bitcoin or not?
- [41:40]
Dan Held
These idiots don't understand how computer science, AKA information theory works. You know, these are, these are very uneducated.
- [41:47]
David
Some of these idiots. Core devs though.
- [41:49]
Dan Held
No one. There's one core dev who's a super religious guy. Yeah. He's believed that the Catholic church has perverted Catholicism. He believes in eating cats. He.
- [41:59]
David
Oh my God.
- [42:00]
Dan Held
So believes all sorts of crazy.
- [42:03]
David
Okay, so we don't take him seriously anymore.
- [42:05]
Dan Held
No, no, he's a lunatic. And so you got a lunatic and a bunch of uneducated plebs that are behind him.
- [42:12]
David
Right.
- [42:12]
Dan Held
And they're like signal for 110, you know, so they're kind of shouting right now about that. And literally every minor and every business is like, what the are you doing?
- [42:19]
David
Like, stop, stop being weird.
- [42:21]
Dan Held
Yeah, stop being weird. And so they might actually fork off, which would be great.
- [42:25]
David
Great, great, great. Let them. I hope they do. I hope they do.
- [42:29]
Dan Held
Please. Exactly. So bip110 is a joke. Is like being considered slash talked about a little bit, but there's nothing I would say in the immediate short term that's, that's kind of like.
- [42:42]
David
Sure, what's. What about the, like the level of urgency around the quantum bit360 or just like how fast things are progressing? Because there is like a level of urgency around quantum. Right. Yeah.
- [42:53]
Dan Held
I would say this is the biggest unresolved question and I would say most pressing issue in bitcoin. Pressing doesn't mean it's an immediate concern, but pressing as in we need to have, I'd say some forward momentum.
- [43:06]
David
Yeah, the foot needs to be on the gas.
- [43:08]
Dan Held
Exactly. I mean Nick Carter obviously has been. Been kind of ringing that bell a bit. I do believe that we should be making actions now or progressing towards a solution. I don't think the threat's imminent even in some of the most aggressive timelines for, you know, quantum mechanic, you know. Quantum. Yeah, or what do they call that, the Q event or something like that. Q data. Yeah. I think it's still five years away, probably at a, at a minimum. But even then it still might take us quite a while to agree upon how we upgrade and the process of migration. You know, if every single bitcoin address wanted to, you know, move over to a post quantum secure encryption standard, it would take significant amount of time. So yeah, this needs to be figured out. I'd say soon, in the next couple years. It'd be great if we had consensus over the next direction and then we have actions happen in like year three. I think that would be like an acceptable or good timeline in my, my book.
- [44:03]
David
I think the big concern was that it wasn't being taken seriously as an issue broadly by Bitcoiners. Is that still true or do you think everyone has kind of realized like that we have to, we have to take this head on?
- [44:16]
Dan Held
I think that's where, like, I respect Nick, but I think he definitely kind of exaggerated the level of apathy. It was largely talked about in most circles I'm a part of. I think the only disagreement was the level of concern, like how, how soon does this need to be resolved, I think is the bigger question. And Nick was kind of raising the alarm, which I applaud him for his efforts. I also think he was a bit too critical of various efforts that were going on. I don't think people were just like, oh, this isn't a problem. I think it was more of like, it's going to be a problem, but it's going to be a little while from now. I think game theoretically that given how advanced AI is getting, that the AI coming up with solutions to make quantum computing more effective will likely lead to its adoption sooner than later. So I do think that five year timeline, while previously was considered extremely aggressive, I think is a safe one. I think even with AI breakthroughs on, you know, building quantum computers, I still think five years would be pretty, pretty aggressive in terms of, of when we think Q day might occur.
- [45:18]
David
Dan, did you watch the Finding Satoshi documentary?
- [45:21]
Dan Held
I did, yeah.
- [45:23]
David
Do you like, agree with the conclusion?
- [45:25]
Dan Held
You know, I'm kind of a Hal Maxi, like, sure. To me, he embodies.
- [45:31]
David
I think you can be and also still agree with the conclusion. So the documentary, we had them on the podcast for listeners who didn't watch kind, in my opinion, kind of does the best job that I think will ever be done about investigating satoshi and comes to a conclusion that it's both Hal Finney and Len Sassman. To me, the addition of Len Sassman was the curveball. Sasserman was a curveball. But like, I, I, my opinion is that I don't think we're ever going to have a more definitive answer than this. Maybe, maybe that's what I'll ask you to like, qualify or disagree about.
- [46:02]
Dan Held
Yeah. What's interesting is that I had a question posed to me once, given more and more time, will it become more or less likely that we find Satoshi which I thought was super interesting. And I, I think it's more likely we. We would have found him sooner. And I think the more time that progresses, there's. It's less likely that we find him. Even though our ability to like, analyze his text and look at all the data we have becomes better. With AI, there, there is data decay that is occurring. Emails, written communication logs that are slowly being deprecated and. Or erased. That would have been. Help us definitively find who Satoshi is. So I would say, like the, the lens, the Lynn Sassam and Hal Finney connection. I thought that was an elegant, good narrative. I don't have any strong opinions for or against the argument. It's certainly a lot better than the New York Times one about. Yeah, right. Oh, man, that was so bad.
- [46:57]
David
Adam Back.
- [46:58]
Dan Held
Yeah, that was just so, so bad. Adam Back is definitely not Satoshi. So, yeah, I would say, like Hel Finney, it definitely feels like Hal Finney wrote the code. It hell, Finney fits the bill perfectly for who Satoshi is. You know, the idea that Lens Acerman wrote the white paper, I mean, the idea that, like, Hal Finney couldn't write a white paper, though, that seems a little weak. The idea, the idea that he had to bring in Len Sasserman for that. Yeah, maybe, but white papers aren't exactly rocket science.
- [47:28]
David
Yeah. Do you think identifying satoshi, does that do anything or is this just a fun game?
- [47:34]
Dan Held
Well, I don't want it. I don't think we should know who Satoshi is. It's a fun game, but it would be negative if we definitively found who Satoshi was, because one, it creates, you know, this, this. This basically deity now becomes a. A cold, hard, real person.
- [47:50]
David
Right. It pops the illusion. Yeah.
- [47:52]
Dan Held
And Satoshi's whole purpose of creating the pseudonym was to be, you know, a pseudonym is to be, you know, someone who wasn't there. There wasn't a physical representation associated himself with this. It was more of a, I am an individual, I've done my contribution, and now I'm gone versus you should look up to me. You should. You should ask me what to do next. He didn't want to be that. And so I think it wouldn't be good if we identified who he was. It is still a fun game. I still try to attempt to identify who Satoshi is, but I don't think it'd be good for the protocol to know who he is. But I don't think it'd be ultimately that much detrimental. Satoshi is likely passed away, and if that's true then he doesn't really have any say over future direction of the protocol.
- [48:32]
David
Four year cycles we seem to be doing them, but I kind of want to look at what happens in the next four years, like 20, 28, but then even into like well into the 2000-30s, like the medium term future of bitcoin. We got, we got bitcoin treasuries, corporate treasuries, we got the bitcoin strategic reserve. Some huge wins, some huge dubs for bitcoin. What kind of wins does bitcoin do? We want bitcoin to get in like its next phase of growth?
- [49:01]
Dan Held
Yeah, I mean both. Further I would say market penetration of how many people own bitcoin, like that's a really important KPI for me. Like how many people across the globe as a percentage of the population own it. Whether it's $100, $10 or a million dollars doesn't really matter because then does
- [49:17]
David
it matter how like if I said etf, does that matter?
- [49:20]
Dan Held
I would prefer them do self custody but it doesn't really matter. They can do non self custody and they still by buying bitcoin they have bought into this new financial system, this new belief in bitcoin. And by believing in bitcoin it does make it more real. It's all a shared aggregate illusion. That's what all money is, both gold the dollar and bitcoin. And so the more people that buy into the concept of it, the more it has linde, the more longer it'll stick around, the bigger it'll become. It's a network effect. It's like a social network but for money. So the more people that buy into it, the better. It's like a social network where you can plug directly into it or you can use an app to go access it. Either way you're buying into this new system which further disenfranchises you from the existing system and ultimately brings about bitcoin's success as a global reserve asset or like a new global money. So I do think buying it even in an ETF is good. It's certainly not negative. It's good, but it's not as good as self custody in it.
- [50:16]
David
Do you think bitcoin flips gold over
- [50:18]
Dan Held
a long enough time period? Yes.
- [50:19]
David
Like a lifetime or like a couple decades.
- [50:23]
Dan Held
Well, you know, depends on the growth rate, right? Like 15 years we went from 0 to 1.5 trillion. I do think what was nice about gold's recent movement is it showed that large market cap assets can still have huge volatility so there was an argument to be made that like bitcoin would never have such large movements ever again because like large market cap assets don't move that much. SpaceX, Bitcoin, Apple I think very much proved that wrong in gold. So yeah, I do think bitcoin will eventually flip in gold. I think that's probably at least 10 to 15 years away. You know, it requires more people to believe at a fundamental level with what the market cap represents is do people believe more in gold or more in bitcoin? And like I said before, this goes back to a generational divide over, you know, world Boomers adopt this as they die off. Millennials and Gen Xers bought into bitcoin a lot more. We start to set policy for different sorts of institutions, both banks and the Fed, etc, Treasury. So through these, I'd say gradual lifetime, sort of generational adoption cycles, that's when we should see gold flipping. With bitcoin, flipping gold, I mean gold is a pretty, pretty boring asset. Not many Gen Xers, Gen Z and millennials buy gold. I mean it's considered the kind of a boomer thing. So as boomers, which are basically the only gold bugs left as they die off, I do see gold's value or gold's perception of being a, you know, store value assets slowly fade away. Especially as well with SpaceX. SpaceX. As Starship program improves and the tonnage that goes to space improves, there will be extremely credible opportunities to mine asteroids and return that gold back to Earth in a way that is economically doable. All gold on Earth is from asteroids. So you know, the, once we see that become more tangible and people start to price in that future expectation of, of asteroid mining becoming real, then gold really has a crisis of faith where its supply becomes largely irrelevant. That will happen in our lifetime. So that's where I think 10 to 15 years is when we see the slipping in of gold. Because that future expectation of 30 years from now starts to get priced into today. I don't think a lot of people really grok how big starship will be in terms of basically what, what he's doing. What Elon's doing is he's mass producing spacecraft at such a huge scale that space travel will be as reliable and as cheap as airplane travel. I mean the consequences of that are so enormous. And when it comes to gold, it's a, a very detrimental consequence because with gold mining, you know, on asteroids, you know, one asteroid, I forget it has like four quadrillion dollars worth of precious metals. You know, Just harnessing one of those asteroids would essentially. And all you have to do is island a, you know, a small, small craft that has additional thrust and it can slowly push that asteroid towards Earth.
- [53:24]
David
And we make it crash into Earth?
- [53:26]
Dan Held
No, you just push into Earth's orbit and make it a little bit.
- [53:29]
David
Oh, okay. Yeah, because you can't make it crash into Earth because then it's kind of a, it's a free for all.
- [53:33]
Dan Held
But I can't, I can't imagine what will happen is when you like land either you can either land mining craft on the spaceship or sorry, mining craft on the asteroid or you can push it into an orbit and then, and then work on it. But once that happens in any sort of tangible manner, I bet gold drops 25% to today. You know, like that's, that's going to be a death sentence for gold. Anyways, I've been talking a little bit too long.
- [53:57]
David
I, I remember when the Winklev went to D. Dave Portnoy's house and they were trying to shill him on bitcoin. This was in co. This was during COVID I think right after Covid and like they were pitching this like at gold asteroid mining to Dave Portnoy and they were doing a terrible job and David Portnoy was so turned off. But that was like six years ago because it was like so absurd and sci fi and crazy. But that was like six years ago and for some reason I'm listening to you now and like this is now we have AI SpaceX is capturing rockets with, with chopsticks. It doesn't seem that far fetched anymore.
- [54:35]
Dan Held
Totally.
- [54:36]
David
Yeah.
- [54:36]
Dan Held
I mean I saw the first starship launch in person. I bought SpaceX before they built the starship program. So that was my original faith. My, my risk was that they wouldn't be able to execute on that. They did. It's pretty cool. I mean I recommend that everyone go see it because it's, you know, a lot of the things that I grew up watching sci fi whys are coming true and that's one of them. Space travel. So yeah, I mean look you. If Elon's right about this, which is pretty damn right like this, they did it like hardship has been built. They caught it with little chopsticks. You know, it's pretty wild. So I, you know, you're right though. Sometimes being early is the same as being wrong. And if you're really, really early, you look like a lunatic.
- [55:17]
David
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dan, this has been great. Thanks for coming on the show and talking to me. I appreciate your. Your perspective on stuff.
- [55:23]
Dan Held
Yeah. Been too long, David. Glad you could have me on Cheers.
- [55:26]
David
Bankless station. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. Bitcoin is risky, but that's what we're here for. You could lose what you put in. But this is Frontier. It's not for everyone. We're glad you were with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot,
- [55:49]
Dan Held
Sam.