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- [00:07]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
- [00:13]
Podcast Host
All.
- [00:14]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where
- [00:21]
Podcast Host
central bankers are tripping over themselves to
- [00:23]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
- [00:25]
Podcast Host
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
- [00:29]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be. The recruiter was good at being a recruiter. And then, you know, my ex girlfriend's stepdad was, like, telling me sea stories about being on a ship and using rebar to spear hammerhead sharks to, like, off the side of the ship. So signed up, fully psyoped into freedom, played a lot of, like, SOCOM, U.S. navy SEALs on PlayStation 2 and Call of Duty and all these other things. Like, fully bought into that whole psyop. Very much like, let's go spread freedom and democracy. Yeah.
- [01:04]
Podcast Host
So, yeah, Bubba would tell me stories. He. He was a captain of large ships, and he would tell stories about having, like, take the ships down the Mississippi into the Gulf and, like, navigating that. But I forget when he was deployed. I think it was after the Gulf war in the 90s, or like, like before 2001. And he would tell stories about it. They would just get. Get commands. Just, like, there'd be, like, stranded boats in the ocean. They just, like, use their artillery to. To sink them.
- [01:35]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, there's no, like, international law, right? There's. Once you go 12 miles off the coast, you're like, international waters, and it's.
- [01:43]
Podcast Host
I don't.
- [01:43]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
You know, there's not. There's, like, rules and treaties and ways that things should be happening. But yeah, if there's a boat out there blowed up. Yeah.
- [01:49]
Podcast Host
I don't want to dox too much, but if you're comfortable sharing. So you enlisted when you're 18. What year was that?
- [01:54]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I was 08.
- [01:55]
Podcast Host
08. Yeah.
- [01:56]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yep.
- [01:56]
Podcast Host
And so you got deployed in 2012?
- [01:58]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I was in boot camp when the meltdown happened.
- [02:00]
Podcast Host
Ah. What was that like?
- [02:02]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I had no idea. I mean, I was completely oblivious. I remember distinctly there. It was the same thing. So, like, nine, 11. I was in, like, sixth grade. And I just remember, like, the teachers were all, like, like, worried. And I remember the same time, like, when. When, you know, the whole Lehman Brothers, Bears, whatever, was, like, crashing because I was in boot camp from August to October of 08 and I just remember, like people were very much paying attention to the news and not to what we were doing. And I'm like, okay, what's going on here? Like something's happening. I don't know what it is because they don't. They completely isolate you from the outside to, you know, it's a whole process. But I came out and in hindsight there were a lot of like second career older men joining the military at the time. And in hindsight it's like if I'd have been paying attention a little bit more, it's like, oh, these guys like just got their asses handed to them because of the crash and needed something to go do. And the military is a fantastic. You know, if you're looking for something like the military is always there. They're taking volunteers all the time. Steady pay, great benefits, you get the pension, all these other things. And, and so there was like, I was 18 and there was a bunch of like older, older men that were joining at the same time, which I think was a boon.
- [03:15]
Podcast Host
And I mean going back to 2012 when you were deployed, what was that experience like?
- [03:21]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I'm very fortunate. So none of my deployments I saw combat. Like I thank God that I never, I was never shot at. We got mortared, right? So like called indirect fire. There's like sending mortars on the base, nothing super close. But I was never like in gun to gun combat and I'm very thankful for that. You know, as a young man you glorify combat and you think about that. But then as I've gotten older and reflected a lot more, it's like, no, I'm really glad I don't have those demons to deal with because there are, I'm sure you've heard about like veteran suicide numbers. Like guys go through hell in combat and I'm thankful to not have that hell to have gone through while still very, very much participated in it. I called myself a fobbit, right? I never left the FOB when I was downrange in Afghanistan. I was like intel sort of back end support, running operations on the backside of things in my nice air conditioning without exposing myself too much to harm.
- [04:21]
Podcast Host
How high tech are those are those operations in the battlefield?
- [04:28]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I mean they're pretty high tech if you. There's this guy on YouTube called Data Slayer and he releases all these YouTube videos about like I built military grade radios using like open source, whatever. Some of the things that he's building were like being fielded and deployed like mesh radio Like WI fi mesh radios, right. So like one of the systems that some of the guys were using would have this like WI fi mesh radio. So that way you were on this ridge and another guy was on this other ridge and another guy was on this other ridge and it would talk long range WI fi. So that way they could all, all the, all the sensors could collaborate and coordinate with each other. And this was 2012. Right. So you can you fast forward and just look at the trajectory of software and like what Palmer Luckey is doing and everything. Warfare has become even crazier. One of the things that in another universe I would have gone on to do some like, technical R and D work for Naval Special Warfare. I'm glad again, glad I didn't go that path. I decided to get out and like be with my family and ended up going into a different kind of warfare R and D. It's open source battlefield. We find ourselves on of ideas and technology. But it was pretty sophisticated even, even in 2012, because that's where a lot of the bleeding edge tech always comes from is from war.
- [05:37]
Podcast Host
Right. So are you officially retired from the Navy or are you in resistance?
- [05:40]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I'm not retired. No, I got out 11 years, four months and three days.
- [05:44]
Podcast Host
Okay.
- [05:45]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Just separated, no retirement. Just decided it wasn't for me anymore. I had a young. I had my first kid and I realized that being away wasn't worth it anymore. The Navy was going to send me back to like a regular unit and I was going to have to deal with like, regular Navy problems, which is not great. I was in middle management too, and I started to see like, behind the curtain of like, oh, all these people that have problems, they're now my problem because I'm like the middle management. I'm a Navy chief, right? Is like the middle management, senior enlisted of the Navy. And so I'm like having to counsel this guy on like sexual harassment. Like, no, you can't talk to this woman like that in the workplace. And I'm doing it like multiple times and nothing's happening to this guy. He's just like, still around. He just like gets shoved into a different department or something like that. So it's like seeing that there's a lack of the ability for anybody to actually drill in and have consequences for people that weren't doing their jobs was like super demoralizing. And then also the Navy stopped giving me sort of like what I wanted to do. I wanted to go into like cyber. I wanted to go into these more advanced technical fields and the Navy was like, no, a Chinese linguist, according to the Manning numbers. Right. Because everything's just like a number according to all the personnel numbers. Like, we need you here to be this job, and we're not going to send you over here because you're too high rank. And the. Whatever the numbers worked out didn't. Didn't accommodate that. It's like this weird formula.
- [07:05]
Podcast Host
What are your thoughts on Hexeth and the trajectory of the armed forces under the second Trump administration?
- [07:12]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
You know, I haven't paid too much close attention to it, from what I can tell. I like that there is, like, an actual aggressive, like, assertiveness to the military. I think the whole, oh, we're the Department of Defense, but we're going to go out and, like, conduct offensive wars was just a huge misnomer and, like, completely misleading. So I'm happy that we relabeled the Department of War, because that's what it is, you know. Hold comments on recent military actions. But I think it is a positive trajectory. I think, though, that there is still a lot of things to, like, wash out in the broader complex that is the federal government that are, like, deeply, deeply entrenched. So I'm cautiously optimistic, but I think there's still some, like, very deeply rooted entities that are not aligned with, like, this whole, like, Hegseth revamp and revitalization. Like, they're giving people, like, tea.
- [08:05]
Podcast Host
I love it.
- [08:06]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I mean, all my boys were on T anyway. It's like, it's not like I got my one buddy that he just, like, he's just super big in yoke because, uh, you go in and you. You beat your body into a pulp. And especially in the special operations community. Right. And again, I'm not. I was just like an intel guy. I got to work and enable the special operations guys. So, like, by no mean, am I like, an authoritative, like, special operator. So let me just, like, throw that out there. But I worked for a lot of these guys, and I have a lot of friends that were in this community, and guys like, their body is just destroyed. You do. The reason why special operations so good at what they do is they do the same thing over and over and over and over again until you don't even have to think about it. And so you're in and out of helicopters and Humvees and boats and like, all these, you know, physically demanding things, your body just starts to tear down. And so a lot of guys would look for other things like tea or, you know, HGH or whatever, whatever, like juice. They Were looking for, like, there's a guy, there's a team of marines in Afghanistan that they were unable to take helicopters because they all got so big and jacked that they were out. Like, they outweighed the capacity of the helicopters. So they had to always go on ground. Now that's like too far, in my opinion. But if you're signing up to like, destroy your body for, you know, your brothers on your left and your right and for the greater good of the nation, I think you should be able to have access to some of these, like, performance enhancing drugs, we'll call them. Right. I don't see any reasons for that. Like, you want the tip top shape military if you're going to fight a war, if you're going to have a military, like, the purpose of a military is to close and destroy the enemy. To do that, you need to be physically dominant. It's becoming less so with the drone warfare and all this other stuff. But still, you still have to be able to like take 100 plus pounds, carry it for, you know, 15 kilometers, go execute a bunch of people, take things off the objective, whatever it is, and then also exfil. And you have to do all of that without your body breaking down. And the reality of our bodies is like, they just don't work after a certain point.
- [10:08]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it's insane to think about. It often makes me feel like a pussy. I was like, God damn it. And it is like, it is true. You have to truly admire the people that take that burden on and go do it with the intent to protect the country and the ideals that it was founded on. And I think that's one thing. It's very conflicting for civilians. And I imagine veterans alike where you get to a point where it's like, are we the baddies? Did you ever ask that question?
- [10:38]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Not until after I get out. Right. So it's a, it's a heavy thing to consider, but I, you know, I cheered when people died. I don't think that is good for your soul. But it's a, it's a reality, right? You're watching the stream, the live stream basically of a drone, and then puff smoke, dude's gone, and then you all cheer because that was the guy. In the moment, it's fine. But like reflecting on just like, man, that like, there should be some very stoic sort of like, not a celebration, but stoic acceptance that, okay, job's done, move on to the next thing. But it's not like I don't think anybody should ever celebrate somebody Else dying like that just is. That just doesn't work out. And then you look into the monetary implications of the forever wars and the debt funding and all that kind of stuff, and this is like a huge thing. And I'll say, you know, bitcoin veterans in general has this sort of thread throughout. Is like, a lot of these guys realize that some of the things that we were sent over to do are not necessarily for the benefit of the nation, but we're the benefit for the people printing the money. And that's why bitcoin is like a huge thing for veterans. And the veterans that finally get bitcoin understand what's at stake and understand that you have all these tools in your toolbox. And ideally, we never want to get to the point where there's violence. Right? We want to be extremely peaceful. Peaceful is not harmless. It's peaceful, meaning you have a capacity that is restrained. Bitcoin enables you to be extremely peaceful and also have a way to usurp and go against this apparatus that is just this. This beast that's just like churning through people and souls that are. It doesn't stop, right? No, just.
- [12:19]
Podcast Host
Well, was it the monetary aspect that led you to reflect and think about, or was there a particular moment that you were sitting and reflecting and saying, oh, man, what was I doing? What are we doing?
- [12:32]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, the monetary aspect was the first of it. Just because there's like some, you know, Smedley Butler has some quotes like wars a racket. All wars are bankers wars. That's somebody else, I think. So, like, understanding that kind of like, opened the door for like, oh, wow, like, this was what I was told we were doing was not necessarily the ultimate motive. Right. Even though there might have been some kernels of truth in there, some, like, good things, some good intentions. It's like, nah, man. There was. We could. There was opportunities to have, like, close and destroy the enemy that were kneecapped or halted or whatever it was. And these people, you know, there's a monetary incentive to keep the machine going, to keep. Right. All these contract companies, all these logistics and supply companies, like, they get paid if they're downrange doing the support and the supply and the logistics. They don't get paid if there's no war. Right. That was the first revelation. The second was just like, I returned to my faith in God and understanding and reading into, like, what the Bible says and everything like this. It's like, oh, wow, there could be a just war. I don't think the wars that I fought in were necessarily just not at the point that I fought them in. Right. Maybe early on you could make a case for it, depending on what kind of theories you believe on the origin of the war, which. That's a whole nother rabbit hole.
- [13:52]
Podcast Host
That's a rabbit hole that I don't have time for.
- [13:56]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
So, like, you know, I'm open to all those concepts and theories and some of them, I think that hold some, carry some water. But yeah, once you just start looking at like the war that doesn't stop and what that means for your soul and for the souls of the people participating in it and the fact that is purely extracting from the American populace to go fund this mass, Mass murder campaign. That's heavy. That's heavy. And that murder campaign.
- [14:24]
Podcast Host
And was the defending of the poppy fields real too?
- [14:27]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Oh, I don't know. I can't comment on that one. Okay, yeah.
- [14:29]
Podcast Host
All right. But what, at what period of time were you having this revelation?
- [14:36]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Interesting enough, it was shout out to my boy Tim. He's a guy that orange peeled me. He could have sort of like liberty peeled me. He's been just like a, a fantastic friend of mine for a long time and I lived with him. So I went to Afghanistan and then 2014, I started going into this, the special operations community, right. Doing intel stuff there. And that's where I met Tim. And just over like bourbon and drinks at the house, we were living together. And he's just like starting to. Introduced me to these ideas of like, liberty and self sovereignty and like all these other things. And that's where it was. It was weird being on like the tip of the spear, the, you know, the proverbial tip of the spear, like bleeding edge kind of stuff, while at the same time starting to see, you know, the rampant fraud, waste and abuse that was in the military to just like go do something. Because by the time I got into that community, we were like ramping down from Afghanistan, you know, kind of rolling up all those things, like the unit that I got to within a week of arriving, like our last group of people that were deployed to Afghanistan, like came back and gave their full, like debrief and everything. So it was like a period of time where I was like, what are we going to do now? Like, what, what, what is our purpose? Like, what, what are we doing? Like, we, we spent all this time training for Iraq and Afghanistan, everything like that. Now that it's like ramping down, what's. What's next, right? And then you just start to see it's like well, nobody has any idea. And everybody's just trying to figure it out to see where we can throw money at things. And that's where I'm like, oh, wow. Okay. So my boy's telling me about, like, the Federal Reserve and the money printing, the Cantillon Effect, like, all these things. And then at the same time, I'm seeing like, hey, it's, it's September. We have a bunch of money to spend. Who needs gear or who wants to go to a course? And I'm like, oh, oh, wow. Like, this is because if we don't spend our budget, we're not going to get budget next year. So it's like this whole game of, like, we need to spend in excess so that way we can ask for more money next year to do more things. And then that just like the loops.
- [16:28]
Podcast Host
So this is an official special ops group that's not deployed and you guys are giving autonomy to do things or what? Budget?
- [16:36]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
It wasn't autonomy. It was, it was. It was part of the normal military budget, right? And you have a budget to like, train man and equip, right? Or man train and equip. And it's fully within the scope. And it's not that it's, like, inherently bad, but it's like these incentive structures of. And you can see this across the entire government, right? Is you have a budget for a given fiscal year. If you don't spend your budget, the next time they come around to, like, you know, do the line item for your budget, they're like, oh, well, you didn't spend your million dollars, so we'll give you, you know, $900,000. Well, that, like, for a given organization within the government, like, that doesn't work out. Right? So it's just like getting a very clear picture of, like, these things I was learning and reading about, but very clear and defined within the DoD of like, oh, wow, yeah, there is like this gross budget inflation problem. And it's not. It's not like in a malicious thing in the sense that, like, you know, the commanding officers and the people running these organizations, there's. There's no malice. They want to, like, do good, but the do good is, like, to spend more, right? It's like this perverse incentive of, like, oh, we need to spend more money. If we don't spend our money, they're not going to give us the same amount next year. They might even give us less. So when we get to the end of a fiscal year, we have some money left over. We got to figure out how to spend it. Now there's like, legitimate uses to spend that. Right. It wasn't like all just like boondoggles, but at the same time, just the incentive, the fact that it's like, oh, we have money to spend, we need to spend it. And then you start talking to people like, as I've talked to people throughout the government that manage like, budgets and stuff, they're like, oh, yeah, that happened in, you know, this organization, Department of Energy, the. Yeah, everywhere. It's always. It's part of the rampant, like, userous inflationary nature of our monetary system.
- [18:09]
Podcast Host
And like, the incentives are so clear. It's like, if you have money, who doesn't want more money and who doesn't want. If given the mandate to spend the
- [18:17]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
money, who's not going to do it? Exactly. Right. Yeah. It's again, it's not a malicious thing. It's just like the system is just designed to make you want to consume and spend more over and over again.
- [18:29]
Podcast Host
All right, so bringing this back to Tim, what was Tim's background? Was he. Was he.
- [18:32]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I won't get into his background.
- [18:33]
Podcast Host
Okay.
- [18:34]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
He's a friend.
- [18:34]
Podcast Host
That's all.
- [18:34]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
That's all I say. He's a good friend from, like.
- [18:37]
Podcast Host
Was it like, broadly speaking, was like liberty minded growing up? Because.
- [18:41]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, he had like a libertarian background.
- [18:42]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [18:43]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
That was like his sort of philosophy that he introduced me to, you know, good Christian man.
- [18:48]
Podcast Host
Was his first foray via the monetary system or was it like free markets and freedom of association?
- [18:54]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I don't know. For me, it was a monetary system. I read it. Was it Tom woods rollback?
- [18:59]
Podcast Host
Yep.
- [19:00]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I, like, that was the first, like, sort of like liberty book that I dug into. For whatever reason, I started listening to Tom Woods.
- [19:05]
Podcast Host
Great, great man to start listening to.
- [19:08]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yep. It was. I learned that 30 minutes every day. I was like, okay, this is good. And so I read his book and that was like my entry point to all of this was like, oh, the money is broken. Which is why I think once I got to bitcoin in the future, it's like, oh, I had the money broken problem. I just didn't see the solution until much later.
- [19:25]
Podcast Host
So money broken problem incept in your brain. What, like 2014?
- [19:30]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, 2015, 2016.
- [19:31]
Podcast Host
Right around there was the first time you were like, oh, bitcoin's the solution.
- [19:37]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
So fast forward again to 2021. I was working in big tech. I was in the office because I was essential. And I'm looking for anything that is remote. Right. So, like, because all These people are going remote now, and I'm in software, and I'm, like, doing software engineering, and I wanted a job. And again, Tim's like, oh, hey, bro, check out this crypto thing. So, you know, he did his time as a shit corner, but he was like, hey, go check out this thing. So, like, I interviewed at Celsius. Oh, yeah?
- [20:09]
Podcast Host
What was that? Like, did you meet.
- [20:11]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
They ghosted me. They ghosted me. It was fine. It was like, I'm glad I interviewed. I tried to get an interview, a Kraken.
- [20:15]
Podcast Host
Like, dodged a bullet there.
- [20:17]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Absolutely dodged a bullet. I didn't land a job there at all, right? Like, there was no. I had no proof of work. This is, like, something I came to realize, too. But it got my foot in the door of, like, the idea, like, I bought some Ethereum, right? Because he was like, oh, you got to go do some smart contract. You're a dev. You got to go do this. And then come to find out, I need, like, I don't know, like, three grand worth of ETH to, like, do anything fun or exciting. I'm just like, what is this? And it costs, like, $30 to send it to my own wallet and everything. I'm like, I got kids. I can't afford this thing. And so it was like, you know, Ethereum and Bitcoin. I was like, okay, well, let me go check out this bitcoin thing. Boom. Node was sinking within a day. Like, I had my old gaming laptop up and running, downloading the blockchain, doing IBD syncing, and I was like, huh, okay. And then, like, I send myself some. It doesn't cost, you know, 30% of whatever I bought. I'm like, okay, what is this? It's all open source. And so I just started, like, going down this rabbit hole of, like, okay, what is this bitcoin thing? Because it's. To me, it was, like, accessible, and it was, like, cheap, I guess, which is funny to think about. And so, like, I just started exploring that and just. I got onto Twitter again and just started, like, poking around there. Eventually landed on rhr, right? That was, like, one of the first.
- [21:24]
Podcast Host
I was going to say, I feel like you've been, like, a ride or die RHR fan, like, for, like, obviously many years. Like, it feels like longer. I feel like you were like, an A one day. One.
- [21:34]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
No, not that long. But, you know, I have this, this. This blessing of ADHD that I've really learned how to channel and manage. And so, like, when I get into something, it's Like, I'm going down the rabbit hole and I'm like free falling. So, you know, I, I did find a remote job at a startup. It's not worth mentioning, but they laid off like 14% of. Of their headcount after the first year. I was part of that. And I acknowledge why because I was simultaneously like, on my gaming laptop, like managing nodes and like losing money on lightning channels and like doing bitcoin Twitter stuff and trying to do my job at the same time. And so I was just like completely checked out from the job because I was like, rabidly consuming bitcoin content. I listened to the whole Sailor series with Breedlove. Like, that was a huge, like, unlock of like, oh, this is a thing. And like this, like, this matters. And that was like a, A big unlock for me as far as like the conviction point. And then it was just, just rapid consumption and just trying to learn every possible thing and, and poking holes in it. Right? Like, trying to figure out like, okay, where does this break down? Where does this. What. What makes this fail? And, you know, it's apathy. I think it's true. The mining centralization thing, that was like, that was a big thing I found. There was a blog post by Adele that was like, titled Fetty Pools, like, looking for something to do. Looking for a problem solved that was not being addressed. And I read this and I was like, huh, okay. And I worked on fetim it for a little bit and I realized that there was not anyone doing bitcoin mining development. Like, not in like an open source, like, large way. It wasn't for a long time that I finally came across like the Stratum B2 project with the exact. Existed at that time, but was not, not the project it is now. You know, I was looking for like open source, like pool software. It was like CK pool. But even that was like, maybe I wasn't looking in the right places, but it just seemed like mining and engineering and mining was like the right place to go. And I feel pretty vindicated about that today.
- [23:32]
Podcast Host
Yeah. But, yeah, as you like. And so with your special ops intel background. Yeah. I feel like you're well equipped to prod and probe the edges of the technology around Bitcoin. And I imagine, you know, when a system's secure and when it's not. Did anything about bitcoin impress or depress you about the security of the network?
- [23:59]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
No, not the security of the network again. It was the mining thing. It was seeing that there was this massive underdeveloped space that was centralizing and it's still to a degree, centralizing. I think we're getting better on that front. But it was purely in the mining spot, right. Like the cryptography, which I've gone down that rabbit hole. I did a whole like year long Motivate the math series with fundamentals where we talked about like he has this whole magic Internet math thing. But like I was the first sort of like test pilot of like learning cryptography because I wanted to understand like, okay, what is this math?
- [24:30]
Podcast Host
He's doing that. He's got a website.
- [24:31]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah.
- [24:32]
Podcast Host
Shout out to Philly John, Die Hard Ride or die. The last one before we went into summer remission was about his fundamentals math programs. If you want to learn more about the hardcore cryptography of bitcoin, I think he's open source and he still has the podcast, right?
- [24:47]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, it's a new podcast.
- [24:49]
Podcast Host
With Rob.
- [24:50]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
With Rob, yeah. But there was a, there was, you know, the prototype with myself. That was a great, it was a great time, but I went down that. Right. It's like, okay, the cryptography. I don't think cryptography is broken. I'm not a, I'm not a quantum guy. I don't, I don't lose sleep at night over it. Looking at the node implementation. Like, I can grok what's going on in like Bitcoin core's code base. You know, I Vibe coded a testnet for CTV activation client at like a conference one time like early on in the Vibe coding days. So, like I feel comfortable enough, but I feel like I still lack a lot of like the, the academic rigor and sort of like patience really, to be honest, to like meaningfully contribute to that project. So I, you know, I looked into that, but it was. I don't think that's my cup of tea necessarily. And so I just kind of like looking around for different opportunities. I didn't see any edge cases though. I didn't like probing. It's like, okay, well the cold card like clicked instantly, right? Because if you're in, if you're in comms in the military even, not even like, you know, this super sweet secret squirrely stuff. If you're in comms, you understand that there's these like devices that you carry around that like you can't let anybody hold it, right? And it's like locked up in the safe at all times and it's like never gets connected to the computers, right, because it holds the cryptography keys for like the military communications. Right. And so all these principles and properties of like security and cybersecurity and everything like that. Like, oh, it's like oh, okay. Like Bitcoiners are like doing this for their money and they have these special purpose air gap devices, right? And like cool carts is like one of a number of them that you could use. But it's like, oh, I don't have to connect this thing to Internet. And it just made sense because I had devices that I operated that I couldn't. Like you don't plug it into the Internet, you don't connect it to the WI fi. Like it's all a standalone self contained system. And that's how I like learn Linux, right? It's like you have to run this black box. Oh, it runs Linux. I'm like, what is Linux? They're like, oh, it's this operating system thing. So yeah, I mean I definitely probed around and thought about it. There's, there's tons of like veterans. Like one of the things that military does is like sand table, like war gaming, right? Adversarial thinking, like how would I attack this red teaming, right? I try to get into that. I have some friends that did like legit red teaming. Like you know, get the, the orange vest and the hat and go walk in with a ladder and say, hey, I'm just here to like fix the sprinkler to like get past security. Then go like plug in a Raspberry PI somewhere and like, you know, hack the network. So that kind of thinking definitely is applicable to Bitcoin. But from a technological standpoint, the biggest thing is just like people running, running the hash rate, running the nodes, holding the keys, right? Not trusting that the benevolent overlords of the custodians are going to do what is best in the minds of the people.
- [27:35]
Podcast Host
Sup freaks?
- [27:36]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
This episode is brought to you by Block's Bitcoin ecosystem.
- [27:39]
Podcast Host
You probably know Cash app, you probably know Square. You definitely know bitkey. If you've been listening to the show for the last couple of years, what matters most is that these are not disconnected random products. They are part of a broader push to make Bitcoin easier to buy, easier to hold and easier to use in the real world. Cash app helps People stack Bitcoin. BitKey helps people custody without turning self custody into a weekend engineering product. Square helps merchants run their businesses and increasingly plug into the bitcoin native payments Rails. Listen, this is the kind of ecosystem Bitcoin needs. We've been talking about this on the show for a while. We know that we need the different parts to line up to make bitcoin. Everyday money block is doing just that. Check the episode description for the current cash app, Bitkey and square links. Sup freaks? When you take bitcoin seriously, you start with custody. You want to control your keys, avoid single points of failure and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up. That is what unchained has been focused on since 2016. Unchained is the leader in collaborative multi sig custody and bitcoin financial services that keep you in control. They secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for more than 12,000 clients. That means about one out of every 200 Bitcoin sits inside an unchained vault. Their model is simple. You hold two keys, they hold one key. And it always takes two keys to move bitcoin. Meaning their single key can't access your bitcoin on its own. Just resilient shared custody that gives you institutional grade security while keeping you sovereign. Unchained also lets you trade straight from your vault, access bitcoin backed commercial loans, open a bitcoin IRA where you hold your own keys and set up personal business trust or retirement vaul. They even offer inheritance solutions built for long term hodlers. Or opt for the highest level private client service with unchained signature and get a dedicated account manager, discounted trading fees, exclusive access to events and features, and much, much more. If you want a partner that helps you secure and grow your bitcoin without giving up control, go to unchained.com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multisig vault. That's TFTC10@ Unchained.com and so you're, you're having these realizations and it seems like obviously because it exists independently, other veterans are these realizations as well. And you guys started the bitcoin veterans project and so how did that come to be?
- [29:45]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
So I didn't start it. There were five guys originally that started it. You can go look it up if you want to, but it started as like a Twitter group chat. And it was just this realization that there was no bitcoin veterans community. Like I think there's like maybe one other, two other like bitcoin adjacent, blockchain, whatever, veteran stuff. But they just identified that there was this gap in the bitcoin industry, in the ecosystem community, whatever you want to call it, that there was like no veterans organization. And then understanding that bitcoin is like this important thing, it's like, oh, well, we need to be educating veterans. And also the government has trained all these veterans on all these skills that directly map onto all these aspects of the bitcoin ecosystem that we can be force multipliers for. Right? Like beans, bullets and band aids. I mean you're like asics, electrons and you know, like whatever else is like secure enclaves. Secure enclaves, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, you know, understanding that you have to secure the radio crypto in a certain way directly translates is like, oh yeah, there's my keys. Like, I can't let my keys go online. You know, backing up physical, physical security defense in depth. Like all these applicable skills to like, I'm going to run a hot wallet on some HSM somewhere. Well, I better have like these layered security things. It's the same thing the data centers are doing, right? It's the same thing. It's like nothing new necessarily, but the gravity and the understanding of the day to day operations of doing that. It's like veterans get that, right? Veterans are molded to be leaders, right? You're taught to step up and get things done when other people are either demoralized or demotivated. You're taught organization, right? Like, even if you don't know how to organize things, by the time you reach a certain rank in the military, they've drilled into your brain. This is how you get people to accomplish a goal. This is how you define a goal. If the goal is unclear, you need to go take it back to your commander and be like, hey, sir, what, what are we trying to accomplish here? Let me develop the plan. Let me bring back to you. We'll reiterate it. Let me go brief it to the boys and then we're gonna go execute. But first we're gonna like train on this and everything. So it's like the, the whole thing originated from just like a Twitter group chat. And then it just grew steam. It was like a bitcoin Twitter spaces. So we're running, we run one every weekday at 10am on X Now. But this was like back in the Twitter days we were running one and it just kind of blew up. Like it was just like a thing. People came in, it was good conversations. We moved from that Twitter group chat over to we have regional chats on signal. So primarily it's around signal. You know, depending on where you're at in the country, you'll get plugged into a regional chat. Those are veterans only. And then we have this huge list of like topical chats, right? So it's like you want a gun chat, you want a privacy or self custody chat, you want to. There's like a Tesla owner's chat, right? There's a pilots chat. There is a chat for like health and wellness. They're like any of these topics. It's just veterans that are bitcoiners that are like, hey, I'm super passionate about this, I want to run it. So we spin up the chat, we throw in some of the founding members of admins, and then we make the dude an admin and we say, here you go, run it, right? Like one of the most active chats is like the bitcoin Veterans of Christ. And there's just like, oh yeah, theological debates and like all these other things going on. The regional chats are more for like coordination and like, hey, here's a meetup going on here. You know the event tonight at Pub Key. I like threw that out there. I was like, hey, come on out. So there's going to be some bitcoin veterans showing up for that. But yeah, it just kind of spawned into this like, bigger group and to the point where we ended up getting a room at the 2024 conference for free, which was awesome. And that blew up. That was a huge success. We had vendors in there and it was this very low key down in the basement of the conference, but very, very high signal event. We qualified people on ham radio down there and so just kept gaining this momentum. And then the following year in 2025, we partnered with bitcoin Park. We're like, hey, can you host like a summit or something like that? Yeah, absolutely, right? Park's great. Love the park. So we did the first official sort of like summit named Summit at Bitcoin park in 2025. It was a day of just like speakers and it was a lot of just discussion of what veterans are. What are these topics that we go into, right? What is 5th gen warfare? What is the fight for your health on the emotional, spiritual, physiological aspects, right? We had doctors up there, the bitcoin veterans, as we've come to find out. It's like veterans have this diverse group of skills and so they're everywhere. We got doctors, we got pilots, we got mechanics, we've got electricians, we've got intel guys, we've got, you know, admin guys, right? And they all have these different skill sets and so they're getting plugged in in all these different aspects across the industry. You know, speaking on stage, running their own meetups, running companies, right? So like this T shirt is this Guy started bit bit print solutions and he just identified that there's not like a good like swag store for like bitcoin merchandise. So he started a swag store, right? And he's got like lightning checkout and all these other things. But it's people like that that are just identifying these gaps and like filling the gaps, right? Because again, veterans are prone to action when they see that there's a problem or something or they're given a problem to solve. It's like, okay, let's go ruthlessly attack this. Let's give it the boys. Let's figure out what's going on. Let's go solve problem solve. And it's just kind of evolved from there. And now we're doing our third annual summit at Bitcoin park this year, November 9th and 10th. Bitcoinveterans.orgsummit2026 for all the info. We're still looking for participants and volunteers and everything. That that's the other crazy thing is like there's no like official like bitcoin veterans org. Like there's some nonprofits that sort of like operation bitcoin does like veteran education. They're partnered with the state of Georgia to do distinct bitcoin veteran like workforce devel or bitcoin mining workforce development and training and everything. That is like an official org that is like, exists. But this like broader bitcoin veterans group is just people getting plugged in. Like, there's no. Nobody's in charge of it. Like, I'm not in charge of bitcoin veterans. Right. Do I get asked a lot of technical questions? Like, absolutely, but there's other very technical people within the community. And so it's become this network of individuals that just understand that there's two rules. There's no violence and there's no shitcoins. And outside of that, have at it, bro. You want to do like a bitcoin veterans pop up meetup in Des Moines? Sure, go for it. Call it bitcoin veterans. But no violence and no shitcoin.
- [36:05]
Podcast Host
I mean, I get the second one. No shitcoin. Seems pretty obvious to me. No violence. Like what is the sort of boundaries of that specific rule? Is it like not advocating for violence? Is it not like getting together and doing like a fight club or what is it?
- [36:17]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
It's not advocating for aggressive violence. Right here in America we have the right to self defense. We still have the second amendment right which defends the first. And so we have government sanction right to self defense. That means that we are an extremely peaceful organization. But again, being veterans, we are highly trained and highly capable that if there is violence to be met in, in a defensive or responsive manner, it's like we're going to be the guys showing up for that, right? We got law enforcement, we've got people that are still active duty. So it's not so much that, like, we don't practice violence in a controlled setting, right? Like rolling jiu jitsu or going to the range, the summit. We're have a range day. The second day of the summit is a range day at a private range just outside of Nashville. And you'll get some of the best training you've ever had in firearms. So it's not so much like violence, it's like no calls for violence, right? And that's really to curb people coming in, fed posting, right? Like, we're not trying to incite violence. We're not trying to incite a revolution. The revolution is fully underway at this point and it's completely peaceful. One of the key things that I believe, and I think a lot of bitcoin veterans would agree with me, is the greatest appeal of bitcoin is the fact that I can use this tool as a peaceful means to protecting my family, protecting my community, and protecting my country from those that would wish it harm. Right? I don't have to go out and mow down a bunch of people because they wish my community harm. I can just be successful. I can stack sats, I can run a business that is cash flow positive and push all of my excess cash flow into bitcoin. And eventually I will starve out the parasitic people that wish me and my country and my community harm, and they'll just die a slow death of starvation. And that to me is like the direction that we're heading in. It's going to be a long, slow grind. But that's why you build the community, you build the networks, you build your citadel, right? Learn how to farm. It's not that hard. Learn how to run the meetup. If you're running the meetup in your local area now you have a network of people. It's like, oh, Billy does goats. Well, we're going to buy goats from Billy. And you know, Bobby over here, he grows, you know, herbs and stuff like that. And, you know, Joe runs like a trash company. So, like, we're all going to go and we're going to pay Joe now to pick up all our trash. Not because he's got the best price, maybe not even because he's got the best service, which he's a veteran. He would. But because he is on the same mission and he is ethically and morally aligned on this idea that bitcoin is money and it is a superior money and it lacks all these negative aspects of fiat. So we're going to enable the people in our community that we want to win, that will enable us to win by using Bitcoin and funneling bitcoin into these companies. Right.
- [38:54]
Podcast Host
Do you think veterans are more attuned to bitcoin than other subsets of the population?
- [39:00]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, we like pain. We know what it's like to suffer. High pain tolerance. Yeah, high pain tolerance. You know, we say that in the depth of the. We're at 64k, right?
- [39:11]
Podcast Host
It's like, I'll take 64 tonight.
- [39:13]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Absolutely, absolutely. I came in on the way down from 69 and rode that thing all the way down. Listening to RJR every week. It is.
- [39:22]
Podcast Host
I mean, my pain tolerance threshold was developed like skateboarding and fighting my brother growing up. But you get used to it. The first bear market was certainly scary for me, but this time around it's like, ah, it's just another one.
- [39:36]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And it's not the pain, right. It's the ethos. You know, everybody that's a veteran stands up and swears an oath to, you know, support and defend the Constitution. That, like, that is a thing. You get some guys that will join, it's like, okay, you, we're either going to go to jail or you're going to join. It's like, okay, commendable for you to, like, sign up and serve. But we're still primarily a volunteer force. And so whether you were sold a lie on what the patriotic mission was, a lot of us, myself included, still believed in like, okay, there's a country and I can serve that country and I can die for that country if needed in the defense of that country. And bitcoin is now just a new mission and a new tool that enables me to not die. I can flourish. I can flourish while still serving others. Right? So you get a lot of veterans that are service oriented, right? They just want to do good, whether they were misdirected or misguided or misinformed, whatever, it doesn't matter. The heart was set on acts of service and they're willing to sign up with their life to carry that out. And so when they get out, you lose this entire identity structure. You lose this entire support structure. So that's another one of the things that bitcoin veterans aims to do. Is like, provide a new mission and a new community to get veterans plugged into another band of brothers that say, hey, man, we get it. We know you're out there alone on this island. You're struggling with ptsd. You're struggling with whatever it is. Like, you don't know how to cope. You don't know how to. To exist in the world. We've got a community for you to plug in, and we're going to help you uplift yourself. We're going to teach you this new skill set. We're going to try to get you plugged into this new skill set. And by the way, if you listen to us and you stack Bitcoin for five to 10 years, you're going to be doing all right.
- [41:18]
Podcast Host
Freaks. Look at me. I'm glowing. I've got like an angel's halo going around me. You know why that is? I feel good. I feel taken care of. I feel blessed, healthy, happy. That is because I'm a crowd health member. My family and I have been crowd health members for five years now. Literally this month, five years ago, we joined crowd health. We've had two babies, we've had multiple health events, and we're never going back to health insurance. Crowd health is crowdfunded health care. So you sign up for crowd health, you pay a monthly fee, you help out with other people's bills, and it's significantly cheaper than health insurance. We were on cobra. It's a family of three. When I left my last job before I went full time to tftc, went on the crowd health. Now as a family of five, we pay, I believe, $700 a month. It's significantly cheaper. They're going to negotiate prices lower for you. They've consistently negotiated health care prices as much as 50, 60, 80% in many cases. They help out with babies. If you have a pregnancy, you pay the first $3,000 and the crowd covers the rest. If you have a regular health event, you pay $500 and the crowd pays the rest. Go to join CrowdHealth.com sign up today. Use a code TFTC. Opt out of health insurance. I'm uninsured, baby, and I love it. Use the code tftc@joincrowdhealth.com you'll get $99 a month for the first three months that you're on the crowd health platform in the community. Bitcoiners, you found sovereign money. Now find sovereign health and sovereign health care. All right, freaks, you know me. You know I don't take sponsor money from Products I wouldn't use myself. So listen up. The Aven Bitcoin Visa card is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the bitcoin lending space in a long time. Here's the deal. You can get a line of credit up to a million dollars backed by your bitcoin without selling a single sat. No gains, no annual fees, no minimum draws. And your bitcoin is custody by Bitgo,
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Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
which is one of the most trusted
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Podcast Host
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- [44:02]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
We raised over an entire bitcoin to support operations in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee. And when I say operations, I don't mean like FEMA and all these other, like, NGO things. A lot of them are like, you know, disaster scammers. Sometimes I don't want to denigrate a lot of it. The other thing to realize is like, western North Carolina is home to a lot of veterans already. And so when we got on the ground there, and I mean like dudes got in their trucks with camping equipment and like whatever resources like water and food and like extra clothes and blankets, because we, we understand what it means to live in, you know, a hole in the ground, right? You understand what the bare necessities are like when you, when you have to take that ruck and throw it on and go like camp in the middle of the woods for like a week with your buddies. You don't want to take extra stuff with you. You know what the necessities are and so the guys were like packing up trailers, packing up the trucks, driving out there and just making contact with the local people that were already plugged in and knew what was going on. And it just so happened that these local people were this group called Christian Rangers, at least in the area that we were operating. And so we just basically plugged in and said, hey, how can we force multiply you? And by and by God's providence, I had all these meshtastic radios, these little like off grid mesh network radios. And one of my buddies, Jordan, shout out to Jordan. I bought like 300 of these from China. I imported them like a couple years back. He's like, hey, man, I got like this like Bourbon Night with my buddies. Like, I'll take 80 of them off your hands. And so I ended up delivering those to him. Lo and behold, a couple months, a few months later, Helene hits and we're like, oh, we have radios that work off grid that can be deployed like now. And so one of this was like driving in all these mesh tastic radios to go hand out. We had them on the National Guard birds, right? The way meshtastic works is like you have to be able to see line of sight and they kind of ping around in a mesh network. And so you got people down in the hollers in the hills of western North Carolina. Well, you can't get radio contact unless you have a National Guard bird flying over top. And now the messages can ping out, up and out. So before the starlings, before, like anything else we were going on, there was like guys hiking through the woods or riding ATVs through these back, you know, these back haulers to go check in on people making contact usually with local churches. Churches you tend to know like, hey, who's around, right? Even if they're not attending in the church, they know like who's in the general facility and just making contact, make sure there's water and communications, right? Because everything was down. The entire grid was down. The electricity, cell phone. And so we probably had anywhere from like 6 to 12 dudes on the ground with their own vehicles, fully funded via bitcoin donations. You know, they were sleeping in like half finished condos in sleeping bags, right? Meanwhile, you have like FEMA taking up all the hotel spaces so that people coming in, like, can't like, find lodgings. So we did it very, very low budget. It was very low budget, but highly effective because we knew that it's not necessarily about going and like figuring out how to just do it for the people there. It was going figuring out who were the leaders in that area, enabling them to figure it out and distribute it. We actually linked up with this one guy, we got him set up with a cold card. We got him funded. And he had this massive warehouse that he ended up using as a logistics hub to disperse all this disaster equipment. And so like, he was not a bitcoiner, he was just a veteran. You know, we did our secret veteran handshake, right? You have a shared experience, a shared ethos. And so like, it's very easy to connect with other veterans and be like, hey man, what do you need? Right? He's like, I just need funding. I got this warehouse. I just need people. I need, you know, a firewatch, you know, because there's people there playing games with all the supplies arriving. So it's like some of, some of our guys just showed up and stood armed watch overnight over like the supplies that were being delivered. Right? It's as simple as that. But like that, you don't get somebody down off the mountain and say, hey, can you stand watch overnight here on all this stuff. It's like, no, man. Their entire house just washed away in a mudslide. So even just a simple act of just like watching over, you know, people and stuff, or getting up there, they hiked up. Some of the guys hiked up to the top. I think it's like Bald Mountain or something like that. There's one of the taller mountains and put like a solar repeater node for meshtastic that ended up just like blowing up the connections all across that area. So that, that was a response to Helene. And I mean, we were, we were on the ground within, you know, weeks before even like the news was like fully covering it. Right? There's that weird like lull where the
- [48:22]
Podcast Host
news was like, you could only see it on X, like, hey, is anybody coming to help? Well, and it's an incredible example of distributed self organization. Yeah, that is actually, I mean, to your point, like FEMA just being reminded of some of the things that FEMA was doing in that. I mean, you remember the story from Florida where people had like the, the destroyed buildings, like in their driveways, and they wanted. They were like literally trying to pay private trash companies to come in and pick it up. And FEMA said, no, you can't do that. And yeah, they were allowed to sit there and just get moldy and create a health hazard. And it's just like a glaring example the incompetence of the federal government where it's like, hey, you have Individuals like yourself and other veterans were self organizing to solve these problems immediately. And there's some bureaucratic bullshit stepping in the way saying like, no, you can't come pick up this trash.
- [49:11]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, it's insane. Well, that's where I see veterans plugging into. Right, because it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on politically, like, veterans are still a very respected class. Right? Because we do, we sign up with our lives. It's like, hey, Uncle Sam, you're going to own me for these next four to eight years. And so there's, there's, there's definitely a degree of respect there. And so one of the things I see bitcoin veterans fitting is some of these harder conversations that might look like they're political one side or the other. It's like, no, this is like a, this is a problem for freedom. Right? So like the whole samurai case, right? The samurai developers are still in jail. I, with the help of, I penned a letter to like US Senators to describe like, hey, if you don't. And during the BPI day on the Hill, I went and talked to some of these staffers about not just like the samurai case, but just in general that like open source developers should not be prosecuted for code that they write. That's like taking like, oh, you murdered somebody with a hammer. Well, I'm going to go, you know, arrest the guy that made the hammer. It's like, that's not how this works. Right? You're going to scare people offshore. You're going to have a brain drain of some of our brightest and our best people leave the country. If you do not protect open source software and open source developers distinctly in the bitcoin space. Right. Because bitcoin is such a powerful tool. You're seeing these parallels now in the AI space, right, with all these open models. It's just, you know, we, we as veterans have a platform to go say some of these hard things because, like, throw your slings and your arrows at me. Like, I'll dodge them. I don't care. Like, they'll hit me. It doesn't matter because I, I will tell you my opinion and I'm going to do, I'm going to go pick up the trash and come and arrest me, bro. Yeah, come on. Come, come. I'm going to do the right thing regardless of what's necessary. I see parallels. Not that I'm saying you should do this, but the whole flak camera thing, right? We don't want surveillance.
- [50:54]
Podcast Host
No, not only that, I said I was on the bitcoin news podcast. I don't know if it published it, but we talked about the flock cameras. The thing that's. I mean, obviously we don't want surveillance, but then it's similar to chain analysis. Not only are the samurai guys in jail, Roman Sterlingov is in jail for bitcoin fog chain surveillance. Chain analysis tools were used to, I strongly believe, incorrectly incriminate him with starting bitcoin fog and bringing this to plot cameras, too. You have so many false positives where it's like, I'm sure you've seen the videos. I think there was a woman in Colorado, like, the cop came to her house ready to arrest her, and she had to prove on the spot, like, hey, that's not me. It's insane.
- [51:41]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Well, that's like. That's another place where veterans, I think can step up. Is like, we are in law enforcement. We're qualified for law enforcement. Go run for sheriff, right? Like, if you want to make a change, One of the other things is in civic service, in civil. Like, I'm not saying don't run for congress. Don't represent it. Like, I think at this point, like, federally, like, unless you're really, really motivated and charged and you have the funds and the resources and the backing to do it, I don't. I think it's probably a waste of your time, but locally, your board of supervisors, your mayor, your sheriff, your, you know, your city auditor, councilman, whatever it is, go get plugged in there and start, you know, talking about freedom tech. Go start talking about these principles that bitcoiners understand and that the broader freedom tech open source movement understands. But go be a beacon of light in your local community to say, no, we don't want this. Right? We don't need to be $21 million in debt because you, you know, all the boomers have mismanaged this county's government for the past decade and a half, right? We can actually do something different. As soon as you start doing that, you'll start to see the tendrils of control, right? So in my local area, I tried to pitch bit bonds, right? I was like, oh, it's a great idea. Well, you can't do it unless Richmond tells you you can, right? I'm in Virginia. We are subjects of Richmond. Right? The county cannot do things without Richmond's approval and express authority. And so any sort of idea. I have gone through multiple iterations with people in my local area of, like, what can we do to, like, write the course on this? And they're like, oh, well, obviously we have to build data centers, which, that's another hot topic. But it's like, no, we have to destroy this heritage farmland and plow it over to build data centers. And I'm like, wait, that's not the only way to create tax revenue. But all these other mechanisms for tax revenue, you have to go to Richmond and get Richmond to approve it. Richmond is not going to let go of that control. So it's like veterans can plug in and any bitcoiners, right? It doesn't take a lot of money to win an election locally, right? So if you're a bitcoiner sitting on a decent stack and you're civically minded and you have the, you know, the gumption to do it, like, go, go spend some money and run a local campaign or find the guy in your local area that's willing to run and just fund his campaign and get people in the local area, have this grass that's. Bitcoin is a grassroots movement, right? Enable people in your local area to rise, whether it's the business owners or it's the local politicians to rise up and say, hey, we're not doing this shit anymore. We're done with fiat. We're done with this stupid Panopticon surveillance state. We're going to use free and open source software. Oh, foia, dude, I tried to foil my county government. They want to charge me $4,000. What to do an email query. And I'm like, I should be able to come in. You can issue me an API key, right? This is 2026. You can check my ID, scan, my face, my eyeballs, whatever. But I should be able to come into the county government, sit down at a terminal, and I should be able to query everything you do because you're my employees, right? You work for me as a citizen of this county. And there's this whole like smoke and mirrors thing around, like foia, like freedom of information acting. And then they charge you an arm and a leg because, oh, it takes it this many hours to do the query. And then it takes so and so to review the query to make sure there's nothing in there that's like censored. I'm like, well, first of all, what is in there that's sensitive? What are you hiding from us? And a lot of the people like, oh, well, some people like email in that, you know, they. Some like domestic abuse victim will like email in to like seek out help. I'm like, okay, you can flag that one as soon as it comes in. But at the end of the week, everything should be released publicly. And I should be able to query it programmatically using my clanker to, like, figure out what you're doing day to day and who you're corresponding with and who you're signing NDAs with. Right. Because I blew up. I did pay for a FOIA request. It was very narrowly scoped. It still cost me like 400 bucks. But I found that my local board of supervisors had, in fact, signed NDAs with data centers, even though publicly they're like, we don't know anything about NDAs. We don't know what you're talking about. We're like, oh, well, what about these emails that we found? And then everybody's surprised. Oh, wow. It's like, no, you work for us, and the radical transparency that you desire so desperately for the populace needs to be flipped around and focused on you.
- [55:37]
Podcast Host
That's what I was just about to say. It's insane, the inversion of the relationship between the government and the government in this country today. As you're describing, the complete opposite of what it should be.
- [55:48]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
We should be making tyrants uncomfortable again.
- [55:50]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Well, bring this back to bitcoin veterans. I mean, it started as a Twitter group chat has obviously grown, and seems like momentum is picking up. Like, if we're four or five years into this sort of amorphous, loose association of veterans within bitcoin, where do you think it'll be like, in another five years? And the. And really, with the context of the force multiplier that you described with bitcoin
- [56:19]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
specifically, and this is something that I've seen in the mining industry specifically, there's a strong veteran presence. Again, because just the direct correlation of, like, if you can run a mining. If you can run a FOB deployed, you can run a mining site. Like, if you feel like you're on a fob. Like, the mining sites that I've been to out in West Texas, it's like, it feels like a mining site. There's a gravel paves, and there's like, all these, like, huts and boxes all over the place. And, like, you know, everybody's like, doing meetings in the morning to figure out what we're doing for the day, stay hydrated. Like, all this stuff. It feels like you're deployed. I'm like, wow, okay. But it's that. That's one aspect. Another one is, you know, you've got the. The Georgia Bitcoin Council, you got the Illinois Bitcoin Council, you've got various meetups that are all being run by veterans, led by veterans, Various groups that like are plugged in. Like there's. I'm fairly confident saying this, I'm pretty sure at least one of the core contributors is a veteran. Like there's a core contributor that's a veteran, right. He's not necessarily directly plugged into bitcoin veterans, but the fact that there's a huge alumni network essentially, right. Like I've heard people talk about like, oh, you go to Ivy League school not for the diploma but for like the network of individuals. Well, veterans have one of the biggest alumni networks ever. Right. And they're all across the board. They're in C suites at S&P 500 companies, they're in bitcoin companies, they're running meetups, they're running random off grid gas mining facilities, they're doing security audits for whatever open source tools that they're using. They're working on protocol development. So I see bitcoin veterans one just being a bigger and more respectable name and it's really just a network of people. And I see it as the organizations and the institutions of the first turning that we are going into bitcoin. Veterans are going to play no small part in that. And that's where I see it.
- [58:18]
Podcast Host
That's why I didn't mention it earlier. But I mean bitcoin famously has this problem being distributed network with no obviously central organization structure. And it's not that I'm calling for that, but I think the skills that you described earlier that veterans are equipped with around organization is desperately needed. And I think you, obviously, I won't speak for every veteran, understand that the distributed nature of the protocol and the governance around the protocol is extremely important. But bringing the organizational skills the veterans have to work within those confines but still get shit done seem like a very massive value add to the network.
- [58:56]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Absolutely. Well, and this is like, this is the whole thing. If you ever talk to Gabe Lord of operation Bitcoin, he does that workforce development, this is like one of the things he says is maybe not what he says, but what he understands is because veterans have these leadership abilities and these skills that have been developed, one of the other things is you also train to a point where you can operate without command and control. Right. So you have to know what the final objective is. Right? The objective is hyper bitcoinization. How do we get there? I don't know, but how do I? And if you look at a command structure and you have command at the top and then all these tiers along the way until you get to the smallest unit of a fire team. That fire team knows what their tactical mission objective is to the point that even if they lose all of communication and blackout on comms and whatever, that fire team together is an effective unit to go close and complete that objective and then also link back up with the rest of the units. Right? So it's great to have like, you know, centralized command and control. There's efficiencies to that. But at the same time, veterans plugged in as leadership across, you know, this network of individuals means that even when a cell is isolated and there's, you know, you're alone and unafraid with no support or, you know, resupply anytime soon, you can still figure out how to get the job done. You can still figure out how to enable yourself and the other people around you. Right? That's the force multiplication thing, is we're not doing it like we're not James Bond. That's a whole psyop, right? Like James Bond is not like that doesn't exist for the most part, right. There's support, there are, you know, tons of people. You can't do things alone. That's one of the biggest humbling aspects that I learned in the military was like, yeah, I'm a smart guy, I'm very motivated, high energy, get a lot of shit done. But I'm nothing without the people on my left and my right. And if they're not coming along and if they're faltering, like, you're only as strong as the weakest leak in your chain, right? So it's like shield lock with these guys and push forward together and you're going to push right through anything that you can ever come across.
- [60:58]
Podcast Host
Yeah, well, you mentioned it earlier, but we have it as a topic that we want to dive into on the list. You mentioned that James Bond not real. Is that fifth generation warfare? Is that a psyop? So getting into this whole concept of fifth generation warfare.
- [61:14]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, fifth generation warfare. Go back and listen to the bitcoin veterans summit. I think it's the pinned tweet on itcoin veterans, but there was an entire panel about it. And you've had sequences like trench warfare, air warfare, all these developments. And where we find ourselves now is in the information warfare, right? We are more interconnected than we've ever been. The Internet has enabled us, for good and for bad, to directly connect with any individual on the planet for an unlimited amount of time and duration. And that's been weaponized. Right. That's been weaponized by our government, other governments, non government entities, individuals. Right? Like this episode is a form of fifth generation warfare. Right? Like we are. I'm putting ideas into your brain right now that when you're listening to me, you talk. And it's never been easier to participate in that. The thing that I think trips up a lot of people is nobody knows that they're in a war. Nobody understands that you're in a war for the. What you're thinking about, what you're focusing your time and attention on. And if you don't understand, you're in a war and you don't understand that you are a combatant in this war because there's no, like, civilians and combatants. Right? Like, it's very easy to like, understand that. If you don't understand that, like, you're just going to get eaten alive. I mean, how about the algo change
- [62:28]
Podcast Host
to speak an example of this? How long have bitcoiners been disconnected from each other?
- [62:34]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Well, I was on Nasser, so I was completely unplugged for a while.
- [62:37]
Podcast Host
But as an example, Twitter, Nikita, this one guy, a central command over the algorithm of Twitter, clicked a button earlier this week and every bitcoiner is like, holy crap, I haven't seen you on this platform in years. And it's isolating bitcoiners and going back, bringing in what we previously discussed, which is veterans ability to organize when you don't have any communication with the outside world. I think that was discombobulating for the amorphous bitcoin community on X. Specifically not having the skills to recognize because my cousin is a big follower of me on Twitter and he's been swearing to me for two years. He's like, you're shadow banned. I can't find any of your tweets. All that.
- [63:23]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And
- [63:26]
Podcast Host
I'm not going to put malignant intent in the. I'm not going to accuse X of having malignant intent. But I think regardless of whether or not they did, the outcome was this sort of isolation of bitcoiners and the inability to pick up signal from others about what's going on. So I think that's an example of fifth generation warfare.
- [63:49]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
It's a spiritual war too, right? Like, I know you're a man of faith. I consider myself a man of faith. It is a spiritual war as well, because, you know, the mind, the body, the soul is all connected. And, you know, one of the things is if you're a man on your own, you know, like, Satan's out there. Looking for you on your own, in isolation, to devour you. It's like he is a. He's a prowling lion waiting to devour the lone man. Which is why I think, like, the Internet's great, but if you don't have, like, in the flesh, real life people that you are getting coffee with, right? Like, the simplest thing you can do is find the boys in your neighborhood or in your whatever, right? Like, I got some. Some good bitcoiner friends that we get coffee semi regularly, but it's like, go meet up in person, because you will not have the same interactions you do online. We are not, like, we have not evolved or adapted or whatever it is to this digital presence that is malignant or not is like sucking our souls into the cyberspace. And I would encourage more people to go to a bitcoin meetup. If you've never been to a bitcoin meetup and you're listening to this episode right now, find your local bitcoin meetup, even if you have to drive three hours and go to it just one time. One time. And I don't know how to describe it, and I feel like you could probably test it. There's many other bitcoiners, I feel is like, the first time you go to, like, a bitcoin event and you show up to a place where everybody is mutually aligned on this fundamental understanding of value, right? Because money is a. Is a placeholder for something else. It's a placeholder for value, right? And so bitcoin as a money means that we are all aligned instantly on the same value set at the fundamental layer. And so now we can build on top of that. And we don't have to start from, like, oh, well, do you think, like, printing money is a bad thing? It's like, well, it's great for civic. Well, no, no, no, no. You. We understand 21 million is the hard cap, and, like, there's nothing else to it. And so we can start to build from there. And there's nothing better than somebody in a room with another person conspiring, right? And it's like, well, people conspire, and they should conspire in the flesh.
- [65:49]
Podcast Host
And we say this a lot on rhr. If you don't have a local meetup, start your own. And it's. It's funny how God works because this is the second time this week I've recorded a podcast, and I've been thinking about the gospel and the homily at mass on Sunday, which was sowing seeds, and that's what these bitcoin meetups do.
- [66:05]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah.
- [66:05]
Podcast Host
And I feel like there's some divine intervention this week. Specifically. The last two conversations I have get goosebumps right now because like it very much aligns with what the gospel and the homily discussed this week.
- [66:19]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
So. Sowing seeds. I recently attended a farming God's way class, right? So my kids school is partnered with this farm just on a mountain ridge in West Virginia. And this old, this, this lovely woman basically got thrown from a donkey, cracked her skull was miraculously healed, right? Has a seizure dog that's been out of work for years now. Miraculously healed attributes all to God is like, I'm going to donate this and become an educational ministry. And so I attended this class because I got in touch through my kid's school. I was like, this is awesome. I've always wanted to like feed people, right? Like I'm going to retire into farming. My wife doesn't want to be a farmer. I'm like, that's fine babe, I got it. I'll handle it for you. But like I'm going to be a farmer, right? I think like the meme of selling our chairs is great, but like take it a step further and grow your own food, right? Like nature has provided this like free thing called sun and water that you can just like grow your own food. And yeah, might not be the best or the taste is, but grow lamb, grow goats, grow cows, grow corn, grow whatever it is. Like start working the land. 1. You will be physically more prepared if you're working a farm for anything that's coming, right? You're going to be mentally prepared because you're going to be outside in the sunshine, right? One of my good friends said it's like, oh, it comes to find out with all this health research, like we just need to go back to farming because you're going to be outside in the sun, eating real food, carrying water, chopping wood, physically active, right? You're not living this sanitary lifestyle plugged into a blue light screen. So you talk about like, you know, reaping what you sow. I think in a very real way, like I think that's where bitcoiners are headed is like, we're going to start growing our own food. There's this already exists, right? Great. Ghee.com. i get my ghee from.
- [67:53]
Podcast Host
From a bitcoiner soap miner. I got the. So my bags over there. I've got the tallow soap in this building right now.
- [67:59]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Sats. Coffee. I get my coffee. I'm about to buy a head of beef from a mutual acquaintance down in Washington, Virginia there.
- [68:07]
Podcast Host
I got, I got a quarter of that beef in my home right now.
- [68:10]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
So it's like food, this fundamental thing is like, get into that business, right? Find out what it is. There's like a company like Oshi making like nut butter and nut bars and stuff. It's like, figure out what food is out there that you can make better as a bitcoiner. Remove all the gross, like goy slop additives and then go do it and sell it for sats. You're going to stack sats?
- [68:30]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [68:30]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Right. Make bread. The simplest inputs is like bread. It's like flour, salt and water at a minimum. Right. You can add other stuff, but you can quantify this, right? And this is, this is like I think maybe business advice. You can quantify what your inputs are and then you figure out how much you need to sell it for to make a profit. And you can make a modest profit, right? You don't need to make 100% markup on whatever you're selling. You can make a modest profit. You can do that for five to 10 years continually. You can grow that business. And if you're stacking stats along the way and saving it, it's like now you have more capital to deploy to make more bread and make, you know, bagels or whatever else, right? Like, you can grow into this thing. Go find some boomer that wants to retire out of his business, start to get to know the business, befriend the guy. Like, there's still good people out there that have businesses that have no successors. Private equity is going to eat those things up, flip them and sell them out to somebody else. Go find the mom and pop shops, figure out what their business is. Figure out if you want to do that business, go run that business and turn it into a bitcoin standard. And now you are the winner in the local area. You're feeding people.
- [69:30]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean that's. We're talking about literally sowing seeds right now too. But like bring it back to bitcoin veterans. I think what you guys are doing, you're going to sowing seeds in the minds of other veterans. And if you're successful in hitting a critical mass of veterans that get bitcoin and are motivated to organize around it and get shit done, like talk about that force multiplier. But you have like quite literally a military that is opted into.
- [69:56]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
We are not a militia, not a
- [69:58]
Podcast Host
militia, but like military, military trained individuals.
- [70:00]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
We do have a lot of guns
- [70:01]
Podcast Host
though, who have opted into the.
- [70:03]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
This.
- [70:03]
Podcast Host
Right?
- [70:03]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, what is it? I think Secretary War or one of the Indo Paycom admiral was talking about how Papara was talking.
- [70:14]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [70:14]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Like it's there, dude, we're there.
- [70:16]
Podcast Host
Well, all right. This is where we get into what are your thoughts on solve war? The thesis.
- [70:22]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I think it's a fantastic thesis. And this is probably a contrarian to maybe the broader bitcoin veterans group. I think it falls down to implementation. Right. Like at a fundamental level, it is database of keys. Right. Like it's key management. It's a database. Right. Introducing bitcoin to a cyber system does nothing new or novel that isn't already accomplished by other cybersecurity systems and protocols and practices. Right. Like I was saying earlier, like having an HSM that is just a cold card is no different than having an HSM that's not a cold card. Right. The same cybersecurity principles apply. I think one of the novel things that most people don't like, most people are thinking like, oh yeah, I'm going to secure my computer with bitcoin. Like, no you're not. That's stupid. I think that the whole pay per Q L402 thing, that's legit.
- [71:17]
Podcast Host
Yeah. But hash rate defending critical military how system. I know I got, I mean I got yelled at because I Jason on and I have a lot of respect for Jason.
- [71:27]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Oh, I love Jason.
- [71:28]
Podcast Host
But great thinker, great thinker. And I think a lot of. I mean obviously like bitcoin is a form of force projection on the world. Yep. But like where I will draw the line and say this does make not. This does not make any sense is like hash rate cannot protect military systems.
- [71:43]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I think this is where. Okay, this is where I think there's. There's a there there. The idea of a macro computer because if you zoom like this phone, there's tiny resistors and different electrical components that are essentially controlling the flow of electricity. Right. That's what chips are doing. Electrical components are doing. And I think there is something too. And bitcoin mining is not like the only aspect of this. But I think because bitcoin mining can saturate a shit ton of energy in one go, you might be able to zoom out and essentially use bitcoin mining as a macro scale electrical component that can be observed like macro observed at a macro level to check the state of it. Right. Because that's essentially what the electrons are doing here is like you're checking the state of the electricity flow. And this is like gross oversimplification. But you're doing that at a micro level. Right? Microchips. I think there might be a. There, there at a macro level where you have. The entire grids can be observed in a given state of electrical flow. And bitcoin mining would 100% plug into that as. As in a. One of the electrical components.
- [72:56]
Podcast Host
So are you talking about like leveling out draw on a grid system or.
- [73:02]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Sure, that that's one aspect, but it's not like, it's not the leveling out that. That's like one aspect of it. It's the. The reason why a certain pixel appears on your screen is because certain electrons are flowing and arranged in a certain way and are observed in a certain state. Right. Macro scale. Now, and this is like when you have a planetary grid. One, there's the balancing aspect to it. But like, when you have a planetary grid, what would be the best way for you to project signals beyond our solar system?
- [73:39]
Podcast Host
Radio waves maybe, Right?
- [73:42]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
What are radio waves? They're just electromagnetic pulses.
- [73:46]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [73:46]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
They're. They're. They're going through the medium that is the air that is space lasers.
- [73:51]
Podcast Host
I don't know.
- [73:52]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
The way that your phone modulates electricity to make the antenna vibrate in a specific frequency to send those waves out. I think this is like my. This is like a theory.
- [74:03]
Podcast Host
We're getting cosmic here. We haven't got cosmic on the show in a while, but I like it.
- [74:07]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I think bitcoin mining plays a huge. Like you look at bitcoin mining with the SMRs and all this other electrical infrastructure and grid, and I think you can get to a point where we can signal like way, way out there using massive energy grids. And people from a distance, galaxies away are able to observe the given state. And this is where, like, it gets a little cosmic because you have to worry about like the time dilation or the time whatever it is between those two observation points. But like, nobody's going to be observing from like a galaxy. Way like my iPhone. But what would be very easy to observe is an entire, you know, the entire North American grid system in a specific configuration that is balanced and managed. And the flows of the electrons or flows of the electrons are given a specific state to be observed using bitcoin mining and other grid assets. Does that make sense? Macrochips, planetary scale. Macrochips.
- [75:15]
Podcast Host
I might not be mentally equipped enough, intellectually equipped enough to.
- [75:21]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
So like, like a transistor in a chip. Right? I know.
- [75:23]
Podcast Host
Yes.
- [75:24]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Right. It's A flow. It's. It's either electrons or flow.
- [75:27]
Podcast Host
You would redesign the grid, and that's like where my mind's going. It's like, okay, okay, I can see you design the grid. And basically the idea would be like, no electron is wasted to a certain extent. Yep. Like what, what I'm thinking through, like getting autistic about this is like, okay, what if you need to add like new forms of hardware that pull from the grid? Like that messes up the state. Right.
- [75:53]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
There's new transistor gates. Right. Like, it's like fundamentally, it's like the gates openers closed sort of thing. And that's again, very, very grossly oversimplification. But it's like, is the energy flowing between point A and point B, between El Paso and New York? Is that flow? What is that flow? How high is that flow? And bitcoin mining definitely can play an aspect in it just because of the monetization aspect of it.
- [76:15]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [76:16]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Like you have this sink of energy, this demand of energy that is completely monetizable from the first electron. And so you can use that to create what I think is like macro scale transistors. Right? Like all these little silicon wafers that like super tiny, like the most complex things we've ever done as humanity, they're all working on this very, very micro nanoscale. But it's still just observing the state of the electrons flowing and whether the gates are opens or closed.
- [76:41]
Podcast Host
Okay, now I'm picking this up now, zoom way out.
- [76:44]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And it's like, is the flow of electrons open or close between El Paso and New York or between New York and Boston or whatever. Right. Like things that you would need to. If you zoom far enough and out, the Earth becomes microscopic. You can still observe the state of that and react to that as a signal. Not to mention, you could use that energy to broadcast, you know, whatever signal you want. Right. The signal being broadcast is determined the modulation of the signal. Right. The data modulated onto that signal is determined by the configuration of the chips that are driving that signal in that antenna. Right. And when you think about like the. The crust of the Earth, right. It's like we can get into like pole shift if you want to as well.
- [77:25]
Podcast Host
Oh, I try not to think about the pole shift.
- [77:27]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Well, maybe. Maybe having a robust energy grid that is well balanced with bitcoin mining and all these other technologies are something that can help stabilize.
- [77:38]
Podcast Host
Do we have enough time? We're in the middle of the pole shift army.
- [77:40]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, I think so, yeah. So when you learn land navigation in the military? I'm at Fort Pickett in Virginia learning land navigation. And they're like, oh, by the way, this map has the magnetic declination adjustment that you need. It's a little bit off, Right. So like that way back when I just kind of. I was like, okay, cool. I need to know that it's not. It's like seven instead of five or whatever. Fast forward to like learning about the magnetic pole shifts. And I'm like, oh, wow. Like, yeah, the poles are moving around because my compass needed to be adjusted based on the map from like the 1960s. Right. It's completely different. So I think there's a there there as well. And that is very cosmic.
- [78:16]
Podcast Host
It's observable, right?
- [78:18]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Definitely observable.
- [78:20]
Podcast Host
Yep.
- [78:23]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah.
- [78:23]
Podcast Host
Try not to think of it. But I mean, how can having a robust. Great. And so like going back to the macro. Cosmic conversation. Yeah, I think now I understand, like the mini transistor is like microgrids. So like daisy chaining natural gas turbines, whatever, to create a microgrid, small modular reactors. And you just bing bong, bing bong. Maybe you have massive generation facilities that are more centralized in certain parts. But I think that's something. I mean, we're going to be discussing it tonight here at pubg, announcing the series with American Bitcoin about energy policy, energy strategy, compute and different forms in Bitcoin and AI. But I think this applies beyond the specific topics to like, national security.
- [79:10]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Absolutely.
- [79:10]
Podcast Host
At the pole shift level, like the security of civilization, broadly speaking.
- [79:15]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
We can't rely on Elon. Elon's going to do some. A lot more cool shit, I think. But like, he is but one man with one team. So it's like we need a lot more people active and engaged on space exploration, you know, energy infrastructure. I'm fully bought into the whole, like, we need a grid renaissance. I was reading a book called One Second After. Have you read that?
- [79:37]
Podcast Host
I've heard of it. I haven't read it, though.
- [79:38]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Fantastic. Well, you'll get there after Mandibles, you
- [79:41]
Podcast Host
know, it takes me a while to get to the box. Yeah.
- [79:43]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
One Second after, basically like the. The whole. And it's been out for a while, so I don't mind spoiling it. But it's like a nuclear bomb detonates in the atmosphere above the eastern seaboard. It wipes out all modern electronics. Right. You have a Carrington event because the electromagnetic. Electromagnetic shield of the Earth is down and we get a solar flare that wipes out Modern electronics. Like, same, same. Right. So it's a book that explores just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, western North Carolina. Again, explores, like, sort of what that might look like. Fantastic read. But I remember reading that and, like, I think one of the prefaces of the book, like, the dude was right in 2001, trying to illustrate the fragility of our electrical infrastructure and our grid in America. And then 911 happened, and all the wind got sucked from any kind of sales that he might have started with, like, hey, guys, our grid's decaying and we need to do something about it. That's why he wrote the book as like, an educational sort of, like, fictional narrative, but, you know, got derailed by the war on terror. Right. Which.
- [80:41]
Podcast Host
And so I got here last night, had a great dinner, and then drinks after. I won't say who, but there's people. Obviously, we have this event again tonight focused on energy policy, but I was talking to somebody who's involved with one of the major utility companies in the country, and we were talking about the fact that a lot of the conversation around energy has become partisan politics where it's like, how do we. How do we get away from making energy a partisan issue? And it's. It's literally has nothing to do with politics. It's just about human flourishing. Like, how do we educate people to understand that problems like the one explained in. In the book One Minute after, one second, one second after, and create a sort of optimistic energy around rejiggering the grid to modernizing the grid? That seems like something we should all want to get behind.
- [81:41]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah. I mean, I think if you. If you want to, like, attack it on one front, it's like, well, if we have more energy production, your electrical bill will go down.
- [81:52]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [81:52]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And it's funny, like, that's.
- [81:53]
Podcast Host
I'm not going to dox. I was talking to somebody at, again, one of the larger utility companies in the country, and I had to explain the Henry Adams curve to him, which
- [82:03]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
is the Henry Adams curve.
- [82:04]
Podcast Host
The Henry Adams curve is the energy consumption per capita over time. I think, going back to 1850, one of the charts on WTF happened in 1971.
- [82:12]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Com, and there's no Energy Rich, Poor Nation.
- [82:16]
Podcast Host
Is that the one that's. I mean, that's, I think, a derivative of it, but, like, it was the Henry Adams curve for us. So, like, I think energy consumption per capita is what it tracks in, like, 1971. It was like going up and to the right and then flatlines. Really? Yeah. And that's one of the most underrated charts in the world, I think. But getting back to the point is like, we have been neglecting our energy infrastructure, many would say going back to 1971, and we are behind. We need to modernize it, we need to update it, we need to make it more distributed, more robust. And the fact that it has become a partisan issue is just mind blowing. It's like, this is bigger than politics. This is literally survival. And the progression of.
- [83:02]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Have you talked to Daniel Batten?
- [83:06]
Podcast Host
It's been a while. Yeah. Yeah. In New Zealand.
- [83:08]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I mean, he. That was like one of the biggest things on the whole because a lot of the. I think a lot of the other side of the aisle partisan stuff is from like, the green side, the environmental side. And Daniel has just like blown all that out of the water. Like, I followed some of his work. Like, it's been phenomenal. And then at the same time, you can point to gridless in Africa. You can point to. Or was it there was that article some dude wrote about. I think it was like a village in Malawi or something that has electricity now because of bitcoin mining.
- [83:34]
Podcast Host
Oh, it was the. In the Congo, right? The. The nature preserve.
- [83:37]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Oh, yeah, there's a Congo.
- [83:38]
Podcast Host
The nature preserve. They were able to utilize the excess capacity on, I believe a substation that sat at the top of a hill. And the transmission lines had decayed over time. But the revenue from the bitcoin mining and they enabled them to rebuild transmission.
- [83:52]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, I think having. Highlighting and having those concrete stories of. And yeah, it's bitcoin, which is great, like propagandized by bitcoin. But because bitcoin is inherently an energy asset and inherently tied to the grid at this point, there's no excuse. It's like if you want to uplift people out of poverty, you will build energy infrastructure for them. And the best way to do that is to find some capitalist that wants to make money on mining bitcoin and say, hey, we've got an energy source. Come drop your bitcoin mining shipping container next to this energy source. You can make some money slice of some of us to develop this infrastructure. And then like, when we don't need you anymore, take your. Take your toys and go home. Yeah. And like, people will do that. That's like, it's happening. That's happening everywhere.
- [84:36]
Podcast Host
And since bitcoin is distributed, the network doesn't care. Maybe blocks slow down, maybe block production slows down a bit, but the network goes on difficulty adjust. But bringing this back to like revitalizing the grid to be able to survive the consequences of a potential Carrington event or a nuclear bomb. EMP poles potentially destroying parts of the infrastructure. You got me thinking like you've heard of Atlantis and if you're a big fan of Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, they'll talk about civilizations advanced, highly advanced civilizations of. Of humanity's past that have been forgotten but may have been super super advanced but taken out by potentially character event. The Unger Dryas was probably like an asteroid that created the great flood that's been talked about throughout history. But like, like not to be hubristic. We should never be hubristic. But is bitcoin like, we're obviously a highly advanced society. Is this like a problem that similarly advanced societies in Earth's past have gotten to but haven't surpassed? But we have the opportunity to. We have to recognize that. I'm getting a little rambly and like heady here in cosmic. It's almost like Fermi's the Great Filter, right. Or Fermi's Paradox. Like if we get the grid sufficiently robust.
- [86:08]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah.
- [86:09]
Podcast Host
We can survive that event and be like the one iteration of humanity that's.
- [86:14]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I think it's going to come down to what is, what does sufficiently robust mean? Right? Like what does that mean? Because does robust mean it's. We're all interconnected? Maybe to a degree. But I think like you're saying these micro grids, right. If you can, if you, if you have, if you have flowing water on your property, go put in a hydro dam and start mining bitcoin, right. Like that. You could build a Faraday cage around that setup. And now you're the guy with electricity. Right? Now you want to make sure you're friends with all your neighbors so you're not the guy that they're going to kill because you're the only one with the lights on. But I think, I think there is something to the monetary incentive to expand the energy infrastructure via bitcoin mining that will not. Well, it is driving micro grids. Like we're getting micro grids because of bitcoin mining. Right. You know, you have. I was just listening to 256 foundation today. They're. They were talking, Schnitzel was on there talking about how he is using the firmware, which is the open source bitcoin mining firmware that they're developing to get to the exact wattage. Like we're tuning bitcoin mining to the exact wattage that is necessary for consumption, which is a prerequisite for Micro grids.
- [87:20]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Well, so let's explain this. Magina, shout out to Schnitzel.
- [87:24]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah.
- [87:24]
Podcast Host
And everybody contributing to the open source mining effort, shout out to 256 foundation for really fostering and pushing that forward. But Magena, I think the big breakthrough is being able to communicate with individual chips on a hashboard and elaborate and expand on what that does for the efficiency. Because we had just had the. We launched TFTC Roundtable. Obviously we did the. The Home Mining Energy Playbook. Not obviously, but we did a home Mining Energy Playbook with the Exergy guys. We had a follow up conversation with the TFTC community on Tuesday night. And between when we launched the Playbook and recorded that podcast and Tuesday's conversation, literally Tuesday morning Schnitzel announced Magina advancements and it's the data that we have in the mining Home Energy Playbook. If you go to the solar section, which is like in like I think part four of the Playbook, like you have a bunch of data in there and it's like the bitcoin mining on using solar, reacting to solar pulls is very volatile. Like Magina would allow you to really smooth out that curve, which makes incredible efficiencies, makes it more profitable. And it's pretty insane that open source firmware is getting us here.
- [88:47]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yes. So on the Mugina front, I'm a big fan. First of all, shout out to exergy boys. They sold me my home heater, we'll call it. And so I will be heating my home this winter and making some money while I do it. Fantastic job. But on the Regina front, this. First of all, you have to understand that most of the bitcoin mining software and hardware has come from China. You have very clear examples of Ant bleed.
- [89:16]
Podcast Host
Ant bleed in the past, ASIC Boost,
- [89:18]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
ASIC Boost, tons of other things of like chicanery, which, like, okay, cool. It's a rational play.
- [89:22]
Podcast Host
Well, Ample was 2015 and I think most people came into bitcoin. Biggest wave of bitcoiners came in post 20. Absolutely post Covid. Yeah. Completely oblivious to Amplee. So could you explain what amplit was to people?
- [89:35]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
It was essentially a backdoor on the firmware itself. Firmware is the thing that runs on like your thermostat has a firmware on it. Right. So people that don't understand like the software aspects of it. You have your operating system. So like iOS, Android or mobile operating systems, Windows, Linux, macOS, or like desktop and laptop operating systems. Firmware generally speaks to like specific components for specific purposes. And bitcoin mining machines have firmware that run on them and have historically been completely closed source and cut off like from inspecting or understanding what they're doing.
- [90:10]
Podcast Host
And many companies have built their business around jailbreaking that firmware to make it more efficient. Yeah.
- [90:16]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And believe, as I understand, it was essentially just a backdoor. It was a way for, I think it might have been like remotely controlling hash rate.
- [90:24]
Podcast Host
Remotely Brick, There you go. The machine.
- [90:26]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, yeah, I'm in that cohort that came in well after amply. Like I know that it was like this backdoor thing, but yeah, the fact that you could have a remote entity because you have to be online to mine bitcoin. Right. You don't necessarily have to be. With recent developments with Stratum 2 and Datum, you don't have to be like connecting your miners directly to the Internet. You can connect to your own infrastructure now. So it's way better in that regard. And you can kind of like block it off from, you know, direct control. But generally speaking, most miners are connecting over the Internet, meaning they're exposing a port. A lot of these firmware developers will say, oh well, we need to charge you a developer fee. So you need to talk to the developer server to make sure that you check that the developer fee is working well. That's a connection to their servers that they control. And they're shipping you the firmware that you have no idea what it's doing. So it's like, oh yeah, I see this connection out to this random server. What is that? I don't know. Oh, that's the developer fee server. Don't worry about it. Now there's legitimate, like there's a there there, right. With having a developer fee. But also that becomes an attack vector and a threat to where you get amplit where you can have your machine just shut down because you're connected to bitmain servers and if they don't like you, they'll shut you down.
- [91:36]
Podcast Host
Or if they want to mine more, they're like, hey, we need less hash rate so we get more bitcoin. Or if, I mean this was 2015, I believe Ampleed came out. And I remember in bitcoin very obsessed with it for years at that point being like, holy crap, this is bad. Because if you believe that bitcoin is a tool of force projection, not only for the individual, but if we do believe that we're getting to the geopolitical game theory with bitcoin as a variable, that's again, fifth generation warfare, another form of it. Is like if you have these backdoors in these chips and China has a sufficient amount of hash rate, Russia has a sufficient amount of hash rate and something's going on in meat space between us and China and they have that back door. It's like, all right, we're just going to turn off their hash rate.
- [92:29]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, it's a. And this is like, that just speaks to the broader open source thesis around like if the tools are not open source for inspection, I would consider it insecure at this point. Right? Like trusted third parties are security holes. That's like a well known, well known thing. But bringing back to Mugena the fact that now we have open source firmware. The crazy thing about Mugena though is not just that it's open source, so you can go check to make sure that it's not backdooring you and gonna brick you and so you greatly reduce your risk.
- [92:58]
Podcast Host
It gives you control over your computer.
- [92:59]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
You give complete control. Right? So like I have a miner and I won't in the, in the basement that's heating the house this winter and it anytime I want to tune the power consumption on it, it shuts down, it stops mining and it restarts the
- [93:16]
Podcast Host
whole thing, which takes time. Which takes time, Burns the chips.
- [93:20]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And so it's just inefficient from like a purely just engineering standpoint. Like there's no reason why it has to be that way. It's just like the way that the manufacturers deployed their stock firmware. Right. And one thing I'll say is. So I was a Chinese linguist, right. So I have some insight into Chinese culture. They're ruthless capitalists. I know they're a communist country, but they're ruthlessly capitalist, like hyper competitive.
- [93:43]
Podcast Host
I've been trying to figure out ways to describe this because just being in the mining industry for almost a decade now and interacting with China, I have a ton of respect. They are ruthless capitalists. The whole, I mean, again, it's like hard to describe because it is command and control.
- [93:58]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Chinese homogenous culture. Yes, they're very homogenous, culturally speaking. So even if you're this capitalist, they
- [94:04]
Podcast Host
get shit done and all they care about is making money. Yep. It's crazy.
- [94:07]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yep. And they're making a killing on these machines because they're making the chips, they're making the machines. The firmware is an afterthought. Just because you need something to run, right? So like you've yet to see a Chinese manufacturer lay into like serious firmware. In fact, they like put in safeguards to like prevent you from jailbreaking the
- [94:24]
Podcast Host
control board your warranty gets. Exactly.
- [94:27]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
So by getting Mujina one is like, now we have say over the features that are running on your, your mining. Whether you're a home miner or you're a mega miner, having a say in the features is like huge, right? Like, if it's doing something that you, that it doesn't. If the stock firmware is not doing what you needed to do, there's almost no recourse because these, these manufacturers know they have you by the balls, right? They're like, oh, where are you going to go get where you can't get your Asics from, right? So I'm a big fan of Proto, like doing, doing that. Like, we need more people making more AS six and more miners, right? With open source firmware, if we can jailbreak these and turn these out. The features like having different hashboards, right? Schnitzel was on the 256 pod talking about different. He's got two different hash boards, multiple different hashboards, right? Like, and there's, there's not a lot.
- [95:11]
Podcast Host
What do you have, like an S19J Pro and an S21?
- [95:14]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I think it was an. I think a J. A 19K and J. K and J. Okay, maybe some other one. But just the fact that to my knowledge there's not firmware in the past has been open source or even that is supported having different hashboards in it, right? So generally speaking you get this bitcoin mining asic. It looks like a metal shoebox and there's three hash boards in there that have the little ASIC chips in it. There's like 300 chips on each board. And then there's this thing called the control board. And the control board is like the brains of the thing. It talks to the stratum servers, it connects to the Internet. It does all the logic. And then the hash boards are just like, purely like, it does one thing and one thing only is like hash Bitcoin. And so you couldn't take a board from a different miner and put it into this other one because you had a bad board. And in fact, the firmware, most firmware won't allow you to run with two hash boards instead of three, right? Like, they're like, they fix that. It's like, oh, you have three hash boards in here.
- [96:08]
Podcast Host
And we only design the logic as such. If we don't see three hash boards, it doesn't work.
- [96:12]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
We're not going to work.
- [96:12]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [96:12]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Or we're going to. We're going to kneecap you if you're not like mining to our pool or whatever. Right. They can do whatever they want. It's their, it's their software, it's their machine. You don't, you bought the machine, but you don't own that machine. Mujina is now enabling anybody to run the firmware that do whatever you want. You want to throttle up and have 2,000 watts or 3,000 watts or 5,000 watts. You can do that and you can do that with a heterogeneous hash boards. Right.
- [96:36]
Podcast Host
And now with the, with the emergence of vibe coding, like now we can get really, now we can get really sci fi. And again that's very bullish on the exergy team and the home mining and the open source mining. This is I think going back to micro grids and having robust micro grids again, making sure no electron is wasted not only at a behind the meter or off grid flare gas mining, but now literally at your home, you can get as granular as your home. Making sure that you're energy draw from the grid is as efficient as possible via bitcoin mining. And it's profitable, or maybe not as profitable, but you're.
- [97:17]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
No, we're not worried about profit. We're not mining for profit. We're mining for the heat.
- [97:20]
Podcast Host
Yes. It's useful. Yep. And it can be, it can make your energy consumption cheaper. Yeah, that's, that's the way to frame it.
- [97:28]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah. Yeah. The mining industry, you know, I got into it professionally a little over two years ago, jumped right into like Stratton V2. I've been working on that. But just in general, the, the lack of engineering, open source engineering, development and talent in the bitcoin mining industry two plus years ago compared to today is night and day. The fact that it's 256 foundation works, the fact that you have stratumy two with a working group, a protocol working group of like big names, you'll see when you go on mempool space, right? It's happening, it's coming. The fact that datum exists, right, like datum was a huge breakthrough, right. Jason Hughes is just like, strand v2 is taking too long. I think rust sucks. I'm just gonna go ahead and ship this thing and like, dude, it works. It works like tons of tons of people out there are like building their own block templates, right. They're doing these awesome things. Strategy two is further accelerating that. The thing I'm most bullish on on strategy two is it's a rust project. And if, if you're not familiar with the bitcoin like dev ecosystem, there's tons of rust tooling, right? So the Bitcoin dev kit, the wallet tooling, Lightning dev kit, the Lightning dev kit, like it's all, there's all rust. And so now we have this suite of bitcoin software that's written in this same programming languages that's able to talk and interact with each other, right? I have a proof of concept where I rotate a coinbase address every block on Testnet 4. So there's like a Testnet developer network. And so like Polstra came into the Stratton V2 project and did a pass on like the coinbase and like you know how that did. So now it supports miniscript.
- [99:04]
Podcast Host
So I could take, Are you giving the mining software an XPub and it's just recycling them?
- [99:11]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Every block you take a mini script wild card descriptor, right? So for anybody that doesn't quite understand, you have like public and private keys for Bitcoin, this public key can be used to create something called a descriptor which is like describing the way that the wallet is formatted, derivation, path, all these other things. And you can do something called a wildcard which just means like this is the high level description of what the wallet is. If you start to fill in the wild cards with concrete numbers, that's where you get like your addresses, right? And so I have, I have a branch of code that takes a wildcard descriptor meaning like here's an XPub essentially very generally speaking, here's an XPub and software programmatically every time you find a block as the pool, just iterate one, right? And by the way like save it off so you know, like which one we started on. So you're not repeating addresses, but it means that every block that was mined on this pool and I have a whole write up hosted on GitHub but every block that was mined on Testnet 4 using this pool that I, that I vibed very much so it's like I'm way better at reading code than I am writing code. So like vibe coding has been a godsend, like huge unlock, but it works, right? I have like 40 some blocks on Testnet 4 that it's the same pool and it's the same wildcard descriptor, the same XPub, but it's a different address that it was mined to in increments of one, right? So the full like descriptor you get like down to like 001002 003, whatever, whatever that descriptor looks like, it would just iterate through those every time it was generating a new coinbase on a block find. So a block was found and the pool was like, cool, we found a block. Let's go look at our wildcard descriptor. Iterate on one, create a new address. And now we use that as a coinbase payout.
- [100:51]
Podcast Host
So for those who are listening to that, like, sounds cool, but like, why, why is that necessary? Or what is the benefit of doing that?
- [100:58]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
If you're worried about quantum computing, you don't want to reuse addresses, right. So that's like the big to do. Because everybody loves to talk about quantum now. So like if you are worried about this and you're a mining pool, go talk to your custodian and tell them that you want to rotate the, the coinbase address every time it is technically possible. Right.
- [101:14]
Podcast Host
I'm having, I'm having this problem with Ocean, where like Ocean, you sign up, you just give them the address and like I get a payout. Like, I'm like, the UX is such. Where I'm like, okay, I got the payout, but the address that I, that I have there is like, obviously the miners are contributing shares and so like it's building up a balance and like, so if I switch out the address, do I get the balance from the previous address or will that ever be paid out? It's like, no.
- [101:38]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah. Well, you should be able to just give them an XPub.
- [101:41]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Or like we're like a silent payment address.
- [101:45]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Oh, absolutely.
- [101:45]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [101:46]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I mean there's. And that's where I say I'm like, I'm hyper bullish. Because like Stratumy 2 is like the mining rust ecosystem now. Like all these other things like lightning and Ark and like all these other ecosystems are also using the same language. So there's like this, this synergy to use a buzzword between the different projects that it's going to get wild. Like Cashew Dev Kit. Right. E Cash. There are people that have been mining in a subordinate pool. Right. So you have your main pool.
- [102:18]
Podcast Host
I mean it's the last time you're on your shows. That's what we're talking about. Yeah. When we Bitcoin plus plus it's happening
- [102:25]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
on mainnet now and the pools have no idea. You don't have to. Pools are just accounting. Right. A mining pool is just. I never thought I'd be working on accounting software, but here I am. Mining pools are just accounting. And so you have These you can do a tiered structure where the prime pool is doing its own accounting and there's nothing stopping you from just being a single consumer of this pool and aggregating all your hash rate through a proxy. But at that proxy, you're doing your own accounting.
- [102:54]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [102:54]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Like perfectly normal. It happens in corporate structures. You got P and L at the top level. You got P and L, the different organizational structures. So it's just an accounting problem. Well, with ecash, it's a database, Right. It's a database that now gives you a bearer asset. Right. The ecash token is a bearer asset. And with bitcoin mining, every mining share is a shitcoin. It's not bitcoin. Right. It's the original.
- [103:20]
Podcast Host
It's an iou.
- [103:21]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
It's an iou. Right? So they're all using databases to track this. All the mining pools are using databases to track your shares. Well, let's just make the database a cashew database and issue you tokens. And now you can take those ehash tokens and you can go find your liquidity on the market wherever you can find it.
- [103:37]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [103:38]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And you can realize your hash rate, you know, probably gains or whatever, your liquidity. If I want to speculate, I'll buy all the ehash from you because I think that, you know, the pool is going to hit a block.
- [103:47]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [103:47]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And you can do this completely separate from what the pool at the high level is doing. You can just do sub accounting. And now you have a community. Right. Heat punks. Right. My local meetup. Maybe we're all heating our houses in the winter. Hey, mine. On my pool here, we'll have ehash tokens that we can exchange. And when the payout happens, now there's a definitive value for all these IOUs that we have. And now you can melt them over lightning and I pay you for coffee.
- [104:10]
Podcast Host
I mean, digital credit's become such a big meme and I think it's been misapplied in the way that it has. But this is the only form of digital credit that exists, is like hash rate shares.
- [104:18]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
FPPs is the first form of digital credit that's a model iou.
- [104:24]
Podcast Host
It's like you're contributing hash and you're basically trusting that the pool is going to give you a commensurate amount of bitcoin once.
- [104:32]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And it doesn't work though, Right. Like the FPPS model, as the block subsidy goes down, the guaranteed bitcoin payout in each block, as that goes down, you need a proportionately larger bag of bitcoin to float the bad luck variance, right?
- [104:43]
Podcast Host
Yes.
- [104:44]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Because what you're doing as a miner, when you go to FTPs pool, you're saying, hey, I want you to take all the risk of the luck variants of bitcoin mining, right? Because you might not hit a block or you might hit five blocks, right? So I'm going to pay you and there's going to be some vig there that the pool is going to take to basically carry that risk. You have the alternative or. Not the alternative, but one of the alternatives like PPLNs, that's what Ocean's running with tides. Demand pool is doing a version of PPLNS where it's like nobody gets paid unless we find a block, right? And demand is doing this cool thing where they have factored in the subsidy versus the fee. Right? So this is. I actually audited one of the initial write ups of this proposal for the schema where the guaranteed 3.125 Bitcoin is distributed normally via PPLNs, right? But the fee is weighted so that way you can construct your own template. And if you want it full of juicy jpegs and you got high fees in there and I want to have pure bitcoin and nothing in my block because I don't like JPEGs, your economic weight and reward for the mining pool is heavier, so you should be rewarded more, right? Just from pure economics, like leaving out any other moral principles or anything. Like from purely economic standpoints, if your block template is heavier and juicier in sats, you should be rewarded more. So this PPL and SJD that demand pool is using accounts for that in their. In their mining share accounting. It says, hey, we're going to pay out when we find a block, but we're going to factor in what your block template looks like. Right? So if you have a heavier block block with higher fees, you're going to get a heavier weight in this payout mechanism.
- [106:14]
Podcast Host
And is that determined by the heaviness of the block versus the expected heaviness of the block or.
- [106:21]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
No, it's purely for the heaviness of the block, right? Because in Stratum B2, I'm sort of telling you the block template I'm using
- [106:27]
Podcast Host
because what I'm trying to get out there was like, what if somebody didn't have the intent to mine a block that wasn't optimized for highest fees, but they just. Just accidentally mined an empty block or something like that? Like it doesn't. The intent doesn't matter. It's the outcome that matters.
- [106:42]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Absolutely. As it should be. Right. Like it's. It's cool. Like, cool. You're telling me you're mining to me a huge juicy block, but it's actually empty. Well, that's not fair. And again, like, it's great that people can create their own templates. I'm a huge proponent of that. Huge fan. But there is. There's still an economic reality to mining that like you want to maximize for fees. And if you're not doing that, if you're opting to do that, you should be rewarded less, economically speaking, than somebody that is filling their block with fees. Right. And it's. I also think private mempools are coming. So that's a whole nother rabbit hole.
- [107:15]
Podcast Host
Elaborate.
- [107:17]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Not in the way that a lot of people think and that are scared. Right. I think what you're going to see is so pool way.
- [107:25]
Podcast Host
The way they exist now is like slipstream.
- [107:27]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Slipstream, yeah. Huge example. Right. Like it used to be, you know, the, the. The dude that minted the 4 Mega. The first ever 4 Mega JPEG, right? That was like a telegram, you know, hex transaction in a telegram message to somebody at a pool.
- [107:40]
Podcast Host
Yeah, right.
- [107:40]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Like that's historically how it's happened. Private mempools exist. Like, you just contact the miners, you can get your transactions in there. Right.
- [107:47]
Podcast Host
Accelerate, like via BTC has had an accelerator for what I think will be
- [107:53]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
realized because the economic incentives align better. Right? Because like fees are great, but like running the infrastructure for those kinds of things and like having to manage it, that's an operational cost. What I think private med pools are going to realize, as is these micro grids that we talked about. Right? You're going to have communities of people that are balancing their grid with their hash rate. And you and I are doing business in this community. Maybe we've got B2B deals. Maybe we just got, you know, I'm just paying you for the beef. I don't want to pay a fee on that transaction. We got, we got 100 PETA hash. Like, what are we paying a fee for? Well, we'll hit a block eventually. And I know you. We have cigars every night, right? Or every week. Like, we meet up. It's like the physical me space. The proof of punch to steal a blurb from mvk. The proof of punch means that, like, I'm not here to screw you over. You're not here to screw me over. So we can actually wait to close our books out. Right? I don't need to close my books with you and we can just keep updating this PSBT transaction of like okay, well here I'm paying you a bitcoin. Oh actually, well like let me, you know, let's, let's re up and like you're actually going to pay me back or whatever it is. But like we don't have to close our books out. And because we're on this micro grid in our community at this bitcoin meetup, we can actually have our own private mempool where we have zero fee transaction clearing anytime we hit a block.
- [109:06]
Podcast Host
This is like a new payment channel.
- [109:08]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
It could be like absolutely. Like you want to something in like
- [109:11]
Podcast Host
naturally I'm like why not just use lighting or something like that.
- [109:13]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
When do you want to splice? Do you want to use the juicy Omega splice that that Dusty was just talking about recently? Right. Why do you want to pay a fee on that? Right. You can pay a fee to these mega miners or you can build your own block template and hash with your own hash rate in your community. And again if you know that you have an extra hash in your community that you're going to hit a block eventually in the next quarter, we can just keep a running, you know, mempool of private zero fee transactions. We don't even need to make it private. Right. The relay will just like people just not pick up our zero fee transactions. But we can make sure that the node that we're using to build our
- [109:44]
Podcast Host
templates includes those transactions.
- [109:46]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Always prioritize our transactions within the community and clears it zero fee because we are already incurring the cost of running the hash rate to pay for that transaction.
- [109:54]
Podcast Host
And you're saving on the transaction. Like I'm trying to think of the incentives, the economic incentive, like could this weaken?
- [110:02]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Well I know you're not a believer in the full blocks, right? You always take the other side of that bet.
- [110:06]
Podcast Host
I think mempools, mempools will always clear eventually is my take.
- [110:10]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Exactly right. But when they stop clearing because I think that like eventually we get the point. I think they will stop clear evidence. There'll be all zero fee transactions in these mining pool communities. There can be micro grade zero fee transactions with fat juicy blocks of zero fee transactions because we're already incurring the cost by mining.
- [110:30]
Podcast Host
And so again like it's the first time I'm hearing this.
- [110:34]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, yeah, this. I didn't drop this one because I
- [110:37]
Podcast Host
like, because I'm thinking like it doesn't like in that case it wouldn't perturb the mining incentives because if you find the block, the pool that mines the block is the miners within that pool are worried about the revenue from that block. But in this use case that you're describing, even if there's zero fees, you're basically reaping the rewards of the fee outside of the blockchain via the peer to peer meats based transaction that you're doing. So you don't care about the profitability of the block that you mined.
- [111:08]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
The profitable miners, the ROI miners, like they're not going to pick up our transactions. But again, hash rate heating and if
- [111:14]
Podcast Host
they do, it's like, all right, cool,
- [111:16]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
exactly, yeah, pick it up please. Because the, you know, the mempool is clearing but otherwise it's, you have a strong bitcoin circular economy that's all heating their basements or their houses or their businesses or their churches or whatever it is with hash rate. That's enough hash rate to hit a block once a month. You want to clear your books once a month for free. Come, you know, participate, Point your hash rate here and you can still point your hash rate to these bigger pools. Right. Like I said, demand pool will pay you based on the fee rate. So you're going to be economically award rewarded accordingly. But there's nothing wrong with you. Like we don't care about the fees. Right. Because we're just, we're mining for heat, we're mining for the heats. Yeah.
- [111:53]
Podcast Host
This is fascinating stuff. Mempools will always clear. Eventually I'll just.
- [112:00]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I don't doubt you anymore.
- [112:02]
Podcast Host
Well, the like that what you just discussed, what you just explained. Excuse me. We should want that and there's like a where we are and how to get there and bring it back to like vibe coding. Like I think the sci fi future that we envisioned, like that's what like I've been getting accused and many bitcoiners been getting accused. Those of us who have fell down the AI rabbit hole, very hard of like, oh, you're like distracted from bitcoin. Like, don't like, what are you doing? It's like, no, I'm trying to learn these tools and master them to the degree that I can so that I can help steward bitcoin. I participate in fifth generation warfare. I'm a propaganda arm for the bitcoin.
- [112:43]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Thank you for your service.
- [112:44]
Podcast Host
You're welcome. Thank you for your service. The like, just like working with the LLMs for media, it's like becoming obvious to me like we're going to be able to vibe code these use cases. Yes. People say don't vibe code like critical bitcoin wallet software yet I'll go out on limb say like we're probably going to get to a point in the next few years where you could probably do that safely.
- [113:09]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Well, you'll have a well reviewed core. Yeah, right. Like you still want well reviewed fundamental foundational software. Right.
- [113:17]
Podcast Host
But who's to say you can't train a model based off of that fundamental core and have it narrowly focused on that fundamental core and build off that. We're becoming a projectionist. And so what you just described, when it comes to bitcoiners focused on AI, that's what I think your focus should be, is how can you master these tools to the extent that you can project to the LLM to build these use cases? Yeah, very easily, if that makes sense.
- [113:45]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I mean that you're describing my day job, right? It's like I wasn't great. I was very average. Average Gary online avg underscore Gary on Twitter. Average Gary on nostr. Very average at software. Right. But with an LLM, I know good software versus bad software. I've read enough and I've debugged enough and I've gone through, through the pain of like learning enough that the LLM is now rapidly iterating faster than I ever could. Right. Because I just don't have that foundational knowledge people pick up in like CS degrees and stuff of like, oh, you know, just spitting out code. Right. Like the boilerplate, like the slog of just like typing it all out. Like I just didn't have that muscle memory. So with AI and with LLMs now, because I know enough to be able to articulate with a good context of like what I want or what I desire from, for the outcome. And I know how to validate the outcome. Right. That's a big piece. I think in engineering and coding is like having designing and projecting something that you can validate and then having making sure that that validation is the piece that you pay the most attention to. Right. So again like with Bitcoin, the validation is spin up a reg test node and like send a transaction, right. And like does it work or does it not work? And you can get to the point now where you can iterate on it,
- [115:02]
Podcast Host
then send that transaction, then on top of that in parallel run a fuzz test to see where this, where this vibe could get fucked up.
- [115:10]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, it's, you know, you've got a swarm of super intelligent interns that will do your bidding and if you're not clear and concise in your meeting in the meaning of what you want, like, they're going to screw it up. But that's where the other side comes in is like, you have a robust research and, you know, Socratic dialog tool to go, hey, I don't know what you're talking about here. Can you tell me more about that? Right? And it can break it down and explain to you and give you links to resources on like, go learn about what this means.
- [115:39]
Podcast Host
Hey, go to the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and go read the whole corpus of that sort of sub forum on Stack Exchange and see if somebody there answered this question years ago.
- [115:51]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yep. Yeah.
- [115:52]
Podcast Host
Two minutes later, like, oh, yeah, somebody did, like in November.
- [115:55]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Still, that knowledge for me, explain it to me like I'm five.
- [115:58]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [115:58]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And it will, it will do this, right?
- [116:00]
Podcast Host
Well, this was true back in 2016. But like, can you go do some further research on all the development progression that's happened and make sure that that's not stale data, like just knowing again, I. That was the conversation earlier in the world of AI, like, what are the critical skills that people are going to need? It's like first principles, thinking and, well,
- [116:20]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
it's, it's the rise of the generalists, right? It's the Renaissance man now that becomes hybrid. And that was. There's a whole, I think Mike Hobart wrote a book called like the Second Renaissance or whatever, talking about how Bitcoin is going to bring back like this renaissance of art and science and math and engineering and all this good stuff because we have hard sound money again. And AI is only going to further exacerbate this because you don't have to be an expert in everything because you have this tool that can make you expert in the very specific niche domain that you need to be in at that given point in time. And you can use it and leverage the tool and grok and understand, vary in that moment in time and then move on to the next thing. Right. And you just have to be just the, the intelligence becomes the discernment and the, the articulation of where you're going. Like you were talking about the projection. It becomes what, what am I trying to accomplish here? What problem am I trying to solve? What are, you know, and, and figuring out the edge cases or the who has solved it already or anything like that is like, put the clanker on it, man. Go out, touch grass, plant your corn, grow your field, come back. And then like, you know, I want to learn, you know, ancient Greek. So it's like I've got an agent loop, like, figuring out what. What is the pedagogy of like, learning a language, which I have some experience with that, but not for this specific one. So it's like, I can go and tell Claude, hey, man, I want to learn ancient Greek. Like, how should I do that? Right. I could have sat down and gone through the slog of, like, watching YouTube and learning blog posts and, like, all these other things to go learn that and contextualize it. Or you let somebody synthesize and distill it, which I don't think, like, there's the danger of, like, outsourcing the way that you think. But if you know concretely what you're after, AI is going to go get it for you.
- [117:58]
Podcast Host
Well, that's. That's like one of my biggest pieces of. Is advice to people venturing into AI is like, be very cautious of asking advice of the LLM. The way I use it is like, I know what the output should be and I'm using it to help me get that output.
- [118:17]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah.
- [118:17]
Podcast Host
And I think that's the most effective way to use these tool. These tools at the current state that they're in. Who's not to say? Like, maybe in the future they will be very good at giving you 100% accurate responses. They have. The hallucination has gotten significantly better over the last year alone. It's not perfect, but, like, when I write, I pair write the. The bent with Martin, our agent. Yep. And I know what the output is. I know what I want to present in the newsletter. And if you get something wrong, I'm like, no, you fucked this up. But, like, I pulled this up. Like, again, it's a week of sewing seats. Like I was telling you the homily in the Gospel from Masses. We. You can. It really stuck with me and come back. And subconsciously I didn't realize until, like, we're having this con. I. As you may know, if you listen to rhr, I become a homeowner for the first time.
- [119:04]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Congrats.
- [119:04]
Podcast Host
Thank you. Thank you. The. We just did our, like, big landscaping overhaul for the first time. We've been in the house for like, three months and we did it last week and subcon. Maybe. I don't know if subconsciously it wasn't subconsciously. I've been going out and, like, watering. Yep. Like. And like. But I pulled that up because I have, like, my headphones and I have my phone. I have the hose in one hand. I'm like, just talking to Martin and the other, like, okay, we need to get this done. Like, run this process. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [119:30]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
It's. You know, it's biblical to work the garden. That was before the fall of man, that we were given work to enjoy in the garden. And I have definitely enjoyed getting this done and being able, like, having more of my time to pursue that. If you haven't yet, I recommend planting a tree for each of your children. Right. And. And you might not see it ever shade you or your kids, but your grandkids will sure be happy that they're.
- [119:55]
Podcast Host
Yeah, we. We actually have to. One of the trees on our property is dead, so we have to cut that down. So we're going to have to plant a tree. I've got three. I got to figure out where we can plant three trees on the property. We have a massive ginkgo tree in our backyard.
- [120:08]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Oh, that's awesome.
- [120:09]
Podcast Host
It's so awesome. And I've become such.
- [120:12]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
You're crunchy now.
- [120:13]
Podcast Host
I'm not even crunchy. I'm just like, a homeowner now. I'm like, oh, I got to, like, tend to my land. Like, for me, I've been a renter.
- [120:19]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Welcome to middle age.
- [120:21]
Podcast Host
I'm like, I'm out there, like, in my shorts and flip flops, like, watering the hydrangeas and enjoying the birds.
- [120:28]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
And you walk by, you're, like, in the mulching, like, there's this weed popping up and just infuriates you.
- [120:32]
Podcast Host
Oh, dude. We have bamboo in our backyard, too, which is good luck.
- [120:35]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Yeah, good luck.
- [120:37]
Podcast Host
This has been awesome.
- [120:39]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
I agree. Thank you, Marty.
- [120:40]
Podcast Host
Thank you. Well, before we end tying this all back to, like, bitcoin veterans, and yeah, maybe not speaking on behalf of all veterans, but I think for any. Or maybe speaking to veterans that are out there, maybe bitcoin curious, like, what is your pitch to them?
- [120:58]
Veteran Bitcoin Enthusiast
Go talk to your brothers that are already in the space. Right? Like, there's. I guarantee you there's some bitcoiner that, you know, that's a veteran, that maybe from your unit. If you got sucked into all this crypto scams. I'm sorry. If you got sucked into that. I actually was talking to a veteran guy this morning. He's gonna power wash the house for me. And I was like, hey, can I pay you in bitcoin? He's like, oh, no, I got this other shitcoin thing. I was like, all right, man. But he wants to sit down and talk, right? So reach out. Like, people respect your. Your own privacy. Of course. But I think it's never been a better time to, like, come out as a bitcoiner, especially if you're a veteran, to just go and talk to other people in your life, other veterans, to be like, hey, man, this bitcoin thing's been super helpful for me. Right? Maybe they've seen that you're winning and maybe they feel like they're not. Right. If nothing else, you can say, hey, here's a leg up. Like, this has worked for me. If they're drowning in sorrows and troubles, finding a community and a purpose again is huge. So, like, if nothing else, reach out. If you're a bitcoiner and you're a veteran listening to this right now, or you're just a veteran, reach out to those you've served with, those that, you know might be fighting the demons that we, we all came home with to varying degrees. And, yeah, give it a second chance. If you, if you've encountered bitcoin in the past and you're like, no, that's dark mark, dark web, drug money, or it's a huge scam, it's not. We're winning and you can win with us if you want.
- [122:28]
Podcast Host
We're going to win. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that. $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.