← THE Bitcoin Podcast
THE Bitcoin Podcast
BASED BITCOIN VETERANS, DECENTRALIZING MINING, & BUILDING FREEDOM TECH | AVERAGE GARY
01:29:41
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- [00:00]
A
There's like a satoshi quote of it might not be the solution, but it will buy some time in the, in the war for freedom. And really, if you look back to like the early cypherpunks and just cryptography in general, like the powers that cryptography offer the individual. And if you haven't read Crypto Sovereignty by Eric Kaysen, I definitely recommend it. But the power that cryptography offers the individual. And cryptography enables not just bitcoin, right? Bitcoin is just the best money that we found to use with cryptography. But, but cryptography underpins everything we do in our digital modern age. And enabling the average person to use cryptography to protect themselves from people that would wish them harm or ill will to their way of life is a powerful concept. And with open source technology and the jet fuel that is bitcoin, sending all of the idealistic bitcoiners into the top tier of elite society, cryptography is only going to accelerate from here. And open source technology is of the means that we're going to accelerate it.
- [01:05]
B
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. If you are listening to this right now, remember you are still early. Find me on noster@primal.net Walker and this podcast@primal.net Titcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search WalkerAmerica and find this podcast on X and Instagram. Itcoin podcast. Head to the show notes for sponsor links. Head to substack.com walkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoinpodcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk. Okay, Gary, welcome. I'm sorry for that snafu on the live streaming.
- [02:07]
A
I'm offended and I'm just gonna leave now.
- [02:09]
B
I'm sorry. My. You know, blame it on my producer. His name's Walter and he's just a real shitbag. Can't. Can't get anything right. Honestly, it's. It's embarrassing. I might have to fire this guy.
- [02:21]
A
Well, you'll save a lot of money by firing him.
- [02:23]
B
Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. He's just, honestly just kind of like not pulling his weight and really bad attitude on this guy. So yeah, we're gonna have to get rid of him. But dude, welcome. We. We saw each other in, in dc, which was A very interesting experience for me. I, I don't know how you're. Did you end up doing the, the day, did you do the day on the Hill stuff too? You did go talk to folks, right?
- [02:46]
A
I did do the down the Hill.
- [02:47]
B
How, how was that for you? Because that, for me, that was eye opening, to put it nicely.
- [02:55]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's going to depend, right, because we all went to go talk to different people. I met the most promising thing. So I'm in Virginia and so Tim Kaine, who is Hillary's running mate in 2016, is my senator. And so I went and met with him and I was like, weird. Yeah. But generally, I don't know. There was like a representative from Arizona. I just like tagged along with somebody else and like her staffer was like, I have no idea anything you guys are talking about. So like, please explain it to me. And we did like a live lightning transaction. Her mind was blown and I think I nailed it because I talked about like security and consumer protection. Because you're not sharing your secret information when you're giving. When you're paying Bitcoin, but with a credit card, you have to like give the secret number on the back of your credit card. And the lady was like, I just had debit card fraud and I had to like close all my accounts and get new cars issued and everything. So it like nailed that one. And then my representative actually came out of his meeting to like come meet with the group of us that was there. And then I ended up giving him this like national security book that like some of the guys from BPI and like, it's got like Matt Pines and some other things, but it covers like policy ideas and stuff like that. And so I was like, hey, I've got these books to give you. And ended up giving that to one of their staffers. So if nothing else, they at least like, you know, wanted books and they were engaging via email afterwards. But the Tim Kaine thing, like I got all the normal fud of whatever, but you know, still met with like a senior staffer. I don't know if that means anything. It was just like an older dude. It wasn't like some young intern. So maybe that meant something about it.
- [04:28]
B
But it sounds like yours was, was perhaps slightly more successful than, than ours was. We're in Illinois and like, why is that? Well, so we actually, we got a chance to meet with our, our senators. They were doing like, it wasn't like an individual meeting. It was like a, some sort of like a co. You Know, a coffee and. And, like, meet and greet with or a bunch of people, like, bring their grievances and such.
- [04:53]
A
Oh, geez.
- [04:54]
B
And then. And the senators, you know, pontificate, and it's Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth and names. Yeah. And Dick Durbin is like, I think, like, 83 or something like that. Like, he's really old. And I just. I went in there and I asked him. I was trying to be, like, very. Went in there in good faith, you know, but they're like, who, you know, go around the room, you know, who are you here. Who are you here with? Who do you represent? Oh, you know, we're at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. And, you know, we're. We're here to advocate on behalf of, you know, bitcoin and, you know, not crypto, and try to really drive that home in, like, every meeting we had, like, that. This is some. This is a different thing because they lump everything together because they're like, well, bitcoin. So you must be a fan of Trump Coin, then, aren't. And you're like, well, no, actually, we think that's a garbage scam. It has nothing to do with bitcoin at all. Like, that's. That's your starting point, right? Like, that's where you're starting from. And. And then there was. So gave the introduction, okay? It was all fine. Dick Durbin, like, asked, like, right off the bat, like, so do you support the genius act? And, like. And I'm like, I honestly don't care.
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A
About it at all.
- [05:59]
B
Again, has nothing to do with bitcoin. And, you know, so then he's like, Then it gets, like, the Q and A part. And just to set the stage for this, the other people that were in the room were, like, there, like, a bunch of nurses there, or like, a kid whose father had taken his own life the year before and was, like, advocating on behalf of mental. And some really heavy and important stuff and really tragic stuff. And then we're there, like, well, we're here to talk about bitcoin. And so maybe the optics weren't, like, great on that, but it is what it is. A lot of the other problems that people were talking about, you know, didn't say this, but I'm thinking, I'm like, boy, a lot of this just traces back to the money being broken, doesn't it? But he asked like, okay, you know, does anybody have any questions for us? Nobody's asking questions. So I stand up and, like, ask a question. Senator, you signed a letter with Elizabeth Warren to Fidelity, telling them that you strongly recommend they do not allow their clients to have exposure to Bitcoin when bitcoin was at $20,000 in the depths of the bear market in 2022. So I'm just wondering with bitcoin now 5x that has your position changed on that at all? You said that it wasn't a reliable store value, et cetera, et cetera. I'd love to hear how you, how you've updated your position. And basically he just goes off on a rant about. He's like, well, I brought crypto fraud ATM crypto fraud legislation to the floor of. And this Sam Bankman Fried guy, just like, respectfully, sir, I'm sorry. That's great. You know, none of us like fraud, but that has nothing to do with bitcoin, you know. And again, and it went, went like this. And then at one point he's like, well you, you know, you need to clean up your act, son. Like your industry needs to. And I'm like, I need to clean up like Sam Bankman Fried is now my fault. People running scams at crypto ATMs are now like my fault. Like, what, what is happening? A couple of the other people we were with were like, sir, we all agree that's a problem. Like none of us want fraud, but that happens with or without bitcoin. This happens all the time, these sorts of scams. And that's terrible. We should do something about that. But respectfully, it has nothing to do with it. He was just not having it got super heated. And then eventually was just like, I'm not talking about bitcoin anymore. And then it was like, well that is that. So that was that interaction. We did have like a couple of positive ones with like senior staffers where they were like, listen. One of them literally told us, they're like, listen, the, the Congresswoman is like 85 and she's retiring like after this. So like she's never going to vote in a, in a pro bitcoin way. Yeah, but she's retiring. So like, just so you know. And I'm like, well, I appreciate the, you know, the honesty there. Some of them were kind of open to learning. Some of them I was like, you are just like, you are fresh out of college and you have oh yeah, no idea what's going on. And you're interfacing like you're basically writing policy that your 80 some year old representative then takes to the floor. Like, what is this system that we have? This explains why is so Broken like, my God, this is insane. So yeah, that, that was my experience was like, got out of those first couple meetings, got to that the bar meet up midday and I was like, I'm pounding a couple of Miller lights because I cannot go into these afternoon ones completely sober. But then I was told it's okay because it's D.C. and everybody day drinks all the time.
- [09:21]
A
So that checks out. Yeah, I don't go there often, but when I do, it's not.
- [09:26]
B
You prefer to day drink?
- [09:28]
A
I don't prefer to drink at all, actually. I'm more of a cannabis enjoyer.
- [09:32]
B
Okay, okay. There's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. I'm sure that many in D.C. are also cannabis enjoyers. Oh yeah. Enjoyers of all things.
- [09:40]
A
Right?
- [09:41]
B
But yeah, it was interesting. BPI did an awesome job. Even though from what I hear on the interwebs now that they're all spooks, which is hilarious.
- [09:50]
A
Yeah, me too. Like I used to be a spook. Like that's what I did in the Navy was I was a spook. I was a Chinese linguist.
- [09:58]
B
Can you talk about that a little.
- [09:59]
A
Bit.
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B
Without doxxing yourself too much? Like, can you, can you get into that a little bit? Because when I found that out I was like, what is, is happening here?
- [10:09]
A
So I mean, star eyed out of high school, like I enlisted at 17 because the scops of like SOCOM, US Navy SEALs on the PlayStation 2 like worked really well, Call of Duty really well. And so I'm like, sweet, I'm going to sign up to serve. Ended up joining the Navy instead of like any of the other, you know, more like combat focused ones because my girlfriend at the time was against it. But I did 11 years, four months and three days in the Navy. Two years of that was language school where they taught me Chinese, Mandarin, and then four years I spent out in Hawaii listening to static and translating Chinese for strategic intelligence purposes. Did a little tour in Afghanistan while I was there. And then I spent the final five years in SOCOM doing like black box radio stuff for all the cool guys. So it's like put the black box in my backpack, try to keep up with the all these like special operations guys and then make sure that, you know, they have the intelligence picture in the tactical environment. Right? So it's like indications and warnings was one of the buzzwords of like, hey, there's a guy over here and he's talking about blowing us up. And then that was like what we trained to. And also just general counterterrorism activities of like where's this guy at? Based on all of his devices, et cetera. Have you ever seen Zero Dark Thirty?
- [11:29]
B
I have not, actually.
- [11:30]
A
So there's a scene in there where, like, a guy's in a van and it's like a little blip on the map. Like, I was the guy in the band, basically, right? I was not like, a cool guy by any means, but I was the guy that would be like, yep, he's over here. Based on my intelligence.
- [11:44]
B
Yeah. Did you. Did you enjoy that at all?
- [11:50]
A
Like, yeah. So. Man, that's an.
- [11:52]
B
It's a loaded question. I know.
- [11:54]
A
No, no, yeah, it goes, like, at the same time, I'm living with one of my best friends and getting, like, liberty pilled, like, truly, you know, because, like, I signed up, like, freedom and democracy, American way, all that stuff, right? And then I'm starting to learn about, like, libertarianism and, like, the actual ideals of individualism and sovereignty and everything like that. And at the same time, I'm like, the action arm of, you know, the war machine. And so that was, like, a really weird time, but I. I enjoyed the people. Like, it's because it was like, on the special operations side of the things, there was a screening process to get into that program. And so it wasn't like your run of the mill, like, military folks, right? There was still, like, you had to be. You had to be good to get into it. And then that kind of bled into, like, it was a lot of people that were, like, down to just get shit done, like, put their heads down, do the work. Motivated. Now, were we misguided, as all people in the DoD were, for, like, what we were doing with this, like, counterterrorism stuff? Like, yes, definitely. But I enjoyed the people that I worked with, and one of my. One of the roles that we trained to and stuff was, like, to make everybody aware so that we could all be safe. Right now there's obviously the offensive side of that, which was ideally, I'd never had. I've never been shot at. I'd never been blown up. The closest was mortars landing in Afghanistan on the same base that I was on, which is pretty jarring. You feel a concussive blast of it depending on how close it is. Uh, but was very fortunate. I. I'm lucky that I never saw, like, actual combat where I'm, like, taking rounds and sending rounds back and everything like that. Um, but all around, like, I would have stayed in if the Navy was actually good at maintaining talent and retention. I tried to go into, like, the cyber field. Right. And, like, I even, like, took this test and, like, pass the test. And the Navy was like, no, we need you to be a Chinese linguist. We'll send you back to the fleet and, like, the regular Navy, and you're going to do all this other not fun stuff. And. And I was like, yeah, no, fuck that. I'll just get a job out and about and left and so landed at Microsoft.
- [14:00]
B
Was that a common thing amongst your peers as well, where it's like, they wanted to be able to move into a different area and then ended up going into the private sector just because, like, things were mismanaged? Was that a fairly common occurrence?
- [14:12]
A
Yeah, it happened. I mean, I got out. So, like, 11 years, you know, 20 years is like the pension point where you get a retirement paycheck for the rest of your life, period. Um, so a lot of guys, once they hit that point, they were like, well, I might as well just do the final, like, nine years and, like, collect the pension or whatever and, like, take easy jobs if you wanted. Staying within the community I was in was also very ideal. Like, I was kind of, like, verbally slotted to go into, like, an R and D at, like, a higher headquarters to do, like, really cool R and D tech work. Now I find myself doing cool R and D tech work, like open source. So I'm still scratching that itch. So, I mean, all things considered, you know, it was a cool job and I enjoyed my time. I don't regret it by any means, because you only know what you know up until a certain point. But I'm. I'm very glad that I got out when I did, which was the end of 2019, right before the world went to shit. And I'm glad that I got this, like, new perspective of the world on, like, what it actually means to have freedom and liberty and, like, democracy is this, like, bullshit idea, right? Like, by the end of it, I was like, yeah, I'm done. Completely done with this. Right? The Navy was not, like, giving me what I wanted. It was arguably a good deal, in my opinion, because, like, hey, I want to go do this other thing that you guys also need people for. But because of the big bureaucracy and, like, numbers and it's all. You're just a number, right? You're a cog in the machine. They're like, well, we don't have enough cogs right here and you need to stay right there and we're not going to take you and move your cog over to this other place because it's actually Doing okay. So I said all right, fuck it, I'm out.
- [15:45]
B
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- [18:25]
A
Well, thank you. I mean, the bitcoin veterans, I mean, the tagline that I like to phrase it as is like, we're educating the warrior class on bitcoin, right? Because a lot of the dudes that I served with and that I know and all the bitcoin veterans, for the most part, once you figure out bitcoin, once you figure out there's this tool, right? And we. We know how to use tools, right? It's. It's. We know how to get things done, organize, like, execute all these. All these different tasks. And it's also one of the things you learn in the military because you have to break down to, like, the lowest common denominator. You learn how to, like, convey messaging, right? So one of the things I had to do a lot was convey, like, technical details in a very, like, understandable way. But that's common across the board, especially those guys that served for a long time. And so you get people that are motivated that know how to actually, like, execute and have, like, discipline. And a lot of guys fall lax to the discipline part, but they know how to do it when they need it. And so, I mean, it was. It's crazy how big this bitcoin veterans group has grown since it started. It started as, like, a Twitter group chat and, like, Twitter spaces and stuff like that. They're still running, like a Twitter daily spaces or whatever. But we have a bunch of signal group chats of nothing but veterans across the United States. And some, like, some of them are foreign. Like, there's a dude from, like, Australia in there, but they're all just actively engaged in, like, meetups or whatever. Like, they're doing things with bitcoin. And even if it is just like, hodling and being the best plumber that they can be, like, they're still doing the thing. And once you realize you have a tool to spread these actual ideals of, like, individualism and liberty and you don't have to hurt anyone, that is, like, immensely. Because one of the things you get signed up for Is like, oh, we're gonna go defend the homeland, right? Like we gotta make sure that we take it over there so they don't come back over here. It's like, no, no, we don't need that anymore. In fact, we subvert this whole apparatus by opting out into Bitcoin, taking whatever productive capacity we bring to society and putting it into this money that you can't fuck with and can't be co opted by the state. And used to nefarious means, right? The, the analogy is like back in World War II or I think it was pre World War II, it's like you had to do war bonds to go fund it. So like if the people were psyoped into funding the war, then they were s into funding the war and that's fine. But if they weren't, you couldn't just print money ad nauseam. And, and then the guys that can get over the hurdle of one, understanding Bitcoin because it's not everybody's going to get it. But then two, coming to grips that like all the, all the forever wars that we fought in like Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and all this shit that we ended up doing was all blood money, like just absolute. And that's like a hard cognitive dissonance to like deal with. And you see, I mean one of the facts, you know, veteran suicide is like 22 a day or whatever is like the average number or something like that. That's because guys, they get out, they don't know how to identify as anything. They don't know what they're supposed to be doing with their lives. And then potentially especially the forever war veterans, they get out and they realize that like they did a lot of horrible shit and they don't know how to cope with that. And there's no way for them to like channel this piss and vigor inside of them for a better cause. I mean, it's not everybody, right? But like you see the demographic of veterans in the United States that are rough family lives, multiple divorces, like I know, unfortunately, I know way too many dudes that I served with that were on like second or third marriages by the time they retired. And it's because the military would just chew you up and spit you out. You have this like adamant loyalty to your brothers in arms, right? Which is good. Like you want that in a military unit, but it comes at a cost. And that cost doesn't need to be paid necessarily. And we can still accomplish the same goals of like protecting people. And what I my personal like philosophy Is like, okay, well, I'm going to take this and bring it local. Like the. The local community, the local bitcoin media. I started it, like, three years ago. It's got a consistent group of dudes. And now I'm just going to be like the local bitcoiner. And I will be public. You know, I'll wear this hat out and about. Like, some people want to, you know, worry about OPSEC and everything, and it's a legitimate threat. But small businesses in the area, my kids, soccer teams, you know, I volunteered at high schools, all these different things. There's other ways of, like, plugging community. And then, like, you just drop bitcoin casually. You don't press it, and it's like, they know you're the bitcoin guy. So, like, when I show up to, like, a small business meetup, like, oh, hey, Gary. It's like, blah, blah. Like, sometimes they're like, hey, it's doing pretty well. And you get sometimes texts from people like, hey, man, that bitcoin thing I bought a little bit. And so thank you very much. But I'm just waiting for them all to catch on. And I think veterans, specifically, because they're so good at, like, the organization and the execution and being like, it's almost like an unassailable position being a veteran in the US like, not a lot of people want to go hard against veterans, right? Like, the general population has this positive perspective of veterans, and I think that's for good reason, because like you said earlier, we all signed up for a. To. To defend our country, right? To. To do. To be in service of our fellow man. You know, some people join because they have no other choice. Like, they're going to go to jail or they got finances or whatever. But, like, a lot of people, it's a voluntary force, so they're signed up to, like, do good. That's why you see a lot of people get out and, like, go into, like, local politics or, like, go in and continue to serve their community in whatever capacity they can. And I think that bitcoin veterans, one of the biggest things we can do is, like, do that at the local level, which we're doing that, right? Like, it's not just me. It's not just, like, the core cadre members. It's, like, got people down in Florida, all across the United States that are, like, plugged into their local meetup and doing the thing.
- [23:43]
B
Can you talk a little bit about, like, some of the. Because in addition to kind of like, the hyperlocal stuff, you guys also have done some very much. I mean, not in your, your, your. Your actual, you know, individual hometown, but like in disaster relief situations. Like, I think that. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because for folks that don't know, I think that was just like, that was incredible to watch that happen as the government was like just kind of fumble fucking around, just not doing anything like, which was maddening.
- [24:11]
A
So we had several guys within bitcoin veterans, some of the core contracts. So Shane Hazel, if you're familiar with him. And then another guy goes by Operation, the guy that writes our daily intelligence bulletin. So there's like a daily intel bulletin that the bitcoin veterans put out. He was there and we had just a number of other people. Hunter was there. This guy Hunter was there. But they showed up to respond to the disaster within days, I think. And the crazy thing is, so Operation Libertas, I ended up. He was like, hey, I got this meshtastic thing. And at the Nashville conference, I like brought a bunch of the nodes and was like shilling it. We did like ham radio stuff. And he's like, hey man, I want like 60 of those just for like my local community. You know, he's, he's plugged in. He understands like the advantageous like position you have when you have like off grid comms. So he happened to have 60 of these mesh tactic radios. And so as there was. And he's in East Tennessee. So as he's responding to this, we.
- [25:06]
B
Say what this is also.
- [25:07]
A
What's that?
- [25:08]
B
What the actual disaster?
- [25:09]
A
Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Western North Carolina. Yeah, Hurricane Helene. It's been over a year at this point, but several of the guys went in there in their own trucks, loaded up, you know, as many like fuel cans, generators, blankets, like all kinds of stuff, and just went down to figure out how they could plug in. What we ended up doing was linking up with this other group called Christian Rangers, which is run by some former soft guys. And they were doing the similar thing. So we ended up just kind of plugging in and like augmenting their force. But what they were doing is they were going up and down the mountains, through the hollers of western North Carolina to find people to like check in on people. And the crazy thing is like, they weren't the only group. So we plugged into just one group in one area. And when you look at the guys that were doing this, they were trained by the US government to go do this kind of shit overseas, right? Like you go to an Austere location and work with minimal resources to accomplish a task. It just so happens this task was like providing aid and support to the local populace of western North Carolina. So we were handing out like mesh tastic radios, and then we had a mesh tastic radio on a National Guard helicopter. Because we got up to the national guard, like, hey, you know, I'm, you know, so and so, and I used to serve, like, let me show you this thing. Can you throw this on your bird? And so the National Guard helicopter had a mesh tastic on it. So as it's flying over, anybody down on the holler could ping off of it and then it would broadcast out to the rest of the network. And so people were able to actually have communications before the cell phone network. They didn't need like ham radio or anything like that. And it was, I mean, it was critical. I don't know of like a definitive thing, but I'm fairly certain, like that saved lives in that area because people were able to like get the word out. But it wasn't just that. It was, you know, other veterans, other just like good old boys from the holler were like paving, like, clearing roads and taking ATVs to go and basically developing a physical network of people, right? Where it's like, hey, I'm gonna go over here and check in with these guys and then come back and report back. That's like a very, very military thing, right? It's if you don't have any communications, you just send a runner. Just literally. It used to be just like a guy that would just run, right? That's like the whole like marathon thing came from like the guy that ran the marathon to like alert about some army. Um, but it's a very well defined thing. So when you have veterans running this sort of operation on home turf, that's the other thing. Like nobody ideally is gonna be shooting at any of veterans. It'd be a bad idea anyway because we're all armed and like proficient. But they're there and like, people want you there. Which was very, very different than Afghanistan, Iraq, like, you know, not everybody wanted us there. So putting the use of skills was super cool. And I didn't personally go down myself. I was definitely on some back end chats, coordinating with everybody. Um, but incredible. I mean, I got the photo updates and stuff. And like the other kind of contrast to like government support is like you had FEMA workers taking up hotels. It's like our dudes were sleeping in the back of their truck or sleeping in like a half built Condo that some guy owned that he was like, yeah, just like, go crash in here. So in sleeping bags, sleeping on the floor. And then making these runs, like relaying messages back like, hey, they need wheat or hay for like the animals. They need fuel. And just gathering intel, right? Which is what we're trained to do and making that intel useful, making that intel like actionable. So it was incredible. I mean we didn't have a lot of people. It was really the people of the area that helped themselves a lot. But there's one guy that we linked up who was like a former ranger and he ended up running this 50,000 square foot warehouse and we ended up funding him through bitcoin, right? So we raised over a bitcoin fundraising for the relief efforts. And we probably spent a fraction of it, maybe like 30k worth, right, because we had to do it all dollar denominated. But. And then when the price bump is like, hey, we still had resources left over to continue this bitcoin veterans thing. So that, that was humbling to be part of and just incredible to watch like running because you, you run exercises stateside when you're in where you're going to like cities or like remote training centers and like running these exercises. But this was like a no shit real world operation where we could put all these skills we had developed to use for the betterment of a community, for, for the betterment of this western North Carolina. And then specifically bitcoin was able to like supercharge this by, by funding the resources. Like all these generators and clothes and blankets and everything that we bought was all enabled because we had bitcoin. And then we got the guy set up with like a hardware wallet and he's running like a 50,000 square foot logistics hub out of this disaster zone. And he just kind of took it and run. It was kind of like we went in, set them up, taught them about how to like operate without the assistance from the government because there was none. And then, you know, you kind of pull back and then check in every once in a while and there's more to come on that we, we actually made contact with a reporter down there that we've been in touch with. So. So stay tuned to bitcoin veterans. Like we have more to come from that story because it's not done right. Like it doesn't. You don't just like show up for a couple weeks and like, hey, we're helping and then like leave. You have to check back in. You have to like make sure that the, the self Sustainment is established, and I think they're at that point. But there's like, way more to that story to be told. Aside from just like the small bitcoin veterans part.
- [30:19]
B
Yeah. I mean, if. If you guys just, like, showed up for a little while and then like, made yourselves known, then left, you'd just be the government. Right, Exactly.
- [30:25]
A
Yeah.
- [30:26]
B
But you'd have to show up really late as well and overspend on it an ungodly amount and then funnel a good portion of that spending into, you know, NGOs, you know, and various various nonprofit organizations that are.
- [30:39]
A
There are some of those that showed.
- [30:40]
B
Up, administrative support, you know, and it's like, like, that's the crazy thing. It's like I feel like anytime something like this happens, it's like, you see. You see that the average person or the above average person or the average Gary, like, people step up and help their fellow man, they help their fellow citizen. And the government, like, is always too slow to respond, always provides ineffective and inefficient support, and then really doesn't actually do anything on a lasting level. Like, there isn't, you know, it's like, well, we did our job and we filed our report and now, now that's all done and say. Because there's ultimately like, no.
- [31:20]
A
Like, there's no accountability.
- [31:22]
B
Yeah. No real accountability. Which is just, like, insane because they're actually the ones that should be accountable. Like the. The average citizen or the, you know, the. The veteran isn't actually accountable to anyone.
- [31:35]
A
There's.
- [31:36]
B
There's no one forcing you to do that there. You're just doing it because you want to do it. The government is accountable to actually all of its citizens. And like, because it's our taxpayer dollars and the money printed out of thin air that funds all of that. And it just like, it just blows your mind. And it makes you realize, you know, for the people, it's like, oh, you know, well. Well, who's going to, you know, who's going to build the roads without the government? It's like, well, the government's not building, like, the roads, you know. Yeah.
- [31:59]
A
And other people built the roads. Like they took their own equipment and went and leveled where there used to be a road, leveled it out so that way even a Tesla could just drive through it. You don't need a four by four. It's pretty crazy. I mean, on the bitcoin veterans thing, another thing I'll say is in November, we're running a bitcoin veterans summit at the park in Nashville. So Bitcoin park in Nashville, November 10th and 11th. We're going to do a two day event. The first day is going to be like speakers and panels. Your, your standard small SC sort of like conference sort of thing. But the cool thing is if you've never been to the park, there's two buildings. So we'll have the speakers and the panels and stuff in one building and then the other building is going to be solely dedicated to just hands on workshops. So like if you've never handled a gun before, you can come to the conference and like we'll have one for you. And in fact it's useful because day two is a range day. So range day and other stuff, it's immediately prior to Nostreville. But yeah, we're going to do another range day. We did a range day back in Nashville last year for the conference. Huge success. And, and so come learn like shoot guns, come discuss. Hear more about bitcoin veterans in this like two day thing at Bitcoin Park. I think it's Bitcoin veterans.org summit. 2025 is like the website and we're actually looking for speakers. So if you're like a veteran listening to this and you're like, oh, that sounds super cool. If you have something to showcase that's related somehow to bitcoin or any of the topics that veterans cover, which is like basically everything, like we have like a Tesla owner's veterans chat or like a pilot's chat, right. And you don't have to be a bitcoin veteran to be in these chats. We won't put you in like the regional chats. Those are veterans only. But if you want to learn about like mining, if you want to learn about privacy or self custody, if you want to learn about business and entrepreneurial ship or just like discuss these topics and you're a bitcoiner, it'll be led and moderated by bitcoin veterans, but it's not exclusive to us. So it's, it's just wild to see like my phone is constantly, like I have to constantly just like read all messages in some of these chats because if you ignore it for too long, it just builds up. Like half the guys can't keep up with half the chats. But if there's a topic that you're into, right, like the mining chat is very, very active. And I think that's parallels very well with again the veteran skill set of like beans, bullets and band aids is kind of like what you learn. That's the same Thing that goes into mining operations, right. You got like machines, electrical equipment. There's a lot of like blue collar skills that veterans have that makes it very directly applicable to the mining industry, which is fantastic.
- [34:16]
B
You want to talk about mining a little bit maybe? Because one of the, one of the things we did have on our, on our docket was, was. Was getting into that a little bit. You want? Yeah. Where's a good place to start with that? Let's we can say like I work.
- [34:28]
A
On mining full time.
- [34:29]
B
Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I'm.
- [34:30]
A
I'm. I'm a software engineer and I work on a big mining operation, we'll say. And I specifically work on the pool side of things. So I've been pretty involved, not pretty involved, lightly involved with Stratum B2 project. But I am actively building a Stratum B2 pool right now. And that is been awesome. But just the mining itself, you don't realize. I started just over a year ago and I had no idea what I was getting into because it's a whole nother rabbit hole of bitcoin. Like there's all these rabbit holes in bitcoin. And I was like, oh, I went down all. I got sick of the macro stuff and everything like that. I'm like, okay, cool. I got. It's going up forever. Laura. Check. But once I was. I got this opportunity to go work in mining doing software engineering, I was like, okay, yeah, sure. And now I'm like in talks about like power generation and like load balancing and like trying to learn the nitty gritty of like what are these data pieces that like what is the pool doing? What does a mining pool do? And that was all something that I had no idea. And when you look at the size and the scale of it, there was some statistic like Tyler Stevens, who's a guy that does mining heat reuse, he wrote a whole book on it and he made the assertion there like if you took all the energy that goes into comfort heating, right? So like heating for homes or water or whatever, like comfort heating. If you took, I think it was like 1% of that and converted that energy to bitcoin mining, we would bet three zeta hash that is like three times the current network hash rate. And so when you kind of couple that with this idea that you can heat your house with a bitcoin miner, you can heat water. If you, if you never check it out, there's a guy called, he goes by Schnitzel, he has like a hot tub that he heats and it's a hot tub. Like it's, it's legitimately the temperature hot tub should be, but it's like 2s 19s heating the thing. And so that sort of stuff, it was just mind blowing. Like it was, you kind of know about this mining stuff, but you never really know the full depth of it. There's all like, you have to work. The easiest thing most people bitcoiners understand, I think is like the 51% attack, right? So it's like 51% of the hash rate. If it's malicious, they can kind of like have an opportunity to reorg the block. But there's like block withholding attacks, there's like hash rate hijacking. There's all these different aspects on the technical side of Bitcoin where if you're sending your hash rate like clear text over the Internet, somebody can just intercept that and redirect it or inject themselves into the middle of that, right? So there's a whole bunch of considerations and that's one of the reasons why I started digging into the research on Stratum 2 is because it's a net better protocol. There's this thing, Stratum B1, it doesn't even have a specification at all. But Stratum 2 defines a very well specced out protocol for like how you do this mining thing. But then it brings like a bunch of other things like end to end encryption, right? So you know, no longer have like this snooping person that can steal your hash rate. It has like authentication, right? So you give it the server's pub key and that way your devices, if it's not the same pub key, it knows it's not talking to the right server, right? So even those two things alone with Stratum V2 is objectively a better protocol than anything else you're going to do with shredding v1. And then you get into the whole like block template creation if you haven't been following like the whole ocean thing. So they created this thing called Datum. Super smart guy Jason Hughes wrote the whole thing in like C programming language and it's like super hyper optimized and like can run off of 1 bar of cellular 2G Internet. And it was solving a lot of the same problems that Shreddom B2 addresses. But it was like he just did it in like six months because he had no, it's still shredding B1 and he had like no like barriers where shredding B2 it's actually three protocols. So there's like the protocol itself. And then you have the mining protocol, which is like the machines to the pool. And then you have something called the template distribution protocol, which is like how to talk to the node. And those are pretty well defined. But then the thing they've added on is this thing called job declaration, which is like, if I want to create my own template to mine on, I need to negotiate with the pool. So that way payouts are correct and like there's like a negotiation that happens. So it's actually these three different protocols that, that are all crammed into one, which is like this huge space of understanding and engineering that you kind of have like wrap your head around. And then, you know, there's mining all the. The fact that mining pursues the cheapest energy available pushes it to the edges and then it also pushes it to very like energy dense locations. So nuclear, right? Or nuclear whatever, however you want to pronounce that. That's big in mining, right? Coupling it with AI, you have this spiky AI load or you need like massive energy for like training a new model. What do you do with that energy when you're not training the next newest model? Well, you could be buying mining bitcoin with it or just in general data centers with like spiky load, right? There's a, a balance to the grid where you have to like keep it at this like exact frequency, otherwise things blow up and people potentially die. And so the engineering that goes into these like critical electrical systems and the coupling that with bitcoin mining has been fascinating to say the least. Because it's like this battery that just prints money for you. It's somewhere you can send the energy and use it for a different purpose and then just like scale it down when you need the energy back.
- [39:43]
B
I feel like people just like the average person, like the average person, one doesn't understand bitcoin, right. The average person also really doesn't understand energy and how like, you know, and they think, well, well if I, you know, if I plug something into the, into the wall, well that's just electricity, nice clean electricity. Like they don't even know like where. Like, like they haven't even thought about it further than like at the wall where I plug stuff in or you know, like people plug like, well I'm, I'm, you know, I'm charging my, my Tesla. So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm saving the planet here. And it's like where is the energy coming from? Where, where is it? You think? It just appears there and then like the load balancing side, that was something I actually like did not understand until bitcoin and started going down that. And that's just like fascinating. So it's like, look, it's. It's not just like, you can't just either have a, have a. Like, if you have a ton of energy, like, that's great. You've got all this excess like solar and wind, you know, at certain times of the day because it's intermittent. But then like, what do you do with that if you don't? You like, you have to use it or you have to just run it into the ground and waste it, which is like, what. Like, you're like. I mean, famously like the UK is spending something like over a billion dollars a year on curtailment right now because they overproduce at certain times. And it's just insane. Insane. And people just don't get. And then you have this like this solution that's sitting right there that's like, well, you should just like print bitcoin with it. Like not out of thin air, like out of energy. And we're still like, that's. We're just, we're so very early on so many parts of this because people haven't even begun to realize there is this like, solution that fixes so many of these problems and it happens to also, like, it's also the hardest money that's ever been discovered. Like, it's just like one, one, two punch. Like it's, it's perfect. The.
- [41:25]
A
The cool thing. So if you're not familiar with sort of like energy infrastructure stuff, there's a book called One Second After. Highly recommend it. It basically sets the premise. Like, you find out eventually it's been out for a while, so there's no spoiler alerts, but EMP detonates in the atmosphere above the eastern seaboard and wipes out all modern electronics. And then it's a fictional story set in the. In the foothills of Asheville, North Carolina, where there's no electricity, right? All modern cars are gone. All like modern everything. So like the dude, the main character, like, there's some like, old carbureted Chevy that they have. So, like they happen to have a car. But you know, his daughter's like type one diabetic. Well, they can't keep insulin cold, right? So like the medication runs out within a couple of weeks. Logistics hub. Run out within a couple of days. Like, grocery stores don't have more than like a few days worth of food at a time. And if trucks are not bringing your food to you, then you have nothing unless you're growing it yourself. So it's a really good fictional story. It was written back in 2001, I think. Like, the guy wrote it to try to highlight the fragility of our electrical infrastructure and infrastructure in general in the United states. Well then 9, 11 happened, right. And like, everybody was like, oh, terrorism, Right. So like, it didn't gain the traction that he wanted because there was this other new shiny thing to go print money and do. And now, you know, I think it's not surprising to anybody that the infrastructure in the United States is like really old and decrepit. But ideally, bitcoin mining helps kind of revitalize that and like, pay for the rebuilding of the infrastructure.
- [42:55]
B
I think that's one of the most promising things when you look at like what bitcoin mining enables. And it's, you know, not just the, like, rebuilding of existing infrastructure to modernize it or to build out the grid and more, you know, remote areas, but it's also like in areas like not just in the US but around the world where it's like they don't, like, there is no infrastructure to rebuild because they've never had it. Yep, it's. It's actually something where you can, you can now make that economical to do instead of relying on, you know, various NGOs again and different grants and things like that that are, you know, you're dependent on somebody else and there's a lot of money being, you know, slipped into people's pockets behind the scenes. It's like you can just mine bitcoin and actually fund the build out of that infrastructure in a really sustainable way. And I think that that's just super powerful. One of the things I'd like to kind of circle back on a little bit with the stratum v2 as it relates to the template creation and whatnot is just your thoughts on kind of mining pool centralization broadly, like how you view this. This is obviously the miners that I talk to. And from what I've looked at, it's like, it's kind of like, should be a top concern for folks.
- [44:05]
A
Yeah. So it's interesting enough like stratum B2 has nothing to do with mining decentralization datum as well. Right. Like, the block template creation is not really where you're going to get the centralization, like stick it stake into the heart of it. It's the accounting. Right. So you have the various different payout mechanisms for basically the pool will Price your hash rate based on whatever accounting mechanism they want, right? And it's all in the terms of services. If you're mining to like one of these big publicly traded pools and stuff like that, even ocean, right, you can go read their tides documentation and understand exactly how they're going to pay you out. But my assertion, my belief is it's not really that. It is this thing called FPPs which is full pay per share, meaning we're going to give you a set amount for every mining share you submit to me. And if you're not familiar with the mining share is it's like your asic, your mining device found an almost block. Like it's a block that is good enough, but it's not good enough for the bitcoin network. But it's enough to demonstrate to me as a mining pool that you are doing this work, right? You're doing all these hashes constantly, over and over. And so it gives into this thing called a poison distribution and this like statistical thing where it's like if you can provide me X number of shares within a given window of time, I know that you have Y amount of hash rate. And so I can kind of pay you out for that as long as you're mining to my pool. So what you see is like these big mining operations, they have month to month electricity costs, right? They have to pay bills every month. And so if your operation is not big enough to win a block, then you're not going to get paid and you, you go bankrupt, right? And so this FPPs thing where it's like, hey, we're going to pay you no matter what, just send us your hash rate. What it means is one, you're not pricing your hash rate, the pool is pricing your hash rate for you. And then two, they're kind of like subsidizing you, right? They're saying, hey, we're going to pay you no matter what. And then there's definitely, you know, margins factored in there because the pool wants to make money. So we' put some margin in there and take a cut off the top. And what that's led to is like this giant centralization because you need massive bags of Bitcoin to kind of float the luck variance. And the luck variance is, hey, I have X amount of hash rate, I'm expected to win Y amount of blocks per day. And it's either going to be less. Like reality is, it's going to be either less or more of that. And so if it's less of that and you're just getting explicitly paid out in those blocks and you don't have enough hash rate to win a lot of blocks, you go bankrupt. If it's more than that, like that's great, you win. But what these FVPs schemas do is they pay consistently to the miners. So the mining operations love it because they know exactly how much hash rate they can give and exactly how much hash rate, you know, how much, how many bitcoin they're going to get back out of that hash rate or dollars really. Right. Because a lot of the mining operations might not necessarily be bitcoiners per se. They're just like, hey, I've got cheap energy, I'm just going to plug in a bunch of asics. And so they're just mining and they don't care about like the centralization factors. This is actually leads into another topic I wanted to discuss was this thing called ehash, which sounds a lot. You asked me earlier, like, are you sure? Did you mean ecash? And I was like, yes, but no.
- [47:07]
B
Yeah. So what is this?
- [47:08]
A
Yeah, so ehash is something I've been working on with this guy named, he goes by VNPRC on Nostr and he's done a lot of the heavy dev work on it. But the concept is these shares that you're, you're mining up to the pool, you issue a cashew token or a cash token for each one of those shares. And so what that means is as you're mining to me as like the hash pool, I'm issuing you blinded tokens. Right. I'm issuing these ecash pieces and you're accumulating those, they have no value. Right. They're speculative in nature at this point. But because it's ecash and there's like a break of linkage between me knowing you as like a miner. I know that like I'm issuing these to you and I know how many I'm issuing to you. But when you go give them to somebody else and they bring them back to me, I don't know that it came from you originally. Right. And that's like a basic principle of ecash in general. But when you apply this to mining now you don't have accounts for a mining pool. You can simply say, hey, this share is valid, let me give you an ecash token for it. And you don't need an account with me necessarily. I don't care who you are. Right. I just know that you're giving me valid proof of work that shows that you're hashing to my pool, to my coinbase or whatever it is. And so you can go on a secondary market, you don't have to come to me necessarily, but you can go sell these ehash tokens for whatever rate that you want. And up until there's a block one or a reward paid out, it's a speculation, right? You have no idea what it's going to. You can guess based on hash rate and everything like that. So you get your like local OG to come float your bags if you have a mining operation that you know is unlucky or something like that, and they can just buy these from you up until the point of a payout, right, and keep the operation going. The other cool thing about it is because it's ecash, it's integrated with nostr and so like anybody anywhere can buy these. And now you get to decide what your hash rate is. You can hold onto them, right? And then when the mining pool gets paid out, now there's a definitive point in time where I have all of these ehash shares outstanding and then I earned this many sats for my mining payout and you just do a very basic function or however you want to account for it. But now you can know the definitive value of one eHash that you've issued. So speculation up until a reward is found, right? And maybe that's a payout via ocean over Bolt 12 lightning, or maybe it's an on chain payment, but either way that payment comes into the E cash mint. And now if it's lightning, you have like inbound liquidity coming in over lightning that you can go redeem your E hash for actual sats on lightning outbound. And it's like a balanced channel, right? Because lightning you have to like balance these channels. So that's the whole premise of this thing called ehash. It's just ecash tokens for mining shares and it just sets up a new market dynamic that I think lowers the threshold of economic viability for mining operation. You don't have to go find some huge bag of bitcoin to make sure that your month electricity bill is cost. If you're mining with ecash, you can kind of have a marketplace of these E cash ehash shares that can be traded about or you can hold on to it. And then like when a payout happens, you go to the mint and say, hey, give me real sats and then the payout happens and you're already like the trust assumption, you're already trusting a mining pool anyway, right? You're trusting that Ocean's going to pay you out. You're trusting that foundry or ant pool or whatever, these brains pool, you're trusting that they're going to pay you out up until a point. So there's no like, net new trust assumption. But you get this added benefits of ecash privacy and this added benefit of, like, I don't need to know your account, right? I can just issue these ecash shares and as long as you bring them back to me, or whoever brings them back to me, it's a valid signature that I can check with cryptographic irrefutability. Like, we're good. Like, I don't care who you are now, you still have like the metadata of, like, I'll see your IP address and I'll see like the amount of hash rate you have and all this other stuff. But that's already the current paradigm. So if we can introduce this. And this is the same sort of argument from the ecash side of things where it's, hey, we're going to still have custodians. Like, they're not going away. In fact, they're increasing. So why would we not want every custodian to be an ecash mint? So that way, even if you, if you're going to rug me, right? Like, any of the exchanges I use can rug me at any minute for whatever sats that I have that I leave on there, and it's my fault. Same thing with a cache mit any sats that I leave in a cache mit it can rug at any point. The difference being, you know, my exchange of choice, river, could rug just me. They could be like, yeah, Gary, like, you're a bad guy now. Like, I'm removing all of your account and everything like that with an ecache mint. It's like all or nothing. I either rug everyone or I rug no one. Because there's this. I can't determine which ones I, you know, like, the ecash you have when you bring it back to me, I don't know where it originated from. I don't know that, like, it was a bad E cash or anything like that. So it's just like a net benefit improvement. And now we're applying it to mining specifically for the shares.
- [51:57]
B
I think that's. That's super fascinating. And like, I think the ecash stuff like, shout out to Cali for. For Cashew. Because, like, there's just been so much incredible development on that. Like, just in like the. He was on the show, like, maybe like a little over a year ago, almost a year and a half ago. And just like since then it's been wild and now you're bringing this other paradigm and it's one of those things where like it again. Yes. You acknowledge it up front as Cali always does. Like, look, yes, you can be like rugged by this, but they have to rug everybody.
- [52:27]
A
It's the best shitcoin.
- [52:29]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Like it's. It. Yes. There is a trade off. It's not layer one bitcoin. Correct. Like now that we've got that out of the way, it serves a really important purpose which is having near perfect privacy, which we obviously like, oh my God, all this. It's like there's always a new data breach.
- [52:48]
A
Right?
- [52:48]
B
Like this. What was this app? Did you see this about T or something? The app where women could like.
- [52:53]
A
Oh yeah, leaked all their driver's licenses and information.
- [52:56]
B
It turns out shockingly that the company that was running this did not in fact delete the selfies and the driver's license photos that they took. Who could have guessed, like the company actually lied about that. And now all of that's out there now. They just. I just saw before we got on here, like private, you know, private messages also leaked throughout this and it's like. But this happens at every. Like this isn't just like with stupid, you know, rating men apps. Like this happens with everything. This happens with exchanges, this happens with bank account. This happens at every level of our interaction with the financial system where there is KYC AML shit in place. And it's just like you don't. Wherever we can remove that we should. And like that seems to be what this is doing here at a really important level. Which is at the mining level, right?
- [53:41]
A
Yeah. Yep. It's. It's giving you an opportunity to have private accountless mining rewards. And that's not something that exists right now. I mean it exists because like so VMPRC did. Did all the code heavy lifting. He did a BTC back in May, I think. He did a presentation on like the accounting piece of it. Like FPPs, PPLNs, all these like acronyms of how many mining payouts happen. That was right before my live demonstration of a proof of concept where I like mined ehash and then talked about the technical specifics. And then at the end of it I went in and like copied the cashew token out of the mining log and went to a web wallet that I just slightly modified to say like, hey, you have this new currency called hash. And I redeemed an ehash token in like a web Wallet it's like one of the most. I can't. It's like nut stash or something like that. But one of the commonly used web wallets and it worked like. And there's a video on YouTube you can go watch of it. And so we're at the point BNPC is. Is luckily funded to a degree to like continue work on this kind of stuff. But the mining, technical mining ecosystem I think is going to see a huge renaissance with the advent of the Bitax was huge. Right. To break open this open source hardware aspect get unique and novel form factors for bitcoin mining because the shoebox size of these bitcoin miners don't fit all applications. We need smaller scale, more modular and everything like that. You get that. You get Stratum V2 which is a robust, very modular way of doing mining and then you couple it with these novel accounting things called ehash and things are going to rip baby. It's going to be awesome.
- [55:23]
B
I think that's so cool. You were nice enough to sell me a bit axe for sats when we were together which was great. Just a nice little P2P transaction and I still actually have to set mine up. It's sitting shame on your. After this. You know what I'm going to. This is going to be a tonight project for me. I think now that I've seen you I've got to be held accountable. But like I. I love all of these things that are really, you know. And we were talking about democracy earlier but for lack of a better word, democratizing. There we go.
- [55:56]
A
That bad boy bit X gamma 602, it's the same chip that's in an S21 right. So you get the same like efficiency but it's one chip. Now they're making boards that look like. You ever do like a gaming card in your PC?
- [56:09]
B
Yeah.
- [56:09]
A
So we are going to have like a PCIe card that like just goes into your computer and it's like a hundred or so watts with a bunch of these chip like 12 of these chips on it that you can just plug into your computer and mine from your computer which by the way might be running a bitcoin node. Right. So like or can do whatever you want to do with it. You can have it running your thermostat or any of these things. The 256 foundation, if you never talked to those guys that's they'd be a good one to chat with. They're the ones pushing. I think their mission statement is to like dismantle the proprietary bitcoin mining empire, which is pretty admirable and thing that I can get down with.
- [56:46]
B
Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a great mission statement right there.
- [56:50]
A
Yeah.
- [56:50]
B
And I mean so that's the thing like obviously we're seeing there is a trend toward centralization. Like with these like if you look at the pool distribution, right, it's like, it's a little bit, it's a little bit scary. But at the same time we do have. There's all this, this kind of grassroots bottom up counter movement that is like enabling plebs to be able to mine at whatever skill. Whether it's you know, you know, just plugging in one bit axe and like you know, doing, doing your small part or anything in between there. Like that gives me a lot of hope because it's like this is still like early days of some of these. Much more like one economical because not everybody has the cash to shell out, you know, for you know, brand new, you know, top of the line mining rig.
- [57:34]
A
Right.
- [57:34]
B
And on the other hand it's just like, it's like, it's a fun thing where people actually have the ability to participate in the bitcoin network in a way that they maybe previously didn't have exposure to. And I feel like the more people that do that, that just gets more people psyched about like the actual like getting down into the nitty gritty ethos of like why the fuck we're here doing this in the first place, right? Like, like because again you, like you. We are trying to get away from centralization. Some centralization is always gonna like many systems will trend toward that. Like that's somewhat natural from like a, you know, an efficient economic perspective. Like I get why these pools suck in a lot of capital. Like it makes sense.
- [58:13]
A
It's efficient.
- [58:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like and it makes it a lot easier for you when you're just direct, you know, okay, point my hash rate at the pool, good to go. But like on the other hand it's like we should do everything we can to, to have that bottom up movement that is trying to separate or to, to add in as many new sources of hash power as possible no matter how small, right? Like every, you know, every bit Axe matters.
- [58:36]
A
It's crazy because I've met, you know, now being in mining, I had to go to some of these like mining specific events and I met a guy that has like multiple like old like army like generators. Like they're not generators but like I can't remember the name for it, but like they're bigger, right? It's like lots of power that you fuel this thing with and bought it for, you know, pennies on the dollar sort of thing off of like Facebook marketplace and then took it to his like Flare Gas site and plugged it in and is hashing with it. Right. And it's not a small amount of hash, right? It's, it's several actual, you know, full fledged S19s are better and it's cheap power. So he's doing pretty well because he's printing bitcoin with his bitcoin miners and he can mine to anywhere in the world, right. You just need a very, very minimal robust connection. Starlink works great now, but if you don't, you could do like they were doing long range WI fi out in West Texas and some of these sites where it's just like point to point. Like you point a WI fi antenna and you can get very, very like the low, the higher frequencies with radio, you can like point them and direct them and they go really, really far and you get really high data rates. You don't need super robust. You can do like long range WI fi over miles to connect your bitcoin miner up to whatever pool you want to. And like you're mining sats in the middle of nowhere. I mean, that's what they're doing in Africa, right? Like these African villages, like, oh, there's a hydro dam. Yeah, sure, we'll just come bring bitcoin miners and we'll pay to like establish electrical infrastructure so you can have lights so your kids can learn how to read and like refrigeration so you can have like fresh food and stuff like that that these people have never had before in their lives. And the people doing it is like, yeah, I'm, I'm making money off of this, but like I'm making money by doing a good thing, right? Bringing electricity to a village in the middle of Africa is a noble thing to do, I believe.
- [60:20]
B
I agree. And like, Gladstein's coverage of a lot of that has been awesome. I think that's like what's helped bring it into kind of somewhat more of the mainstream eye. Even though again, like vast majority of people still just have no idea what's, what's going on with anything related to bitcoin. Like, we are still very early, but at the same time, like, these are the kind of stories that end up getting, like, that end up getting picked up, right? Like, it's one of those Things that, like, you just can't. Like, you know, trying to, like, argue against, like, veterans or, like, it's like you're trying to argue against, like, electrifying a rural African village so that kids can, you know, be able to actually have light to see by. And, like. Like, it just, like, what are you gonna argue? How are you gonna argue against that? Or like, oh, yeah, I'm taking this flared gas, and I hooked up a generator to it, so it's no longer just burning, you know, into the atmosphere. And now I'm turning this into bitcoin. Like, what's your argument? Like, what's your argument against that? There isn't a rational argument against that. There is only, like, an irrational argument that maybe makes sense in the brains of somebody like Elizabeth Warren, but not in anybody that is actually being, you know, being honest with themselves or everybody else. And, like, I love that kind of stuff. It's like the landfill gas mining as well. Like, another type of flared mining where it's like, yes, this is awesome. Because what are you going to say against this? Like, it's just. It's good. It is a good thing, and we should have as much of it as possible. Like, great. Thank you, bitcoin miners, for your ingenuity. Like, we should be praising this kind of stuff. And I think that. I mean, obviously there's been a vibe shift in terms of the. The overall recognition of bitcoin. But back to what. Where we started with this, in terms of talking to some of the staffers in D.C. especially Democratic staffers, which is all I talk to, being from Illinois.
- [62:02]
A
Yep.
- [62:03]
B
There's still so many misperceptions out there, and people have this tendency, like, because Trump speaks positively about bitcoin, that must mean that being positive about bitcoin is a Trump thing. It's like, people, you are only hurting yourselves and your constituents when you associate bitcoin with Trump. It's. It's like, it's not his. It's everyone's. It's anyone's. You're just literally only hurting yourself. And I think. I hope more people are coming around that. But on the other hand, it's like, a lot of these people are just really, really, really old, and they just won't be in office much longer. And that's how things are going to change. And we just.
- [62:37]
A
Well, you've had a whole new influx of bitcoiners, too. That. Because Trump is like, bitcoin. I live in a pretty red area, rural, agricultural area. And so some people, when Trump was Like, bitcoin, yay. They came back and like, hey, Gary, you still doing that bitcoin thing? And I'm like, yeah, what do you want to know? They're like, oh, well, Trump's talking about. I was like, okay, I don't care. It works for me the same as it works for him. So, like, if you. If you want to learn, I will teach. You just have to, like, take the time out of your day to come and let me rant at you. I guess that's the hard part is, like, you got to find the entry point for everyone.
- [63:11]
B
Yeah, I know. I had the same experience. A couple of my really good buddies, like, had been, you know, care about the. You know, love these dudes. Like, they're. They're good friends of mine and, like, you know, smart dudes, too. Like, very smart and successful dudes, but, like, just couldn't get them to, like, really give too much of a. About bitcoin.
- [63:27]
A
Yep.
- [63:28]
B
And then it was like, Trump came out and they were like, all right, I'll get some. And I was like.
- [63:33]
A
Okay. My first meetup attendee is one of my local friends here. He showed up. Luckily, like, the only person to show up, I had slides on a projector on a wall of, like, a side room in a restaurant, and I gave my, like, 101 presentation. He still is a no coiner to my knowledge, even though I've been like, hey, whenever you want to set up your wall. He said, oh, yeah, I'll figure it out eventually. And just like, it's. But he gets everything. Like, I met him through, like, sort of, like, libertarian circles in the area. So he gets like. And the Fed, he gets the problem with all of modernity. Right. And. But has yet to, like, take it upon himself to, like, actually do the thing. And it just. I mean, at this point, I'm just like, all right, that's whatever, dude.
- [64:17]
B
Like, he still come to meetups?
- [64:19]
A
No, no, no, he came to that one and that was it. Like, yeah, doesn't go to meetups. Just kind of was like, oh, thanks for having me. Like, that's cool. But, yeah, still. Still a no coiner, as far as I know.
- [64:30]
B
People are funny, and I think sometimes it's like, a lot of people, just, especially in the usa, like, if you're doing okay, like, if you're not, if the fiat system hasn't totally beat you down yet, or at least you're not aware of how much it's beaten down your potential, you're just like, well, you know, maybe this Sounds interesting, but like I don't really need it or whatever. This, you know, this magic Internet money, I don't really need it yet.
- [64:56]
A
Yeah.
- [64:57]
B
Whereas like, if you know, depending on what part of the world you're from, like if you're from a place where they, the currency has been devalued by half, you know, overnight, multiple times in your own lifetime, like, oh yeah, you get why you might want something that you know, as an absolutely, you know, capped total supply. Or if you know, for instance, you've had your bank account shut down, you very quickly understand why censorship resistant money is a really good thing and you would want that. You don't have to explain why those things are good to people who have experienced the negative side of that equation. For people that haven't, like, you know, it's, it's a tougher sell. Like you can, even if you talk about inflation, it's like, you know. Yeah, look, look, like you know, this cabal of central bankers is literally stealing your, you know, your life's work from you. But it's like, yeah, but it's not that much.
- [65:44]
A
You know, my stock portfolio's up so.
- [65:46]
B
I've got no problems. Well, my house is, my house is worth, you know, worth more than it, more than it was because I, you know, I bought it pre Covid and now it's doubled in value. Like that's another. This is a digression. But like it's wild to like look, look at the real estate markets. Like pretty much across the board, but certain areas obviously more so than others. Like you look at the pre Covid prices for real estate and it's just like, oh my God. Like it was just like it was literally like half in many cases of, of what it, what it is now. Like the prices literally doubled in, across so many years.
- [66:17]
A
Oh, we bought into equity. We bought in 2021. This is like pre Bitcoin, right? I mean it's like we got rates through the floor. We got like a good price because we locked it in. They built a house. But like the price of the house, like the reason I get all these equity scam calls all the time is like, oh well they, they, they know that the house value went up. And I'm like, no it hasn't. Like there's a nick on the wall now it's like a brand new nice house. Like it's definitely gone down in value because we've used the out of it and, and people just don't understand.
- [66:49]
B
Is wild. It's like, and houses Are like, houses are great for living in and for raising a family in and for using. They're just really, really bad stores of value compared to bitcoin, like bitcoin. Because bitcoin doesn't get that nick in the wall. Bitcoin doesn't have the water heater blowout or whatever might happen like that. Bitcoin just perfectly exists in its state forever, whereas your house is just like, it just gets beaten up and it's. It's a liability. Right. It's costing you more money. Like it's. Unless you are putting in a ton of money to it to remodel it or to do upgrades to it to add a new addition, whatever. Like it's not getting more valuable. Like it's, you know, and. But people just. We have not been ingrained that way. And that's why a house that's, you know, 30, 40 years old, that is, you know, not had anything done to it and has just kind of degraded and deteriorated little by little. It's worth, you know, 10, 15 times as much as it was when it was built. And it's just like. But we're like, people just aren't ready for that yet. And I think, like, people. It's going to be actually really messy when people really start realizing, like four years from now, like, oh, wait, this whole bitcoin thing, like, it really is repricing my house. Like, hold on, Bitcoin was worth how much now and my house is worth this? Like, the math is going to break people's brains. Like it should already, if you've looked at the math.
- [68:11]
A
Yep.
- [68:12]
B
But again, we're still so early.
- [68:15]
A
Well, the, the. It's like the medium home prices now. What was it? It was. Oh, one Bitcoin is like 0.28 of a median home. It's one of the things. So the bitcoin veterans dib the Daily Intelligence Bulletin. One of the prices he puts in there, he's like ounces of gold, obviously, the fiat price. But then like, how much of a median home can you buy with one bitcoin? And that's cool to watch out because that number is like going up because eventually a median home in the US Is going to be one bitcoin. With one bitcoin, you will be able to buy a house, which is ridiculous to think of, especially where like, I'm always flabbergasted when I sit back and reflect on just like the historical and like the convergence of all the things like understanding sort of like economics, Austrian economics and everything. Like that right. Having a job in, like, engineering, having read, like, rich dad, poor dad, understanding that, like, real estate is not an asset sort of thing was like, that framing gave it to me being very tuned into budgeting. And then, like, I hit this bitcoin thing, and it was like, this perfect convergence of, like, all of these things in my past that I went hard and fast down the rabbit hole. This is like, end of 21, early 22, and, like, all throughout the bear, I'm just like a rabid bitcoiner, like, telling. And they're like, it's going down. What are you talking about? I was like, no, but you don't understand.
- [69:31]
B
You know, part of me wishes, like, as we're. As, you know, we're pumping around. I know bitcoin's boring right now because it's only at, like, you know, 118,000 or something. And the memories of goldfish, apparently. But, like, part of me, like, yeah, it's a number go up is fun, but boy, number go down is really fun too, because it means you can actually stack cheap sats while everyone else is freaking out.
- [69:52]
A
So I just paid this.
- [69:54]
B
I wouldn't mind 58k gang again is all I'm saying. Throwing it out there, it'd be painful.
- [69:58]
A
But, like, there might be a problem for my marriage because I would, like, liquidate everything, and my wife's not cool with that yet. So, you know, it might be a problem, but I would take it on. The number go down, though. The number goes down that, like, the dollar number go down. That's not important. Right? It's nice, but I just paid my rancher today for another head and a half of cattle. The head into the half of cattle was cheaper than the full head of cattle last time. Time in bitcoin terms, because I paid bitcoin. So, like, the first time I bought a head of cattle, it was like 16 million sats, right? The second time I bought it was 8 million sats. The third time was 7 million sats. And this time I just paid 5.8 million sats for a head and a half of cattle.
- [70:41]
B
Wow.
- [70:42]
A
So it's like when I. I talk about that, like, that's one of the. I'm still on Facebook due to local small business stuff and, like, the gym that we're members of, very strong, like, Facebook presence. And I only post bitcoin propaganda. But one of my to post on there is, like, everything's getting cheaper for me. It's so wonderful. And I have a friend who's like, a giant Think boy engineer at one of the big tech companies that just like, loves to do the. All the highbrow fud. And I'm just waiting. When we flip Nvidia, that's where he works. When we flip Nvidia, that'S when I will have a leg to stand on with him as far as he's concerned.
- [71:15]
B
So it's so close to. Yeah, like, we're. We're very. We're just, you know, just the grim reaper knocking on that door. Like it's. It's one after another.
- [71:24]
A
Yeah.
- [71:25]
B
Yeah.
- [71:25]
A
Well, the number go down for me. Like, I got three kids, right? So, you know, the wedding costs of. Of my kids in the future goes down over time in bitcoin terms. Right. The tuition, like, you put away some money for tuition and it's like, oh, look at. We didn't actually have to spend all the bitcoin we bought for the tuition because we pumped. Congratulations.
- [71:47]
B
Like, it's a complete reframing. And I think that that's like. Like we've been so conditioned to think that everything must get more expensive. Like, that it just. Not that it must even. That's just what happens.
- [71:57]
A
Like the natural.
- [71:59]
B
Yeah, it's just a normal, normal part of things. Everything just gets more expensive. I know for me and for a lot of people, I think Jeff's Booth's the Price of tomorrow was like a huge, just like eye opening thing. I was already partially down the bitcoin rabbit hole, but then I read that and have read it again since then, and it was just like one of those, like, moments where I thought, oh my God, the scale of the theft is so much worse than I realized because everything should be getting, like, necessarily should be getting cheaper because technology makes it cheaper. Like, duh. But you know, until you hear those simple words expressed in that way, like, it's obvious in hindsight, but until you hear it, you don't really. You don't really grok it. Like, I think that's why. That's why his book was so profound for so many people. It's because you just needed to hear that. And then once you hear it, you're like, oh my God, like they are really stealing from us just hand over fist, year after year. And it's disgusting.
- [72:52]
A
The. The other Jeff that I like to follow Only on Noster. Dr. Jeff Booth or Ross?
- [72:59]
B
Ross.
- [72:59]
A
Yeah, yeah, Jeff Ross. He just posted something earlier today. I saw he was like, bullish on blue collar skills, bearish on white collar skills. That to me because, like the. Have you tried Vibe coding yet?
- [73:11]
B
No, not really. I mean, beyond just like a little tinkering, like. No, no, I have not to a significant level.
- [73:17]
A
It's incredible. And I've demoed this at BitDev, so one of the other things I do is I help run DC bit devs. So if you're ever in the DC area, we do it like usually the third Thursday of the month. We'll end up most likely at Pub key eventually. So Pubkey DC is coming and that's probably where BitDevs will rehome itself eventually. We got booted out of the strategy headquarters, but it like presenting there. I was like, hey, what do you, what do you want to build? Right? Like anybody in the crowd, what do you want to build? And I just put it into the prompt. I was like, hey, I put on. So what you can do is you can open up the prompt and then turn on like speech to text and then you just talk to it and that's it. And then you just tell it what you want and it just, I mean it shits something out. It's not going to be production quality, right? It's not going to, you're not going to like run a business on something that you vibe code necessarily. But as an engineer, I know how to talk to this thing as an engineer and I treat it like an intern that doesn't talk back, doesn't get tired and does exactly what I tell it to do. So it's like I've, I've learned now. It's like, okay, as long as I can tell it exactly what I want. I've gotten better at sort of like framing the context of everything. I mean, this thing is incredible. It's like, yes, all the white collar jobs are going away. All the jobs, let me rephrase that. All the jobs that require just like pushing paper around and like Excel spreadsheets and all this other, like, it's gonna go away. Like you're not gonna need a team of 10 accountants to run the books. You're gonna have like a couple dudes maybe that are using AI to like run the books for you and it will be better than the team of 10.
- [74:49]
B
Well, I think too, a lot of the low level programming jobs are going away. Like I think India's economy is gonna get destroyed and like people aren't like, it's been good for them for a while. Like it. All of those like fiverr type, low level, you know, like grunt work programming jobs, those are going away. Like they're. And they will not come back. Because you don't need, like, it's not like you need to have your, you know, a really competent engineer and then like a team of like grunts who are doing all the really boring setup stuff. But it still needs to be done because, like, it's, you know, a necessary part of the process. Now it's just like, no, you can just have that one engineer just literally have, have AI handle it. Like they can just literally vibe code what they need instead of. And like we're still in the early innings of this where like it's going to get exponentially better. I currently have increasing rate, like three.
- [75:40]
A
Vibe coding sessions up right now on my computer.
- [75:43]
B
What do you use? What's your, what's your preferred claude if.
- [75:46]
A
You'Re going to do software? I found that claude. I mean, I think any of them probably will get you there if you're not technical. But the CLAUDE models, from my experience and understanding is they've kind of honed in on software and being really good for engineers and stuff like that. And then the Goose, which is blocks open source AI thing, that's really powerful. One of my friends who's like, yeah, I've been thinking about writing a bookstop. I'm like, go download this Goose thing, plug it in, sign up for Grok or whatever. It interfaces with all these different AIs. And I was like, just talk to it. Like, tell it your book idea, tell it exactly what it is and it can build out everything you need for it, right? You can be like, hey, I want to create a rough draft outline about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah. And it will do that. And then if it's wrong, you just say, hey, not, I didn't mean, I meant this, I meant not that. And it takes them back and forth, but I can't type faster than this thing just shits out code. Like it will just if you give it a very. And it's interesting, right? In the software world, there's this thing called Agile that's come around in like more recent times where it's like iteration and iteration, everything like that. And then it used to be in the past it was this thing called waterfall where you define all the requirements up front. And now I'm like, waterfall is the way to go. Because if I give all of the very specific requirements, if I need a database, I need a web server, I need a user interface, and I tell it exactly what kind of database, I tell it what I need on the web, serve what kind of data. Like you can outline everything up front and then you tell it to go and it's really good. It's really good. And then you just tweak it right, like, and that's where you need the engineering skills. Still is. Like when you see something that's not ideal or like what you didn't intend, you got to be, you know, you treat it like an intern. You go, no, do it again. It was wrong. And it goes, you're absolutely right. Like that's Claude's phrase is like you're absolutely right. So it feels good too.
- [77:35]
B
I've really, the primary way, I guess I've just more vibe brainstormed with AI because like if I'm dr, If I'm driving or whatever, I'll just put it into like full like voice conversation mode. Like either grok or, or chat GBT and just like go back and forth and like, okay, I want to like, I want to flesh like flesh this particular idea out. Like, or you know, even like, like, you know, just to create like different like engaging questions for interviews or something. Like, like trying to like think about ways that I haven't, haven't approached certain questions within Bitcoin yet, but approach it from the lens of this particular person who I'm going to be talking to as this type of background. And like it's honestly so nice like from a hands free perspective to be able to just like, to do that, to have that conversation. And like again that's, that interface is just getting even better too. And that's the thing. The pace of change is just astonishing. And like, and it's pretty cool to see that like this just enables the like, okay, it doesn't turn a retarded person into like a genius, right. But it allows a smart, competent person to be augmented to an insane degree beyond what you would usually be able to accomplish. And like I, like, I mean I think at this point it's like pretty much everybody who is, you know, of above average intelligence is using these tools. But I feel like that gap is just going to continue widening between like the actual achievers and the laggards because this is just an accelerate. Like this is a, this is a cat. This is an accelerant, right? Like it is making the flames go higher.
- [79:03]
A
I'm cooking some things. I don't want to talk about it too soon, but like I've got, I've got something cooking that I'm pretty excited about. It involves noster knee cash. I'll just say that.
- [79:14]
B
Okay, okay, so.
- [79:15]
A
And I think it is, I think it is it is a novel use case. So we'll, we'll see, we'll see what the masses think. And it, on top of that, I think it also might be like a viable business model. So, like, well, again, maybe offline. I'll, I'll tease it to you.
- [79:30]
B
Okay.
- [79:31]
A
But I, so I started playing around with Grok recently. I wasn't playing around with it, and then I had to like, I guess hosted the bitcoin veteran space on, on Shader for like a week. And so like I had the handle and everything. And so I was like, all right, let me try this Gro thing. And it was surprisingly good. I started talking with like, you know, I, I, if you look at my primal reads or like articles on Noster, it doesn't have to be in primal, but I, I have some like, conversations with Grok where I was like, hey, you know, like, let's talk about how all of these cellular band baseband radio chips are completely locked, permissioned and not open source at all. And so like, what, what does that, what does that mean for like, the usability of our phones? Because there's no reason why this device can't talk to your device directly. And it was beautiful to see Jack Dorsey finally, like when he bit chatted that like the, the ability, like unlocking in people's mind that, like, I don't need to talk to some server over there. I can talk to like the person down the hall. Because our radios and our phone are hyper robust, like incredibly robust. And there's no reason why they shouldn't just all talk to each other the same thing with like your, your WI fi router in your home. But there's this like, misaligned incentive of all the telecom communications people to like, not include that they want you to go through their service because, I mean, it comes down to money. They want to be able to bill you, right? Like, you're using the service, you're doing whatever. But that also comes with like, the surveillance and the permission nature of it. Where the technology that we're at, like, our phones are capable of so much more except they are locked down at the hardware chip level. Like, at the chip level. Your cell phone radio will not operate without like some proprietary, like, it's completely proprietary. It's like Broadcom and Qualcomm are these like, companies that have it completely locked down. If we could liberate that. And I think bitch is like one illustration of like, hey, look at this cool thing you do with your phone where you don't need the Internet like take that even more steps further like unlock these chips for, for use. But yeah, we'll, we'll see what happens. The FCC kind of, it's weird like the way that radio frequency bands work in the United States is you actually lease space so like a visible spectrum of light. Right. And then like radio frequency and then the FCC has a controlling mechanism where it's like okay you cell phone provider get this one little sliver here where you can run this service and like all these other things and they like chop it all up all for deconfliction. But we're at a point with technology where our phones like there's radio waves all around us all the time right. Like our phones can decipher that and kind of this thing called beam forming where you can take like multiple antennas and like have a directional very like projected beam formed antenna set up to cut through noise interference and all kinds of other stuff like that all exists and is practical to apply. It's just, just we don't have the incentives to do it yet at these massive companies that make these chips. And it's hard because it's a physical thing. Right. You have to manufacture the radio chips in a specific way. The same way these bit axes like the chip in here is still proprietary to Bitmain that makes it. We just have really smart guys that reverse engineer the entire thing. Scott9000 by the way shout out legend like literally like hooking things up to the pins of the chip to figure out how it works to like reverse engineer this thing. And now we have a bit X and we're getting more.
- [82:59]
B
I'm always so grateful for open source devs just hacking, just hacking away. It's a beautiful thing. But to your point about Dorsey's bitchat Carl and I we have our own little bit chat where we bitch at each other because we're not around a lot of other people who are using this. So we have a household bitch that but it, it, it's incredible to see and to your point as well about like the WI fi side like yeah like Bluetooth is like one way to do this but obviously like there are, you can do this over WI fi as well. Like there's no reason that you need to be going through like going through these providers. Like you can have peer to peer communications with what already exists with the tech that's already right here. And I think that's just something that's been like kind of hidden almost from people like obviously.
- [83:43]
A
Yep.
- [83:44]
B
That like the whole reason that a lot of these Trusted intermediaries are there, or maybe not the reason they're there, but because they are there. They are also tapped on by the government all the time and provide. That is a channel through which you can be surveilled. But when you actually go peer to peer and it's encrypted, you can't be. And that I think is really terrifying to the powers that be, not just in the U.S. but across the world. Like it's a really powerful thing to be able to send messages that you know, can't be intercepted or if they are intercepted, can't be, can't be, you know, decrypted. Like that is a, that is a beautiful piece of freedom tech and people should have that. Like that should be the norm. Like the nor the norm should be privacy. But we've been kind of psyoped into thinking that like you know, well why, why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide? Which is just the most. It's like such a damaging people that.
- [84:42]
A
Say that ask them if they. With the door open.
- [84:44]
B
Yeah. Oh yeah.
- [84:45]
A
It's like just be like do you take a dump with the door open?
- [84:48]
B
Exactly. Go ahead, I'll watch you poop right now. Go ahead.
- [84:52]
A
What are you scared of? I usually charge, but we could talk about that offline.
- [84:58]
B
No, it's amazing though. And just like again, where, where does it go from here? Like with a lot of these things like either way, with you know, direct peer to peer communications with stuff like with ecash, these very privacy preserving technologies, these different layers, we're kind of at this, the infancy of a lot of these where it's like they're starting to get out, like the message is starting to spread. But it's like it needs to keep spreading a little bit faster because at a certain point, you know, once you know, the powers that be finally catch on, these are the things that they hate, right? They hate anything that they cannot control. So of course they will try to, you know, co op these things, shut them down. But like that's the beautiful thing about open source software is it's like go ahead, like you can try but like it's, it's just not going to work. Like the genie is already out of the bottle and that's like, that gives me a lot of hope about the future because it's like even though there are these problems, it's like, hey, we get a little bit of a, a little bit of a head start in them and that may be all we need.
- [86:03]
A
Yeah, I mean I think there's like a satoshi quote of, you know, like, it might not be the solution, but it will buy some time in the, in the war for freedom. And, and really, if you look back to like the early cypherpunks and just cryptography in general, like the powers that cryptography offer the individual. And if you haven't read Crypto Sovereignty by Eric Haysen, I definitely recommend it. But the power that cryptography offers the individual. And cryptography enables not just bitcoin, right? Bitcoin's just the best money that we found to use with cryptography. But cryptography underpins everything we do in our digital modern age. And enabling the average person to use cryptography to protect themselves from people that would wish them harm or, you know, ill will to their way of life is a powerful concept. And with open source technology and the jet fuel that is bitcoin, sending all of the idealistic bitcoiners into the top tier of elite society, cryptography is only going to accelerate from here. And open source technology is one of the means that we're going to accelerate it.
- [87:06]
B
Amen to that. And that's a perfect note to wrap on. Gary, thank you so much for joining me, man. Anywhere you want to, anywhere else you want to send people or remind people of, I'll link your nose, turn, whatnot. People should go check out bitcoin veterans. Where else do you want people to go to?
- [87:22]
A
Yeah, so dc.dc bitdev.com if you're interested in a Socratic seminar talking about Bitcoin and technology, VA Freedom Tech is my website where I sell bit axes and I sell meshtastic devices. That's like my side hustle. So it's low volume, but like I'm happy to ship you and proliferate. Freedom Tech Shenandoah Bitcoin Club is like the local meetup. So if you're ever passing through Highway 81, we're like one of the last exits in northern actual true Northern Virginia, the Northern Shenandoah Valley. Stop off, say hi. But then specifically Bitcoin veterans.org and if you're interested in that summit in November, Bitcoinveterans.org summit2025. You can find us on Nostr. Bitcoin Veterans is on X. I am not on X. Unless it's like there's some technical post on bitcoin veterans. Then you know, it's like, oh, Gary, Gary picked up the phone with X on it and decided to shit post. But that's it. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Walker. I'M honored to have met you and thank you for having this conversation. I look forward to doing great things with you in the future.
- [88:22]
B
The honor is mine sir. Looking forward to seeing you again in the flesh. Hopefully soon. Appreciate your time man. And yeah, keep building Freedom Tech Peace. I'm going to go ahead and cut this now. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. Find me on noster@primal.net Walker and this podcast@primal.net Titcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at Titcoin Podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.comwalkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin Podcast. Until next time, stay free.